Striking the Balance

After that, the Jewish fighters pulled away from the road, their machine guns covering the retreat. They had several rendezvous points in the area: farms owned by Poles they could trust(Poles we hope we can trust, Mordechai thought as he neared one of them). There they got back into more ordinary clothes and stashed weapons of greater firepower than rifles. These days in Poland, you might as well have been naked as go out in public without a Mauser on your shoulder.

Mordechai slipped back into Lodz from the west, well away from the direction of the fighting. It wasn’t long past noon when he strolled into the fire station on Lutomierska Street. Bertha Fleishman greeted him outside the building: “They say there was a Nazi raid this morning, just a couple of kilometers outside of town.”

“Do they?” he answered gravely. “I hadn’t heard, though there was a lot of gunfire earlier in the day. But then, that’s so about one day in three.”

“It must have been that what’s-his-name-Skorzeny, that’s it,” Bertha said. “Who else would be crazy enough to stick his nose in the wasps’ nest?”

While they were standing there talking, the Order Police district leader who’d taken Anielewicz to Bunim approached the fire station. Oskar Birkenfeld still carried only a truncheon, and so waited respectfully for the rifle-toting Anielewicz to notice him. When Mordechai did, the man from the Order Police said, “Bunim requires your presence again, immediately.”

“Does he?” Anielewicz said. “Whatever for?”

“He’ll tell you that,” Birkenfeld answered, sounding tough-or as tough as he could when so badly outgunned. Anielewicz looked down his nose at him without saying anything. The Order Service man wilted, asking weakly, “Will you come?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll come, though Bunim and his puppets could stand to learn better manners,” Mordechai said. Birkenfeld flushed angrily. Mordechai patted Bertha Fleishman on the shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

At his Bialut Market Square offices, Burnm stared balefully at Anielewicz. “What do you know of the Deutsche who severely damaged our advancing column this morning?”

“Not much,” he answered. “I’d just heard it was a Nazi attack when your pet policeman came to fetch me. You can ask him about it after I go; he heard me get the news, I think.”

“I shall ascertain this,” Bunim said. “So you deny any role in the attack on the column?”

“Am I a Nazi?” Anielewicz said. “Bertha Fleishman, the woman I was talking with when Birkenfeld found me, thinks that Skorzeny fellow might have had something to do with it. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve heard talk he’s here in Poland somewhere, maybe to the north of Lodz.” If he could do the SS man a bad turn, he would.

“Skorzeny?” Bunim flipped out his tongue but did not waggle it back and forth, a sign of interest among the Lizards. “Exterminating that one would be a whole clutch of eggs’ worth of ordinary Tosevites like you.”

“Truth, superior sir,” Mordechai said. If Bunim wanted to think he was bumbling and harmless, that was fine with him.

The Lizard said, “I shall investigate whether these rumors you report have any basis in fact. If they do, I shall bend every effort to destroying the troublesome male. Considerable status would accrue to me on success.”

Mordechai wondered whether that last was intended for him or if Bunim was talking to himself. “I wish you good luck,” he said, and, despite having led the raid on that column moving north against the Germans, he meant what he told the Lizard.

“Now we’re cooking with gas!” Omar Bradley said enthusiastically as he sat down in Leslie Groves’ office in the Science Building at the University of Denver. “You said the next bomb wouldn’t be long in coming, and you meant it.”

“If I told lies about things like that, you-or somebody-would throw my fanny out of here and bring in a man who delivered on his promises,” Groves answered. He cocked his head to one side. Off in the distance, artillery still rumbled. Denver did not look like falling, though, not now. “And you, sir, you’ve done a hell of a job defending this place.”

“I’ve had good help,” Bradley said. They both nodded, pleased with each other. Bradley went on, “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to use that second bomb anywhere near here. We can try moving it someplace else where they need it worse.”

“Yes, sir. One way or another, we’ll manage that,” Groves said. The rail lines going in and out of Denver had taken a hell of a licking, but there were ways. Break the thing down into pieces and it could go out on horseback-provided all the riders got through to the place where you needed all the pieces.

“I figure we will,” Bradley agreed. He started to reach into his breast pocket, but arrested the motion halfway through. “All this time and I still can’t get used to going without a smoke.” He let out a long, weary exhalation. “That should be the least of my worries-odds are I’ll live longer because of it.”