Upsetting the Balance

He was right about that. Foolish colors aside, some of the pictures hardly looked like anything human. But Liu Han had talked with women who’d miscarried, and remembered them speaking of the oddly shaped lumps of flesh they’d expelled. She was willing to believe Ttomalss wasn’t lying to her.

“Will you take more pictures now, superior sir, or may I dress?” she asked.

“Not of the hatchling, but of you, that we may study how your body changes as the hatchling grows inside.” Ttomalss took out what had to be a camera, although Liu Han had never seen one so small in a human’s hands. He walked all around her, photographing from front, back, and sides. Then he said, “Now you dress. I see you again soon.” He skittered out the door. He did remember to close it after himself, for which Liu Han was duly grateful.

Sighing, she got back into her clothes. Other cameras hidden in the hut probably recorded that. She’d given up worrying about it. The little scaly devils had had her under close surveillance ever since she fell into their clutches, and that had grown closer yet after Bobby Fiore somehow managed to get out of the camp.

Yet no matter how tight it was, there were ways around it. Ttomalss had told her something worth knowing. She took a couple of silver Mex dollars from a hiding place among her pots and pans, then left the hut herself.

A lot of people gave her a wide berth as she walked slowly down the dirt road that ran in front of the house-anyone who was so obviously involved with the little devils was not to be trusted. But children didn’t skip alongside her chanting “Running dog!” as they once had.

The market square brawled with life, merchants selling pork and chicken and ducks and puppies and vegetables of every sort, jade and silk and cotton, baskets and pots and braziers-anything they could raise or find or trade for (or steal) in the refugee camp. Women in clinging dresses with slits pasted alluring smiles on their faces and offered to show men their bodies, a euphemism for prostituting themselves. They didn’t lack for customers. Liu Han pitied them; she knew what they had to endure.

She dodged a mountebank juggling knives and bowls as he strolled through the market. Her sidestep almost made her upset the ivory tiles of a mahjong player who made his living by matching wits against all comers (and maybe by unduly clever fingers as well). “Watch where you’re going, stupid woman!” he shouted at her.

Bobby Fiore had used a one-fingered gesture to answer shouts like that; he knew what it meant and the Chinese didn’t, so he could vent his feelings without getting them angry. Liu Han just kept walking. She paused in front of a cart full of straw hats. As she tried one on, she said to the man behind the cart, “Did you know the little scaly devils have a camera that can see how hot things are? Isn’t that amazing?”

“If I cared, it would be,” the hat seller answered in a dialect she could hardly follow; the camp held people from all over China. “Do you want to buy that hat or not?”

After haggling for a while, she walked on. She talked about the camera at several other stalls and carts, and bought somebok choi and a small brass pot. She’d wandered through half the market before she came to a poultry seller whose stand was next to that of a pig butcher. She told him about the camera, too, while she bought some chicken feet and some necks. “Isn’t that amazing?” she finished.

“A camera that can see how hot things are? Thatis amazing,” he said. “You think I give you that much for thirty cents Mex? Woman, you are crazy!”

She ended up paying forty-five cents Mex for the chicken parts, which was too much, but she kept her temper about it. With the poultry seller, “Isn’t it amazing?” was a code phrase that meant she had information to pass, and his “Thatis amazing” said he’d understood. Somehow-she had no idea how, and didn’t want to know-he’d get word to the Chinese Communists outside the camp.

She knew the little scaly devils watched her closely, not only because they were interested in her pregnancy but also because of what Bobby Fiore had done. But if she spread gossip all through the marketplace, how could they figure out which person who heard it was the one who mattered? She just seemed like a foolish woman chattering at random.

What she seemed and what she was were not one and the same. As best she could, she was getting her revenge.

Having a rifle in his hands again made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was doing something worth doing once more. The months he’d spent in the little Polish town of Leczna had been the most pleasant he’d passed since the Germans invaded in 1939-especially the romance he’d had with Zofia Klopotowski, who lived next door to the people who had taken him in-but that memory made him feel guilty, not glad. With a war raging all around, what right did he have to take pleasure in anything?