Striking the Balance (50 page)

“Mm, that’s so.” Goldfarb glanced over at Mzepps. “Is he happy?”

“I’ll ask him.” Mather did, then laughed “ ‘Are you crazy?’ he says.” Mzepps spoke some more. Mather went on, “He says he’s alive and fed and not being tortured, and all that’s more than he expected when he was captured. He may not be dancing in the daisies, but he’s got no kick coming.”

“Fair enough,” Goldfarb said, and went back to work.

Sergeant Herman Muldoon peered out through a glassless second-story window of the Wood House across Quincy, Illinois, down toward the Mississippi at the base of the bluffs. “That there,” he declared, “is one hell of a river.”

“This is a hell of a place, too,” Mutt Daniels said. “Yeah, the windows are blown to smithereens, but the house itself don’t hardly look no different than the way it did last time I was in this town, back about nineteen and seven.”

“They made the joint to last, all right,” Muldoon agreed. “You set stone blocks in lead, they ain’t goin’ anyplace. Bein’ shaped like a stop sign don’t hurt, neither, I guess: more chance to deflect a shell, less chance to stop one square.” He paused. “What were you doin’ here in 1907, Lieutenant, you don’t mind my askin’?”

“Playin’ ball—what else?” Mutt answered. “I started out number two catcher for the Quincy Gems in the Iowa State League—my first time ever in Yankee country, and Lord! was I lonesome. Number one catcher—his name was Ruddock, Charlie Ruddock—he broke his thumb second week in May. I hit 360 for a month after that, and the Gray’s Harbor Grays, out in Washington State, bought my contract. The Northwestern League was Class B, two notches up from Quincy, but I was kinda sorry to leave just the same.”

“How come?” Muldoon asked. “You ain’t the kind of guy to turn down a promotion, Lieutenant, and I bet you never was.”

Daniels laughed softly. He looked out toward the Mississippi, too. It
was
a big river here, but not a patch on what it would be when it got down to his home state, which shared its name. It hadn’t had the Missouri or the Ohio or the Tennessee or the Red or a zillion other rivers join it, not yet.

Only a quarter of him was thinking about the Mississippi, though. The rest looked not so much across Quincy as across almost two thirds of a lifetime. More to himself than to Herman Muldoon, he said, “There was this pretty little girl with curly hair just the color o’ ripe corn. Her name was Addie Strasheim, an’ I can see the little dimple in her cheek plain as if it was yesterday. She was a sweetie, Addie was. I’d’a stayed here all season, likely tell I woulda married her if I coulda talked her pa into it.”

“You get the chance, you oughta go lookin’ for her,” Muldoon said. “Town ain’t been fought over too bad, and this don’t look like the kind of place where a whole bunch of people pull up stakes and head for the big city.”

“You know, Muldoon, for a pretty smart guy, you can be a natural-born damn fool,” Mutt said. His sergeant grinned back at him, not in the least put out. Slowly, again half to himself, Daniels went on, “I was twenty-one then, she was maybe eighteen. Don’t think I was the first boy who ever kissed her, but I reckon there couldn’t have been more than a couple ahead of me. She’s alive now, she’s got old, same as me, same as you, same as everybody. I’d sooner think of her like she was, sweet as a peach pie.” He sighed. “Hell, I’d sooner think of me like I was, a kid who thought a kiss was somethin’ special, not a guy standin’ in line for a fast fuck.”

“World’s a nasty place,” Muldoon said. “You live in it, it wears you down after a while. War makes it worse, but it’s pretty bad any old way.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Mutt said.

“Here.” Muldoon took his canteen off his belt and held it out to Mutt. “Good for what ails you.”

