Christopher Reich - The Runner

“Father?” he called, sotto voce . “I’m home.”

His whisper died inside the barren shell and he laughed silently. He had no idea where his father might be, nor did he care. Six months had passed since he’d last seen him, a lunchtime visit on his way to the Austro-Hungarian border. There he’d sat, Otto Seyss, gray and paunchy, proud holder of National Socialist Party number 835, one of the oldest of the alte kampfer , loudly proclaiming over his ersatz coffee and ersatz sausage that the retreat of the German army on all fronts was a ruse.A ruse! And that any day now, Hitler would unleash his secret weapons under construction at the rocket laboratories at Peenemunde and the war would be over -snap — like that. The Allies forced to surrender, the Russians driven back to Stalingrad, the German army once again victorious with all Europe its prize. Seyss had branded his father’s talk of secret weapons a sham, arguing that the war had been over for two years already, and that he should get the hell out of Munich as soon as possible if he wanted to survive the coming fight. His father had responded accordingly, calling him a traitor and a coward. The same things he’d called his wife six years earlier when she’d declared herself unwilling to support the tyrant who had shipped her youngest son to a detention camp. Only that time, he’d punctuated his remarks with a vicious right hook that sent his wife home to Dublin for good with a shattered jaw.

Seyss returned to the front door before venturing upstairs and scanned the road in both directions. Lindenstrasse was deserted. The once noble townhouses had been picked clean and abandoned, the entire neighborhood left to its decaying self. Not a GI or German was in sight. Reassured, he made his way to the main staircase. Remarkably, it was intact, except for the banister which was nowhere to be seen. He climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, stopping only when he’d reached the top.

The third floor was composed of three rooms. His parents’ bedroom occupied the northern half. The southern half was divided into two rooms for Seyss and his younger brother, Adam. He glanced into Adam’s room, imagining a lanky, argumentative boy with a crop of honey-colored hair and his own blue eyes. He stood still for a moment searching for some reminder of his loss, waiting for a sliver of remorse, hoping even, but none came. Adam was just one more casualty of the war. That he had never donned a uniform or picked up a rifle mattered little.

Seyss continued down the hallway and entered his own room. Crossing to the opposite wall, he lowered himself to one knee. A carpet of glass, mortar and dust an inch deep covered the floor. He cleared a small circle, then hooked his fingers under the heating grate, gave a firm tug, and laid it to one side. Delicately, he inserted his hand into the rectangular void. His fingers crept to the right, to the shallow shelf he had carved as a boy to hide his collection of French postcards, sepia-toned photographs of “adventurous” French women. A wall of dirt tickled his fingertips. Confounded, he reached further into the hole, but froze when he heard the whine of an approaching engine. After a moment, another engine joined it, then another. An entire fucking armored column was advancing down Lindenstrasse!

Seyss slid his hand from the hole and lifted his eyes above the windowsill. Two Jeeps and an armored personnel carrier crammed full of troops were a few hundred meters away and closing. Egon had warned him that the Americans would make the search for Janks’s murderer a top priority. In light of the extraordinary information he possessed, Seyss had been foolish not to heed the admonition. For three hours last night, Egon had discussed the most intimate details of Terminal: the Allied leaders’ meeting place in Potsdam, their daily schedule, proposed security measures, even the addresses in the leafy suburb of Babelsberg where Churchill, Truman, and Stalin would reside during the conference. The intelligence was far better than any soldier could expect and, if accurate, had come from the highest levels of the American command. Seyss made it a point to question such things.

Outside, the growl of the motors grew louder. Seyss pressed himself against the wall, darting a glance out the window every few seconds. One hand dropped to his waist, but the Luger he sought wasn’t there. His only defense against inquisitive Americans was thepersilschein folded neatly in his breast pocket. Issued by the occupational government, the document declared that one Sgt Erwin Hasselbach was free of any ties to the Nazi party and eligible for all manner of work. Signed by a major general in the Third Army, it was what passed for identification these days. The document got its nickname from a laundry detergent called Persil. Hold apersilschein and you were clean.

He’d taken other precautions, of course. Along with his papers, Egon had provided some black hair dye, a pair of his father’s reading specs, and some cheap ill-fitting clothing. He’d be fine as long as someone didn’t look too closely.

Seyss peeked out the window again. Damn! The little procession was continuing along Lindenstrasse as if it were rolling along a streetcar track. His heart was beating very fast now. He was sweating. Embarking on a mental reconnaissance of his home, he plotted his escape should the soldiers, in fact, be charged with his arrest. Move now and he could make it to the ground floor in time to get out the back. His eyes shot to the exposed vent. What lay inside was imperative to his coming journey. His passport to Potsdam, as it were.

Clenching his fist, he forced himself to wait a second longer. No fugitive in his right mind would return to his home. It was the first place any policeman would look. Ergo, no policeman would think he’d be stupid enough to go there. Ergo, no policeman would waste his time checking the place, especially once they knew that his home was situated in a suburb of Munich that had been razed from the map.

Daring another look, Seyss noted that the vehicles showed no sign of slowing. If anything, they were moving faster. One by one, they rumbled past, leaving only spirals of dust in their wake. He wanted to laugh. He always did when he got out of a tight scrape.

Returning to the floor, he delved his arm into the heating vent. This time he reached in as far as he could, meeting the curtain of dirt and pushing through it. His fingers touched a blunt metallic object. Taking hold, he worked it brusquely through the earthen shaft until it passed through the rectangular opening and sat on the floor by his feet.

The sterling silver box was the size and width of a hardbound book. Embossed on its cover were the twin bolts of lightning that denoted the SS. Beneath the runes, engraved in a neat cursive script, was Seyss’s name. Once, the box had held his medals.

Commanding himself to relax, he removed its cover and sorted through the contents, cataloguing each item even as he slipped them into his pockets. Old folding buck knife, SS issue, sharpened to a razor’s edge. One billfold, contents a thousand Reichsmarks. Two dog tags taken from dead GIs. And finally, wrapped in a sheet of wax paper, a sturdy white card with a black stripe running diagonally across it from top to bottom. Typeset Cyrillic, not western lettering. The government issue identification of one Colonel Ivan Truchin, late of the Russia NKYD or secret police.

Seyss ran a finger along the card’s edges, marveling at its immaculate condition. Few Russian soldiers were issued official pieces of identification. Fewer still managed to keep them in any kind of decent condition. A document issued by the Comintern itself, one bearing the signature of Lavrenti Beria, now that was a rarity, indeed, and spoke of Colonel Truchin’s importance to the revolution. Seyss gingerly slid it into his breast pocket. His ticket to Terminal. Nothing else would have brought him back to his house.