The Runner Page 5

  “Erich, so wonderful to see you,” declared Egon Bach, rising from a wing chair. “Sleep the great healer? You’re looking fit, all things considered.”

  Every large family has its runt and Egon Bach, youngest of the seven Bach children, claimed the title. He was very short and very thin and his cropped brown hair, cut a full inch above the ear, spoke volumes about his love of all things fascist. It was his vision, however, that had kept him from active service. His tortoiseshell spectacles carried lenses so thick that his obsidian eyes stared at you from the end of a drunken corridor. But Seyss had never heard him complain about his physical shortcomings. Instead, Egon had joined the family business and used his position as sole heir in the executive suite to bring him the glory a battlefield never would. Whatever enmity he’d felt at being left out of the match he’d channeled into his work. Last Seyss heard, he’d been appointed to the firm’s executive board, the youngest member by thirty years.

  “Hello, Egon. I apologize for keeping your father waiting.”

  “Don’t apologize to Father,” he said in a sprightly tone. “Apologize to me.”

  “You?” Seyss shook the smaller man’s hand, finding the grip cool and clammy. “You called me down here?”

  A self-satisfied smile. “I’ve been running the firm for a year now.”

  Seyss had difficulty imagining the diminutive man, two years his junior, running the behemoth that was Bach Industries. A little like Goebbels governing the Reich. “I hadn’t heard your father had retired.”

  “He hasn’t—at least not officially. The Americans have him under house arrest. The past year he’s suffered a series of strokes that have left him soft. He’ll be dead before fall.”

  Don’t smile, Egon, or I’ll cuff you, thought Seyss. “And how is it that you escaped the Allies’ interest? They’re a thorough bunch.”

  “Thorough but pragmatic,” answered Egon, sensing his anger and taking a wise step to the rear. “We’ve managed an arrangement. I’ve been declared necessary to the rebuilding of Germany.”

  “Have you? Bravo.” Seyss raised an eyebrow, but decided not to delve any further into the subject. The Bachs had always brokered some type of arrangement going with whoever was in power. Monarchs, republicans, fascists. It came as no surprise that Egon had worked out something with the Americans. Approaching the window, Seyss peeked from the lace curtains. Fifty meters away, two American soldiers stood guard at the entry to Villa Ludwig’s driveway. “Where were they when I arrived last night?”

  “On duty, of course. Otherwise I would have met you myself.”

  An arrangement indeed. Enough to clear the Olympicstrasse of military police for an hour but not to rid himself of a permanent guard. Things were more complicated than Bach had let on. “And your family? How did your brothers make out?”

  Egon removed his glasses and as he polished them with his tie, his defenseless eyes crossed. “Fritz was killed at Monte Cassino a year ago. Heinz was in your area, the Dnieper Bend in the Ukraine. Apparently his tank took a direct hit. It was one of ours: a Panzer IV from our Essen metalwerke. A shame.” The creep sounded more concerned about the failure of the equipment than the death of his brother. “You knew about Karl. Seven kills before he went down over the Channel.”

  “I’d heard, yes.” The Bachs might be an arrogant bunch but they were brave. Three of four sons lost. The Führer could ask no more of any family. “My condolences.”

  Replacing his glasses, Egon retrieved two beers from the cherrywood side bar. “To fallen comrades.”

  “May their memories never be forgotten.”

  The Hacker-Pschorr was warm, but still Seyss’s favorite, and its bitter aftertaste resuscitated memories of his time with the Bach family. In this room, he’d listened to Hans Frizsche, the voice of the German DNB, announce the Anschluss with Austria, and a year later the annexation of the Sudetenland. In this room, he’d received the orders canceling his leave in August of 1939. In this room, he’d lowered himself to one knee and asked the only woman he’d ever loved to marry him. For a moment, he allowed himself to drift with the tide of his bittersweet memories. Before he could stop himself, he asked, “And Ingrid?”

  “At Sonnenbrücke taking care of Father.” The Bachs owned homes in every corner of Germany. Each had a name. Sonnenbrücke was their palatial hunting lodge in the Chiemgauer Alps. “She always wanted to be a doctor,” added Egon. “Now’s her chance.”

  “And Wilimovsky?”

