Page 34 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

“Nyet,”Bagnall answered firmly.“Anglichani.” You never could be sure how a Russian would react if he thought you were a Jerry-better to set him right straightaway.

“Ah,Anglichani. Khorosho,” the Russian said: Englishman-good. He rattled off something Bagnall thought was thanks for the directions and hurried off toward the street to which Bagnall had pointed.

Bagnall headed on toward the market square. As a fighting man, he got plenty of black bread, the cabbage soup calledshchi, and borscht, along with the occasional bit of hen or mutton or pork. The Russians ate and thrived, the Germans ate and didn’t complain-the winter before the Lizards came, they’d been eating horses that froze to death in the snow. Bagnall wanted something better, or at least different; he wanted to see if any of thebabushkas would part with some eggs.

The old and middle-aged women sat in rows behind rickety tables or blankets on which they’d laid out what they had for sale. With their solid, blocky figures and the outlines of their heads smoothed and rounded by the scarves they all wore, they reminded Bagnall of nothing so much as figures from those cleverly carved, multilayered sets of Russian wooden dolls. The immobile stolidity with which they sat only enhanced the illusion.

No one was displaying any eggs, but that didn’t necessarily signify. He’d found out good stuff often got held back, either for some special customer or just to keep it from being pilfered. He walked up to one of thebabushkas and said,“Dobry den.” The woman stared at him, expressionless.“Yaichnitsa?”

She didn’t bother returning his good-day. She didn’t even bother scowling at him; she just looked through him as if he didn’t exist. It was one of the most effortlessly annihilating glances he’d ever received. He felt himself wilting as she let him know she didn’t have any eggs, and that even if she had had some eggs, she wouldn’t have had any for a German.

Before the Lizards came, before the partisans emerged from the forest to reclaim a share of Pskov, she never would have dared to act so to a German, either. If she’d had eggs, she would either have turned them over or hidden them so well the Nazis would never had suspected they were there. As it was, he got the notion she was just taunting him.

“Nyet nemets,”he said, as he had before.“Anglichani.”

“Anglichani?”She gave forth with a spate of Russian, much too quick for him to follow in detail. What he did get, though, suggested that that made a difference. She plucked a few sorry-looking potatoes out of a bowl-you’d have to have been starving to want them. Underneath lay more equally unprepossessing spuds-and, nestled among them, several eggs.

“Skolko?”he asked. “How much?”

She wanted 500 rubles apiece, or 750 marks. German money had been falling against its Soviet equivalent ever since Bagnall arrived in Pskov. The Soviet Union and Germany were still going concerns, but the Lizards in Poland and to the south of Pskov screened the city away from much contact with other German forces. The Soviet presence, on the other hand, was growing. That might lead to trouble one day, as if the Reds and the Nazis didn’t already have enough trouble getting along.

“Bozhemoi!”Bagnall shouted, loud enough to draw glances frombabushkas several places away. He’d learned you’d best forget all you’d ever known of British reserve if you wanted to get anywhere dickering with Russians. If you stayed polite, they thought you were weak and they rode roughshod over you.

He knew he mixed his cases and numbers in a way that would have got him a caning in sixth-form Latin, but he didn’t care. This wasn’t school; this was the real world. However inelegant his Russian might have been, it worked, and he didn’t think thebabushka was any budding Pushkin, either. He ended up buying three eggs for seven hundred rubles, which wasn’t half bad.

“Nyet anglichani,”thebabushka said, pointing at him.“Zhid.”

Bagnall remembered an old, beautifully dressed Jewish man he’d seen walking slowly along a Paris street with a six-pointed yellow star with the wordJuif on it sewn to his jacket pocket. The expression of dignified misery that man had worn would go with him to his grave. But the sneer in thebabushka’s voice told him something of how others had thought it a good idea to make the old Jew wear a yellow star.

“Zhid?”Bagnall said quietly.“Spasebo. Thank you.” Thebabushka’s gray eyes went blank and empty as a couple of stones. Bagnall took the eggs and headed for the house he shared with Ken Embry and Jerome Jones. He hoped he wouldn’t run into Tatiana the sniper.

A buzz in the sky made him turn as he walked past a grassy park on whose greensward sheep grazed under the watchful eyes of Red Army andWehrmacht guards. After a moment, he spotted an approaching plane: not a Lizard fighter, lean and graceful as a shark and a millionfold more deadly, but a human-built machine that hardly looked as if it belonged in the same sky as Lizard aircraft or even those of the RAF.

