Tilting the Balance

By the time he was done, Ussishkin’s eyes were wide and staring. “This will work?” he demanded.

“They had enough trouble with it in Warsaw,” Mordechai said. “I don’t know just what it will do here, but it ought to do something.”

“You’re still lying low, aren’t you?” Ussishkin said, then answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are. And even if you weren’t, I’d be a better choice to approach Tadeusz Sobieski, anyhow. He’s known me all his life; when he was born, my Sarah delivered him. I’ll talk with him first thing in the morning. We’ll see if he can be as generous to the Lizards as you have in mind.”

With that, Anielewicz had to be content. He stayed inside Dr. Ussishkin’s house. Sarah wouldn’t let him help with the cooking or cleaning, so he read books and studied the chessboard. Every day, a horse-drawn wagon rattled down the street, carrying supplies from Sobieski the grocer to the Lizards at their rocket battery.

For several days, nothing happened. Then one bright, sunny afternoon, a time when neither the Luftwaffe nor the Red Air Force would be insane enough to put planes in the air over Poland, the battery launched all its rockets, one after another, roar! roar! roar! into the sky.

Farmworkers came running in from the fields. Mordechai felt like hugging himself with glee as he listened to scraps of their excited conversation: “The things have gone crazy!” “Shot off their rockets, then started shooting at each other!” “Never seen fireworks like them in all my born days!”

Dr. Ussishkin came into the house a few minutes later. “You were right, it seems,” he said to Anielewicz. “This was the day Tadeusz laced all the supplies with as much ginger as he had. They do have a strong reaction to the stuff, don’t they?”

“It’s more than a drunk for them; more like a drug,” Mordechai answered. “It makes them fast and nervous-hair-trigger, I guess you might say. Somebody must have imagined he heard engines or thought he saw something in one of their instruments, and that would have been plenty to touch them off.”

“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Ussishkin said. “Not the ones who went berserk out there today, but the higher ranking ones who ordered the battery placed where it was.”

They didn’t have long to wait for their answer. At least one of the Lizards must have survived and radioed Lublin, for in side the hour several Lizard lorries from the urban center rolled through the streets of Leczna. When they left the next day, they took the rocket launchers with them. If the battery went up again, it went up somewhere else.

With the Lizards out of the neighborhood, Anielewicz had no more excuse for staying indoors all the time. Zofia Klopotowski waylaid him and dragged him into the bushes, or as near as made no difference. After his spell of celibacy, he kept up with her for a while, but then his ardor began to flag.

Just as he’d never imagined he’d have been relieved to see the Lizards erect their rocket battery in his own back yard, so to speak, he found equally surprising his halfhearted wish that they’d come back.

A disheveled soldier shouted frantically in Russian. When George Bagnall didn’t understand fast enough to suit him, he started to point his submachine gun at the grounded aviator.

By then, Bagnall had had a bellyful of frantic Russians. He’d even had a bellyful of frantic Germans, a species that did not exist in stereotype but proved quite common under the stress of combat. He got to his feet, knocked the gun barrel aside with a contemptuous swipe, and growled, “Why don’t you shove that thing up your arse-or would you rather I did it for you?”

He spoke in English, but the tone got across. So did his manner. The Red Army man stopped treating him like a servant and started treating him like an officer. The old saw about the Hun being either at your throat or at your feet seemed to apply even more to Russians than it did to Germans. If you gave in to them, they rode roughshod over you, but if you showed a little bulge, they figured you had to be the boss and started tugging at their forelocks.

Bagnall turned to Jerome Jones. “What’s this bloody goon babbling about? I have more Russian than I did when we got stuck here-not hard, that, since I had none-but I can’t make head nor tail of it when he goes on so blinking fast.”

“I’ll see if I can find out, sir,” Jones answered. The radar man had spoken a little Russian before he landed in Pskov; after several months-and no doubt a good deal of intimate practice with the fair Tatiana, Bagnall thought enviously-he was pretty fluent. He said something to the Russian soldier, who shouted and pointed to the map on the wall.

“The usual?” Bagnall asked.