He waved. His support squad vanished among the trees. If anything went wrong at the meeting, the Germans would pay. A couple of years before, Jewish fighters wouldn’t have been so smooth about moving in the woods. They’d had practice since.
Anielewicz walked up the trail toward the clearing where he was supposed to confer with the Nazis and see what Heinrich Jager had up his sleeve-or what he said he had up his sleeve. Since that talk with the Pole who called himself Tadeusz, Anielewicz was leery about believing anything the German might tell him. On the other hand, he would have been leery about believing Jager without talking to Tadeusz, too.
As he’d been instructed, he paused before entering the clearing and whistled the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. He found that a curious choice for the Germans, since those bars made a Morse V-for-victory, the symbol of the anti-Nazi underground before the Lizards came. But, when somebody whistled back, he advanced up the forest track and out into the open space.
There stood Jager, and beside him a tail, broad-shouldered man with a scar on his face and a glint in his eye. The scar made the big man’s expression hard to read: Mordechai couldn’t tell if that was a friendly grin or a nasty one. The German had on a private’s tunic, but if he was a private, Anielewicz was a priest.
Jager said, “Good day,” and offered his hand. Mordechai took it: Jager had always dealt fairly with him. The German panzer colonel said, “Anielewicz, here is Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who’s given the Lizards more trouble than any ten men you could name.”
Mordechai kicked himself for not recognizing Skorzeny. The German propaganda machine had pumped out plenty of material about him. If he’d done a quarter of what Gobbels claimed, he was indeed a hero on the hoof. Now he stuck out his hand and boomed, “Good to meet you, Anielewicz. From what Jager says, you two are old friends.”
“We know each other, yes,Standartenfuhrer.” Mordechai shook hands, but deliberately used Skorzeny’s SS rank rather than theWehrmacht equivalent Jager had given.I know what you are.
So what?Skorzeny’s eyes answered insolently. He said, “Isn’t that sweet? How do you feel about giving the Lizards a boot in the balls they haven’t got?”
“Them or you, it doesn’t much matter to me.” Anielewicz kept his voice light, casual. Skorzeny impressed him more than he’d expected. The man didn’t seem to give a damn whether he lived or died. Mordechai had seen that before, but never coupled with so much relentless energy. If Skorzeny died, he’d make sure he had a lot of choice company.
He studied Anielewicz, too, doing his best to intimidate him with his presence. Mordechai stared back. If the SS man, wanted to try something, he’d be sorry. He didn’t try. He laughed instead. “All right, Jew, let’s do business. I’ve got a little toy for the Lizards, and I could use some help getting it right into the middle of Lodz where it’ll do the most good.”
“Sounds interesting,” Mordechai said. “So what is this toy? Tell me about it.”
Skorzeny set a finger by the side of his nose and winked. “It’s the biggest goddamn ginger bomb you ever did see, that’s what. Not just the powdered stuff, mind you, but an aerosol that’ll get all over everything in a huge area and keep the Lizards too drugged up to get into it for a long time.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “We’ve tested it on Lizard prisoners, and it’s the straight goods. It’ll drive ’em out of their skulls.”
“I bet it will,” Anielewicz answered.Sure it will. If he’s telling the truth. Is he? If you were a mouse, would you let a cat carry cheese down into your hole? But if Skorzeny was lying, he didn’t show it at all. And if, by some odd chance, he was telling the truth, the ginger bomb would wreak all the havoc he said it would. Mordechai could easily imagine the Lizards battling one another in the streets because they were too full of ginger to think straight, or even to do much thinking at all.
He wanted to believe Skorzeny. Without Jager’s obscure warning, he thought he would have believed Skorzeny. Something about the SS man made you want to go in the direction he was pushing. Anielewicz had enough of that gift himself to recognize it in others-and Skorzeny had a big dose.
Anielewicz decided to prod a little, to see what lay behind the bluff, hearty facade. “Why the devil should I trust you?” he demanded. “When has the SS ever meant anything but trouble for Jews?”
“The SS means trouble for all enemies of theReich.” Pride rang in Skorzeny’ s voice. In his own way, he was-or seemed-honest. Anielewicz didn’t know whether he preferred that or the hypocrisy he’d been expecting. Skorzeny went on, “Who now is the most dangerous enemy of theReich? You kikes?” He shook his head. “Of course not. The Lizards are the most dangerous. We worry about them first and the rest of the shit later.”
