“This is good, Egon. Very good. But it will only be of use once I’m in Potsdam. Have you been by the border? Stalin has it zipped up tight.”
Egon reached into his jacket and handed Seyss a visitor’s pass to the Cecilienhof issued in the name of Aaron Sommerfeld. “Mr. Sommerfeld is a member of the U.S. State Department’s delegation to the conference. Currently, he finds himself in a hospital in Frankfurt laid up with a bad case of dysentery.”
Seyss examined the pass. “It’s for tomorrow.”
Egon shrugged uninterestedly. He might have given him lousy seats to the symphony instead of a warrant for his death. “As I said, time is a luxury we no longer possess. You have yourself to thank.”
Seyss slid the pass into his pocket. “There might be another way. Truman is visiting Berlin today to raise the flag over the headquarters of the American command. Naturally there will a speech, a tour of the building. Eisenhower will be with him. So will your good friend, General Patton. Get me a decent rifle and I’ll take all three.”
Egon was shaking his head before Seyss had finished speaking. “Truman isn’t enough. We must have Churchill, too. Otherwise, the Brits will talk the Americans down. As for Eisenhower, no one will care. Soldiers are supposed to die. Besides, it must be in Potsdam. It must occur under the Russians’ nose if it’s to mean a thing. It must appear as if Stalin had sanctioned the entire affair. The cauldron must be made to boil, understand?”
But Seyss was in no mood for understanding. “Tomorrow, Egon? Are you out of your mind? You’re giving me no time to plan, no time to have a look around. It’s a himmelfahrtskommando. A one-way ticket to heaven! Suicide!”
Egon kept his eyes locked on Seyss, speaking as if the words hadn’t registered. “Your name will be on the list of visitors arriving from Berlin. The others are press, a few VIPs. A bus leaves from the Bristol Hotel at nine in the morning.”
“And a way out?” Seyss demanded. “Have you planned that for me too?” Suddenly, he was angry. Furious. Not only at Egon but at himself. Of course Egon hadn’t planned a way out. Why should he have, when Seyss himself hadn’t expected to come out alive? But something had changed over the last days. He’d seen that Germany would survive and the thought of his country battling back from the brink instilled in him a new desire to fight with it.
“Come, come,” said Egon. “You’re being dramatic. I have every faith in your ability to wangle your way out. You couldn’t expect me to think of everything.”
Seyss laughed dryly. He felt as if he were stepping outside himself and looking back at a man he didn’t know. A stupid man. Why should Egon Bach want him to escape? Seyss was the only man who could attach him to the murder of two world leaders. Egon couldn’t afford to have a loose cannon careering across the desk of Bach Industries. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Germany, only the family konzern. A strong Germany meant a healthy Bach Industries, and a healthy Bach Industries, profit for Egon Bach. His venal eye rendered Seyss’s love of country a rube’s fantasy.
And as Seyss walked across the room and replaced the dossier on the mantelpiece, he felt a cold hand settle on his shoulder. Sächlichkeit.
“You know, Egon, you’re right. I wouldn’t dream of asking you for anything else. The information you’ve provided is top-notch. The rest is up to me.”
Egon smiled confidently. “I’m glad you think so.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t think we need ever speak to each other again.”
It was true. He had everything he needed. Moreover, he didn’t want anyone left to tie him to the murder of two world leaders, either. He had no intention of being captured or killed. He was, after all, a Brandenburger.
Sensing his intentions, Egon lost the self-assured grin. “Erich, don’t be rash.”
“I’m not, Egon. Just smart.”
“This is ridiculous. Why, we’re practically family.” But even as he spoke, his right hand was delving inside his jacket, fumbling for an all-too-conspicuous bulge.
Seyss found his holster, unsnapped the leather flap, and withdrew the Colt .45, all in single fluid motion. Family? With a Jew? As he dropped the safety and tightened his finger on the trigger, the thought made him cringe.
“I might as well be your brother,” mumbled Egon, his words coming fast and loose. He had freed his pistol from his pocket, a neat little Browning 9-mm, and held it limply in front of him, his hand shaking almost as much as his voice. “Christ, I’m your boy’s uncle. If that’s not blood, I don’t know what is.”
Seyss let go the pressure on the trigger, cocking his head just the slightest. His boy’s uncle? What was he talking about?
