The Runner (21 page)

Judge approached the bed, staring hard at the wrinkled countenance. Conducting his preliminary research into Goering’s wartime activities, he’d come across the Bach name time and time again. It had been May in New York and while everyone’s eyes and ears were tuned to the horror stories coming from Dachau and Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he’d been reading the testimonies of foreign laborers who had toiled in Alfred Bach’s myriad factories. Sixteen-hour workdays on unheated factory floors with no breaks given for lunch or dinner. Failure to meet daily quotas punished with flagellation, pummeling, and withholding of meals. Questioning a command, the same. One Russian laborer who had failed to properly arm a bucket of fuses was made to hop the length of the concrete floor (over one hundred yards) on his knees. When a kneecap fractured and he could no longer move, he was beaten with a rifle butt, then removed to the infirmary, where he was given neither medical care, food, nor a bed. He died the next day. One Bach factory mandated a particularly creative form of torture to inspire their lethargic “employees.” The offender was placed in a wooden box two feet wide and four feet high while cold water was dripped onto his head. The punishment lasted between two and twelve hours. Pregnant women were not excluded. Such barbarous treatment was the rule, not the exception.

Conditions outside the factories were no better. Workers were housed in dog kennels or public urinals or made to sleep in open trenches in camps with no running water and no medical attention. They received two meals daily, a thin soup with rancid vegetables in the morning and a chunk of bread with a slathering of jam at night. Five hundred calories maximum. The men who supervised the factories and camps, the brutes who carried out these punishments, were not generally members of the German military but employees of Bach Industries assigned to the company
werkschütze
or factory police. The average “work expectancy” of a newly arrived laborer was “three months until exhaustion.” Three months, then death. For each slave, Alfred Bach paid the Reich Labor Ministry four marks per day. Naturally, the workers received nothing.

There he lay, the man himself, Alfred Bach, eyes sunken, skin waxy, looking as harmless as any old man preparing to die. Stories abounded about his predilection for patrolling the factory floors, overseeing the smallest matters of production. While he’d never struck a man himself, he had known what went on inside his factories. He had condoned it. If nothing else, it had been his responsibility to contract with the SS or the Labor Ministry for adequate numbers of impressed foreign workers—read slave labor—to maintain his factories at maximum output. How else could he interpret his factory managers’ constant demand for additional workers? How else could anyone?

“Mr. Bach, can you wake up for a few minutes?” Judge asked. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

The cannon king stirred. His eyes opened and he gazed first at Ingrid, then at Judge. “Good morning,” he said. His voice was strong.

“Good morning,” said Judge, heartened. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it shouldn’t take very long. My name is Devlin Judge and I’d like to know if—”

“Good morning,” Alfred Bach repeated. He was smiling now.

“Yes, good morning, Mr. Bach.” Judge looked across the bed to Ingrid, who stood with arms folded over her chest, her face vacant of any expression. “Now, then, if I might ask you—”

“Good morning.”

Judge patted the man’s arm.
Be patient,
he told himself.
Give the old-timer a minute to wake up.
He smiled at Ingrid to show he was understanding of her father’s condition, that he wasn’t the brute she took him for. A second later, a gob of phlegm slapped him in the face.

“Thief!” cried the old man. “Think you can take my company from me, do you? I won’t permit it. No son can rob his father. I am a holder of the Golden Party Badge. The Führer will not permit it!” Alfred Bach lunged forward, swinging a gnarled fist at Judge. He missed wildly and the motion carried him halfway out of his bed. He was naked, his chest crisscrossed with scratches and scabs. Judge leaped forward and grabbed hold of one arm, then the other, guiding him gently back onto the bed. Ingrid patted her father’s head, whispering for him to calm down. Suddenly the old man wrestled free, swinging his arm in a wide arc that battered Ingrid’s head. She paid the blow no attention, taking hold of the offending arm and fixing it to the bed with a pair of cloth restraints. Following her example, Judge fell to a knee and took hold of the straps extending from beneath the mattress. A minute later, Alfred Bach was restrained.

Judge cleaned his face and rushed from the room. After a minute, Ingrid joined him. They stood in the half light of the hallway, eyeing each other. “I’m sorry,” they said in unison.

“No,” said Judge, “let me apologize. I should have taken your word.”

“Papa is very old and very angry. Thank you for being gentle with him. It’s easy to lose one’s temper.”

“A little too gentle.” Judge ran a finger along the edge of his tooth. “Did he do that?”

Ingrid mimicked the motion, tracing a chipped incisor. “Yes. He’s rather strong for an old man, isn’t he?”

