Striking the Balance (75 page)

Off to the left, not quite far enough away from his convalescent tent to be out of earshot, somebody said, “We ought to string up all the stinking bastards who kissed the Lizards’ butts while they was here. String ’em up by the balls, matter of fact.”

Auerbach shivered, not so much because of what the fellow said as at the calm, matter-of-fact way he said it. In Europe, they’d called people who’d gone along with the Nazis, people like Quisling, collaborators. Auerbach had never figured anybody would need to worry about collaborators in the U.S.A., but he didn’t know everything there was to know, either.

Penny said, “There’s gonna be trouble. Anybody who’s got a score to settle against somebody else will say they went along with the Lizards. Who’s gonna be able to sort out what’s true and what ain’t? Families will be feuding a hundred years from now on account o’ this.”

“You’re probably right,” Rance said. “But there’s going to be trouble sooner than that.” He was thinking like a soldier. “The Lizards may have pulled out of here, but the Army hasn’t pulled in. We’ll eat Karval empty by tomorrow at the latest, and then what do we do?”

“Walk toward Denver, I reckon,” Penny answered. “What else can we do?”

“Not much,” he said. “But walk—what? A hundred miles, maybe?” He gestured toward the crutches that lay by his cot. “You might as well go on without me. I’ll meet you there in a month, maybe six weeks.”

“Don’t be silly,” Penny told him. “You’re doin’ a lot better than you were.”

“I know, but I’m not doing well enough.”

“You will be,” she said confidently. “Besides, I don’t want to leave you, darling.” She blew out the one flickering candle that lit the inside of the tent. In the darkness, he heard cloth rustle. When he reached out toward her, his hand brushed warm, bare flesh. A little later, she rode astride him, groaning both in ecstasy and, he thought, in desperation, too—or maybe he was just guessing she felt the same thing he did. Afterwards, not bothering to dress, she slept beside him in the tent.

He woke before sunrise, and woke her, too. “If we’re going to do this,” he said, “we’d better get started early as we can. That way we can go a long way before it gets too hot, and lie up during the hottest part of the day.”

“Sounds good to me,” Penny said.

The eastern sky was just going pink when they set out. They were far from the first to leave Karval. Singly and in small groups, some people were making their way north along one of the roads that led out of town, others along the westbound road, and a few hearty souls, splitting the difference, heading northwest cross-country. Had Auerbach been in better shape, he would have done that. As things were, he and Penny went west: the Horse River was likelier to have water in it still than any of the streams they would cross heading north.

He was stronger and better on his crutches than he had been, but that still left him weak and slow. Men and women passed Penny and him in a steady stream. Refugees from Karval stretched out along the road as far as he could see.

“Some of us are going to die before we get to Denver,” he said. The prospect upset him much less than it would have before he got wounded. He’d had a dress rehearsal for meeting the Grim Reaper; really doing it couldn’t be a whole lot worse.

Penny pointed up to the sky. The wheeling black specks up there weren’t Lizard airplanes, or even Piper Cubs. They were buzzards, waiting with the patient optimism of their kind. Penny didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Rance wondered if one of those buzzards would gnaw his bones.

He needed two days to get to the Horse. Had its bed been dry, he knew he wouldn’t have got much farther. But people crowded the bank, down where the river passed under Highway 71. The water was warm and muddy, and there, not twenty feet away, some idiot was pissing into the stream. Auerbach didn’t care about any of it. He drank till he was full, he splashed his face, he soaked his head, and then he took off his shirt and soaked that, too. As it dried, it would help keep him cool.

Penny splashed water on her blouse. The wet cotton molded itself to her shape. Auerbach would have appreciated that more had he not been so deadly weary. As things were, he nodded and said, “Good idea. Let’s get going.”

They headed north up Highway 71, and reached Punkin Center early the next morning. They got more water there. A sad-eyed local said, “Wish we could give you some eats, folks—you look like you could use ’em. But the ones ahead o’ you done et us out of what we had. Good luck to you.”

“I told you to go on without me,” Auerbach said. Penny ignored him. One foot and two crutches at a time, he wearily plodded north.

By the end of that afternoon, he figured the buzzards were out tying napkins around their necks, getting ready for a delicious supper of sunbaked cavalry captain. If he fell over and died, he figured Penny could speed up and might make it to Limon before the heat and the dry and the hunger got her.

“I love you,” he croaked, not wanting to die with things left unspoken.

“I love you, too,” she answered. “That’s why I’m gonna get you through.”

He laughed, but, before he could tell her how big a joke that was, he heard cheering up ahead. He pointed, balancing for a moment on one foot and one crutch. “That’s an Army wagon,” he said in glad disbelief. The horses were the most beautiful animals he’d ever seen.

The wagon was already full, but the soldiers gave him and Penny canteens and crackers and scooted people around to make room in back. “We’ll get you up to the resettlement center,” one of them promised, “and they’ll take care of you there.”

That took another couple of days, but there were supply depots all the way. Auerbach spent his time wondering what the resettlement center would be like; the soldiers didn’t talk much about it. When they finally got there, he found out why: it was just another name for a refugee camp, one dwarfing the squalid, miserable place outside Karval.

“How long will we have to stay here?” he asked a harried clerk who was handing Penny bedding for two and directing her to an enormous olive-drab communal tent, one of many all in a row.

“God knows, buddy,” the corporal answered. “The war may be stopped, but this ain’t no Easy Street. Ain’t gonna be for a long time, neither. Welcome to the United States, new and not so improved model. With luck, you won’t starve.”

