The Runner

by Christopher Reich

  Mullins lowered his eyes, sighing loudly, then landing both fists softly on the desktop. “Aye, the polio. Nearly killed Mr. Roosevelt, too. Poor boy, hardly stood a chance. He’s with the Lord now. At least we can take comfort in that.” He drew on his cigar and sat back in his chair. “I am sorry about Father Francis. He was the good egg, wasn’t he?”

  And this time, Judge felt the barb. The good egg. He being the bad one: the violence-prone urchin on his way to the state reformatory until Spanner Mullins had intervened. His self-pity angered him until he recognized it for what it was. Mullins’s none-too-subtle way of letting him know who was in charge.

  “Yes, he was,” Judge answered equably. “Francis was always the good one.”

  “And this bastard, Seyss, you say he’s the man responsible?”

  Judge patted the briefcase by his side, happy to be on the safe side of reminiscence. “Eyewitness evidence written in the Germans’ own hand.”

  “I imagined as much. Else you wouldn’t be sitting here before me.”

  Suddenly, Mullins was out of his chair, stubbing out the cigar while circling the desk and motioning for Judge to join him. “Off your duff, then, lad. The boss wants to say his hellos before his noontime ride.”

  “Patton?”

  “Who else?”

  “SO THIS IS JUDGE? He doesn’t look like such a mean sonuvabitch to me. Show him in, dammit. Show him in!”

  General of the Army George S. Patton, Jr., strode across the room with the energy of an untamed stallion. Resplendent in tan breeches and black riding boots, pearl-handled revolver at his side and cigar clenched in his teeth, he was the personification of American victory: brash, arrogant, and with a shower of stars on his uniform—Judge counted twenty-four in all—more than a little overwhelming.

  “Got here in a hurry, I see,” he said. “I admire a man with a fire under his ass.”

  Judge was sure to give the extended hand a firm shake. “It’s an honor, sir,”

  Patton patted him on the arm while shooting Mullins a questioning glance. “Sure this is the right man, Colonel? I’m not certain he’s quite the ferocious bastard you advertised.”

  Mullins smiled broadly, locking his arms behind his back. “That he is, General. Just give him a little prodding. Believe me, he’s tougher than a bulldog and at least half as smart.”

  Patton roared, and kicked the white bull terrier sleeping at his feet. “Hear that, Willie, you yellow bastard?”

  “Willie” for William the Conqueror, Judge remembered. The dog whimpered and buried his head under his paws.

  The three men were standing in the center of Patton’s palatial office. At the far end of the room sat a broad pine desk framed by the Stars and Stripes and the colors of the United States Third Army. Behind the desk, a French window rose from the polished wooden floor to the molded ceiling, which itself was a masterwork. Painted in the center of the ceiling was a trompe l’oeil watercolor of Apollo in his golden chariot parting the clouds and casting a bolt of lightning from what appeared a height of a hundred feet, but was only about fifteen. The twin runes of the SS—flashes they were called—adorned the collar of his tunic. It was a suitably pagan image, thought Judge, but by then Patton was talking again.

  “I appreciate you stepping away from your duty in Luxembourg and giving us a hand. The war crimes trials are an important event. A soldier finds his glory on the battlefield. The place for a lawyer is a courtroom. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. If you want out, say so now. I don’t want you quitting midstream.”

  “No, sir,” said Judge loudly, responding to Patton’s infectious bravado. “My only regret is that the transfer is temporary. I’ll be with you for seven days. I hope that proves to be enough time.”

  “Hell, Major, in thirty-six hours, I turned the entire Third Army on its axis and motored a hundred miles through the shittiest piece of weather you’d ever laid eyes on to relieve my good friend, General McAuliffe, at Bastogne. If I could keep forty thousand men moving for three days in a blizzard while under enemy fire, you can find one lousy German in seven.”

  “Yessir.” There it was again. The booming voice. The willful nod. Give him a machine gun, point the way, and he’d be over the top in a second, screaming like a banshee as he stormed an enemy pillbox. Patton had that strong an effect on a man.