Just then, a little boy came running down the hallway, excited by the commotion. At the sight of an American uniform, he stopped short, dashing behind his mother’s legs for cover.

“Pauli. Don’t be shy. Say hello to the major.”

The boy stepped around his mother and extended a hand. He had straight blond hair that fell to his eyebrows and pale blue eyes. It was obvious to Judge that he was ten pounds too thin. “Good morning, sir,” he ventured in accented English.

“I always knew who would win the war,” Ingrid Bach whispered to Judge, then in a louder voice, “May I introduce my son, Paul von Wilimovsky.”

Judge gave the boy’s hand a firm shake. “Are you taking good care of your mother?”

“Yes, sir. I gather the wood and clean Grandpapa’s bedpan.”

“Pauli!” Ingrid tousled the boy’s hair. “He’s the man of the house. And you? Children?”

Judge was taken aback by the encroachment on his private sphere. Usually he would say “none,” and move on to another subject. No one liked to share a passing acquaintance’s bad news, especially when it concerned a six-year-old boy who had died of poliomyelitis. Frankly, it was easier not to say anything. Still, something about the way that Ingrid looked, child hugged to her waist, her broken life on unapologetic display, made him feel that lying would be harder than telling the truth.

“A boy,” he said. “His name was Ryan. He left us three years ago.”

Ingrid reached out a hand to touch him even as she hugged her boy to her waist. “My dear major, I’m so sorry.” He was unable to look at her as she spoke. The immediacy of her grief threatened to reawaken emotions over which he had no control. “Pauli came three weeks early. For the first few days he refused to nurse. He was so fragile, so . . .’’ She let the words drop off. “I don’t know how I would’ve managed without him. He’s everything to me.”

Judge looked at the hand on his arm, acutely aware of its insistent pressure and its assumption of intimacy. He and his wife had never touched after Ryan’s death.

“You haven’t had another?” she asked. The question was spontaneous, a gesture of hope.

“I wanted to, but it didn’t work out. Anyway, we’re not married any—” He cut himself off midstream, realizing he’d said too much already. Her sincerity, however unquestioned, was an invasion and had no place in the day’s conversation. Whatever empathy he felt toward Ingrid Bach, he had to remember whose blood flowed in her veins. “No,” he said, curtly.

Ingrid dropped her hand from his arm, retreating to the opposite side of the corridor. She led him down the back stairs, through the kitchen to the great hall. Pauli took off down the driveway as soon as she opened the front door and in a moment was lost in the high grass leading toward the lake. Judge spotted his driver playing ball with the other GIs. He placed two fingers into the corner of his mouth and whistled loudly, signaling for him to bring the jeep around on the double. Waiting, he turned to look at Sonnenbrücke’s imposing gray facade. Veins of crystal swarmed inside each cut stone. No wonder the place glittered like a diamond.

Ingrid stood beside him on the brick portico, gazing down the valley. “Why are you looking for Erich?”

“He killed two men escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp. One was an American officer.”

Judge thought it funny how the deaths of two men didn’t sound like anything too urgent, and wished he could add to it. He remembered Altman’s words, the sly suspicion that Seyss owned some ulterior motive for escaping other than simply to gain his own freedom. “One last race,” according to Corporal Dietsch.
“Kameraden.”
Would Judge ever find out what it was?

“I thought most of our soldiers had already been released from your holding pens,” said Ingrid.

“Most have. But Seyss was a special case. He was being held as a war criminal.”

She averted her eyes and Judge could see a shiver rustle her shoulders. It was a subject about which she knew too much already. “And how did you learn about us? I mean Erich and me—that we were engaged to be married.”

Judge looked over her shoulder, willing the goddammed driver to get his ass over here. Seeing the jeep approach, he returned his eyes to her. Christ, she was a mess. Her knees were bruised. Her dress bore greasy stains near her waist, where she wiped her hands when cooking. And she could do with a little makeup. He forced himself to imagine her together with the man whose picture he carried in his pocket. Seyss, the Olympian; Seyss, the owner of two Iron Crosses; Seyss, the man who’d murdered Judge’s only brother and seventy more defenseless Americans.

She’s a Bach. Remember that.

“I’m sorry,” he answered, “but I’m not at liberty to say.” Behind him, the jeep arrived with a screech of the brakes. He climbed in, offering the slightest doff of his cap. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting back. It’s a long ride to Bad Toelz. I thank you for your cooperation. Good-bye, Miss Bach.”

Somehow von Wilimovsky didn’t suit her—the Bach name and its colored history were marked indelibly upon her—and this time she didn’t correct him. She bobbed her chin, then turned and walked back inside the lodge.