“Yeah?” Nobody had ever offered Mutt water with a promise like that. He unscrewed the lid, raised the canteen to his lips, and took a swig. What came out was clear as water, but kicked like a mule. He’d had raw corn likker a time or three, but this stuff made some of the other moonshine he’d poured down feel like Jack Daniel’s by comparison. He swallowed, coughed a couple of times, and handed the canteen back to Muldoon. “Good thing I ain’t got me no cigarettes. I light a match and breathe in, I figure I’d explode.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” the sergeant said with a chuckle. He looked at his watch. “We better grab some sack time while we can. We start earnin’ our pay again at midnight.”

Daniels sighed. “Yeah, I know. An’ if this goes just right, we push the Lizards back a quarter of a mile down the Mississippi. At that rate, we can have the whole damn river open about three weeks before Judgment Day.” Once he got the complaints out of his system, he rolled himself up in a blanket and fell asleep in a minute and a half, tops.

As he was dozing off, he figured Captain Szymanski would have to kick him awake, because he was down for the count. But he woke up in good time without the help of the company commander’s boot. Mosquitoes made sure of that. They came through the glassless windows of the Wood House buzzing like a flight of fighter planes, and they didn’t chew him up a whole lot less than getting strafed would have.

He slapped at his hands and his face. He wasn’t showing any other bare skin, but that was plenty for the mosquitoes. Come morning, he’d look like raw meat. Then he remembered the mission. Come morning, he was liable to
be
raw meat.

Muldoon was awake, too. They went downstairs together, a couple of old-timers still hanging on in a young man’s world, a young man’s game. Back when he was a kid fighting to hook onto a big-league job even for a little while, he’d resented—he’d almost hated—old geezers who hung on and hung on and wouldn’t quit and give the new guys a chance. Now he was a geezer himself. When quitting meant going out feet first, you were less inclined to do it than when all you lost was your job.

Captain Szymanski was already down there in the big hall, telling the dogfaces what they were going to do and how they’d do it. They were supposed to know, but you didn’t get anywhere taking brains for granted. Szymanski finished, “Listen to your lieutenant and your sergeant. They’ll get you through.” That made Mutt feel pretty good.

More mosquitoes buzzed outside. Crickets chirped. A few spring peepers peeped, though most of them had already had their season. The night was warm and muggy. The platoon tramped south toward the Lizards’ forward positions. Boots clunked on pavement, then struck dirt and grass more quietly.

A couple of scouts halted the advancing Americans just north of Marblehead, the hamlet next down the river from Quincy. “Dig in,” Mutt whispered through the sticky darkness. Entrenching tools were already biting into dirt. Daniels missed the elaborate trench networks of the First World War, but fighting nowadays moved too fast to make those practical in most places. Even a foxhole quickly scraped out of the dirt was mighty nice to have sometimes, though.

He tugged back the cuff of his sleeve to look at his watch. A quarter to twelve, the glowing hands said. He held it up to his ear. Yes, it was ticking. He would have guessed it a couple of hours later than that, and something gone wrong with the attack “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” he muttered.

No sooner had he lowered his arm than artillery opened up, off to the east of Quincy. Shells started slamming into Marblehead, some landing no more than a couple of hundred yards south of where he crouched. Nothing had gone wrong after all; he’d just been too keyed up to keep track of time.

“Let’s go!” he shouted when his watch told him it was time. The barrage shifted at the same moment, plastering the southern half of Marblehead instead of the northern part. Lizard artillery was busy, too, but mostly with counterbattery fire. Mutt was glad the Lizards were shelling the American guns, not him.

“Over here!” a scout yelled. “We’ve got paths cut through their wire.” The Lizards used stuff that was like nothing so much as a long, skinny double-edged razor blade. As far as he was concerned, it was even nastier than barbed wire. The plan had said there would be paths, but what the plan said didn’t always have a lot to do with reality.

Lizards in Marblehead opened up on the Americans as they were coming through the wire. No matter how many traps you set, you wouldn’t get all the rats. No matter how you shelled a place, you wouldn’t clear out all the fighters. Mutt had been on the receiving end of barrages a lot worse than this one. He’d expected opposition, and here it was.

