Striking the Balance (57 page)

“Yes.” Stalin filled a pipe with
makhorka
and puffed out a cloud of acrid smoke. “It is the end for Britain, you know. Were Churchill not a capitalist exploiter, I might have sympathy for him. The British did a very great thing, expelling the Lizards from their island, but what has it got them in the end? Nothing.”

“They could yet produce their own atomic weapons,” Molotov said. “Underestimating them does not pay.”

“As Hitler found, to his dismay,” Stalin agreed. For his part, Stalin had underestimated Hitler, but Molotov did not point that out. Stalin sucked meditatively on the pipe for a little while before going on, “Even if they make these bombs for themselves, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, what good does it do them? They have already saved their island without the bombs. They cannot save their empire with them, for they have no way of delivering them to Africa or India. Those will stay in the Lizards’ hands from this time forward.”

“A cogent point,” Molotov admitted. You endangered yourself if you underestimated Stalin’s capacity. He was always brutal, he could be naive, foolish, shortsighted. But when he was right, as he often was, he was so breathtakingly right as to make up for the rest.

He said, “If the German fascists persuade the Lizards to withdraw from territory that had been under their occupation before the aliens invaded, it will be interesting to see how many of those lands eagerly return to Nazi control.”

“Much of the land the fascists occupied was ours,” Molotov said. “The Lizards did us a favor by clearing them from so much of it.” Nazi-held pockets persisted in the north and near the Romanian frontier, and Nazi bands one step up from guerrillas still ranged over much of what the Germans had controlled, but those were manageable problems, unlike the deadly threats the fascists had posed and the Lizards now did.

Stalin sensed that, too, saying, “Personally, I would not be brokenhearted to see the Lizards remain in Poland. With peace, better them on our western border than the fascists: having made a treaty, they are more likely to adhere to it.”

He had underestimated Hitler once; he would not do it twice. Molotov nodded vigorously. Here he agreed with his superior. “With the Nazis’ rockets, with their gas that paralyzes breathing, with their explosive-metal bombs, and with their fascist ideology, they would make most unpleasant neighbors.”

“Yes.” Stalin puffed out more smoke. His eyes narrowed. He looked through Molotov rather than at him. It was not quite the hooded look he gave when mentally discarding a favorite, consigning him to the
gulag
or worse. He was just thinking hard. After a while, he said, “Let us be flexible, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Let us, instead of demanding withdrawal before negotiations, propose a cease-fire in place while negotiations go on. Perhaps this will work, perhaps it will not. If we are no longer subject to raids and bombings, our industry and collective farms will have the chance to begin recovery.”

“Shall we offer this proposal alone, or shall we try to continue to maintain a human popular front against the alien imperialists?” Molotov asked.

“You may consult with the Americans and Germans before transmitting the proposal to the Lizards,” Stalin said with the air of a man granting a great boon. “You may, for that matter, consult with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese—the small powers,” he added, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. “If they are willing to make the Lizards the same offer at the same time, well and good: we shall go forward together. If they are unwilling . . .  we shall go forward anyway.”

“As you say, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov was not sure this was the wisest course, but imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he got the despatch announcing the new Soviet policy—and, better yet, imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he had to bring Hitler the news—came close to making it all worthwhile. “I shall begin drafting the telegram at once.”

Heinrich Jäger was getting to be a pretty fair horseman. The accomplishment filled him with less delight than it might have under other circumstances. When you had to climb on a horse to go back and visit corps headquarters, that mostly proved you didn’t have enough petrol to keep your utility vehicles operational. Since the
Wehrmacht
barely had enough petrol to keep its panzers operational, the choice lay between visiting corps headquarters on a bay mare or on shank’s mare. Riding beat the devil out of walking.

The road through the forest forked. Jäger urged the mare south, down the right-hand fork. That was not the direct route back to his regiment. One of the good things—one of the few good things—about riding a horse as opposed to a
Volkswagen
was that you did it by yourself, without a driver. Jäger didn’t want anyone to know he was turning down the right-hand fork. If anyone found out, in fact, he would soon be having intimate discussion with the SS, the SD, the
Gestapo,
the
Abwehr,
and any other security or Intelligence service that could get its hands (to say nothing of assorted blunt, sharp, heated, and electrically conductive instruments) on him.

“Why am I doing this?” he said in the middle of forest stillness broken only by the distant rumble of artillery. The mare answered with a snort.

