Tilting The Balance (59 page)

“Buy me another schnapps,” he said, to Skorzeny.

The SS colonel grinned. “You want me to get you drunk first, so you can say you didn’t know what I was doing when I had my way with you? All right, J a’ger, I’ll play.” He strode to the bar.

Lieutenant General Kurt Chill turned a sardonic eye on his Soviet opposite numbers – or maybe, George Bagnall thought, it was just the effect the torches that blazed in the Pskov Krom created. But no, the general’s German was sardonic, too: “I trust, gentlemen, we can create a united front for the defense of Pleskau? This would have been desirable before, but cooperation has unfortunately proved limited.”

The two Russian partisan leaders, Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, stirred in their seats. Aleksandr German spoke Yiddish as well as Russian, and so followed Chill’s words well enough. He said, “Call our city by its proper name, not the one you Nazis hung on it. Cooperation? Ha! You at least had that much courtesy before.”

Bagnall, whose German was imperfect, frowned as he tried to keep track of the Jewish partisan leader’s Yiddish. Vasiliev had no Yiddish or German; he had to wait until an interpreter finished murmuring in his ear. Then he boomed “Da!” and followed it up with a spate of incomprehensible Russian.

The interpreter performed his office: “Brigadier Vasiliev also rejects the use of the term ‘united front.’ It is properly applied to unions of progressive organizations, not associations with reactionary causes.”

Beside Bagnall, Jerome Jones whistled under his breath. “He shaded that translation. ‘Fascist jackals’ is really what Vasiliev called the Nazis.”

“Why does this not surprise me?” Bagnall whispered back. “If you want to know what I think, that they’ve come back to calling each other names instead of trying to kill each other is progress.”

“Something to that,” Jones said.

He started to add more, but Chill was speaking again: “If we do not join together now, whatever the name of that union may be, what we call this city will matter no more. The Lizards will give it their own name.”

“And how do we stop that?” As usual, German got his comment in a beat ahead of Vasiliev.

The Russian partisan leader amplified what his comrade had said: “Yes, how do we dare put our men on the same firing line as yours without fearing they’ll be shot in the back?”

“The same way I dare put Wehrmacht men into line alongside yours,” Chill said: “by remembering the enemy is worse. As for being shot in the back, how many Red Army units went into action with
NKVD
men behind them to make sure they were properly heroic?”

“Not our partisans” German said. Then he fell silent, and Vasiliev had nothing to add, from which Bagnall inferred General Chill had scored a point.

Chill folded his arms across his chest. “Does either of you gentlemen propose to take overall command of the defenses of Pleskau – excuse me, Pskov?”

Aleksandr German and Vasiliev looked at each other. Neither seemed overjoyed at the prospect of doing as Chill had suggested. In their valenki, Bagnall wouldn’t have been overjoyed either. Conducting hit-and-run raids from the forest wasn’t the same as fighting a standup campaign. The partisans knew well how to make nuisances of themselves. They also had to be uneasily aware that partisan warfare hadn’t kept the Germans from Pskov or driven them out of it.

Finally Vasiliev said, “Nyet.”He went on through his interpreter. “You are best suited to lead the defense provided you do it so that you are defending the town and the people and the Soviet fighters in the area as well as your own Nazis.”

as I can with the men and resources I have available,” Chill answered. “This also means that if I give an order to one of your units, I expect it to be obeyed.”

“Certainly,” Vasiliev answered, “so long as the unit’s commander and political commissar judge the order to be in the best interest of the cause as a whole, not just to the advantage of you Germans.”

“That is not good enough,” Chill replied coldly. “They must take the overall well-being, as their governing assumption, and obey whether they see the need or not. One of the reasons for having an overall commander is to have a man in a position where he can see things his subordinates do not.”

“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. Aleksandr German echoed him.

“Oh, bugger, here we go again,” Bagnall whispered to Jerome Jones. The radarman nodded. Bagnall went on, “We’ve got to do something, before we go through another round of the idiocy that had the Bolshies and Nazis blazing away at each other a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy getting stuck between them again.”

