“Oh, yes.” Mordechai put an edge of irony in his voice. He wondered how many years had rolled past since Judah Ussishkin last got truly drunk. Probably more than I’ve been alive, he thought.
Far off in the distance, he heard airplane engines, at first like gnats with deep voices but rapidly swelling to full-throated roars. Then roars, these harsh and abrupt, rose from the rocket battery the Lizards had stationed out beyond the beet fields.
Ussishkin’s face grew sad. “More death tonight, this time in the air.”
“Yes.” Anielewicz wondered how many German or Russian planes, how many young Germans or Russians, were falling out of the sky. Almost as many as the Lizards had shot at-their rockets were ungodly accurate. Flying a mission knowing you were likely to run into such took courage. Even if you were a Nazi, it took courage.
Somewhere not far away, a thunderclap announced a bomber’s return to earth. Dr. Ussishkin gulped down the second glass of brandy, then got himself a third. Anielewicz raised an eyebrow; maybe he did mean to get drunk. The physician said, “A pity the Lizards can slay with impunity.”
“Not with impunity. We-” Anielewicz shut up. One glass of brandy had led him to say one word too many. He didn’t know how much Ussishkin knew about his role as Jewish fighting leader, he’d carefully refrained from asking the doctor, for fear of giving away more than he learned. But Ussishkin had to be aware he was part of the resistance, for Anielewicz was not the first man who’d taken refuge here.
In a musing voice, as if speculating about an obscure and much disputed biblical text, Ussishkin said, “I wonder if anything could be done about those rockets without endangering the townsfolk.”
“Something could probably be done,” Anielewicz said; he’d studied the site with professional interest while the Lizards prepared it “What would happen to the town afterwards is a different question.”
“The Lizards are not the hostage takers the Nazis were,” Ussishkin said, still musingly.
“I have the feeling they knew war only from books before they got here,” Mordechai answered. “A lot of the filthy stuff, no matter how well it works, doesn’t get into that kind of book.” He glanced sharply over at Ussishkin. “Or are you saying I should do something about that rocket installation?”
The doctor hesitated; he knew they were treading dangerous ground. At last he said, “I thought you might perhaps have some experience in such things. Was I wrong?”
“Yes-and no,” Anielewicz said. Sometimes you had to know when to drop your cover, too. “Playing games with the Lizards here is a lot different from what it’s like in a place like Warsaw. A lot more buildings to hide among there-a lot more people to hide among, too. Here their rocket launchers and everything they use are set up right out in the open-hard to get at without being spotted.”
“I don’t suppose the razor-wire circles around them make matters any easier, either,” Ussishkin murmured.
“They certainly don’t.” Anielewicz thought about going off in the night and trying to pot a few Lizards from long range with his Mauser. But the Lizards had gadgets that let them see in the dark the way cats wished they could. Even without those gadgets, sniping wouldn’t really hurt the effectiveness of the battery: the Lizards would just replace whatever males he managed to wound or kill.
Then, all of a sudden, he laughed out loud. “And what amuses you?” Judah Ussishkin asked. “Somehow I doubt its razor wire.”
“No, not razor wire,” Anielewicz, admitted. “But I think I know how to get through it.” He explained. It didn’t take long.
By the time he was done, Ussishkin’s eyes were wide and staring. “This will work?” he demanded.
“They had enough trouble with it in Warsaw,” Mordechai said. “I don’t know just what it will do here, but it ought to do something.”
“You’re still lying low, aren’t you?” Ussishkin said, then answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are. And even if you weren’t, I’d be a better choice to approach Tadeusz Sobieski, anyhow. He’s known me all his life; when he was born, my Sarah delivered him. I’ll talk with him first thing in the morning. We’ll see if he can be as generous to the Lizards as you have in mind.”
With that, Anielewicz had to be content. He stayed inside Dr. Ussishkin’s house. Sarah wouldn’t let him help with the cooking or cleaning, so he read books and studied the chessboard. Every day, a horse-drawn wagon rattled down the street, carrying supplies from Sobieski the grocer to the Lizards at their rocket battery.
For several days, nothing happened. Then one bright, sunny afternoon, a time when neither the Luftwaffe nor the Red Air Force would be insane enough to put planes in the air over Poland, the battery launched all its rockets, one after another, roar! roar! roar! into the sky.
Farmworkers came running in from the fields. Mordechai felt like hugging himself with glee as he listened to scraps of their excited conversation: “The things have gone crazy!” “Shot off their rockets, then started shooting at each other!” “Never seen fireworks like them in all my born days!”
Dr. Ussishkin came into the house a few minutes later. “You were right, it seems,” he said to Anielewicz. “This was the day Tadeusz laced all the supplies with as much ginger as he had. They do have a strong reaction to the stuff, don’t they?”
“It’s more than a drunk for them; more like a drug,” Mordechai answered. “It makes them fast and nervous-hair-trigger, I guess you might say. Somebody must have imagined he heard engines or thought he saw something in one of their instruments, and that would have been plenty to touch them off.”
“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Ussishkin said. “Not the ones who went berserk out there today, but the higher ranking ones who ordered the battery placed where it was.”
They didn’t have long to wait for their answer. At least one of the Lizards must have survived and radioed Lublin, for in side the hour several Lizard lorries from the urban center rolled through the streets of Leczna. When they left the next day, they took the rocket launchers with them. If the battery went up again, it went up somewhere else.
With the Lizards out of the neighborhood, Anielewicz had no more excuse for staying indoors all the time. Zofia Klopotowski waylaid him and dragged him into the bushes, or as near as made no difference. After his spell of celibacy, he kept up with her for a while, but then his ardor began to flag.
Just as he’d never imagined he’d have been relieved to see the Lizards erect their rocket battery in his own back yard, so to speak, he found equally surprising his halfhearted wish that they’d come back.
A disheveled soldier shouted frantically in Russian. When George Bagnall didn’t understand fast enough to suit him, he started to point his submachine gun at the grounded aviator.
By then, Bagnall had had a bellyful of frantic Russians. He’d even had a bellyful of frantic Germans, a species that did not exist in stereotype but proved quite common under the stress of combat. He got to his feet, knocked the gun barrel aside with a contemptuous swipe, and growled, “Why don’t you shove that thing up your arse-or would you rather I did it for you?”
He spoke in English, but the tone got across. So did his manner. The Red Army man stopped treating him like a servant and started treating him like an officer. The old saw about the Hun being either at your throat or at your feet seemed to apply even more to Russians than it did to Germans. If you gave in to them, they rode roughshod over you, but if you showed a little bulge, they figured you had to be the boss and started tugging at their forelocks.
Bagnall turned to Jerome Jones. “What’s this bloody goon babbling about? I have more Russian than I did when we got stuck here-not hard, that, since I had none-but I can’t make head nor tail of it when he goes on so blinking fast.”