Tilting The Balance (56 page)

He raised an eyebrow. “Not bad at all. Better than most of what I’ve had lately, as a matter of fact.” To prove he meant it, he quickly drained the glass. Then he said, “So you’re still in touch with the underground?”

“Yes,” Rivka answered. “If it weren’t for them, the Order Service men would have taken Reuven and me along with Moishe by now.”

“Can you let me know how to get hold of them? If nothing else, I’ll need somewhere to sleep while I’m looking things over.” Can’t very well stay in a flat with my cousin’s wife, not when he’s in gaol.

“It’s not as hard as you might think.” Amusement shone in Rivka’s eyes. “Go across the hall to flat number twenty-four. Knock on the door – twice, then once.”

He’d used a password to identify himself to her. Now he had to trot out a secret knock? He’d always thought that sort of thing more the province of sensational novels than sober fact, but he was learning better in a hurry. If you wanted to keep going when every man’s hand was raised against you, you had to figure out ways to keep from being noticed.

He went across the hall, found the battered door with a tarnished brass 24 on it. Knock, knock… knock. He waited. The door opened. The big man standing in it said, “Nu?”

“Nu, the lady across the way sent me here,” Goldfarb replied. With his shaggy beard and soldier’s cap over civilian clothes, the big man looked like a bandit chief. He also looked like someone it would be wiser not to annoy. Goldfarb was glad he’d had the right code to introduce himself to Rivka Russie; without it, this fellow likely would have descended on him like a falling building. He’d been right to have his wind up.

But now the man grinned (showing bad teeth) and stuck out his hand. “So you’re Russie’s English cousin, are you? You can call me Leon.”

“Right.” The fellow had a blacksmith’s grip, Goldfarb discovered. He also noted that while the local Jew had said he could call him Leon, that didn’t mean it was his name: another precaution out of the books, and probably as necessary as the rest.

“Don’t stand there – come in,” Leon said. “Never can tell who’s liable to be looking down the hall.”

He closed the door behind Goldfarb. “Take your pack off if you like – it looks heavy.”

“Thanks” Goldfarb did. The apartment was, if anything, barer than Rivka’s. Only mattresses on the floor said people lived, or at least slept, here. He said, “Moishe’s still in Lodz?” Leon, he figured, would know more surely than Rivka had.

The big man nodded. “He’s in Prison One on Franciszkanska Street – the Nazis called it Franzstrasse, just like they called Lodz Litzmannstadt. We call it Franzstrasse ourselves, sometimes, because there’s a big sign with that name right across from the prison that nobody’s ever bothered taking down.”

“Prison One, eh?” Goldfarb said. “How many are there?”

“Plenty,” Leon answered. “Along with being good at killing people, the Nazis were good at putting them away, too.”

“Do you know where in the prison he’s locked up?” Goldfarb asked. “For that matter, do you have plans for the building?”

“Who do you think turned it into a prison? The Germans should have dirtied their hands doing the work themselves?” Leon said. “Oh yes, we have the plans. And we know where your cousin is, too. The Lizards don’t let Jews anywhere near him – they’re learning – but they haven’t learned yet that some Poles are on our side, too.”

“This whole business must make you meshuggeh sometimes,” Goldfarb said. “The Lizards are better to Jews here than the Nazis ever were, but they’re bad for everybody else, so sometimes you find yourself working with the Germans. And the Poles don’t like Jews, either, but I guess they don’t like the Lizards any better.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” Leon agreed. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do much in the way of figuring out. You wanted plans, I’ll show you plans.” He went over to a cabinet, yanked out a roll of paper, and brought it over to Goldfarb. When Goldfarb opened it, he saw they weren’t just plans but Germanically meticulous engineering drawings. Leon pointed. “They have machine guns on the roof, here and here. We’ll have to do something about those.”

“Yes,” Goldfarb said in a small voice. “A machine gun we don’t do something about would put rather a hole in our scheme, wouldn’t it?”

That might have been Leon’s first taste of British understatement; he grunted laughter. “Put a hole in us, you mean – probably lots of holes. But let’s say we can take out the machine guns-”

“Because if we don’t, we can’t go on anyhow,” Goldfarb broke in.

“Exactly,” Leon said. “So let’s say we do. You’re supposed to be bringing some presents with you. Have you got them?”

