Upsetting the Balance (56 page)

The shopkeeper must have noticed the sour stare he sent the franc. “Vichy says we have to use them,” the fellow said with a shrug. “So do the Lizards.”

Jäger just shrugged and stuck the coin in his pocket. The less he had to put his halting French on display in Albi, the happier he was. He and Otto Skorzeny had already been here longer than they wanted. Other raids Skorzeny planned had run like clockwork. Here, the clock was slow.

He rolled up his twine and walked out of the shop onto the Avenue du Maréchal Foch. As always when he looked about in Albi, a line from some English poet sprang to mind. “A rose-red city half as old as time.” Pink and red brickwork predominated hereabouts, though brown and muddy yellow added to the blend. If one—or, here, two—had to rusticate, there were worse places than Albi in which to do it.

The aluminum coin from Marshal Pétain’s mint went when he bought a kilo of
haricots verts.
He carried the beans back to the flat he and Skorzeny were sharing.

He hoped his comrade in arms hadn’t brought home another tart. When Skorzeny had a mission directly before him, he was all business. When he didn’t, his attention wandered and he needed something else to keep him interested in the world. He’d also been drinking an ungodly lot lately.

But when Jäger got back to the flat, he found Skorzeny alone, sober, and beaming from ear to ear. “Guess what?” the big SS man boomed. “Good old Uncle Henri finally shipped us the last piece we need to put our toy together.”

“Did he? That’s first-rate,” Jäger said. A mortar was not an impressive-looking piece of lethal hardware, especially disassembled: a sheet-metal tube, an iron base plate, three legs for the tripod, and some straps and screws and a sight. Any individual component could go through the still-functional mails of Vichy France without raising a Gallic eyebrow. But now that the base plate had finally come, they could turn everything back into a mortar in a matter of minutes.

“Let’s go do it now,” Skorzeny said excitedly.

“In daylight?” Jäger shook his head. That idea still appalled him. “The plant runs three shifts. We’ll do just as much damage if we hit it at night, and we’ll have a better chance of getting away clean.”

“Sometimes, Jäger, you’re a bore,” Skorzeny said.

“Sometimes, Skorzeny, you’re a crazy man,” Jäger retorted. He’d long since learned that you couldn’t let Skorzeny grab any advantage, no matter how tiny. If you did, he’d ride roughshod over you. The only thing he took seriously was a will whose strength matched that of his own, and God hadn’t turned out a whole lot of those.

Now Skorzeny laughed, a raucous note that filled the little furnished flat “A crazy man? Maybe I am, but I have fun and the Lizards don’t.”

“They’ll have even less fun once we’re through with them,” Jäger said. “Shall we walk by the factory one last time, make sure we’re not overlooking anything?”

“Now you’re talking!” The prospect of action, of facing danger, always got Skorzeny’s juices flowing. “Let’s go.”

“First smear that glop over your scar,” Jäger said, as he did whenever Skorzeny was about to go out in public in Albi. The Lizards were terrible at telling people apart, but that scar and the SS man’s size made him stand out. They made him stand out for human collaborators, too.

“Bore,” Skorzeny repeated, but he rubbed the brown makeup paste over his cheek. It left him looking as if his face had been burned, but the Lizards weren’t looking for a man with a burn. They were after a man with a scar
—and they won’t be shy about snapping up any friends he has along, either,
Jäger thought.

Baggy trousers, a tweed jacket, a cloth cap . . . to Jäger, they made Skorzeny look like a German in down-at-the-heels French clothes rather than a down-at-the-heels Frenchman, but he did know the Lizards were a less demanding audience. He thought the beret he wore made him look dashing. Skorzeny insisted it looked like a cowflop on his head. He took the chaffing in good part; wearing a beret in France these days meant you supported Vichy, which was exactly the impression he was trying to create.

The factory was on the Rue de la Croix-Verte, in the northeastern part of the city. Jäger and Skorzeny walked past the theater and the Jardin National on their way to it. They ambled along, hands in their pockets, as if they had all the time in the world. Skorzeny gave a pretty girl the eye. She stuck her nose in the air, ignoring him with Gallic panache. He laughed as raucously as he had back in the apartment.

