The Runner Read online

  “What’s next?” asked Janks. “That it? We done here?”

  “That is all, Colonel,” said Vlassov.

  “Good. Load up your wagon and get the hell out of here.”

  As the footsteps tramped above him, Seyss slid his wrist toward his eyes and focused on the watch’s tritium hands. Eight minutes past nine. Bed check was well under way. Had the officer of the watch reached his barracks yet?

  He crawled forward until he was under the porch that extended from the southern side of the kitchen. A cool breeze lapped at his face. Vlassov lumbered back and forth carrying his evening’s wages. After his fourth trip to the wagon, he reentered the kitchen and spoke to Janks. “All done, Colonel. I see you next week.”

  “Till next week, Mr. Vlassov. My boys will open the gate once they see you in your wagon. Go on, now.”

  Vlassov grunted a good-bye and walked out of the room. The kitchen door opened and closed. Seyss slid from beneath the porch and raised himself to one knee. Vlassov was standing in the dark, smoking his customary cigarette before mounting his wagon and leaving the camp. Seyss stared at him a moment. He had been taught to hate the mongrel Slav, to disrespect this man without a homeland, this untermensch. But all he saw was an opponent. A man who stood in his way.

  Placing the blade of the dagger in his mouth, he grasped the railing, and sprang onto the porch. He landed silently. A single step and he was upon Vlassov. Spinning him round, he clamped a hand over his mouth, then plunged the dagger into the base of his throat. Vlassov grunted, bucked once, and was still. Maintaining his grip on the knife, Seyss peeled off the Czech’s reefer jacket one arm at a time. He removed the dagger and gently lowered the body to the ground. A clean kill.

  Seyss checked his watch. Twelve past the hour. The officer of the watch had reached his barracks by now. At any moment, the whistle would sound announcing that a prisoner was missing. Three short blows, a pause, then three more. The gates would remain locked until Janks gave the all-clear. Urging himself to hurry, he plucked Vlassov’s cap off the porch and placed it on his own head, sure to tuck his lank blond hair under the visor. He had put on the Czech’s jacket when the kitchen door opened. Colonel Janks stepped onto the porch, slowly extending his neck like a cautious turtle. No doubt he’d heard Vlassov’s dying snort and decided to see if something was amiss. Spotting the Czech’s body, he took an involuntary step forward. When he raised his head, he was looking at Erich Seyss.

  Seyss moved reflexively, shoving the colonel against the door while slapping a hand over his mouth. Janks stared into his pale blue eyes and for a moment, Seyss saw his own fear mirrored in the American’s face. He considered delivering Janks a blow to the head, leaving him unconscious. No one would care about a dead Czech, but an American officer killed by a German POW? The whole army would be after him. Then he heard Janks’s plaintiff voice offering Vlassov twenty loaves of bread for an Iron Cross and his reason evaporated.

  “Tell me, Colonel,” he whispered, “how many loaves of bread for an SS officer’s dagger?”

  Janks’s eyes tightened in confusion. “But you weren’t—”

  Before he could complete his thought, Seyss rammed the blade into his chest. He withdrew the knife and stabbed him again. Janks’s eyes bulged. He coughed, and a skein of blood decorated Seyss’s cheek. Seyss could feel it warming his skin, rolling down his face, brushing his lips. He tasted the blood of his enemy and his heart beat madly. He took a deep breath, willing the demon to pass, but it was too late and he knew it.

  Smiling, he let the wildness take him.

  When he was again himself, he pulled at the dagger but it was either impaled on bone or so slick with blood that it would not come free. He dropped Janks’s body, then knelt beside it, searching for the pearl-handled Colt automatic that the colonel displayed so proudly on his hip. Vain Americans. Every last one wanted to be like Patton. He removed the pistol from its holster and shoved it into his pocket.

