See How They Run (19 page)
The afternoon sky had already lost its bright, silver-blue polish, Alix noticed as she got off the huffing, puffing train. Heavy chunks of gray cloud were sliding over the city like dirty ice on wheels.
In the Russian train square itself, Alix was met by a stern-faced chauffeur and a woman cook named Maria, who was holding a bouquet of flowers for her. The puffy Chaika automobile looked like an American Packard out of the 1940s.
The couple hugged Alix convincingly, as if she were a young woman returning from a year away at university.
Her ride in the Chaika lasted less than twenty minutes through the salt-cured, resort part of the seaport city.
There were boathouses everywhere, and squawking seagulls overhead. Little dinky cottages,
isbas
, with ginger-bread facades and great overgrown vegetable gardens. The Russians apparently went on vacation, Alix thought to herself, and planted little cabbages and turnips for their relaxation.
Then Alix found herself standing outside the imposing and quite beautiful dacha of the Soviet writer Lev Ginzburg. She was, in fact, being greeted like Catherine the Great by the sparkly-eyed, eighty-five-year-old genius.
In their high-spirited conversation in the front yard, standing in the shadow of sixty-foot pine and birch trees, Alix was told that the large czarist estate, as well as the servants, the Chaika, and a snowplow, were provided to Lev Ginzburg by the Soviet Writers Union.
In return for the largesse, Ginzburg told her, all he had to do was concoct mesmerizing fairy-tale collections of TV scenarios for the beloved children all over the Soviet Union.
“And now you’re willing to give all this up?” Alix stared into the eyes of the diminutive, almost pretty, white-haired man.
The Russian seemed a little surprised by the question. “Oh yes. Of course. Come inside now. You’ll be staying in the very same room where I work.
Used to world
eh? You see, I’ve absolutely run out of fairy tales, anyway.”
The Russian writer’s workroom was unusually large for a dacha. “It’s as, tall as one of my stories.” Lev Ginzburg grinned at Alix. His little cherry-red eyes were sparkling rubies.
Alix looked all around the magical room. She was feeling magical herself.
Ten-foot-high bookshelves took up two of the workroom walls completely. There was a cluttered table. A miniature four-poster bed.
There was a clutter of Russian folk art: icons and primitive Siberian wood carvings. A Bokhara carpet. A samovar, brewing dark, fragrant tea.
Large French doors on the far wall led to a veranda that looked down on a gray, deserted Baltic Sea beach.
The cook, Maria, brought cognac, sour bread, and hot hors d’oeuvres for Alix. She built a small fire.
Shortly after Maria left Alix, the Newspaperman and the Lawyer came, both of them well-known and successful in their fields. After much hugging and a few tears, they began to read over the demands that had been prepared for their day at the twenty-second Olympiad in Moscow.
Alix herself typed out the demands, changing phrases that struck them as inexact, or melodramatic, or undramatic. The important message had to be
exact
. People had to understand once and for all.
Just reading the accusations, charges, and proposals aloud made Alix tremble. There was horrifying truth written down. Justice was the cry from every page. The demands formed an important document about who the Nazis had been—and
who they were now
.
At seven o’clock in the evening, the chauffeur came upstairs with a pair of thick-bladed, all-purpose Russian scissors. While Alix and the others continued to talk, the Russian unceremoniously chopped off her black hair, the Rothschild trademark. The man clipped and chopped until Alix looked like a boy.
“Let me look, please,” she asked.
Alix stared into a little hand mirror, and she had to laugh to keep herself from silly crying.
Her hair had been cut off. Just like her mother’s.
The Strauss house on Upper North Avenue in Scarsdale reminded David of a landlocked sailing ship. It existed with no apparent purpose. There were no lights. Over the summer the grass had grown knee high. No one came or left except for a single gimpy sailor: the housekeeper.
That morning David shaved and showered in the downstairs bath, with its view out over the Four Corners Texaco station.
As he stared down on pretty Lincoln Avenue—the hair dryer parting his hair in great clumps, showing patches of pale white scalp—things that Harry Callaghan had recently told David flashed into his mind.