It was, nonetheless, the first human-built airplane-and, not coincidentally, the first plane not loaded with ordnance intended to punch his ticket-he’d seen in a long time. That alone sent his spirits soaring. The Red Army guards raised a cheer when they spied the red stars painted on the wings and fuselage and tailplane.

The Russian aircraft was coming into Pskov at treetop height. At first Bagnall thought that was just because it skimmed the ground to give the Lizards a harder time spotting it. Then, as it lowered its flaps, he realized the pilot intended to bring it down right in the park.

“He’s out of his bloody mind,” Bagnall muttered. But the pilot wasn’t. The biplane wasn’t going very fast and wasn’t very heavy; it rolled to a stop with better than a hundred yards of meadow to spare. It even managed to avoid running over a sheep or butchering one with its prop as it taxied. Bagnall trotted toward it with the vague notion of congratulating whoever had done the flying.

First out of the aircraft was a tall, skinny fellow with a thick red beard. He wore a field-gray tunic, but Bagnall would have guessed him for a German even without it-his face was too long and beaky to belong to most Russians.

Sure enough, he started yelling in German: “Come on, you dumb-heads, let’s get this stinking airplane under cover before the Lizards spot it and blow it to hell and gone.”

The pilot stood up and shouted support for the Nazi. Bagnall didn’t follow all of it, but he knewmaskirovka meant camouflage. That wasn’t what made him stop and stare, though. He’d heard the Reds used female pilots, but he hadn’t more than half believed it till now.

Yet there she was. She took off her leather flying helmet, and hair the color of ripe wheat spilled down almost to her shoulders. Her face was wide and rather flat, her skin fair but tanned except around the eyes, where her goggles shielded it from the sun. The eyes themselves were intensely blue.

She saw him and the officer’s cap he was wearing, climbed down out of the biplane, and walked up to him. Saluting, she said, “Comrade, I am Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, reporting to Pskov as ordered with the German sergeant Georg Schultz, a tank gunner and highly capable mechanic.”

Fumblingly, Bagnall explained he wasn’t really a Red Army officer, and who he really was. Without much hope, he added,“Vuy gavoritye po-angliski?”

“No, I don’t speak English,” she replied in Russian, but then she did switch languages:“Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann Deutsch ein wenig sprechen.”

“I speak a little German also. Perhaps more than a little now,” he answered in the same tongue.

Hearing German, Georg Schultz came up and greeted Bagnall with a stiff-arm salute and a loud,“Heil Hitler.”

Bugger Hitler,was the first thought that came to Bagnall’s mind. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, he and Schultz-and, for that matter, Schultz and Ludmila Gorbunova-would have been at each other’s throats. The Germans made even more uncomfortable allies than the Russians.

Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova looked pained. “He is a dedicated fascist, as you hear. But he has also done very good work for the Red Air Force. With tools in his hand, he is a genius.”

Bagnall studied Schultz.

“He must be,” he said slowly. If the Nazi hadn’t been bloody good, the Communists would have got rid of him on general principles. That they hadn’t was probably a measure of their own desperate situation.

Men came running up to drag the biplane as far in among the trees over to one side of the park as its wings would permit. Others draped it with camouflage netting. Before long, it had all but disappeared.

“Thatmay do,” Ludmila said, casting a critical eye its way. She turned back to George Bagnall. “I think I am glad to meet you. You English here in Pskov, you are-” She ran out of German, then tried a couple of Russian words Bagnall didn’t understand. Finally he got the idea she meant something likearbitrators.

“Yes, that is right,” Bagnall answered in German. “When theWehrmacht commander and the partisan brigadiers cannot agree, they bring their arguments for us to decide.”

“What if they don’t like what you decide?” Georg Schultz asked. “Why should they listen to a pack of damned Englishmen?” He stared at Bagnall with calculated insolence.

“Because they were killing each other here before they started listening to us,” Bagnall answered. Schultz looked like one very rugged customer, but Bagnall took a step toward him anyhow. If he wanted a scrap, he could have one. The flight engineer went on, “We do need to stick together against the Lizards, you know.”

“That is part of why the two of us were sent here,” Ludmila Gorbunova said. “We are German and Russian, but we have worked well with each other.”

Schultz leered at her. Bagnall wondered if she meant they were sleeping together. He hoped not. She wasn’t as pretty as Tatiana, but on three minutes’ acquaintance she seemed much nicer. Then she noticed Schultz’s slobbering stare, and answered it with one that would have made any longsuffering English barmaid proud.

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