He was glib. He was convincing. He was all the more frightening on account of that. “Why use this thing in Lodz?” Mordechai asked. “Why not at the front?”
“Two reasons,” Skorzeny answered. “First, you get a lot more enemies in one place at concentration areas in the rear. And second, a lot of Lizards at the front have some protection against gas warfare, and that keeps the ginger out, too.” He chuckled. “Ginger is gas warfare-happy gas, but gas.”
Anielewicz turned to Heinrich Jager. “What do you think of this? Will it work? If it was up to you, would you do it?”
Jager’s face didn’t show much, but Jager’s face, from what Mordechai had seen, seldom showed much. He half regretted his words; he was putting on the spot the nearest thing he had to a friend and ally in theWehrmacht. Jager coughed, then said, “I’ve been on more missions with Colonel Skorzeny than I care to remember.” Skorzeny laughed out loud at that. Ignoring him, Jager went on, “I’ve never seen him fail when he sets himself a goal. If he says this will do the job, you’d better listen to him.”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Anielewicz said. He gave his attention back to Otto Skorzeny. “Well,Herr Standartenfuhrer, what will you do if I tell you we don’t want anything to do with this? Will you try to get it into Lodz anyhow?”
“Aber naturlich.”Skorzeny’s Austrian accent made him sound like an aristocrat fromfin de siecle Vienna rather than a Nazi thug. “We don’t give up easily. We’ll do this with you or without you. It would be easier with you, maybe, and you Jews can put yourselves in our good graces by going along. Since we’re going to win the war and rule Poland, doesn’t that strike you as a good idea?”
Come on. Collaborate with us.Skorzeny wasn’t subtle. Mordechai wondered if he had it in him to be subtle. He sighed. “Since you put it that way-”
Skorzeny slapped him on the back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Ha! I knew you were a smart Jew. I-”
Noise from the woods made him break off. Anielewicz quickly figured out what it was. “So you brought some friends along to the meeting, too? They must have bumped up against mine.”
“I said you were a smart Jew, didn’t I?” Skorzeny answered. “How soon can we get this moving? I don’t like waiting around with my thumb up my arse.”
“Let me get back to Lodz and make the arrangements to bring in your little package,” Mordechai said. “I know how to get in touch with Colonel Jager here, and he probably knows how to get in touch with you.”
“Yes, probably.” Jager’s voice was dry.
“Good enough,” Skorzeny said. “Just don’t take too damn long, that’s all I have to tell you. Remember, with you or without you, this is going to happen. Those Lizards will be sorry about the day they crawled out of their eggs.”
“You’ll hear from me soon,” Mordechai promised. He didn’t want Skorzeny doing whatever he had in mind all by himself. The SS man was altogether too likely to succeed at it, whatever it was. It might make the Lizards sorry, but Anielewicz wouldn’t have bet the Jews would care for it, either.
He whistled loudly, a cue for his men to head toward Lodz, then nodded to Jager and Skorzeny and left the clearing. He was very thoughtful all the way back down there.
“How far do we trust the Germans?” he asked back at the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “How farcan we trust the Germans, especially when one of them has told us not to?”
“Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes,”Bertha Fleishman said. Mordechai nodded; he’d had a secular education, with Latin a good part of it. For those who didn’t know their Virgil, Bertha translated: “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.”
“That’s it exactly,” Solomon Gruver said. The fireman was a battered, blunt-faced fellow who looked like a prizefighter and had been a sergeant in the Polish Army in 1939. He’d managed to conceal that from the Nazis, who probably would have liquidated him for it. It made him enormously useful to the Jewish underground: unlike most of its members, he hadn’t had to learn matters military from scratch. He tugged at his bushy, gray-streaked beard. “Sometimes I think Nussboym had the right idea after all: better to live under the Lizards than with these Nazimamzrim cracking the whip.”
“Either way, we get the short end of the stick,” Mordechai said. Heads bobbed up and down along the length of the table. “With the Nazis, it’s just us who get the short end, but it’s bloody short. With the Lizards, everybody gets it, but maybe not so bad as the Germans give it to us.” He chuckled ruefully. “Some bargain, isn’t it?”
“So what do we do?” Gruver demanded. This wasn’t a military matter, or not strictly so. He let others lead-sometimes made others lead-in policy decisions, then weighed in with his own opinion, but was oddly shy about taking the lead himself.
Everybody looked at Anielewicz. Partly that was because he’d met the Germans, partly because people were used to looking at him. He said, “I don’t think we have any choice but to take the thing from Skorzeny. That way, we have some control over it, no matter what it ends up being.”
“The Trojan Horse,” Bertha Fleishman suggested.
Mordechai nodded. “That’s right. That’s just what it’s liable to be. But Skorzeny said he’d do it with us or without us. I believe him. We’d be making a big mistake if we ever took that man less than seriously. We’ll take it now, we’ll do our best to find out what it is, and go from there. Otherwise, he’d find some other way to sneak it into Lodz without our knowing-”
“You really think he could do that?” Gruver asked.
“I have talked with this man. I would not put anything past him,” Mordechai answered. “The only way we have a chance of getting away with this is pretending we’re a pack ofschlemiels who believe everything he says. Maybe then he’ll trust us to do his dirty work for him and not look inside the Trojan Horse.”
“And if it is the world’s biggest ginger bomb, as he says?” somebody asked.
“Then we have a lot of Lizards getting into a king-sized brawl, right in the middle of Lodz,” Mordechai said.“Alevai omayn, that’s all we have.”
“T-T-T-oma,” the Tosevite hatchling said triumphantly, and looked right at Ttomalss. Its mobile face twisted into an expression that indicated pleasure.
“Yes, I am Ttomalss,” the psychologist agreed. The hatchling had no control over its excretions, but it was learning to talk. The Big Uglies were a peculiar species indeed, as far as Ttomalss was concerned.
“T-T-T-oma,” the hatchling repeated, and added an emphatic cough for good measure. Ttomalss wondered whether it really was putting stress on his name or just reproducing another word-like sound it knew.
“Yes, I am Ttomalss,” he said again. If Big Uglies acquired language in a way at all similar to that which hatchlings of the Race used, hearing things over and over would help it learn. It was already showing itself to be a good deal more precocious than hatchlings of the Race as far as talking went: however it learned words, it learned them rapidly. But its coordination, or rather lack of same, set it apart from hatchlings still wet with the juices of their eggs.
He started to repeat his name once more, but the communicator squawked for attention. He went over to it and saw Ppevel staring out of the screen. “Superior sir,” he said as he turned on the video so Ppevel could see him in turn. “How may I serve you, superior sir?”
The assistant administrator for the eastern section of the main continental mass wasted no time with polite small talk. He said, “Prepare the hatchling that came from the body of the Tosevite called Liu Han for immediate return to the surface of Tosev 3.”
Ttomalss had known for some time that that blow might come. He still could not prevent a hiss of pain. “Superior sir, I must appeal,” he said. “The hatchling is at the point of beginning to acquire language. To abandon the project involving it would be to cast aside knowledge that can be obtained in no other way, violating principles of scientflic investigation the Race has traditionally employed regardless of circumstances.” He knew no stronger argument than that.