Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  He wondered if the Lizards called it something altogether different.

  A little more than an hour brought him into the outskirts of Lodz. He’d been told the town had fallen to the Nazis almost undamaged. It wasn’t undamaged now. The briefings he’d read on the submarine said the Germans had put up a hell of a scrap before the Lizards drove them out of town, and that they’d lobbed occasional rockets or flying bombs (the briefings weren’t very clear about which) at it ever since.

  Most of the people in the outer part of the city were Poles. If any German settlers remained from Lodz’s brief spell as Litzmannstadt, they were lying low. Sneers from the Poles were bad enough. He didn’t know what he would have done with Germans gaping at him. All at once, he regretted hoping the German bombers had a good mission. Then he got angry at himself for that regret. The Germans might not be much in the way of human beings, but against the Lizards they and England were on the same side.

  He walked on down Lagiewnicka Street toward the ghetto. The wall the Nazis had built was still partly intact, although in the street itself it had been knocked down to allow traffic once more. As soon as he set foot on the Jewish side, he decided that while the Germans and England might be on the same side, the Germans and he would never be.

  The smell and the crowding hit him twin sledgehammer blows. He’d lived his whole life with plumbing that worked. He’d never reckoned that a mitzvah, a blessing, but it was. The brown reek of sewage (or rather, slops), garbage, and unwashed humanity made him wish he could turn off his nose.

  And the crowd! He’d heard men who’d been in India and China talk of ant heaps of people, but he hadn’t understood what that meant The streets were jammed with men, women, children, carts, wagons—a good-sized city was boiled down into a few square blocks, like bouillon made into a cube. People bought, sold, argued, pushed past one another, got in each other’s way, so that block after block of ghetto street felt like the most crowded pub where Goldfarb had ever had a pint.

  The people—the Jews—were dirty, skinny, many of them sickly-looking. After tramping down from the Polish coast, Goldfarb was none too clean himself, but whenever he saw someone eyeing him, he feared the flesh on his bones made him conspicuous.

  And this misery, he realized, remained after the Nazis were the better part of a year out of Lodz. The Jews now were fed better and treated like human beings. What the ghetto had been like under German rule was—not unimaginable, for he imagined it all too vividly, but horrifying in a way he’d never imagined till now.

  “Thank you, Father, for getting out when you did,” he said. For a couple of blocks he simply let himself be washed along like a fish in a swift-flowing stream. Then he began moving against the current in a direction of his own choosing.

  Posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski seemed to follow him wherever he went. Some were tattered and faded, some as new and bright as if they’d been put up yesterday, which they probably had. Rumkowski stared down at Goldfarb from a variety of poses, but always looked stern and commanding.

  Goldfarb shook his head; the briefing papers had had considerable to say about Rumkowski and his regime in Lodz, but not much of that was good. In sum, he amounted to a pocket Jewish Hitler. Just what we need, Goldfarb thought.

  A couple of times, he passed Order Service men with their armbands and truncheons. He noticed them not only for those, but also because they looked uncommonly well-fed. A pocket Jewish SS, too. Wonderful. Goldfarb kept his head down and did his best to pretend he was invisible.

  But he had to look up from time to time to tell where he was going; studying a street map of Lodz didn’t do enough to let him make his way through the town itself. Luckily, being one mote in a swirling crowd kept him from drawing special notice. After three wrong turns—about half as many as he’d expected—he walked into a block of flats on Mostowski Street and started climbing stairs.

  He knocked on what he hoped was the right door. A woman a couple of years older than he was—she would have been pretty If she hadn’t been so thin—opened it and stared at his unfamiliar face with fear-widened eyes. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  Goldfarb got the idea something unpleasant would happen to him if he gave the wrong answer. He said, “I’m supposed to tell you even Job didn’t suffer forever.”

  “And I’m supposed to tell you it must have seemed that way to him.” The woman’s whole body relaxed. “Come in. You must be Moishe’s cousin from England.”