  The general looked older in person than he did in his photographs. He was a tall man, bald save a crust of white hair. His face was ruddy, possessed of a wind-kissed hue that spoke of hours spent outdoors. His eyes were a hard agate blue, measuring their range of fire from concrete gun slits. His mouth was cast in permanent disapproval. The first words you’d expect to see it utter were “fuck” or “shit” or “piss,” and you wouldn’t be disappointed. Older, Judge thought, but damned fit for a man of sixty.

  Clamping the cigar in the corner of his mouth, Patton wrapped an arm around Judge’s shoulder and guided him to the side of the room. “Mullins tells me this is a personal matter between you and Major Seyss?”

  “Seyss was the scene commander at Malmedy. He issued the order to open fire.”

  “And your brother, the priest, he was there?”

  “That would be Francis Xavier. He should never have been at the front.”

  But Patton didn’t appear to hear. Eyes wrinkled in distaste, he stared at the floor, slowly shaking his head. “Hard to believe a man of Seyss’s caliber could do such a thing. He ran for his country in the ’36 Olympics, you know? The Boche called him the White Lion. He was a national hero.”

  Judge wasn’t sure if Patton was appalled by Seyss’s behavior or trying to defend it. Patton was an Olympian, too. He’d represented the United States in the modern pentathlon in the 1912 Games in Stockholm. Maybe that explained the prideful note in his voice.

  Patton shook off his reverie with a grunt, and strode to the center of the room. The time for intimacy was over, his buoyant manner restored. “I take it you know the details of Seyss’s escape. Frankly, I’m livid. We can’t have the German people getting the idea that they can kill our boys and get away with it. An officer, no less. I won’t have it, understand?”

  He began a slow march toward the door, one hand patting Judge’s back. “Need anything, call me. Don’t worry about going through proper channels. That’s all bullshit. If there’s a problem, I want to hear from you directly. And if you can’t find me, talk to Mullins. Is that clear?”

  Judge said yes.

  Patton spun to face Mullins, jabbing the cigar at his beefy chest. “And, Colonel, remember what the order from Ike said. Be sure to extend Major Judge our every courtesy and convenience.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Judge caught a sarcastic glance passing between them and the thought came to him that despite their alacrity, these two proud men might be peeved at having an investigator from outside their ranks foisted upon them. Patton’s encouraging hand and enthusiastic voice erased the idea as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Now, Major,” he barked, “draw a weapon from the armory and get the hell out of here. I don’t want to hear a goddamn word from you until you’ve found Seyss.”

  Judge got the message loud and clear. Patton was there if needed, but only in the strictest of emergencies. Firing off a salute, he followed Mullins from the room.

  “Just one more thing, Major,” Patton called from behind his desk.

  Judge froze, craning his head through the door. “Yes, sir?”

  “Don’t bring me the sonuvabitch. Just kill him.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  BACK IN MULLINS’S OFFICE, Judge collapsed in a chair opposite his new commanding officer’s desk. Taking a moment to polish his reading specs, he gave the office a quick once-over. Parquet floors, battered desk, American flag in one corner, regimental flag in the other, and in the center of it all, flashing his leprechaun’s smile, Stanley “Spanner” Mullins. The words to a favorite Gershwin tune played in his head. “Seems like old times just got new again.
”

  Opening his satchel, he withdrew the UNWCC dossier and slid it across the desk. “You seen the file on this guy?”

  Mullins brought it toward him, admiring its heft. “Looks as if Herr Seyss has been attracting the eye of our colleagues in Washington for some time.”

  “Yeah, too long.”

  Setting an elbow on the desk, Judge went over the file’s contents. Seyss had first appeared on Allied radar in the fall of 1942, he explained, as a junior officer attached to Einsatzgruppe B, operating out of Kiev on the Russian front. The Einsatzgruppe, or action commandos, were the bad boys. Professional murderers. Following the wake of the German army’s advance, they methodically rounded up Jews, Gypsies, Communists—just about any minority deemed unsuitable for incorporation into the Thousand Year Reich—and killed them. He turned up a second time in Poland in the spring of ’43, just in time to lead a company of storm troopers on a raid into the Warsaw Ghetto. Eighteen months later, his shadow fell across Frankie’s path in the Ardennes. Looking back, there wasn’t much question of the outcome. Francis hadn’t stood a chance.