“Pardon me?”
And in that instant, Egon raised the Browning and straightened his arm to fire.
Seyss’s grip hardened round the Colt. Stepping forward, he depressed the trigger even as he raised the pistol. A split second passed, no more, but to Seyss it was all the time in the world. As a sprinter, he had learned to measure the world in halves of seconds, in quarters, in eighths. Somehow, he could see things more clearly when he was moving. Motion brought clarity, and clarity, understanding. Where others saw a blur, he saw an outline. Where others saw a shadow, he saw a form and could discern its intent. And so he knew he had won.
Squeezing off a round, he drilled a hole dead center in Egon Bach’s forehead.
Some people had no business touching firearms.
CHAPTER
47
IT WAS RAINING WHEN JUDGE left Ingrid’s apartment the next morning. The sky huddled low, a gray umbrella leaking fat drops that tasted like dirt and gasoline. Bilgewater, he thought, from the bottom of a sinking ship. He walked down Eichstrasse to the first main thoroughfare and turned right, heading west. Ingrid’s apartment was in the Mitte district of Berlin, on the western edge of the Russian zone. The area was a wreck, a maze of crumbling matchboxes. One building stood for every two knocked down. The place brought to mind a middleweight journeyman beaten to within an inch of his life and hanging on only by dumb tenacity.
He continued a block or two, then ducked under the striped awning of a stubborn grocer. The stalls were bare of fruits and vegetables. The shelves held a dozen cans of beans, corned beef, and sweet potatoes. All American. Still, the grocer stood behind the counter, apron secured around his sizable girth, hair a pomade lake, offering his customers a smile meant for a better day. Judge nodded and turned his attention back to the street.
No cars traversed the wide boulevard. No trucks. No motorcycles. In fact, he couldn’t see a motorized vehicle of any size or shape. The only things moving at seven o’clock Wednesday morning were horses and pedestrians and both were hauling wagons and litters piled high with debris. He’d stepped back in time. It was 1900 and his mother was due to leave on the SS Bremerhaven sailing from Hamburg for New York on the morning tide.
The rain stopped and Judge ventured out into the street, craning his neck in either direction. Not good, he thought to himself. How could he expect to get around Berlin without a car? A streetcar passed, trundling along at a jolly five miles per hour. He could walk faster. A squad of Red Army soldiers shuffled by and in his nervousness, he waved hello to them. Slowly, the city came to life. A jeep zoomed past, then a truck with a red star painted on its hood. Another jeep, another truck. This went on for five minutes, interrupted only by the hacking cough of some ancient German sedans jury-rigged to run off a wood-burning fire.
Two motorbikes zipped by in close succession, hardly more than beat-up Schwinns with a scrappy little motor bolted to their chassis. But Judge couldn’t care less about the size of their engines. Anything that could get him around the city at a decent rate was okay by him. His scavenger’s eye fell instead to the twin black saddlebags hanging over the bike’s rear wheel. Emblazoned in gold were a huntsman’s circular horn and the initials DBP. Deutsche Bundespost. The German postal authority.
Judge had his answer.
A LAST MOTORBIKE WAS PARKED in the courtyard behind th
e stalwart stone premises of the Berlin Mitte post office. It looked even older and more beat up than the others, its tires bald, more than a few spokes bent, broken, or missing. The gas tank was dented and the seat ripped, so that even from his position twenty yards away, he could see a spring or two protruding. Still, the bike had a license plate affixed to its front tire guard and the requisite black saddlebags.
Judge hid himself in a recessed doorway halfway up the alley leading to the post office and for ten minutes watched the postmen come and go. From the scant activity, it was clear that mail service was only just being restored. He considered bribing a carrier for his bike or simply asking for a ride, but discarded both possibilities without real consideration. He needed the bike and he needed it now, without argument, discussion, or disagreement. Like it or not, there was only one surefire way. “The strong-arm stuff,” Spanner Mullins liked to say, and for once, he didn’t disagree.
Running back to the street, he wrestled a sturdy length of two-by-four free from a pile of debris. He returned to his spot just as an engine sprang to life. A glance revealed the courier to be an elderly man dressed in an army sergeant’s field gray tunic. Taking a breath, Judge gripped the plank in his hand like a Louisville Slugger and brought it to rest on his right shoulder. And as the cycle crossed the threshold of his vision, he stepped into the alley and swung for the bleachers.
