Striking the Balance

“See anything unusual around here?” Mordechai asked, as he did every time he came to check on the bomb. As they always did, the guards shook their heads. The job of guarding the crate was turning into routine for them; neither was a man of much imagination. Anielewicz knew he had more than was good for him.

He made his way out toward the street, pausing to ask Mendel the question he’d just put to Saul and Chaim. Mendel affirmed that he hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, either. Anielewicz told himself he was worrying over nothing: nobody but the Jewish underground (and the Nazis, of course) knew the bomb had come into Lodz, and nobody but his own people knew where it was now. The Nazis wouldn’t have tried to set it off, not with their cease-fire with the Lizards still holding.

He’d told himself that a great many times. He still had trouble believing it. After almost five years of war, first against the Germans and then sometimes against the Germans and Lizards both, he had trouble believing any counsel of safety.

As he emerged onto the street, he fumbled at his trousers to show why he had gone back behind the wall, then looked up and down to see if anyone was taking any special notice either of him or of the wrecked factory building. He didn’t spot anyone like that, so he started up the street.

There maybe fifteen meters ahead of him, striding along briskly, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with light brown hair. The fellow turned a corner. Anielewicz followed, not thinking much of him except that his black coat was too short: it flapped halfway down his calves instead of at his ankles as it should have. Not many men in Lodz were so big, which no doubt explained why the fellow couldn’t find a coat to fit him. He lacked only six or eight centimeters of two meters’ height.

No, Anielewicz hadn’t seen many men that size in the ghetto. Big, beefy men, because they needed more food, had a way of dying faster on bad rations than small men did. But Anielewicz had seen a man about that tall some time in the not too distant past. He frowned, trying to remember when and where. One of the Polish farmers who sometimes passed information on to the Jews? It had been outside of Lodz: he was fairly sure of that.

All at once, he started to run. When he got to the corner at which the tall man had turned, he paused, his head swiveling this way and that. He didn’t see the fellow. He walked over to the next corner, where he peered both ways again. Still no sign of the man. He kicked at a paving stone in frustration.

Could that have been Otto Skorzeny on the streets of the Lodz ghetto, or was he starting at shadows? The SS man had no rational reason to be here; so Anielewicz tried to convince himself he’d spied someone else of about the same size and build.

“It’s impossible,” he muttered under his breath. “If the Nazis blow up Lodz in the middle of peace talks, God only knows what the Lizards will drop on their heads: reap the wind, sow the whirlwind. Not even Hitler’s thatmeshuggeh.”

As with his earlier, more general fears, he had trouble dismissing this one. When you got right down to it, who could say just howmeshuggeh Hitler was?

David Goldfarb and Basil Roundbush climbed off their bicycles and made their eager way toward the White Horse Inn like castaways struggling up to the edge of a desert oasis. “Pity we can’t bring Mzepps with us,” Roundbush remarked. “Do the poor blighter good to have a night out, don’t you think?”

“Me?” Goldfarb said. “I’ve given up thinking for the duration.”

“Commendable attitude,” Roundbush said with a nod. “Keep that firmly in mind, lad, and you’ll go far-though thinking about not thinking does rather spoil the exercise, eh?”

Goldfarb had the sense not to get stuck in that infinite regress. He opened the door to the White Horse Inn and was greeted by a cloud of smoke and a roar of noise. Basil Roundbush shut the door after them. As soon as he’d done so, Goldfarb pushed aside the black cloth curtains that screened off the short entryway and went inside.

He blinked at the bright electric lamps. “I liked the place better when it was all torchlight and hearthfire,” he said. “Gave it more atmosphere: you felt Shakespeare or Johnson might drop in for a pint with you.”

“If Johnson dropped in, it would be for more than one, and that’s a fact,” Roundbush said. “All the fires did take one back to the eighteenth century, I must say. But remember, old boy, the eighteenth century was a filthy, nasty place. Give me electricity every day.”

“They seem to be doing just that,” Goldfarb said, making his way toward the bar. “Amazing how quickly you can get a system of electricity up and running again when you’re not being bombed round the clock.”