Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

He raised an eyebrow. “Not bad at all. Better than most of what I’ve had lately, as a matter of fact.” To prove he meant it, he quickly drained the glass. Then he said, “So you’re still in touch with the underground?”

“Yes,” Rivka answered. “If it weren’t for them, the Order Service men would have taken Reuven and me along with Moishe by now.”

“Can you let me know how to get hold of them? If nothing else, I’ll need somewhere to sleep while I’m looking things over.” Can’t very well stay in a flat with my cousin’s wife, not when he’s in gaol.

“It’s not as hard as you might think.” Amusement shone in Rivka’s eyes. “Go across the hall to flat number twenty-four. Knock on the door-twice, then once.”

He’d used a password to identify himself to her. Now he had to trot out a secret knock? He’d always thought that sort of thing more the province of sensational novels than sober fact, but he was learning better in a hurry. If you wanted to keep going when every man’s hand was raised against you, you had to figure out ways to keep from being noticed.

He went across the hall, found the battered door with a tarnished brass 24 on it. Knock, knock… knock. He waited. The door opened. The big man standing in it said, “Nu?”

“Nu, the lady across the way sent me here,” Goldfarb replied. With his shaggy beard and soldier’s cap over civilian clothes, the big man looked like a bandit chief. He also looked like someone it would be wiser not to annoy. Goldfarb was glad he’d had the right code to introduce himself to Rivka Russie; without it, this fellow likely would have descended on him like a falling building. He’d been right to have his wind up.

But now the man grinned (showing bad teeth) and stuck out his hand. “So you’re Russie’s English cousin, are you? You can call me Leon.”

“Right.” The fellow had a blacksmith’s grip, Goldfarb discovered. He also noted that while the local Jew had said he could call him Leon, that didn’t mean it was his name: another precaution out of the books, and probably as necessary as the rest.

“Don’t stand there-come in,” Leon said. “Never can tell who’s liable to be looking down the hall.” He closed the door behind Goldfarb. “Take your pack off if you like-it looks heavy.”

“Thanks” Goldfarb did. The apartment was, if anything, barer than Rivka’s. Only mattresses on the floor said people lived, or at least slept, here. He said, “Moishe’s still in Lodz?” Leon, he figured, would know more surely than Rivka had.

The big man nodded. “He’s in Prison One on Franciszkanska Street-the Nazis called it Franzstrasse, just like they called Lodz Litzmannstadt. We call it Franzstrasse ourselves, sometimes, because there’s a big sign with that name right across from the prison that nobody’s ever bothered taking down.”

“Prison One, eh?” Goldfarb said. “How many are there?”

“Plenty,” Leon answered. “Along with being good at killing people, the Nazis were good at putting them away, too.”

“Do you know where in the prison he’s locked up?” Goldfarb asked. “For that matter, do you have plans for the building?”

“Who do you think turned it into a prison? The Germans should have dirtied their hands doing the work themselves?” Leon said. “Oh yes, we have the plans. And we know where your cousin is, too. The Lizards don’t let Jews anywhere near him-they’re learning-but they haven’t learned yet that some Poles are on our side, too.”

“This whole business must make you meshuggeh sometimes,” Goldfarb said. “The Lizards are better to Jews here than the Nazis ever were, but they’re bad for everybody else, so sometimes you find yourself working with the Germans. And the Poles don’t like Jews, either, but I guess they don’t like the Lizards any better.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” Leon agreed. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do much in the way of figuring out. You wanted plans, I’ll show you plans.” He went over to a cabinet, yanked out a roll of paper, and brought it over to Goldfarb. When Goldfarb opened it, he saw they weren’t just plans but Germanically meticulous engineering drawings. Leon pointed. “They have machine guns on the roof, here and here. We’ll have to do something about those.”

“Yes,” Goldfarb said in a small voice. “A machine gun we don’t do something about would put rather a hole in our scheme, wouldn’t it?”

That might have been Leon’s first taste of British understatement; he grunted laughter. “Put a hole in us, you mean-probably lots of holes. But let’s say we can take out the machine guns-”

“Because if we don’t, we can’t go on anyhow,” Goldfarb broke in.

“Exactly,” Leon said. “So let’s say we do. You’re supposed to be bringing some presents with you. Have you got them?”

By way of answer, Goldfarb opened the battered Polish Army pack that had come from an exile in England. No one had paid any attention to it since he’d landed here. Close to half the people on the road wore one like it, and a lot of those who didn’t had corresponding German or Russian gear instead.

Leon looked inside. His long exhalation puffed out his mustache. “They don’t look like much,” he said dubiously.

“They’re bloody hell to load, but they’ll do the job if I can’t get close enough to use them. I’ve practiced with them. Believe me, they will,” Goldfarb said.

“And what’s all this mess?” Leon pointed into the pack, which held, along with the bombs he’d already disparaged, a motley assortment of metal tubes, levers, and a spring that might have come from the suspension of a lorry.

“The mechanism for shooting them,” Goldfarb answered. “They built one in sections especially for me, lucky chap that I am, so the business end wouldn’t keep sticking out the top of my pack. The whole bloody thing together is called a PIAT-Projector, Infantry, Antitank.” The last four words were necessarily in English.

Leon, luckily, understood “tank.” He shook his head anyhow. “No tanks”-he said panzers-“at the jail.”

“There’d better not be,” Goldfarb said. “But a bomb that will make a hole in the side of a tank will make a big hole in the side of a building.”

He got the impression that that was the first thing he’d said which impressed Leon, even a little. The man from the underground (Goldfarb suppressed a picture of Leon coming up from a London tube station) plucked at his beard. “Maybe you have something there. How far will it shoot?”

“A couple of hundred yards-uh, meters.” Watch that, Goldfarb told himself. You can give yourself away if you don’t think metric.

“Should be far enough.” Leon’s sardonic smile said he’d caught the slip, too. “Do you want to look over the prison before you try cracking it?”

“I’d better. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing before I do it, right?”

“It helps, yes.” Leon studied him. “You’ve seen some action, I think.”

“In the air, yes. Not on the ground, not like you mean. On the ground, I’ve just been strafed like everybody else.”

“Yes, I know about that, too,” Leon said. “But even in the air-that’ll do. You won’t panic when things start going crazy. Why don’t you leave your hardware here? We don’t want to bring it around to the prison till it’s time to use it.”

“Makes sense to me, as long as you’re sure nobody’s going to steal it while we’re gone.”

Leon showed teeth in something that was not a smile. “Anyone who steals from us… he’s very sorry and he never, ever does it again. This happens once or twice and people start to get the idea.”