Upsetting the Balance полностью

“I used to worry about that, too,” Jager answered. “I still do, but not so much. Do it often enough and you stop thinking about it.” He shook his head. “Like you stop thinking about killing people, but on a smaller scale, if you know what I mean.”

Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. “I like that. It’s true, too, no doubt about it.”

Cautiously, Jager said, “Like killing Jews, too, don’t you think, Skorzeny? The more you do, the easier it gets.” There were just the two of them, here in the quiet of southern France. If you couldn’t speak your mind, or at least part of it, here, where could you? And if you couldn’t speak your mind anywhere, was life really worth living? Were you a man or just a mindless machine?

“Don’t start in on me about that,” Skorzeny said. Now he tossed his head like a man shaking flies. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I fought alongside those Jews in Russia, remember, same as you did, when we raided the Lizards for their explosive metal.”

“I remember,” Jager said. “I don’t have anything to do with-” He stopped. How many of the prisoners extracting uranium from the failed nuclear pile outside Hechingen and bringing it to Schloss Hohentubingen had been Jews? A good many, without a doubt. He might not have condemned them himself, but he’d exploited them once they were condemned. He tried again: “When theReich’s hands are dirty, how can anyone’s hands be clean?”

“They can’t,” Skorzeny said placidly. “War is a filthy business, and it dirties everything it touches. The whole business with the Jews is just part of that. Christ on His cross, Jager, are you going to feel clean after we give Albi our little dose of joy and good tidings?”

“That’s different.” Jager stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “The Lizards can shoot back-they shoot better than we do. But marching the Jews up to a pit and shooting them a row at a time-or the camps in Poland… People will remember that sort of thing for a thousand years.”

“Who remembers the Armenians the Turks killed in the last war?” Skorzeny said. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.” He rubbed his dry palms back and forth, as if washing his hands.

Jager couldn’t match that callousness. “Even if you were right-”

“Iam right,” Skorzeny broke in. “Who worries about the Carthaginians these days? Or, for that matter, about the-what’s the right name for them,Herr Doktor Professor of archaeology? — the Albigensians, that’s it, from the town just ahead?”

“Even if you were right,” Jager repeated, “they aren’t all gone and they won’t be all gone, not with the Lizards holding Poland. And those ones who are left will see to it that our name stays black forever.”

“If we win the war, it doesn’t matter. And if we lose the war, it doesn’t matter, either.” Skorzeny climbed to his feet. “Come on. We’ll get into Albi by sundown, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for our toys to arrive.”

That closed out the possibility of more talk. Jager also got up.I shouldn’t have expected anything else, he told himself. Most German officers wouldn’t talk about Jews at all. In a way, Skorzeny’s candor was an improvement. But only in a way. Sighing, Jager tramped on toward Albi.

Liu Han felt invisible. With a wicker basket in hand, she could wander from one of Peking’s markets to the next without being noticed. She was just one more woman among thousands, maybe millions. No one paid the least attention to her, any more than you paid attention to one particular flea among the many on a dog’s back.

“Think of yourself as a flea,” Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her. “You may be tiny, but your bite can draw blood.”

Liu Han was sick to death of being a flea. She was sick to death of being invisible. She’d been invisible all her life. She wanted to do something bold and prominent, something to make the scaly devils regret they’d ever interfered with her. Of course, the one time she’d not been invisible was when she’d been in the little devils’ clutches. She prayed to the Amida Buddha and any other god or spirit who would listen that she never attain such visibility again.

“Bok choi,very fresh!” a merchant bawled in her ear. Others hawked barley, rice, millet, wheat, poultry, pork, spices-any sort of food or condiment you could imagine.

Back in another market, somebody had been selling canned goods: some Chinese, others made by foreign devils with their foods inside. Liu Han’s gorge rose, thinking about those. The little scaly devils had kept her alive with them while they held her prisoner on the plane that never came down. If she tasted them again, she would remember that time, and she wanted to forget. The only good that had come from it was her baby, and it was stolen and Bobby Fiore, its father, dead.