Christopher Reich - The Runner

“But, Herr Major, the woman was still alive.”

“Get him!” Seyss could not allow logic to interfere with his orders. He heard a whistle blow and another twenty women were jogged into the pit. Two carried infants.Funny, he thought,why don’t they make more fuss? A squad of soldiers lined up behind them. They raised their rifles and fired. The women collapsed. A baby cried and one of the soldiers ran into the pit and fired off a few shots.

“There,” shouted Seyss, gesturing madly at the extermination squad, “Look, Gruber, that man is firing indiscriminately. One bullet. What is so hard to understand? Replace him at once.”

Gruber averted his gaze. “With who?”

“Someone from Erhardt’s company.”

“They’ve been dismissed. Some of the men are upset. They are no longer fit.”

No longer fit. Seyss knew what that meant. A little killing and they’d broken like children.

“Upset?” he yelled. “What about me? I am upset, too. What am I to say to Himmler when I return to Berlin — ‘the men refused your order’?”

He remembered his last meeting with the Reichsführer SS. A leisurely perusal of the statistics just in from Einsatz Kommando A in Riga, his pal Otto Ohlendorf’s command. 138,500 Jews killed. Fifty-five communists. Six Gypsies. 400,000 rounds of ammunition expended at a cost of two Reichsmarks per bullet. Himmler inquiring in his unhurried professional voice, “Unacceptable. Wouldn’t you agree, Herr Sturmbannführer?” He flicked a paper or two, his finger coming to rest at a particularly bothersome figure. “Fifty thousand children. That’s fine. But can you explain to me why our men require two bullets to eliminate a child? Solve the problem, Seyss. One bullet. See to it. The waste makes me sick.”

Seyss strode to the endless line of women and pushed another twenty into the pit. “Take proper aim and use a single round,” he shouted to the einsatz squad. “Reichsführer Himmler is giving you a direct order. Do you understand?” He drew his pistol and passed behind the line of women, brushing the nose of his pistol against the bare nape of their necks. He stopped at the last woman. She had fine blonde hair and a fair complexion. Hardly the semite to look at. But he’d been fooled before. And placing the gun to the base of her skull, he pulled the trigger.

“You see. It’s not so hard. One bullet!”

Inside the closet, Seyss cringed as the words reverberated inside his skull. Yet even as the tattered vestiges of his conscience hung in the dark beside him, he twirled the knife in his hand, turning the blade up to deliver a slashing blow, willing the officer to open the closet door.

Inches away, the American stood in the alcove, asking if the woman wanted a glass of water. She said sure, and he walked into the bathroom, humming along with the radio. Something about “sitting under an apple tree”. Seyss couldn’t make out the lyrics. His mind was fuzzy. He was hot and his muscles ached. The soldier returned to the bedroom. Seyss heard a bottle being set down on the desk and a glass to go with it. Then the bedsprings again. The woman made a terrible braying noise as she was being fucked.

“Sachlichkeit,” he whispered through gritted teeth.Objectivity. Control. Discipline. You are a man standing inside a wooden box. The darkness is temporary. Consider it a test of your stamina, a measure of your physical abilities. But reason was no cure for his untethered anxiety.

Suddenly, the closet was unbearable. The jacket scuffing the back of his neck, the shelf collapsing upon his head, the musty odor scratching his nostrils, invading his throat. Worst, though, was the smell of his own body. He could no longer remain so close to himself. Still, for one more agonizing second, he managed to choke down his fears. He ignored the clothing crawling all over him, and his olfactory distress. Squeezing his eyelids tightly, he even dredged up a moment of calm, if calm is what you call it when your skin is covered with goosebumps and your heart beating hard enough to crack a rib.

And then, like a frayed cord, his discipline snapped.

“To hell with it,” he said, and quietly hauled himself out of the closet.

The two were splayed across the bed, the American on top of his German whore, copulating vigorously. Seyss crossed the room in two strides, planting his knee in the crook of the soldier’s back before he could turn his head. Dropping his knife to the bed, Seyss threw his left arm around the American’s neck and took firm hold of the jaw. He braced his right arm across the rim of the man’s shoulders, pulled the body taut against his knee, and gave a single ferocious twist to the left. The vertebrae snapped instantly and the body fell limp.

It was over in three seconds.

If the whore was screaming, Seyss couldn’t tell. Her labored gasps sounded no different to her annoying bray. Shoving the American corpse off her, he sat down on the bed, sure to retrieve his knife.

“Shh,” he said, covering her mouth with a hand. “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She was very pretty, no more than eighteen beneath all that cheap makeup. She had blonde hair and deep blue eyes and for a moment she reminded him of one of the maidens he’d slept with in the Lebensborn hostel, some busty zealot from the Bund Deutscher Mädchen eager to provide the Reich with a parcel of racially superior children. He looked at her again and realized he’d been mistaken. She looked like Ingrid Bach.

And as she ventured a smile, nervously nodding her cooperation, he kissed her on the forehead and plunged the knife into her chest.

The uniform fit better than he had expected. The trousers fell to his heel and not a millimeter below it. The waist was a few sizes too large, but a belt cinched it nicely. And the jacket fit as if tailor-made. He had shaved and showered, taking pains to doctor the raw groove where Judge’s bullet had nicked his scalp. He had shampooed his hair thoroughly, so that no longer was it the same inkbottle black, but a dark, lustrous brown. Using a pair of nail scissors, he had cut it very short, then doused it with witch hazel and parted it directly above his left eye.

After giving his tie a final going over, Seyss buttoned up his jacket. In one pocket, he carried a little more than two hundred dollars and a picture of his sweetheart back home. In another, the few dog tags and identification cards he’d picked up in Munich. He looked damned sharp clad in khaki. What a wonder it did for his soul to be in uniform once again. The wrong uniform, to be sure, but who was he to argue? These days everything was upside down.

Adjusting the cap squarely on his head, he stood at attention. Something was wrong. He checked the uniform the tie. Everything was in order. What was it, then? He looked himself up and down until he found the problem. His posture. He looked as if he were waiting for the Fuhrer to pass in review.Relax, old man. He dropped a shoulder and forced his stomach to droop. And in a moment he’d achieved the indolent attitude, at once cocksure and uncertain, of the citizen soldier.

Better, but not perfect.

Then he saw it.

It was his face. It was too closed. Too private. Too German. Americans were so trusting, so wide-eyed, so eager. Every feeling they’d had — every heartbreak, every crush, every promotion, every setback — was there to see, smack in the middle of their face. Smile, he told himself, and taking a deep breath, he stretched his cheeks from ear to ear. Raise your eyebrows. Open your eyes a shade wider. He thought of his childhood, a day at the carnival, the prospect of the Ferris Wheel. He pictured himself at the top gazing over all Munich, then gave himself a fat sausage for good measure. Bliss!