  Fighting to maintain his nerve, Seyss stepped off the porch and mounted the wagon. Vlassov’s jacket was slick with blood, but in the dark it appeared only to be badly stained. He gave the reins a brief tug. The two bays raised their heads as one, then turned to the left and walked toward the gate. Passing through the shadow of the watchtower, he glanced up and saw the nose of a .30-caliber machine gun drooping over the parapet, and behind it a baby-faced soldier aligning him in its sights. Ahead, a dirt road ran through the meadow before veering left and disappearing into the veil of forest that descended from the mountain. A GI approached the wagon, cradling his carbine in one arm. Seyss hunched over the reins to shield the jacket. His right hand delved into his pocket for the comforting heft of Jank’s pistol. He could only hope it was loaded. Lowering his eyes, he whispered “Good night.”

  “Yeah,” grunted the guard. “See you next Sunday.” He patted the bay’s rump, then turned to the gate, dragged it open, and waved the wagon through.

  The whistle blew when he was fifty yards down the road. A moment later, klieg lights doused the wagon. Several gunshots rang out. But no figure could be seen at the reins.

  Erich Seyss was gone.

  The White Lion was free.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE CAFÉ DOWNSTAIRS WAS PLAYING Dietrich again. “Lilli Marlene” for the third time this morning and it was still before ten. Glad for the distraction, Devlin Judge slid his chair from his desk and stepped onto the balcony of his fifth-floor office. The music was clearer now. Dietrich’s dusky voice bounced off the cobblestones and wandered through the canyon of apartments and office buildings, mingling with the cling-clang of bicycle bells and the hot sweet scent of freshly baked croissants.

  Humming nervously, Judge let his eyes wander the rooftops of Paris. A bold sun splashed the landscape of ocher tile and verdigris, its lustral rays erasing a lifetime of soot and grime. The Arc de Triomphe stood guard at the end of the block. Through the fine morning haze, the towering limestone plains looked close enough to touch. If he rose on his toes, he could catch the crown of the Eiffel Tower. Normally the sights made his heart jump. Today he found the view mundane. His work, too, refused his attention. Since arriving three hours earlier, he’d been unable to concentrate on anything except the uneasy buzz that had taken firm, unremitting possession of his gut.

  Today was the day. He didn’t need a damn thing to make his heart race faster than it already was.

  Ordering himself back to his desk, he pulled on his reading glasses, tugged at his cuffs, and with a resigned sigh, picked up the leather-bound diary he’d been struggling with all morning. The faded blue script spoke of a dinner in August of 1942 given by Adolf Hitler at Wolfschanze, his battlefield headquarters in east Prussia. Hitler had ranted at length about the chronic shortage of labor in the country’s largest factories and had ordered shipments of foreign workers to the Fatherland increased. Sklavenarbeit was the word he employed. Slave labor. The information would be useful tomorrow when Judge sat face to face with the diarist himself and listened to the fat man’s confident denials. In open court, it would prove damning.

  The prospect made Judge smile for the first time that morning.

  Selecting a bookmark from a neat stack two inches deep, he inscribed a number at its head and inserted it into the diary. He sighed. No. 1,216, and still nearly three years of the war to go. Copying the numerals to his legal pad, he transcribed the pertinent details in the painstaking print he’d developed over five years as an attorney. Neatness brought clarity, and clarity, order, he reminded himself. There was no room for confusion in a proper legal argument. That went for the simplest case of larceny. It counted double for the most important trial in the tenure of civilized mankind.

  Devlin Parnell Judge had not come to Europe simply as an attorney but as a member of the International Military Tribunal, the august legal body established by the Allied powers—Russia, Britain, France and the United States—to try the leaders of the Third Reich for war crimes. The acts were so heinous, s
o original in their barbarity, that they warranted a new and unique classification: Crimes against humanity.

  Judge had been assigned to the Interrogations Division. They were the hard-eyed boys, charged with drawing incriminating statements from the accused so that their silver-tongued colleagues could make mincemeat of them on the stand. It wasn’t the first team, but he was happy all the same. Every lawyer in Manhattan, including those who worked alongside him at the U.S. Attorney’s office, wanted in. The war crimes trials would make front-page news and the men who stood before the bar would be as famous as Ruth or DiMaggio. Though he’d lobbied hard for the spot, Judge’s motivations had little to do with career advancement. Nor were they shaped by any altruistic bent. Only as a member of the International Military Tribunal could he uncover the details of what had happened to his brother, Francis Xavier, an ordained Jesuit priest and army chaplain killed in Belgium seven months before. More important, only as a member of the IMT could he have the power to make those responsible pay.