B
EFORE THEY REACHED THE CREST
of the mountain, Judge asked his driver to stop. He stepped from the jeep and walked to the edge of the road so that he could stare down at Sonnenbrücke. So far below, it looked like a model cut set against a field of green. For a moment he thought he saw her standing in front of the castle, as still as one of the porcelain figurines she collected, then a cloud passed and he realized it had only been a ray of light.

CHAPTER

23

H
EADLIGHTS PIERCED THE FALLING RAIN.
First one set, then another, until an entire column was winding through the darkness and Seyss knew it was the convoy they’d been waiting for. The trucks were still far away, at least three kilometers by his reckoning, too distant even to hear the grumble of their engines. The parade of lights passed through the village of Kronberg, then traversed the flat countryside. He counted seven trucks in all. His eyes left them, advancing along the ribbon of black a shade darker than everything surrounding it. The road wound through a hamlet of barns and farmhouses, crossed a brook, then began the climb into the mountains toward his position.

“Sit tight,” whispered Hans-Christian Lenz. “They’ll be here in ten minutes. All we have to do is wait. My brother will take care of the rest. Tonight, we’re garbagemen. We pick up all the trash that falls from the trucks!”

“What’s on the agenda for tomorrow night?” asked Seyss. “Cleaning the sewers?”

Lenz grinned wolfishly. “It would give me great pleasure to tell an esteemed officer of the Waffen-SS to fuck himself.”

“Would it, now?”

“Yes. Immense, in fact.” Lenz wiped the water dripping from his mustache. “Know where I can find one?”

Seyss laughed dryly, hunkering down in the waist-high brush. Thank Christ for Lenz, he thought to himself. He had found his traveling companion in a dingy two-room flat in Darmstadt, exactly where he’d said he’d be should Seyss ever pass through town. It had been harder to convince Bauer to lend a hand with the operation without spilling news of it to Egon Bach. Ingenuity and improvisation were not words in Bauer’s everyday lexicon. Pride was, however, and once Seyss had shared his personal reasons for not wanting to approach the Circle of Fire for assistance so early in the mission, Bauer had agreed to go along.

The Americans appeared firm in their desire to bring Seyss to justice. Jeeps with loudspeakers mounted onto their hoods patrolled the streets of Heidelberg, and he assumed every other large city, blaring his name and description and the crimes for which he was wanted. Some enterprising Yanks had even posted Wanted: Dead or Alive flyers bearing his photo all over Darmstadt and Frankfurt. Had anyone recognized him, they would have happily broken a bottle over his head and dragged him to the authorities to claim their cash reward. As it was, few people gave him a second look. With his black hair, borrowed spectacles, and adopted slouch, he looked like any other bedraggled survivor. Germans were too concerned with their own plight to keep an eye on their neighbors.

Seyss pulled his jacket closer around, shivering in the foul weather. “Biedermann, Bauer,” he said in a tight whisper, “spread out along this side of the road. Steiner, you go with Lenz across the road.”

“Who the hell is running this operation?” protested Lenz. “Me or you?” He shook his head and after muttering something about officers not knowing their proper place, turned to Steiner and said, “Come on, then, didn’t you hear what the Führer said?”

Seyss watched as the two men shuffled across the slick road and disappeared into the undergrowth fifteen feet away. Lenz was too sarcastic for his taste, but a true
kamerad.
When informed of Seyss’s dilemma earlier that evening, the stout Berliner had tugged at his mustache and shaken his head.

“A thousand American? That’s ten thousand reichsmarks these days. Certainly more than my lousy life is worth.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Seyss had said. “But can you help?”

“Yes, but on one condition. I have a right to know who I am working with. You’ve told me your rank, now tell me your name.”

Without hesitating, Seyss spoke his true name and explained why the entire U.S. Army was looking for him. He told him about killing Janks and Vlassov and nearly being captured by Judge. He required a thousand dollars to escape the country. While not the entire truth, it was all Lenz needed to know.

“You’re that Seyss—the White Lion?” Lenz had crowed in disbelief. “I was at Olympic Stadium the day you ran. My entire family had crowded onto the U-bahn for the trip. It seemed like all of Berlin was there. You were magnificent.”

“I was fourth and no such thing.”

But Lenz would not be deterred in expressing his admiration. “You ran in the Olympic Games. You were our national champion. Don’t be modest.” He shook Seyss by the shoulders. “The White Lion himself. It’s an honor to know you.”

Politely, Seyss had beaten him back. “What about the money?”

