Tilting The Balance (67 page)

She hadn’t said she was, not quite, but she didn’t deny it, either, only waited to see what he’d say next He didn’t know what the hell to say. He’d run across a few queers in his time, but to find out somebody he liked not just because he wanted to lay her but on account of who she was – and he couldn’t be fooled on something like that, not when they’d been living in each other’s pockets through months of grinding combat – was one of these creatures almost as alien as a Lizard… that was a jolt, no doubt about it.

“I dunno,” he said at last. “Reckon I’ll keep my mouth shut. Last thing I want to do is cost us a medic as good as you are.”

She startled him immensely by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. An instant later, she looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Mutt. I don’t want to play games with you. But that’s one of the kindest things anybody ever said about me. If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?”

Words like unnatural and perverted flashed across his mind. But he’d had plenty of chances to see that Lucille was good people – somebody you could trust your life to, in the most literal sense of the words.

“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon. Mutt had never imagined he could be relieved to take cover from a bombardment, but right at that moment he was.

Liu Han hated going out to the market. People looked hard at her and muttered behind her back. Nobody had ever done anything to her – the little scaly devils were powerful protectors – but the fear was always there.

Little devils paced through the prison camp marketplace, too. They were smaller than people, but nobody got too close to them; wherever they went, they took open space with them. It was, more often than not, the only open space in the crowded market.

The baby in her belly gave her a kick. Even the loose cotton tunic she wore couldn’t disguise her pregnancy any longer. She didn’t know what to feel about Bobby Fiore: sadness that he was gone and worry about whether he was all right mingled with shame over the way the scaly devils had forced them together and a different sort of shame at conceiving by a foreign devil.

She let the market din wash over her and take her away from herself. “Cucumbers!” – a fellow pulled a couple of them from a wicker basket tied round his middle. They were long and twisty like snakes. A few feet away another man cried the virtues of his snake meat. “Cabbages!” “Fine purple horseradish!”

“Pork!” The man selling disjointed pieces of pig carcass wore shorts and an open jacket. His shiny brown belly showed through, and looked remarkably like one of the bigger cuts of meat he had on display.

Liu Han hesitated between his stall and the one next to it, which displayed not only chickens but fans made from chicken feathers glued to brightly painted horn frames. “Make up your mind, foolish woman!” somebody screeched at her. She hardly minded; that, at least, was an impersonal insult.

She went up to the man who sold chickens. Before she could say anything, he quietly told her, “Take your business somewhere else. I don’t want any money from the running dogs of the imperialist scaly devils.”

A Communist, she thought dully. Then anger flared in her. “What if I tell the scaly devils who and what you are?” she snapped.

“You’re not the dowager empress, to put me in fear with a word,” he retorted. “If you do that, I will find out about it and disappear before they can take me – or if I don’t, my family will be looked after. But you – you’ve been a quiet running dog so far. But if you begin to sing as if you were in the Peking opera, I promise you’ll be sorry for it. Now go.”

Liu Han went, a stone in her heart. Even buying pork at a good price from the fellow in the stupid jacket didn’t ease her spirit. Nor did the cries of the merchants who hawked amber or slippers with upturned toes or tortoiseshell or lace or beaded embroidery or fancy shawls or any of a hundred other different things. The little scaly devils were generous to her: why not, when they wanted to learn from her how a healthy woman gave birth? For the first time in her life, she could have most of the things she wanted. Contrary to what she’d always believed, that didn’t make her happy.

A little boy in rags flashed by. “Running dog!” he squealed at Liu Han, and vanished into the crowd before she got a good look at his face. His mocking laughter was all she could report to the scaly devils, assuming she was foolish enough to bother.

The baby kicked her again. How was he supposed to grow up when everyone down to street urchins scorned his mother so? The easy tears of pregnancy filled her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

She started back toward the house she’d shared with Bobby Fiore. Though it was a house finer than the one she’d had back in her own village, it seemed as empty as the gleaming metal chamber in which the little scaly devils had imprisoned her on their plane that never came down. The resemblance didn’t end there, either. Like that metal chamber, it wasn’t a home in any proper sense of the word, but a cage where the little devils kept her while they studied her.

Suddenly she had had all the study she could stand. Maybe no scaly devils waited back at the house right now to take photographs of her and touch her in intimate places and ask her questions that were none of their business and talk among themselves with their hisses and pops and squeaks as if she had no more mind of her own than the kang that kept her warm at night. But so what? If they weren’t there now, they would be later today or tomorrow or the day after that.

Back in her village, the Kuomintang was strong; even thinking about being a Communist was dangerous, though Communist armies had done more than most in fighting the Japanese. Bobby Fiore hadn’t had any use for the Reds, either, but he’d willingly gone with them to take a poke at the scaly devils. She hoped he still lived, even if he was a foreign devil, he was a good man – better to get along with than her Chinese husband had been.

If the Communists had fought the Japanese, if Bobby Fiore had gone with them to raid the little devils… they were likely to be doing more against the devils than anyone else. “I owe them too much to let them do whatever they want with me forever,” Liu Han muttered.

Instead of going on to her house, she turned around and went back to the stall of the fellow who sold chickens and chicken feather fans. He was haggling with a skinny man over the price of a couple of chicken feet When the skinny man sullenly paid his price and went away, he gave Liu Han an unfriendly look. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go away.”

