See How They Run (10 page)
David spotted Alix from high up on his fifth-floor sun porch at Cherrywoods. It was late on a sparkling, blue-skied Saturday, less than a week after the mysterious death of Benjamin Rabinowitz.
Alix was walking in front of the Sunset Lounge. She had on a pink shirt, faded jeans, and sandals hanging from a beaded belt. Her black hair was longer than ever.
ROTHSCHILD!
Even from that distance, David could see why she’d had such success everywhere. Somehow Alix managed to fuse the
haut monde
and the everyday one. She could be beautiful or down-to-earth—sometimes with just a turn of her head.
After watching her for a few minutes, David retreated off the creaky wooden porch. He walked back inside his bedroom.
As he put on a shirt, he mentally reviewed the distant past in his mind. Then David stopped and sat down hard on the edge of his bed.
He stared at the collection of Nazi books and papers. He gazed out the porch screen door.
Very slowly, David wandered back out to the porch again. Alix was gone.
David’s eye drifted along with a canoe down on Lake Arrow. He saw two boys in red rubber swim masks and matching nose plugs playing on the diving float. Across the lake, an FBI agent sat in a high-perched gazebo, casually watching East and West Houses through binoculars.
David raised an arm to the man. The agent seemed to wave back. “
Cozy as hell
,” David muttered. Why the hell hadn’t he just gone downstairs and said hello to Alix like a normal human being? Damn it!
David stepped inside again and looked at the face in the mirror over his sink. Familiar enough. David frowned. Shook his head of curly black hair.
“Ass,” he said to the image staring back at him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing anyway?”
“Ass.”
There was a knock on the door. Of course! Alix had come up to say hello
to him
. David started to laugh at himself. He
had
to laugh.
“Shee-oot. You better snap to soon, son.”
He pulled open the bedroom door.
It wasn’t Alix after all.
It was one of the hotel porters.
A man named Johnny Williams, who lived in Pough-keepsie, and who used to take David and Nick to the YMCA basketball tourney on Market Street in Poughkeepsie every spring.
David succeeded in blowing his opening lines anyway.
“Oh! … Yes? … Uh … hi, John,” David managed.
Johnny Williams grinned. “Oh, excuse me … excuse me, Dr. Strauss.”
Which finally forced Alix to step into the doorframe.
Her hands were nervously smoothing her jeans. She looked terrified.
She pushed hair away from her eyes.
“Oh, damn it. I’m sorry. I was just afraid to come up alone, David. John volunteered. Well … I sort of volunteered John.”
Then the two of them were hugging.
Johnny Williams was patting both of them on their backs—as if to say that whatever they were doing was just fine. Alix was crying a little. She was mumbling condolences about Upper North Street, Elena, Nick, and everything.
Finally, Alix stepped back and looked at David.
“How are you doing?” Alix started to laugh. “I couldn’t just write this time. I had to come.”
That evening, Cherrywoods’ Lake Lounge smelled of pine resin and wildflowers—also faintly of wood ducks and brown trout. Outside on the lake, a flotilla of sailboats looked like Indian tepees on the horizon.
Heads at the bar began to turn and look at Alix and David.
The two of them talked about how Cherrywoods hadn’t changed since they’d been teenagers coming up there every summer. Nothing too seriously revealing. Just nice-man-meets-nice-girl talk. Just two friends trying to remain sane during a particularly bad time. A time worse than either of them wanted to let on.
At eight-thirty, they hiked to the hotel’s summer kitchen.
That hectic eighty-by-sixty-foot food emporium was a chef’s wildest dream. To be more exact, the kitchen was everything a French Jew named Jules Stein could dream about, read in
Gourmet
magazine, hear on
The French Chef
, or outright steal on his annual six-week pilgrimage back to Provence.
Alix’s eye traveled along wooden pegboards with cutting and spooning utensils, down past a fleet of stainless-steel pots and skillets.
Even with the hotel less than a third full, at least forty loaves of brick-oven white, caraway rye, pumpernickel, and sourdough bread sat like adobe houses on butcher-block tables.
New York-cut steaks, as thick as the Ulster County phone directory, were stacked on another table.
Roast beefs, ribs, roasting chickens were in abundance.