“I can’t give you a thousand dollars I don’t have. But with a little luck, I can help you get your hands on something just as good.” And with that, Lenz had gone on to explain the neat “business” his brother, Rudy, had set up for himself.

Every few days, a convoy of trucks left the American airbase at Darmstadt for the German army hospital in Königstein, seventy miles away. The trucks carried medicine, canned food, and other hospital supplies—all of it packed into cartons weighing between fifty and one hundred pounds. Through an American pal, Rudy Lenz had wangled a job where he not only supervised the loading and unloading of the trucks but chose the five-man team that did the actual lifting. His instructions to his men were simple: Stow the choicest items in the last truck, where the loading crew would ride to the hospital atop the sea of swaying boxes. The rest, Lenz had explained, was easy. “A milk run,” in the slang of the American flyers.

Or so he had said five hours ago.

Seyss kept his eyes glued to the straight expanse of road leading from the village of Hoechs, on the flats below them. The spill of beams rounded a corner, a kilometer away. The first truck emerged from behind a stone wall and began climbing the hill. Its engine’s lusty growl turned to a whine, then a howl as the driver worked his way through the gears. Soon the air was abuzz with the angry attack of seven two-and-a-half-ton trucks struggling up a steep incline.

Seyss flattened his body in the sopping grass, keeping his head raised just high enough to see Lenz across from him. The night smelled of jasmine and pine and a hundred other scents he knew and loved. The ground began to tremble, and he was unable to keep his stomach from trembling along with it. How many times had he lain like this during the war, submachine gun cradled in his arms, a company of men awaiting his command to attack? Each time he’d been paralyzed with fright, sure that when he’d raise his arm and cry for his men to attack, his voice would fail him and he’d collapse bawling onto the ground. The same fragility accosted him now.

Running his hands through the damp grass, he forced his breath to come slowly, deeply. The mechanized roar of the approaching convoy cleared his mind of his old fears. Never once had he flinched from battle. Never once had he failed at the decisive moment. But since leaving Villa Ludwig in Munich, a discomfiting question had haunted his mind’s periphery: Why was he taking this last and greatest risk? To whom did he owe this service? To the Fatherland? To the memory of Adolf Hitler? To the German people? At one time or another, he had told himself that it was for any one of them. Horseshit, all of it! He had served. He had wept. He had bled. He owed no one a thing. Sensing the ground shake under him, ears assailed by the scream of twenty-eight wheels lumbering up a slick hill in the dark of the night, Erich Seyss faced down the answer he knew had been lurking inside him. He was doing it for himself. To keep whatever was left of him alive.

Lenz raised a hand, his signal to be ready to move. Seyss nodded his head in response. The lead truck was twenty meters away. Suddenly it sounded its horn, a sharp, ear-splitting bleat. Seyss spun his head to check if any of his men were visible. Biedermann and Bauer lay flat on their bellies, head to the ground. He looked back toward the road as the horn blared again. A pair of deer—a buck and a doe—escaped the truck’s beams, darting into the tree line.

The first truck thundered past, then the second. All Seyss could see of the drivers was a fleeting glimpse of a cigarette’s ember glowing in the pitch-dark cabin. The fourth truck passed and the fifth. He brought himself to his knees. The last truck rumbled by. He rose and began running up the hill behind the truck. Around him, Biedermann and Bauer were doing the same. Lenz trotted up the incline, Steiner close behind.

As if on cue, the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck fell. Two men stood at either side of the bay. Seyss guessed the fat one waving was Rudy Lenz. Suddenly, a torrent of boxes tumbled onto the slick asphalt. Seyss picked up the closest to his feet and carried it into the brush. The word
oleomargarine
was stenciled on the cardboard. He dropped it, then went back for another. The five men scrambled back and forth, slipping on the pavement, hoisting boxes, throwing them into the undergrowth, then advancing up the hill and doing it again. It was back-breaking work and before the taillamps of the last truck were out of sight, Bauer and Lenz were doubled over, gulping down air as if they’d been punched in the gut. Seyss ran all the harder for them. Corned beef, tinned milk, Hershey bars, lard, sardines, something called peanut butter, chicken, pickled herring, more corned beef, peaches, cherries, and flour. Finally, even he had to stop for breath. He stood for a few seconds, hands resting on his knees, staring up the dark slope. In the pounding rain, the trail of boxes looked like stepping stones climbing a waterfall.

It is straw,
Lenz had said earlier.
And we will spin it into gold.

Seyss gathered his breath and went after another carton. He didn’t need gold. Just a thousand dollars and a Russian GAZ.