Striking the Balance

“It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”

“I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.“Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. Thechutzpah it takes to try something like that-and the luck you need to get away with it… ”

“What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.

One other question, of course, overrode all of those.Where was the bomb?

He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up — from his work.

He wasn’t the only man in earshot. The last thing Anielewicz wanted to do was spread panic through the ghetto. “Come on upstairs with me,” he said, as casually as he could.

Gruver’s long face turned somber. With his bushy eyebrows, harsh features, and thick, graying beard, he generally looked grim. When he felt grim, he looked as if his best friend had just died. He put down his wrench and followed Mordechai up to the room where the leaders of the Jewish fighters commonly met.

On the stairwell, he said quietly, “Bertha’s up there. She picked up something interesting-what it is, I don’t know-and she’s passing it along. Is whatever you’ve got something she can know about?”

“It’s something she’d better know about,” Anielewicz answered. “If we can’t deal with it ourselves, we may have to let Rumkowski’s gang oftukhus-lekhers know it, too, and maybe even the Lizards, though that’s the last thing I want to do.”

“Oy!”Those eyebrows of Gruver’s twitched. “Whatever it is, it must be bad.”

“No, not bad,” Mordechai said. Gruver gave him a quizzical look. “Worse,” he explained as they got to the top of the stairs. Gruver grunted. Every time Anielewicz lifted his foot off the worn linoleum of the floor, he wondered if he would live to set it down again. That was not in his hands, not any more. If Otto Skorzeny pushed a button or flicked a switch on a wireless transmitter, he would cease to be, probably so fast he wouldn’t realize he was dead.

He laughed. Solomon Gruver stared at him. “You’re carrying news like this and you find something funny?”

“Maybe,” Anielewicz answered. Skorzeny had to be one frustrated SS man right this minute. He’d risked his life getting that bomb into Lodz (Anielewicz who’d despised him on sight, knew how much courage that had taken), but his timing was bad. He couldn’t touch it off now, not without destroying the shiny new cease-fire between the Lizards and theReich.

A couple of serious-looking Jewish men came out of the meeting room. “We’ll take care of it,” one of them promised Bertha Fleishman.

“Thank you, Michael,” she said, and started to follow them out. She almost ran into Anielewicz and Gruver. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you two here.”

“Mordechai ran into something interesting,” Solomon Gruver said. “What it is, God knows, because he’s not talking.” He glanced over to Mordechai. “Not talking yet, anyhow.”

“Now I am,” Anielewicz said. He walked into the meeting room. When Gruver and Bertha Fleishman had followed him inside, he closed the door and, with a melodramatic touch, locked it. That made Bertha’s eyebrows fly up, as Gruver’s had before.

Mordechai spoke for about ten minutes, relaying as much as Mieczyslaw had told him. As he passed it on, he realized how little it was. When he was finished, Gruver looked at him and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the damned Nazis trying to pull our chains and make us run around like chickens in the fannyard.” He shook his head, repeating, “I don’t believe a word.”

“If it hadn’t been this Jager who sent us the message, I wouldn’t believe it, either,” Anielewicz said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you know, the nerve-gas bomb would have done us in.” He turned to Bertha. “What do you think?”

“As far as I can see, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter,” she answered. “We have to act as if it is, don’t we? We can’t really afford to ignore it.”

“Feh!”Gruver said in disgust. “We’ll waste all sorts of time and effort, and what will we come up with? Nothing, I tell you.”