First of all, Harry had told him that the terrorist group had been the ones who had killed Elena and Nick. The shooting of Heather had been an
accident
.
The Strausses had been supporting the secret group—which David knew. Then Nick had apparently convinced Elena to stop her heavy financial contributions. In early April, Nick and Elena had actually begun preliminary talks with Intelligence people in Washington. They’d broken the thirty-five-year silence of the secret defense group. They had been fully prepared to expose what they knew of the ultimate plot.
Elena and Nick had been that frightened by the final plan for Dachau Two
, David thought now.
What in the name of God was it going to be? And wasn’t it insanely ironic that Elena had kept him out of the dangerous group, while Alix had been recruited by the German Jew Ben Iban.
He decided to go for a drive in the Gray Ghost.
As far as David Strauss was concerned, Frankfurt, Germany, Alix’s situation, the bizarre shooting spree at the Kleine-Garten marked the end of it for him.
Anything that remained of the Nazi/Jewish/Strauss family melodrama could go on very well without him now. It would just have to.
At School Road, David sat in the gray Mercedes with the motor running. He lit up a cigarette, smoking it without moving a muscle or even an eyelid.
David was looking down on the field where his friend Hal Friedman had once made the most incredible diving catch in the history of American sandlot football. Christ, what an unbelievable fool he’d been with Alix, he was thinking at the same time. What had Alix been thinking of him all that time in Europe?
He saw a young girl in a tan Friendly’s uniform walking down School Road, going to work.
Against his will, he could see Alix moving, down the same street twenty years before. Wearing penny loafers, argyle socks, Ambush perfume; maybe his ridiculous school sweater with the big gold S; one of those gold circle pins. The memory was like a good hard punch in the stomach.
Paul Simon was singing on the car radio. “Slip-Sliding Away.” The radio station was devoting the whole hour to Simon—and to sending David snide messages about the condition of his life.
He lit another cigarette with the stub of the last. Delicious tobacco flavor.
David remembered an incident with Chaim Rabitz. Deserting the young Hasid boy up in the woods at Mountain House. Letting him cry his heart out. Hurting another Jew.
That was about the worst flicking thing David could ever remember doing to anybody.
Other than punching some troglodytic German photographer in the teeth, that is.
And killing Michael Ben-Iban in Frankfurt. Actually killing another man.
David’s cigarette had burned all the way down. He released the Mercedes’s hand brake and drove back home.
Twenty-five Upper North Avenue. Where he and Nick the Quick had been little goddamn boys together. Where Elena had made them onion and garlic bagels every Sunday morning for about twenty years in a row.
Two dark Oldsmobiles were sitting out in front of the house when David turned the corner.
The lonely old sailing ship had visitors. Something didn’t look right.
David switched off the radio and climbed up the front steps. What in the name of God was going on now.
“Slip-Sliding Away” was playing at full volume in his head.
Harry Callaghan had come to Scarsdale with two new-comers from Washington.
The two men didn’t look like agents or interrogators, David was thinking as he accepted their handshakes. They were slicker. Big-business types.
Suits
. They looked like they ought to work for E.F. Hutton or PaineWebber.
They made David remember something his grandfather had told him once while they were strolling along Park Avenue near Forty-eighth Street in New York.
“The American businessman is a peculiar animal, David. See there, that businessman in front of the Waldorf Every day he puts on his nice three-piece suit … to go and shovel horse manure.”
“We’re just here to have a little chat,” the more affable of the two men said to David.
“There have been a few significant developments in the past day or so,” the more aggressive government man said.
“I’m not interested.” David shook his head. “If I can help by talking to you two, good. But I’m not interested.”
“Look, I’ve got something to say here. Maybe you won’t want to hear this, Dr. Strauss.” The tougher of the two men from Washington spoke.
“You see, we’re fairly certain we know what Dachau Two is all about now. Both our Arab sources and Mossad feel that it’s a very large-scale strike. Something to put the Jewish terrorists way, way up on the hit parade. Something important, like Lod, or Munich. Only
bigger
than Lod or Munich.”