  Today was the day.

  The phone rang and Judge pounced on it.

  But it was only a driver from Motor Transport confirming his pickup tomorrow morning. Was six o’clock all right? They needed an hour to get to Orly and an hour on top of that for the flight to Mondorf-les-Bains. The major would be at the Ashcan by nine o’clock sharp. Judge said he’d be ready and hung up the phone.

  The Ashcan was slang for the Palace Hotel in Luxembourg, a fading five-star princess pressed into service as a maximum-security prison. Inside its peeling stucco walls resided fifty of the highest-ranking Nazis in captivity. Speer, Donitz, Keitel: the shameless bonzen of the National Socialist Workers’ party. And, of course, Hermann Wilhelm Goering, Hitler’s jovial prince, and the man with whose interrogation Judge had been charged.

  He continued reading, the historical significance of his work granting him a resolve he couldn’t otherwise muster. Ten minutes later, he decided further progress was futile. Off came the glasses, down went the diary. He simply couldn’t concentrate. Better not to work at all than to risk bad product. Rising from his desk, he closed the balcony doors behind him. The music was no longer a distraction, just a nuisance. Germany’s most famous expatriate singing the English lyrics to Hitler’s favorite tune. Why did the song make him so homesick?

  Pacing the perimeter of his cramped office, Judge plucked a dozen law books from their scattered resting places and returned them to the shelves. He was not a tall man, but the beam of his shoulders and the girth of his neck conspired to ensure that he was never ignored. This strength was also apparent in his back, which was broad and well muscled, the result of a youth hustling barrels of Canadian whiskey at the local speakeasy. His hands, too, were thick and compact, at odds with his well-manicured nails and the wedding band he still wore only to pretty them.

  He had a gambler’s sly face with flashing brown eyes and a smile that promised trouble. His black hair was cut short and parted with a razor slash. And this guileful mien set on a fighter’s frame lent him a smoldering ambiguity. At El Morocco, he was made to wait even with a reservation in hand. At the Cotton Club, he was immediately shown the best table in the house. But Judge had no problem reconciling his physical contradictions, for in them he read his own secret history. He was the neighborhood rascal masquerading as the law. The reformed sinner who prayed louder than the rest, not so that God might better hear him but to drum out his own undying doubts.

  Finished replacing the heavy legal tomes, he scanned the office for anything else out of place. The bookshelves were packed full, spines arranged by height. A dozen legal pads rose high on a credenza. As usual his desk was immaculate. A chipped porcelain mug stuffed with a bouquet of sharpened pencils decorated one corner. An army-issue day calendar rested in the other, its officious red script declaring the date to be Monday, July 9. Tucked behind a green-visored table lamp stood two small photographs—his sole concession to lending his office of six weeks a touch of home.

  One showed a tall, portly man with wavy dark hair sporting the bold pinstripes of the Fordham Rams, his insouciant smile and practiced slouch betrayed by the serious grip with which he held the bat to his shoulder. Judge picked up the frame and wiped away a day’s accumulation of dust, then returned it to its place. His brother, Francis, hadn’t been much of a ball player. He was a klutz with a glove and slow as an ox. But give him a fastball and he’d knock it out of the park. Anything else, forget it. He’d go down swinging in four pitches. The words full count were nowhere in his lexicon.

  The second photo was smaller, worn and creased from a thousand days in Judge’s wallet. A smiling four-year-old greeted the camera, dark hair parted and combed like his father’s, eyes opened wide with excitement as if life was something he couldn’t get enough of. Judge dusted that photo, too, returning his boy’s smile with equal parts longing and pride.

  He’d brought a few other reminders of home with him to Europe—a sterling fob watch gifted him by his old boss, Thomas Dewey, back when Dewey was just a special prosecutor and not yet governor of New York State; a small ornately sculpted crucifix that had belonged to his brother, and a photo of his parents, deceased these ten years—but these he stored in his drawer. An attorney’s eyes were best kept on his work, he’d been taught, and personal mementos little more than crutches for the unfocused mind.

