Tilting the Balance

“Did you hear what he said? ” someone going the other way exclaimed. “They used an atomic bomb to blow up the prison. ” Russie and Goldfarb looked at each other, shook their heads, and started to laugh.

Less than http://www.bookswebbuys.ru an hour had gone by since the first blast (piat, Goldfarb called it, which sounded more Polish than either Yiddish or English) hit the prison, but the streets heading out of the ghetto already had checkpoints on them; the Lizards and their human henchmen, Order Service thugs and Polish bullies, had wasted not a moment. Some people took one look and decided they didn’t need to leave after all; others queued up to show they had the right.

Moishe started to get into a line that led up to a couple of Poles. Goldfarb pulled him out of it. “No, no, ” he said loudly. “Come on over here. This line is much shorter. ”

Of course that line was much shorter: at its head stood three Lizards. Nobody in his right mind wanted to trust his fate to them when human beings were around. Humans might be thugs, but at least they were your own kind of thugs. But Moishe couldn’t drag Goldfarb back from the line he’d chosen without making a scene, and he didn’t dare do that. Convinced his cousin was leading them to their doom, he took his place in the queue that led up to the aliens.

Sure enough, the wait to get to them was short. A Lizard turned one eye turret toward Russie, the other toward Goldfarb. “You is? ” he asked in bad Yiddish. He repeated the question in worse Polish.

“Adam Zilverstajn, ” Goldfarb answered at once, using the name on his new, forged identity card.

“Felix Kirshbojm, ” Moishe said more hesitantly.

He waited for alarms to go off, for guns to be pointed and maybe fired. But the Lizard just stuck out his hand and said, “Card. ” Again, Goldfarb promptly surrendered his. Again, Moishe paused almost long enough to draw suspicion to himself before he handed his over.

The Lizard fed Goldfarb’s card into a slot on a square metal box that sat on a table next to him. The box gulped it down as if alive. While still collaborating with the Lizards, Russie had seen enough of their astonishing gadgetry to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t so. It spat out Goldfarb’s phony card. The Lizard looked at a display-like a miniature movie screen, Moishe thought-it held in its hand. “You go on business? You be back-seven days? ” it said as it returned the card to Moishe’s cousin.

“That’s right, ” Goldfarb agreed.

Then Russie’s card went into the machine. He almost broke and ran as the Lizard turned an eye turret toward the handheld display; he was sure words like traitor and escapee showed up there. But evidently they didn’t, for the Lizard waited till the card came out again, then said, “You go business seven days, too? ”

“Yes, ” Moishe said, remembering not to tack “superior sir” onto the end.

“You both go seven days, ” the Lizard said. “You go-how to say-together? ”

“Yes, ” Moishe repeated. He wondered if the Lizards were looking for people traveling in groups. But the guard just handed him his card and got ready to receive the next set of people passing through the checkpoint.

David Goldfarb indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew! ” as soon as they’d walked a couple of hundred meters past the guard and out of the ghetto.

Whew! did not seem enough to Moishe. “Gottenyu, ” he said, and then added, “I thought you’d killed us both when you pulled me into that line with the Lizards. ”

“Oh, that. ” Now Goldfarb looked jaunty. “No, I knew just what I was doing there. ”

“You could have fooled me! ”

“No, seriously-look at it. If we go through a line with Poles or those Order Service would-be Nazi shmucks, they’re liable to look at the pictures on the cards-and if they do that, we re dead. No matter what the machine tells them, they’ll see we don’treally look like the pictures on the cards or not enough, anyhow. But the Lizards can’t tell you from Hedy Lamarr without the machine to do it for them, That’s why I wanted them to check us. ”

Moishe thought it over and found himself nodding. “Cousin, ” he said admiringly “you’ve got chutzpah. ”

“Never get anywhere with the girls if I didn’t, ” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You ought to see a chap I served with named Jerome Jones-he had crust enough to make a pie, he did. ”

Watching the way his cousin smiled put Moishe in mind of his mother. But Goldfarb also had an alienness about him that went deeper than the curious expressions peppering his Yiddish. He wasn’t automatically wary the way Polish Jews were. “So that’s what growing up really free does for you, ” Moishe murmured.

“What did you say? ”

“Never mind. Where will we pick up Rivka and Reuven? ” Russie wondered if Goldfarb had lied to him about them just to get him moving. The man had the gall for it, no two ways about that.

But Goldfarb just asked, “Are you sure you want to find out? Suppose the Lizards catch you but kill me? The less you know, the less they can squeeze out of you. ”

“They aren’t as good at squeezing as you’d think, ” Moishe said. “They didn’t come close to getting everything I know out of me. ” Nevertheless, he didn’t push the question. Mordechai Anielewicz’s Jewish fighters had had that don’t-ask-if-you-don’t-need-to-know rule, too. Which meant… “You were-you are-a soldier. ”

Goldfarb nodded. “RAF, actually, but yes. And you were going to be a doctor, before the Nazis came. My father used to beat me over the head with that; all I ever wanted to do was fiddle around with the insides of radios and such. Made me a valuable piece of goods when the war came, though: they put me into radar training straightaway, and I kept an eye on the Jerries all through the Blitz. ”

Russie didn’t follow all of that; a couple of key words were in English, of which he knew next to nothing. He was content just to walk along for a while, savoring his freedom and daring to think about staying free a while longer. If his accomplished cousin was from the British military, maybe a submarine like the one Anielewicz had sometimes summoned lay waiting off the Polish coast. He started to ask about that, then changed his mind. If he didn’t need to know, what was the point in trying to learn?

Goldfarb hurried up Krawiecka Street. He looked nervously to the right and left as he did. Finally, he said, “The sooner we’re out of Lodz, the better I’ll like it. Outside the ghetto, a Jew really sticks out around here, doesn’t he? ”