  Egon shook his head brusquely. “Shot down in the East a year ago. Pity for a girl to be widowed so young, though it’s the boy I’m worried about. Just six.” Suddenly he froze, his voice ratcheting up a notch. “Not interested, are you? Or have you been all along?”

  Seyss met Egon’s salacious gaze, but his thoughts were with Ingrid and the time was a crisp fall day in 1938. They had been seeing each other for a year and he had arrived that morning to spend his weekend pass at Villa Ludwig before continuing on to an infantry training course at Brunswick. Against her father’s will, she had decided to study medicine. With the Jews forbidden to practice, there was a growing shortage of doctors and she was anxious to break from her family. Even now, he could see her as she fell onto the couch in that exaggerated fashion that infuriated her father, a perfectly assembled mess of platinum hair and ruby red lipstick.

  “I’ve decided to get a flat of my own,” she had said, after they’d had a cup of tea.

  “What for?” he asked. “You have plenty of room here. Besides, your father won’t permit it.”

  “I want us to be alone. You could come see me anytime you like. I’m sick of Fritz or Hilda barging in. Egon watches us through the keyhole.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re just eighteen.” He, being twenty-one, and the embodiment of wisdom.

  “Almost nineteen,” she replied coquettishly, tracing the looping silver script embroidered on his left sleeve. LAH. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. “An officer assigned to the Führer’s bodyguard shouldn’t have to ask my father’s permission every time he wants to see me.”

  Erich considered the dilemma. He didn’t like to admit that he was a stickler for rules and regulations. Earlier in the day, they’d argued about her makeup and clothing. Adhering to the party line, he had found himself saying that too much lipstick was un-German and that pants demeaned her femininity. He’d even declared that an SS man couldn’t be seen with a “trouser woman.” At that, Ingrid had broken out laughing, and after a moment, he had joined her. He knew what he had said was ridiculous, but an uncontrollable part of his nature compelled him to defend the party’s philosophy. He was, above all, a good National Socialist. Truth be told, he adored her tight blouses and soft curls. The idea of spending the night alone with Ingrid Bach was overpowering.

  “I think the museum quarter would be the best place to start looking, don’t you?”

  Ingrid screamed with delight and pulled him close. Guiding his hand to her breast, she kissed him in a very un-German fashion.

  “I said, you’re not still interested?” Egon repeated.

  “Of course not,” snapped Seyss, his attention again riveted to the here and now. He felt angry with himself for allowing his emotions free reign. Tucking in his jaw, he adopted the dry tone taught all SS officers. Sächlichkeit, it was called. The ability to view one’s circumstances with rigid objectivity. “Please pass along my regards to her and the boy.”

  “I’ll be sure to.” Egon laughed rudely. “Though I’m not certain she’ll be too pleased. She never quite recovered, you know.”

  “It was a different time,” said Seyss, answering his own accusations as well as his host’s. “One had obligations.”

  “As a party member, I understand. As Ingrid’s brother, I take a different view. You hurt her badly.”

  Seyss finished his beer and set down the empty glass. Five minutes listening to Egon’s nasal bray and he remembered all over again how much he hated the impudent bastard. He was sick of the small talk. He’d
risked his life to be here and killed two men in the process. It was time to get down to business.

  “How did you find me, anyway?”

  “It was easy once I realized you’d be on the Allies’ list of war criminals. Still, I’d have thought you’d have learned to follow orders in your time. It was a foolish thing, killing the camp commander. He was with us, you know.”

  “It was necessary.”

  “It was rash. One more Nazi on the run means nothing to the Americans. But you had to murder an officer. Damn it, man, what were you thinking?”

  Seyss tightened the muscles in his neck as his temper flared. What could Egon Bach know about the need to avenge your comrades? To cleanse your soul with the blood of your enemy? About the beauty of looking into a man’s eyes as he died by your hand? The smaller man’s anger fired his impatience to learn the reason why he’d been told to come to Munich. But he’d be damned if he asked.