“We’ll take that,” Penny said, and Auerbach had to nod. Together, they set off to acquaint themselves with the new United States.

In his green undershirt and black panzer man’s trousers, Heinrich Jäger didn’t look badly out of place on the streets of Lodz. Lots of men wore odds and ends of German uniform, and, if his was in better shape than most, that meant little. His colonel’s blouse, on the other hand, he’d ditched as soon as he jumped out of the
Storch.
A
Wehrmacht
officer was not a popular thing to be, not here.

Ludmila strode along beside him. Her clothes—a peasant tunic and a pair of trousers that had probably once belonged to a Polish soldier—were mannish, but no one save a particularly nearsighted Lizard could have mistaken her for the male of the species, even with an automatic pistol on her hip. Neither pants nor sidearm drew any special notice. A lot of women wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses, and a surprising number—most but not all of them Jewish-looking—carried or wore firearms.

“Do you know Lodz at all?” Ludmila asked. “Do you know how to find—the person we’re looking for?” She was too sensible to name Mordechai Anielewicz where anyone might overbear his name.

Jäger shook his head. “No and no, respectively.” He kept his voice low; nobody who spoke German,
Wehrmacht
officer or not, was likely to be popular in Lodz these days, not with Jews, not with Poles, and not with Lizards, either. “I expect we’ll find him, though. In his own way, he’s a big man here.”

He thought about asking a policeman. He had a couple of different brands from which to choose: Poles in dark blue uniforms and Jews with armbands left over from German administration and with kepis that made them look absurdly like French
flics.
That didn’t strike him as a healthy idea, though. Instead, he and Ludmila kept walking north up Stodolniana Street till they came to what had to have been the Jewish quarter. Even now, it was brutally crowded. What it had been like under the
Reich
was something Jäger would sooner not have contemplated.

Many more of those comic-opera Jewish policemen were on the street in that part of town. Jäger kept right on ignoring them and hoping they would extend him the same courtesy. He nodded to a fellow with a wild mop of hair and a big, curly reddish beard who carried a Mauser, had another slung over his shoulder, and wore crisscross bandoliers full of brass cartridges: a Jewish bandit if ever there was one, and as such a man likely to know where Anielewicz could be found. “I’m looking for Mordechai,” he said. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly at his clear German.
“Nu?
Are you?” he said, using Yiddish, perhaps to see if Jäger could follow.

Jäger nodded again to show he could. The Jewish fighter went on, “So you’re looking for Mordechai. So what? Is he looking for you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Jäger answered. “Does the name Skorzeny mean anything to you?”

It did. The fighter stiffened. “You’re him?” he demanded, and made as if to point the rifle he carried at Jäger. Then he checked himself. “No. You can’t be. He’s supposed to be taller than I am, and you’re not.”

“You’re right” Jäger pointed to Ludmila.
“She’s
really Skorzeny.”

“Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jäger.

As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jäger recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jäger caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”

She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jäger would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jäger!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”

“I’ll listen to him.” Anielewicz glanced at Ludmila. “Who’s your friend?”

She answered for herself, with manifest pride: “Ludmila Vadimovna Gorbunova, Senior Lieutenant, Red Air Force.”

“Red Air Force?” Anielewicz’s lips silently shaped the words. “You have the oddest friends, Jäger—her and me, for instance. What would Hitler say if he knew?”

“He’d say I was dead meat,” Jäger answered. “Of course, since I was already under arrest for treason, he’s already said that, or his bully boys have. Right now, I want to keep him from blowing up Lodz, and maybe keep the Lizards from blowing up Germany to pay him back. For better or worse, it still is my fatherland. Skorzeny doesn’t care what happens next. He’ll touch that thing off for no better reason than because someone told him to.”

“You were right,” the woman beside Anielewicz said. “You did see him, then. I thought you were worrying over every little thing.”

“I wish I had been, Bertha,” he replied, worry and affection warring in his voice. He turned his attention back to Jäger. “I didn’t think . . .  anybody”—he’d probably been about to say something like
even you damned Nazis
, but forbore—“would explode the bomb in the middle of truce talks. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?” His gaze sharpened. “You were arrested for treason, you say?
Gevalt!
They found you were passing things to us?”

“They found out I was, yes,” Jäger answered with a weary nod. Since his rescue, things had happened too fast for him to take them all in at once. For now, he was trying to roll with each one as it hit. Later, if there was a later and it wasn’t frantic, he’d do his best to figure out what everything meant. “Karol is dead.” One more memory he wished he didn’t have. “They didn’t really have any idea how much I was passing on to you. If they’d known a tenth part of it, I’d have been in pieces on the floor when my boys came to break me out—and if my boys knew a tenth part of it, they never would have come.”

Anielewicz studied him. Quietly, the younger man said, “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known about the bomb, it would have gone off, and God only knows what would have happened next.” He offered the words as in consolation for Jäger’s having been rescued by his men when they didn’t know what he’d truly done; he understood, with a good officer’s instinctive grasp, how hard that was to accept.

“You say you saw Skorzeny?” Jäger asked, and Anielewicz nodded. Jäger grimaced. “You must have found the bomb, too. He said it was in a graveyard. Did you move it after you found it?”

“Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too—not just the wireless switch, but the manual device—so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”

Jäger held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”

“If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”

“Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jäger. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation.
“Nu?
Would he?”

“I know two things,” Jäger answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow—no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”