  Satisfied that his office was in presentable shape, he contemplated returning to his desk. Eyeing the low-backed chair, he took an unconscious step backward, as if it were electrified. Even on good days, he wasn’t a patient man. Today he was downright skittish. A hand fell to his wrist and he began turning his watch round and round. He couldn’t remember when he’d acquired the habit, only that it was a long time ago. What was waiting but a genteel form of torture?

  The latest batch of documents had arrived yesterday at noon. Forty-seven filing cabinets stuffed with three thousand pounds of official government correspondence, property of the Reich Main Security Office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse 8, Berlin headquarters of the SS, or Schutzstaffel—Hitler’s private black guard. Judge’s spies upstairs in C&C—Cataloguing and Collating—told him these were the papers he’d been waiting for: movement orders, casualty lists, after-action reports chronicling the daily battlefield history of the SS’s elite divisions. Somewhere inside was word of who had killed his brother. It was just a question of finding it.

  Today was the day.

  A sharp knock at the door interrupted his vacillating. A short, rumpled officer with thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed spectacles entered the office. His uniform was similar to Judge’s. Dark olive jacket, khaki shirt and tie, with light slacks to match. “Pink and greens,” in the military vernacular. Like Judge, he was an attorney and carried the insignia of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps on his lapel.

  “I think you’d better come with me,” said Colonel Bob Storey, chief of the IMT’s Document Control Division. “We might have found our pot of gold.”

  “What is it? Do you have a name?”

  “Just come along. You’ll have plenty of time to ask questions later.”

  Judge grabbed his coat and dashed out of the office. The hallways of 7 rue de Presbourg bustled with civilian and military personnel. Not a day passed without a mother lode of documents being discovered somewhere in Germany. Last week, 485 tons of diplomatic papers were found in a cave in the Harz Mountains. The week before, the archives of the Luftwaffe Central Command turned up in a salt mine in Obersalzberg, Austria. Anything remotely dealing with activities that might be construed as war crimes was sent here. Given the scope of the Nazis’ atrocities and their propensity for documenting their every act, that made for a hell of a lot of paper.

  Judge followed Storey at a close distance, the two marking a brisk pace. He was troubled by his older colleague’s ambivalence. If they’d found a pot of gold, why wasn’t he more excited? After all, Bob Storey had been his partner in this thing from day one—his cheerleader, his unofficial commanding officer, and
more recently, Judge believed, his friend.

  He’d approached Storey his very first day on the job, asking his help with a personal matter. His older brother, Francis Xavier, had been killed last December at Malmedy, he explained. Might Storey keep an eye out for any documents that might shed light on the facts surrounding the incident? It was a tale every American knew well, emblazoned on the country’s collective memory by headlines of fire and vitriol. “Captured GIs Massacred in Malmedy.” “A Hundred Soldiers Shot in Cold Blood.” And, perhaps, most eloquently, “Murder!” Storey agreed immediately.

  These were the details: On the morning of Sunday, December 17, 1944, a column of American troops, primarily members of B Battery of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, found themselves driving south on a two-lane country road in eastern Belgium. The day was sunny, the temperature above zero. Little snow covered the ground. The men traveled in a convoy of thirty vehicles—jeeps, weapons carriers, heavy trucks, and two ambulances—reaching the village of Malmedy at twelve-fifteen. The area was safely under American control. Route markers had passed through earlier in the day and several other units had followed the same path without incident an hour before. But as B Battery passed through Malmedy, word came that German patrols had been spotted a few miles to the southwest. (Though the massive German counteroffensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge had been launched the day before, no fighting had been reported in this particular sector.)

  B Battery continued as planned. A few miles outside of Malmedy, after passing through the Baugnez Crossroads, an intersection of five country roads, the convoy suddenly came under direct fire from a column of German tanks less than half a mile away. At least five vehicles were hit and their occupants killed or wounded. The rest halted immediately, many seeking protection in a gully next to the road. The rapidly approaching German tanks kept up their fire, both with machine gun and cannon. Two minutes later, a Panther tank plowed B Battery’s lead jeep off the road. In the face of a vastly superior force, the American soldiers—among them, Father Francis Xavier Judge, SJ—surrendered.