  To temper his restlessness, he clasped his hands behind his back and made a slow circuit around the room. His eyes fell to a patch of wall where a replica of Alfred Bach’s golden party badge, the highest honor the Nazi party bestowed upon civilians, used to hang. In its place was a photograph of Alfred Bach with Edward VIII, the English monarch who had given up his throne to marry an American divorcée. Shocked, he took a closer look at the other pictures hanging nearby. The color photo of Adolf Hitler thanking Alfred Bach for the handmade armchair he’d been given for his fiftieth birthday had been replaced by one of the elder Bach in the company of Charles Lindbergh, the famed American flyer. Another showed Alfred Bach shaking hands with Winston Churchill, circa 1912.

  “It’s not wise to wear your allegiance on your sleeve,” chimed Egon from across the room. “These days, it’s difficult to meet anyone who voluntarily joined the party, let alone someone who actually voted our Führer into power. We’re a nation of amnesiacs. National socialism is dead, Erich.”

  But Seyss wasn’t interested in an apology for Bach’s cosmetic renunciation of the party. “And Germany?”

  “The Fatherland will never die. You and I won’t allow it. What did Herder say about our country’s geist—its spirit?”

  “‘It shall flourish so long as a single German lives,’ ” quoted Seyss from an ancient textbook.

  “Exactly. Hurry up, then. We have a quarter of an hour until our guests arrive. I imagine you’re starving.”

  As Seyss followed Egon Bach into the hallway, he paused for a last look at the drawing room. A spray of chrysanthemums decorated a nook previously reserved for a national socialist banner. The bronze bust of Hitler cast by Fritz Todt had been replaced by a replica of Michelangelo’s David. And, of course, there was the matter of the photographs.

  The room had changed.

  It was Erich Seyss who hadn’t.

  CHAPTER

  5

  DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, THEY WALKED, through a white-tiled catacomb lit by stuttering bulbs in steel mesh cages, a passage so narrow and dank that Seyss nearly succumbed to his recently acquired claustrophobia. Now, three hundred thirty-seven stairs later, they had arrived. Barring their path was a gray steel door large enough to have locked down the boiler room of the battleship Bismarck. Above it, the words “Luftschutzbunker 50 Personen,” were painted in perfect black script. Air raid shelter. 50 persons.

  Egon leaned his shoulder into the door and gave a shove. “A little dramatic, perhaps, but necessary. Hard for my colleagues to visit the main house.”

  “You mean they couldn’t fit into the trunk of the Mercedes?” Seyss asked dryly.

  Egon did not laugh. “Go on, then. These are not men one keeps waiting.”

  Seyss’s first thought was that he’d never seen a shelter decorated so opulently. The underground refuge was done up like the lobby of the Adlon in Berlin: navy carpets, teak coffee tables, sleek sofas. All that was missing was the Babylonian fountain spewing water from an elephant’s trunk and an unctuous maître d’hôtel eager to show them to a table.

  Two older men stood waiting in the center of the room. Greeting them, Egon turned to Erich and said, “I believe you know Mr. Weber and Mr. Schnitzel.”

  “Good evening, gentlemen. It’s been some time.” Seyss delivered a firm handshake to each man, punctuated by a curt nod and crisp click of the heels. He had worked with both during the war and if they weren’t friends, they were certainly well acquainted. Robert Weber was vice chairman of North German Aluminum, the country’s largest metals company. Arthur Schnitzel, finance director of FEBA, a monolithic chemical concern.

  “You’re looking well, Major,” said Weber. “May I offer my congratulations on your escape.”

  “Yes, congratulations,” cawed Schnitzel, “though we could have done without the theatrics.”

  Seyss answered with a clipped smile, staring daggers into the old man’s gray eyes until he averted his gaze. During his tenure as SS Reichsführer Himmler’s adjutant for industrial affairs, his brief had been to ensure that manpower requirements necessary to run their plants at full capacity were met. He was Himmler’s golden boy in those days, in charge of negotiating contracts between Germany’s most important industrial concerns and the SS main office for the transport, and delivery, of foreign impressed labor, mostly Jews and mischlings from Poland and Russia. Suddenly it was clear why they were meeting in an air raid bunker and not in Egon’s living room. Like him, Weber and Schnitzel were wanted by the Allied powers for war crimes. Slave labor, no doubt. Not everyone could be declared “necessary to the rebuilding of Germany.”

