Highlander - Donna Lettow [59]
Issachar blanched at the notion of Avram selling him out to the Germans, but he didn’t fall for the bluff. “Get them out of here,” he told his men.
MacLeod, who’d watched the proceedings with an air of detached interest, spoke up, shaking his head. “Oh, dear. De Gaulle isn’t going to like this, Issachar. He’ll not like this at all.”
“What? What about de Gaulle?”
Seeing he had the mobster’s interest, MacLeod milked the part for all it was worth. “Well, I didn’t want to tell anyone”— he looked suspiciously at Avram—“but that’s the real reason de Gaulle sent me here. To establish a supply line from the French Resistance through Warsaw to the Russians and back. You name it—arms, equipment…art…gold…”
“Gold?” Issachar echoed.
“And since you’ve got similar operations already in place, I thought you and your people would be perfect to recommend for the job. But if you can’t even keep track of a dozen guns”—MacLeod laughed at the notion—“then I guess I’ll just have to find someone else.” He sighed and started from the room.
“Wait, wait,” Issachar said. “Guns. Maybe we do have some guns.” He motioned to one of his goons. “Go see if we have the boy’s guns. Go!”
“And ammunition,” MacLeod called after the man, as the goon hurried from the room.
Issachar smiled broadly. “Of course, ammunition. What’s the use of guns without ammunition? You’ll tell that to de Gaulle, right?”
They left Mila 18 with a dozen rifles more than they had entered with, packed in three wooden boxes. For each rifle, Issachar had come up with twenty rounds of ammunition. Avram laughed as they reached the street.
“What’s so funny?” MacLeod asked.
“Izzy didn’t steal the ammunition from us. There was no ammo in that shipment. I can’t believe you actually got Shmuel Issachar to donate to the cause. You were brilliant!”
MacLeod tried to look humble. “Well, I’ve done a bit of acting in my day. Sometimes it comes in handy. And what about you? Was that Cagney you were doing in there?”
“Yeah, what did you think? ‘You dirty rat,’” he repeated.
“Frankly, I think you sounded more like Peter Lorre. Maybe gangsters just aren’t your style, Avram.”
Humph. “Well, at least we got the guns. You take that box, give two of the rifles to Gutman at his base, take the other two back to our unit. I’ll deliver these two boxes back to Anielewicz. We’ll rendezvous back on the roof.”
“Whatever you say, Scarface,” MacLeod said, setting off for Gutman’s base across the Ghetto.
When Avram and MacLeod met up once again on the roof of the apartment building overlooking the Gesia Street gate, it was well after sundown. Their post was meagerly supplied and sparsely furnished. A battered wooden crate, a stained and tattered blanket. A metal ammunitions box, still stenciled in German, holding a handful of grenades, a few extra rounds of ammo, and a half dozen Molotov cocktails lovingly handcrafted from old wine bottles during the lull following the January uprising. Over in one corner of the roof, a plunger detonator connected to two thin wires trailing over the side of the building, barely perceptible from the street. The wires disappeared under the sidewalk and eventually connected to a cache of explosives, dynamite mostly, in a carefully constructed cavern dug just inside the Gesia Street gate. It had taken some work, but MacLeod had managed to convince the ZOB leadership to risk most of the explosives they could scrounge on this and a similar mine beneath the Brushmakers’ gate. He knew they had to block German access to the Ghetto when the time came, to limit the number of Nazis they’d have to take on at any one time.
“Miriam all right?” MacLeod wondered. He