By way of answer, Goldfarb opened the battered Polish Army pack that had come from an exile in England. No one had paid any attention to it since he’d landed here. Close to half the people on the road wore one like it, and a lot of those who didn’t had corresponding German or Russian gear instead.

Leon looked inside. His long exhalation puffed out his mustache. “They don’t look like much,” he said dubiously.

“They’re bloody hell to load, but they’ll do the job if I can’t get close enough to use them. I’ve practiced with them. Believe me, they will,” Goldfarb said.

“And what’s all this mess?” Leon pointed into the pack, which held, along with the bombs he’d already disparaged, a motley assortment of metal tubes, levers, and a spring that might have come from the suspension of a lorry.

“The mechanism for shooting them,” Goldfarb answered. “They built one in sections especially for me, lucky chap that I am, so the business end wouldn’t keep sticking out the top of my pack. The whole bloody thing together is called a
PIAT
– Projector, Infantry, Antitank.” The last four words were necessarily in English.

Leon, luckily, understood “tank.” He shook his head anyhow. “No tanks” – he said panzers-”at the jail.”

“There’d better not be,” Goldfarb said. “But a bomb that will make a hole in the side of a tank will make a big hole in the side of a building.”

He got the impression that that was the first thing he’d said which impressed Leon, even a little. The man from the underground (Goldfarb suppressed a picture of Leon coming up from a London tube station) plucked at his beard. “Maybe you have something there. How far will it shoot?”

“A couple of hundred yards – uh, meters.” Watch that. Goldfarb told himself. You can give yourself away if you don’t think metric.

“Should be far enough.” Leon’s sardonic smile said he’d caught the slip, too. “Do you want to look over the prison before you try cracking it?”

“I’d better. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing before I do it, right?”

“It helps, yes.” Leon studied him. “You’ve seen some action, I think.”

“In the air, yes. Not on the ground, not like you mean. On the ground, I’ve just been strafed like everybody else.”

“Yes, I know about that, too,” Leon said. “But even in the air – that’ll do. You won’t panic when things start going crazy. Why don’t you leave your hardware here? We don’t want to bring it around to the prison till it’s time to use it.”

“Makes sense to me, as long as you’re sure nobody’s going to steal it while we’re gone.”

Leon showed teeth in something that was not a smile. “Anyone who steals from us… he’s very sorry and he never, ever does it again. This happens once or twice and people start to get the idea.”

That probably meant just what Goldfarb thought it did. He didn’t want to know for sure. Goldfarb left the pack on the floor and walked out of the flat after Leon.

Franciszkanska Street was about ten minutes away. Again crowds and sights and smells buffeted Goldfarb. Again he reminded himself that this was how things were long after the Nazis had been driven away.

He stuck to Leon like a pair of socks; even though he’d memorized the local map, he didn’t want to do much navigating on his own. Leon presently remarked, “We’ll just walk by, casual as you please. Nobody will think anything about us looking as long as we don’t stop and stare. The first rule is not to make yourself conspicuous.”

Goldfarb looked, turning his head as if to carry on a conversation with Leon. At first glance, the prison was a tough nut to crack: two machine guns on the roof, barred windows, razor wire around the perimeter. At second glance, he said quietly, “It’s too close to everything else and it doesn’t have enough guards.”

“They didn’t send a blind man over,” Leon said, beaming. “Right both times. That gives us our chance.”

“And what do we do to take it?” Goldfarb asked as they left Prison One behind.

“For now, you don’t do anything,” Leon said. “You sit tight and wait for the right time. Me, I have to go see some people and find out what I need to do to incite myself a riot.”

Bobby Fiore paced along a dirt track somewhere in China. His comrades said they weren’t far from Shanghai. That meant little to him, because he couldn’t have put Shanghai on the map to keep himself out of the electric chair. His guess was that it wasn’t too far from the ocean: the air had the vaguely salty tang he’d known when he played in places like Washington State and Louisiana, anyhow.

The weight of the pistol on his hip was comforting, like an old friend. His baggy tunic hid the little gun. He’d acquired a new straw hat. If you ignored his nose and the five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, he made a pretty fair imitation peasant He still didn’t know what to make of the rest of the band. Some of the men who trudged along in the loose column were Chinese Reds like Lo and the rest of the gang who had gotten him into this mess in the first place. They too looked like peasants, which was fair enough, because he gathered most of them were.