  “Gentlemen, this isn’t a coffee-klatsch,” said Egon, flitting between them at his usual frenetic pace. “We have much to discuss and little time. Help yourself to brandy and cigars, then let’s get started.”

  Schnitzel and Weber poured themselves generous snifters of VSOP, then took their places on a maroon velvet couch. Seyss sat across from them, choosing an antique armchair. Nothing like a little discomfort to focus the mind on matters at hand.

  “Germany is in ruins,” declared Egon Bach as he slipped down between Schnitzel and Weber. “We have no electricity. Sewage is kaput. No mail has been delivered since April. We no longer have a government, a police force, or even a soccer team. Coal is more expensive than caviar and cigarettes are worth more than both of them together. Verrückt! Crazy!”

  “We are a divided people,” said Weber, picking up the baton. Dressed in a severe black suit, monocle in his eye, he was the embodiment of his native Prussia. The Allies have split the country into four zones of occupation. The British have taken the Ruhr and the North. The French, the Rhineland and Saar. The Americans control the center from Bavaria to Niedersachsen, and the Russians have stolen the East.”

  “Our industry is in ruins,” continued Schnitzel. “Frankfurt, Cologne, Mannheim—all leveled. Young Bach here lost seventy of his ninety plants. Sixty percent of his production capability wiped out.” A short white-haired man who had lost his right leg at the Somme in 1916, Schnitzel wore his crutches and neatly pinned trousers more proudly than any medal. Friends and enemies alike knew him as the Stork. “I’m hardly better off. Fifty-five percent of my factories have been damaged beyond repair.”

  “But salvageable,” added Weber. “None of our companies have been forced to stop production completely. Give us five years and we can bring our output back to what it was before the war. The key to the revival of Germany is the rebuilding of our industry.”

  “If we are permitted to do so,” said Egon. “The Allies have forbidden us to reconstruct our plants. They want to dismantle the forges, blast furnaces, and steel works, that survived the war and cart them off to France and England, even, God forbid, to Russia. A crew of American engineers is scheduled to dismantle our fifteen-thousand-ton press next week. They’ll probably ship the damn thing to New Jersey and use it to make guns for their battleships.”

  Perched on the edge of his seat, Seyss listened with a rapt silence. The recounting of his country’s pillage stoked his anger as a
breeze fans a fire. And though he said nothing, his mind was churning. What could be so important that Weber and Schnitzel had risked arrest to see him? Why this lengthy preamble? Why the persuasive pitch to their voices, the pleading gleam to their eyes? There was no need to convince him. He was a soldier. He did what he was told.

  He’d imagined that he’d been summoned from Garmisch to help a kamerad escape the country—Bormann, perhaps, Eichmann, maybe even the Führer. There were rumors Hitler was alive, that the corpses in the Reich Chancellery belonged to his double and Eva Braun’s sister. Clearly that wasn’t the case. The conversation was more concerned with the state of the economy than any military objective. Confused, he was left with the same question as when he’d jumped into the back of Egon’s Mercedes nearly twenty-four hours earlier. What did they have in store for him?

  “Rumor has it they’re going to flood the coal mines,” Weber was saying. “Send our soldiers to France as forced labor.”

  “A permanent end to our war-making ability,” lamented Schnitzel. “Germany is to become a pastoral state, an agrarian economy.”

  “Think of Denmark,” said Egon. “Without Tivoli Gardens.” Standing, he walked to a side table where a scale model of Grosse Gertie the Bachs’ monstrous 200-mm cannon, rested. He picked up the field gun, admiring it from every angle as if it were a Fabergé egg. “The Allies have confiscated our weaponry. It is against the law for a German to possess so much as a side arm. We’re not even allowed to keep the grease from our stoves, lest we use it to manufacture explosives. We will be left nothing with which to defend ourselves.”

  Weber plucked the monocle from his eye. “And that, Herr Seyss, is our problem. We haven’t gathered here today to bemoan our financial losses. We have larger issues at heart. Look around you. The Americans are withdrawing their troops from our country and sending them to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan. The war has bankrupted the British. There’s an election in a few weeks’ time and talk is Churchill is for the dung heap. You can imagine where that will leave us and our agrarian economy.”