“As you say, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov was not sure this was the wisest course, but imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he got the despatch announcing the new Soviet policy—and, better yet, imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he had to bring Hitler the news—came close to making it all worthwhile. “I shall begin drafting the telegram at once.”
Heinrich Jäger was getting to be a pretty fair horseman. The accomplishment filled him with less delight than it might have under other circumstances. When you had to climb on a horse to go back and visit corps headquarters, that mostly proved you didn’t have enough petrol to keep your utility vehicles operational. Since the Wehrmacht barely had enough petrol to keep its panzers operational, the choice lay between visiting corps headquarters on a bay mare or on shank’s mare. Riding beat the devil out of walking.
The road through the forest forked. Jäger urged the mare south, down the right-hand fork. That was not the direct route back to his regiment. One of the good things—one of the few good things—about riding a horse as opposed to a Volkswagen was that you did it by yourself, without a driver. Jäger didn’t want anyone to know he was turning down the right-hand fork. If anyone found out, in fact, he would soon be having intimate discussion with the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the Abwehr, and any other security or Intelligence service that could get its hands (to say nothing of assorted blunt, sharp, heated, and electrically conductive instruments) on him.
“Why am I doing this?” he said in the middle of forest stillness broken only by the distant rumble of artillery. The mare answered with a snort.
He felt like snorting himself. He did know the answer: partly the debt he felt to Anielewicz personally, partly that Anielewicz and his Jewish fighters had kept their side of the bargain they’d made with him and didn’t deserve incineration, partly the way his stomach knotted whenever he thought about what the forces of the Reich had done to the Jews of eastern Europe before the Lizards came—and were still doing to the Jews remaining in the territory they controlled. (He remembered all too vividly the Jewish and homosexual prisoners who worked on the atomic pile under Schloss Hohentübingen till they died, which seldom took long.)
Was all that reason enough to violate his military oath? The head of the SS and the Führer himself had authorized Skorzeny to visit atomic fire upon Lodz. Who was Colonel Heinrich Jäger to say they were wrong?
“A man,” he said, answering the question no one had asked aloud. “If I can’t live with myself, what good is anything else?”
He sometimes wished he could turn off his mind, could numb himself to everything that happened in war. He knew a good many officers who were aware of the horrors the Reich had committed in the east but who refused to think about them, who sometimes even refused to admit they were aware of them. Then there was Skorzeny, who knew but didn’t give a damn. Neither path suited Jäger. He was neither an ostrich, to stick his head in the sand, nor a Pharisee, to pass by on the other side of the road.
And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands . . . anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.
His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher—the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.
His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.
“Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.
Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jäger’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them—or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.
His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jäger said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.
Jäger sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if a Hausfrau hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.
He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jäger rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.
Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jäger kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jäger bounded into the house.
The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.
Biting his lip, Jäger walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jäger remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.
The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jäger walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.
Jäger turned away, partly sickened, partly afraid. Now he knew who had visited this farmhouse before him. They’d signed their masterpiece, so to speak: on Karol’s belly, they’d burned in the SS runes with a redhot poker or something similar. The next interesting question was, how much had they asked him before they finally cut out his tongue? He didn’t know Jäger’s name—the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here—but if he’d described Jäger, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.
Whistling tunelessly, Jäger went outside, unhitched the mare, and rode away. Where to ride troubled him. Should he flee for his life? If he could get to Lodz, Anielewicz and the Jews would protect him. That was loaded with irony thick enough to slice, but it was also probably true.
In the end, though, instead of riding south, he went north, back toward his regiment. Karol and his family had been dead for days now. If the SS did know about him, they would have dropped on him by now. And, never mind the Jews, he still had the war against the Lizards to fight.
When he did get back to the regimental encampment, Gunther Grillparzer looked up from a game of skat and said, “You look a little green around the gills, sir. Everything all right?”
“I must have drunk some bad water or something,” Jäger answered. “I’ve been jumping down off this miserable creature”—he patted the horse’s neck—“and squatting behind a bush about every five minutes, all the way back from corps headquarters.” That accounted not only for his pallor but also for getting back h
ere later than he should have.
“The galloping shits are no fun at all, sir,” the panzer gunner said sympathetically. Then he guffawed and pointed to Jäger’s mare. “The galloping shits! Get it, sir? I made a joke without even noticing.”