He blazed away with his tommy gun, then threw himself flat behind the overturned hulk of an old Model A. Mike Wheeler, the platoon BAR man, hosed down the town with his Browning Automatic Rifle. Daniels wished for Dracula Szabo, the BAR man in his old platoon. Dracula would have got right up there nose-to-snout with the Lizards before he let ’em have it

His platoon’s attack developed the Lizard position. The company’s other platoon moved on the town from the east a couple of minutes later. They knew where the enemy was holed up, and winkled the aliens out house by house. Some Lizards surrendered, some fled, some died. One of their medics and a couple of human corpsmen worked side by side on casualties

A little fight,
Mutt thought wearily. A few men killed—even fewer Lizards, by the look of things. Marblehead hadn’t been heavily garrisoned. A few of the locals started sticking their heads out of whatever shelters they’d made to protect themselves from pieces of metal flying around with hostile intent.

“Not too bad,” Herman Muldoon said. He pointed west, toward the Mississippi. “Another stretch of river liberated. We’ll clear all the Lizards out a lot sooner than three weeks before Judgment Day like you said.”

“Yeah,” Daniels agreed. “Mebbe six weeks.” Muldoon laughed, just as if Mutt had been kidding.

XIII

Liu Han turned and saw Liu Mei pickup a bayonet Nieh Ho-T’ing had been careless enough to leave on the floor. “No!” Liu Han shouted. “Put it down!” She hurried across the room to take the edged weapon away from her little daughter.

Before she got there, Liu Mei had dropped the bayonet. The baby stared up at her with wide eyes. She started to scold Liu Mei, then stopped. Her daughter had obeyed her when she yelled in Chinese. She hadn’t had to speak the little scaly devils’ language or use an emphatic cough to make the baby understand her.

She scooped up Liu Mei and squeezed her tight. Liu Mei didn’t scream and squawk and try to get away, as she had when Liu Han first got her back from Ttomalss. Little by little, her daughter was becoming used to being a human being among other human beings, not a counterfeit little devil.

Liu Mei pointed to the bayonet. “This?” she asked in the little devils’ tongue, complete with interrogative cough.

“This is a bayonet,” Liu Han answered in Chinese. She repeated the key word: “Bayonet.”

Liu Mei made a noise that might have been intended for
bayonet,
though it also sounded like a noise a scaly devil might have made. The baby pointed in the general direction of the bayonet again, let out another interrogative cough, and said, “This?” once more.

Liu Han needed a moment to realize that, in spite of the cough, the question itself had been in Chinese. “This is a bayonet,” she said again. Then she hugged Liu Mei and gave her a big kiss on the forehead. Liu Mei hadn’t known what to make of kisses when Liu Han got her back, which struck Liu Han as desperately sad. Her daughter was getting the idea now: a kiss meant you’d done something pleasing.

The baby laughed in reply. Liu Mei laughed, but seldom smiled. No one had smiled at her when she was tiny; the scaly devils’ faces didn’t work that way. That saddened Liu Han, too. She wondered if she would ever be able to make it up to Liu Mei.

She paused and sniffed, then, despite the baby’s protests—Liu Mei, whatever else you could say about her, wasn’t shy about squawking—put a fresh cloth around her loins after cleaning the night soil from them.

“Something goes through you,” she told her daughter. “Is it enough? Are you getting enough to eat?”

The baby made squealing noises that might have meant anything or nothing. Liu Mei was old for a wet nurse now, and Liu Han’s breasts, of course, were empty of milk because her child had been stolen from her so young. But Liu Mei did not approve of the rice powder and overcooked noodles and soups and bits of pork and chicken Liu Han tried to feed her.

“Ttomalss must have been feeding you from tins,” Liu Han said darkly. Her mood only got angrier when Liu Mei looked alert and happy at hearing the familiar name of the little scaly devil.

Liu Han had eaten food from tins, too, when the little devils kept her prisoner aboard the airplane that never came down. Most of those tins had been stolen from Bobby Fiore’s America or other countries that ate similar kinds of foods. She had loathed them, almost without exception. They were preferable to starving to death, but not, as far as she was concerned, greatly preferable.

