Striking the Balance (41 page)

“Hey, Sam,” Ristin said in that language. “Baseball this afternoon?”

“Yes,” Ullhass echoed. “Baseball!” He added an emphatic cough.

“Maybe later—not now,” Sam said, to which both Lizards responded with steam-whistle noises of disappointment. With their fast, skittery movements, they made surprisingly good middle infielders, and had taken to the game well. Their small size and forward-sloping posture gave them a strike zone about the size of a postage stamp, too, so they were good leadoff men—well, leadoff males—even if they seldom hit the ball hard.

“Good weather for a game,” Ristin said, doing his best to tempt Sam. A lot of soldiers played ball when they were off duty, but Ristin and Ullhass were the only Lizards who joined in. With Yeager’s endless years of bush-league experience, everybody was glad to see him out there, and people had put up with his Lizard pals for his sake. Now Ullhass and Ristin were starting to get noticed for the way they played, not for their scaly hides.

“Maybe later,” Sam repeated. “Now I want to see my wife and son. If you don’t mind too much.” The Lizards sighed in resignation. They knew families mattered to Tosevites, but it didn’t feel real to them, any more than Yeager understood in his gut how much their precious Emperor meant to them. He headed for the stairs. Ristin and Ullhass started practicing phantom double plays. Ristin, who mostly played second, had a hell of a fast pivot.

Up on the fourth floor, Jonathan was telling the world in no uncertain terms that he didn’t care for something or other it had done to him. Listening to him yowl, Sam was glad the Lizards who lived up there weren’t around to hear the racket. It sometimes drove him a little squirrely, and he was a human being.

The crying stopped, very suddenly. Sam knew what that meant: Barbara had given the baby her breast. Sam smiled as he opened the door to their room. He was fond of his wife’s breasts, too, and figured the kid took after his old man.

Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”

Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.

Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”

The buildup intrigued her. “What
do
you have?” she breathed.

“It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time. If ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”

She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”

“This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”

“It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”

“Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing—especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”

“Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He had no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.

Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and—” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “—you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.

“No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit in
Tom Sawyer?
‘First Pipes—“I’ve Lost My Knife,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff is
strong.”

“Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes—smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second—and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”

“Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”

“You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.

Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party—from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”

“Yeah, we’ll probably be there just about when that pouch goes empty,” he agreed. “God knows when that colored fellow will come through town again. If he ever does.”

They smoked the bowl empty, then filled it again. The room grew thick with smoke. Sam’s eyes watered. He felt loose and easy, the way he had after a cigarette in the good old days. That he also felt slightly nauseated and his mouth like raw meat was only a detail, as far as he was concerned.

“That’s good,” Barbara said meditatively, and punctuated her words with another set of coughs. She waved those aside. “Worth it.”

“I think so, too.” Sam started to laugh. “Know what we remind me of?” When Barbara shook her head, he answered his own question: “We’re like a couple of Lizards with their tongues in the ginger jar.”

“That’s terrible!” Barbara exclaimed. Then she thought it over. “It
is
terrible, but you may be right. It is kind of like a drug—tobacco, I mean.”

“You bet it is. I tried quitting a couple of times when I was playing ball—didn’t like what it was doing to my wind. I couldn’t do it. I’d get all nervous and twitchy and I don’t know what. When you can’t get any, it’s not so bad: you don’t have a choice. But stick tobacco in front of us every day and we’ll go back to it, sure enough.”

Barbara sucked on the pipe again. She made a wry face. “Ginger tastes better, that’s for certain.”

“Yeah, I think so, too—now,” Sam said. “But if I’m smoking all the time, I won’t think so for long. You know, when you get down to it, coffee tastes pretty bad, too, or we wouldn’t have to fix it up with cream and sugar. But I like what coffee used to do for me when we had it.”

“So did I,” Barbara said wistfully. She pointed toward the cradle. “With him waking up whenever he feels like it, I could really use some coffee these days.”

“We’re a bunch of drug fiends, all right, no doubt about it.” Yeager took the pipe from her and sucked in smoke. Now that he’d had some, it wasn’t so bad. He wondered whether he ought to hope that Negro would come around with more—or for him to stay away.

The partisan leader, a fat Pole who gave his name as Ignacy, stared at Ludmila Gorbunova.
“You
are a pilot?” he said in fluent but skeptical German.

Ludmila stared back. Almost at sight, she had doubts about Ignacy. For one thing, almost the only way you could stay fat these days was by exploiting the vast majority who were thin, sometimes to the point of emaciation. For another, his name sounded so much like
Nazi
that just hearing it made her nervous.

Also in German, she answered, “Yes, I am a pilot
You
are a guerrilla commander?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There hasn’t been much call for piano teachers the past few years.”