“Life is like that sometimes,” Jäger said. Grillparzer scratched his head. Jäger just led away the horse. He’d ridden it a long way; it needed seeing to. Grillparzer shrugged and went back to his card game.
Nieh Ho-T’ing and Hsia Shou-Tao passed the little scaly devils’ inspection and were allowed into the main part of the tent on the island in the lake at the heart of the Forbidden City. “Good of you to invite me here with you today,” he said, “instead of—” He stopped.
Instead of your woman, the one I tried to rape. Nieh completed the sentence, perhaps not exactly as his aide would have. Aloud, he answered, “Liu Mei has some sort of sickness, the kind babies get. Liu Han asked the central committee for permission to be relieved of this duty so she could care for the girl. Said permission having been granted—”
Hsia Shou-Tao nodded. “Women need to look after their brats. It’s one of the things they’re good for. They’re—” He stopped again. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing had no trouble coming up with a likely continuation. They’re also good for laying, which causes the brats in the first place. But Hsia, while he might have thought that, hadn’t come out and said it. His reeducation, however slowly it proceeded, was advancing.
“Liu Han has all sorts of interesting projects going on,” Nieh said. Hsia Shou-Tao nodded once more, but did not ask him to amplify that. Where women were not involved, Hsia was plenty clever. He would not allude to the whereabouts of the scaly devil Ttomalss where other little devils might hear.
Nieh had thought that by this time he would be delivering small pieces of Ttomalss to the little devils one at a time. It hadn’t worked out that way. The capture of the little devil who’d stolen Liu Han’s child had gone off as planned—better than planned—but she hadn’t yet taken the ferocious revenge she and Nieh had anticipated. He wondered why. It wasn’t as if she’d become a Christian or anything foolish like that.
A couple of chairs were the only articles of human-made furniture inside the tent. Nieh and Hsia sat down in them. A moment later, the little scaly devil named Ppevel and his interpreter came out and seated themselves behind their worktable. Ppevel let loose with a volley of hisses and pops, squeaks and coughs. The interpreter turned them into pretty good Chinese: “The assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, notes that one of you appears to be different from past sessions. Is it Nieh Ho-T’ing or Liu Han who is absent?”
“Liu Han is absent,” Nieh answered. The little devils had as much trouble telling people apart as he did with them.
Ppevel spoke again: “We suspect a link between her and the disappearance of the researcher Ttomalss.”
“Your people and mine are at war,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “We have honored the truce we gave in exchange for Liu Han’s baby. We were not required to do anything more than that. Suspect all you like.”
“You are arrogant,” Ppevel said.
That, coming from an imperialist exploiter of a little scaly devil, almost made Nieh Ho-T’ing laugh out loud. He didn’t; he was here on business. He said, “We have learned that you scaly devils are seriously considering cease-fires without time limits for discussion of your withdrawal from the territory of the peace-loving Soviet Union and other states.”
“These requests are under discussion,” Ppevel agreed through the interpreter. “They have nothing to do with you, however. We shall not withdraw from China under any circumstances.”
Nieh stared at him in dismay. He had been ordered by Mao Tse-Tung himself to demand China’s—and, specifically, the People’s Liberation Army’s—inclusion in such talks. Having the little scaly devils reject that out of hand before he could even propose it was a jolt. It reminded Nieh of the signs the European foreign devils had put up in their colonial parks: NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED.
“You shall regret this high-handed refusal,” he said when he could speak again. “What we have done to you is but a pinprick beside what we might do.”
“What you might do is a pinprick beside the damage from an explosive-metal bomb,” Ppevel replied. “You have none. We are strong enough to hold down this land no matter what you do. We shall.”
“If you do, we’ll make your life a living hell,” Hsia Shou-Tao burst out hotly. “Every time you step out on the street, someone may shoot at you. Every time you get into one of your cars or trucks or tanks, you may drive over a mine. Every time you travel between one city and another, someone may have a mortar zeroed on the road. Every time you bring food into a city, you may have to see if it is poisoned.”
Nieh wished his aide hadn’t given the little devils such bald threats. Liu Han would have known better, she was, as Nieh had discovered to his own occasional discomfiture, a master at biding her time till she was ready to attack a target full force. But Nieh did not disagree with the sentiments Hsia had expressed.
