The Runner by Christopher Reich Read Free Book Online Page B

hours ago.
    Seyss walked to the night table and splashed water in his face, then on his chest and neck. Drying himself, he crossed the room to open the curtains. Sunshine flooded the bedroom. He unlatched the window and a wave of hot air swept over him. It was not six in the morning, but six in the evening. He had slept eighteen hours without waking.
     
    T HREE SETS OF CLOTHING HUNG inside the armoire. He chose a pair of tan trousers and a white shirt. Putting them on, he stared at his body in the mirror. His face and forearms were colored a rich mountain brown but the rest of him was ghostly pale. The scar from the Russian’s bullet had left an ugly pink weal four inches long above his waist. He could count his ribs easily. His arms, though, had kept their tone. Once he’d done thirty-seven pull-ups to win a battalion fitness contest. He was less pleased with his posture. A late-opening parachute had compressed three veterbrae in his spine and left him slightly askew, tilted an inch or so to the left. His hair had turned nearly white in the mountain sun but his face was too slim, shadowed by the haunted scowl he’d seen on so many other soldiers and sworn never to adopt himself. Once women had found him handsome. They’d told him he had a kind mouth and soulful eyes. Moving closer to the mirror, he struggled to find a hint of the compassion they’d seen. He couldn’t.
    After buttoning his shirt, he grabbed a loden blazer and gave himself a final looking over. His shock was immediate and overwhelming. Staring back at him was a civilian. A man who would never again don his country’s uniform. A man who had lost the war. Cheeks scrubbed, hair combed, clothes just so, he looked more like a country squire than an escapee from an American prison camp. The thought came to him that he was betraying the comrades he’d left eighty miles away in a barbed-wire pen. He dismissed it. Any man who’d suffered even a little of war knew never to question his luck. Good fortune was like a weekend pass: never too soon coming and always too soon gone. Besides, Seyss didn’t imagine he’d be taking a vacation anytime soon.
     
    T HE DRAWING ROOM OF THE Villa Ludwig hadn’t changed since the war began. Louis XV sofas upholstered in burgundy chintz crowded every wall. The Bösendorfer grand, ever polished as if for that evening’s performance, shared its corner with an immortal Phoenician palm. And sagging from the walls hung the same succession of dreary landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich. A mausoleum for the living, observed Seyss, as he entered the marble-floored chamber.
    “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