It was another man who struck the mailman, a stranger who chucked him off the bike and gave him a swift kick in the gut for good measure. Better the postman concentrate on regaining his wind than giving chase.
Climbing onto the bike, Judge tested the throttle with a few tentative strokes. The chassis might be gone to crap, but the fiesty engine growled magnificently. He steered the bike onto Blumenstrasse, accelerating wildly until the post office was far behind him. He had the criminal’s “high” going—the fast-beating heart, the clarity of vision, the sense of invincibility—and God help any man who tried to stop him. Yet even in the crystalline delirium of theft, part of him knew he’d hit rock bottom. Brawling with General Carswell at Jake’s Joint, beating up Bauer, and now, committing what amounted to armed robbery. He’d been on a downward spiral since setting foot in the country and now he’d reached his final refuge: the lawless and wholly unrepentant landscape of his youth.
It was necessary, a rational voice preached. You didn’t have any other choice.
Stow it, his old self answered. The time for arguing was long gone.
At the next street, Judge veered left and didn’t slow until he’d reached Unter den Linden. Ingrid had drawn a crude map of Berlin in the cloak of dust that layered her vanity table. If he ever got lost, all he had to do was motor north or south—depending upon where he was in the city—and he would hit the grand boulevard that in the western part of town was called the East–West Axis, and in the east, past the Brandenburg Gate, became Unter den Linden. Once on this street, he could orient himself.
Little sign remained of the storied linden trees his mother used to describe so fondly. The few standing were nothing but charred stumps. Passing beneath the Brandenburg Gate, Judge slowed the motorbike to a crawl. A hundred yards away sprawled the Reichstag, Germany’s House and Senate rolled into one. The massive building had been at the center of the fight for Berlin and it had paid the hangman his wages. A gargantuan web of twisted steel and crumbled walls erupted from a rubble island an entire city block in length. Ahead lay the East–West Axis, eight lanes across, and on either side, the Tiergarten, Berlin’s Central Park, a sprawling lot denuded of all vegetation. A mile along, the Victory Column rose from the center of the boulevard, a soaring iron pillar one hundred feet tall, fashioned from sword and cannon captured by the first Kaiser at Sedan in 1870 and topped by a statue of Samothrace, goddess of victory. Four flags flew from its summit: the French Tricolor, the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, and the Hammer and Sickle. American tanks, self-propelled guns, and artillery were drawing up on either side of the street, cannons to the fore. He had little question about Truman’s route.
Driving, Judge began to check the faces of the men he passed. He was looking for a particular pair of eyes, brazen, too confident by half, a hard-stamped jaw, and a cruel mouth. But if he knew the face he was looking for, he didn’t know the nationality. Russian, German, Hungarian, British? No, he decided. None of the above.
Seyss needed to move about freely through Berlin. He required a maximum of freedom that was accorded only one person these days: an American soldier. An officer, to be sure. For his grand finale, Seyss wouldn’t have it any other way.
Judge steered the bike left at the Victory Column, but soon found himself disoriented. Pulling over to the sidewalk, he waved down a neatly dressed gentleman—the only one around with a clean shirt, pressed trousers, and hair combed in a part. In his best colloquial German, he explained he was new in the city and that he needed directions to Wannsee. The man didn’t question his story and obliged gladly, going so far as to quiz Judge afterward on the route. When Judge had passed the impromptu exam, he asked whether the man had any idea where the American president was expected later that day.
“Ja, natürlich,” came the enthusiastic reply. “The Air Defense building on Kronprinzenallee. Just around the corner. All their greatest generals will be there. Patton, Bradley, even Eisenhower, himself. It was on Radio Berlin yesterday evening.”
Judge scooted forward a foot, the bike’s scrappy engine sputtering in time to his own agitated heart. The entire high command present at one occasion. He had little doubt Seyss would attend.
Confident now that he possessed at least a rudimentary idea of the cityscape, Judge set out to find three addresses. The first belonged to Rosenheim, Alfred Bach’s urban oasis, the others to close friends of the Bach family with whom Ingrid had proposed they might stay, the Gesslers and the Schmundts.
