The boy stepped around his mother and extended a hand. He had straight blond hair that fell to his eyebrows and pale blue eyes. It was obvious to Judge that he was ten pounds too thin. “Good morning, sir,” he ventured in accented English.
“I always knew who would win the war,” Ingrid Bach whispered to Judge, then in a louder voice, “May I introduce my son, Paul von Wilimovsky.”
Judge gave the boy’s hand a firm shake. “Are you taking good care of your mother?”
“Yes, sir. I gather the wood and clean Grandpapa’s bedpan.”
“Pauli!” Ingrid tousled the boy’s hair. “He’s the man of the house. And you? Children?”
Judge was taken aback by the encroachment on his private sphere. Usually he would say “none,” and move on to another subject. No one liked to share a passing acquaintance’s bad news, especially when it concerned a six-year-old boy who had died of poliomyelitis. Frankly, it was easier not to say anything. Still, something about the way that Ingrid looked, child hugged to her waist, her broken life on unapologetic display, made him feel that lying would be harder than telling the truth.
“A boy,” he said. “His name was Ryan. He left us three years ago.”
Ingrid reached out a hand to touch him even as she hugged her boy to her waist. “My dear major, I’m so sorry.” He was unable to look at her as she spoke. The immediacy of her grief threatened to reawaken emotions over which he had no control. “Pauli came three weeks early. For the first few days he refused to nurse. He was so fragile, so . . .’’ She let the words drop off. “I don’t know how I would’ve managed without him. He’s everything to me.”
Judge looked at the hand on his arm, acutely aware of its insistent pressure and its assumption of intimacy. He and his wife had never touched after Ryan’s death.
“You haven’t had another?” she asked. The question was spontaneous, a gesture of hope.
“I wanted to, but it didn’t work out. Anyway, we’re not married any—” He cut himself off midstream, realizing he’d said too much already. Her sincerity, however unquestioned, was an invasion and had no place in the day’s conversation. Whatever empathy he felt toward Ingrid Bach, he had to remember whose blood flowed in her veins. “No,” he said, curtly.
Ingrid dropped her hand from his arm, retreating to the opposite side of the corridor. She led him down the back stairs, through the kitchen to the great hall. Pauli took off down the driveway as soon as she opened the front door and in a moment was lost in the high grass leading toward the lake. Judge spotted his driver playing ball with the other GIs. He placed two fingers into the corner of his mouth and whistled loudly, signaling for him to bring the jeep around on the double. Waiting, he turned to look at Sonnenbrücke’s imposing gray facade. Veins of crystal swarmed inside each cut stone. No wonder the place glittered like a diamond.
Ingrid stood beside him on the brick portico, gazing down the valley. “Why are you looking for Erich?”
“He killed two men escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp. One was an American officer.”
Judge thought it funny how the deaths of two men didn’t sound like anything too urgent, and wished he could add to it. He remembered Altman’s words, the sly suspicion that Seyss owned some ulterior motive for escaping other than simply to gain his own freedom. “One last race,” according to Corporal Dietsch. “Kameraden.” Would Judge ever find out what it was?
“I thought most of our soldiers had already been released from your holding pens,” said Ingrid.
“Most have. But Seyss was a special case. He was being held as a war criminal.”
She averted her eyes and Judge could see a shiver rustle her shoulders. It was a subject about which she knew too much already. “And how did you learn about us? I mean Erich and me—that we were engaged to be married.”
Judge looked over her shoulder, willing the goddammed driver to get his ass over here. Seeing the jeep approach, he returned his eyes to her. Christ, she was a mess. Her knees were bruised. Her dress bore greasy stains near her waist, where she wiped her hands when cooking. And she could do with a little makeup. He forced himself to imagine her together with the man whose picture he carried in his pocket. Seyss, the Olympian; Seyss, the owner of two Iron Crosses; Seyss, the man who’d murdered Judge’s only brother and seventy more defenseless Americans.
She’s a Bach. Remember that.
“I’m sorry,” he answered, “but I’m not at liberty to say.” Behind him, the jeep arrived with a screech of the brakes. He climbed in, offering the slightest doff of his cap. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting back. It’s a long ride to Bad Toelz. I thank you for your cooperation. Good-bye, Miss Bach.”
