Only a colonel draws a single room!
Behind him, the tumblers fell and the door opened a notch, froze, then closed again. A clumsy voice echoed in the hallway, “And next time, Stupak, the pot will be mine.”
Seyss tiptoed to the alcove, knife drawn and resting at his side. He darted a glance to his left. The closet. He imagined the dark, the confinement, the close company of his own breathing. His skin bristled. What choice did he have? Finally free of the American military police, he could risk nothing to alert them to his survival. Two feet away, the door handle began to turn. Seyss drew a breath, opened the closet, and climbed inside.
Seconds later, the door to room 421 burst open, banging against the wall, then slamming shut. Inside the closet, the sounds were amplified tenfold and hit Seyss’s ears with the raucous clap of a shellburst. He stood hunched over, head brushing the shelf above him, half wrapped in the uniform he’d come to steal. The American walked into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. (He weighed a hundred kilos easy if the chorus of screaming bedsprings were to be believed.) He had a woman with him and soon the two were laughing and giggling like a couple of horny teenagers. Their shoes came off, each thrown to a different corner of the room.
“Musik? Ja. Ist gut?” the lady asked.
Seyss heard a soft brushing noise that could only be the drawing of curtains, then the fuzz and static of a radio warming up. A female singer’s voice drifted across the room.
“Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate, darling, I remember the way you used to wait.”
It was Dietrich herself singing “Lilli Marlene” in English for the Americans. Christ, thought Seyss, they’ve even taken our music.
Locusts!
Despite the absolute dark, he stood with his eyes open, arguing to himself that his sentence inside the closet would be of short duration. Five minutes, ten at the most. The two would make love, then drift off. He could slip out unnoticed, maybe even with a uniform draped over his arm. But as the minutes crawled by, and the sounds of the two pigs’ lovemaking grew more fevered, he realized that was not to be. He might be trapped inside this god-awful prison for hours, maybe the entire day. He breathed deeply, repeating the same word over and over. Ruhe. Ruhe. Calm. Calm. He was sweating, yet his skin was cool to the touch, bordering on clammy. Every moment the air was growing warmer, his heart beating faster. He felt a box descending over his head, stopping up his ears and smothering his mouth. Cold hands closed around his neck. Pressure. Everywhere pressure.
He blinked, and once more he was in Camp 8, trapped beneath the kitchen while Janks bartered away the prisoners’ supplies. He was at the Villa Ludwig walking down a sterile, white-tiled corridor with Egon Bach, descending deeper and deeper into the earth. He closed his eyes, hoping for a measure of peace, but was confronted instead with a kaleidoscope of his own memories, the confines of the closet allowing him no escape.
Just one bullet!
His own voice screamed at him as if he were a bald recruit.
Did you hear me, Gruber? One bullet per person. We must conserve ammunition.
Seyss was standing on a muddy ridge overlooking a dense forest in the rolling hills outside of Kiev. A ravine called Babi Yar. It was October of 1941, the height of autumn’s magnificent pageant. The leaves burned red, yellow, orange, and every shade in between. A cool wind brushed his face, the acrid smell of spent powder making his eyes water. He heard another volley of shots and he blinked involuntarily. Then came the sniping that enraged him, single shots, here and there.
He turned and strode down the hill into the ravine, past the line of women. They were all ages: children, teenagers, mothers, the very old and the very young. They were naked, white as ghosts. One grabbed his cuff, pleading, “I am twenty-three. Please.” Seyss did not look at her. He pulled free and walked to Sergeant Gruber, slapping him hard on the shoulder.
“Gruber, one bullet per person. Have your men take better aim, goddammit. We must conserve ammunition.” He was saying the same things over and over. He knew it but could not stop himself. What else was there to say? He had orders. From the Reichsführer SS himself. One bullet per Jew. No more. He must enforce them. “Gruber, do you understand?”
“Jawohl, Herr Major.”