Before the Lizards came, the Soviet Union had been the most dangerous enemy of theReich. That hadn’t stopped the Nazis from building extermination camps in Poland, diverting resources they could have used to fight the Bolsheviks. Anielewicz said, “All right, suppose you drive the Lizards away from Lodz and Warsaw. What happens to us Jews then?”
Skorzeny spread his big hands and shrugged. “I don’t make policy. I just kill people.” Amazing that his grin could be disarming after he said something like that, but it was. “You don’t want to be around us, though, and we don’t want you around, so maybe we could ship you somewhere. Who knows? To Madagascar, maybe; they were talking about that before the Lizards came, but we didn’t exactly own the seas.” Now that twisted grin was wry. “Or maybe even to Palestine. Like I say, who the hell knows?”
He was glib. He was convincing. He was all the more frightening on account of that. “Why use this thing in Lodz?” Mordechai asked. “Why not at the front?”
“Two reasons,” Skorzeny answered. “First, you get a lot more enemies in one place at concentration areas in the rear. And second, a lot of Lizards at the front have some protection against gas warfare, and that keeps the ginger out, too.” He chuckled. “Ginger is gas warfare-happy gas, but gas.”
Anielewicz turned to Heinrich Jager. “What do you think of this? Will it work? If it was up to you, would you do it?”
Jager’s face didn’t show much, but Jager’s face, from what Mordechai had seen, seldom showed much. He half regretted his words; he was putting on the spot the nearest thing he had to a friend and ally in theWehrmacht. Jager coughed, then said, “I’ve been on more missions with Colonel Skorzeny than I care to remember.” Skorzeny laughed out loud at that. Ignoring him, Jager went on, “I’ve never seen him fail when he sets himself a goal. If he says this will do the job, you’d better listen to him.”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Anielewicz said. He gave his attention back to Otto Skorzeny. “Well,Herr Standartenfuhrer, what will you do if I tell you we don’t want anything to do with this? Will you try to get it into Lodz anyhow?”
“Aber naturlich.”Skorzeny’s Austrian accent made him sound like an aristocrat fromfin de siecle Vienna rather than a Nazi thug. “We don’t give up easily. We’ll do this with you or without you. It would be easier with you, maybe, and you Jews can put yourselves in our good graces by going along. Since we’re going to win the war and rule Poland, doesn’t that strike you as a good idea?”
Come on. Collaborate with us.Skorzeny wasn’t subtle. Mordechai wondered if he had it in him to be subtle. He sighed. “Since you put it that way-”
Skorzeny slapped him on the back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Ha! I knew you were a smart Jew. I-”
Noise from the woods made him break off. Anielewicz quickly figured out what it was. “So you brought some friends along to the meeting, too? They must have bumped up against mine.”
“I said you were a smart Jew, didn’t I?” Skorzeny answered. “How soon can we get this moving? I don’t like waiting around with my thumb up my arse.”
“Let me get back to Lodz and make the arrangements to bring in your little package,” Mordechai said. “I know how to get in touch with Colonel Jager here, and he probabl
y knows how to get in touch with you.”
“Yes, probably.” Jager’s voice was dry.
“Good enough,” Skorzeny said. “Just don’t take too damn long, that’s all I have to tell you. Remember, with you or without you, this is going to happen. Those Lizards will be sorry about the day they crawled out of their eggs.”
“You’ll hear from me soon,” Mordechai promised. He didn’t want Skorzeny doing whatever he had in mind all by himself. The SS man was altogether too likely to succeed at it, whatever it was. It might make the Lizards sorry, but Anielewicz wouldn’t have bet the Jews would care for it, either.
He whistled loudly, a cue for his men to head toward Lodz, then nodded to Jager and Skorzeny and left the clearing. He was very thoughtful all the way back down there.
“How far do we trust the Germans?” he asked back at the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “How farcan we trust the Germans, especially when one of them has told us not to?”
“Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes,”Bertha Fleishman said. Mordechai nodded; he’d had a secular education, with Latin a good part of it. For those who didn’t know their Virgil, Bertha translated: “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.”