Upsetting the Balance

Mordechai figured he could safely show he’d heard his own name. “Yes, Shmuel, that’s me,” he said, touching the brim of his cloth cap and doing his best to leave the impression that he was an idiot.

“Superior sir, this male is now calling himself Shmuel,” Jakub Kipnis said. Mordechai had less trouble following him than he’d had understanding the Lizard; Kipnis spoke more slowly, thinking between words. “In Warsaw, this male was known as Mordechai Anielewicz.”

Flee? Utterly futile. Even if the Lizard guard behind him didn’t cut him down, how could he break out of the prison camp? The answer was simple: he couldn’t. “You are Anielewicz?” he asked, pointing to Kipnis. The most he could hope to do now was confuse the issue.

“No, you liar, you are,” the interpreter said angrily.

The Lizard made noises like a steam shovel with a bad engine. He and Jakub Kipnis went back and forth, now mostly too fast for Mordechai to keep up with them. The Lizard said, “If this is Anielewicz, they will want him back in Warsaw. He has much to answer for.” Anielewicz shook his head. If he had to understand two sentences, why those two?

“Superior sir, it is Anielewicz,” Kipnis insisted, slowing down a little. “Send him to Warsaw. The governor there will know him.” He stopped in consternation. “No-Zolraag has been replaced. His aides will know this male, though.”

“It may be so,” the Lizard said. “Some of us are learning to tell one Big Ugly from another.” By his tone, he didn’t find that an accomplishment worth bragging about. He turned his eyes to the guard behind Anielewicz. “Take this male to the prison cells for close confinement until he is transported to Warsaw.”

“It shall be done,” the Lizard said in his own language. Gesturing with his rifle barrel, he dropped into Yiddish: “Come along, you.”

Mordechai sent Jakub Kipnis a venomous glance. Since he was still claiming to be Shmuel the partisan, that was all he could do. He wanted to give thetukhus-lekher of an interpreter something more than a glare by which to remember him, but consoled himself by thinking the traitor’s turn would come some day. It wasn’t as it had been under the Nazis. A lot of Jews had weapons now.

“Come along, you,” the Lizard guard repeated. Helplessly, Anielewicz stepped out into the corridor ahead of him. The Lizard interrogator said something to the guard, who paused in the doorway to listen.

The world blew up.

That was Anielewicz’s first confused thought, anyhow. He’d been under aerial bombardment before, in Warsaw from the Nazis and then from the Lizards. One moment Mordechai was glumly heading toward prison-and probably toward much worse trouble than that. The next, he was hurled against the far wall of the hallway while ceiling timbers groaned and shifted and tore away from one another to let him see streaks of gray-blue sky.

He staggered to his feet. A meter or two behind him, the Lizard guard was down, hissing piteously. The window in the interrogator’s office had blown in, skewering him with shards of shattered glass like shrapnel. His automatic rifle lay forgotten beside him.

Head still ringing, Anielewicz snatched it up. He fired a short burst into the Lizard’s head, then looked into the office where he’d been grilled. The Lizard interrogator in there was down, too, and wouldn’t get up again; flying glass had flensed him.

By the chance of war, Jakub Kipnis was not badly hurt. He saw Mordechai, saw the Lizard rifle, and made a ghastly attempt at a smile. “The German flying bomb-” he began. Mordechai cut him down with another short burst, then made sure of him with a shot behind the ear.

That took care of the two Lizards and the man who’d known Anielewicz was Anielewicz. Behind him, an alarm began to ring. He thought it had to do with him till he smelled smoke-the building was afire. He set down the rifle, scrambled out of the now glassless window (actually, almost glassless; a sharp shard sliced his hand), and dropped to the ground. With any luck at all, no one would know he’d been in there, let alone that he’d been found out.

Not far away, smoke still rose from an enormous crater. “Must have been a tonne, at least,” muttered Mordechai, who had more experience gauging bomb craters than he’d ever wanted to acquire. At the edge of the crater lay the wreckage of the flying bomb’s rear fuselage.

He spared that barely a glance. The rocket or whatever it was had done more than wreck the prison camp’s administrative building. It had blown up in the middle of the yard. Broken men, and pieces of men, lay all around. Groans and shrieks in several languages rose into the sky. Some men, those nearest the crater and those who’d been unlucky enough to stop a chunk of the fuselage, would never groan or shriek or cry again.