  Mullins ran a cracked fingernail across the cover page. “Says here he’s a local boy, born and raised in Munich. Twenty-one Lindenstrasse.”

  Judge had noted the address, too, and was anxious to visit the place. “Any idea where that is?”

  “None. But, Jesus, lad, didn’t you get a look at the place flying in? The city was eighty percent destroyed. Even if he still has a home, odds are he won’t go near it.”

  Maybe, thought Judge, but it was as logical a starting point. Helping Mullins flip the page, he continued where he’d left off. “Seyss’s father was a factory owner. Nothing about the mother. No word if either of them made it through the war. He had one brother, a queer who got himself a one-way ticket to Ravensbruck in ’39.”

  “They killed him because he was a nancy boy?” Mullins gave a startled guffaw. “A bit rough, wouldn’t you say?”

  Judge simply shook his head. One more incomprehensible crime among a thousand others. What frightened him more was the allegiance Seyss continued to show his government after they’d killed his brother. A true believer, he thought, and the recognition drew goose bumps up and down his arms. Rising from his chair, he circled the desk to better view the file with Mullins.

  A color photograph of Erich Seyss taken upon his arrest was stapled to the inside cover. Seyss faced the camera squarely, dressed in a charcoal tunic with a pointed black collar, an identification board bearing his name held in front of his chest. He was almost handsome. A harder version of an East Coast blue blood, Judge thought. Bringing the mug shot closer, he memorized the features for the hundredth time: the line of the hair, high on his forehead with a fragile widow’s peak. The set of the lips, thin and determined. The frank gaze, yes, especially the gaze. A man couldn’t disguise his eyes. They were pale, almost translucent. Even in his prisoner’s attire, Seyss looked sure of himself. Not cocky, like the hoods who worked for the Dutchman or Luciano, but resolute. And something else, too. A word popped into Judge’s head. Remorseless.

  A true believer.

  Drawing the file toward him, he removed the photograph and set it to one side. He returned his attention to the stack of papers, choosing a two-page report and handing it to Mullins. It was a translation of the after-action report filed by the First SS Panzer Division on December 17, 1944. “Here’s our evidence.”

  Mullins read the report without comment, pausing only to remove his half-smoked cigar from the ashtray and relight it. Judge read the report along with him. When he’d finished, he knew that, like Francis, he, too, had a higher calling.

  “Brutal bastard,” sighed Mullins, chomping the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “If I were you, Dev, I’d take the general’s advice. Kill him and be done with it.”

  Judge looked queerly at Mullins, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “That’s against the law, Spanner.”

  Mullins beckoned him close with a curl of his finger and a crooked smile. “This is Germany, lad. There is no law.”

  START AT THE BEGINNING, MULLINS had taught him. So he did.

  “What about the murder of this Colonel Janks?”

  “I’m afraid General Patton didn’t tell you some of the seamier details surrounding the murder. Seems our man Janks was not the straightest of arrows. Word is, he had an operation going on the side. The second man killed, this Czech fellow, Vlassov, was his partner. The two had a sweet deal running: Nazi souvenirs for victuals.”

  “You’re telling me Janks was starving the prisoners to line his own pockets?” Judge supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. For the past two years, Manhattan had been overflowing with souvenirs from the Pacific—samurai swords, Japanese flags, family photographs taken from the wallets of the emperor’s dead soldiers. It figured that sooner or later wares from Germany would make it back to the States.

  “But mum’s the word,” said Mullins. “This sordid business doesn’t make the late Colonel Janks any less the patriot. Our job is to teach Jerry not to mess with his American overseers.”

  Judge cracked a wry smile. Agree or not, he understood the harmful effect of negative public relations. “You been up to that camp? Easy to sneak out of?”

  “Not yet,” said Mullins. “But it’s not Sing Sing, if that’s what you mean. A few of Seyss’s comrades are still vacationing there. Brace them, if you have to. Maybe one will have some interesting news for you.”

