Mila 18 - Leon Uris [212]
“I feel bad, Moritz—believe me.”
“What a kick in the ass life is. If one thief doesn’t get you, another will,” Moritz opined.
Andrei sympathized with him. Moritz the Nasher was a gambler, a smuggler, a man who existed by wit. But he was also a supreme realist. He knew that he had been caught flat. At least Andrei Androfski and the Joint Forces held him no malice. Maybe he was lucky, after all. Had the Germans or the Militia found him first ... curtains ... Umschlagplatz. He had hoped that he and his wife Sheina could ride the war out in Mila 18. They had enough supplies and medicine to see through a year or two without ever coming up. But ... what kind of a life was it for a man? Never to see the sun. Nobody to play cards with. Candy running out. Always in fear that the next minute or the next or the next those goddamn German dogs would sniff him out.
“Let me ask you something, Androfski,” Moritz asked. “This here Joint Forces—you the ones who blasted the SS men at Zamenhof and Niska?”
Andrei nodded.
“You the ones who fixed up Warsinski?”
Andrei nodded again.
“You guys really mean business?”
Andrei nodded for the third time.
“Let me tell you something. You work, you live, you do your best, but you never quite get onto the idea of the way they’re kicking you around. In the last week—since the ambush—for the first time in my life I’m proud to be a Jew.”
“That’s the way we all want to go out.”
Moritz shrugged. “So, maybe I’m glad you found me first. Obviously, you realize you have me over a barrel.”
“Obviously,” Andrei agreed.
Moritz munched on another square of chocolate, somewhat relieved that his long, taut vigil was over.
“Moritz,” Andrei said, “the one thing that Joint Jewish Forces really needs is a quartermaster.”
“What’s a quartermaster?”
“Someone high class to get in supplies.”
“You mean a smuggler?”
“No. Quartermaster is a respectable position. Every army has them.”
“What’s the cut?”
“Well, a regular army—like ours—doesn’t work on cuts.”
“Oy vay! What a day this has been. All I’ve ever done is run a nice clean business.”
“Moritz, you’re too much of a gambler to ride this war out in a hole. We’ve got doctors. Sheina will get treatment You’ll have lots of interesting people here to share this bunker.”
“I bet I will. Tell me honest, Androfski. This post of quartermaster. It is important? I mean, like a Ulany colonel?”
“In our army,” Andrei said, “it’s the most important.”
Moritz sighed in resignation. “One condition. No one inquires into my past finances.”
“Done,” Andrei said.
They clasped hands, Moritz pulled a faded double deck of cards, shuffled, and began to deal. “Before you move in, one game of sixty-six.”
Chapter Seven
AN ANT LINE OF laborers in a Brushmaker’s building bent their backs, pushing large clumsy carts. The line moved in an endless circle from the lumber store to the lathe room to the assembly room.
An emaciated slave named Creamski, who had kept alive somehow for ten months, loaded the cart with finished toilet-brush handles from the lathe room. He grunted down the corridor, pushing the load at a snail’s pace.
The assembly room consisted of ten long tables, each forty feet long. Each table had a series of varied drilled holes to stuff bristles, tie the wires, and attach the handles. Fifty men worked each table.
Creamski pushed his cart to table number three; toilet brushes. A “leader” stood at the head of each table. “They are here,” Creamski whispered to the “leader.”
He pushed his cart along the table, placing several handles before each bench.
“They are here,” he whispered.
“They are here.”
The word passed down the line and over to the next table and the next—“They are here.”
“You there!” the German foreman shouted from the balcony. “Hurry up!”
Creamski moved faster, emptying the cart. He turned it about and pushed it out of the room, down the corridor, past the lathe room, and into the lumber warehouse.
While his cart was being loaded with boards he stepped into the checker’s office.
“Now!” he said to the checker. The