The poultry seller said, “What other interesting gossip have you heard?” The kind of gossip he found interesting had to do with the little scaly devils.
“What do you want for these chicken backs here?” she asked, not responding right away. He named a price. She shrieked at him. He yelled back. She attacked his gouging with a fury that astonished her. Then, after a moment, she realized she’d found a safe way to vent her sorrow for Bobby Fiore.
For whatever reasons he had, the poultry seller got caught up in the squabble, too. “I tell you, foolish woman, you are too stingy to deserve to live,” he shouted, waving his arms.
“And I tell you, the little scaly devils are on especial watch for your kind, so you had better take care!” Liu Han waved her arms, too. At the same time, she watched the poultry seller’s face to make sure he understood your kind to mean Communists, not thieving merchants He, nodded. He followed that perfectly well. She wondered how long he’d been a conspirator, looking for double meanings everywhere and finding them, too.
She hadn’t been a conspirator long, but she’d managed to put a double meaning across. Even if the little devils were listening to and understanding every word she said, they wouldn’t have grasped the second message she’d given the poultry seller. She was learning the ways of conspiracy herself.
XIX
London was packed with soldiers and RAF men sailors and government workers. Everyone looked worn and hungry and shabby. The Germans and then the Lizards had given the city a fearful pounding from the air. Bombs and fires had cut broad swaths of devastation through it. The phrase on everyone s lips was, “It’s not the place it used to be.”
All the same it struck Moishe Russie as a close approximation to the earthly paradise. No one turned to scowl at him as he hurried west down Oxford Street toward Number 200. In Warsaw and Lodz, gentiles had made him feel he still wore the yellow Star of David on his chest even after the Lizards drove away the Nazis. The Lizards weren’t hunting him here, either. There were no Lizards here. He didn’t miss them.
And what the English reckoned privation looked like abundance to him. People ate mostly bread and potatoes, turnips and beets, and everything was, rationed, but nobody starved. Nobody was close to starving. His son Reuven even got a weekly ration of milk: not a lot but, from what he remembered of his nutrition textbooks, enough.
They’d apologized for the modest Soho flat in which they’d set up his family, but it would have made three of the ones he’d had in Lodz He hadn’t seen so much furniture in years: they weren’t burning it for fuel here. He even had hot water from a tap whenever he wanted it.
A guard in a tin hat in front of the BBC Overseas Services building nodded as he showed his pass and went in. Waiting inside, sipping a cup of ersatz tea quite as dreadful as anything available in Poland stood Nathan Jacobi. “Good to see you, Mr. Russie,” he said in English, and then fell back into Yiddish: “And now, shall we go and give the Lizards’ little stumpy tails a good yank?”
“That would be a pleasure,” Moishe said sincerely. He pulled his script from a coat pocket. “This is the latest draft, with all the censors’ notes included. I’m ready to record it for broadcast.”
“Jolly good,” Jacobi said, again in English. Like David Goldfarb, he flipped back and forth between languages at will, sometimes hardly seeming to realize he was doing so. Unlike Goldfarb’s, his Yiddish was not only fluent but elegant and unaccented; he spoke like an educated Warsaw Jew. Russie wondered if his English was as polished.
Jacobi led the way to a recording studio. But for a couple of glass squares so the engineers could watch the proceedings, the walls were covered with sound-deadening tiles, each punched with its own square grid of holes. On the table sat a microphone with a BBC plaque screwed onto its side. A bare electric bulb threw harsh light down onto the table and the chairs in front of it.
The arrangements were as up-to-date as human technology could produce. Moishe wished they impressed him more than they did. They were certainly finer than anything the Polish wireless services had had in 1939. But that was not the standard by which Russie judged them. In the first months after the Lizards took Warsaw, he’d broadcast anti-Nazi statements for them. Compared to their equipment, the BBC gear looked angular, bulky, and not very efficient, rather like an early wind-up gramophone with trumpet speaker set alongside a modem phonograph.
He sighed as he sat down on one of the hard-backed wooden chairs and set his script in front of him. The censors’ stamps-a triangular one that said PASSED FOR SECURITY and a rectangle that read PASSED FOR CONTENT-obscured a couple of words. He bent down to peer at them and make sure he could read them without hesitation; even though the talk was being recorded for later broadcast, he wanted to be as smooth as he could.
He glanced over to the engineer in the next room. When the man suddenly shot out a finger toward him, he began to talk: “Good day, people of Earth. This is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London in free England. That I am here shows the Lizards lie when they say they are invincible and their victory inevitable. They are very strong; no one could deny that. But they are not supermen”-he’d had to borrow Ubermenschen from the German to put that across-“and they can be beaten.
“I do not intend to say anything about how I came from Poland to London, for fear of closing that way for others who may come after me. But I will say that I was rescued from a Lizard prison in Lodz, that Englishmen and local Jews took part in the rescue, and they defeated both the Lizards and their human henchmen.
“Too many men, women, and children live in parts of the world under Lizard occupation. I understand that, if you are to survive, you must to some degree go on about your daily work. But I urge you from the bottom of my heart to cooperate with the enemy as little as you can and to sabotage his efforts wherever you can. Those who serve as their prison guards and police, those who seek work in their factories to make munitions that will be used against their fellow human beings-they are traitors to mankind. When victory comes, collaborators will be remembered… and punished. If you see the chance, move against them now.”
He had his talk nicely timed-he’d practiced it with Rivka back in the flat. He was just reaching his summing-up when the engineer held, up one finger to show he had a minute left, and came to the end as the fellow drew his index finger across his throat. The engineer grinned and gave him a two-finger V for victory.
Then it was Nathan Jacobi’s turn. He read an English translation (similarly stamped with censors’ marks) of what Russie had just said in Yiddish, the better to reach as large an audience as possible. His timing was as impeccable as Moishe’s had been. This time the engineer signaled his approval with an upraised thumb.
“I think that went very well,” Jacobi said. “With any luck at all, it should leave the Lizards quite nicely browned off.”
“I hope so,” Moishe said. He got up and stretched. Wireless broadcasting was not physically demanding, but it left him worn all the same. Getting out of the studio always came as a relief.
Jacobi held the door open for him. They went out together. Waiting in the hallway stood a tall, thin, tweedy Englishman with a long, craggy face and dark hair combed high in a pompadour. He nodded to Jacobi. They spoke together in English. Jacobi turned to Moishe and switched to Yiddish: “I’d like to introduce you to Eric Blair. He’s talks producer of the Indian Section, and he goes in after us.”
Russie stuck out his hand and said, “Tell him I’m pleased to meet him.”