Striking the Balance

“You’re right” Jager pointed to Ludmila.“She’s really Skorzeny.”

“Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jager.

As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jager recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jager caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”

She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jager would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jager!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”

“I’ll listen to him.” Anielewicz glanced at Ludmila. “Who’s your friend?”

She answered for herself, with manifest pride: “Ludmila Vadimovna Gorbunova, Senior Lieutenant, Red Air Force.”

“Red Air Force?” Anielewicz’s lips silently shaped the words. “You have the oddest friends, Jager-her and me, for instance. What would Hitler say if he knew?”

“He’d say I was dead meat,” Jager answered. “Of course, since I was already under arrest for treason, he’s already said that, or his bully boys have. Right now, I want to keep him from blowing up Lodz, and maybe keep the Lizards from blowing up Germany to pay him back. For better or worse, it still is my fatherland. Skorzeny doesn’t care what happens next. He’ll touch that thing off for no better reason than because someone told him to.”

“You were right,” the woman beside Anielewicz said. “You did see him, then. I thought you were worrying over every little thing.”

“I wish I had been, Bertha,” he replied, worry and affection warring in his voice. He turned his attention back to Jager. “I didn’t think… anybody”-he’d probably been about to say something likeeven you damned Nazis, but forbore-“would explode the bomb in the middle of truce talks. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?” His gaze sharpened. “You were arrested for treason, you say?Gevalt! They found you were passing things to us?”

“They found out I was, yes,” Jager answered with a weary nod. Since his rescue, things had happened too fast for him to take them all in at once. For now, he was trying to roll with each one as it hit. Later, if there was a later and it wasn’t frantic, he’d do his best to figure out what everything meant. “Karol is dead.” One more memory he wished he didn’t have. “They didn’t really have any idea how much I was passing on to you. If they’d known a tenth part of it, I’d have been in pieces on the floor when my boys came to break me out-and if my boys knew a tenth part of it, they never would have come.”

Anielewicz studied him. Quietly, the younger man said, “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known about the bomb, it would have gone off, and God only knows what would have happened next.” He offered the words as in consolation for Jager’s having been rescued by his men when they didn’t know what he’d truly done; he understood, with a good officer’s instinctive grasp, how hard that was to accept.

“You say you saw Skorzeny?” Jager asked, and Anielewicz nodded. Jager grimaced. “You must have found the bomb, too. He said it was in a graveyard. Did you move it after you found it?”

“Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too-not just the wireless switch, but the manual device-so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”

Jager held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”

“If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”

“Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jager. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation.“Nu? Would he?”

“I know two things,” Jager answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow-no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”