He felt like snorting himself. He did know the answer: partly the debt he felt to Anielewicz personally, partly that Anielewicz and his Jewish fighters had kept their side of the bargain they’d made with him and didn’t deserve incineration, partly the way his stomach knotted whenever he thought about what the forces of the
Reich
had done to the Jews of eastern Europe before the Lizards came—and were still doing to the Jews remaining in the territory they controlled. (He remembered all too vividly the Jewish and homosexual prisoners who worked on the atomic pile under
Schloss Hohentübingen
till they died, which seldom took long.)

Was all that reason enough to violate his military oath? The head of the SS and the
Führer
himself had authorized Skorzeny to visit atomic fire upon Lodz. Who was Colonel Heinrich Jäger to say they were wrong?

“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 the
Reich
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 Jäger. 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 Jäger’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,” Jäger 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.

Jäger 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 a
Hausfrau
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. Jäger 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. Jäger kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jäger 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, Jäger 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 Jäger 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. Jäger 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.

Jäger 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 Jäger’s name—the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here—but if he’d described Jäger, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.

Whistling tunelessly, Jäger went outside, unhitched the mare, and rode away. Where to ride troubled him. Should he flee for his life? If he could get to Lodz, Anielewicz and the Jews would protect him. That was loaded with irony thick enough to slice, but it was also probably true.

In the end, though, instead of riding south, he went north, back toward his regiment. Karol and his family had been dead for days now. If the SS did know about him, they would have dropped on him by now. And, never mind the Jews, he still had the war against the Lizards to fight.

When he did get back to the regimental encampment, Gunther Grillparzer looked up from a game of skat and said, “You look a little green around the gills, sir. Everything all right?”

“I must have drunk some bad water or something,” Jäger answered. “I’ve been jumping down off this miserable creature”—he patted the horse’s neck—“and squatting behind a bush about every five minutes, all the way back from corps headquarters.” That accounted not only for his pallor but also for getting back here later than he should have.

“The galloping shits are no fun at all, sir,” the panzer gunner said sympathetically. Then he guffawed and pointed to Jäger’s mare. “The galloping shits! Get it, sir? I made a joke without even noticing.”

“Life is like that sometimes,” Jäger said. Grillparzer scratched his head. Jäger just led away the horse. He’d ridden it a long way; it needed seeing to. Grillparzer shrugged and went back to his card game.

Nieh Ho-T’ing and Hsia Shou-Tao passed the little scaly devils’ inspection and were allowed into the main part of the tent on the island in the lake at the heart of the Forbidden City. “Good of you to invite me here with you today,” he said, “instead of—” He stopped.

Instead of your woman, the one I tried to rape.
Nieh completed the sentence, perhaps not exactly as his aide would have. Aloud, he answered, “Liu Mei has some sort of sickness, the kind babies get. Liu Han asked the central committee for permission to be relieved of this duty so she could care for the girl. Said permission having been granted—”

Hsia Shou-Tao nodded. “Women need to look after their brats. It’s one of the things they’re good for. They’re—” He stopped again. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing had no trouble coming up with a likely continuation.
They’re also good for laying, which causes the brats in the first place.
But Hsia, while he might have thought that, hadn’t come out and said it. His reeducation, however slowly it proceeded, was advancing.

“Liu Han has all sorts of interesting projects going on,” Nieh said. Hsia Shou-Tao nodded once more, but did not ask him to amplify that. Where women were not involved, Hsia was plenty clever. He would not allude to the whereabouts of the scaly devil Ttomalss where other little devils might hear.

Nieh had thought that by this time he would be delivering small pieces of Ttomalss to the little devils one at a time. It hadn’t worked out that way. The capture of the little devil who’d stolen Liu Han’s child had gone off as planned—better than planned—but she hadn’t yet taken the ferocious revenge she and Nieh had anticipated. He wondered why. It wasn’t as if she’d become a Christian or anything foolish like that.

A couple of chairs were the only articles of human-made furniture inside the tent. Nieh and Hsia sat down in them. A moment later, the little scaly devil named Ppevel and his interpreter came out and seated themselves behind their worktable. Ppevel let loose with a volley of hisses and pops, squeaks and coughs. The interpreter turned them into pretty good Chinese: “The assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, notes that one of you appears to be different from past sessions. Is it Nieh Ho-T’ing or Liu Han who is absent?”