Striking the Balance Read online

  Jäger had been on several missions with Skorzeny: in Russia, in Croatia, in France. He marveled that he remained in one piece after them. He marveled even more that Skorzeny did. He also set himself to resist whatever blandishments Skorzeny hurled his way. If you stood up to the SS man, you got respect. If you didn’t, you got run over.

  Skorzeny thumped his belly. The scar that furrowed his left cheek pulled up the corner of his mouth as he asked, “Got any food around these parts, or do you aim to starve me to death?”

  “You’re not wasting away,” Jäger said, looking him over with a critical eye. “We have some stew—pork and turnips—and some ersatz coffee. Will they suit your majesty?”

  “No truffled pheasant, eh? Well, stew will do. But fuck ersatz coffee and the dying horse that pissed it out.” Skorzeny pulled a canteen off his belt, undid the stopper, and passed the canteen to Jäger. “Have a snort.”

  Jäger drank warily. With Skorzeny’s sense of humor, you had to be wary. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Where did you come by this?”

  “Not a bad cognac, eh?” Skorzeny answered smugly. “Courvoisier VSOP five-star, smoother than the inside of a virgin’s twat.”

  Jäger took another sip, this one with appropriate reverence, then handed the felt-covered aluminum flask back to Skorzeny. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know where you found it. If you tell me, I’ll desert and go there myself. Wherever it is, it’s a nicer place than this.”

  “Which isn’t saying one hell of a lot, when you get down to it,” Skorzeny said. “Now, where’s that stew?” When he’d filled the metal bowl from his own mess kit, he gulped the stuff down, then sent a shot of cognac after it. “Shame to chase anything so vile, but the hooch doesn’t do me any good if I don’t drink it, eh?” He gave Jäger a shot in the ribs with his elbow.

  “Whatever you say,” Jäger answered. If you let the SS man sweep you away, you were in trouble—he kept reminding himself of that. Of course, since Skorzeny was here, he was going to find himself in trouble anyway; Skorzeny brought it with him, along with heavenly cognac. What sort of trouble, now, that varied from mission to mission. Jäger got up and stretched as lazily as he could, then said, “Let’s go for a little walk, shall we?”

  “Oh, you just want to get me alone,” Skorzeny said in a shrill, arch falsetto. The panzer crewmen still eating their suppers guffawed in delight. Gunther Grillparzer swallowed wrong and started to choke; somebody had to pound him on the back before he could breathe straight again.

  “If I were that desperate, you big ugly lunk, I think I’d shoot myself first,” Jäger retorted. The troopers laughed again. So did Skorzeny. He dished it out, but he could take it, too.

  He and Jäger strode away from the encampment: not far enough to get lost, but out of earshot of the soldiers. Their boots squelched in mud. The spring thaw had done as much as the Lizards to slow the German advance. Off in a pond not far away, one of the first frogs of the new year let out a loud, mournful croak.

  “He’ll be sorry,” Skorzeny said. “An owl will get him, or a heron.” He sounded as if he thought the frog had it coming.

  Jäger didn’t care about frogs one way or the other. “The devil’s work, you said. What sort of deviltry have you got in mind, and where do I fit into it?”

  “Don’t even know if you do or not,” Skorzeny answered. “Have to see how things go. But as long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop by and say hello.” He bowed from the waist. “Hello.”

  “You’re impossible,” Jäger said with a snort. By the way Skorzeny beamed, he took that for a compliment. Holding onto his patience with both hands, Jäger went on, “Let’s try it again. Why are you in the neighborhood?”

  “I’m going to deliver a present, as soon as I figure out the best way to do it,” the SS man said.

  “Knowing the kind of presents you deliver, I’m sure the Lizards will be delighted to have this one,” Jäger told him. “Anything I can do to tie a bow on the package, you know you have only to ask.” There. He’d gone and said it. One way or another, odds were it would get him killed.

  He waited for the SS Standartenführer to go into extravagant, probably obscene detail about the latest plan for making the Lizards’ lives miserable. Skorzeny took a childish delight in his murderous schemes (Jäger got a sudden mental image of him as a child of six in Lederhosen, opening a package of tin soldiers; somehow the child Skorzeny in his mind had a scarred face, too). Now, though, he sent Jäger a hooded look before answering, “It’s not for the Lizards.”