Ludmila stared again, this time for a different reason.
This
had been a member of the petty bourgeoisie? He’d certainly managed to shed his class trappings; from poorly shaved jowls to twin bandoliers worn crisscross on his chest to battered boots, he looked like a man who’d been a bandit all his life and sprang from a long line of bandits. She had trouble imagining him going through Chopin
études
with bored young students.

Beside her, Avram looked down at his scarred hands. Wladeslaw looked up to the top of the linden tree under which they stood. Neither of the partisans who’d accompanied her from near Lublin said anything. They’d done their job by getting her here. Now it was up to her.

“You have here an airplane?” she asked, deciding not to hold Ignacy’s looks, name, or class against him. Business was business.

If the Great Stalin could make a pact with the fascist Hitler, she could do her best to deal with a Schmeisser-toting piano teacher.

“We have an airplane,” he agreed. Maybe he was trying to overcome distrust of her as a socialist and a Russian, for he went on with a detailed explanation: “It landed here in this area when the Lizards were booting out the Germans. We don’t think anything was wrong with it except that it was out of fuel. We have fuel now, and we have a new battery which holds a charge. We have also drained the oil and the hydraulic fluid, and have replaced both.”

“This all sounds good,” Ludmila said. “What sort of airplane is it?” Her guess would have been an Me-109. She’d never before flown a hot fighter—or what had been a hot fighter till the Lizards came. She suspected it would be a merry life but a short one. The Lizards had hacked Messerschmitts and their opposite numbers from the Red Air Force out of the sky with hideous ease in the early days of their invasion.

But Ignacy answered, “It’s a Fieseler 156.” He saw that didn’t mean anything to Ludmila, so he added, “They call it a
Storch—
a Stork.”

The nickname didn’t help. Ludmila said, “I think it would be better if you let me see the aircraft than if you talk about it.”

“Yes,” he said, and put his hands out in front of him, as if on an imaginary keyboard. He had been a piano teacher, sure enough. “Come with me.”

The aircraft was about three kilometers from Ignacy’s encampment. Those three kilometers of rough trail, like most of the landscape hereabouts, showed how heavy the local fighting had been. The ground was cratered; chunks of metal and burned-out hulks lay everywhere; and she passed a good many hastily dug graves, most marked with crosses, some with Stars of David, and some just left alone. She pointed at one of those. “Who lies under there? A Lizard?”

“Yes,” Ignacy said again. “The priests, so far as I know, have not yet decided whether Lizards have souls.”

Ludmila didn’t know how to answer that, so she kept quiet. She didn’t think she had a soul, not in the sense Ignacy meant. The things people too ignorant to grasp the truths of dialectical materialism could find over which to worry themselves!

She wondered where the alleged Fieseler 156 was hiding. They’d passed only a couple of buildings, and those had been too battered to conceal a motorcar, let alone an airplane. Ignacy led her up a small rise. He said, “We’re right on top of it now.” His voice showed considerable pride.

“Right on top of what?” Ludmila asked as he led her down the other side of the rise. He took her around to a third side—and then realization sank in.
“Bozhemoi!
You built a platform with the aircraft under it.” That was
maskirovka
even the Soviets would have viewed with respect.

Ignacy heard the admiration in her voice. “So we did,” he said. “It seemed the best way of concealing it we had available.” To that she could only nod. They’d done as much work as the Red Air Force had outside Pskov, and they couldn’t even fly the airplane they were hiding. The partisan leader pulled a candle out of one of the pockets of the
Wehrmacht
tunic he was wearing. “It will be dark in there with the earth and the timer and the nets blocking away the light.”

She sent Ignacy a suspicious look. She’d had trouble from men when they got her alone in a dark place. She touched the butt of her Tokarev. “Don’t try anything foolish,” she advised him.

“If I tried nothing foolish, would I be a partisan?” he asked. Ludmila frowned but held her peace. Stooping, Ignacy held up an edge of the camouflage netting. Ludmila crawled under it. She in turn held it up so the Polish guerrilla could follow her.

The space under the camouflaged platform was too large for a single candle to do much to illuminate it. Ignacy walked over to the aircraft hidden there. Ludmila followed him. When the faint glow showed her what the aircraft was, her eyes got wide. “Oh, one of these,” she breathed.

“You know it?” Ignacy asked. “You can fly it?”

“I know of it,” she answered. “I don’t know yet whether I can fly it. I hope I can, I will tell you so much.”

The Fieseler
Storch
was a high-wing monoplane, not much bigger than one of her beloved
Kukuruzniks,
and not much faster, either. But if a
Kukuruznik
was a cart horse, a
Storch
was a trained Lipizzan. It could take off and land in next to no room at all; flying into a light breeze, it could hover in one place, almost like a Lizard helicopter. Ludmila took the candle from Ignacy and walked around the plane, fascinatedly studying the huge flaps, elevators, and ailerons that let it do its tricks.