Striking the Balance

He and Jager strode away from the encampment: not far enough to get lost, but out of earshot of the soldiers. Their boots squelched in mud. The spring thaw had done as much as the Lizards to slow the German advance. Off in a pond not far away, one of the first frogs of the new year let out a loud, mournful croak.

“He’ll be sorry,” Skorzeny said. “An owl will get him, or a heron.” He sounded as if he thought the frog had it coming.

Jager didn’t care about frogs one way or the other. “The devil’s work, you said. What sort of deviltry have you got in mind, and where do I fit into it?”

“Don’t even know if you do or not,” Skorzeny answered. “Have to see how things go. But as long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop by and say hello.” He bowed from the waist. “Hello.”

“You’re impossible,” Jager said with a snort. By the way Skorzeny beamed, he took that for a compliment. Holding onto his patience with both hands, Jager went on, “Let’s try it again. Why are you in the neighborhood?”

“I’m going to deliver a present, as soon as I figure out the best way to do it,” the SS man said.

“Knowing the kind of presents you deliver, I’m sure the Lizards will be delighted to have this one,” Jager told him. “Anything I can do to tie a bow on the package, you know you have only to ask.” There. He’d gone and said it. One way or another, odds were it would get him killed.

He waited for the SSStandartenfuhrer to go into extravagant, probably obscene detail about the latest plan for making the Lizards’ lives miserable. Skorzeny took a childish delight in his murderous schemes (Jager got a sudden mental image of him as a child of six inLederhosen,

opening a package of tin soldiers; somehow the child Skorzeny in his mind had a scarred face, too). Now, though, he sent Jager a hooded look before answering, “It’s not for the Lizards.”

“No?” Jager raised an eyebrow. “Well. If it’s for me, what are you doing giving me fair warning?” He suddenly sobered; officers who displeased the High Command had been known to disappear from the face of the earth as if they had never been. What had he done to displease anyone save the foe? “If you’re carrying a pistol with one bullet in it, you’d better tell me why.”

“Isthat what you’re thinking?Gott im Himmel, no!” Skorzeny held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “Nothing like that, I swear. Not you, not anybody you command or who commands you-no Germans at all, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, all right, then,” Jager said in considerable relief. “So what are you getting all coy with me for? The enemies of theReich are the enemies of the

Reich. We’ll smash them and go on.”

Skorzeny’s face grew unreadable again. “You say that now, but it’s not the song you’ve always sung. Jews are enemies of theReich, nicht wahr?”

“If they weren’t beforehand, we’ve certainly done enough to make them so,” Jager said. “Even so, we’ve had good cooperation from the ones in Lodz, keeping the Lizards from using the city as a staging point against us. When you get down to it, they’re human beings,ja?”

“We’ve had cooperation from them?” Skorzeny said, not answering Jager’s question. “I’ll tell you who’s had cooperation from them: the Lizards, that’s who. If the Jews hadn’t stabbed us in the back, we’d hold a lot more of Poland than we do.”

Jager made a tired gesture. “Why do we need to get into all of that? You know what we were doing to the Jews in Poland and Russia. Is it any wonder they don’t love us for the good Christians we are?”

“No, it’s probably no wonder,” Skorzeny said without any rancor Jager could hear. “But if they want to play that game with us, they’re going to have to pay the price. Now-do you want me to go on with what I have to say, or would you sooner not listen so you don’t have to know a thing?”

“Go ahead,” Jager said. “I’m not an ostrich, to stick my head in the sand.”

Skorzeny grinned at him. The scar on his cheek pulled half his face into a grimace that might have come from a gargoyle sitting somewhere high on a medieval cathedral-or maybe that was just Jager’s mind, pulling horror from the SS man’s words: “I’m going to set off the biggest damned nerve-gas bomb the world has ever seen, and I’m going to do it right in the middle of the Lodz ghetto. So what do you think of that? Are you a colonel, or just a scoutmaster in the wrong uniform?”

“Fuck you, Skorzeny,” Jager said evenly. As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered a Jewish partisan who’d used that invitation about every other sentence. SS men had shot the Jew-Max, his name was-at a place called Babi Yar, outside of Kiev. They’d botched the job, or Max wouldn’t have had the chance to tell his story. God only knew how many they hadn’t botched.

“That’s not an answer,” Skorzeny said, as immune to insult as a Lizard panzer was to machine-gun bullets. “Tell me what you think.”