  “No?” Jäger raised an eyebrow. “Well. If it’s for me, what are you doing giving me fair warning?” He suddenly sobered; officers who displeased the High Command had been known to disappear from the face of the earth as if they had never been. What had he done to displease anyone save the foe? “If you’re carrying a pistol with one bullet in it, you’d better tell me why.”

  “Is that what you’re thinking? Gott im Himmel, no!” Skorzeny held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “Nothing like that, I swear. Not you, not anybody you command or who commands you—no Germans at all, as a matter of fact.”

  “Well, all right, then,” Jäger said in considerable relief. “So what are you getting all coy with me for? The enemies of the Reich are the enemies of the Reich. We’ll smash them and go on.”

  Skorzeny’s face grew unreadable again. “You say that now, but it’s not the song you’ve always sung. Jews are enemies of the Reich, nicht wahr?”

  “If they weren’t beforehand, we’ve certainly done enough to make them so,” Jäger said. “Even so, we’ve had good cooperation from the ones in Lodz, keeping the Lizards from using the city as a staging point against us. When you get down to it, they’re human beings, ja?”

  “We’ve had cooperation from them?” Skorzeny said, not answering Jäger’s question. “I’ll tell you who’s had cooperation from them: the Lizards, that’s who. If the Jews hadn’t stabbed us in the back, we’d hold a lot more of Poland than we do.”

  Jäger made a tired gesture. “Why do we need to get into all of that? You know what we were doing to the Jews in Poland and Russia. Is it any wonder they don’t love us for the good Christians we are?”

  “No, it’s probably no wonder,” Skorzeny said without any rancor Jäger could hear. “But if they want to play that game with us, they’re going to have to pay the price. Now—do you want me to go on with what I have to say, or would you sooner not listen so you don’t have to know a thing?”

  “Go ahead,” Jäger said. “I’m not an ostrich, to stick my head in the sand.”

  Skorzeny grinned at him. The scar on his cheek pulled half his face into a grimace that might have come from a gargoyle sitting somewhere high on a medieval cathedral—or maybe that was just Jäger’s mind, pulling horror from the SS man’s words: “I’m going to set off the biggest damned nerve-gas bomb the world has ever seen, and I’m going to do it right in the middle of the Lodz ghetto. So what do you think of that? Are you a colonel, or just a scoutmaster in the wrong uniform?”

  “Fuck you, Skorzeny,” Jäger said evenly. As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered a Jewish partisan who’d used that invitation about every other sentence. SS men had shot the Jew—Max, his name was—at a place called Babi Yar, outside of Kiev. They’d botched the job, or Max wouldn’t have had the chance to tell his story. God only knew how many they hadn’t botched.

  “That’s not an answer,” Skorzeny said, as immune to insult as a Lizard panzer was to machine-gun bullets. “Tell me what you think.”

  “I think it’s stupid,” Jäger answered. “The Jews in Lodz have been helping us. If you start killing off the people who do that, you run out of friends in a hurry.”

  “Ahh, those bastards are playing both ends against the middle, and you know it as well as I do,” Skorzeny said. “They kiss whichever ass is closest to them. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, anyhow. I’ve got my orders, and I’m going to carry them out.�
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  Jäger came to attention and flipped up his right arm. “Heil Hitler!” he said.

  He had to give Skorzeny credit: the big bruiser recognized it was sarcasm, not acquiescence. Not only that, he thought it was funny. “Come on, don’t be a wet blanket,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. You can give me a lot of help this time, too.”

  “Yes, I’d make a splendid Jew,” Jäger said, deadpan. “How long do you suppose a circumcision takes to heal up?”

  “You didn’t used to be such a smartmouth,” Skorzeny said, rocking back on his heels and sticking thumbs into trouser pockets so he looked like a young lout on a streetcorner. “Must be senility coming on, eh?”

  “If you say so. How am I supposed to help, though? I’ve never been inside Lodz. In fact, the offensive steered wide around it so we wouldn’t get bogged down in street fighting there. We can’t afford to go losing panzers to Molotov cocktails and things like that; we lose too many of them to the Lizards as is.”

  “Yeah, that’s the line you sent back to division, and division sent it back to army group headquarters, and the High Command bought it,” Skorzeny said with a nod. “Bully for you. Maybe you’ll get red stripes on your trousers like a General Staff officer.”

  “And it’s worked, too,” Jäger said. “I saw more street fighting in Russia than I ever wanted. Nothing in the world chews up men and machines like that, and we don’t have them to waste.”