“Nor I,” Jones whispered back. “If that’s what the ground-pounders call war, thank God for the
RAF
, is all I have to say.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “Remember, I’d already found that out. You weren’t along for the raid on the Lizard base south of here.” They thought you were too valuable to risk he thought without much rancor. Ken and poor dead A If and I. we were expendable, but not you – you know your radars too well.

As if thinking along similar lines, Jones answered, “I tried to come along. The bloody Russians wouldn’t let me.”

“Did you? I didn’t know that.” Bagnall’s opinion of Jones went up a peg. To volunteer to get shot at when you didn’t have to took something special.

As most Englishmen would, Jones brushed that aside. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We have to worry about now, as you said.” He got up and said loudly, “Tovarishchi!” Even Bagnal knew that one – it meant Comrades! Jones went on, in Russian and then in German, “If we want to hand Pskov to the Lizards on a silver platter, we can go on just as we are now.”

“Yes? And so?” Kurt Chill asked. “What is your solution? Shall we all place ourselves under your command?” His smile was hard and bright and sharp, like a shark’s.

Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”

“Why not?” Bagnall got to his feet. He had only German, and not all he wanted of that, but he gave it his best shot: “The Red Army doesn’t trust the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht doesn’t trust the Red Army. But have we English done anything to make either side distrust us? Let General Chill command. If Russian units don’t like what he proposes, let them complain to us. If we think the orders are fair, let them obey as if the commands came from Stalin. Is that a fair arrangement?”

Silence followed, save for the murmur of Vasiliev’s interpreter as he translated Bagnall’s words. After a few seconds, Chill said, “In general, weakening command is a bad idea. A commander needs all the authority over his troops he can get. But in these special circumstances-”

“The Englishmen would have to decide quickly,” Aleksandr German said. “If they cannot make up their minds, orders may become irrelevant before they give their answer.”

“That would be part of the packet,” Bagnall agreed.

“The Englishmen would also have to remember that we are all allies together here against the Lizards, and that England is not specially aligned with the Russians against the Reich,”Lieutenant General Chill said. “Decisions which fail to show this evenhandedness would make the arrangement unworkable in short order – and we would start shooting at each other again.”

“Yes, yes,” Bagnall said impatiently. “If I didn’t think we could do that, I wouldn’t have advanced the idea. I might also say I’m not the only one in this room who has had trouble remembering we are all allies together and that plans should show us much.”

Chill glared at him, but so did German and Vasiliev. Jerome Jones whispered, “You did well there, not to single out either side. This way each of them can pretend to be sure you’re talking about the other chap. Downright byzantine of you, in fact.”

“Is that a compliment?” Bagnall asked.

“I meant it for one,” the radarman answered.

Chill spoke to the Russian partisan leaders. “Is this agreeable to you, gentlemen? Shall we let the Englishmen arbitrate between us?”

“He rides that ‘gentlemen’ hard,” Jones murmured. “Throws it right in the face of the comrades-just to irk ‘em, unless I miss my guess. Gentlemen don’t fit into the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Bagnall listened with but half an ear. He was watching the two men who’d headed the “forest republic” before the Lizards arrived. They didn’t look happy as they muttered back and forth. Bagnall didn’t care whether they were happy. He just hoped they could live with the arrangement.

Finally, grudgingly, Nikolai Vasiliev turned to General Chill and spoke a single sentence of Russian. The translator turned it into German:

“Better the English than you.”

“On that, if you’reverse roles, we agree completely,” Chill said. He turned to Bagnall, gave him an ironic bow. “Congratulations. You and your British colleagues have just become a three-man board of field marshals. Shall I order your batons and have a tailor sew red stripes to your trouser seams?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Bagnall said. “What I need is assurance from you and from your Soviet counterparts that you’ll abide by whatever decisions we end up making. Without that, we might as well not start down this road.”

The German general gave him a long look, then slowly nodded. “You do have some understanding of the difficulties with which you are involving yourself. I wondered if this was so. Very well, let it be as you say. By my oath as a soldier and officer of the Wehrmacht and the German Reich, I swear that I shall accept without question your decision on cases brought before you for arbitration.”

