She felt Wysochi at her side helping to lever her back to her feet and as she tried to brush the dust from her hair she took a moment to look around. Of the two hundred fighters she had begun the battle with there were barely fifty left standing. It had been a mighty near-run thing.
‘Get back to Jerusalem Avenue,’ she shouted, her voice cracked and parched. She turned to the lieutenant. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’
He shook his head. ‘No. It is the people of Warsaw who must thank you.’
Major Hartley sat, stupefied, in his room, idly playing with the glass of Solution. An almost empty bottle of Blood Heat’s Finest 20% Solution sat on his desk in mute testimony to the way Hartley had been punishing himself – and the bottle – for the last hour.
He grabbed at the bottle and attempted to top up his glass, but his hand was so unsteady that most of the red Solution tipped over the desk. With a slurred curse, he pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and tried to mop up the spill. In the end he gave up and simply lowered his forehead into the refreshingly cool pool of Solution.
Even if he hadn’t been quite so blood-drunk he would still have been befuddled by how these Poles – these badly armed, outnumbered and ill-trained Poles – had defeated his beloved SS.
He had never ever seen men – and women! – fight like that, as though they were indifferent to death. He was a veteran of the Troubles, a veteran who thought he had experienced every horror war had to offer, but he had never experienced anything to compare to these Polish fighters. They fought like the very possessed, hurling themselves, careless of their own safety, of their own survival, on his StormTroopers. He wondered for a moment whether they had been drugged, whether they had been dosed with blood, but this he knew was ridiculous. The only thing that would make a soldier fight like that was desperation… that and the Fury who was leading them.
What had his StormTroopers started calling her: Lady Death?
No wonder he had failed. And in the SS there was only one remedy for failure.
Major Hartley checked his watch. It was now nearly eight o’clock. His two young sons would be in bed. He took the envelope addressed to his wife and placed it squarely before him. Then taking up his Mauser, he blew a hole in his head.
28
The Demi-Monde: 79th Day of Winter, 1004
It was that canny nuJu Abraham Eleazar who secured a homeland for his people in NoirVille, a homeland that became known as the nuJu Autonomous District (the JAD). Eleazar developed a chemical additive – Aqua Benedicta – which prevents blood congealing and enabled the Blood Brothers to store and preserve the blood they traded. It was Aqua Benedicta that made the Blood Brothers the Demi-Monde’s pre-eminent blood brokers. The establishing of the JAD was a deal which both parties were pleased to conclude: Shaka and his Blood Brothers secured a supply of Aqua Benedicta and in exchange they respected the independence of the JAD and the right of the JADniks to follow the WhoDoo religion. The only element of friction in this relationship is that the JAD has become a sanctuary for NoirVillian woeMen fleeing husbands and fathers.
– Include Us Out: A Short History of the JAD: Schmuel
Gelbfisz, JAD Hipster Books and Comics
‘I’ve got lice!’ squealed Norma Williams. She leapt to her feet and began to rake her fingers frantically through her hair.
Vanka laughed. ‘Everybody’s got lice. Why should you be different?’
It was true: in the cramped, crowded and decidedly unhygienic confines of a war-ravaged Ghetto, lice – and rats and mice and fleas – had overrun the place. Everyone had lice, just as everyone was filthy and foul and permanently scared shitless that one of the never-ending procession of SS artillery shells smashing into the city had their name on it.
But seeing the look of real horror on Norma’s face, Ella took pity on her. Making a real effort – her moaning was incessant – she tried to be reassuring. ‘If it bothers you that much the best thing to do, when you turn in tonight, is to hang your clothes outside. The frost will kill the lice.’
‘I don’t mean in my clothes.’ Norma lowered her voice and looked suspiciously around at the other people huddled in the cellar. ‘I mean in my hair,’ she whispered. ‘I’m infested.’
Vanka decided to rejoin the conversation. ‘Well, you could take off your head and leave that outside at night…’
He was silenced by a glare from Ella. The antagonism between those two was becoming a real pain: what had started out as dislike had rapidly degenerated into loathing.
She tried again. ‘Most of the women have taken to cropping their hair, Norma; wearing it short makes it easier to delouse.’
Norma looked at Ella as though she was mad. ‘Crop my hair? After I took all these years to grow it? Don’t be ridiculous. What I want is some hot water, a clean towel, some anti-nit shampoo and a change of clothes.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And to get out of this shithole.’
Ella had to admit that Norma was quite right: their home was a shithole. The really quite pleasant hotel they had checked into when they had first arrived in the Ghetto was long gone, pummelled flat by the incessant artillery bombardment. Now the three of them had been reduced to scratching out a life in the hotel’s forty-foot-square cellar, which they shared with the other refugees. It was a dank, dark, dismal existence and Ella hated it.
Just as the twenty or so people she was sharing her cellar home with hated it. Not that they complained much: they were so dispirited that they’d long ago given up complaining. Now they simply sat in the darkness, mute and blank-eyed. Twenty-odd days into the siege it seemed that her fellow cellarniks had become indifferent to what happened to them: the horror and the terror they had experienced had made them numb to their own suffering and to that of their fellow man. The Poles were near to breaking.
Ella sighed: she wished that Norma had been rendered numb and dumb, she wished the girl would stop her continual carping. She didn’t know what was worse, Norma constantly twittering in her ear about how horrible things were or the SS artillery trying to smash her to a pulp. For three weeks she hadn’t been able to get away from either of them. She’d hardly been out of the cellar since she’d arrived in the Ghetto, had hardly seen daylight in all that time. Snipers made wandering around during the day a dangerous occupation and she only risked it when hunger forced her to scavenge for food. Ella wasn’t sure if she could take much more. And neither, she thought, could the Poles.
Desperately, courageously and tirelessly as the Poles had fought, the SS had made steady and relentless advances into the Ghetto. It seemed that every night the WFA was obliged to abandon one stronghold or another as it was overrun. And, as Ella understood it, there were more of the SS now and they had refined their tactics. No longer were they as arrogant and as careless as they had been in the opening days of the fighting, now there was a deadly, callous professionalism about them.
Archie Clement had learnt. He’d learnt that the best way to beat the WFA was to grind them down, to exhaust them physically and emotionally, to pound them – day and night – with artillery fire. He had made Warsaw into one vast killing zone. The Warsaw Ghetto had become the apotheosis of Asymmetric Warfare.
The General, Ella decided, back in the comfort and safety of the Real World, must be so proud of his creation.
‘Is there a Vanka Maykov in ‘ere?’
Ella turned towards the door. There, silhouetted by the uncertain light cast by an oil lamp, stood a scrawny boy dressed in a tattered and torn SS jacket with a mud-splattered chapka set lopsidedly on his head.
‘I’m Maykov,’ called out Vanka. ‘And who might you be?’
The boy saluted. ‘I am Karol Michalski, Senior Sergeant in Trixie’s Terriers. I’ve got an order to escort you’ – he checked a scruffy piece of paper he had in his hand – ‘an’ a Miss Ella Thomas an’ a Miss Norma Williams to headquarters to meet wiv the WFA Emergency Executive.’
Ella felt a tug on her sleeve. ‘Why are we being taken to headquarters?’ Norma whispered, genuine terror in her voice. She had never come to terms with the fact that Heydrich had put a reward on her head. The lice hadn’t helped her peace of mind either.