  “Bracing” was cop slang for physically intimidating a suspect to make him talk. Basically, it meant beating the crap out of a man until he confessed. Under Mullins’s tutelage, Judge had become a master practitioner. But after a few years, he’d sworn off it. He’d always harbored the quaint notion that a man was innocent until proven guilty, and that brains were more powerful than brawn.

  “That’s a start, anyway,” he said. “What kind of help can you throw my way?”

  “Last count we’ve got twelve teams fanned out over our zone of occupation, at two hundred officers and three hundred enlisted men whose primary mission in life is to hunt down these Nazi bastards. Officially, they’re part of CIC—counterintelligence. Only ten were policemen back home and fewer than that speak the lingo. Why do you think I’m so glad to see you?”

  Before Judge could offer a sarcastic aside, a short, prim officer bustled into the room. Sporting a pencil-thin mustache, hair slick with brilliantine, he looked like a poor man’s Errol Flynn—a little fatter, without the dashing chin and with a right eye that wandered aimlessly.

  “Afternoon, Mullins,” he said, before turning to Judge and offering a hand. “Hadley Everett, Division G-Two. I coordinate the intelligence ops around here. MIS. CIC. SIS. Glad to have you aboard.”

  Judge spotted the twin stars pinned to each epaulet and rocketed from his chair to a position of rigid attention. “General Everett. It’s a pleasure, sir.”

  “At ease, Major.” Everett eyed him up and down, as if Judge were a bum asking for a dime. “Not many men wangle a transfer from Ike. Impressive. I just hope you’re up to the task.”

  News spread quickly, thought Judge. He couldn’t help noticing the oversized ring on Everett’s finger. A West Point grad. Ringknockers, they were called. The military’s equivalent of a Harvard man—Judge’s natural nemesis in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Summoning his powers of equanimity, he smiled. “Well, sir, I certainly wouldn’t want to disappoint General Eisenhower.”

  “Good thinking. Still, if you need any help finding your way, don’t hesitate to shout.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I think I can manage.”

  Judge’s work gathering information about Hermann Goering’s activities had brought him into contact with members of each of the branches Everett had mentioned. MIS stood for military intelligence, the group responsible for gathering information about the strength and intentions of enemy forces. Their goal was to determine who would attack, where and when. Interrogation of prisoners, behind-the-lines espionage, and photo
reconnaissance fell into their bailiwick. Now that the war was over, they were out of a job.

  CIC, or counterintelligence, was concerned with the security of American forces in the field. Their mission was to identify all organizations or groups of people among the civilian populations who might be hostile to American forces. In occupied Germany, that meant tracking down war criminals and other Germans targeted for automatic arrest.

  SIS stood for signals intelligence—the eavesdroppers and code breakers.

  Judge didn’t like this showboat telling him what to do, so he went over to the offensive. “I take it Seyss’s photo has been wired to all police units around the zone.”

  “Not all of them, I’m afraid,” replied Everett. “Wires are still down in some places and it’s an extremely busy time for us. Tallyho and all. But I’ve been instructed to provide any resources we can muster.”

  That was double-talk if he’d ever heard it. Only time would tell if Everett was as good as his word. “I’d like to suggest that we dispatch couriers with copies of the photograph to every CIC unit and military police detachment in our zone. We’ll start at the army level and work our way down through regiment, division, and so on. Enough copies should be made to give our counterparts in the British, French, and Russian zones.”

  “You can forget about the Russians,” said Mullins. “Ivan doesn’t play ball.”

  “Rather,” said Everett, running a finger along his mustache. “Best to steer clear of our Soviet comrades. Go on, then, Major. I’m keen to hear what else you have in mind.”

  Judge relaxed a notch, happy to see that Everett was receptive to his plan. “Seyss is no different from a criminal on the run. He may be on his home turf but if we get the word out that we’re after him, and if we offer some kind of reward, someone, somewhere is going to recognize him. As General Patton pointed out, he was an Olympian. That can work for and against us. On the one hand, a good portion of the population may recognize him. On the other hand, if he’s considered a hero, they may be hesitant about turning him over to us. Regardless, we get the word out that we’re serious about catching this bastard.”