Mila 18 - Leon Uris [209]
“You’ve got no guts for torture,” Warsinski snarled in defiance, “no real guts for it. Jews are too weak!”
Tolek slipped his pistol into his belt, grabbed Warsinski’s out-sized mustache in his fist, and ripped it from his face.
“Yaaaaaahhhh!” Warsinski screamed, clutching a gory upper lip with his free hand.
Tolek slipped the pliers onto a big dirty fingernail of Warsinski’s free hand.
“Adam, tighten the thumbscrew. Warsinski can loosen the bolt if he wants to reach for it. It will cost him a fingernail to try.”
Adam Blumenfeld tightened the bolt, crunching the vise into Warsinski’s knuckle. He gasped. The sweat poured from his face and turned his underwear to a soggy rag. Adam turned the thumbscrew a quarter turn.
“Yahhhh!”
Warsinski suddenly tried to reach for the screw, but Tolek held the pliers tight and a fingernail tore loose.
Mucus spurted from his nose, and his eyes ran.
“Will you co-operate?”
“Stop! Stop! I’ll talk!”
As his thumb was freed he stumbled blindly around the room, wailing and bouncing off the walls. He sank in a blubbering, groaning hulk to the floor. A mass of sweaty ugliness.
Tolek and the other two looked down at him with disgust, and Tolek was sick to his stomach with himself for his brutality, but he knew he could not puke in the presence of an enemy who regarded it as a weakness.
“He didn’t even last five minutes,” Pinchas said. “I didn’t think he would.”
They dragged him to the cot and flung him on it.
In a few minutes Alexander Brandel came in and after shuddering at the first sight of Warsinski grilled him for twelve hours from questions and knowledge gained from the Good Fellowship archives. Piotr Warsinski revealed his own crimes, the crimes of his officers, his own fortunes, the places of hidden stores, information about Stutze, Schreiker, Koenig, the Nightingales, and the Reinhard Corps.
Next morning Piotr Warsinski was killed in accordance with the Joint Forces’ judgment by a single bullet through the back of his head.
Chapter Six
THE IMMEDIATE PROBLEM FACING Joint Forces was locating a new command bunker in the central area. The other bunkers were already jammed to capacity, and the hundred people from Mila 19 added to the problem. To build a suitable underground complex for two to three hundred people would take weeks.
Alexander Brandel’s knowledge through his past dealings became invaluable. By one means or another he knew of most hiding places in the ghetto.
Alex suspected there was a large bunker under Mila 18, across the street from his own former headquarters.
He had often done business with a smuggler named Moritz Katz, a rotund little chap who in pre-war Warsaw had been a furrier. His business was always considered on the fringe; a tightrope between the legal and the unlawful. It was difficult to come right out and say that Moritz fenced stolen goods. His clientele was always high class. He carried an ethical concept with him into the ghetto. He was a decent fellow, as smugglers went. After all, smuggling was an honorable necessity in ghetto life. Moritz bought and sold at reasonable prices. Moreover, he was softhearted. When things got particularly desperate, Alex could always get Moritz to make an urgent delivery of essentials at cost price.
Moritz had two distinguishing features. He was in a never-ending card game, and his mouth always chewed sweets, fruit, cake, candy. For the latter frailty, he was known as Moritz the Nasher.
The Bathyrans who guarded the rooftops around Mila 19 detected Moritz the Nasher entering and leaving Mila 18 so many times that it had to be suspected as his headquarters.
These suspicions were advanced after the bunker at Mila 19 was expanded until its rooms stretched to the sewer under the middle of the street. Deborah Bronski had the room next to the sewer pipe with the children from the orphanage. Many times they heard foreign sounds coming from either the inside of the pipe or beyond it.
From this Alex concluded that Moritz the Nasher had a bunker under Mila 18, separated from his own by the twelve-foot pipe.