Christopher Reich - The Runner

Seyss had pulled away again. Judge worked the throttle, not wanting too large a distance to grow between them. Responding to his instructions, the bike shot forward and at that instant, a pushcart piled high with fractured porcelain nosed into his path. The road was blocked. Braking madly, he threw the handlebars to the left. A grunt and the bald tires slid out from under him.

He came to rest two feet from the pushcart. His pants were torn, his knees and elbows bloodied. The bike was a wreck, front tire folded back on itself, chain broken and splayed like a three foot worm. Ignoring the half-hearted queries of passers-by, he skirted the pushcart, desperate to catch sight of the Horsch. He spotted it, a hundred yards up the road. As if in sympathy, it had stopped to allow an oncoming streetcar to pass before negotiating a sharp left turn. With a sigh of infinite frustration, he watched Erich Seyss disappear up the narrow street, a shimmering shadow under the midday sun.

Then his eye came to rest upon the striped awning of a stubborn grocer. And above it a street sign:Eichstrasse.

And then he ran.

The door slammed and Ingrid rushed from the bathroom.

“Devlin, I have some wonderful news. You’ll never guess what…”

He stood in the doorway, dressed in the uniform of an American officer, blue folder tucked under one arm. His face was harder than she remembered, shorn of youth’s innocent disguise. His cheeks were hollow. His jaw thicker, more resolute. New lines advanced from the corners of his eyes. He was the only man the war had made more handsome.

“The uniform,” said Erich Seyss, touching the lapel of his jacket. “Strange, I know. I’m still getting used to it myself. It’s the only way to get around town without too many questions.”

Ingrid stared at him for a few seconds, not knowing what to say. Her skill at making conversation had fled, along with the air from her lungs and, for a moment, she couldn’t decide how to deport herself: whether to act the maiden betrayed, the resourceful mother, or the secret accomplice come to aid in his capture.

He decided for her. Closing the door, he crossed the short distance between them and took her in his arms. He stroked her hair, and for a few seconds, her heart fluttered as it had six years ago. Here he was then, the long lost object of her adoration. The man whose actions had shredded her every belief in herself. The source of her strength and her misery. The father of her only child.

She held him for as long as it took to realize she no longer loved him, then let him go. “Hello, Erich.”

“Ingrid.”

She raised a hand to his cheek, wanting to touch him. It was a reflex; a remembrance of an intimacy lost. And she stopped herself just shy of his burnished skin.

Seyss looked her up and down, nodding his head. “Now I know I wasn’t a fool to let you ruin my career.”

Ingrid broke from his embrace and walked to the vanity, needing the distance to make sense of his words. “I beg your pardon?”

“I came back for you,” he said, following her every step. “Two years ago, it was, in March. We’d lost Stalingrad. Everyone knew the war was over. It was just a question of when. Suddenly, I decided that you were more important than the party or some bureaucrat’s idiotic rules. I didn’t have a pass, but I left anyway. I took a sleeper to Munich, then drove to Sonnenbrucke. You were gone. To a friend’s somewhere for the week.”

“But I was married. Surely you knew.”

“Of course,” he answered, standing at her shoulder like a stubborn suitor. “Foolish of me, but I thought I could lure you away.”

Ingrid stood preternaturally still, her eyes fastening upon every detail of the apartment’s hard-won cleanliness. The floor she’d mopped with a moth-eaten sweater, the furniture she’d polished with a lace dress, the duvet plumped up after airing for an hour. Her surprise was not rooted in disappointment or regret. Not for an instant did she ask herself “what if”. She was captured, instead, by her immunity to his words. And at that moment, she realized she was truly free of him.

“No one told me.”

“Only Herbert knew.” Seyss smirked. “Glad to know someone can keep their oaths.”

He laid a hand on her shoulder and turned her around so they were standing close to one another. Uncomfortably close, by Ingrid’s reckoning. Smiling mawkishly, he took her hands in his. “Ever since, I’ve wondered what would have happened if I’d arrived a day earlier. I’ve asked myself the same question again and again.”

“It’s in the past, Erich. We’re different people now.”

“Would you have divorced Wilimovsky? Would you have married me?”

Ingrid tried to avert her eyes, but couldn’t. His unwavering gaze didn’t belong to a spurned lover, but a betrayed commander. It was his pride, not his heart, that had been wounded. “No.”

“And now that he’s dead?”

Finally, she looked away, her eyes coming to rest on their intertwined hands. “For the longest time after you left, I kept track of your whereabouts. I’d call my brothers and ask if they’d seen you, if you were safe. Sometimes I swear I wanted to hear that you’d been killed. The hardest thing I ever did was to stop caring for you.”

“I’m sorry.”

She pulled her hands free. “It’s too late for apologies, Erich. Six years. These days, that’s a lifetime.”

“When did you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“When did you stop caring?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What does it matter?”

Grasping her arms, he gave her a violent jolt. “When?”

She stared at him before answering, keenly aware that despite his lovelorn words he was not here to pay a social call. “Long before you ‘ruined your career for me’, I didn’t have the strength to hate you anymore.”

Turning her shoulders, she forced herself from his embrace. She was frightened by his coarse behavior. Never had he been pushy or demonstrative. If anything, he was the opposite. Cool to the point of indifference. Sachlichkeit , he called it, and when she used to say it was just a soldier’s ruse to get out of an argument, he’d simply smile at her and give a shake of his blond head.

A queer expression crossed Seyss’s face, a rare current of indecision, and for a moment his lips moved as if he were going to ask her something. But just as suddenly, his hesitation vanished. Pivoting, he walked to the window, and right away she saw that his bearing had changed. The spine had stiffened. The shoulders fallen back. He was the soldier again, the time for reminiscences done and discarded. And she knew she’d been right to feel afraid when he’d first walked through her door.

“How did you know I would be here?”

Pulling back a lace curtain, Seyss craned his head outside and peered up and down the street. The windows were simply wooden frames, the glass blown out during the battle for the city. “I didn’t, really,” he said, pulling his head back into the apartment. “Egon mentioned you might be in town. He told me all about your crusade with Major Judge. Actually, I was looking for a place to go to ground for a few hours. Tell me, schatz , when is he due back?”

Ingrid approached him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Erich, please go. I won’t tell him you’ve been here. I give you my word.”

He shot her a bemused look, as if her suggestion were ridiculous, then returned his eyes to Eichstrasse. “Soon, I take it. Or do you wear that perfume all the day long?” He sniffed at the air. “Joy. It was my favorite. I suppose I should be jealous.”

Ingrid took a step back, her cheeks flushing with shame. She’d picked up a petit flaçon of the perfume at the open-air market in the Tiergarten, a token to celebrate her finding a way to visit her cousin. Now her victory was in tatters, and she had to find some means of alerting Devlin to Erich’s presence.