Striking the Balance

Noise from the woods made him break off. Anielewicz quickly figured out what it was. “So you brought some friends along to the meeting, too? They must have bumped up against mine.”

“I said you were a smart Jew, didn’t I?” Skorzeny answered. “How soon can we get this moving? I don’t like waiting around with my thumb up my arse.”

“Let me get back to Lodz and make the arrangements to bring in your little package,” Mordechai said. “I know how to get in touch with Colonel Jager here, and he probably knows how to get in touch with you.”

“Yes, probably.” Jager’s voice was dry.

“Good enough,” Skorzeny said. “Just don’t take too damn long, that’s all I have to tell you. Remember, with you or without you, this is going to happen. Those Lizards will be sorry about the day they crawled out of their eggs.”

“You’ll hear from me soon,” Mordechai promised. He didn’t want Skorzeny doing whatever he had in mind all by himself. The SS man was altogether too likely to succeed at it, whatever it was. It might make the Lizards sorry, but Anielewicz wouldn’t have bet the Jews would care for it, either.

He whistled loudly, a cue for his men to head toward Lodz, then nodded to Jager and Skorzeny and left the clearing. He was very thoughtful all the way back down there.

“How far do we trust the Germans?” he asked back at the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “How farcan we trust the Germans, especially when one of them has told us not to?”

“Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes,”

Bertha Fleishman said. Mordechai nodded; he’d had a secular education, with Latin a good part of it. For those who didn’t know their Virgil, Bertha translated: “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.”

“That’s it exactly,” Solomon Gruver said. The fireman was a battered, blunt-faced fellow who looked like a prizefighter and had been a sergeant in the Polish Army in 1939. He’d managed to conceal that from the Nazis, who probably would have liquidated him for it. It made him enormously useful to the Jewish underground: unlike most of its members, he hadn’t had to learn matters military from scratch. He tugged at his bushy, gray-streaked beard. “Sometimes I think Nussboym had the right idea after all: better to live under the Lizards than with these Nazimamzrim cracking the whip.”

“Either way, we get the short end of the stick,” Mordechai said. Heads bobbed up and down along the length of the table. “With the Nazis, it’s just us who get the short end, but it’s bloody short. With the Lizards, everybody gets it, but maybe not so bad as the Germans give it to us.” He chuckled ruefully. “Some bargain, isn’t it?”

“So what do we do?” Gruver demanded. This wasn’t a military matter, or not strictly so. He let others lead-sometimes made others lead-in policy decisions, then weighed in with his own opinion, but was oddly shy about taking the lead himself.

Everybody looked at Anielewicz. Partly that was because he’d met the Germans, partly because people were used to looking at him. He said, “I don’t think we have any choice but to take the thing from Skorzeny. That way, we have some control over it, no matter what it ends up being.”

“The Trojan Horse,” Bertha Fleishman suggested.

Mordechai nodded. “That’s right. That’s just what it’s liable to be. But Skorzeny said he’d do it with us or without us. I believe him. We’d be making a big mistake if we ever took that man less than seriously. We’ll take it now, we’ll do our best to find out what it is, and go from there. Otherwise, he’d find some other way to sneak it into Lodz without our knowing-”

“You really think he could do that?” Gruver asked.

“I have talked with this man. I would not put anything past him,” Mordechai answered. “The only way we have a chance of getting away with this is pretending we’re a pack ofschlemiels who believe everything he says. Maybe then he’ll trust us to do his dirty work for him and not look inside the Trojan Horse.”

“And if it is the world’s biggest ginger bomb, as he says?” somebody asked.

“Then we have a lot of Lizards getting into a king-sized brawl, right in the middle of Lodz,” Mordechai said.“Alevai omayn, that’s all we have.”

“T-T-T-oma,” the Tosevite hatchling said triumphantly, and looked right at Ttomalss. Its mobile face twisted into an expression that indicated pleasure.

“Yes, I am Ttomalss,” the psychologist agreed. The hatchling had no control over its excretions, but it was learning to talk. The Big Uglies were a peculiar species indeed, as far as Ttomalss was concerned.

“T-T-T-oma,” the hatchling repeated, and added an emphatic cough for good measure. Ttomalss wondered whether it really was putting stress on his name or just reproducing another word-like sound it knew.