A stream of lorries rolled out of the gas-mask plant as the two Germans came up to it. The lorries headed off to the east, to help save Lizards from German gas. The factory itself was a large, nondescript building of orange brick, utterly unremarkable from the outside. Only the Lizard guards who paced its perimeter with automatic rifles made it seem at all important.

Jäger didn’t even turn his head toward it. He just glanced at it out of the corner of his eyes as he mooched on past. As for Skorzeny, he might not even have suspected the place existed, let alone that it manufactured goods which hurt the
Reich.
He was pompous and arrogant, no doubt about that, but a mission made him all business.

He and Jäger bought lunch at a little café a couple of blocks from the gas-mask factory. The chicken—actually, almost chickenless—stew was pretty bad, even by wartime standards, but the house wine that went with it was noticeably better than
ordinaire.
After a couple of glasses, you stopped noticing the stringy carrots and sad potatoes that accompanied the little diced-up bits of chicken-or rabbit, or maybe cat.

Lunch finished, Jäger and Skorzeny walked back the way they had come. The Lizards took no notice of them. Skorzeny started whistling something. After the first few bars, Jäger gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. A good thing, too; it was the “Horst Wessel Song.”

When they got back to the flat, Skorzeny hopped up and down like a kid with a new toy. “I want to do it now,” he said, over and over.

“Better we wait till tonight,” Jäger kept answering. “Less chance of someone noticing us setting up a mortar in the middle of the Parc Rochegude.”

“But they’re more likely to notice us carrying the stuff at night,” Skorzeny argued. “You carry boxes during the day, you’re a workman. You carry boxes at night, if you’re lucky people think you’re a burglar on your way to do a job. You aren’t so lucky, they think you’ve already done it and they try to rob you.”

“No,” Jäger said yet again. “The park is just a little ways away—that’s why we took this flat, remember? We can carry all our gear in one trip, set up in the middle of that nice stand of elms we found, and start firing. We can get off eight or ten bombs in a minute or so and then get the hell out of there. What could be better than that?”

“Watching the fur fly,” Skorzeny answered without hesitation. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose we could do that anyway. Wouldn’t be a good idea to walk past the factory on our way out of town.”

“Why?” Jäger said in mock astonishment. “Just because we’ll have lobbed eight or ten bombs full of Tabun into it and around the neighborhood? All we’d have to do is hold our breath as we went by.”

“You’re right—maybe we could get away with it.” Before Jäger could explode, Skorzeny laughed at him. “I’m joking, son, I’m joking.”

“Tabun isn’t anything to joke about.” Jäger cast a respectful eye on the mortar bombs he and Skorzeny had carried down through the Lizard lines from Germany. Had one of those bombs developed the tiniest leak, the sun would have gone dark in the sky, his lungs would have stopped working, and he wouldn’t have made it to Albi.

“Well, I don’t say you’re wrong about that,” Skorzeny answered. “It’s some very nasty stuff, for a fact. The
Führer
wasn’t going to use it, even against the Lizards, till the British hauled out their mustard gas. Then I suppose he decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

“The
Führer
knows about gas,” Jäger said. “He was in the trenches in France himself.” He remembered his own days there, the frantic cries of alarm when the gas shells started landing, the struggle to get your mask on and tight before the tendrils of poison reached you and started eating your lungs, the anguished cries of comrades who hadn’t grabbed their masks fast enough, the stifling feel of every breath, the way you started wanting to tear off the mask after you’d worn it for hours on end, no matter what happened to you once you did . . . Across a quarter of a century, those memories remained vivid enough to make the fear sweat prickle up under his arms.

Grumpily, Otto Skorzeny said, “All right, Jäger, we’ll do it your way, tonight when it’s nice and dark. Should be clear, too, which won’t be bad if we can spy the North Star through the trees. Give us a better gauge of true north than our compasses would if somebody’s tampered with our marks.”

“That’s true,” Jäger said. They’d picked the spot from which they would fire a good while before. Thanks to some excellent maps of Albi and their French friends (no, not friends, partners: the Frenchmen had been enemies of Vichy when Pétain collaborated with the Germans, and remained enemies now that he was collaborating with the Lizards), they knew the range and bearing from their chosen copse in the Parc Rochegude to the gas-mask factory, to within a few meters and minutes of the arc. It was just a matter of getting the mortar pointing in the right direction, fiddling with the elevation screw, and firing away.

