Striking the Balance

Those eyes fixed on him, sharply. He knew she was searching his features-and knew what she’d find. His brown, curly hair and formidable nose had not sprung from native English stock. After a moment, she relaxed and said, “Yes, I’m Jewish-and you, unless I’m wrong.” Now that he heard more than a sentence from her, he caught her accent-like the one his parents had, though not nearly so strong.

He nodded. “Guilty as charged,” he said, which won a cautious smile from her. He left her a tip as large as the one Basil Roundbush had given Sylvia, though he could afford it less well. He raised his mug to her before he drank, then asked, “What are you doing here?”

“In England, do you mean?” she asked, wiping the bar with a bit of rag. “My parents were lucky enough, smart enough-whatever you like-to get out of Germany in 1937.I came with them; I was fourteen then.”

That made her twenty or twenty-one now: a fine age, Goldfarb thought reverently. He said, “My parents came from Poland before the First World War, so I was born here.” He wondered if he should have told her that; German Jews sometimes looked down their noses at their Polish cousins.

But she said, “You were very lucky, then. What we went through… and we were gone before the worst. And in Poland, they say, it was even worse.”

“Everything they say is true, too,” David answered. “Have you ever heard Moishe Russie broadcast? We’re cousins; I’ve talked with him after he escaped from Poland. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, there wouldn’t be any Jews left there by now. I hate being grateful to them, but there you are.”

“Yes, I have heard him,” Naomi said. “Terrible things there-but there, at least, they’re over. In Germany, they go on.”

“I know,” Goldfarb said, and took along pull at his bitter. “And the Nazis have hit the Lizards as many licks as anyone else, maybe more. The world’s gone crazy, it bloody well has.”

Basil Roundbush had been talking with a sandy-haired Royal Navy commander. Now he turned-back to find a fresh pint at his elbow-and Naomi behind the bar. He pulled himself straight; he could turn on two hundred watts of charm the way most men flicked on a light switch. “Well, well,” he said with a toothy smile. “Our publican’s taste has gone up, it has indeed. Where did he find you?”

Not sporting,Goldfarb thought. He waited for Naomi to sigh or giggle or do whatever she did to show she was smitten. He hadn’t seen Roundbush fail yet. But the barmaid just answered, coolly enough, “I was looking for work, and he was kind enough to think I might do. Now if you will excuse me-” She hurried off to minister to other thirst-stricken patrons.

Roundbush dug an elbow into Goldfarb’s ribs. “Not sporting, old man. You have an unfair advantage there, unless I’m much mistaken.”

Damn it, hewas sharp, to have identflied the accent or placed her looks so quickly. “Me?” Goldfarb said. “You’re a fine one to talk of advantages, when you’ve got everything in a skirt from here halfway to the Isle of Wight going all soppy over you.”

“Whatever could you be talking about, my dear fellow?” Roundbush said, and stuck his tongue in his cheek to show he was not to be taken seriously. He gulped down his pint, then waved the pot at Sylvia, who had at last come back. “Another round of these for David and me. If you please, darling.”

“Coming up,” she said.

Roundbush turned back to the Royal Navy man. Goldfarb asked Sylvia, “When did she start here?” His eyes slid toward Naomi.

“A few days ago,” Sylvia answered. “You ask me, she’s liable to be too fine to make a go of it. You have to be able to put up with the drunken, randy sods who want anything they can get out of you-or into you.”

“Thanks,” Goldfarb said. “You’ve just made me feel about two inches high.”

“Blimey, you’re a gent, you are, next to a lot of these bastards,” Sylvia said, praising with faint damn. She went on, “Naomi, her way looks to be pretending she doesn’t notice the pushy ones, or understand what they want from her. That’s only good for so long. Sooner or later-likely sooner-somebody’s going to try reaching down her blouse or up her dress. Then we’ll-”

Before she could say “see,” the rifle-crack of a slap cut through the chatter in the White Horse I

“Timed that well, I did, though I say so my own self,” Sylvia remarked with more than a little pride.

“That you did,” Goldfarb agreed. He glanced over toward Naomi. Their eyes met for a moment. He smiled. She shrugged, as if to say,All in a day’s work. He turned back to Sylvia. “Good for her,” he said.

Liu Han was nervous. She shook her head. No, she was more than nervous. She was terrflied. The idea of meeting the little scaly devils face-to-face made her shiver inside. She’d been a creature under their control for too long: first in their airplane that never came down, where they made her submit to one man after another so they could learn how people behaved in matters of the pillow; and then, after she’d got pregnant, down in their prison camp not far from Shanghai. After she’d had her baby, they’d stolen it from her. She wanted her child back, even if it was only a girl.

With all that in her past, she had trouble believing the scaly devils would treat her like someone worth consideration now. And she was a woman herself, which did nothing to ease her confidence. The doctrine of the People’s Liberation Army said women were, and should be, equal to men. In the top part of her mind, she was begi

Perhaps sensing that, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “It will be all right. They won’t do anything to you, not at this parley. They know we hold prisoners of theirs, and what will happen to those prisoners if anything bad happens to us.”

“Yes, I understand,” she said, but she shot him a grateful glance anyhow. In matters military, he knew what he was talking about. He’d served as political commissar in the first detachment of Mao’s revolutionary army, commanded a division in the Long March, and been an army chief of staff. After the Lizards came, he’d led resistance against them-and against the Japanese, and against the counterrevolutionary Kuomintang clique-first in Shanghai and then here in Peking. And he was her lover.

Though she’d been born a peasant, her wits and her burning eagerness for revenge on the little devils for all they’d done to her had made her a revolutionary herself, and one who’d risen quickly in the ranks.

A scaly devil emerged from the tent that his kind had built in the middle of thePan Jo Hsiang Tai- the Fragrant Terrace of Wisdom. The tent looked more like a bubble blown from some opaque orange shiny stuff than an honest erection of canvas or silk. It clashed dreadfully not only with the terrace and the walls and the elegant staircases to either side, but also with everything on theCh’iung Hua Tao, the White Pagoda Island.

Liu Han stifled a nervous giggle. Peasant that she was, she’d never imagined, back in the days before the little scaly devils took hold of her life and tore it up by the roots, that she would find herself not just in the Imperial City inside Peking, but on an island the old Chinese Emperors had used as a resort.

The little devil turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han, the other toward Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You are the men of the People’s Liberation Army?” it asked in fair Chinese, and added a grunting cough at the end of the sentence to show it was a question: a holdover from the usages of its own language. When neither human denied it, the scaly devil said, “You will come with me. I am Essaff.”

Inside the tent, the lamps glowed almost like sunlight, but slightly more yellow-orange in tone. That had nothing to do with the material from which the tent was made; Liu Han had noticed it in all the illumination the little scaly devils used. The tent was big enough to contain an antechamber. When she started to go through the doorway, Essaff held up a clawed hand.