  “Ja, ja, ja,” Skorzeny said with exaggerated patience. He leaned forward and glared at Jäger. “And I also happen to know that one of the reasons we swung around Lodz in two prongs is that you cut a deal with the Jewish partisans there. What do you have to say to that, Mr. General Staff Officer?”

  It might have stopped snowing, but it was anything but warm. All the same, Jäger felt his face heat. If Skorzeny knew that, it was in an SS dossier somewhere . . . which did not bode well for his long-term survival, let alone his career. Even so, he answered as calmly as he could: “I say it was military necessity. This way, we have the partisans on our side and driving the Lizards crazy instead of the other way round. It’s worked out damned well, so you can take your ‘I also happen to know’ and flush it down the WC.”

  “Why? What does Winston Churchill want with it?” Skorzeny said with a leer. The joke would have been funnier if the Germans hadn’t been making it on the radio from the day Churchill became prime minister to the night the Lizards arrived. The SS man went on, “You have to understand, I don’t really give a damn. But it does mean you have connections with the Jews. You ought to be able to use those to help me get my little toy right to the center of town.”

  Jäger stared at him. “And you pay me thirty pieces of silver afterwards, don’t you? I don’t throw away connections like that. I don’t murder them, either. Why not ask me to betray my own men while you’re at it?”

  “Thirty pieces of silver? That’s pretty good. Christ was a damn kike, too, remember. And a whole fat lot of good it did him. So.” Skorzeny studied Jäger. “The more help we get from your little chums, the easier the job will be, and I’m in favor of easy jobs whenever I can get ’em. They pay me to risk my neck, but they don’t pay me to stick it out when I don’t have to.”

  This from a man who’d blown up a Lizard panzer by jumping onto it and throwing a satchel charge between turret and hull. Maybe Skorzeny called that a necessary sort of risk; Jäger had no way of knowing. He said, “You touch off a nerve-gas bomb in there, you’re going to kill a lot of people who don’t have thing one to do with the war.”

  This time, Skorzeny’s laugh was rude. “You fought in Russia, same as I did. So what?” He thumped Jäger in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen and listen good. I’m going to do this with you or without you. It’d make my life easier if it was with you. But my life has been tough before. If it’s tough again, believe me, I’ll cope. So what do you say?”

  “I don’t say anything right now,” Jäger answered. “I’m going to have to think this one over.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down in a parody of sweet reason. “Think all you want. Just don’t take too long doing it.”

  The guard pointed a Sten gun at Moishe Russie’s middle. “Come on, get moving,” he said, his voice harsh and merciless.

  Russie rose from the cot in his cell. “The Nazis put me in the ghetto, the Lizards put me in gaol,” he said. “I never thought Jews would treat me the same way.”

  If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”

  He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.

  He didn’t know exactly where here was. Somewhere in Palestine, of course, but he and his family had been brought in tied and blindfolded and concealed under straw. The outer walls of the compound were too high for him to see over them. He could tell he was in a town from the noises that came through the golden sandstone: smiths pounding on metal, wagons rattling by, the distant babel of a marketplace. Wherever he was, he was surely walking on soil mentioned in the Torah. Whenever he remembered that, awe prickled through him.

  Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders: Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed. Isaiah had been talking about the Egyptians, and the Lizards were in Egypt now. Russie didn’t want them to follow Moses across the Sinai and into Palestine.

  Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland—or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.

  “Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.

  When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. If only it were so, he thought wryly. Give him a swatter and he might be dangerous to a fly. Past that . . . past that, the members of the underground were letting their imaginations run away with them.

  He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.

  Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”

  “He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”

  “He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.

  “And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us—he betrayed me—and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraa
g looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.

  “Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”

  “You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green—brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of the Herrenvolk down solid.

  He did not succeed in impressing Begin. “You would be well advised to remember where you are,” the underground leader replied imperturbably. “We can always sell you to the British, and maybe get more from them for you than your people would give us for Russie here.”

  “I took this risk when I let you bring me up to this part of the continental mass,” Zolraag said; he had courage, whatever you thought of him and his kind. “I still have hopes, though, of persuading you that aligning with the Race, the inevitable victors in this conflict, will serve you best in the long run.”

  Moishe spoke for the first time: “What he really hopes is to get back his old rank. His body paint is very plain these days.”

  “Yes, and that is your fault,” Zolraag said with an angry hiss like that of a venomous serpent “It was through you that the province of Poland passed from being peaceful to becoming restive, and you turned on us and blamed us for policies of similar nature to those you had previously praised.”