Below Seyss was the pit, a strip of excavated land one hundred meters long, thirty meters wide, and five meters deep. He didn’t know what idiot imagined they could place all the bodies here. The pile was already ten deep the length of it, and the women were still arriving, truck after truck. Two days now. How many were there? Ten thousand? Fifteen? A few of his men were walking over the corpses as if they were stones, skipping here and there, then bending over and placing their pistols to the back of a neck and pulling the trigger.
“You see, Gruber,” Seyss was saying, pointing at the offender. “One bullet, only. Get that man. Bring him here. Now!”
“But, Herr Major, the woman was still alive.”
“Get him!” Seyss could not allow logic to interfere with his orders. He heard a whistle blow and another twenty women were jogged into the pit. Two carried infants. Funny, he thought, why don’t they make more fuss? A squad of soldiers lined up behind them. They raised their rifles and fired. The women collapsed. A baby cried and one of the soldiers ran into the pit and fired off a few shots.
“There,” shouted Seyss, gesturing madly at the extermination squad, “Look, Gruber, that man is firing indiscriminately. One bullet. What is so hard to understand? Replace him at once.”
Gruber averted his gaze. “With who?”
“Someone from Erhardt’s company.”
“They’ve been dismissed. Some of the men are upset. They are no longer fit.”
No longer fit. Seyss knew what that meant. A little killing and they’d broken like children.
“Upset?” he yelled. “What about me? I am upset, too. What am I to say to Himmler when I return to Berlin? ‘The men refuse your order.’?’’
He remembered his last meeting with the Reichsführer SS. A leisurely perusal of the statistics just in from Einsatz Kommando A in Riga, his pal Otto Ohlendorf’s command. There were 138,500 Jews killed, 55 Communists, 6 Gypsies. That meant 400,000 rounds of ammunition expended at a cost of two reichsmarks per bullet. Himmler inquiring in his unhurried professorial voice, “Unacceptable. Wouldn’t you agree, Herr Sturmbannführer?” He flicked a paper or two, his finger coming to rest at a particularly bothersome figure. “Fifty thousand children. That’s fine. But can you explain to me why our men require two bullets to eliminate a child? Solve the problem, Seyss. One bullet. See to it. The waste makes me sick.”
Seyss strode to the endless line of women and pushed another twenty into the pit. “Take proper aim and use a single round,” he shouted to the Einsatz squad. “Reichsführer Himmler is giving you a direct order. Do you understand?” He drew his pistol and passed behind the line of women, brushing the nose of his pistol against the bare nape of their necks. He stopped at the last woman. She had fine blond hair and a fair complexion. Hardly the Semite to look at, but he’d been fooled before. And placing the gun to the base of her skull, he pulled the trigger.
“You see. It’s not so hard. One bullet!”
Inside the closet, Seyss cringed as the words reverberated inside his skull. Yet even as the tattered vestiges of his conscience hung in the dark beside him, he twirled the knife in his hand, turning the blade up to deliver a slashing blow, willing the officer to open the closet door.
Inches away, the American stood in the alcove, asking if the woman wanted a glass of water. She said sure, and he walked into the bathroom, humming along with the radio. Something about sitting under an apple tree. Seyss couldn’t make out the lyrics. His mind was fuzzy. He was hot and his muscles ached. The soldier returned to the bedroom. Seyss heard a bottle being set down on the desk and a glass to go with it. Then the bedsprings again. The woman made a terrible braying noise as she was being fucked.
“Sächliclikeit,” he whispered through gritt
ed teeth. Objectivity. Control. Discipline. You are a man standing inside a wooden box. The darkness is temporary. Consider it a test of your stamina, a measure of your physical abilities.
But reason was no cure for his untethered anxiety.
Suddenly, the closet was unbearable. The jacket scuffing the back of his neck, the shelf collapsing upon his head, the musty odor scratching his nostrils, invading his throat. Worst, though, was the smell of his own body. He could no longer remain so close to himself. Still, for one more agonizing second, he managed to choke down his fears. He ignored the clothing crawling all over him and his olfactory distress. Squeezing his eyelids tightly, he even dredged up a moment of calm, if calm is what you call it when your skin is covered with goose bumps and your heart beating hard enough to crack a rib.
