Tilting The Balance (80 page)

“This is the Big Ugly male named Bobby Fiore?” Ttomalss asked in fair Chinese.

“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said in a small voice. “Where is this picture from? May I ask?”

“From the city called Shanghai. You know this city?”

“Yes, I know this city – I know of it, I should say, because I have never been there. I have never been close to it.” Liu Han wanted to make that as plain as she could. If Bobby Fiore had been killed fighting against the scaly devils, as certainly looked likely, she didn’t want Ttomalss to suspect she was involved. Of that she was innocent.

The little devil turned one eye turret toward the photograph, the other toward her. She always found that disconcerting. He said, “This male of yours met these evil males who fight us while he was in this camp. He met with them here, in this house. We have proof of this, and you do not ever say it is a lie. If he is with the Big Ugly bandits, maybe you are with these bandits, too?” In spite of the interrogative cough, his words sounded much more like a threat.

“No, superior sir.” Liu Han used the other cough, the emphatic one. She would have been more emphatic still had she not been feeding the Communists information for weeks. Fear clogged her throat. To the little scaly devils, she was hardly more than an animal. Moreover, she was a woman, and women always ended up with the raw end of any deal.

“I think you are telling me lies.” Ttomalss used the emphatic cough, too.

Liu Han burst into tears, Part of that was strategy as calculating as any general’s. Tears bothered the little scaly devils even more than they bothered men: the little devils never cried. Seeing water from a person’s eyes affected them much as seeing smoke coming out of someone’s ears would have affected her. It distracted them and kept them from pushing as hard as they would have otherwise.

But if she forced the timing of the tears, at bottom they were real enough. Without the scaly devils, she never would have had anything to do with Bobby Fiore; he’d been just another of the men with whom they’d paired her. But he’d been as good to her as circumstances allowed – and he was the father of the child that kicked in her belly even now. Seeing him dead in a great puddle of his own blood was like a blow to the face.

And she wept for herself. Just before the little scaly devils came down from the sky, the Japanese had bombed her village and killed her husband and son. Now Bobby Fiore was gone, too. Everyone she cared about seemed to die.

She hugged herself; her forearms went around the swell of her abdomen. The baby kicked again. What would the little devils do with it once it came out into the world? Fear filled, her again.

Ttomalss said, “Stop this disgusting dripping and answer what I say. I think you are lying, I tell you. I think you know much more of these bandits than you admit… Is that the right word, admit? Good. I think you hide this from us. We do not put up with these lies forever, I promise. Maybe not for long at all.”

“Do you know what I think?” Liu Han said. “I think you have night soil where your wits should be. How am I supposed to be a bandit? I am in this camp. You put me here. You put all the people in here. If there are bandits among them, whose fault is that? Not mine, I tell you.”

She managed to startle Ttomalss enough to make him turn both eye turrets toward her. “There are bandits in this camp; I admit that. When we set it up, we did not know how many foolish and dangerous factions you Big Uglies had, so we did not weed you carefully before we planted you here. But just because the bandits are here does not mean a properly obedient person will have anything to do with them.”

The phrase he used had the literal meaning of properly respectful to one’s elders. Hearing a little devil speak of filial piety was almost enough to send Liu Han from tears to hysterical laughter. But she sensed she’d made him retreat; he spoke to her now more as equal to equal, not in the badgering way he’d used before.

She pressed her tiny advantage: “Besides, how could I have anything to do with bandits? You watch me all the time. The only place I ever go is to the market. What can I do there?”

“The bandits came here,” Ttomalss said. “This male” – he held up the photo of Bobby Fiore’s corpse-”went with them. You knew it, and you said nothing to us. You are not to be trusted.”

“I did not know where Bobby Fiore went, or why,” she returned. “I never saw him again after that – till now.” She started to cry again.

“I told you not to do that,” the little devil said peevishly.

“I can’t – help it,” Liu Han said. “You show me a horrible picture that says my man is dead, you say I did all sorts of dreadful things” – mostof which I did-”and now you want me not to cry? Too much!”

Ttomalss threw his hands in the air, much as Liu Han’s husband had when he’d given up arguing with her. She hardly mourned him and her boy any more; her life had taken too many other hammer blows since they died. The scaly devil said, “Enough! Maybe you are telling the truth. Our drug to learn this works imperfectly, and I noted that we do not want to give it to you for fear of harming the hatchling growing inside you. You Big Uglies are revolting in so many different ways, and we have to learn about all of them if we are to rule you properly.”

“Yes, superior sir.” Being bold came anything but easy for Liu Han, however useful she found it. She always breathed a silent sigh of relief when she returned to the submissive behavior that had been drilled into her since childhood.