  “That’s right,” he said. She closed the door behind him. He went on, “And you’re Rivka? Where’s your son?”

  “He’s out playing. In the crowds on the street, the risk is small, and besides, someone has an eye on him.”

  “Good.” Goldfarb looked around. The flat was tiny, but so bare that it seemed larger. He shook his head in sympathy.

  “You must be sick to death of moving.”

  Rivka Russie smiled for the first time, tiredly. “You have no idea. Reuven and I have moved three times since Moishe didn’t come back to the flat we’d just taken.” She shook her head. “He thought someone had known who he was. We must have been just too late getting out of the other place. If it hadn’t been for the underground, I don’t know what we would have done. Got caught, I suppose.”

  “They got word to England, too,” Goldfarb said, “and orders eventually got to me.” He wondered if they would have, had Churchill not spent a while talking with him at Bruntingthorpe. “I’m supposed to help get Moishe out of here and take him—and you and the boy back to England with me. If I can.”

  “Can you do that?” Rivka asked eagerly.

  “Gott vayss—God knows,” he said. That won a startled laugh from her. He went on, “I’m no commando or hero or anything like that. I’ll work with your people and I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.”

  “A better answer than I expected.” Her voice was judicious.

  “Is he still in Lodz?” Goldfarb asked. “That’s the last information I had, but it’s not necessarily good any more.”

  “As far as we know, yes. The Lizards aren’t in a lot of hurry about dealing with him. That doesn’t make sense to me, when he did such a good job of embarrassing them.”

  “They’re more sure than quick,” Goldfarb said, remembering pages from the briefing book. “Very methodical, but not swift. What sort of charge do they have him up on?”

  “Disobedience,” Rivka said. “From everything he ever said while he was on better terms with them, they couldn’t accuse him of anything much worse.”

  That fit in with what Goldfarb had read, too. The Lizards seemed rank-, class-, and duty-conscious to a degree that made the English and even the Japanese look like wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists. In that kind of society, disobedience had to be as heinous a sin as blasphemy in the Middle Ages.

  “Still here in Lodz,” Goldfarb mused. “That’s good, I suppose. The Lizards’ main Polish headquarters is in Warsaw. Getting him out of there would be a lot tougher.” He grinned wryly. “Besides, I don’t fancy walking all that way east, not when I’ve just come here from the coast the same way.”

  “Would you like some tea?” Rivka asked. A moment later, she added another, more indignant question: “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, really,” Goldfarb said, though he was still chuckling. “It’s only that any woman in my family would have asked exactly the same question.”

  “I am a woman in your family,” Rivka said quietly.

  “That’s true. You are.” They eyed each other across the gulf of lifetimes spent in very different lands. Goldfarb’s parents had escaped the ghetto; to him, this place was something medieval returned to malignant life, and Rivka in her long black dress almost as much a part of the past come again. He wondered how he seemed to her: exotic stranger from a land rich and peaceful compared to Poland, in spite of everything Hitler and the Lizards had done to England, or just an apikoros, someone who’d abandoned most of his Judaism to get along in the wider world? He didn’
t know how to ask, or even if it was his business.

  “Do you want that cup of tea?” Rivka asked again. “It’s not real tea, I’m afraid, only chopped-up herbs and leaves.”

  “Same sort of muck we’ve been drinking at home,” Goldfarb said. “Yes, I’d like some, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Rivka Russie made the “tea” on an electric hot plate. She served it to him in a glass with sugar but no milk. That was how his parents drank it, but he’d come to prefer the way most Englishmen took theirs. Asking for milk here, though, didn’t seem likely to produce anything but embarrassment. Cautiously, he sipped.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Not bad at all. Better than most of what I’ve had lately, as a matter of fact.” To prove he meant it, he quickly drained the glass. Then he said, “So you’re still in touch with the underground?”

  “Yes,” Rivka answered. “If it weren’t for them, the Order Service men would have taken Reuven and me along with Moishe by now.”