“What about you?” Bagnall asked the two Soviet brigadiers. Aleksandr German and Vasiliev seemed imperfectly delighted once more, but German said, “If in a dispute you rule against us, we shall accept your decision as if it came from the Great Stalin himself. This I swear.”

“Da,” Vasiliev added after the interpreter had translated for him. “Stalin.” He spoke the Soviet leader’s name like a religious man invoking the Deity – or perhaps a powerful demon.

Kurt Chill said, “Enjoy the responsibility, my English friends.” He sent Bagnall and Jones a stiff-armed salute, then strode out of the meeting chamber in the Krom.

Bagnall felt the responsibility, too, as if the air had suddenly turned hard and heavy above his shoulders. He said, “Ken won’t be pleased with us for getting him into this when he wasn’t even at the meeting.”

“That’s what he gets for not coming,” Jones replied.

“Mm – maybe so.” Bagnall looked sidelong at the radarman. “Do you suppose the Germans will want you to give up the fair Tatiana, so as to have no reason to be biased toward the Soviet side?”

“They’d better not,” Jones said, “or I’ll bloody well have reason to be biased against them. The one good thing in this whole pestilential town – if anyone tries separating me from her, he’ll have a row on his hands, that I tell you.”

“What?” Bagnall raised an eyebrow. “You’re not enamored of spring in Pskov? You spoke so glowingly of it, I recall, when we were flying here in the Lane.”

“Bugger spring in Pskov, too,” Jones retorted, and stomped off.

In fact, spring in Pskov was pretty enough. The Velikaya River, ice-free at last, boomed over the rapids as it neared Lake Pskov. Gray boulders, tinted with pink, stood out on steep hillsides against the dark green of the all-surrounding woods. Grass grew tall on the streets of deserted villages around the city The sky was a deep, luminous blue, with only a few puffy little white clouds slowly drifting across it from west to east Along with those clouds, Bagnall saw three parallel lines of white, as straight as if drawn with a ruler. Condensation trails from Lizard jets, he thought, and his delight in the beauty of the day vanished. The Lizards might not be moving yet, but they were watching.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked up from the beet field at the sound of jet engines. Off to the north he saw three small silvery darts heading west. They’ll be landing at Warsaw, he thought with the automatic accuracy of one who’d been spotting Lizard planes for as long as there had been Lizard planes to spot – and German planes before that. Wonder what they’ve been up to.

Whoever headed the Jewish fighters these days would have someone at the airport fluent enough at the Lizards’ speech to answer that for him. So would General Bor-Komorowski of the Polish Home Army. Anielewicz missed getting information like that, being connected to a wider world. He hadn’t realized his horizons would contract so dramatically when he left Warsaw for Leczna.

Contract they had. The town had had several radios, but without electricity, what good were they? Poland’s big cities had electricity, but nobody’d bothered repairing the lines out to all the country towns. Leczna probably hadn’t had electricity at all until after the First World War. Now that it was gone again, people just did without.

Anielewicz went back to work. He pulled out a weed, made sure he had the whole root, then moved ahead about half a meter and did it again. An odd task he thought: mindless and exacting at the same time. You wondered where the hours had gone when you knocked off at the end of the day.

A couple of rows over, a Pole looked up from his weeding and said, “Hey you, Jew! What does the creature that says he’s governor of Warsaw call himself again?”

The fellow spoke quite without malice, using Anielewicz’s religion to identify him not particularly to scorn him. That he might feel scorned anyhow never entered the Pole’s mind. Because he knew that, Anielewicz didn’t feel scorned, or at least not badly. “Zolraag,” he answered, carefully pronouncing the two distinct a sounds.

“Zolraag,” the Pole echoed, less clearly. He took off his cap, scratched his head. “Is he as little as all the others like him? It hardly seems natural.”

“All the males I’ve ever seen are about the same size,” Mordechai answered. The Pole scratched his head again. Anielewicz had worked with the Lizards almost every day; he knew them as well as any man could. Here in Leczna, Lizards were hardly more than a rumor. The locals might have seen them when they ran the Nazis out of town, or when they went to Lublin to buy and sell. Other than that, the aliens were a mystery here.