“They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”
“I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If-Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”
“I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”
“How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer.Fair enough, he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancee?”
Naomi stopped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.
The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock-and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.
“Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father-and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this-you will not be the only one who is impatient.”
“All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.
Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
“Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand.Siss! Siss! Siss! Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.
“But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”
“I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszow. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jager had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”
“It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”
“I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.“Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. Thechutzpah it takes to try something like that-and the luck you need to get away with it… ”
“What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.
One other question, of course, overrode all of those.Where was the bomb?
He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up — from his work.
He wasn’t the only man in earshot. The last thing Anielewicz wanted to do was spread panic through the ghetto. “Come on upstairs with me,” he said, as casually as he could.
Gruver’s long face turned somber. With his bushy eyebrows, harsh features, and thick, graying beard, he generally looked grim. When he felt grim, he looked as if his best friend had just died. He put down his wrench and followed Mordechai up to the room where the leaders of the Jewish fighters commonly met.
On the stairwell, he said quietly, “Bertha’s up there. She picked up something interesting-what it is, I don’t know-and she’s passing it along. Is whatever you’ve got something she can know about?”
“It’s something she’d better know about,” Anielewicz answered. “If we can’t deal with it ourselves, we may have to let Rumkowski’s gang oftukhus-lekhers know it, too, and maybe even the Lizards, though that’s the last thing I want to do.”
“Oy!”Those eyebrows of Gruver’s twitched. “Whatever it is, it must be bad.”
“No, not bad,” Mordechai said. Gruver gave him a quizzical look. “Worse,” he explained as they got to the top of the stairs. Gruver grunted. Every time Anielewicz lifted his foot off the worn linoleum of the floor, he wondered if he would live to set it down again. That was not in his hands, not any more. If Otto Skorzeny pushed a button or flicked a switch on a wireless transmitter, he would cease to be, probably so fast he wouldn’t realize he was dead.
He laughed. Solomon Gruver stared at him. “You’re carrying news like this and you find something funny?”
“Maybe,” Anielewicz answered. Skorzeny had to be one frustrated SS man right this minute. He’d risked his life getting that bomb into Lodz (Anielewicz who’d despised him on sight, knew how much courage that had taken), but his timing was bad. He couldn’t touch it off now, not without destroying the shiny new cease-fire between the Lizards and theReich.
A couple of serious-looking Jewish men came out of the meeting room. “We’ll take care of it,” one of them promised Bertha Fleishman.
“Thank you, Michael,” she said, and started to follow them out. She almost ran into Anielewicz and Gruver. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you two here.”
“Mordechai ran into something interesting,” Solomon Gruver said. “What it is, God knows, because he’s not talking.” He glanced over to Mordechai. “Not talking yet, anyhow.”
“Now I am,” Anielewicz said. He walked into the meeting room. When Gruver and Bertha Fleishman had followed him inside, he closed the door and, with a melodramatic touch, locked it. That made Bertha’s eyebrows fly up, as Gruver’s had before.
Mordechai spoke for about ten minutes, relaying as much as Mieczyslaw had told him. As he passed it on, he realized how little it was. When he was finished, Gruver looked at him and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the damned Nazis trying to pull our chains and make us run around like chickens in the fannyard.” He shook his head, repeating, “I don’t believe a word.”