The Runner (8 page)

CHAPTER

8

E
RICH
S
EYSS WAS A CONNOISSEUR
of destruction. He had only to hear a shell’s whistle to know its caliber, to catch a rifle’s report to guess its bore, to lay eyes on a ruin and know who and what had devastated it. Staring at the ravaged facade of a three-story building in a squalid, bombed-out district of south Munich, therefore, he needed only a few seconds to recreate the action that had rendered it a teetering, gutless wreck. Sustained machine-gun fire had chiseled a thousand pocks into the building. Fire from a phosphorous grenade had garlanded the windows with wreaths of impregnable soot. Any fool could see where the tank had rammed through the bottom floor, leaving the house lopsided and in need of a crutch.

Seyss imagined the American troops scrambling up the road, each squad providing covering fire for the next, as slowly, inexorably, they took up position around the house. He could hear the tap-tap-tapping of small arms, the thudding of the machine gun, the muffled roar of the grenades, and above them all, the screams of the wounded. City fighting was slow, sweaty, and unimaginably loud. The mere recollection left his mouth dry and sticky. Sometime during the pitched battle, an artillery piece had been brought to bear. A 75-mm Howitzer, by the size of the hole rent in the wall high on the second story. That was the end, of course. The boys defending the house would have had no choice but to give it up and move down the road to the next parcel of land worth dying for. One more piece of Germany swallowed by the relentless green tide.

Seyss poked his head round the stack of empty ammo crates that for the last twenty minutes had served as his blind, glancing a last time up and down the street. Satisfied that no unfriendly eyes were watching the building, he crossed the road and jogged up the front path, neatly threading his way through a field of debris. He paused by the entry long enough to read the address inscribed on a soot-encrusted brass plaque. Twenty-one Lindenstrasse. He offered an unfeeling smile. Home.

Hurrying inside, he made a quick tour of the ground floor, through the salon, the living room, the kitchen. His eyes scanned what floor remained for boot prints, cigarette butts, any sign of a recent visit. He saw nothing to alarm him. At times, he was forced to tiptoe across the coarse spars that had supported the flooring. Hearing a strange flutter, he froze and glanced up. Through the torn floorboards, he glimpsed the ceiling of his bedroom three stories above him. The tail of his curtains gently slapped the wall, then fell back.

Twenty years had passed since he’d lived at Lindenstrasse. At the age of eight, he’d been sent away to school, first to the state military barracks at Brunswick, then to the SS Academy at Bad Toelz. Home had always been simply a way station between postings. If he’d expected an onslaught of nostalgia, he was mistaken. His only sadness was at the condition of the house itself. Nearly all the flooring had been torn out, probably to use as firewood. It went without saying that the furniture, paintings, carpets, and assorted bric-a-brac that had made up his home was gone. Even the wallpaper had been rudely torn off. The house was nothing but a husk.

“Father?” he called, sotto voce. “I’m home.”

His whisper died inside the barren shell and he laughed silently. He had no idea where his father might be, nor did he care. Six months had passed since he’d last seen him, a lunchtime visit on his way to the Austro-Hungarian border. There he’d sat, Otto Seyss, gray and paunchy, proud holder of National Socialist party number 835, one of the oldest of the
alte kämpfer,
loudly proclaiming over his ersatz coffee and ersatz sausage that the retreat of the German Army on all fronts was a ruse.
A ruse!
And that, any day now, Hitler would unleash his secret weapons under construction at the rocket laboratories at Peenemünde and the war would be over—
snap!
—like that. The Allies forced to surrender, the Russians driven back to Stalingrad, the German Army once again victorious, with all Europe its prize. Seyss had branded his father’s talk of secret weapons a sham, arguing that the war had been over for two years already, and that he should get the hell out of Munich as soon as possible if he wanted to survive the coming fight. His father had responded accordingly, calling him a traitor and a coward. The same things he’d called his wife six years earlier when she’d declared herself unwilling to support the tyrant who had shipped her youngest son to a detention camp. Only that time, he’d punctuated his remarks with a vicious right hook that had sent his wife home to Dublin for good with a shattered jaw.

