Highlander - Donna Lettow [57]
“We have to get the gravel out or it won’t heal,” MacLeod explained. “Just a little more, then I’ll stop. I promise … okay?” His voice was tender, his touch gentle. Miriam sighed, nodding, and closed her eyes, allowing him to continue.
“How’s our heroine?”
At the sound of Avram’s voice from the bottom of the stair-well, Miriam’s eyes flew open. “Tzaddik?” she called out, and then saw him coming up the stairs. “Tzaddik, you’re alive!” His shirt lay in shreds on his back, his trousers torn, but he was whole and alive. In his arms he carried two rifles, a pistol and an ammo belt he had liberated from their owners before fleeing the scene of the crime. Miriam jumped up to meet him, eager to touch him, to make sure he was real, but a sharp pain tore through her belly when she moved too fast. Startled, she started to fall and immediately MacLeod’s strong arms were there to catch her, and he helped her gently down to the steps again.
“Some cuts, a lot of bruises,” MacLeod filled Avram in. “Probably some nightmares she’ll never be rid of, but nothing we can do about that right now. I’m concerned about what’s going on inside here, though.” He touched Miriam’s midsection, which she was cradling protectively. “We should find Dr. Cohen.” Dr. Israel Cohen, one of the only physicians left in the Ghetto, was a ZOB partisan who during the January uprising had proven himself equally skilled with a grenade as with a scalpel.
“No!” Miriam protested. “There’s no time. I have to see Anielewicz. As soon as we can. It’s urgent.” Using the handrail, Miriam managed to get back to her feet.
If Miriam needed to see the ZOB leader that urgently, MacLeod realized her news had to be grim. “The Aktsia?” he asked, resigned to the answer he knew he’d hear.
“Tonight. The Germans strike before first light.”
MacLeod and Avram exchanged a look, and Avram handed him the weapons he’d scrounged. Then Avram put an arm around Miriam’s waist. “Anielewicz is at the Mila Street base. Can you walk?” He helped her gingerly down a step, then another, and when the shooting pain did not return, she pulled away from him and started down the stairs under her own power.
“Looks like I’ll have to,” she said as she reached the bottom landing and turned toward Avram with a little lopsided smile, the best her bruised face could manage. “You seem to have blown up the only working transportation in the Ghetto.”
Juggling the rifles, MacLeod attempted to put his jacket back on. “Hell of a signal, Avram. Next time, you might try whistling.”
“Hey, stop with the kvetching,” Avram protested, “it worked, didn’t it? Three of the bastards dead, another five out of commission—admit it, Errol Flynn couldn’t have done it better,” he said, invoking the name of one of his heroes in the American films he used to like to watch before the war.
“Errol Flynn would have used a stunt man,” MacLeod groused as he followed them down the stairs.
Chapter Twelve
Warsaw: April 18, 1943
MacLeod and Avram escorted Miriam across the Ghetto to the ZOB headquarters in an old building on Mila Street where she could meet with Anielewicz, the ZOB commander, and be tended to by Dr. Cohen. After they dropped her off safely, MacLeod had thought they’d return to their unit to prepare for the coming confrontation. But Avram had other ideas.
He led MacLeod into an apartment building a few blocks away at Mila Street 18. They passed through the lobby to a rear hallway, then down a flight of stairs into an empty basement. Avram knocked twice on a section of the wall that looked no different than the walls around it. MacLeod knew it was the entrance to an underground bunker.
“Tell Shmuel, Tzaddik’s here,” Avram announced to the empty room. They could hear locks turning, then a section of the wall swung out. They had been granted admission to the bunker beneath Mila 18.
The guard at the door was a big, hulking lug who didn’t so much talk as he did grunt as he gestured them down the stairs, and MacLeod couldn’t remember seeing him before at any of the ZOB meetings or drills. And a face like that one he