“We’ll take that,” Penny said, and Auerbach had to nod. Together, they set off to acquaint themselves with the new United States.
In his green undershirt and black panzer man’s trousers, Heinrich Jager didn’t look badly out of place on the streets of Lodz. Lots of men wore odds and ends of German uniform, and, if his was in better shape than most, that meant little. His colonel’s blouse, on the other hand, he’d ditched as soon as he jumped out of theStorch. AWehrmacht officer was not a popular thing to be, not here.
Ludmila strode along beside him. Her clothes-a peasant tunic and a pair of trousers that had probably once belonged to a Polish soldier-were mannish, but no one save a particularly nearsighted Lizard could have mistaken her for the male of the species, even with an automatic pistol on her hip. Neither pants nor sidearm drew any special notice. A lot of women wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses, and a surprising number-most but not all of them Jewish-looking-carried or wore firearms.
“Do you know Lodz at all?” Ludmila asked. “Do you know how to find-the person we’re looking for?” She was too sensible to name Mordechai Anielewicz where anyone might overbear his name.
Jager shook his head. “No and no, respectively.” He kept his voice low; nobody who spoke German,Wehrmacht officer or not, was likely to be popular in Lodz these days, not with Jews, not with Poles, and not with Lizards, either. “I expect we’ll find him, though. In his own way, he’s a big man here.”
He thought about asking a policeman. He had a couple of different brands from which to choose: Poles in dark blue uniforms and Jews with armbands left over from German administration and with kepis that made them look absurdly like Frenchflics. That didn’t strike him as a healthy idea, though. Instead, he and Ludmila kept walking north up Stodolniana Street till they came to what had to have been the Jewish quarter. Even now, it was brutally crowded. What it had been like under theReich was something Jager would sooner not have contemplated.
Many more of those comic-opera Jewish policemen were on the street in that part of town. Jager kept right on ignoring them and hoping they would extend him the same courtesy. He nodded to a fellow with a wild mop of hair and a big, curly reddish beard who carried a Mauser, had another slung over his shoulder, and wore crisscross bandoliers full of brass cartridges: a Jewish bandit if ever there was one, and as such a man likely to know where Anielewicz could be found. “I’m looking for Mordechai,” he said. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly at his clear German.“Nu? Are you?” he said, using Yiddish, perhaps to see if Jager could follow.
Jager nodded again to show he could. The Jewish fighter went on, “So you’re looking for Mordechai. So what? Is he looking for you?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Jager answered. “Does the name Skorzeny mean anything to you?”
It did. The fighter stiffened. “You’re him?” he demanded, and made as if to point the rifle he carried at Jager. Then he checked himself. “No. You can’t be. He’s supposed to be taller than I am, and you’re not.”
“You’re right” Jager pointed to Ludmila.“She’s really Skorzeny.”
“Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jager.
As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jager recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jager caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”
She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jager would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jager!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”
“I’ll listen to him.” Anielewicz glanced at Ludmila. “Who’s your friend?”
She answered for herself, with manifest pride: “Ludmila Vadimovna Gorbunova, Senior Lieutenant, Red Air Force.”
“Red Air Force?” Anielewicz’s lips silently shaped the words. “You have the oddest friends, Jager-her and me, for instance. What would Hitler say if he knew?”
“He’d say I was dead meat,” Jager answered. “Of course, since I was already under arrest for treason, he’s already said that, or his bully boys have. Right now, I want to keep him from blowing up Lodz, and maybe keep the Lizards from blowing up Germany to pay him back. For better or worse, it still is my fatherland. Skorzeny doesn’t care what happens next. He’ll touch that thing off for no better reason than because someone told him to.”
“You were right,” the woman beside Anielewicz said. “You did see him, then. I thought you were worrying over every little thing.”
“I wish I had been, Bertha,” he replied, worry and affection warring in his voice. He turned his attention back to Jager. “I didn’t think… anybody”-he’d probably been about to say something likeeven you damned Nazis, but forbore-“would explode the bomb in the middle of truce talks. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?” His gaze sharpened. “You were arrested for treason, you say?Gevalt! They found you were passing things to us?”
“They found out I was, yes,” Jager answered with a weary nod. Since his rescue, things had happened too fast for him to take them all in at once. For now, he was trying to roll with each one as it hit. Later, if there was a later and it wasn’t frantic, he’d do his best to figure out what everything meant. “Karol is dead.” One more memory he wished he didn’t have. “They didn’t really have any idea how much I was passing on to you. If they’d known a tenth part of it, I’d have been in pieces on the floor when my boys came to break me out-and if my boys knew a tenth part of it, they never would have come.”
Anielewicz studied him. Quietly, the younger man said, “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known about the bomb, it would have gone off, and God only knows what would have happened next.” He offered the words as in consolation for Jager’s having been rescued by his men when they didn’t know what he’d truly done; he understood, with a good officer’s instinctive grasp, how hard that was to accept.
“You say you saw Skorzeny?” Jager asked, and Anielewicz nodded. Jager grimaced. “You must have found the bomb, too. He said it was in a graveyard. Did you move it after you found it?”
“Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too-not just the wireless switch, but the manual device-so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”
Jager held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”
“If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”
“Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jager. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation.“Nu? Would he?”
“I know two things,” Jager answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow-no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”