Ppevel remained unimpressed. “How is this different from what you are doing now?” he demanded. “We hold the centers of population, we hold the roads between one of them and another. Using these, we can control the countryside.”
“You can try,” Nieh Ho-T’ing told him. That was the recipe the Japanese had used in occupying northeastern China. It was almost the only recipe you could use if you lacked the manpower—or even the devilpower—to occupy a land completely. “You will find the price higher than you can afford to pay.”
“We are a patient people,” Ppevel answered. “In the end, we shall wear you down. You Big Uglies are too hasty for long campaigns.”
Nieh Ho-T’ing was used to thinking of the Europeans and Japanese as hasty folk, hopelessly out of their depth in dealing with China. He was not used to being perceived as a blunt, unsubtle barbarian himself. Pointing a finger at Ppevel, he said, “You will lose more fighters here in China than you would from an explosive-metal bomb. You would do better to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal of your forces now than to see them destroyed piecemeal.”
“Threats are easy to make,” Ppevel said. “They are harder to carry out.”
“Conquests are sometimes easy to make, too,” Nieh replied. “They are harder to keep. If you stay here, you will not be facing the People’s Liberation Army alone, you know. The Kuomintang and the eastern devils—the Japanese—will struggle alongside us. If the war takes a generation or longer, we shall accept the necessity.”
He was sure he spoke the truth about the Kuomintang. Chiang Kai-shek had betrayed the Chinese revolution, but he was as wily a politician as any in the land. Even after the Japanese invaded, he’d saved the bulk of his strength for the conflict against the People’s Liberation Army, just as Mao had conserved force to use against him. Each of them recognized the need for protracted war to gain his own objectives.
What the Japanese would do was harder to calculate. Without a doubt, though, they hated the little scaly devils and would fight them ferociously, even if without any great political acumen.
Ppevel said, “As I told you before, we are going to keep this land. Your threats we ignore. Your pinpricks we ignore. We recognize only true force. You are far too backward to build an explosive-metal bomb. We have no need to fear you or anything you might do.”
“Maybe we cannot build one,” Hsia Shou-Tao hissed, “but we have allies. One of these bombs might yet appear in a Chinese city.”
This time, Nieh felt like patting Hsia on the back. That was exactly the right thing to say. Nieh knew—he did not think Hsia did—that Mao had sent Stalin a message, asking for the use of the first bomb the Soviet Union did not urgently require in its own defense.
The interpreter translated. Ppevel jerked in his chair as if he’d sat on something sharp and pointed. “You are lying,” he said. Yet the interpreter’s Chinese sounded uncertain. And Nieh did not think Ppevel sounded confid
ent, either. He wished after all that he’d had Liu Han along; she would have been better at gauging the little devil’s tone.
“Are we lying when we say we have allies?” Nieh replied. “You know we are not. The United States was allied with the Kuomintang and the People’s Liberation Army against the Japanese before you scaly devils came here. The Soviet Union was allied with the People’s Liberation Army against the Kuomintang. Both the U.S.A. and the USSR have explosive-metal bombs.”
He thought the chances that one of those bombs would make its way to China were slim. But he did not have to let Ppevel know that. The more likely the little devil reckoned it to be, the better the bargain the People’s Liberation Army would get.
And he’d rocked Ppevel too. He could see as much. The high-ranking scaly devil and his interpreter went back and forth between themselves for a couple of minutes. Ppevel finally said, “I still do not altogether believe your words, but I shall bring them to the attention of my superiors. They will pass on to you their decision on whether to include you Chinese in these talks.”
“For their own sake and for yours, they had best not delay,” Nieh said, a monumental bluff if ever there was one.
“They will decide in their own time, not in yours,” Ppevel answered. Nieh gave a mental shrug: not all bluffs worked. He recognized a delaying tactic when he saw one. The little devils would discuss and discuss—and then say no. Ppevel went on, “The talks between us now are ended. You are dismissed, pending my superiors’ actions.”
“We are not your servants, to be dismissed on your whim,” Hsia Shou-Tao said, anger in his voice. But the interpreter did not bother translating that; he and Ppevel retreated into the rear area of the enormous orange tent. An armed little devil came into what Nieh thought of as the conference chamber to make sure he and Hsia departed in good time.
Striking the Balance Page 50