And then like a frayed cord, his discipline snapped.
“To hell with it,” he said, and quietly hauled himself out of the closet.
The two were splayed across the bed, the American on top of his German whore, copulating vigorously. Seyss crossed the room in two strides, planting his knee in the crook of the soldier’s back before he could turn his head. Dropping his knife to the bed, Seyss threw his left arm around the American’s neck and took firm hold of the jaw. He braced his right arm across the rim of the man’s shoulders, pulled the body taut against his knee, and gave a single ferocious twist to the left. The vertebrae snapped instantly and the body fell limp.
It was over in three seconds.
If the whore was screaming, Seyss couldn’t tell. Her labored gasps sounded no different from her annoying bray. Shoving the American’s corpse off her, he sat down on the bed, sure to retrieve his knife.
“Shh,” he said, covering her mouth with a hand. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She was very pretty, no more than eighteen beneath all that cheap makeup. She had blond hair and deep blue eyes and for a moment she reminded him of one of the maidens he’d slept with in the Lebensborn hostel, some busty zealot from the Bund Deutscher Mädchen eager to provide the Reich with a passel of racially superior children. He looked at her again and realized he’d been mistaken. She looked like Ingrid Bach.
And as she ventured a smile, nervously nodding her cooperation, he kissed her on the forehead and plunged the knife into her chest.
THE UNIFORM FIT BETTER THAN he had expected. The trousers fell to his heel and not a millimeter below it. The waist was a few sizes too large, but a belt cinched it nicely. And the jacket fit as if tailor-made. He had shaved and showered, taking pains to doctor the raw groove where Judge’s bullet had nicked his scalp. He had shampooed his hair thoroughly, so that no longer was it the same ink-bottle black but a dark, lustrous brown. Using a pair of nail scissors, he had cut it very short, then doused it with tonic and parted it directly above his left eye.
After giving his tie a final going over, Seyss buttoned up his jacket. In one pocket, he carried a little more than two hundred dollars and a picture of his sweetheart back home. In another, the few dog tags and identification card he’d picked up in Munich. He looked damned sharp clad in khaki. What a wonder it did for his soul to be in uniform once again. The wrong uniform, to be sure, but who was he to argue? These days everything was upside down.
Adjusting the cap squarely on his head, he brought himself to attention. Something was wrong. He checked the uniform, the tie. Everything was in order. What was it, then? He looked himself up and down until he found the problem. His posture. He looked as if he were waiting for the Führer to pass in review. Relax, old man. He dropped a shoulder and forced his stomach to droop. And in a moment he’d achieved the indolent attitude, at once cocksure and uncertain, of the citizen soldier.
Better, but not perfect.
Then he saw it.
It was his face. It was too closed. Too private. Too German. Americans were so trusting, so wide-eyed, so eager. Every feeling they’d had—every heartbreak, every crush, every promotion, every setback—was there to see, smack in the middle of their face.
Smile, he told himself, and taking a deep breath, stretched his cheeks from ear to ear. Raise your eyebrows. Open your eyes a shade wider. He thought of his childhood, a day at the carnival, the prospect of the Ferris wheel. He pictured himself at the top gazing over all Munich, then gave himself a fat sausage for good measure. Bliss!
He looked in the mirror and saw an American officer staring back.
Bringing himself to attention, he raised his right arm and laid his rigidly aligned fingers to the tip of his brow.
“Good morning,” he said aloud, “Captain Erich Seyss reporting for duty.”
CHAPTER
40
DARREN HONEY HAD NEVER SEEN General Donovan in such a state. Normally a man of unshakable calm and storied reserve, Donovan was pacing back and forth across his office like a caged tiger, first shouting, then whispering, and yes, even growling. It was readily apparent how he’d earned the nickname Wild Bill.
“This Patton thing has become a mess,” railed Donovan. “If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have said all his talk about going after the Russians was just bluster. Something that riding partner of his, von Wangenheim, put into his head. Now I’m not so sure.”