But the others… He glanced over at the fellow nearest him, who carried a rifle and wore a ragged khaki uniform. “Hey, Yosh!” he called, and mimed pivoting at second base to turn a double play.

Yoshi Fukuoka grinned, exposing a couple of gold teeth. He dropped the rifle and went into a first baseman’s stretch, scissoring himself into a split and reaching out with an imaginary mitt to snag the equally imaginary ball. “Out!” he yelled, the word perfectly comprehensible to Fiore, who lifted a clenched fist in the air, thumb pointing up.

The Reds looked from one of them to the other. They didn’t get it. To them, Fukuoka was an eastern devil and Fiore a foreign devil, and the only reason they were tagging along with the Japs was that they all hated the Lizards worse than they hated each other.

Fiore hadn’t even counted on that much. When he stumbled into the Japanese camp – and when he figured out the soldiers there were Japs and not Chinamen, which took him a while – he wished he could find himself a priest for last rites, because roasting over a slow fire was the best he’d expected from them. They’d bombed Pearl Harbor, they’d butchered Liu Han’s husband – what was he supposed to expect?

The Japs had taken a little while to figure out he was an American, too. Their Chinese – the only language they had in common with him – was almost as bad as his, and a good-sized honker and round eyes had counted for less at first than his outfit. When they did realize what he was, they’d seemed more alarmed than hostile.

“Doolittle?” Fukuoka had asked, flying bombers over the ground with his hand.

Even though he thought he’d get killed in the next couple of minutes, that had sent Bobby into laughter which, looking back on it, was probably close to hysterical. He knew a lot of the men from Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had landed in China, but getting mistaken for one by a jittery Jap was too much.

“I ain’t no bomber pilot,” he’d said in English. “I’m just a second baseman, and a lousy one, to boot.”

He hadn’t expected that to mean a thing to his interrogator, but the Jap’s eyes had widened as much as they could. “Second base?” he’d echoed, pointing at Fiore. “Beisoboru?”

When Fiore still didn’t get it, Fukuoka had gone into an unmistakable hitting stance. The light went on in Fiore’s head. “Baseball!” he yelled. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it. You play ball, too?”

It hadn’t been enough for him to win friends and influence people right off, but it had kept him from getting shot or bayoneted or suffering any of the other interesting things that could have happened to him. His questioning stayed questions, not torture. When, haltingly, he explained how he’d been part of the attack on the prison camp guard station that got him promoted from prisoner to fellow fighter.

“You want kill…?”One of the Japs had said a word in his own language. When he saw Fiore didn’t get it, he’d amended it to, “Little scaly devils?”

“Yeah!” Bobby had said savagely. The Japanese might not have known English, but they understood that just fine.

And so he’d started marching with them. That still drove him crazy. They were the enemy, they’d kicked the U.S.A. in the balls at Pearl Harbor, jumped on the Philippines and Singapore and Burma and eight zillion little islands God knows where in the Pacific, and here he was eating rice out of the same bowl with them. It felt like treason. He had uneasy visions of standing trial for treason if he ever got back to the States, But the Japs hated Lizards more than they hated Americans, and, he’d discovered, he hated Lizards worse than he hated Japs. He’d stayed.

The Reds had joined the band a couple of days after he did. They and the Japs hadn’t seemed to have any trouble getting along. That puzzled Bobby – they’d been shooting at each other right up to the day the Lizards came, and probably for a while afterwards, too.

The leader of the Red detachment was a man of about his own age named Nieh Ho-T’ing. Fiore spent more time talking with the Chinese than he did with any of the Japs except Pukuoka the ballplayer, he had more words in common with them. When he asked why they didn’t have any trouble making common cause with their recent foes, Nieh had looked at him as if he were a moron and replied, “The enemy of my enemy is a friend.”

It seemed as simple as that to the Japs, too. They were looking for fighters, they knew The Reds could fight, and that was all she wrote. If they thought about anything else, they sure didn’t show it.

Shanghai was in Lizard hands. The closer the band got to it, the more Bobby began to jitter. “What do we do if we see a Lizard tank?” he demanded of Nieh.