For one long second, all was static; a beautifully lit diorama scored by a bullet’s earsplitting report and a siren’s undulating wail. Seyss stood poised above Rizzo’s body, while his comrades were captured in various positions of distress. Bauer, the stockiest and oldest of them, stared blindly into the maw of the kleig; Steiner, the spindly clerk, checked the chamber of the sniper’s rifle with a marksman’s competence. And Biederman, blond and cagey, crouched behind the steamer trunk packed with ammunition. Then came the bone-crunching staccato of a heavy machine gun and all was motion.
Chunks of wood and tin and concrete erupted from the walls, the floor, the mountains of rotting crates, arcing through the air like exploding rock. Seyss ducked his head and dashed for protection behind the nearest box. With his pistol, he motioned for Steiner to fire at the light. His exhortations came too late. The lank dark-haired man managed only to lift the rifle to his shoulder when he was caught in the chest with a string of bullets. He had no time even to scream. Lifted off his feet, his thorax burst in an ejaculation of torn flesh and viscera. As his body hit the floor, Judge saw that he had been cut in two. Seyss was yelling for Bauer to get down and for Biederman to come to him. But Bauer was already down, digging his nails into the concrete floor as if he were hanging from a cliff. And Biederman, hiding behind the ammunition box, looked as if he wasn’t going anywhere either. A thirty cal bullet penetrated the trunk setting off a chain reaction of small arms fire. A split-second later, rounds began to explode inside the box. Biederman looked this way and that, indecision creasing his features. Just as he began to move towards Seyss, a bullet exited the trunk, finding his jaw and, a microsecond later, his brain and skull. A cap of gore sprayed from his head and he collapsed.
Judge yanked his pistol from its holster and took aim at Seyss. Safety off, hammer back. All evening long, he’d been wondering how he’d react when he saw him, whether as Seyss himself had advised, he’d shoot first and ask questions later, or if he’d heed his commitment to an orderly arrest. But the turbulent events of the moment, the cacophonous sound and fury erupting all around him, freed him from the choice. Tightening his finger on the trigger, he acknowledged his darkest wish and swore to bring it to fruition.
The Colt bucked in his hand, the first shot going high and to the right, tearing a gaping hole in the crate above Seyss. He fired twice more, but the bullets went astray.
Seyss spun, bringing his pistol in line with his eye, trying at once to aim and to glimpse the man who wanted to kill him. For a split second, their eyes locked, the hunter and the hunted, the prosecutor and the pursued. The light cast Seyss’s face with a crystalline clarity — the cut of the jaw, the flared nostrils, the determined set of his milky blue eyes. Nowhere could Judge read fear. The world was exploding around him, his comrades lay dead and dying, yet Seyss maintained an expression of absolute assurance.
Judge pulled the trigger again, missing, as Seyss let off four rounds in rapid succession. Flame spit from the pistol and Judge slammed his head onto the crate, raising an arm to protect his face from the shards of wood slicing through the air like broken glass. Two inches from his head yawned a jagged hole large as a pumpkin. He rolled away from it and brought his gun to bear on Seyss.
But Seyss was gone, running across the open floor toward Bauer, his last unwounded comrade. His excursion was short lived. Three MPs brandishing Thompson sub-machine guns darted through the door leading from the garage, their entry presaged by ragged bursts of fire. Seyss arrested his forward motion, skidding on a heel as he fought to return to the relative safety of his previous position. He fired twice, felling two of the policemen, and a third time shattering one of the kliegs.
Still the siren wailed.
Judge felt a reckless tide swelling inside him. Everything was going wrong. Rizzo was dead. So were Seyss’s comrades, and now, two American MPs. The army had a term for this: FUBAR — fucked up beyond all recognition. All because some stupid sonuvabitch had turned on the kliegs before he’d been given the order. Overcome with anger, remorse, and most of all frustration, he jumped to his feet and yelled as loudly as he could, “Seyss! Stop you yellow bastard!”
Seyss turned as if slapped. Never compromising his stride, he raised his gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He was out of ammunition. Judge took dead aim at the moving figure and fired. The first bullet was high, showering Seyss with a barrage of splinters. The second appeared to pass right through him. A jagged chunk of wood spun from the crates behind his shoulder and struck him in the head. Seyss stumbled, bringing an hand to his face as he collapsed to the ground. Judge stepped close to the edge, craning his neck for the sight of blood, even as he contained a triumphant whoop. Had he shot him? With Seyss halfway to the unlit recesses of the armory, it was difficult to tell.
Yet even as Judge strained to make out the prostrate form, a bullet tore into the box at his feet and another passed so close to his head to make his ear stop up. Two more bullets creased the air above him and Judge flung himself to the rough surface. Suddenly, he was shaking with fear. A lightning peek around the armory revealed no errant marksmen. He focused once more on Seyss. The German lay still.
But then something else caught Judge’s eye. From the far side of the building, down the row from where Seyss lay, the weakest of lights blinked, once, twice, three times. A firefly in the nocturnal gloom. The pattern repeated itself. Short. Long. Short. Dot. Dash. Dot.
Only then did Judge notice the siren had stopped.
His heart beat pounded furiously as an urgent voice shouted into the vaulted space. “Grenade!”
Two silver pineapple-shaped canisters sailed into the armory, bounding once, twice, three times across the floor. Judge’s immediate response was to look toward the ammunition pen. There, behind a chain mesh fence, stacked to within inches of the armory ceiling, were crates of bullets, mortars, artillery shells, and every other god awful explosive device the gods of war had seen fit to deliver unto man in the twentieth century. He imagined a sliver of white-hot shrapnel cutting through a crate and piercing the sheath of metal that enclosed the gunpowder. First one crate would blow, then another and another. The whole armory would go up in a conflagration of Wagnerian proportions. The explosion would make “the Gotterdammerung” look like a scout’s bonfire!
With a speed and finesse he did not know he possessed, Judge pulled himself through the draft vent and onto the corrugated roof. Lying on the cold surface, his breath coming in halting grasps, he dared a final glance into the armory. His last sight even as the first grenade exploded was of a bare slab of concrete decorated by a few specks of blood and a black Luger. Where a second before a man had lain, there was nothing.
Erich Seyss was gone.
Chapter 32
Judge’s room at the American Military Hospital in Heidelberg was small and sterile, a ten by ten cubicle with an iron bed, a free-standing armoire, and a night table decorated by an electric fan and a pitcher of water. A brittle light filtered through rain-streaked windows, casting a jaundiced pall across the peeling linoleum floor. A single set of footsteps drifted from the hallway then faded, leaving only the rale and whoosh of the pernickety fan and the patter of raindrops pelting the window. Judge’s vigilant ear sized upon the noises and mistook them for a familiar and terrible sound. In his half-sleep, he was transported to another hospital room, this one in Brooklyn, not Heidelberg, and he saw a younger version of himself standing next to a monstrous metal box someone had cheerfully decided to call an “iron lung”. His son was inside the box, lying on his back so that only his head protruded beyond a heavy plastic and rubber collar. The rushed intake of breath, the labored wheezing that had brought father to son’s side, belonged to him, or rather to the machine that breathed for him — air pressure taking the place of paralyzed muscles, forcing the four year-old’s lungs to expand and contract.