Seyss returned to the front door before venturing upstairs and scanned the road in both directions. Lindenstrasse was deserted. The once-noble town houses had been picked clean and abandoned, the entire neighborhood left to its decaying self. Not a GI or a German was in sight. Reassured, he made his way to the main staircase. Remarkably, it was intact, except for the banister, which was nowhere to be seen. He climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, stopping only when he’d reached the top.

The third floor was composed of three rooms. His parents’ bedroom occupied the northern half. The southern half was divided into two rooms for Seyss and his younger brother, Adam. He glanced into Adam’s room, imagining a lanky, argumentative boy with a crop of honey-colored hair and his own blue eyes. He stood still for a moment searching for some reminder of his loss, waiting for a sliver of remorse, hoping even, but none came. Adam was just one more casualty of the war. That he had never donned a uniform or picked up a rifle mattered little.

Seyss continued down the hallway and entered his own room. Crossing to the opposite wall, he lowered himself to one knee. A carpet of glass, mortar, and dust an inch deep covered the floor. He cleared a small circle, then hooked his fingers under the heating grate, gave a firm tug, and laid it to one side. Delicately he inserted his hand into the rectangular void. His fingers crept to the right, to the shallow shelf he had carved as a boy to hide his collection of French postcards, sepia-toned photographs of “adventurous” French women. A wall of dirt tickled his fingertips. Confounded, he reached farther into the hole, but froze when he heard the whine of an approaching engine. After a moment, another engine joined it, then another. An entire fucking armored column was advancing down Lindenstrasse!

Seyss slid his hand from the hole and lifted his eyes above the windowsill. Two jeeps and an armored personnel carrier crammed full of troops were a few hundred meters away and closing. Egon had warned him that the Americans would make the search for Janks’s murderer a top priority. In light of the extraordinary information he possessed, Seyss had been foolish not to heed the admonition. For three hours last night, Egon had discussed the most intimate details of Terminal: the Allied leaders’ meeting place in Potsdam, their daily schedule, proposed security measures, even the addresses in the leafy suburb of Babelsberg where Churchill, Truman, and Stalin would reside during the conference. The intelligence was far better than any soldier could expect and,
if accurate,
had come from the highest levels of the American command. Seyss made it a point to question such things.

Outside, the growl of the motors grew louder. Seyss pressed himself against the wall, darting a glance out the window every few seconds. One hand dropped to his waist, but the Luger he sought wasn’t there. His only defense against inquisitive Americans was the
persilschein
folded neatly in his breast pocket. Issued by the occupational government, the document declared that one Sgt. Erwin Hasselbach was free of any ties to the Nazi party and eligible for all manner of work. Signed by a major general in the Third Army, it was what passed for identification these days. The document got its nickname from a laundry detergent called Persil. Hold a
persilschein
and you were clean.

Seyss looked out the window again. Damn! The little procession was continuing along Lindenstrasse as if rolling along a streetcar track. His heart was beating very fast now. He was sweating. Embarking on a mental reconnaissance of his home, he plotted his escape should the soldiers, in fact, be charged with his arrest. Move now and he could make it to the ground floor in time to get out the back. His eyes shot to the exposed vent. What lay inside was imperative for his coming journey. His passport to Potsdam, as it were.

Clenching his fist, he forced himself to wait a second longer. No fugitive in his right mind would return to his home. It was the first place any policeman would look. Ergo, no policeman would think he’d be stupid enough to go there. Ergo, no policeman would waste his time checking the place, especially once they knew that his home was situated in a suburb of Munich that had been razed from the map.

Daring another look, Seyss noted that the vehicles showed no sign of slowing. If anything, they were moving faster. One by one, they rumbled past, leaving only spirals of dust in their wake. He wanted to laugh. He always did when he got out of a tight scrape.

Returning to the floor, he delved his arm into the heating vent. This time he reached in as far as he could, meeting the curtain of dirt and pushing through it. His fingers touched a blunt metallic object. Taking hold, he worked it brusquely through the earthen shaft until it passed through the rectangular opening and sat on the floor by his feet.

The sterling silver box was the size and width of a hardbound book. Embossed on its cover were twin bolts of lightning, in fact, ancient runes that denoted the SS or Schutzstaffel, the private army organized by Heinrich Himmler and others in 1923 to act as Adolf Hitler’s personal protection squad. Beneath the runes, engraved in a neat cursive script, was Seyss’s name. Once the box had held his medals.

