“Pity. You’d be a rich man.”
“Give me some time,” cracked Rizzo, his voice steadier. “We just opened for business.”
Seyss relaxed a notch. That was more like the Rizzo he knew. “Lead the way. Once we gather up everything, we’ll take a look at the truck. You have it ready?”
“Yep. Gassed up and rarin’ to go. She’s a beaut. A Ford deuce and a half with Ivan’s red star painted big as life on the hood and the doors. Must’ve been shipped over during Lend-Lease. Whatever you do, promise me you’ll get it the hell out of town in a hurry. Anybody stops you, just speak a little Russkie and pretend you don’t understand what they’re saying.”
Seyss smiled inwardly. That was precisely his plan. “Come the dawn, we’ll be far from these gates. Don’t be worrying yourself, Captain.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Follow me.”
Rizzo set off as if on a forced march. From the entry, he turned left, counting off the stacks of crates as he passed them. Reaching six, he made an abrupt right turn and vanished into one of the narrow corridors that ran the length of the armory. Seyss followed close behind, then Bauer and the others. Their flashlights cut a shallow path, barely illuminating the concrete floor five feet in front of them. Above their shoulders, the crates brooded like crumbling statues to a pagan deity.
Seyss felt at home in the darkness, his incipient fear of tight spaces lost amid the trudging of rubber-soled feet and the hushed intake of breath. A frisson of excitement warmed his stomach, the same self-congratulatory sensation he experienced before a race when he sized up the competition and determined he would win. He reminded himself that this was only a preliminary heat. The main event would engender a return to Berlin, a return to the city of his greatest triumphs and his greatest defeats.
Arriving at a crossroads of sorts, Rizzo thrust his flashlight in front of him and made a sweep of the area. “There you are, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Your next exhibit.”
Seyss handed his flashlight to Bauer, then stepped past Rizzo. The guns and uniforms he had picked out sat on top of a pile of splintered palates: the Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle with twenty-seven notches cut into the stock, the Pepshkas with their drum barrels, the Tokarev pistols, the pea-green tunics with sky-blue epaulets. Everything exactly as it had been left. A metal trunk rested on the ground next to the pallets. He flipped open the locks to find the ammunition he’d requested. But all that was no longer enough. Proximity to his goal made him the greedier.
“Grenades,” Seyss called. “For true authenticity, our exhibit will require a few dozen grenades.”
Rizzo hesitated, looking lost. “They’re in the ammo pen.”
“Go get them.”
Rizzo checked over his shoulder, looking toward the entrance to the garage as if expecting someone to answer for him. “They’ll cost you more.”
Seyss pulled an envelope from his jacket and handed it to Rizzo. “Surely you’ll toss them in gratis. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do.”
Rizzo opened the envelope, running a thumb over ten hundred-dollar bills. Again he glanced over his shoulder toward the garage. “I don’t know. Guns, a little ammunition, that’s one thing. Grenades, they’re a whole ’nother ball game. And if you don’t mind my saying, your friends don’t look too much like gentlemen.”
Behind them, Bauer, Biedermann and Steiner were sorting through the uniforms. Though they spoke in hushed tones, one could not mistake the clipped cadence of their language.
“The war has made rogues of us all, I’m afraid,” said Seyss, his patience at an end. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Rizzo was too nervous, too much changed from their last visit. Removing Bauer’s work-issue Luger from the lee of his back, he pointed it at Rizzo’s chest, and said “The grenades, Captain. It’s not a point for discussion.”
“Give me a break, will you?” Rizzo’s hands shuttled from one pocket to another searching for his key ring.
“Front left,” said Seyss. “Don’t pretend you don’t know where they are.”
Rizzo muttered something about “fuckin’ Nazis” and how “he never wanted to do this in the first place,” then in a fit of frustration, threw the keys at Seyss. “Get ’em yourselves. They’re free. All you want. Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”
“Where am I going?” Seyss cringed at the remonstrative twang to Rizzo’s voice. Staring hard at the American, he caught the man’s gaze dart high above his shoulder, the brown eyes open wide in expectation. He knew the look. Hope, impatience, desperation rolled into one. Spinning his head, he followed Rizzo’s eyes, but saw only the fuzzy outline of crates receding into the darkness. Someone was there, though. He knew it. He yanked Rizzo by the collar and jabbed the pistol’s snout under his jaw. “What’s happening here, Captain?”