Somehow von Wilimovsky didn’t suit her—the Bach name and its colored history were marked indelibly upon her—and this time she didn’t correct him. She bobbed her chin, then turned and walked back inside the lodge.
BEFORE THEY REACHED THE CREST of the mountain, Judge asked his driver to stop. He stepped from the jeep and walked to the edge of the road so that he could stare down at Sonnenbrücke. So far below, it looked like a model cut set against a field of green. For a moment he thought he saw her standing in front of the castle, as still as one of the porcelain figurines she collected, then a cloud passed and he realized it had only been a ray of light.
CHAPTER
23
HEADLIGHTS PIERCED THE FALLING RAIN. First one set, then another, until an entire column was winding through the darkness and Seyss knew it was the convoy they’d been waiting for. The trucks were still far away, at least three kilometers by his reckoning, too distant even to hear the grumble of their engines. The parade of lights passed through the village of Kronberg, then traversed the flat countryside. He counted seven trucks in all. His eyes left them, advancing along the ribbon of black a shade darker than everything surrounding it. The road wound through a hamlet of barns and farmhouses, crossed a brook, then began the climb into the mountains toward his position.
“Sit tight,” whispered Hans-Christian Lenz. “They’ll be here in ten minutes. All we have to do is wait. My brother will take care of the rest. Tonight, we’re garbagemen. We pick up all the trash that falls from the trucks!”
“What’s on the agenda for tomorrow night?” asked Seyss. “Cleaning the sewers?”
Lenz grinned wolfishly. “It would give me great pleasure to tell an esteemed officer of the Waffen-SS to fuck himself.”
“Would it, now?”
“Yes. Immense, in fact.” Lenz wiped the water dripping from his mustache. “Know where I can find one?”
Seyss laughed dryly, hunkering down in the waist-high brush. Thank Christ for Lenz, he thought to himself. He had found his traveling companion in a dingy two-room flat in Darmstadt, exactly where he’d said he’d be should Seyss ever pass through town. It had been harder to convince Bauer to lend a hand with the operation without spilling news of it to Egon Bach. Ingenuity and improvisation were not words in Bauer’s everyday lexicon. Pride was, however, and once Seyss had shared his personal reasons for not wanting to approach the Circle of Fire for assistance so early in the mission, Bauer had agreed to go along.
The Americans appeared firm in their desire to bring Seyss to justice. Jeeps with loudspeakers mounted onto their hoods patrolled the streets of Heidelberg, and he assumed every other large city, blaring his name and description and the crimes for which he was wanted. Some enterprising Yanks had even posted Wanted: Dead or Alive flyers bearing his photo all over Darmstadt and Frankfurt. Had anyone recognized him, they would have happily broken a bottle over his head and dragged him to the authorities to claim their cash reward. As it was, few people gave him a second look. With his black hair, borrowed spectacles, and adopted slouch, he looked like any other bedraggled survivor. Germans were too concerned with their own plight to keep an eye on their neighbors.
Seyss pulled his jacket closer around, shivering in the foul weather. “Biedermann, Bauer,” he said in a tight whisper, “spread out a
long this side of the road. Steiner, you go with Lenz across the road.”
“Who the hell is running this operation?” protested Lenz. “Me or you?” He shook his head and after muttering something about officers not knowing their proper place, turned to Steiner and said, “Come on, then, didn’t you hear what the Führer said?”
Seyss watched as the two men shuffled across the slick road and disappeared into the undergrowth fifteen feet away. Lenz was too sarcastic for his taste, but a true kamerad. When informed of Seyss’s dilemma earlier that evening, the stout Berliner had tugged at his mustache and shaken his head.
“A thousand American? That’s ten thousand reichsmarks these days. Certainly more than my lousy life is worth.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Seyss had said. “But can you help?”
“Yes, but on one condition. I have a right to know who I am working with. You’ve told me your rank, now tell me your name.”
