Christopher Reich - The Runner

“Room service.”

Seyss knocked on the door to room 421, then stepped back into the center of the hallway and waited. Chin raised just so, white towel draped over an arm, he looked like any other waiter in the hotel. He raised his hand to knock again, but thought twice. Silence bred suspicion, but best not to take it too far. He looked over both shoulders, then dropped to one knee and examined the lock. It was an old brass affair with a keyhole capacious enough to see into the room. Undoing his belt, he threaded its metal tongue into the lock, feeling the smooth mass of the tumbler. Raising the tongue, he wedged the tip of his knife into the keyhole, so that it acted as a fulcrum upon which he could exert greater pressure on the tumbler. With a jerk, he flicked the knife downward, forcing the tongue against the tumbler and freeing the lock. He depressed the handle and swept inside.

The room was dark, curtains drawn against the morning light. Back pressed to the door, Seyss trained his ear for the sound of another man’s breathing. Only colonels and above claimed a room for themselves. Everyone else doubled up. He heard nothing. Turning on the light, he walked to the center of the room, taking in the furnishings with a sweep of his head. Twin beds were pressed against either wall, a night table separating them. Only one had been slept in. A desk and chair decorated another wall. He walked back to the alcove and opened the closet. Several freshly laundered uniforms hung from one side of the rack. He removed one, then took a pressed shirt, a tie, socks and underwear from the shelf above it. He threw all of it onto the bed and began to undress. Catching another glimpse of himself in the mirror, he realized he couldn’t don the uniform without at least shaving. The sight of his scraggly hair and beard begged explanation. The Americans were a well-groomed lot, he’d grant them that.

If the bedroom was cramped, the bathroom was fit for a king. Marble floors and counters, gold-plated fixtures, a tub large enough to swim in and, directly above it, a shower head the size of a pie tin. Seyss stripped to the waist, then filled a mug with hot water. He added a dollop of shaving cream and, using a lovely badger-hair brush, brought the soapy mix to a lather. Raising the brush to his face, he heard a sound at the front door, the unmistakable tinkle of metal against metal. “Move!” he ordered himself. He turned off the water, dumping the foam into the sink even as he bent and scooped up his shirt and jacket. The noise came again and he imagined a drunken hand fumbling for the lock.Mach Schnell! Sweeping a hand across the light switch, he bolted into the bedroom, eyes darting to every corner for a place to hide. Again he noted the untouched bedspread and cursed his carelessness.

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 breathing. His skin ruffled. 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 bonnet descending over his head, boxing 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 there. 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 an offender. “One bullet, only. Get that man. Bring him here. Now!”