The Runner Read Free Page B

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, so 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