Without hesitating, Seyss spoke his true name and explained why the entire U.S. Army was looking for him. He told him about killing Janks and Vlassov and nearly being captured by Judge. He required a thousand dollars to escape the country. While not the entire truth, it was all Lenz needed to know.
“You’re that Seyss—the White Lion?” Lenz had crowed in disbelief. “I was at Olympic Stadium the day you ran. My entire family had crowded onto the U-bahn for the trip. It seemed like all of Berlin was there. You were magnificent.”
“I was fourth and no such thing.”
But Lenz would not be deterred in expressing his admiration. “You ran in the Olympic Games. You were our national champion. Don’t be modest.” He shook Seyss by the shoulders. “The White Lion himself. It’s an honor to know you.”
Politely, Seyss had beaten him back. “What about the money?”
“I can’t give you a thousand dollars I don’t have. But with a little luck, I can help you get your hands on something just as good.” And with that, Lenz had gone on to explain the neat “business” his brother, Rudy, had set up for himself.
Every few days, a convoy of trucks left the American airbase at Darmstadt for the German army hospital in Königstein, seventy miles away. The trucks carried medicine, canned food, and other hospital supplies—all of it packed into cartons weighing between fifty and one hundred pounds. Through an American pal, Rudy Lenz had wangled a job where he not only supervised the loading and unloading of the trucks but chose the five-man team that did the actual lifting. His instructions to his men were simple: Stow the choicest items in the last truck, where the loading crew would ride to the hospital atop the sea of swaying boxes. The rest, Lenz had explained, was easy. “A milk run,” in the slang of the American flyers.
Or so he had said five hours ago.
Seyss kept his eyes glued to the straight expanse of road leading from the village of Hoechs, on the flats below them. The spill of beams rounded a corner, a kilometer away. The first truck emerged from behind a stone wall and began climbing the hill. Its engine’s lusty growl turned to a whine, then a howl as the driver worked his way through the gears. Soon the air was abuzz with the angry attack of seven two-and-a-half-ton trucks struggling up a steep incline.
Seyss flattened his body in the sopping grass, keeping his head raised just high enough to see Lenz across from him. The night smelled of jasmine and pine and a hundred other scents he knew and loved. The ground began to tremble, and he was unable to keep his stomach from trembling along with it. How many times had he lain like this during the war, submachine gun cradled in his arms, a company of men awaiting his command to attack? Each time he’d been paralyzed with fright, sure that when he’d raise his arm and cry for his men to attack, his voice would fail him and he’d collapse bawling onto the ground. The same fragility accosted him now.
Running his hands through the damp grass, he forced his breath to come slowly, deeply. The mechanized roar of the approaching convoy cleared his mind of his old fears. Never once had he flinched from battle. Never once had he failed at the decisive moment. But since leaving Villa Ludwig in Munich, a discomfiting question had haunted his mind’s periphery: Why was he taking this last and greatest risk? To whom did he owe this service? To the Fatherland? To the memory of Adolf Hitler? To the German people? At one time or another, he had told himself that it was for any one of them. Horseshit, all of it! He had served. He had wept. He had bled. He owed no one a thing. Sensing the ground shake under him, ears assailed by the scream of twenty-eight wheels lumbering up a slick hill in the dark of the night, Erich Seyss faced down the answer he knew had been lurking inside him. He was doing it for himself. To keep whatever was left of him alive.
Lenz raised a hand, his signal to be ready to move. Seyss nodded his head in response. The lead truck was twenty meters away. Suddenly it sounded its horn, a sharp, ear-splitting bleat. Seyss spun his head to check if any of his men were visible. Biedermann and Bauer lay flat on their bellies, head to the ground. He looked back toward the road as the horn blared again. A pair of deer—a buck and a doe—escaped the truck’s beams, darting into the tree line.
The first truck thundered past, then the second. All Seyss could see of the drivers was a fleeting glimpse of a cigarette’s ember glowing in the pitch-dark cabin. The fourth truck passed and the fifth. He brought himself to his knees. The last truck rumbled by. He rose and began running up the hill behind the truck. Around him, Biedermann and Bauer were doing the same. Lenz trotted up the incline, Steiner close behind.