“Nothin’s happening. What do ya mean?”
Seyss levered the barrel up, so that the gun sight punctured his skin. “Say again?”
Rizzo moved his mouth, but no words came out. Or if they did Seyss did not hear them. For at that moment, a siren wailed, a door flew open, and the midnight sun burst into the armory.
WHICH DUMB SON OF A BITCHturned on the kliegs?
Devlin Judge buried his face in his arm, squeezing his eyelids shut to block out the brilliant light. Who turned on the lights? Who ordered the siren? No one was supposed to have moved until he gave the signal.
Lifting his head, Judge pried open an eye. Spears of shimmering white punctured his dilated pupils. The light immobilized him, nailing him to his splintery perch on top of a stack of Sokoloy machine guns. One hand slid to the walkie-talkie by his waist. It stood upright, its antenna poking through a draft vent cut in the roof. No, he had not keyed in the signal by mistake.
For two hours, he’d been waiting for Seyss. Waiting for the White Lion to show his prized skin. From his vantage point high above the armory floor, he’d followed Seyss’s progress through the armory. Everything had been going according to plan—Seyss and his men arriving at twelve midnight on the nose, Rizzo leading them to the guns and uniforms, keeping the conversation light. Then Seyss had asked for the grenades and Rizzo had broken. A few more feet, Judge wanted to yell at him. A few more feet and we would have cast the net!
An entire company of military police surrounded the armory, 175 men in all. Armored personnel carriers stood at all four corners of the compound. Two jeep-mounted klieg lights had been set up inside the garage to ensure proper visibility. But no one was to have budged, no one was to have moved a muscle, until Judge keyed in the signal and Mullins blew his goddammed whistle.
Forcing open his eyes, Judge saw the armory floor awash in a spectral light. Seyss stood directly below, a gun in his outstretched hand. He looked no different than he had a few days ago, hair dyed black, dressed in a navy jacket and trousers. His plan withering around him, he appeared cool and relaxed. Rizzo cowered a few feet away, raising his hands to his face as if to defend himself against a blow. It struck Judge how they looked like actors on a stage, their every feature defined, their movements dramatized by the kliegs’ merciless vigil. Then, as if a casual afterthought, Seyss raised the pistol and fired it point-blank into Rizzo’s face. Rizzo dropped like a sack of manure. No thespian could replicate the ocean of blood advancing across the concrete floor from the back of his head.
For one long second, all was static; a beautifully lit diorama scored by a bullet’s earsplitting report and a siren’s undulating wail. Seyss stood poised above Rizzo’s body, while his comrades were captured in various positions of distress. Bauer, the stockiest and oldest of them, stared blindly into the blaze of the kliegs; Steiner, the spindly clerk, checked the chamber of the sniper’s rifle with a marksman’s competence. And Biedermann, blond and cagey, crouched behind the steamer trunk packed with ammunition. Then came the bone-crunching staccato of a heavy machine gun and all was motion.
Chunks of wood and tin and concrete erupted from the walls, the floor, the mountains of rotting
crates, arcing through the air like exploding rock. Seyss ducked his head and dashed for protection behind the nearest box. With his pistol, he motioned for Steiner to fire at the light. His exhortations came too late. The lanky dark-haired man managed only to lift the rifle to his shoulder when he was caught in the chest with a string of bullets. He had no time even to scream. Lifted off his feet, his thorax burst in an ejaculation of torn flesh and viscera. As his body hit the floor, Judge saw that he had been cut in two. Seyss was yelling for Bauer to get down and for Biedermann to come to him. But Bauer was already down, digging his nails into the concrete floor as if he were hanging from a cliff. And Biedermann, hiding behind the ammunition box, looked as if he wasn’t going anywhere either. A thirty-cal bullet penetrated the trunk, setting off a chain reaction of small-arms fire. A split second later, rounds began to explode inside the box. Biedermann looked this way and that, indecision creasing his features. Just as he began to move toward Seyss, a bullet exited the trunk, finding his jaw, and a microsecond later, his brain and skull. A cap of gore sprayed from his head and he collapsed.