The scaly devil said, “You will be closely watched. If you have any sense, you will act in a way that shows you’remember this.” He stalked out of Liu Han’s dwelling. Had he been a man, he would have, slammed the door behind him. Since he was a scaly devil, he left it open. Liu Han had learned that meant he thought anyone on the street was welcome to come in.

She poured herself a cup of tea from the battered brass pot that simmered above a charcoal brazier. Sipping it helped relax her – but not enough. She walked over and closed the door, but that didn’t make her feel any more secure. She was as much the little devils captive here as she had been in the metal cell on the airplane that never came down.

She wanted to scream and curse and tell Ttomalss exactly what she thought of him, but made herself hold back Screaming and cursing would make her a scandal among her neighbors, and being the little scaly devils’ creature made her scandal enough already. Besides, they might be taking talking cinema pictures of her as they had to her shame up in that metal cell if she cursed them, they could find out about it.

The baby moved inside her not a kick this time but a slow oceanic roll followed by a quick flutter Again her arms went protectively round her belly If she kept on obeying the little devils, what would the baby’s fate be?

And if she didn’t obey them, what would its fate be then? She didn’t think the Communists would disappear even if the scaly devils conquered all of China (all of the world, she added to herself something that never would have occurred to her before she spent time with Bobby Fiore). They’d kept right on fighting the Japanese; they would count on the people to hide them from the little devils. And they were very good at revenge.

In the end, fear wasn’t what made her go out of her house and walk slowly toward the prison camp marketplace. Fury was: fury with the little scaly devils for turning her life upside down, for treating her like a beast rather than a human being, or showing her, without the slightest worry over what she night feel to see him dead, the picture of the man she’d come to love – all they wanted from her was to confirm the body did belong to Bobby Fiore.

“Bean sprouts!” “Candles!” “Fine tea here!” “Carved jade!” “Peas in their pods!” “Sandals and straw hats!” “You can’t eat my tasty ducks!” “Fine silk parasols – keep your pretty skin white!” “Pork sits sweet in your belly!”

The hubbub of the market square surrounded Liu Han. Along with vendors shouting the virtues of their wares, customers shouted scorn in the age-old struggle to get a better price. The din was dreadful. Liu Han could hardly hear herself think.

Ttomalss had warned her she would be closely watched. She believed that; the little scaly devils didn’t understand people well enough to lie convincingly. But just because they watched her and listened to her, could they understand anything she said in this racket? She couldn’t understand people who were yelling right beside her, and the little devils had trouble following even the most plain-spoken Chinese. She could probably say most of what she wanted without their being any the wiser. She went slowly through the market, stopping now here, now there to haggle and gossip. Even had she been foolish enough to go straight to her contact in the marketplace, the Communists would have trained her to know better. As things were, she spent a lot of time loudly complaining about the little devils to a cadaverous-looking man who sold herbal medicines – and who worked for the Kuomintang. If the scaly devils landed on him, they’d be doing the Communists a favor.

Eventually, in the course of her wanderings, she reached the poultry dealer who had his stand next to the big-bellied pork merchant with the open vest. As she looked over the cut-up chunks of duck and chicken, she remarked, as if it were something that mattered little to her, “The little devils showed me a picture of Bobby Fiore today. They do not say so, but they put an end to him.”

“I am sorry to hear this, but we know the ghost Life-Is-Transcendent has been seeking him.” The poultry seller also spoke obliquely; that prancing ghost was a precursor of the god of death.

“He was in a city,” Liu Han said.

“May he have aided the rise of the proletarian movement,” the poultry seller answered. He paused, then asked very quietly, “Was the city Shanghai?”

“What if it was?” Liu Han was indifferent. To her, one city was just like another. She’d never lived in a place that had more people than this prison.

“If it was,” the fellow went on, “a heavy blow against oppression and for the liberty of the oppressed peasants and workers of the world was struck there not long ago. In his passing, the foreign devil may well have shown himself to be a hero of the Chinese people.”

Liu Han nodded. Since the scaly devils had the photo of Bobby Fiore dead, she’d figured they were likely the ones who had shot him – and the likeliest reason they had for shooting him was his being part of a Red raiding team. He wouldn’t have thought of himself as a hero of the Chinese people: she was sure of that. Though living with her had rubbed some of the rough edges off him, at heart he remained a foreign devil.

She didn’t much care that he had died a hero, either. She would rather have had him back at her hut, foreign and difficult but alive. She would rather have had many things that hadn’t happened.

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.

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.