But they were what Liu Mei had known, just as the scaly devils were the company she had known. The baby thought the food of China, which seemed only right and proper to Liu Han, tasted and smelled peculiar, and ate it with the same reluctance Liu Han had felt in eating canned hash and other horrors.

Foreign-devil food could still be found in Peking, though most of it was under the control of rich followers of the Kuomintang’s counterrevolutionary clique or those who served as the scaly devils’ running dogs—not that those two groups were inseparable.

Nieh Ho-T’ing had offered to get some by hook or by crook so Liu Mei could have what she was used to.

Liu Han had declined when he first made the offer and every time since. She suspected—actually, she more than suspected; she was sure—one reason he’d made his proposal was to help keep the baby quiet through the night. She had a certain amount of sympathy with that, and certainly had nothing against a full night’s sleep, but she was dedicated to the idea of turning Liu Mei back into a proper Chinese child as fast as she could.

She’d had that thought many times since she got her baby back. Now, though, she stared down at Liu Mei in a new way, almost as if she’d never seen the child before. Her program was the opposite of the one Ttomalss had had in mind: he’d been as intent on making Liu Mei into a scaly devil as Liu Han was on turning her daughter back into an ordinary, proper person. But both the little devil and Liu Han herself were treating Liu Mei as if she were nothing more than a blank banner on which they could draw characters of their own choosing. Wasn’t a baby supposed to be something besides that?

Nieh wouldn’t have thought so. As far as Nieh was concerned, babies were small vessels to be filled with revolutionary spirit. Liu Han snorted. Nieh was probably annoyed that Liu Mei wasn’t yet planning bombings of her own and didn’t wear a little red star on the front of her overalls. Well, that was Nieh’s problem, not Liu Han’s or the baby’s.

Over a brazier in a corner of the room, Liu Han had a pot of
kao kan mien-erh,
dry cake powder. Liu Mei liked that better than the other common variety of powdered rice,
lao mi mien-erh
or old rice flour. She didn’t like either one of them very much, though.

Liu Han went over and took the lid off the pot. She stuck in her forefinger and took it out smeared with a warm, sticky glob of the dry cake powder. When she brought the stuff over to Liu Mei, the baby opened her mouth and sucked the powdered rice off the finger.

Maybe Liu Mei was getting used to proper sorts of food after all. Maybe she was just so hungry that anything even vaguely edible tasted good to her right now. Liu Han understood how that might be from her own desperate times aboard the airplane that never came down. She’d eaten grayish-green tinned peas that reminded her of nothing so much as boiled dust. Perhaps in the same spirit of resignation, Liu Mei now took several blobs of
kao kan mien-erh
from Liu Han’s finger and didn’t fuss once.

“Isn’t that good?” Liu Han crooned. She thought the dry cake powder had very little flavor of any sort, but babies didn’t like strongly flavored food. So grandmothers said, anyhow, and if they didn’t know, who did?

Liu Mei looked up at Liu Han and let out an emphatic cough. Liu Han stared at her daughter. Was she really saying she liked the dry cake powder today? Liu Han couldn’t think of anything else that cough might mean. Although her daughter had still expressed herself in the fashion of a little scaly devil, she’d done it to approve of something not only earthly but Chinese.

“Mama,” Liu Mei said, and then used another emphatic cough. Liu Han thought she would melt into a little puddle of dry-cake-flour mush, right there on the floor of her room. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been right: little by little, she was winning her daughter back from the scaly devils.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked at his companions in the room above the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “Well, now we have it,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

“We ought to give it back to the Nazis,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “They tried to kill us with it; only fair we should return the favor.”

“David Nussboym would have said we should give it to the Lizards,” Bertha Fleishman said, “and not the way Solomon meant, but as a true gift.”