As if on cue, the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck fell. Two men stood at either side of the bay. Seyss guessed the fat one waving was Rudy Lenz. Suddenly, a torrent of boxes tumbled onto the slick asphalt. Seyss picked up the closest to his feet and carried it into the brush. The word oleomargarine was stenciled on the cardboard. He dropped it, then went back for another. The five men scrambled back and forth, slipping on the pavement, hoisting boxes, throwing them into the undergrowth, then advancing up the hill and doing it again. It was back-breaking work and before the taillamps of the last truck were out of sight, Bauer and Lenz were doubled over, gulping down air as if they’d been punched in the gut. Seyss ran all the harder for them. Corned beef, tinned milk, Hershey bars, lard, sardines, something called peanut butter, chicken, pickled herring, more corned beef, peaches, cherries, and flour. Finally, even he had to stop for breath. He stood for a few seconds, hands resting on his knees, staring up the dark slope. In the pounding rain, the trail of boxes looked like stepping stones climbing a waterfall.
It is straw, Lenz had said earlier. And we will spin it into gold.
Seyss gathered his breath and went after another carton. He didn’t need gold. Just a thousand dollars and a Russian GAZ.
CHAPTER
24
HIS NAME WAS OTTO KIRCH, but everyone knew him as the Octopus, said Hans-Christian Lenz, and he controlled the upper levels of the black market in the Frankfurt–Heidelberg corridor. He was a fat man, three hundred pounds if an ounce, bald as an egg with a schoolboy’s apple cheeks and a rattlesnake’s glassy eyes. Dangerous, Herr Major. Very dangerous. No one knew where he’d been or what he’d done during the war. Most guessed he’d laid up somewhere safe—Vichy, France, Portugal, maybe Denmark—waiting for the fighting to end.
Waiting for his time to begin, Seyss added silently.
The two men were driving south toward Mannheim in Rudy Lenz’s battered prewar Citroën truck. The previous night’s haul was loaded in the back, concealed behind a pile of brick and masonry. The added weight slowed the truck to twenty miles an hour. It was good cover. The only Germans driving these days were those rebuilding their ravaged cities. Every few minutes an American jeep or truck sped by, horn blaring. The victors owned the road along with everything else.
Traffic thinned as they entered the outskirts of Mannheim. Allied bombing had so completely destroyed the city that there were simply no more people living there. Lenz turned right off the main road and for the next forty minutes guided the truck onto a s
eries of unpaved tracks, each bumpier than the last.
The Octopus ran his operation from the ruins of a turbine-assembly plant in the center of town, a part of the city that looked to Seyss as if it had been hammered flat into a million tiny pieces. Where the plant had stood was a mystery, for nothing remained taller than five feet. Not a thing. It was a desert landscape, with miniature dunes of rubble and ash rising and falling as far as the eye could see. At eight o’clock on a clear and breezy morning, not a soul was visible.
In the midst of this wasteland, Lenz cut the engine and announced that they had arrived.
“Where the hell is everybody?” asked Seyss as he climbed from the cabin.
“Wait and see. Whoever says the German is not a resourceful animal is mistaken.”
Seyss walked to the rear of the truck, flipped down the tail, and began hoisting boxes to the ground. He couldn’t share his companion’s jovial mood until the transaction was completed and a thousand dollars, or its equivalent in Reichsmarks, lined his pockets.
“Don’t bother,” said Lenz, motioning at the boxes. “There’s plenty enough men for that. We’re gross chieber, you and I. Big-timers. We don’t do our own lifting.”
Seyss shook his head and kept hauling boxes from the truck. If nothing else, the activity helped relieve his tension. He had not slept well the night before, despite the success of their midnight raid. He was exposing himself too often. Walking too freely through cities rife with Americans and their lackeys. Revealing his name to too many people. He had no right to such bravado. He wasn’t worried about Bauer or Biedermann or Steiner, but now Lenz, too, knew his identity. Yes, Lenz was a kamerad. Yes, he was doing him a great service by turning over the profits from his half of the take. But what about his brother, Rudy? It went without saying that he knew Seyss’s name, too. Could he be trusted? The chain was growing longer. Sooner or later there would be a weak link.
The Runner Page 22
