“It is indeed,” both males from the inspectorate said together. The second one went on, “Now-when was the last time you saw these two Big Uglies?”

“I do not precisely remember,” Gorppet answered. “As I say, it was some time ago. Do you know what has become of them? I rather miss their company.” Was that too audacious? He’d find out.

Together, the two males made the negative gesture. “We were hoping you would be able to tell us,” the second one said.

Gorppet made the same gesture himself. “I am sorry, superior sir, but I cannot do it. I hope nothing unfortunate has happened to them.” That was even true, especially when he thought of Rance Auerbach. The Big Ugly had been through the worst the fighting could do, just as Gorppet had himself.

“We do not know,” the first inspector said. “We believe, however, that they were involved in the recent unfortunate incident. You do know to which matter I refer?”

“I believe so, superior sir-gossip is everywhere,” Gorppet answered. “I hope not, for their sakes.” And you don’t know about me after all! He felt like laughing in the inspectors’ faces.

17

Mordechai Anielewicz had just sat down to supper when air-raid sirens began to wail in the streets of Lodz. Bertha exclaimed in dismay and set the roast chicken she was bringing in from the kitchen down on the table. Mordechai sprang to his feet. “Grab your masks, everyone!” he said. “Then down to the cellar as fast as we can go.”

His own gas mask was right behind him. He pulled it on, wondering how much good it would do. He’d already made the acquaintance of German poison gas once. He’d been lucky then; Heinrich Jager had had syringes of the antidote. Even so, he’d almost died. A second exposure… He didn’t want to think about it.

Bertha had her mask on. So did Miriam and David. Heinrich… Where was Heinrich? Anielewicz shouted his younger son’s name.

“I’ve got my mask, Father!” Heinrich Anielewicz shouted back from the bedroom. “But I can’t find Pancer!”

“Leave the beffel!” Mordechai exclaimed. “We’ve got to get down to the cellar!”

“I can’t leave him,” Heinrich said. “Oh-here he is, under the bed. I’ve got him.” He came out with the beffel in his arms. “All right-we can go now.”

The sirens were shrieking like lost souls. Mordechai whacked Heinrich on the backside as his son hurried past him. “You put yourself in danger and your whole family with you, on account of your pet,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry,” Heinrich said. “But Pancer saved us once, you know, so I thought I ought to save him, too, if I could.”

That wasn’t the sort of response to which Anielewicz could find an easy comeback. Heinrich didn’t see his life as more important than the beffel’s. “Come on,” Mordechai said. Bertha carefully shut the door behind them as they hurried down the hall, down the stairs, and into the cellar below the block of flats. Everyone else in the building hurried with them, men, women, and children all wearing masks that turned them from people into pig-snouted aliens.

“There, you see!” From behind his mask, Heinrich’s still-piping voice rose in triumph. “They’ve got a dog, and they’ve got a cat?”

“I see.” Anielewicz said. “The other thing I see is, they took chances they shouldn’t have, and so did you?”

Heinrich’s older brother had a more urgent, more important question: “If an explosive-metal bomb goes off in Lodz, how much good will hiding in the cellar do us?”

“It depends on just where the bomb goes off, David,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know for sure how much good it will do. I do know we’ve got a better chance in the cellar than upstairs.”

By the time he and his family got in, the cellar was already packed. People talked in high, excited voices. Mordechai didn’t talk. He did worry. The cellar didn’t hold enough food and water to let people last very long before being forced to go out. He’d complained to the manager, who’d nodded politely and not done a thing. If the worst came…

It didn’t, not this evening. Instead, the all-clear blew, a long, steady blast of sound. “Thank God,” Bertha said quietly.

“Just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “But with things the way they are, we can’t know ahead of time, so we have to treat every one like the real thing. Let’s go upstairs. Supper won’t even be cold.” He took off his mask. Breathing unfiltered air, even in the cramped quarters of the cellar, felt far better than the seemingly lifeless stuff he got through the rubber and charcoal of the mask.

After supper, Bertha was washing dishes with Miriam helping her when the telephone rang. Mordechai picked it up. “Hello?”

“Just another drill.” David Nussboym sounded wryly amused with the world.

“Yes, just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “Nu?” He didn’t know how to respond to the man whose hirelings had come unpleasantly close to killing him a couple of times.

“When do you suppose the real thing will come along?” Nussboym asked. He didn’t seem to feel the least bit guilty about what he’d done.

“What, Molotov didn’t tell you before he sent you out here?” Anielewicz jeered.

“No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t,” replied the Jew from Lodz who’d become an NKVD man. “He told me I would be the best man on the spot because of my old connections here, but that was all.”

Anielewicz wondered how to take that. “You know Molotov personally?” he said. “Sure you do, just like I know the Pope.”

“Say hello to him for me next time you see him,” Nussboym answered imperturbably. “Know Molotov personally? I don’t think anyone does, except maybe his wife. But I deal with him, if that’s what you mean. I’m the one who got him out of his cell in the middle of Beria’s coup.”

He spoke matter-of-factly enough. If he was lying, Anielewicz couldn’t prove it by his tone. “If he sent you here thinking there’d be a war, he didn’t do you any favors,” he observed.

“This thought also occurred to me,” Nussboym said. “But I serve the Soviet Union.” He spoke without self-consciousness. He’d been a Red before Anielewicz and some of the other Jewish fighters in Lodz spirited him off to the USSR because he was also too friendly with the Lizards. They’d been playing a double game with the Race and the Germans. They’d got away with it, too, but Mordechai didn’t ever want to have to take such chances again.

He said, “And what does serving the Soviet Union mean about your being here now?”

“I volunteered for this, because I know Lodz and because your interests and the Soviet Union’s coincide for the time being,” David Nussboym answered. “We both want to stop the war any way we can. This is what you get for going to bed with the fascists during the fighting.” No, he hadn’t forgotten what had happened all those years ago, either.

With a sigh, Anielewicz answered, “If the Race had beaten the Nazis then, odds are they’d have beaten the Russians, too. And what Soviet Union would you be serving these days if that had happened?”

“I don’t deal in might-have-beens,” Nussboym said, as if Mordechai had accused him of a particularly unsavory vice. “I deal in what’s real.”

“All right,” Anielewicz said amiably. “What’s real here? If the Germans come over the border, what do we do about it? Do we start yelling for Soviet soldiers to help drive them away?”

He chuckled under his breath, figuring that would get a rise out of his former colleague if anything could. And it did. “No!” Nussboym exclaimed. Had he been a Lizard, he would have used an emphatic cough. “Formally, the USSR is and will stay neutral in case of conflict.”

“Molotov doesn’t want the Germans and the Race landing on Russia with both feet, eh?” Behind that cynical tone, Mordechai felt a certain amount of sympathy for the Soviet leader’s position.

“Would you?” Nussboym returned, which showed he was thinking along similar lines.