“Yes, and because he kept saying things like that, we said goodbye to him,” Gruver answered. “We don’t need any more of such foolishness.”

“Just a miracle we managed to get that hideous stuff out of the casing and into our own sealed bottles without killing anybody doing it,” Anielewicz said: “a miracle, and a couple of those antidote kits the
Wehrmacht
men sold us, for when their own people started feeling the gas in spite of the masks and the protective clothes they were wearing.” He shook his head. “The Nazis are much too good at making things like that.”

“They’re much too good at giving them to us, too,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Before, their rockets would send over a few kilos of nerve gas at a time, with a big bursting charge to spread it around. But this . . .  we salvaged more than a tonne from that bomb. And they were going to have us place it so it hurt us worst. The rockets could come down almost anywhere.”

Solomon Gruver’s laugh was anything but pleasant. “I bet that Skorzeny pitched a fit when he found out he couldn’t play us for suckers the way he thought he could.”

“He probably did,” Mordechai agreed. “But don’t think he’s done for good because we fooled him once. I never thought the
mamzer
would live up to the nonsense Göbbels puts out on the wireless, but he does. That is a man to be taken seriously no matter what. If we don’t keep an eye on him all the time, he’ll do something dreadful to us. Even if we do, he may yet.”

“Thank God for your friend, the other German,” Bertha said.

Now Anielewicz laughed—uncomfortably. “I don’t think he’s my friend, exactly. I don’t think I’m his friend, either. But I let him live and I let him carry that explosive metal back to Germany, and so . . .  I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a stiff-necked sense of honor, and he’s paying back a debt.”

“There can be decent Germans,” Solomon Gruver said reluctantly. That almost set Mordechai laughing again. If he had started, the laugh would have carried an edge of hysteria. He could imagine some plump, monocled Nazi functionary using that precise tone of voice to admit,
There can be decent Jews.

“I still wonder if I should have killed him,” Mordechai said. “The Nazis would have had a much harder time building their bombs without that metal, and God knows the world would be a better place without them. But the world wouldn’t be a better place with the Lizards overrunning it.”

“And here we are, still stuck in the middle between them,” Bertha Fleishman said. “If the Lizards win, everyone loses. If the Nazis win, we lose.”

“We’ll hurt them before we go,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve helped us do it, too. If they should come back, we won’t let them treat us the way they did before. Not now. Never again. What was the last desire of my life before the Lizards came has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defense is a fact.”

How tenuous a fact it was came to be shown a moment later, when a Jewish fighter named Leon Zelkowitz walked into the room where they were talking and said, “There’s an Order Service district leader down at the entrance who wants to talk with you, Mordechai.”

Anielewicz made a sour face. “Such an honor.” The Order Service in the Jewish district of Lodz still reported to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews under the Nazis and was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards. Most of the time, the Order Service prudently pretended the Jewish fighters did not exist. That the Lizards’ puppet police came looking for him now—he needed to find out what it meant. He got up and slung a Mauscr over his shoulder.

The Order Service officer still wore his Nazi-issue trench coat and kepi. He wore his Nazi-issue armband, too: red and white, with a black
Magen David
on it; the white triangle inside the Star of David showed his rank. He carried a billy club on his belt. Against a rifle, that was nothing much.

“You wanted me?” Anielewicz was ten or twelve centimeters taller than the district leader, and used his height to stare coldly down at the other man.

“I—” The Order Service man coughed. He was chunky and pale-faced, with a black mustache that looked as if a moth had landed on his upper lip. He tried again: “I’m Oskar Birkenfeld, Anielewicz. I have orders to take you to Bunim.”

“Do you?” Anielewicz had expected a meeting with Rumkowski or some of his henchmen. To be summoned instead to meet with the chief Lizard in Lodz . . .  something out of the ordinary was going on. He wondered if he should have this Birkenfeld seized and drop out of sight himself. He’d made plans to do that at need. Was the need here? Temporizing, he said, “Does he give me a safe-conduct pledge to and from the meeting?”