The western section of Berlin had escaped the war with only minor damage. Some houses were in disrepair. Shutters hung askew. Lawns grew untended, while whole facades screamed for a fresh coat of paint. The majority, however, appeared in good enough shape: narrow Wilhelmine row houses fronted by gardens of roses and petunias and surrounded by quaint brick walls.
A jeep was parked at the corner of Schopenhauerstrasse and Matterhornstrasse. Judge slowed his motorcycle, and as he passed, granted the two MPs on watch an officious nod. Instead of crossing through the intersection, though, he turned right onto Schopenhauerstrasse itself. He kept his speed down, the wheels bouncing over the uneven cobblestones. He slowed further as he passed number 83, glancing to his right long enough to spot a steel helmet framed in the second-floor window. Whether it was Honey or Mahoney waiting for him, they were being obvious about it. A second jeep waited at the end of the block. Two more policemen in front and a field radio in back.
The family Gessler occupied a Teutonic castle shrunken to scale on the half island Schwanenwerder. No jeeps this time. No policemen playing at surveillance. But the lack of military presence only heightened Judge’s anxiety. Spanner Mullin’s first law of surveillance was to cover not just a suspect’s home but the homes or gathering points of all known associates. According to Ingrid, the Gesslers had been the Bachs’ closest friends for more than thirty years. Jacob Gessler was her godfather. If Patton was interested enough in Judge’s capture to station a squad of MPs at Rosenheim, why hadn’t he put a soul here?
Judge brought the bike to a halt in front of an imposing wrought-iron gate. A black Mercedes sedan was parked in the forecourt. The car was covered with grime; its windshield a slab of mud. It hadn’t been driven for a month. His eyes fell to a puddle of oil on the forecourt not far from the front door. Nearing the gate, a section of asphalt had been washed away from the driveway. The earth was still damp from the morning showers and a single set of tire tracks was clearly visible in the mud. The tracks bled onto the main road before fading a few yards farther on. Had the master of the house gone for a morning drive or had his guest?
Climbing from the mo
torbike, Judge unbuckled a saddlebag and withdrew a few letters, then pushed open the fence and walked up the drive. The front door opened before he had a chance to knock.
“Kann ich Ihnen behilflich sein? Can I help you?” The man was short and gray-haired with a clerk’s wispy mustache and a banker’s distrustful gaze. Seventy if a day, but none the weaker for it. At home on a warm summer’s day, he wore a three-piece suit of navy serge.
“Special delivery. I have a letter for your guest.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Personal, Herr Gessler,” said Judge, guessing. “For Herr Seyss.”
Gessler stepped onto the front steps and shut the door behind him. “Who are you? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A message from the Americans,” Judge continued, his suspicions writing the script. “It is imperative I reach him.”
Gessler’s eyes opened wide. “Herr General Patton?”
Judge nodded. “Jawohl.”
Gessler stepped closer, whispering in his ear. “Herr Egon has gone to meet the Sturmbannführer at Schmundt’s home. Grossen Wannsee twenty-four.” Schmundt, another of Ingrid’s friends!
“Herr Bach is here in Berlin?”
Gessler had gone red with excitement. “But you must hurry. He left an hour ago.”
Judge ran to the motorcycle, kick started the engine, and rode like hell for the suburb of Wannsee. It was a fifteen-minute trek along the lake of the same name. Flicking his wrist, he checked his watch. Eleven o’clock.
Seyss is here. Seyss is in Berlin.
He repeated the words over and over, as if until now he hadn’t quite believed his own suppositions. He crossed the S-bahn tracks, and then a small bridge, slowing to read the street sign. Grossen Wannsee.
The single-lane road wound right, then left, climbing and descending a series of rolling hills. Giant oaks lined the way, a centuries-old honor guard. Judge passed through their meandering shadows as if they were reminders of his own conscience. He’d had Seyss and let him escape. He wanted to believe he’d been frustrated by his adopted humanity, that his reflexes had been blunted by the certainty—or was it just a wish?—that reason must vanquish force. More likely, it was nerves. Either way, nine men and four women were dead as a result of a moment’s hesitation. And his brother’s killer left to run wild with no telling what devastation he might yet wreak.
The Runner Page 40