Commanding himself to relax, he removed its cover and sorted through the contents, cataloguing each item even as he slipped it into his pockets. One folding buck knife, SS issue, sharpened to a razor’s edge. One billfold, contents a thousand Reichsmarks. Two dog tags taken from dead GIs. And finally, wrapped in a sheet of wax paper, a sturdy white card with a black stripe running diagonally across it from top to bottom. Typeset in Cyrillic, not Western, lettering. The government-issue identification of one Colonel Ivan Truchin, late of the Russian NKVD or secret police.

Seyss ran a finger along the card’s edges, marveling at its immaculate condition. Few Russian soldiers were issued official pieces of identification. Fewer still managed to keep them in any kind of decent condition. A document issued by the Comintern itself, one bearing the signature of Lavrenti Beria, now that was a rarity, indeed, and spoke to Colonel Truchin’s importance to the revolution. Seyss gingerly slid it into his breast pocket. His ticket to Terminal. Nothing else would have brought him back to his house.

But Seyss wasn’t quite finished. A last foray into his adolescent hiding place yielded a canvas web belt, black, tattered, unremarkable except for its surprising weight. Around a kilo, if he wasn’t mistaken. Cut into the belt were ten oblong pockets. In each rested one hundred grams of gold smelted from the SS private foundry near Frankfurt. The slim ingots had been labeled “nonmonetary” gold because of their lesser purity—.95 versus the Reichsbank’s standard of .999. It was difficult and costly to purify gold extracted from candelabras, wedding rings, eyeglasses, watches, dental fillings, and the like. Each ingot bore the imprimatur of the Third Reich: an eagle holding a wreathed swastika in its talons.

Seyss cinched the belt low around his waist, tucking in his shirt over it, then patted himself down to make sure the belt wasn’t visible. Egon had provided him with two thousand American dollars, an amount well in excess of his needs. Still, Seyss preferred to be prudent. Egon Bach’s intelligence was
spitzenclasse,
but his planning was too meticulous, cut through with the fanciful ambitions and precise timetables of an armchair general.

Seyss was to lead a squad of men into the Soviet zone of occupation, travel two hundred kilometers along the main corridor to Berlin, and pierce the guarded enclave of Potsdam. Former members of Seyss’s command had been tracked down and recruited. Good men, all. Contacts had been established along the route of travel—in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and the German capital itself. He would have access to safe houses, revised intelligence, and most important, Soviet weaponry, transport, and uniforms. Once in Potsdam, however, he would be on his own. He knew the objectives. How he chose to fulfill them was his choice. Only five days remained until the conference began and Egon had made it clear he must act soon afterward. Something about ensuring that the last wishes of a country’s leaders not be respected.

The rest, Egon had said, would take care of itself. Dominos, he’d laughed. One falling onto the back of the next.

Reviewing the carefully laid-out plan a final time, Seyss selected those elements that would be of use and discarded the rest. While impressed by Egon’s logistics, he was also wary of them. Information flowed two ways. To his mind, the operation was already too big. He worried that Weber or Schnitzel, or one of their cronies among the Circle of Fire, might find the details of such a plan helpful in bartering his freedom from his American overlords. Then, of course, there was Egon, himself. His uneasy arrangement with the Americans left Seyss nervous. Very nervous indeed.

One last item remained inside the box. A photograph of a young couple standing in front of a sparkling fountain. Out of habit, he turned it over to read the date and place inscribed, though he hardly needed a reminder. September 3, 1938. Nuremberg. God, he looked magnificent, his uniform just so, his jackboots buffed to a high polish. So did Ingrid. Like the princess she was and would always be. He skimmed his thumb over her face, imagining the feel of her cheek. Staring into her eyes, he saw only the heartache that was to follow—his abrupt good-bye, the canceled nuptials, the failure even to explain himself—and he was accosted by a wave of shame.
Sächlichkeit,
he reminded himself.
You gave her up for the Fatherland.
He’d practically memorized Darré’s letter. “The Office of Race and Resettlement therefore denies your application for marriage on grounds of violating section IIC of . . .’’ He winced at the memory, though his belief in the verdict was undiminished, then continued his recital. “. . . so that the purity of the Fatherland may not be further diluted.”