David put up his hand to stop the man from saying any more. “I don’t know if you people can understand this, but I don’t believe I have any more to give to this particular cause. What do you
think
you want from me now?”
“I want to try and make you feel the meaning of
massacre
. Do you
feel
massacre, Doctor?”
What David Strauss thought he felt was uncontrollable anger, some kind of terrible electrical overload in his brain.
He was beginning to understand that he couldn’t just leave things as they were now. He couldn’t simply bow out of it. They weren’t going to let him. And that meant unbelievable, unendurable pain coming up ahead.
He looked at Harry, and the older man bowed his head slightly.
David’s mind quickly ran over the events leading up to this point: the initial attack in Scarsdale; Heather’s and Elena’s deaths; Nick’s and Beri’s deaths in California; the trip to Europe with Alix; the shooting of Ben-Iban; Alix’s connection with the secret revenge group.
David thought about how Elena had felt he ought to be spared from knowing about the revenge group right from the first. How Nick had shouldered that family responsibility, and died because of it.
After the Frankfurt shooting, the American intelligence people had really given him no choice in the matter. They had shipped him right home, gotten David away from the scene of danger.
Thousands of miles away, he had been able to accept being out of the affair. More than that, it had begun to seem impossible that he ever might get involved again. David had settled into a slightly unreal, numb, but passable daily routine.
Now, David understood that the period of adjustment was over. He felt a terrible squeezing sensation in his brain. He felt nauseated all of a sudden.
“We have space booked for you on Aeroflot this evening, Dr. Strauss … early this week the Russians found the wreck of a small plane near Odessa that was loaded with arms and equipment. Two Storm Troop members were found dead near the wreck … We’d, like you to go to Moscow for us, Dr. Strauss. There’s always the chance you might recognize one of them. More important, we want you there in case there are any negotiations, any important communications. You might very well be able to help then.”
David looked over at Harry. “Are you still in this thing with me?”
The pipe-smoking man nodded in his quiet, confident way. Of course he was going to Russia. Harry Callaghan was committed
until the job was finished
.
They went to Russia together, David and Harry did.
They were going to hunt down Alix and the others, David knew.
Time and Newsweek would
construct neat, red-lined boxes on the Dachau Two strike team.
One cleverly entitled its piece “Black Sabbath: The Last Olympic Team,” and therein described the commando group in thriller prose worthy of John Le Carré, or at least Frederick Forsyth.
The Dachau Two group, a.k.a. “Storm Troop,” was a highly motivated and very well financed terrorist team.
It was the Jewish version of PLO’s Black September, and as such had learned its history lessons well. The group was lean and very sharp, with nearly all of its members handpicked from top Intelligence agencies or armies. Mossad, Shin Beth, the CIA, MI6 and Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (West Germany’s antiterrorist specialists) all contributed personnel to make the Dachau Zwei team the most awesomely professional and fearsome group that has been assembled to date.
All in all, twenty-nine Storm Troop members went to the Olympics to avenge wrongs committed against the Jewish people. They included:
Code name: Storm Troop Main.
Benn Essmann. The Soldier. Colonel Essmann was a decorated and widely known war hero in Israel. Joined the army when he was seventeen and just out of Jerusalem’s Rechavia High School. Mossad agent for four years. Then left the company because of concerns over political intervention. Father and sister killed in a PLO bombing. Two cousins murdered at Munich Olympics. There are Arab allegations that Essmann was still following orders from, the Menachem Begin government when he went into Russia. (Other reports have Ben Essmann listed No. 3 on Mosaad’s secret death lists.)
Joseph Servenko. The Architect. A Russian Jew and leader of past movements to recognize Jewish human rights in Soviet Russia. Three of Bervenko’s brothers are in Soviet prisons. Servenko’s wife was reportedly killed during a raid by the Russian secret police.
Gary Weinstein. The Engineer, or “Einstein.” Came from the CIA by way of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Virginia Institute of Technology, and Honeywell Corporation. The most brilliant of the terrorists. Also the most unstable. Weinstein worked in a Washington, D. C., garage for 2 1/2 years perfecting the electronics for Dachau Two.