So were delicious apples, pears, Kadota figs; tins of cocoa; David’s old childhood nemesis, Postum. There were cold pantries and vegetable bins; a walk-in freezer with separate butter and milk refrigerators; nine flat-black gas stoves, each with sixteen burners.
“Since we’ve been displaced persons here, I’ve been cooking,” David said as he conducted the cook’s tour. “If you’re hungry, Alix, and brave, we could maybe cook something tonight.”
Alix broke into her most comfortable and natural smile of the day. Her first real smile in weeks, she thought to herself.
“I can’t tell you how much I like that idea. I might even cook for you,” she said. “If
you’re
brave.”
David fetched a bottle of Lafitte-Rothschild from the bar, and, drinking immoderately as they went, they fashioned boned chicken breasts, tomatoes, pommes frites, cherries, sausage, and
beaucoup de
garlic into a spectacular feast for two.
After which they ate like pampered royalty in the huge Sunset Lounge.
With Tommy Thompson’s Four playing “Feelings” and “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” for forty to fifty ballroom-dancing couples. With two FBI agents taking shifts sitting at one of the banquette tables, guarding David and eyeing Alix.
David ordered a third bottle of wine, and they began to listen more closely to Tommy Thompson. Sax, drums, trumpet, piano. Slightly staccato and not always together. Schmaltzy as hell. “Wonderful as leafing through old
Life
magazines,” Alix said.
A young bearded man was dancing with his wife and five-year-old daughter. Very touching and nice. Two eighty-year-olds performed a tango hustle.
Finally, David and Alix got up to dance. They danced to “Fascinating Rhythm,” then a fox-trot to “There’s a Small Hotel.”
The band shifted into a slow number, “Moonlight and Roses,” and David and Alix could suddenly hear the floorboards of the lounge creaking like a crowded gymnasium.
They danced one more slow song, the band’s finale, “Stars Fell on Alabama,” which segued into “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “Good Night, Irene.”
They left the moonlit lounge through French doors leading into the even more moonlit gardens.
Owls were hooting way off in the woods. Nearby cicadas sounded like a softly blown whistle. It was disturbing to David, though. He began to get obsessively paranoid as soon as they walked out into the darkness and night noises.
Alix loosely hung on to his arm. David was terribly aware of her perfume, a light, flowery, subtle smell. Her soft hip was just barely touching his.
“Three bottles of vino. Whew!” Alix shot her eyebrows up. “We should go in now, David,” she finally said. “I’m a little frightened being out here in the dark.
“You’re a wonderful host,” Alix said as they walked the long corridor to her room. “And you’re the best French cook in New Paltz, Dr. Strauss.”
“Maybe next to my mentor, Jules,” David said. “You’re the best schmaltzy waltzer around,” he added.
David then bent slightly and kissed Alix. He tasted a sweet, faint fruit he couldn’t identify. He felt slightly dizzy.
The two of them stood in the hallway for another uncomfortable moment. Alix switched her weight from one foot to the other. David brushed his hair back with his fingers.
“I’ll see you in the morning?” Alix finally said.
As he climbed the remaining two flights to his room, David caught himself whistling “Feelings,” a song he didn’t like, but which seemed pretty fantastic that night.
Inside his room, he sat on his big Victorian couch and felt a little horny. No, he felt a lot horny.
He doodled on a page in his Crapbook. He listened to the crickets and owls.
David then sketched out a fake
New York Times
front page, and wrote a whimsical headline, which he loved:
NOTHING BAD HAPPENED TODAY.
Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Something nice. Then something not so nice.
First, two bicycles, their riders in perfect control, letting their machines glide through the woods like electric-blue hawks.
Coming up behind the bikes, the Führer. Cruising along a Rockwellian country road in a black, late-model Mercedes sedan … a classic German automobile, the Engineer observed. A wealthy and powerful German’s pleasure car.
Stepping out of the automobile, the Führer was formally introduced to SS Captain Otto Kaltenmaus, supervisor of Auschwitz crematorium number 1, smuggled out of Germany in 1945 by HIAG, the organization of SS veterans set up by Martin Bormann.