  “Can you let me know how to get hold of them? If nothing else, I’ll need somewhere to sleep while I’m looking things over.” Can’t very well stay in a flat with my cousin’s wife, not when he’s in gaol.

  “It’s not as hard as you might think.” Amusement shone in Rivka’s eyes. “Go across the hall to flat number twenty-four. Knock on the door—twice, then once.”

  He’d used a password to identify himself to her. Now he had to trot out a secret knock? He’d always thought that sort of thing more the province of sensational novels than sober fact, but he was learning better in a hurry. If you wanted to keep going when every man’s hand was raised against you, you had to figure out ways to keep from being noticed.

  He went across the hall, found the battered door with a tarnished brass 24 on it. Knock, knock . . . knock. He waited. The door opened. The big man standing in it said, “Nu?”

  “Nu, the lady across the way sent me here,” Goldfarb replied. With his shaggy beard and soldier’s cap over civilian clothes, the big man looked like a bandit chief. He also looked like someone it would be wiser not to annoy. Goldfarb was glad he’d had the right code to introduce himself to Rivka Russie; without it, this fellow likely would have descended on him like a falling building. He’d been right to have his wind up.

  But now the man grinned (showing bad teeth) and stuck out his hand. “So you’re Russie’s English cousin, are you? You can call me Leon.”

  “Right.” The fellow had a blacksmith’s grip, Goldfarb discovered. He also noted that while the local Jew had said he could call him Leon, that didn’t mean it was his name: another precaution out of the books, and probably as necessary as the rest.

  “Don’t stand there—come in,” Leon said. “Never can tell who’s liable to be looking down the hall.” He closed the door behind Goldfarb. “Take your pack off if you like—it looks heavy.”

  “Thanks” Goldfarb did. The apartment was, if anything, barer than Rivka’s. Only mattresses on the floor said people lived, or at least slept, here. He said, “Moishe’s still in Lodz?” Leon, he figured, would know more surely than Rivka had.

  The big man nodded. “He’s in Prison One on Franciszkanska Street—the Nazis called it Franzstrasse, just like they called Lodz Litzmannstadt. We call it Franzstrasse ourselves, sometimes, because there’s a big sign with that name right across from the prison that nobody’s ever bothered taking down.”

  “Prison One, eh?” Goldfarb said. “How many are there?”

  “Plenty,” Leon answered. “Along with being good at killing people, the Nazis were good at putting them away, too.”

  “Do you know where in the prison he’s locked up?” Goldfarb asked. “For that matter, do you have plans for the building?”

  “Who do you think turned it into a prison? The Germans should have dirtied their hands doing the work themselves?” Leon said. “Oh yes, we have the plans. And we know where your cousin is, too. The Lizards don’t let Jews anywhere near him—they’re learning—but they haven’t learned yet that some Poles are on our side, too.”

  “This whole business must make you meshuggeh sometimes,” Goldfarb said. “The Lizards are better to Jews here than the Nazis ever were, but they’re bad for everybody else, so sometimes you find yourself working with the Germans. And the Poles don’t like Jews, either, but I guess they don’t like the Lizards any better.”

  “It’s a mess, all right,” Leon agreed. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do much in the way of figuring out. You wanted plans, I’ll show you plans.” He went over to a cabinet, yanked out a roll of paper, and brought it over to Goldfarb. When Goldfarb opened it, he saw they weren’t just plans but Germanically meticulous engineering drawings. Leon pointed. “They have machine guns on the roof, here and here. We’ll have to do something about those.”

  “Yes,” Goldfarb said in a small voice. “A machine gun we don’t do something about would put rather a hole in our scheme, wouldn’t it?”

  That might have been Leon’s first taste of British understatement; he grunted laughter. “Put a hole in us, you mean—probably lots of holes. But let’s say we can take out the machine guns—”

  “Because if we don’t, we can’t go on anyhow,” Goldfarb broke in.

  “Exactly,” Leon said. “So let’s say we do. You’re supposed to be bringing some presents with you. Have you got them?”

