Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“This I know,” Anielewicz answered. “But better our devils than the devils on the other side.”

“No, that’s not the lesson.” Moishe stubbornly shook his head. “The lesson is, better that we not become devils ourselves.”

Anielewicz’s scowl was fearsome. Russie felt the fear. If the leader of the Jewish fighting forces chose to ignore him, what could he do about it? But before Anielewicz replied, he glanced at the fighters who accompanied him. A couple of them were nodding at Russie’s words. That seemed only to make Anielewicz angrier.

“All right!” He spat on the filthy cobblestones. “We’ll keep the stinking Germans alive, then, if you love them so well.”

“Love them? You must be out of your mind. But I hope I still know what justice is. And,” Russie added, “I hope I still know that what mankind thinks of me is more important than any Lizard’s good opinion-and that includes Zolraag’s.” His own vehemence surprised him, the more so because he got on well with the aliens’ governor.

Anielewicz also surprised him. “There for once we agree, Reb Moishe. There, in fact, we might even find common ground with General Bor-Komorowski, should the need ever arise.”

“Really?” Russie was not sure he wanted to find common ground with Bor-Komorowski on anything save the desirability of getting rid of the Germans. Bor-Komorowski was a good Polish patriot, which made him only a little less fascist-or perhaps just less efficiently fascist-than Heinrich Himmler. Still…” That may be useful, one of these days.”

Moscow! The winter before, German troops had seen the spires of the Kremlin from the Russian capital’s suburbs. None came any closer than that, and then they’d been thrown back in bitter fighting. Yet now Heinrich walked freely through the streets the Wehrmacht had been unable to reach.

Beside him, Georg Schultz looked this way and that, as he did every day going to and from the Kremlin. Schultz said, “I still have trouble believing how much of Moscow is still in one piece. We bombed it, the Lizards bombed it-and here it is still.”

“It’s a big city,” Jager answered. “It can take a lot of punishment and not show much. Big cities are hard to destroy, unless…” His voice trailed away. He’d seen pictures of Berlin now, and wished he hadn’t.

He and Schultz both wore ill-fitting civilian suits of cheap fabric and outdated cut. He would have been ashamed to put his on back in Germany. Here, though, it helped him fit in, for which he was just as glad. He would not have been safe in his tankman’s uniform. In the Ukraine, the panzer troops had sometimes been welcomed as liberators. Germans remained enemies in Moscow, even after the coming of the Lizards.

Schultz pointed to a poster on a brick wall. “Can you read what that says, sir?”

Jager’s Russian was better than it had been, but still far from good. Letter by unfamiliar Cyrillic letter, he sounded out the poster’s message. “Smert means ‘death,’ ” he said. “I don’t know what the second word is. Something to do with us.”

“Something nasty,” Schultz agreed. The poster showed a pigtailed little girl lying dead on the floor, a doll beside her. A footprint in blood led the eye to a departing soldier’s marching boot, on the heel of which was a German swastika.

Before he got to Moscow, Jager had been certain down to the very core of him that the Wehrmacht would have beaten the Red Army for good this year had the Lizards not intervened. Now he wondered, though he’d never said so out loud. It wasn’t just that Russia was so much bigger than Germany; he had known that all along. But despite the stubbornness of Soviet resistance, he hadn’t believed the Russian people were as firmly behind Stalin as the Germans were behind Hitler. Now he did, and it was a disturbing thought.

His shoes scuffed on the paving of Red Square. The Germans had planned a victory parade there, timed for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It hadn’t happened. Russian sentries still paced back and forth in front of the Kremlin wall in their own stiff version of the goose step.

Jager and Schultz came up to the gateway by which they entered the Kremlin compound. Jager nodded to the guards there, a group of men he saw every third day. None of the Russians nodded back. They never did. Their leader, who wore a sergeant’s three red triangles on his collar patches, held out his hand. “Papers,” he said in Russian.

As usual, he carefully examined the documents the Germans produced, compared photographs to faces. Jager was certain that if he ever forgot his papers, the sergeant would not pass him through even though he recognized him. Breaking routine was not something the Russians did well.

Today, though, he and Schultz had everything in order. The sergeant started to stand aside to pass them through when someone else came trotting across Red Square toward the checkpoint. Jager turned to see who was in such a tearing hurry. As he did, his mouth fell open. “I’ll be Goddamned,” Schultz said, which about summed things up.

Unlike the tankmen, the fellow approaching wore a German uniform-an SS uniform at that-and wore it with panache. His every aggressive stride seemed to warn that anyone who gave him trouble would have a thin time of it. He was tall and broadshouldered and would have been handsome had a scar not seamed his left cheek. Actually, he was handsome anyhow, in a piratical sort of way.

Instead of bristling at him as Jager had expected, the Russian guards grinned and nudged each other. The sergeant said, “Papers?”

The SS man drew himself up to his full impressive height. “Stuff your papers, and stuff you, too!” he said in a deep, booming voice. His German held an Austrian accent. The sentries practically hugged themselves with glee. The sergeant came to an attention stiffer than he might have granted Marshal Zhukov, waved the big bruiser into the Kremlin.

“Why didn’t we ever try that?” Schultz said admiringly.

“I don’t have the balls for it,” Jager admitted.

The SS man spun toward them. For all his size, he was light on his feet “So you are Germans after all,” he said. “I thought you might be, but what with those rag-pickers’ getups, I couldn’t be sure till you opened your mouths. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“Major Heinrich Jager, Sixteenth Panzer,” Jager answered crisply. “Here is my tank gunner, Sergeant Georg Schultz. And now, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, I might ask you the same question.” The SS rank was the equivalent of captain; however much brass this fellow had, Jager was his superior.

The SS man’s brace was almost as rigid-and as full of parody-as the Soviet sergeant’s had been. Clicking his heels, he declared in falsetto, “SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Skorzeny begs leave to report his presence, sir!”

Jager snorted. The scar on Skorzeny’s cheek partly froze the left corner of his mouth and turned his smile into something twisted. Jager asked him, “What are you doing here, especially in that suit? You’re lucky the Ivans haven’t decided to take your nose and ears.”

“Nonsense,” Skorzeny said. If he ever had doubts about anything, he didn’t show them in public. “Russians only know how to be one of two things: masters or slaves, if you convince them you’re the master, what does that leave them?”

“If,” Georg Schultz murmured, too softly for the SS man to hear.

“You still haven’t said why you’re here,” Jager persisted.

“I am acting under orders from-” Skorzeny hesitated; Jager guessed he’d been about to say from Berlin. He resumed: “from my superiors. Can you say the same?” He gave Jager’s Russian suit a fishy stare.