Striking the Balance

Bagnall wished Borcke hadn’t used English, as if expecting a reply in the same tongue-one the Russians did not know. Keeping the two alleged allies from each other’s throats was anything but easy. The RAF man answered in German, which many of the Red Army men could follow: “No, we have no agreement yet. The Lizards need to talk to their superiors before they decide whether they can give us the books we want.”

The Russians accepted that as a matter of course. To their way of thinking, moving an inch past the orders you had was dangerous. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on you. Borcke snorted in contempt; theWehrmacht let people do more thinking for themselves. “Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, and then turned that into Russian:“Nichevo.”

“Nichevo, da,”

Bagnall said, and swung up onto the horse. Riding it wasn’t as pleasant as being in a heated motorcar, but it did keep his legs and thighs warm. That was something. He hadn’t been on horseback above half a dozen times before he came to Pskov. Now he sometimes felt ready to ride in the Derby. Intellectually, he knew that wasn’t so, but the strides he had made in equitation encouraged him in the fancy.

After a cold night encampment, he got back into Pskov the next afternoon. He went over to theKrom, the medieval stone castle, to report the delay to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill and to Brigadiers Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, the German and Russian officers commanding in the city. With them, as he’d expected, he found Ken Embry. The RAF men, being relatively disinterested, served as lubricant betweenWehrmacht and Red Army personnel.

After Bagnall made his report, he and Embry headed back to the wooden house they shared with Jerome Jones. When they drew near, they heard a dish shatter with a crash, and then angry voices, two men’s and a woman’s, shouting loudly.

“Oh, bugger, that’s Tatiana!” Ken Embry exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Bagnall said. They both started to run. Panting, Bagnall added, “Why the devil couldn’t she leave Jones alone after she took up with that Jerry?”

“Because that would have been convenient,” Embry answered. Ever since he’d been pilot and Bagnall flight engineer aboard their Lancaster, they’d had a contest to see who could come up with the most casually cynical understatements. For the moment, Embry had taken the lead.

Bagnall, though, was a better runner, and got to the door a couple of strides ahead of his comrade. He would willingly have forgone the honor. All the same, he threw the door open and rushed inside, Embry right behind him.

Georg Schultz and Jerome Jones stood almost nose-to-nose, screaming at each other. Off to one side, Tatiana Pirogova had a plate in her hand, ready to fling. By the shards, she’d thrown the last one at Jones. That didn’t mean this one wouldn’t fly at Schultz’s head. At that, Bagnall was glad Tatiana was still flinging crockery instead of reaching for the scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle she wore slung on her back.

She was a striking woman: blond, blue-eyed, shapely-altogether lovely. If face and body were all you cared about. She’d made advances to Bagnall, not so long ago. That she’d been Jones’ lover at the time hadn’t been the only reason he’d declined. It would have been like bedding a she-leopard-probably fun while it lasted, but you could never afford to turn your back afterward.

“Shut up, all of you!” he shouted now, first in English, then in German, and finally in Russian. The three squabblers didn’t shut up, of course; they started yelling at him instead. He thought the fair Tatiana was going to let fly with that plate, but she didn’t, not quite.Good sign, he thought. Having them scream at him was another good sign. Since he wasn’t(thank God!) sleeping with any of them, they might be slower to get lethally angry at him.

Behind him, Ken Embry said, “What the devil is going on here?” He used the same mixture of Russian and German he did with Lieutenant General Chill and the Russian partisan brigadiers. Their squabbles sometimes came near to blows, too.

“This bastard’s still fucking my woman!” Georg Schultz shouted, pointing at Jerome Jones.

“I am not your woman. I give my body to whom I please,” Tatiana answered, just as hotly.

“I don’t want your body,” Jerome Jones yelled in pretty fluent Russian; he’d studied the language in his undergraduate days at Cambridge. He was a thin, clever-looking fellow in his early twenties, about as tall as Schultz but not nearly so solidly made. He went on, “Christ and the saints, how many times do I have to tell you that?”

His picturesque oath meant nothing to Tatiana, or even less. She spat on the floorboards. “That for Christ and the saints! I am a Soviet woman, free of such superstitious twaddle. And if I want you again, little man, I will have you.”

“What about me?” Schultz said, like the others conducting the argument at the top of his lungs.