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to the Jewish Ghetto.
    He’d spent a day carefully studying the Wall surrounding the Ghetto, analyzing it surreptitiously from the apartment buildings
     and shops across the narrow streets. It was almost beyond his comprehension—wherever he stood outside the Wall, Polish children
     played in the streets while their mothers went about their daily chores, shopping, chatting with their neighbors, trying to
     maintain some semblance of normalcy in the face of the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, less than twenty yards away, if the sketchy
     reports reaching Paris were at all accurate, hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings were being systematically
     murdered. It just didn’t seem possible.
    When he thought no one was looking, he’d stood by the Wall, touched it. In some places it was as tall as he was, in others
     it must have been as much as six feet taller, all of it of sturdy red brick and mortar. At the top, barbed wire spiraled its
     length, supplemented in places by shards of broken glass embedded in the mortar. A serious wall, designed to let no one in,
     and no one out. He could take the Wall, he knew—especially under the cover of night—and make it into the Ghetto. But back
     out, with an elderly rabbi and his wife…He had to keep looking for a weakness in the Germans’ design.
    It had been midafternoon when he noticed Rivka near a bakery on Zelanza Street, close to the western face of the Wall. He
     had remembered seeing her in another market earlier in the day, the dark-eyed waif remarkable among the other pigtailed Polish
     girls because of the tattered and frayed overcoat that seemed way too large for her but not nearly warm enough for the January
     cold. But now the coat seemed to fit her, in an odd sort of way.
    From across the street, he had watched her go into the bakery and, quick as a flash, stuff two loaves of bread into the coat
     while the baker was distracted. She scurried from the shop before the baker had even looked up from his customer, then she
     strolled casually down the street as if nothing had happened.
    Smuggling. Stealing food to smuggle back into the Ghetto, MacLeod was willing to bet. And she was good at it, too, by the
     look of things. If she could get in and out of the Ghetto, there must be a way for him, as well. He had followed her from
     a distance.
    Soon they had reached a section of the Wall that faced onto several blocks of apartments blown to hell by the Germans in the
     battle for Warsaw. Corners of brick buildings jutted up out of rubble a yard deep, bleak monuments to those who had lived
     and died there. There were no other pedestrians around, no shops, no residents. Only devastation, and a young girl on a mission.
     MacLeod was careful to stay hidden in the shadows.
    She looked around carefully, then started toward the Wall. Then, in that paranoia that is only bred of desperation, she must
     have heard something, or caught a glimpse of something, because she turned around abruptly and spotted MacLeod.
    Her eyes grew wide with fear, but the fear quickly mixed with something that could have been defiance when she realized he
     wasn’t a soldier and he was alone. MacLeod spoke fast, before he lost her. “Little girl,” he said quietly, “I need your help.
Proszg
.” But his strangely accented Polish had only proven to her he was an outsider, and she turned and ran through the rubble,
     away from the Wall as fast as she could, as if the devil himself was chasing her.
    MacLeod had tried to follow—she left a clear trail of food dropped from her overcoat that would have pleased Hansel and Gretel—but
     when he’d made it through the shifting rubble and back to a busy street nearby, he had lost her.
    All the next afternoon he had hidden in the rubble, hoping against hope that she’d make her rounds again and have to return
     his way. Just before sundown he finally saw her, coat bulging with stolen food, looking around her constantly as she walked,
     wary,