Upsetting the Balance

“They don’t,” Friedrich said with a grim certainty Anielewicz didn’t want to explore.

Mordechai went on, “-but they don’t like Germans, either.” Friedrich scowled, but didn’t interrupt. Anielewicz finished, “Best bet, as far as I can see, is heading up to Lodz. It’s a good-sized city; strangers won’t stick out the way they would in Piotrkow. And it still has a good many Jews left.”

“As if I should care about that.” Friedrich snorted, then sobered. “Or maybe I should-you Jew bastards have had practice with an underground, haven’t you?”

“You Nazi bastards made us practice with one,” Anielewicz said. “So-Lodz?”

“Lodz,” Friedrich agreed.

Cabbage, black bread, potatoes. For variety, turnips or beets. Heinrich Jager wished he were back at the front, if for no other reason than the tinfoil tubes of meat and butter front-line soldiers got. You didn’t starve to death on cabbage, black bread, and potatoes, but after a while you started to wish you would. No matter how important the work he was part of, life in Germany these days felt cold and gray and dull.

He speared the last piece of potato, chased the last bit of sauerkraut around his plate, soaked up the last juices from the sauerkraut with his bread-which, he had to admit, was better than the really horrid stuff the bakers had turned out in 1917. That still didn’t make it good.

He got to his feet, handed the plate and silverware to a kitchen worker who took them with a word of thanks, and started out of the refectory. Opening the door, he almost ran into a tall man in a black SS dress uniform gaudy with silver trim.

The SS colonel folded him into a bearhug. “Jager, you miserable son of a bitch, how the hell are you?” he boomed. A couple of physicists who had been eating in the refectory with Jager stared in disbelief and dismay at the raucous apparition invading their quiet little corner of the world.

Life might remain cold and gray, but it wouldn’t be dull any more. “Hullo, Skorzeny,” he said. “How goes with you?” Life might abruptly end aroundStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny, but it would never, ever be dull.

The scar that furrowed the SS man’s left cheek pulled half his grin up into a fearsome grimace. “Still going strong,” he said.

“As if you knew any other way to go,” Jager replied.

Skorzeny laughed, as if that had been some sort of clever observation rather than simple truth. “You know someplace where we can talk quietly?” he asked.

“You don’t have any idea how to talk quietly,” Jager said, and Skorzeny laughed again. “Come on, I’ll take you to my quarters.”

“I’d need a trail of bread crumbs just to find my way around this place,” Skorzeny grumbled as Jager led him through the medieval maze of Schloss Hohentubingen. Once in Jager’s room, he threw himself into a chair with such abandon that Jager marveled when it didn’t collapse under him.

“All right, how do you want to try to get me killed now?” Jager asked.

“I’ve come up with a way, never you fear,” the SS man said airily.

“Why does this not surprise me?”

“Because you’re not a fool,” Skorzeny answered. “Believe me, I have come to know fools in all their awesome variety these past few years. Some of them wear uniforms and think they’re soldiers. Not you-so much I give you.”

“And for so much I thank you,” Jager said. He remained unsure whether Skorzeny qualified as a fool in uniform, even after most of a year’s acquaintance. The man took chances that looked insane, but he’d brought off most of them. Did that make him lucky or good? His string of successes was long enough for Jager to give him some benefit of the doubt. “How are you going to twist the Lizards’ stumpy little tails this time?”

“Not their tails, Jager-the other end.” Skorzeny gave that grin again. Perhaps he intended it as disarming; no matter how he intended it, the scar twisted it into something piratical. “You’ve heard that the English have started using mustard gas against the Lizards?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.” Jager’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d spent hours sealed into a stifling gas mask during the First World War. He also remembered comrades who hadn’t got their masks on and sealed in time. His mouth curled down. “I don’t blame them, not really, but it’s an ugly business. And why did they have that gas ready, d’you think? — to use against us when we got over the Channel, unless I miss my guess.”

“Probably.” Skorzeny waved a dismissive hand. He didn’t care about why; what and how were all that mattered to him. He added, “Don’t get up on your high horse, either. If the English had tried gassing us, we’d have shown them mustard gas is a long way from the nastiest thing around. We do things better these days than they did in the last war.”

“No doubt.” Skorzeny sounded very certain. Jager wondered how he knew, how much he knew, and how the new gases, whatever they were, had been tested-and on whom. Asking such questions was dangerous. To Jager’s mind, so wasnot asking them, but few of his fellow officers agreed.