To kill time till darkness fell, they played skat. As he usually did, Skorzeny won money from Jäger. They were playing for Vichy francs, though, so the losses hardly felt real. Jäger thought of himself as a pretty fair cardplayer, and wondered if Skorzeny cheated. He’d never caught him at it and, if he did, Skorzeny would make jokes about it and turn it into a lark. What could you do?

When twilight came and the sky turned purple-gray, Skorzeny stuck the cards in his pocket and said, “Shall I make us some supper?”

“I thought you wanted us to live till tonight,” Jäger said, which earned him a glare from the bigger man. As anyone does who spends time in the field, Skorzeny had learned to cook after a fashion: roasted meats, stews made from whatever was handy thrown into a pot and stuck over the fire for a while. Since Jäger cooked the same way, he waved a hand to tell Skorzeny to go ahead.

You couldn’t do a lot to mess up beans and cabbage and onions and carrots and potatoes. The stew was bland and boring, but it filled the belly. At the moment, Jäger didn’t care about anything else. The flat had good blackout curtains. That let him turn on the electric lights after supper, and let Skorzeny win more funny money from him with those possibly trained pasteboards.

Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven . . . the hours crawled slowly past. When midnight struck, Skorzeny loaded the thirty kilos of mortar onto his back, slung into a big cloth bag. Jäger carried the bombs in the packs he and the SS man had used to bring them down from German-held territory.

They closed the door behind them and went downstairs and then outside as quietly as they could. Every little clank they made seemed magnified in the dark, silent street. Jäger wondered how many people were peering at them as they trudged east down the Avenue du Maréchal Foch toward the park.

He also wondered if he would make it to the park. Added together, the mortar bombs and powder charges were at least as heavy as the weapon that fired them, while he was not nearly so big and burly as Otto Skorzeny.

He was staggering but still moving along when they got to the Parc Rochegude. A rustle in the bushes made him snatch for the pistol he wore in the waistband of his trousers. “Just a couple playing games,” Skorzeny said with a coarse laugh. “Might have been a couple of men, but it’s too dark for me to be sure.”

The tree-surrounded open space they’d picked to set up the mortar had no couples using it, for which Jäger was heartily glad: he had found a discarded French letter in it one morning. “We won’t need the compass or the North Star,” he said with relief. A few days before, Skorzeny had splashed whitewash on a branch of one of the elms in the grove. Set the base plate of the mortar on the gray stone Jäger had placed in the grass, aim the barrel over the white splash, and the Lizards—and the humans who worked for them—would learn collaboration had its price.

Skorzeny assembled the mortar, swearing softly when he barked his knuckles in the darkness. He’d practiced so often in the flat that the lethal little device quickly grew from a collection of innocent-looking hardware to an artillery piece. He lined it up roughly on the marked branch, then turned the traversing screw to bring it to exactly the bearing he wanted. At last he grunted in satisfaction and began adjusting the elevation screw so the mortar would fling its bombs just the right distance.

Jäger, meanwhile, had been taking the bombs out of the packs and standing them on their tailfins by the mortar. Even without knowing the particularly lethal freight they carried, anyone would have recognized them as intended for no good purpose: nothing painted flat black and full of sharp curves and angles was apt to be a kiddie toy.

“Flick on your lighter,” Skorzeny said. “I want to make sure I have the elevation right. Wouldn’t do to shoot over or under.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Jäger dug the lighter out of his pocket and flicked the wheel with his thumb. His breath came short and quick, as if he’d spied a Lizard panzer’s turret traversing to bring its main armament to bear on him. A cry of
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
and feet pounding toward the copse would be just as disastrous now.

After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Skorzeny said, “Everything’s fine. Douse it.” Jäger flicked the cover over the flame. Even that little noise made his heart pound. Well, the Parc Rochegude would know bigger noises any minute now.

Skorzeny softly slapped him on the back. He took that as his signal to begin. Snatching up a bomb, he dropped it down the barrel of the mortar.

Wham!
The noise hit harder than that of a panzer’s cannon; he didn’t have several centimeters of steel shielding him from most of it now. He grabbed another bomb, sent it after the first one.
Wham!