“The general still has that damned Nazi on the payroll?” Honey scratched his head in bewilderment. Since arriving in Bad Toelz in late May, Patton had taken his daily equitation in the company of his groom, one Baron von Wagenheim. Like Patton, von Wagenheim was an Olympian, winner of a gold medal in dressage at the 1936 games in Berlin. He was also an unrepentant Nazi who had spent the war as an SS colonel of cavalry. “I thought Ike would have put an end to that by now.”
“Just one of Georgie’s ‘eccentricities,’ says dear old Ike. He doesn’t have any idea of the anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic bilge the old kraut is spewing.”
“And Patton’s falling for it?”
“Falling for it?” Donovan chortled disgustedly. “Why, he eats up every word like it’s his Thanksgiving turkey. Georgie’s convinced that Henry Morgenthau is a lunatic and that Stalin has his sights on the Eiffel Tower. He’s put former Wehrmacht troops in charge of guarding a camp of DPs and he wants to commandeer a village in the mountains and turn it into a concentration camp for Jews. Instead of denazifying the place, he’s hiring every goddammed one of them he can find. He’s gone over the top, I tell you. Over the top!”
Donovan stomped to his desk and fiddled with a tape recorder. “I asked the Signal Corps to put a bug on Georgie’s phone a week back. I want you to listen to this. You won’t believe your ears.”
Honey grimaced involuntarily. A bug on Patton! Weren’t they supposed to be spying on the enemy?
Donovan switched on the recorder and a moment later a scratchy voice hollered across the room. There was no mistaking its owner. George Patton at his irascible best.
“Hell,” shouted Patton, “we are going to have to fight them sooner or later. Why not do it now while our armies are still intact and we can have their hind end kicked back into Russia in three months? We can do it easily with the help of the German troops we have, if we just arm them and take them with us. They hate the bastards.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, George,” chuckled a British voice on the other end of the line.
Donovan whispered “Monty” and Honey’s stomach fell to the floor.
Patton went on. “You don’t have to get mixed up in it at all if you are so damn soft about it and scared of your rank. Just let me handle it down here. In ten days, I can have enough incidents happen to have us at war with those sons of bitches and make it look like they started it!”
“We’ve already stacked the weapons,” said Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. “One whisper of war and I’ll have the bloody Wehrmacht rearmed within twenty-four hours. But that’s all I’m prepared to do at this point. By the bye, your little Jerry still on the move?”
“Hell, yes,” roared Patton. “The man’s indomitable. If the entire German Army we
re made up of sons of bitches like him, you’d still be trying to take Caen.”
“That I very much doubt,” retorted Monty, bristling at the insult. “Still, I don’t know how you’ve managed to keep your boys off him. There’s a photo of him in every constabulary in the British zone. Chap sets foot here, he’s done for.”
“It hasn’t been easy. Ike stuck me with a real pain in the ass to head up the investigation. Probably the only man in Europe who could actually find ‘my little Jerry.’” Patton managed a fair imitation of Monty’s languid brogue. “But don’t worry your aristocratic behind. Everything’s well in hand.”
“Right, then,” said Monty. “I’ll catch up with you in Berlin next week. Cheerio.”
Donovan switched off the recorder, then fell into a worn leather chair next to his desk. “We taped it Friday afternoon. Patton’s in Berlin now. How d’ya like it?”
Honey crossed to the window and looked down on Maximillianstrasse. Panes of glass rattled as a tram passed below, ringing its bell in advance of its next stop. The fact was, he didn’t like it at all. He was tired of the subterfuge, tired of peeking into other men’s lives—even if it was for the good of the country. He didn’t like knowing that Ike was impotent and had been for the entire war (his girlfriend, the Brit Kay Summersby, was an agent, too) or that Patton was as mad as a heated-up bull rhino. Sometimes he couldn’t believe that just three years had passed since he’d put on his country’s uniform; three years since he’d been working as an assistant greens keeper at the Congressional Country Club just outside of Washington, D.C.
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