Christopher Reich - The Runner

Judge glanced at von Luck, and he was there, in the cell with him, staring down at the general as he was tied into his chair, hands bound behind him, watching him grimace as the coarse ropes were pulled tight, shaving the skin from his wrists. The cell smelled clean. Carbolic soap and lemon oil. A man entered and took up position in front of von Luck. It was Seyss. He wore his camouflage uniform, Iron Crosses neatly in place, and his muddy jackboots. His cheeks were smudged with battlefield grime. His hair was its natural blond and a lank forelock hung across his eye. He held a pistol in his hand. A Walther .38. Von Luck pleaded his innocence but Seyss paid him no mind. The pistol rose, then descended in a blur. And as Judge followed its dull gray arc, he was no longer looking at Seyss, but at himself ten years earlier as he whipped a blackjack against the neck of a suspected murderer inside the interrogation room of the mighty Twentieth precinct.

Judge blinked and the picture vanished. A second had passed, no more.

“Do you have any idea where Seyss might have gone?” he asked.

Von Luck shrugged. “You said he’d been contacted by Kameraden . That would indicate fellow SS officers or members of the Allgemeine SS .”

“The Allgemeine SS ?”

“The civilian wing. Reserved for businessmen, politicians, and industrialists eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the Fuhrer. I have no idea what such men might have wanted with Seyss. I was an officer of the Wehrmacht, Major. I am a professional, not a fanatic.”

Judge thought it amusing how defeat tempered a man. Von Luck, the promulgator of such profound military axioms as “Victory forgives all, defeat nothing,” and “Imitation is the bravest form of deception”. To the professional soldier, passing oneself off as the enemy was an act of cowardice. And shooting a defenseless prisoner, a crime punishable by death. How much more fanatical could a professional soldier become?

“Still, I don’t envy your task,” von Luck continued. “Once Seyss is committed to something — anything — he is unstoppable. Erich was never so much a Nazi as a patriot. He was fond of Houston Chamberlain: ‘The ideal politics is to have none; but this non-politics must be boldly recognized and forced upon the world.’ Understand that and you will understand Seyss.”

Judge got the drift, if not the nuances. Shoot first, ask questions later. Not much of a clue to a man’s whereabouts in a country of fifty million people. “So you’ve got no idea?”

Under the hospital smock, the wasted shoulders rose and fell, but von Luck’s eyes held their focus. “ Are you familiar with the work of Wagner?”

Judge nodded, while Honey shifted restlessly on his stool.

“Think of Erich Seyss as Parsifal unmasked. At once, a romantic and a realist. A man willing to destroy himself, as well as everything and everyone around him, to validate his principles.”

“Gotterdämmerung,” said Judge. The Ring of the Nibelungen — the mention brought back memories of the family gathered round the wireless on Sunday nights, listening to Wagner broadcast live from the Met. It had been his mother’s one lasting link to Germany: music. And he’d grown to love it as much as she. Brahms, Beethoven, and, of course, Wagner. His mother claimed he was the greatest German to have ever lived. She’d never mentioned he was its greatest anti-semite, too.

“Bravo, Major.” Von Luck leaned forward, his bemused expression indicating he was ready to part with the information he held dear. “Did you know that Seyss deserted his post as Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant to be with the woman he loved? He knew his punishment would be severe, yet he chose to go all the same. In the event, he was sentenced to twelve months with a punishment battalion on the eastern front. Only a true German would destroy his career for a woman.”

“Who was she?” Judge phrased the question nonchalantly, but already his heart was beating faster.

“The richest and prettiest woman in Germany. Her name was Ingrid Bach.”

Sonnenbrucke glittered like a seashell in the morning sun, a fairy tale château with spiral towers and stone battlements. Surrounded on three sides by soaring granite peaks, it stood alone in a lush meadow at the head of a valley deep in the Bavarian Alps, ten kilometers from the Austrian border. A jewel, thought Devlin Judge, as he viewed the castle from a road high above the valley floor. Worthy of a prince, not a scoundrel.

Finding Ingrid Bach had proven easy. Her father, Alfred, stood high on the United Nations War Crimes Commission’s list of war criminals — ranked sixteenth among the first twenty-two to be tried that fall in Nuremberg — and his capture in April had made front page news. GERMANY’S CANNON KING CORRALLED, read one rag. BACH BUSTED! screamed another. Too senile to be put in the dock, he was being held under house arrest at his hunting lodge in the mountains. His daughter Ingrid was there too, though of her own volition, acting as his nursemaid and caretaker.

Judge held his breath as the Jeep squealed around yet another hairpin curve. The road was in miserable condition, hardly more than a rocky furrow carved from the mountainside. Two feet to his right, the track crumbled and fell away. He had only to extend his head over the Jeep’s chassis to stare down a thousand-foot precipice. This part of the country had been dubbed the “national redoubt.” In these mountains, it was rumored Hitler had constructed an alpenfestung — a mountain fortress into which his loyal soldiers could withdraw to marshal their strength for one last stand against the Allied forces. If true, he had chosen well. The dense forest and rugged terrain made the area impenetrable.

Judge glanced at his driver, an eager corporal supplied by Seventh Army HQ. Despite the hazardous road conditions, he seemed perfectly at ease, humming “We’ll Meet Again”, as he shifted through the gearbox in preparation for another one hundred and eighty degree turn. Honey had begged off the trip, wanting to meet with sources of his own he claimed might have information about Seyss’s whereabouts. No doubt, men of Altman’s ilk.

The nose of the Jeep dipped as it came around the curve. A rear tire dug into a pothole. The vehicle bucked, then shot down the road. Gasping, Judge fell back into his seat. He would never complain about Manhattan’s streets again.

Fifteen minutes later, he arrived at Sonnenbrucke.

A pink granite driveway wound for a mile through waist-high grass. They passed a gazebo overlooking a pond slick with algae and a fractured dock extending from the shores of a small lake. Two Jeeps were parked half a mile from the lodge. Several GIs, all with mitts, stood in a square playing catch. Apparently, Alfred Bach posed little threat of escaping the bonds of his house arrest. The driver slowed and gave Judge’s name to the nearest soldier. The GI threw a fastball to his buddy in left field, then waved them on.

Judge waited until the Jeep had come to a complete halt and the engine extinguished before getting out. He hadn’t thought about his ribs or his tailbone for the last two hours. It was his legs that were killing him, rigid as pistons and still braced for the expected tumble off the cliff. A loud bang in the woods beyond the lake made him duck his head. The sharp crack was followed by another, and then another, until it sounded as if someone were blowing off a string of firecrackers.

An elderly manservant in a black frock coat and striped trousers opened the door before he could knock. “May I help you, sir?” His English was impeccable; Oxford or Cambridge or wherever all the snobs in merry old England lived.