Striking the Balance

Skorzeny set a finger by the side of his nose and winked. “It’s the biggest goddamn ginger bomb you ever did see, that’s what. Not just the powdered stuff, mind you, but an aerosol that’ll get all over everything in a huge area and keep the Lizards too drugged up to get into it for a long time.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “We’ve tested it on Lizard prisoners, and it’s the straight goods. It’ll drive ’em out of their skulls.”

“I bet it will,” Anielewicz answered.Sure it will. If he’s telling the truth. Is he? If you were a mouse, would you let a cat carry cheese down into your hole? But if Skorzeny was lying, he didn’t show it at all. And if, by some odd chance, he was telling the truth, the ginger bomb would wreak all the havoc he said it would. Mordechai could easily imagine the Lizards battling one another in the streets because they were too full of ginger to think straight, or even to do much thinking at all.

He wanted to believe Skorzeny. Without Jager’s obscure warning, he thought he would have believed Skorzeny. Something about the SS man made you want to go in the direction he was pushing. Anielewicz had enough of that gift himself to recognize it in others-and Skorzeny had a big dose.

Anielewicz decided to prod a little, to see what lay behind the bluff, hearty facade. “Why the devil should I trust you?” he demanded. “When has the SS ever meant anything but trouble for Jews?”

“The SS means trouble for all enemies of theReich.” Pride rang in Skorzeny’ s voice. In his own way, he was-or seemed-honest. Anielewicz didn’t know whether he preferred that or the hypocrisy he’d been expecting. Skorzeny went on, “Who now is the most dangerous enemy of theReich? You kikes?” He shook his head. “Of course not. The Lizards are the most dangerous. We worry about them first and the rest of the shit later.”

Before the Lizards came, the Soviet Union had been the most dangerous enemy of theReich.

That hadn’t stopped the Nazis from building extermination camps in Poland, diverting resources they could have used to fight the Bolsheviks. Anielewicz said, “All right, suppose you drive the Lizards away from Lodz and Warsaw. What happens to us Jews then?”

Skorzeny spread his big hands and shrugged. “I don’t make policy. I just kill people.” Amazing that his grin could be disarming after he said something like that, but it was. “You don’t want to be around us, though, and we don’t want you around, so maybe we could ship you somewhere. Who knows? To Madagascar, maybe; they were talking about that before the Lizards came, but we didn’t exactly own the seas.” Now that twisted grin was wry. “Or maybe even to Palestine. Like I say, who the hell knows?”

He was glib. He was convincing. He was all the more frightening on account of that. “Why use this thing in Lodz?” Mordechai asked. “Why not at the front?”

“Two reasons,” Skorzeny answered. “First, you get a lot more enemies in one place at concentration areas in the rear. And second, a lot of Lizards at the front have some protection against gas warfare, and that keeps the ginger out, too.” He chuckled. “Ginger is gas warfare-happy gas, but gas.”

Anielewicz turned to Heinrich Jager. “What do you think of this? Will it work? If it was up to you, would you do it?”

Jager’s face didn’t show much, but Jager’s face, from what Mordechai had seen, seldom showed much. He half regretted his words; he was putting on the spot the nearest thing he had to a friend and ally in theWehrmacht. Jager coughed, then said, “I’ve been on more missions with Colonel Skorzeny than I care to remember.” Skorzeny laughed out loud at that. Ignoring him, Jager went on, “I’ve never seen him fail when he sets himself a goal. If he says this will do the job, you’d better listen to him.”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Anielewicz said. He gave his attention back to Otto Skorzeny. “Well,Herr Standartenfuhrer, what will you do if I tell you we don’t want anything to do with this? Will you try to get it into Lodz anyhow?”

“Aber naturlich.”

Skorzeny’s Austrian accent made him sound like an aristocrat fromfin de siecle Vienna rather than a Nazi thug. “We don’t give up easily. We’ll do this with you or without you. It would be easier with you, maybe, and you Jews can put yourselves in our good graces by going along. Since we’re going to win the war and rule Poland, doesn’t that strike you as a good idea?”

Come on. Collaborate with us.Skorzeny wasn’t subtle. Mordechai wondered if he had it in him to be subtle. He sighed. “Since you put it that way-”

Skorzeny slapped him on the back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Ha! I knew you were a smart Jew. I-”