Kaltenmaus had been living in Pennsylvania for almost thirty years now. He was known as Sven Hetling, a good neighbor, a very good citizen. Had anyone accused Mr. Hetling of the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children, his neighbors would have defended him staunchly.
When the Engineer had revealed to Hetling that he was once again needed by the Reich, however, Captain Otto Kaltenmaus had returned to his old form with the snap of a crisp salute. It almost seemed as if the slightly gawky-looking farmer missed the excitement of the old days.
Captain Kaltenmaus would do whatever was necessary to further the plan of Dachau Two and the Fourth Reich.
Later that afternoon, the Führer and the Engineer sat on the warm hood of the shiny, hand-tooled Mercedes.
Four hundred yards down a rutted dirt turnoff, Otto Kaltenmaus’s ramshackle house seemed to be leaning up against a great old elm tree.
On the opposite side of the farmhouse stood the much more impressive living quarters of his prizewinning Wyandotte, Rock Island, and White Leghorn chickens.
A very necessary and potentially devastating experiment was in progress on the earnest-looking farm.
The Engineer was already well along in his final countdown. His work of the past two and a half years was on the line right now.
The Engineer’s voice was measured: a metronome, an emotionless sound that was frightening in itself.
“One hundred forty-six … one hundred forty-seven … one hundred forty-eight.”
“This little chicken house,” the Führer said. “It is something like the barracks that once stood at Auschwitz. Also, you know that Reichsführer Himmler owned a chicken farm?”
The gaunt, scholarly-looking Engineer nodded. His flat gray eyes never once left the chicken house.
“Look.” There was a slight octave change in the man’s voice. “Do you see it?”
Bright white sparks were jumping off the shack’s roof. There was evidence of extreme heat or electricity at work.
Inside the building, Sven Hetling’s chickens had begun to screech and buck. Their blood was boiling, the Engineer computed. Compounded microwaves were penetrating their bodies at an extraordinarily high rate.
Then came a low-register buzzing noise. As if a nearby high-tension tower had shorted out or fallen.
“One-eighty-nine.” The Engineer solemnly checked his five-minute stopwatch. “A little over three minutes. This is exceptionally good. It’s better than we should have hoped for.”
Eerie white sparks were sputtering over the chicken house like silver rain. The low sky was filled with black clouds, and it was the weirdest natural sight imaginable.
“Well, let’s go see,” the Engineer finally said, something like sadness coming into his voice.
The Führer and the Engineer began to walk in measured deliberate strides toward the glowing farm.
The weaving ruts were ankle deep from the tires of heavy delivery trucks. The crabgrass on the strip between the tracks had grown nearly a foot high, and it was full of rotting green apples.
The Engineer had to use a thick wet rag to open the steaming door of the blistered, peeling shack.
Terrible heat and a sharp, unpleasant odor escaped in a blast, as if from a furnace. Tiny sparks were flying around the dark room like lightning bugs. Little droplets of silver rain seemed to cling to the rafters and overhead beams.
As they stepped farther into the smoking building, the Führer and the Engineer saw cage after mesh-wire cage filled with burned, nearly blackened, chickens.
In one corner lay the body of Captain Otto Kaltenmaus. The German man had burned to death as well. He was unrecognizable.
“The Captain served Dachau Two well.” The Führer quietly shook his head. “No need for unnecessary witnesses, I suppose. No need for an old man who might accidentally share a secret with one of his American friends or neighbors.”
On a closer look now, the upper layer of cages drew the Engineer’s attention.
Inside these cages, slightly gray hens and capons with deep, red-rimmed eyes were stumbling from wall to wall. The birds walked something like barroom drunks. As they touched the sides of their cages, the chickens sizzled and appeared to dance a bizarre step or two.
“This is not acceptable!”
The Engineer spoke in a disturbed whisper. “Some of the birds are still alive!”
The Führer, meanwhile, had already turned away and was walking down the rutted dirt road. …
Not the least bit displeased with the work of his brilliant Engineer. Quite awestruck and shaken, in fact.
The ovens were ready.
Las Flores, Brazil.
Heading for the beautiful island of Las Flores, 250 miles north of São Paulo, Brazil, were an expensive, blue-and-white Corniche sedan, a golden Cessna Skyhawk, and a sleek Chris-Craft Corinthian yacht.