Striking the Balance

“A man,” he said, answering the question no one had asked aloud. “If I can’t live with myself, what good is anything else?”

He sometimes wished he could turn off his mind, could numb himself to everything that happened in war. He knew a good many officers who were aware of the horrors theReich had committed in the east but who refused to think about them, who sometimes even refused to admit they were aware of them. Then there was Skorzeny, who knew but didn’t give a damn. Neither path suited Jager. He was neither an ostrich, to stick his head in the sand, nor a Pharisee, to pass by on the other side of the road.

And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands… anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.

His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher-the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.

His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.

“Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.

Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jager’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them-or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.

His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jager said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.

Jager sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if aHausfrau

hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.

He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jager rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.

Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jager kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jager bounded into the house.

The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.

Biting his lip, Jager walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jager remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.

The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jager walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.

Jager turned away, partly sickened, partly afraid. Now he knew who had visited this farmhouse before him. They’d signed their masterpiece, so to speak: on Karol’s belly, they’d burned in the SS runes with a redhot poker or something similar. The next interesting question was, how much had they asked him before they finally cut out his tongue? He didn’t know Jager’s name-the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here-but if he’d described Jager, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.