“If it hadn’t been this Jager who sent us the message, I wouldn’t believe it, either,” Anielewicz said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you know, the nerve-gas bomb would have done us in.” He turned to Bertha. “What do you think?”
“As far as I can see, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter,” she answered. “We have to act as if it is, don’t we? We can’t really afford to ignore it.”
“Feh!”Gruver said in disgust. “We’ll waste all sorts of time and effort, and what will we come up with? Nothing, I tell you.”
“Alevai omaynyou’re right and there’s nothing to find,” Mordechai said. “But suppose-just suppose-you’re wrong and there is a bomb. Then what? Maybe we find it. That would be good; with a bomb of our own, we could tell the Lizards and Nazis both where to head in. Maybe the Lizards find it, and use it as an excuse to blow up some city somewhere-look what happened to Copenhagen. Or maybe we don’t find it and the Lizards don’t find it. Suppose the truce talks break down? All Skorzeny has to do is get on the wireless and-”
Solomon Gruver grimaced. “All right. You made your point, damn you. Now all we have to do is try to find theverkakte thing-if, like I say, it’s there to be found in the first place.”
“It’s somewhere here, in our part of the city,” Anielewicz said, as he had before. “How could the SS man have got it here? Where would he have hidden it if he did?”
“How big is it?” Bertha asked. “That will make a difference in where he might have put it.”
“It can’t be small; it can’t be light,” Anielewicz answered. “If it were, the Germans would load these bombs into airplanes or onto their rockets. Since they don’t do that, the bombs can’t be something they’d leave behind a kettle in your kitchen.”
“That makes sense,” Gruver admitted. “It’s one of the few things about this miserable business that does. Like you say, it narrows down the places where the bomb is liable to be… if there is a bomb.” He stubbornly refused to acknowledge that was anything more than anif.
“Around the factories,” Bertha Fleishman said. “That’s one place to start.”
“One place, yes,” Gruver said. “A big one place. Dozens of factories here, all through the ghetto. Straw boots, cartridge casings, rucksacks-we were making all sorts of things for the Nazis, and we’re still making most of them for the Lizards. So where around the factories would you have us start?”
“I’d sooner not start with them,” Anielewicz said. “As you say, Solomon, they’re too big to know where to begin. We may not have much time; it probably depends on how soon the Lizards and the Nazis quarrel. So where’s the likeliest place that SSmamzer would have hidden a big bomb?”
“From what you say about him, would he have picked the likeliest place?” Solomon Gruver asked.
“If he didn’t, we’re going to be in even more trouble than I already think we are,” Mordechai answered. “But I think, I hope, I pray this time he didn’t. He couldn’t have spent much time in Lodz. He’d have wanted to hide this thing for a little while, escape, and then set it off. It wouldn’t have needed to stay hidden very long or be hidden very well. But then the cease-fire came along and complicated his life-and maybe saved ours.”
“If this isn’t all a load ofdreck to make us spin our wheels,” Gruver said.
“If,” Anielewicz admitted.
“I know one other place we ought to check,” Bertha Fleishman said: “the cemetery and the ghetto field south of it.”
Gruver and Anielewicz both looked at her. The words hung in the air of the dingy meeting room. “If I were doing the job, that’sjustwhere I’d put it,” Mordechai exclaimed. “Can’t think of a better place-quiet at night, already plenty of holes in the ground-”
“Especially in the ghetto field,” Bertha said, catching fire at a suggestion she had first made casually. “That’s where so many mass graves are, from when the sickness and starvation were so bad. Who would pay any special attention to one more hole in the ground there?”
“Who would notice anybody coming to dig one more hole in the ground in the middle of the night?” Solomon Gruver’s big head bobbed up and down. “Yes. If it’s anywhere, that’s where we need to start looking.”
“I agree,” Mordechai said. “Bertha, that’s wonderful. If you’re not right, you deserve to be.” He frowned after he said that, working it through to make sure he’d really given her the compliment he’d intended. To his relief, he decided he had.
She smiled back at him. When she smiled, she wasn’t plain and anonymous any more. She still wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary sense of the word, but her smile gave her an odd kind of beauty. She quickly sobered. “We’ll need to have fighters along, not just diggers,” she said. “If we do find this hideous thing, people are going to want to take it away from us. As far as that goes, Lizards are people here.”
“You’re right again,” Anielewicz said. “Draining the nerve gas out of the Nazi bomb made us dangerous nuisances. If we have this bomb, we won’t be nuisances. We’ll have real power.”
“Not while it sits in a hole in the ground,” Gruver said. “As long as it’s there, the most we can do is blow ourselves up with our enemies. That’s better than Masada, but it’s not good. It’s not good enough. If we can get the bomb out and put it where we want it, now-that’s good. For us, anyhow.”
“Yes,” Mordechai breathed. Visions of might floated through his head-hurting the Lizards and getting the Nazis blamed for it, smuggling the bomb into Germany and taking real revenge for what theReich had done to the Jews of Poland. Reality intervened, as reality has a way of doing. “There’s only the one bomb-if there’s any bomb there at all. We have to find it, and we have to get it out of the ground if it’s there-you’re right on both counts, Solomon-before we can even think about what to do with it.”
“If we go with half the fighters in the ghetto, other people will know we’re after something, even if they don’t know what,” Gruver said. “We don’t want that, do we? Find it first, then see if we can get it out without raising a fuss. If we can’t-” He shrugged.
“We’ll walk through the cemetery and the ghetto field,” Anielewicz declared-if he was commander here, hewould command. “If we find something, then we figure out what to do next. And if we don’t find anything”-he too shrugged, wryly-“then we figure out what to do next.”
“And when someone asks us what we’re doing there, what do we tell him?” Gruver asked. He was good at finding problems, not so good at solutions.
It was a good question. Anielewicz scratched his head. They had to say something, and something both innocuous and convincing. Bertha Fleishman said, “We can tell people we’re looking for areas where no one is buried, so we can dig in those places first in case we have to fight inside the city.”
Anielewicz chewed on that, then nodded, as did Solomon Gruver. Mordechai said, “It’s better than anything I could have come up with. It might not even be a bad idea for us to do that one of these days, though there are so many graves there I’d bet there isn’t much open space to be had.”
“Too many graves,” Bertha said quietly. Both men nodded again.
The cemetery and the ghetto field next to it lay in the northeastern corner of the Jewish district of Lodz. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was in the southwest, two, maybe two and a half kilometers away. It started to drizzle as Mordechai, Bertha, and Solomon Gruver tramped across the ghetto. Anielewicz looked gratefully up at the heavens; the rain would give them more privacy than they might have had otherwise.
A white-bearded rabbi chanted the burial service over a body wrapped in a sheet; wood for coffins had long since become a luxury. Behind him, amid a small crowd of mourners, stood a stooped man with both hands pressed up to his face to hide his sobs. Was it his wife going into the increasingly muddy ground? Mordechai would never know.