“You did,” she said, “and I will, if that’s what you’really want. But if you and your friends” – she did not name them out loud-”are interested in knowing more about the little scaly devils who come to my hut, you’ll ask me to stay.”

The poultry seller’s expression did not change. “You’ll have to earn our trust, show you’re telling the truth,” he said, his voice still hostile. But he did not yell for Liu Han to leave.

“I can do that,” she said. “I will.”

“Maybe we’ll talk, then,” he said, and smiled for the first time.

He supposed he should thank God they weren’t often in a hurry. They’d interrogated him after he was caught. On the whole, he’d spoken freely. He didn’t know many names, so he couldn’t incriminate most of the people who’d helped him – and he figured they were smart enough not to stay in any one place too long, either.

The Lizards hadn’t bothered questioning him lately. They just held him, fed him (at least as much as he’d been eating while he was free), and left him to fight boredom as best he could. They didn’t put prisoners in the cells to either side of his or across from it Even if they had, neither the Lizard guards nor their Polish and Jewish flunkies allowed much chatter.

The Lizard guards ignored him as long as he didn’t cause trouble. The Poles and Jews who served them still thought he was a child molester and a murderer. “I hope they cut your balls off one at a time before they hang you,” a Pole said. He’d given up answering back. They didn’t believe him, anyhow.

Some blankets, a bucket of water and a tin cup, another bucket for slops – such were his worldly goods. He wished he had a book. He didn’t care what it was; he would have devoured a manual on procedures for inspecting light bulbs. As things were, he stood, he sat, he paced, he yawned. He yawned a lot.

A Polish guard stopped in front of the cell. He shifted the club he carried from right hand to left so he could take a key out of his pocket. “On your feet, you,” he growled. “They got more questions for you, or maybe they’re just gonna chop you up to see how you got to be the kind of filthy thing you are.”

As Russie got up, he remembered there were worse things than boredom. Interrogation was one of them, not so much for what the Lizards did as for the never-ending terror of what they might do.

Crash! Something hit the side of the prison like a bomb. At first, as he staggered and clapped hands to ears, Moishe thought that was just what it was, that the Germans had landed one of their rockets right in the middle of Lodz.

Then another crash came, hard on the heels of the first. It flung the Pole headlong against the bars of Russie’s cell. The guard went down, stunned and bleeding from the nose. The key flew from his hand. In a spy story, Moishe thought, it would have had the consideration to land in his cell so he could grab it and escape. Instead, it bounced down the hall, impossibly far out of reach.

Still another crash – this one knocked Russie off his feet and showed daylight through a hole in the far wall. As he curled up into a frightened ball, he wondered what the devil was going on. The Nazis couldn’t have fired three rocket bombs so fast… could they? Or was it artillery? How could they have brought artillery through Lizard held territory to shell Lodz?

His ears rang, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the nasty chatter of gunfire. A Lizard ran down the hall, carrying one of his kind’s wicked little automatic rifles. He fired out through, the hole the shells had made in the wall. Whoever was outside returned fire. The Lizard reeled back, red, red blood spurting from several wounds.

Someone – a human – burst in through the hole. Another Lizard came running up. The man cut him down; he had a submachine gun that at close range was as lethal, as anything the aliens used.

More men rushed in behind the first. One of them shouted, “Russie!”

“Here!” Moishe yelled. He uncoiled and scrambled to his feet, hope suddenly overpowering fright.

The fellow who’d called his name spoke in oddly accented Yiddish: “Stand back, cousin. I’m going to blow the lock off your door.”

Spy stories came in handy after all. Russie pointed to the floor of the corridor. “No need. There’s the key. This mamzer” – he pointed to the unconscious Pole-”was about to take me away for more questions.”

“Oy. Wouldn’t that have been a balls-up?” The last wasn’t in Yiddish; Moishe wasn’t sure what language it was in. He had precious little time to wonder, the man grabbed the key, turned it in the lock. He yanked the door open. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Moishe needed no further urging. Alarms were clanging somewhere, off in the distance; power here seemed to be out. As he ran toward the hole in the outer wall, he asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m a cousin of yours from England. David Goldfarb’s my name. Now cut the talk, will you?”

Moishe obediently cut the talk. Bullets started flying again; he ran even harder than he had before. Behind him, somebody screamed. The medical student part of him wanted to go back and help. The rest made him keep running – out through the hole, out through the open space around the prison, out through a gap in the razor wire, out through the screaming, gaping people in the street.

“There are machine guns on the roof,” he gasped. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”

“Snipers,” his cousin answered. “Good ones. Shut up. Keep running. We aren’t out of this mess yet.”

Russie kept running. Then, abruptly, his companions, those who survived, threw away their weapons as they rounded a corner. When they rounded another corner, they stopped running. David Goldfarb grinned. “Now we’re just ordinary people – you see?”

“I see,” Moishe answered – and, once it was pointed out to him, he did.

“It won’t last,” said one of the gunmen who’d been with Goldfarb. “They’ll turn this town inside out looking for us. Somebody kills a Lizard, they get nasty about that.” His teeth showed white through tangled brown beard.

“Which means it’s a good idea to get away from the net before they go fishing,” Goldfarb said. “Cousin Moishe, we’re going to take you back to England.”

“Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.

He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man – who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”

“That’s-wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.

A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.