Judge yanked his pistol from its holster and took aim at Seyss. Safety off, hammer back. All evening long, he’d been wondering how he’d react when he saw him, whether, as Seyss himself had advised, he’d shoot first and ask questions later, or if he’d heed his commitment to an orderly arrest. But the turbulent events of the moment, the cacophonous sound and fury erupting all around him, freed him from the choice. Tightening his finger on the trigger, he acknowledged his darkest wish and swore to bring it to fruition.
The Colt bucked in his hand, the first shot going high and to the right, tearing a gaping hole in the crate above Seyss. He fired twice more, but the bullets went astray.
Seyss spun, bringing his pistol in line with his eye, trying at once to aim and to glimpse the man who wanted to kill him. For a split second, their eyes locked, the hunter and the hunted, the prosecutor and the pursued. The light cast Seyss’s face with a crystalline clarity—the cut of the jaw, the flared nostrils, the determined set of his milky blue eyes. Nowhere could Judge read fear. The world was exploding around him, his comrades lay dead and dying, yet Seyss maintained an expression of absolute assurance.
Judge pulled the trigger again, missing, as Seyss let off four rounds in rapid succession. Flame spit from the pistol and Judge slammed his head onto the crate, raising an arm to protect his face from the shards of wood slicing through the air like broken glass. Two inches from his head yawned a jagged hole as large as a pumpkin. He rolled away from it and brought his gun to bear on Seyss.
But Seyss was gone, running across the open floor toward Bauer, his last unwounded comrade. His excursion was short-lived. Three MPs brandishing Thompson submachine guns darted through the door leading from the garage, their entry presaged by ragged bursts of fire. Seyss skidded on a heel as he fought to return to the relative safety of his previous position. He fired twice, felling two of the policemen, and a third time shattering one of the kliegs.
Still the siren wailed.
Judge felt a reckless tide swelling inside him. Everything was going wrong. Rizzo was dead. So were Seyss’s comrades, and now, two American MPs. The army had a term for this: FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. All because some stupid sonuvabitch had turned on the kliegs before he’d been given the order. Overcome with anger, remorse, and most of all frustration, he jumped to his feet and yelled as loudly as he could, “Seyss! Stop, you yellow bastard!”
Seyss turned as if slapped. Never compromising his stride, he raised his gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He was out of ammunition. Judge took dead aim at the moving figure and fired. The first bullet was high, showering Seyss with a barrage of splinters. The second appeared to pass right through him. A jagged chunk of wood spun from the crates behind his shoulder and struck him in the head. Seyss stumbled, bringing a hand to his face as he collapsed to the ground. Judge stepped close to the edge, craning his neck for the sight of blood, even as he contained a triumphant whoop. Had he shot him? With Seyss halfway to the unlit recesses of the armory, it was difficult to tell.
Yet even as Judge strained to make out the prostrate form, a bullet tore into the box at his feet and another passed so close to his head as to make his ear stop up. Two more bullets sliced the air above him and Judge flung himself to the rough surface. Suddenly, he was shaking with fear. A lightning peek around the armory revealed no errant marksmen. He focused once more on Seyss. The German lay still.
But then something else caught Judge’s eye. From the far side of the building, down the row from where Seyss lay, the weakest of lights blinked once, twice, three times. A firefly in the nocturnal gloom. The pattern repeated itself. Short. Long. Short. Dot. Dash. Dot.
Only then did Judge notice that the siren had stopped.
His heartbeat pounded furiously as an urgent voice shouted into the vaulted space. “Grenade!”
Two silver pineapple-shaped canisters sailed into the armory, bouncing once, twice, three times across the floor. Judge’s immediate response was to look toward the ammunition pen. There, behind a chain mesh fence, stacked to within inches of the armory ceiling, were crates of bullets, mortars, artillery shells, and every other god-awful explosive device the gods of war had seen fit to deliver unto man in the twentieth century. He imagined a sliver of white-hot shrapnel cutting through a crate and piercing the sheath of metal that enclosed the gunpowder. First one crate would blow, then another and another. The whole armory would go up in a conflagration of Wagnerian proportions. The explosion would make Götterdämmerung look like a scout’s bonfire!
