They’d captured him anyhow, a few months later. Growing the beard again had been the one good thing about the prison into which they’d clapped him. He shook his head. No, there had been one other good thing about that prison-the commando raid that got him out of it. The trip to England by submarine had followed immediately.
He peered around the shelter. Amazingly, some people managed to sleep despite the chaos. The stink of fear and stale piss was the same as he’d known back in Warsaw.
Rivka said, “Maybe that was the last wave of them.”
“Alevai omayn,”Moishe answered fervently: “May it be so-amen!” The vigor of his reply made Rivka smile. Wishing didn’t make things so, worse luck, but he didn’t hear any more explosions, either nearby or off in the distance. Maybe Rivka was right.
The all-clear sounded half an hour later. Friends and neighbors woke the men and women who’d slept in spite of everything. People slowly went back above ground to head back to their homes-and to discover whether they had homes to head back to. It was about as dark on the street as it had been inside the shelter. The sky was overcast; the only light came from fires flickering here and there. Moishe had seen that in Warsaw, too.
Fire engines screamed through the streets toward the worst of the blazes. “I hope the Lizards didn’t wreck too many mains,” Moishe said. “They’ll need all the water pressure they can get.”
“I just hope our block of flats is still standing,” Rivka said. They turned the corner. “Oh, thank God, it is.” Her voice changed timbre: “Get away from there, Reuven! That’s broken glass-you could cut yourself.”
A woman lay groaning in front of the apartment building. Moishe hurried over to her. He’d been a medical student when the war started, and used what he’d learned in the Warsaw ghetto-not that all the medical training in the world did any good when people were starving to death.
“My leg, my leg,” the woman moaned. Russie was just starting to learn English, so that didn’t mean much to him. But the way she clutched at the injured part, and the way the shin bent where it had no business bending, told him everything he needed to know.
“Doctor,” he said; he’d made sure he learned that word. He pointed to himself. It wasn’t quite true, but he was the closest thing to a doctor the poor woman would see for a while, and thinking he was the genuine article might give her more confidence in him. He wanted that; he knew how to set a broken leg, but he also knew how much the process hurt.
The woman sighed, he hoped with relief. A small crowd had gathered around her and Moishe. He looked up to the people and said, “Fetch me a couple of flat boards and some rags to tie them to her leg.”
Nobody moved. Russie wondered what was wrong until Rivka said gently, “Dear, they don’t understand Yiddish.”
He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling seventeen different kinds of idiot. He tried again, this time in the clear German he’d learned in school. Every time he had to use it, irony rose up to choke him. Here, in the heart of Germany’s most important enemy, the irony was doubled.
But no one in the crowd followed German any better than Yiddish. In desperation, Moishe tried Polish. “Here, I’ll get what you need,” somebody said in the same language. Better yet, he translated Russie’s request into English. Several people hurried away. In the rubble from years of bombings, boards and rags were easy to come by.
Moishe said to the fellow who spoke Polish, “Tell her I’m going to set her leg and splint it. Tell her it will hurt.” The man spoke in English. The injured woman nodded. “Maybe you and a couple of other men should hold her while I work,” Moishe went on. “If she thrashes around, she’s liable to make things worse.”
The woman tried to thrash. Moishe didn’t blame her; he admired the way she did her best to keep gasps from turning into shrieks. He got the broken bones aligned and tied the splint tight to keep them from shifting again. When he was through, the woman whispered, “Thank you, Doctor.”
He understood that. It warmed him. When he stood up, his own knees clicked. The sky was growing light. He sighed. No point in going to bed. He had an early broadcast scheduled at the BBC Overseas Services. Yawning, he said to Rivka, “I may as well just get my script and go on in.”
“Oh, dear,” she said sympathetically, but nodded. He and his family went upstairs together. He found the manila folder with the papers inside, then realized he was wearing only a greatcoat over pyjamas. He threw on a white shirt and a pair of trousers and headed out to face the world. A stretcher party had taken away the woman with the broken leg. Moishe hoped she’d do well. He wouldn’t sleep, but he thought his wife and son might.
The building that housed the BBC Overseas Services was at 200 Oxford Street, not far west of his Soho flat and a few blocks east of Hyde Park. As he walked to work, London came to life around him. Pigeons cooed and sparrows chirped-lucky creatures, they knew nothing of war, save that it made the air sharp with smoke. Bicycles, men and women afoot, and horse-drawn wagons and even buggies taken out of sheds where they’d moldered for a generation clogged the streets. Petrol was in as desperately short supply here as in Warsaw or Lodz; only fire engines had all they needed.
Nathan Jacobi approached the building that housed the studios from the other direction at the same time as Moishe reached it. The two men waved to each other. Moishe broadcast in Yiddish and German; Jacobi translated his words into English. His Yiddish was polished and elegant. If his English came close to it-Russie wasn’t qualified to judge, but doubted the BBC would have hired him if it didn’t-he made a very effective newsreader indeed.
Now he surveyed Moishe with a sympathetic eye. “Bad for you last night? You look done in.”
“Iam done in,” Russie said. “I hope the tea in there has a jolt to it this morning. If it doesn’t, I’m apt to fall asleep in front of the microphone.”
“It’ll be hot, anyhow,” Jacobi said, which was true. “As for the jolt, you never can tell from day to day, not with these messes of leaves and roots and rose hips we get instead of the proper stuff.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of vintage Darjeeling-Bloody war.”
The last two words were in English. Moishe knew what they meant, but took the adjective literally. “Bloody war is right. And the worst of it is, we can’t make the Lizards out to be as black as we would otherwise, because they haven’t done much worse to us than we were already doing to ourselves.”
“You would know best about that. Anyone who was in Poland-” Jacobi shook his head. “But still, if we hadn’t been geared up to a fever pitch to fight each other, could we have put up such a battle against the Lizards?”
“I suppose not, but it’s no credit to us that we were,” Russie answered. “It’s not as if we knew they were coming. We’d have gone right on slaughtering ourselves if they hadn’t come, too. Still, I admit that’s neither here nor there at the moment. They are here, and we have to make life miserable for them.” He waved the pages of his script, then fished out his pass and showed it to the guard at the door. The guard nodded. Russie and Jacobi went in to get ready to broadcast.
3
“Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have an emergency call for you from the206th Emperor Yower,” Atvar’s adjutant said. In the vision screen, the younger male looked as worried as he sounded.
“Very well, Pshing, patch it through,” Atvar said, setting aside for a moment the war against the Big Uglies for his private conflict with the shiplord Straha. After Straha failed to topple him from command of the conquest fleet, the shiplord should have known revenge was on its way. Atvar wondered what sort of lying nonsense Straha would come up with to justify himself.