Striking the Balance

Some of the Russian emigres had Russian wives, others sweethearts. The ones who didn’t could look for willing Frenchwomen. Straha didn’t miss lady Lizards the way a man missed women: out of sight (or rather, out of scent) really was out of mind for him. But, again, he’d be watching the Race as a whole move along, and he wouldn’t be a part of it.

“Shiplord, that’s hard,” Sam said.

“Truth,” Straha said. “But when I came down to this not empire, I did not ask that life be easy, only that it continue. Continue it has. Continue it will, in the circumstances I chose for myself. I shall likely have a long time to contemplate whether I made the correct decision.”

Sam wanted to find the right thing to say, but for the life of him could not come up with anything.

Mordechai Anielewicz walked casually past the factory that, up until a few months before, had housed workers turning out winter coats for the Lizards. Then one of the Nazis’ rocket bombs had scored a direct hit on the place. It looked like any other building that had taken a one-tonne bomb hit: like the devil. The only good thing was that the rocket had come down during the night shift, when fewer people were working.

Anielewicz looked around. Not many people were on the street. He tugged at his trousers, as if adjusting them. Then he ducked behind one of the factory’s shattered walls; any man might have done the same to get some privacy in which to ease himself.

From deeper in the ruins, a voice spoke in Yiddish: “Ah, it’s you. We don’t like people coming in here, you know.”

“And why is that, Mendel?” Mordechai asked dryly.

“Because we’re sitting on an egg we hope we don’t ever have to hatch,” the guard answered, his own tone less collected than he probably would have liked.

“As long as it’s in our nest and not the one the Germans laid for it,” Anielewicz answered. Getting it out of the ghetto field had been an epic in itself, and not one Mordechai ever wanted to repeat. The bomb had not been buried deep, or he and his comrades never would have budged it. As things were, the gaping hole in the ground that marked its presence had remained for the Lizards to spot when morning came. Fortunately, the cover story-that the corpses in that grave were suspected to have died of cholera, and so had to be exhumed and burned-had held up. Like most Lizards, Bunim was squeamish about human diseases.

Mordechai peered out from the gloom inside the ruined factory. None of the people who had been on the street was looking back. Nobody seemed to have taken any notice that he hadn’t come out after going in there for privacy’s sake. He walked farther into the bowels of the building. The way back twisted and went around piles of brick and tumbledown interior walls, but, once out of sight of the street, was free of rubble.

There, sitting in its oversized crate on a reinforced wagon, rested the bomb the Nazis had buried in the ghetto field. It had taken an eight-horse team to get it here; they’d need another eight horses to get it out, it they ever had to. One of the reasons Mordechai had chosen to hide the bomb here was the livery stable round the corner. Eight of the sturdiest draft horses the Jewish underground could find waited there, ready to be quickly brought over here in case of emergency.

As if by magic, a couple of Schmeisser-toting guards appeared from out of the shadows. They nodded to Anielewicz. He set his hand on the wagon. “When we have the chance, I want to get this damned thing out of Lodz altogether, take it someplace where there aren’t so many Lizards around.”

“That would be good,” said one of the guards, a skinny, walleyed fellow named Chaim. “Put it somewhere without so many people around, too. Everybody who isn’t one of us could be one of-them.”

He didn’t specify whothey were. Likely he didn’t know. Mordechai didn’t know, either, but he had the same worries Chaim did. The enemy of your enemy wasn’t your friend here-he was just an enemy of a different flavor. Anybody who found out the bomb was here-Lizards, Poles, Nazis, even the Jews who followed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski(and wasn’t that an odd juxtaposition of names? Anielewicz thought)-would try to take it away and take advantage of it.

Anielewicz rapped gently on the crate again. “If we have to, we can play Samson in the temple,” he said.

Chaim and the other guard both nodded. That other fellow said, “You’re sure the Nazis can’t set it off by wireless?”

“Positive, Saul,” Anielewicz answered. “We made certain of that. But we have the manual detonator not far away.” Both guards nodded; they knew where it was. “God forbid we have to use it, that’s all.”

“Omayn,”Chaim and Saul said together.