Upsetting the Balance

“But it’s not, don’t you see?” Mordechai said, something like desperation in his voice. “After that, who stops the Lizards from doing exactly as they please? If you know who I am, you know I’ve worked with them, too. They don’t make any bones about it: they intend to rule mankind forever. When they say forever, they don’t mean a thousand years like that madman Hitler. They mean forever, and they aren’t madmen. If they win now, we won’t get a second chance.”

“Better them than the Germans,” Nussboym said stubbornly.

“But you see, David, the choice isn’t that simple. We have to-” Without changing expression, without breaking off his flow of words, Amelewicz hit Nussboym in the belly, as hard as he could. He’d intended to hit him in the pit of the stomach and win the fight at the first blow,blitzkrieg — fashion, but his fist landed a few centimeters to one side of where he wanted to put it Nussboym grunted in pain but instead of folding up like a concertina, he grappled with Mordechai. They fell together, knocking over with a crash the chair on which Anielewicz had been sitting.

Mordechai had done a lot of fighting with a rifle in his hand. It was a different business altogether when the fellow you were trying to beat wasn’t a tiny spot seen through your sights, but was at the same time doing his best to choke the life out of you. Nussboym was stronger and tougher than he’d figured, too. Again, he realized being on the opposite side didn’t turn you into a sniveling coward.

Nussboym tried to knee him in the groin. He twisted aside and took the knee on the hip. He would have thought it even less sporting had he not tried to do the same thing to Nussboym a moment earlier.

They rolled up against Mordechai’s desk. It was a cheap, light, flimsy thing, made of pine and plywood. Mordechai tried to bang Nussboym’s head against the side of it. Nussboym threw up an arm just in time.

A heavy glass ashtray fell off the desk. Anielewicz was damned if he knew why he’d kept the thing around. He didn’t smoke. Even if he had smoked, nobody in Poland had any tobacco these days, anyhow. But the ashtray had been on his desk when he got the office, and he hadn’t bothered getting rid of it.

It came in handy now. He and David Nussboym both grabbed for it at the same time, but Nussboym couldn’t reach it Mordechai’s arm was longer. He seized it and hit Nussboym in the head. Nussboym groaned but kept fighting, so Mordechai hit him again. After the third blow, Nussboym’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

Anielewicz struggled to his feet. His clothes were torn, he had a bloody nose, and he felt as if he’d just crawled out of a cement mixer. People crowded in the doorway, staring. “He was going to tell the Lizards who I am,” Mordechai said. His voice came out raw and rasping; Nussboym had come closer to strangling him than he’d thought.

Bertha Fleishman nodded briskly. “I was afraid that would happen. Do you think we have to shut him up for good?”

“I don’t want to,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t want any more Jews dead. He’s not a bad man, he’s just wrong here. Can we get him out of the way for good?”

She nodded again. “He’ll have to go east, but we’ll manage. I have enough Communist friends to be sure he’ll get into Russia without ever having the chance to speak his piece to the Lizards.”

“What’ll happen to him there?” Anielewicz asked. “They’re liable to ship him to Siberia.” He’d meant it for a joke, but Bertha’s sober nod said it was indeed a possibility. Mordechai shrugged. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. He’ll have a chance to stay alive there, and we’d have to kill him here.”

“Let’s get him out of here for now,” Bertha said. More quietly, she added, “You ought to think about disappearing, too, Mordechai. Not everyone who favors the Lizards is as open as Nussboym. You could be betrayed any time.”

He bit his lip. She was right He knew she was right. But the idea of going on the road again, finding another alias and joining a partisan band, pierced him with a chill worse than any winter’s gale.

“Good-bye, Lodz. Good-bye, flat,” he muttered as he took hold of David Nussboym’s feet.

18

Heinrich Jager felt like a table-tennis ball. Whenever he returned from a mission, he never knew where he would bounce up next: to Schloss Hohentubingen to help the men with the thick glasses and the high foreheads drive the explosive-metal bomb project forward, off on another run with Otto Skorzeny to tweak the Lizards’ snouts, or to lead panzers into battle, something he actually knew how to do.

After he got back from Albi, they’d stuck him in a panzer again. That was where the powers that be stuck him when the war was going badly. If the Lizards overran theVaterland, everything else became irrelevant.