Christopher Reich - The Runner

Seyss disliked him immediately. The greasy smile, the dancing eyes. He was too glib by half. “Dan Gavin,” he replied, in a voice loud enough to make any self-respecting German cringe. “I understand you ran into a close friend this afternoon, Ingrid Bach?”

“Yeah, yeah, I sure did,” said Rossi. “She’s a lovely gal. Coming soon, is she? We’re due to leave anytime.”

Seyss gave an earnest shake of the head. “I’m afraid she won’t be joining you this evening. She turned ill around five. Something she ate. What do they call it? Berlin Tummy?”

Rossi looked like his mother had dropped dead while kissing him goodnight. “No. Really? Jeez, I’m sorry to hear that. Make sure you give her my best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

Seyss promised to give her the message. “Listen, Hal,” he added before the forlorn Ami could get away. “Ingrid wondered if I might go in her place. I’m sure she told you she had something important to tell Chip DeHaven. I’ve known Chip forever and I don’t want to let Ingrid down. It would mean so much to her. Got room for another body?”

Rossi tapped his forearm, signaling to come closer. “Is it all that serious?” he whispered, “Ingrid was pretty worked up about having to see DeHaven. She said it might make a decent story.”

Seyss looked this way and that, as if afraid of prying ears. “Without being too dramatic, I have to admit it is. But hardly anything newsworthy. A family matter, actually.”

“Figures.” Rossi shrugged, pepping up a second later as he rediscovered some spark of inner cheer. “Well, Danny boy, you’re not as pretty as your sister, but if I’m lucky, after you talk to Chip you’ll spot me a hand or two of five card stud.”

Seyss smiled inwardly. To hell with Patton and the rendezvous at the Ceclienhof tomorrow morning at eleven. He was going to Potsdam tonight. “Kind of you to take me along, Hal, but that might be asking too much.”

And together they headed to the bar to cement their new friendship.

Seyss had just one question. What the hell was “five card stud”?

The Ford carrying Erich Seyss, Hal Rossi, and three other half-sotted American newshounds pulled into the drive of Kaiserstrasse 2 at 9:15. If they were an hour late, at least they’d made good use of the time. Five better chums weren’t to be found anywhere in Germany. A quartet of soldiers surrounded the car, opening the doors on cue. Climbing from the sedan, Seyss saluted the ranking officer and followed Rossi and the others into the house.

The “Little White House” was an ungainly toad of a home; an unsmiling three-storey palace painted a tepid mustard with narrow windows and a sloping red shingle roof. Sitting on a broad knoll overlooking the Wannsee, it did, however, have a wonderful lake view.

Seyss paused on the front landing, wanting to survey the grounds. A dozen soldiers milled around the courtyard chatting with the newly arrived chauffeurs. A pair of Russian sentries stood at the gate, their rigid posture attesting to a largely ceremonial role. No threat there. But nearby in the lavender twilight waited Stalin’s crack troops, patrolling the wooded hills and dales of Babelsberg and its adjacent community, Potsdam.

Crossing the border into Potsdam, Seyss had been amazed at the sheer number of Red Army troops Stalin had shipped in to provide security. The entire route to the Little White House was lined with pea green. Yet his searching eye hadn’t stopped at the side of the road. He was quick to discern bands of soldiers roaming the wooded hills. He’d read a note in Patton’s dossier stating that “Stalin promises to have a man behind every tree”. The author might have added” and a sub-machine gun, too”.

Inside, the party was in full swing. Lights blazed from the main salon and Seyss could see a group of gray-haired men sitting round a card table engrossed in their hands. Someone was playing the piano badly and singing even worse. He let his companions lead the way down the corridor, making sure he stayed comfortably to the rear. His first order of business was to get out of the house. Leave immediately and he’d have ten or fifteen minutes until one of his new cronies remarked upon his absence. If luck was with him, they’d be either too tight or too involved with a good set of cards to notice.

God forbid he see Chip DeHaven. He had no idea what the man looked like, whether he was young or old, fat or thin. How to explain his fraud did not bear imagining. No words could gild his suspect presence. Someone would ask to see his identification or his orders and all he could provide was the dogtag of a GI killed nine months ago in France. It was a situation from which there was no escape. No, he decided, he could not see Chip DeHaven.

Mumbling something about needing the commode, he backtracked to the foyer and ran upstairs. He found a bathroom halfway down the hall and locked the door behind him. Moving to the sink, he washed his face with cold water, willing away the effects of the alcohol he’d drunk. He raised a hand in front of him, trying to hold it steady. Its reflection in the mirror betrayed a constant tremor, and suddenly, he could feel his heart pounding inside of his chest as if it were straining to break free of its mooring. He took several deep breaths and the palsy disappeared.Stand straighter, he told himself.Chin up. You’re in your element. Behind the lines in another man’s uniform. A Brandenburger.

And as he stared at his countenance, daring himself to accept this final challenge, he began setting forth his plan to reach Ringstrasse 2, Stalin’s private residence no more than five kilometers away, where this evening the Grand Marshal of the Soviet Union was entertaining Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and their highest advisors. No doubt it was a fete of some opulence. Seyss had attended a similar dinner three years earlier, when Hitler had feted Mussolini in Berlin upon the latter’s daring escape from Gran Sasso and he knew that it would be a ritzy affair — vodka, caviar, music, the works. No one had an inferiority complex like the Bolshies. More importantly, he knew that security would not just be tight, it would be impossible. A formal guest list would exist and no matter the emergency no one not properly vetted would be admitted. An unknown American, therefore, would have no chance of gaining entry. The right Russian, though, might make it.

Seyss’s attention fell to his pocket, where he held between his fingers a firm piece of paper the size of a passport. Removing it, he read over the name and the unit designation. Colonel Ivan Truchin, Fifty-fifth Police Division NKVD. Born 2 August 1915, Stalingrad. For two months in the summer of forty-three, he’d posed as the great Truchin, defender of Stalingrad, parading up and down the streets of Minsk, offering the district commander his advice on the proper placement of artillery, tanks, and troops in defense of the coming German attack. He had come unannounced with neither orders nor adjutant, just an unquestioned confidence the equal of divine right. And they listened to his advice. Was it not the NKVD who, fearing the mass desertion during the battle for Stalingrad, lined up every platoon, every company, every battalion and shot every tenth man in the head to teach a stern but much needed lesson? If they don’t get you, we will. Was it not the NKVD who had liquidated the entire officer corps in the purges of thirty-six and thirty-seven. One million or two, who was counting? Was not Lavrenti Beria, chief of the NKVD, Stalin’s closest confidant? One ignored a colonel of the Soviet Secret Police at his peril — his very great peril.

So then, Truchin it would be.

He gave himself a final looking over in the mirror. “Live dangerously,” he whispered and, smiling grimly, left the bathroom. In the courtyard, he collared Sergeant Schneider, the chauffeur who’d driven them from Berlin.