The Worm in Every Heart

Radoslaw.

Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz, the Home Army’s highest-ranking “officer.” Behind her, Kotzeleh hears Fat Chavah make a noise somewhere between a sob and a sigh; Lev sags sideways against the sewer wall for a second, but masters himself almost immediately. While Kotzeleh just stands there, her cold eyes half-lashed, daring the contact to frisk her (metaphorically) for any signs of normal human weakness: staring down the future’s foregone conclusion like it was just another open pipe-mouth full of stink and danger, just another black and empty barrel on another Nazi gun.

So this is the end, she thinks, feeling nothing. And notes, aloud, with an acid little nod to his sleeve—

“That must be why you took off your armband.”

The contact shrugs, unfazed. “Wear the Home Army’s insignia from now on, you might as well paint a target on your chest.” He gestures at the hard-breathing crowd behind him like he’s showing off what he bought for dinner. “They need me alive, dumpling, to get them past the barriers; they want me alive, because they want to live. Can you blame them?”

THEM, no. But—

“—you should go too, maybe,” Lev puts in, suddenly. Adding, as Kotzeleh pins him with a glare: “Look, it only makes sense, nu? While you still can.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“But you . . . ” He trails off. “You could get word to somebody, that’s all I’m thinking. Get them to send back reinforcements.”

And if there’s no one left to send, Rabbi? What then?

“Why don’t you go yourself, if you’re so eager?” she snaps.

And now it’s Lev’s turn to raise his brows and shrug, throwing an ironic glance the contact’s way—his thoughts so clear that Kotzeleh can practically hear them in her head. What, me, with the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion tattooed on my face? To men like this, I’m not even Polish—but you, Kotzeleh, you. You, my dear . . .

. . . can pass.

As she already has done, many times, and may well do a few more before the bullet hits the bone. Yet the injustice of it twists in her nonetheless, raising a flush under sewer-pale skin—the contact, smiling that bad-teeth corpse’s smile at her, his offer a secret handshake, a shared sin, the same temptation she’s had to guard against since bombs first began to fall. A siren song whose first verse always sounds like leave the Jews behind and come along, sweetheart, you with your pretty blond hair and your straight little nose, so Aryan-pure you’d fool the Fuhrer himself, whose chorus always sounds like just leave them to die down here like the rats they are, come along with us up into daylight, and survive . . .

“You could live a long time,” the contact tells her, smiling wider. “You’re young yet, dumpling.”

Kotzeleh takes one last look at him for reference, then tucks her gun away again; he isn’t worth the effort, let alone the ammunition. Answering, simply—

“No. I’m not.”

To which the contact frowns, mouth kiting up on one side, like he’s bitten into something sour. But whatever comeback he’s planning is derailed when—with an ugly, scraping CLANG—the manhole above them is suddenly prised up, popping free like a boil to reveal a knot of gaping Nazi faces.

The refugees flatten, shrieks rising. A woman grabs both her children with a hand across each one’s mouth, hauling them backwards out of sight, as confusion—ever-infectious—rips through the crowd around her. Caught full in the spill of sunshine, Kotzeleh goes for her gun but somehow gets her knife instead; she turns to see the contact waving frantically upwards, yelling: “Mein herren, no, don’t shoot! We—”

And: Is that really the trail of an “s,” right there at the end? Kotzeleh will never know, not that it matters—her blade has already punched through his voicebox and out the other side before she even thinks to aim it, loosing a startlingly vivid pump of heart’s blood twenty feet in the air to spatter some Nazi’s cheek.

Because that’s what you get for not wearing your armband, you “charming” bastard. You get to die after all, the same as everybody else, even dirty Christ-killers like Lev—

(and me)

Another refugee, male this time, swerves in mid-flight to punch her full in the mouth, hard. And spits, as he does it: “Crazy bitch!”

Kotzeleh grins, through pinkening teeth. “Crazy Jew bitch,” she corrects, gently.

Then the shooting finally starts.

Machine-gun chatter magnified from a thousand reverberate curves, kicking up brown spray as Chavah, Lev and Kotzeleh dive one way, the refugees the other—hot whine ruffling the rat-tailed nape of Kotzeleh’s neck as Lev fires past her, a lucky shot that erases half of one Nazi’s face in a single bloodjet burst. And then down, down, further and faster, slipping and sliding on corroded metal, shit-slimed clumps of trash.

They pause near a grate, a rushing waterfall of sludge, hearts hammering; Kotzeleh puts her head between her knees to clear it, and raises it again to an unfamiliar sound. Some odd sort of rhythmic, mechanical grunting that reaches them only sporadically, sandwiched between fresh volleys.

“They should be chasing us,” Lev murmurs, to himself. Then, watching Fat Chavah sniff and Kotzeleh wrinkle her brow, still trying to place that ever-growing noise: “What is it you’re smelling, you two?”

Fat Chavah: “ . . . flowers?”

Gas.