“My God! David Nussboym!” he exclaimed. “I might have known you’d turn up again.” His mouth hardened. “Bad pennies usually do.”
“You shipped me off to the gulags to die, you and your collaborationist pals,” Nussboym said. “I wouldn’t be a tukhus-lekher for the Nazis, so you got rid of me.”
“You were going to sell us out to the Lizards,” Anielewicz said. “They might have won the war if you had. Where would we be then?”
They stared at each other with a loathing apparently undimmed since the fighting ended. Nussboym said, “The camps chew you up and spit you out dead. Russians, Jews, Lizards… it doesn’t matter. Some people get by, though. The first denunciation I signed, I was sick for a week afterwards. The second left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But do you know what? After a while, you don’t care. If you get the better rations; if you get the other bastard’s job; if, after a while, you get out of the camp-you don’t care any more.”
“I believe you don’t,” Mordechai said, looking at him as he might have looked at a cockroach in his salad.
Nussboym looked back steadily, without showing he was insulted, with a small, superior smile, as if to say, You haven’t been where I have. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And that was true. Anielewicz thanked God it was true. But he still thought that, even in the gulag, he would have found some way to fight back. Some people must have managed it.
He shrugged. It didn’t really matter. “So what do you want?” he asked harshly.
“I want you to know”-by which Nussboym meant his Russian bosses wanted Anielewicz to know-“the Germans were the ones who blew up the ships from the Lizards’ colonization fleet.”
“You brought me all the way over here to tell me that?” Mordechai didn’t laugh at him, but that took an effort. “You sneaked over the border to tell me that?” He was sure Nussboym hadn’t crossed officially. Had Nussboym done so, they wouldn’t have met in Rozenzweig’s bakery. “Why would it matter to me, even if it’s true?”
“Oh, it’s true.” David Nussboym sounded very sure. Of course, his job was to sound sure. He would be nothing but a recording, mouthing the words his bosses-NKVD men, probably-had impressed on him.
“I have contacts with the Nazis, too,” Anielewicz said.
“Of course you do.” Now heat came into Nussboym’s voice-he was speaking for himself here, not for his bosses. “Why do you think I couldn’t stomach working with you twenty years ago?”
“So you work for Molotov, who got into bed with Hitler and blew out the light-on Poland,” Mordechai said, and had the dubious pleasure of watching Nussboym’s sallow features flush. He went on, “The Nazis say Russia did it.”
“And what would you expect?” Nussboym returned. “But we have the evidence. I could give it to you-”
“Why would you?” Anielewicz asked. “If you’ve got it, give it to the Lizards.”
Nussboym coughed a couple of times. “For some reason, the Lizards don’t always trust things they get straight from us.”
“Because you lie all the damned time, just like the Nazis?” Anielewicz suggested. David Nussboym did not dignify that with a reply; Mordechai hadn’t really expected that he would. The question he’d asked was a serious one, though, and Nussboym hadn’t answered it, either. That meant Anielewicz had to do some thinking on his own. “So you want the Lizards to get this from us, do you?”
“They would be likelier to believe you than us, yes,” Nussboym said.
“Well, what if they do?” Anielewicz knew he was thinking out loud; if his old rival didn’t like it, too bad. “That might embroil them against the Reich — probably would, as a matter of fact. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “And if they did go at it, the Nazis would do their best to wipe Poland off the face of the Earth. I thought Molotov liked having a buffer between him and the swastika.”
“I have not spoken with him about that,” Nussboym said.
Did that mean he had spoken with Molotov about other things? How important a cog in the machine had he become? How important a cog did he want Anielewicz to think he’d become? How much of a difference was there between those last two?
Those were interesting questions. They were also beside the point. Anielewicz had no trouble seeing what the point was: “You don’t care what the Reich does to Poland, because you want to make the Lizards jump on the Nazis with both feet. If they do, the Reich won’t be strong enough to worry you any more.”
He watched Nussboym closely. The skinny little man hadn’t given away much when Anielewicz knew him before. He gave away nothing whatever now; he might have been carved from stone. But his very immobility was an answer of sorts.
Nodding, Mordechai said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do your own dirty work on this one.”
Nussboym raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t believe the Nazis did it?”
Anielewicz shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I do believe it. Even with Hitler dead, they’re crazier than your bosses are. What I don’t believe is that you’ve got any evidence to prove they did it. If the Lizards haven’t been able to come up with any, how are you supposed to?”
“The Lizards are very good with science and machines and instruments,” Nussboym answered. “When it comes to people-no. We do that better.”
He was probably right. The Lizards had improved with people as time passed, but they weren’t good. They’d probably never be good. They weren’t people, after all. Even so… “You’ll have to do your own dirty work,” Anielewicz repeated. Nussboym studied him in turn, then got up and left the bakery without another word.
There were times when Straha wondered whether the Tosevites who lived in the not-empire called the United States and who, for a reason he’d never grasped, styled themselves Americans had any more sense when it came to larger matters. Reporters were a prime example. These days, his telephone rang constantly.
“Straha here,” the ex-shiplord would answer in his own language. He had, in fact, learned a fair amount of English. He used the language of Home as a testing gauge. His working assumption was that no one ignorant of it would be able to tell him anything worth hearing.
Some Big Uglies, hearing the Race’s hisses and pops, would hang up. That suited him fine. Some would try to go on in English. When they did, he would hang up. That also suited him fine.
But, even when reporters did know and used the language of the Race, they used it in a Tosevite fashion and for Tosevite purposes. “I greet you, Shiplord,” one of them said after Straha had announced himself. “I am Calvin Herter. I write for the New York Times. I would like to ask you a few questions, if I may.”
“Go ahead,” Straha said. Herter spoke his language fairly well-not so well as a real expert like Major Yeager, but well enough. “Ask. I will answer as best I can.” It would pass the time.
He regretted saying that a moment later, for the Big Ugly asked the same question all the others had: “Which not-empire do you think attacked the colonization fleet, and why?”
Having answered, How should I know, when I am not a Tosevite? any number of times already, Straha felt mischief stir in him. Had his character not had that streak, he wouldn’t have tried to overthrow Atvar and he likely wouldn’t have fled from the conquest fleet to the Tosevites. And I would be better off today, he thought, but not till after he had answered, “Why, this one, of course-the United States.”
“Really?” Herter said. “Why do you think that?”
“It stands to reason,” Straha answered. “Your not-empire could hurt the Race more easily than either the Reich or the Soviet Union, because fewer folk would expect you to try it.”