With a speed and finesse he did not know he possessed, Judge pulled himself through the draft vent and onto the corrugated roof. Lying on the cold surface, his breath coming in halting gasps, he dared a final glance into the armory. His last sight even as the first grenade exploded was of a bare slab of concrete decorated by a few specks of blood and a black Luger. Where a second before a man had lain, there was nothing.
Erich Seyss was gone.
CHAPTER
32
JUDGE’S ROOM AT THE American Military Hospital in Heidelberg was small and sterile, a ten-by-ten cubicle with an iron bed, a freestanding armoire, and a night table decorated by an electric fan and a pitcher of water. A brittle light filtered through rain-streaked windows, casting a jaundiced pall across the peeling linoleum floor. A single set of footsteps drifted from the hallway, then faded, leaving only the rattle and whoosh of the persnickety fan and the patter of raindrops pelting the window. Judge’s vigilant ear seized upon the noises and mistook them for a familiar and terrible sound. In his half sleep, he was transported to another hospital room, this one in Brooklyn, not Heidelberg, and he saw a younger version of himself standing next to a monstrous metal box someone had cheerfully decided to call an iron lung. His son was inside the box, lying on his back so that only his head protruded beyond a plastic collar. The rushed intake of breath, the labored wheezing that had brought father to son’s side, belonged to him, or rather to the machine that breathed for him, its constantly regulated air pressure taking the place of paralyzed muscles, forcing the four-year-old’s lungs to expand and contract.
Judge reached out to touch his boy. He could see him so clearly—the frightened eyes, the sallow cheeks, the indomitable smile. He just wanted to hold his hand.
Ryan turned his head, and as their eyes met, Judge trembled, for he knew his son was alive.
“Daddy.”
Judge woke, bolting upright as the memory of his boy slipped away from him like sand through his fingers. He remained still for a few seconds, caught in the never-never land between dream and reality. A few more breaths and he wasn’t sure he’d seen him at all.
Judge rested for another minute, then took inventory of his injuries. His cheekbone was swollen, tender as a ripe tomato. One tooth was lost. His shoulder was bruised and his hands scraped and raw. But nothing compared to the knot on the back of his head and the jac
khammer it powered, drilling deep inside his skull.
Hoping for a moment’s respite, Judge closed his eyes. But instead of darkness and calm, he saw the explosion all over again—the white-hot flash that slapped his eyes, the rolling ball of fire, the instantaneous thunderclap. Somewhere in there, he’d been tossed off the armory roof like a rag doll and fallen twenty feet to the ground below. What happened after that, to him and to those inside the armory, he didn’t know.
In the hallway, a new pair of footsteps approached, steady as a drumbeat, then stopped abruptly. A firm hand rapped on his door.
“Come in,” called Judge in a bluff voice that made his head throb.
The door opened and a patch of salt-and-pepper hair peeked around it. Next came the watery blue eyes and the sharp nose. “The lad awakes,” chimed Spanner Mullins as he walked into the room. “You’ve been asleep since they brought you in here. Sixteen hours by my count. Let me have a look at you, then.”
Judge offered a weak smile. Not counting his ex-wife, Mullins was the closest thing to a relative he had. How was that for a sad thought? “I’m okay,” he said. “Just cuts and bruises.”
Mullins looked him up and down as if eyeing Friday’s piece of fish. “Not bad considering the plunge you took onto an asphalt deck.”
Judge didn’t want a shoulder to cry on. Only one issue concerned him. “Did we get him?”
Mullins ignored the question, pointing to Judge’s cheek and grimacing. “Are you in much pain?”
Judge sat up straighter. For a second, his head swelled and the pounding trebled. Just as quickly it died off. He could move, but only slowly. “Did we get him?”
Mullins laid a meaty hand on his shoulder and gave a kindly squeeze. “We did, lad. Gone to his Maker has Mr. Seyss, along with two of his closest friends. May they dance in hell with the devil himself.”
Judge asked Mullins for a glass of water and took a short drink. As the water trickled down his throat and into his stomach, he waited for it to ignite some flame of jubilation, some rush of relief and joy coupled with an adrenaline-fueled arrogance that once again he’d succeeded. But those emotions were nowhere present. Seyss’s death was a hollow victory, late in coming and paid for dearly.
The Runner Page 27