  By way of answer, Goldfarb opened the battered Polish Army pack that had come from an exile in England. No one had paid any attention to it since he’d landed here. Close to half the people on the road wore one like it, and a lot of those who didn’t had corresponding German or Russian gear instead.

  Leon looked inside. His long exhalation puffed out his mustache. “They don’t look like much,” he said dubiously.

  “They’re bloody hell to load, but they’ll do the job if I can’t get close enough to use them. I’ve practiced with them. Believe me, they will,” Goldfarb said.

  “And what’s all this mess?” Leon pointed into the pack, which held, along with the bombs he’d already disparaged, a motley assortment of metal tubes, levers, and a spring that might have come from the suspension of a lorry.

  “The mechanism for shooting them,” Goldfarb answered. “They built one in sections especially for me, lucky chap that I am, so the business end wouldn’t keep sticking out the top of my pack. The whole bloody thing together is called a PIAT—Projector, Infantry, Antitank.” The last four words were necessarily in English.

  Leon, luckily, understood “tank.” He shook his head anyhow. “No tanks”—he said panzers—“at the jail.”

  “There’d better not be,” Goldfarb said. “But a bomb that will make a hole in the side of a tank will make a big hole in the side of a building.”

  He got the impression that that was the first thing he’d said which impressed Leon, even a little. The man from the underground (Goldfarb suppressed a picture of Leon coming up from a London tube station) plucked at his beard. “Maybe you have something there. How far will it shoot?”

  “A couple of hundred yards—uh, meters.” Watch that, Goldfarb told himself. You can give yourself away if you don’t think metric.

  “Should be far enough.” Leon’s sardonic smile said he’d caught the slip, too. “Do you want to look over the prison before you try cracking it?”

  “I’d better. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing before I do it, right?”

  “It helps, yes.” Leon studied him. “You’ve seen some action, I think.”

  “In the air, yes. Not on the ground, not like you mean. On the ground, I’ve just been strafed like everybody else.”

  “Yes, I know about that, too,” Leon said. “But even in the air—that’ll do. You won’t panic when things start going crazy. Why don’t you leave your hardware here? We don’t want to bring it around to the prison till it’s time to use it.”

  “Makes sense to me, as long as you’re sure nobody’s going to steal it while we’re gone.”

  Leon showed teeth in so
mething that was not a smile. “Anyone who steals from us . . . he’s very sorry and he never, ever does it again. This happens once or twice and people start to get the idea.”

  That probably meant just what Goldfarb thought it did. He didn’t want to know for sure. Goldfarb left the pack on the floor and walked out of the flat after Leon.

  Franciszkanska Street was about ten minutes away. Again crowds and sights and smells buffeted Goldfarb. Again he reminded himself that this was how things were long after the Nazis had been driven away.

  He stuck to Leon like a pair of socks; even though he’d memorized the local map, he didn’t want to do much navigating on his own. Leon presently remarked, “We’ll just walk by, casual as you please. Nobody will think anything about us looking as long as we don’t stop and stare. The first rule is not to make yourself conspicuous.”

  Goldfarb looked, turning his head as if to carry on a conversation with Leon. At first glance, the prison was a tough nut to crack: two machine guns on the roof, barred windows, razor wire around the perimeter. At second glance, he said quietly, “It’s too close to everything else and it doesn’t have enough guards.”

  “They didn’t send a blind man over,” Leon said, beaming. “Right both times. That gives us our chance.”

  “And what do we do to take it?” Goldfarb asked as they left Prison One behind.

  “For now, you don’t do anything,” Leon said. “You sit tight and wait for the right time. Me, I have to go see some people and find out what I need to do to incite myself a riot.”

  Bobby Fiore paced along a dirt track somewhere in China. His comrades said they weren’t far from Shanghai. That meant little to him, because he couldn’t have put Shanghai on the map to keep himself out of the electric chair. His guess was that it wasn’t too far from the ocean: the air had the vaguely salty tang he’d known when he played in places like Washington State and Louisiana, anyhow.