Before Bertha could answer, the telephone rang. She got up and went into the parlor to answer it. After a moment, she called, “It’s for you, Mordechai.”
“I’m coming. At least it waited till I was almost finished with supper.” Anielewicz equated telephone calls with trouble. A lot of years had burned that equation into his mind. He took the handset from his wife, who returned to the table. “Hello?”
“Anielewicz? This is Yitzkhak, up in Glowno. We’re going to take the sheep to market tomorrow. Do you want a last look at them before they go?”
“No, you can send them without me,” Anielewicz said, to confuse anyone who might be listening despite the Germanand Lizard-made gadgets he’d had installed on his phone line to defeat would-be snoops. He operated on the assumption that, whatever the Reich and the Race could manufacture, they could also find a way to defeat. If he’d admitted wanting to go up to Glowno, Yitzkhak would have known something was badly wrong. To make things sound as normal as they could, he went on, “How’s your cousin doing?”
“Pretty well, thanks,” Yitzkhak answered. “She’s up on crutches now, and the cast will come off her leg in another month. Then it’s just a matter of getting the strength back into the muscles. It’ll take time, but she’ll do it.”
“Of course she will,” Mordechai said. “That’s good news.” He’d seen enough wounded men during the fighting to know it might not be so easy as Yitzkhak was saying, but only time would tell. After stepping in front of a bus, the other Jew’s cousin was lucky to have got off with only a broken leg.
After a little inconsequential talk, Yitzkhak got off the line. Anielewicz went back to the supper table. When he sat down, his wife raised a questioning eyebrow.
“That miserable flock of sheep,” he said; he couldn’t be quite sure who was listening to what he said inside his flat, either. “Yitzkhak wanted to know if I needed to check them before he got rid of them. I told him to go ahead; I’m sick of the foolish things.”
His children stared; they knew he owned no sheep and had no interest in owning any. He held up a hand to keep them from asking questions. They understood the signal, and refrained. Bertha knew what he was talking about. “Well, we have some leftovers here,” she remarked, by which Mordechai knew he’d be taking them with him for lunch when he went up to Glowno.
Sure enough, his wife had a sack waiting for him when he headed off early the next morning. He took it with a word of thanks, kissed her, and climbed aboard his bicycle. He could have ridden the bus and arrived faster and fresher, but he and his colleagues had been talking over their plans ever since the Polish nationalists tried to abscond with the explosive-metal bomb. The Jews hadn’t intended to sneak it out of Glowno in the dead of night. Anielewicz grinned-very much the opposite.
And he always liked to measure himself by exercise. His legs began to ache dully before he’d got very far outside of Lodz, but he settled into a kilometer-eating rhythm and the pain got no worse. After a while, it even receded. That marked the day as a good one. He hoped it would prove an omen.
He was not the only Jew on the road with a rifle or a submachine gun on his back. That would have been true any day, but was more true today than most. And motorcars and even lorries full of armed Jews rolled past him. Some of the men in those cars and lorries, recognizing him as one of their own, waved when they went by. Every now and then, he would take a hand off the handlebars and wave back.
By the time he got to Glowno, Jewish fighters filled the town. Signs in the windows of shops owned by Jews welcomed the militia to town and invited the fighters to come in and spend money on food or drink or soap or clothes or any of two dozen other different things.
The Poles on the streets of Glowno eyed the armed Jews with expressions ranging from resignation to alarm. A generation earlier, such a gathering of Jews would have been impossible, and would have been broken up with bloodshed if attempted. Now… Now, here in Glowno, the Jews would have won any fighting that started.
A crackle of rifle fire began outside of town. Anielewicz cocked his head to make sure just where it was coming from, then relaxed. The fighters had a marksmanship contest planned, and that was what he heard. A few minutes later, on the other side of Glowno, a machine gun came to deadly, raucous life. Mordechai knew the fellow handling it. He’d fought against the Germans in a machine-gun company in 1939, and had specialized in the weapons ever since. Thanks to the Lizards, the Jews had plenty of machine guns of German, Polish, and Soviet manufacture (along with a few oddities such as Austro-Hungarian Schwarzloses left over from the First World War), but not all the fighters knew how to keep them in top working order.
Loud blasts announced grenades tearing up a meadow. The man giving lessons in how to throw them was a rarity in football-mad Poland: he’d spent his childhood in the United States, and had played a lot of baseball there. Anielewicz knew next to nothing about baseball, but did understand it involved plenty of throwing.
His own role at the gathering was more theoretical. He closeted himself with leaders of Jewish militias from all around Lizardoccupied Poland and gave them the best advice he could on how to get along with the Race. “Never let the Lizards forget how badly the Poles outnumber us,” he said. “The more reason they think we have to be loyal to them, the likelier they are to give us all the toys we want and to back us if we do have trouble with the goyim.”
His listeners nodded sagely. A lot of them had used the same tactics over the years. Like Anielewicz, a lot of them had also intrigued with the Reich or the Soviet Union to keep the Lizards from gaining too dominant a position. The trick in playing that game was so simple, Mordechai didn’t bother mentioning it: don’t get caught.
He was drinking a stein of beer in the tavern where he’d overheard the Polish nationalists plotting to hijack the bomb when Yitzkhak found him. Yitzkhak looked like a clerk: he was short and slight and had a pinched-up face that didn’t approve of anything. Like Mordechai, he was from Warsaw. He’d fought like a madman against the Nazis, and later against the Lizards.
When he spoke, he sounded faintly accusing: “On the telephone, you said you weren’t coming up.”
“I changed my mind-is this against the law?” Anielewicz returned. Even here, they were careful of what they said and how they said it.
“Well, you can’t see your sheep,” Yitzkhak said petulantly. “The mob here, they all got sold, and I don’t know where the devil they’ve gone now. I don’t much care, either, if you want to know the truth.”
The bomb had gone, then. Mordechai let out a sigh of relief and ordered another mug of beer. The hubbub the Jewish fighters had raised in and around Glowno had let Yitzkhak and his friends get the weapon out of town with no one the wiser. Anielewicz had counted on that-and had counted on the fighters to bail Yitzkhak and his friends out of trouble if they got into any.
Aloud, he said, “Well, let me buy you a shot for all the trouble you’ve gone through on account of those damn sheep.”
“A shot doesn’t begin to do it,” Yitzkhak said, sour still, but that didn’t mean he refused the vodka. Anielewicz bought himself another beer, too. All things considered, he was of the opinion he’d earned it.
After he’d drunk it, he went out to see if anyone had stolen his bicycle. Unlike the bomb, it was still there. As he started to climb aboard it for the ride back to Lodz, he saw a couple of Lizards coming along the street. Judging what they were thinking wasn’t easy, but to him they looked horrified at seeing so many humans swaggering around with guns.
That-and the steins of beer he’d drunk-made him smile. If they weren’t used to the idea that people weren’t their slaves by now, too bad. With more than a little bravado, he waved to them, calling, “I greet you, males of the Race.”