See How They Run (2 page)
Especially when they shared an old story—that was the best.
But when they finally began to talk about the most sinister topic, when the loathsome Reich was brought up, the wizened old woman’s hands knotted into tight fists. She could barely breathe.
A single word, a single idea, was pounding on her brain
.
Danger
.
“No matter what good we are able to accomplish, the Nazis get wealthier and more powerful,” Benjamin Rabinowitz began. “In South America. In West Germany and Austria. Even in Chicago and New York. In the south of France …”
“They are indeed ready again, Elena,” Michael Ben-Iban elaborated. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Their wealth at this time is astounding.
“The opulent estates you know about, and the gold and diamond reserves. What you don’t know about are the legitimate businesses. All over the world. The so-called multinational companies run with the Reich’s, money. Automobile companies. Oil companies. Communications conglomerates.
Like nothing we’ve seen before!
”
Benjamin Rabinowitz now began to elaborately review his plan. His proposal to silence the Reich once and for all time. The financing of which was the chief reason for the important Jerusalem meeting.
When Rabinowitz finished, tears were pooling in the soft brown eyes of Elena Strauss. The deadweight sadness and disappointment she was feeling right then were too much for her frail, weakened body. What Elena Strauss had to do next seemed an impossible task. What she had to do seemed like a betrayal.
The wealthy American woman stared across the table at hawklike Michael Ben-Iban, perhaps the bravest Nazi-hunter next to Simon Wiesenthal and Dr. Michael Ben-Zohar. She looked at shrewd, feisty Benjamin Rabinowitz.
Such old, old friends
, she thought.
Such a wonderful; courageous alliance they’d shared … even more so because so very few people knew of their heroics
.
Somehow, all three of them had survived the German death camps: Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka.
They had all been members of She’erit Hapleetch, the
“Surviving Remnant,”
formed when no countries other than the Jewish community in Palestine had been willing to accept large groups of survivors from the death camps.
Instead of planning for the Jewish state, however, they had been among those who planned revenge and retribution. They had been among those who planned for the future defense of the Jewish people.
Together with forty-four other survivors, they had drawn up the radical brotherhood’s priority list for the first Nazihunting year of 1946. That first year they had patiently tracked down and killed SS Brigadier General Ernst Grawitz; SS Major Otto Steiner, supervisor of the Belsen gas chambers; SS Colonel Albert Hohlfelder, who had viciously sterilized thousands of Jewish children by mass X-ray exposure.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, they had diligently hunted dangerous members of Die Spinne and ODESSA
.
They had relentlessly watched for the dreaded Nazi renaissance
.
They had remembered the terrible Holocaust—every last abhorrent detail
.
“Benjamin, I have listened carefully to your plan, your fears about a new Reich.” Elena was finally able to speak again. “I have lived and slept with your arguments, your dark conclusions. I have considered them as carefully as anything in my life … You say you need a great deal of money from me. Seven or eight hundred thousand dollars. I spoke at length with my oldest grandson before I came to Jerusalem. We talked about the Nazis, about the present condition of the Reich.”
“They have never been more dangerous than right now,” Benjamin Rabinowitz said.
Elena Strauss shook her head. “We think you’re terribly wrong,” she sighed. “But more important than that, the actions of our group have always been accomplished with great honor, with justice in all our minds. No matter how strong our enemies become, Benjamin, Michael, we must never go down to their Hun, barbarian level. This is the secret strength of the Jewish people, I believe. This is one reason we have survived.
I don’t believe we should act against our enemies now. Not in this hateful manner
.”
The thin voice of Rabinowitz suddenly rose above the clatter of the King David terrace. It was like the voice of a stern and knowing rabbi rebuking his shortsighted congregation.
“You’ve lived as a wealthy American for too long, Elena,” the old man railed. “You don’t understand the terrifying world we live in today. You couldn’t possibly, and still talk as you do. The Fourth Reich’s money is everywhere, Elena. The Nazi cancer is everywhere. In the Middle East. In America. In Germany, where the Spider’s cells are springing up everywhere. Where little blond-haired children are marching again.”
Elena Strauss reached into her purse.
“I have a small check. I want you to continue the search for Bormann, Mengele, Muller. You must! Please! As for the rest, I say
no
. My grandson wants to go to the other contributing families. To the American FBI. If necessary, we would break our vows to stop a dangerous confrontation at this time … You are taking away the last possibility of justice ever being accomplished for the six million! I will not allow this to happen! No! No!” The American woman’s face was drawn tight. Her eyes were filled with rage.
Neither Benjamin Rabinowitz nor Michael Ben-Iban could believe that Elena Strauss would even speak of breaking their blood oath. For a moment, they were numb. Benjamin Rabinowitz’s mouth was filled with bile. He thought he was going to be sick on the hotel terrace.
Elena Strauss was turning them down at the worst possible time
.
The elderly woman suddenly stood up from their table. She was trembling, blinking her eyes very rapidly.
“I have been feeling bad this fall. Sick. Old—which I am. I should go back to my room now. This is a hard day for me, too.”
Mrs. Elena Strauss bent and gave each of the old men a quick hug. They each hugged her back. The sadness was overwhelming in its intensity.
Thirty-five years
… now, threats! The breaking of oaths! There were tears in all of their eyes as they embraced. It was like the hollow, numb, empty feeling that comes on first hearing of a friend’s death.
“Benjamin … Michael …
shalom
.”
“She is a very, very old woman. A good woman,” Michael Ben-Iban whispered, after Elena had disappeared back into the hotel “Perhaps in a little time she’ll come to understand … Benjamin? Are
you
all right, Benjamin?”
Benjamin Rabinowitz folded his thin arms and moaned softly.
“
There is no time not to understand
. If only I had made her see the terrible danger we know is there, Michael.
The fault is mine
. Oh, Moshe, no one but Jews will protect other Jews from our enemies. You know that.”
Michael Ben-Iban nodded sadly. He knew. He knew it all too well.
Ben-Iban also knew that the enemy was truly capable of anything now. Even a second Holocaust. Even a terrible bombing right there in Israel. For the first time in thirty-five years, Ben-Iban thought, the Jewish nation could be without an adequate defense. A defense manned by Jews who understood the grave, ever-present danger.
As the two ancient survivors finished their drinks that sad afternoon, the Arab Imam was still wailing, still praying from his distant minaret.
The priest’s prayer was that God would come and give him back his golden city.
His prayer was that God would come down and kill all the Jews
.
One hundred seventy-four days later, it suddenly began to happen.
On four continents across the civilized world.
A heart-sinking plot that would be called
Dachau Zwei
.
Dachau Two
.
Dr. David Strauss
Scarsdale, New York
.
April 24, 1980
.
One day before the beginning
.
Along the dark, gray country roads there were Tudor and Norman mansions with eight-foot-high hedges and pollarded trees. There was a striking chimney-red tennis court with high white referee chairs—where a rich adulteress named Norma Lynch had been shot to death in 1943.
There were rigidly rectangular cream and lime-green tile swimming pools and trendy bumper stickers:
Honk if you believe in tennis
; and Post roads, James Fenimore Cooper streets, Leatherstocking lanes. …
These things, in fact, were the rule of thumbing one’s nose in that part of Westchester County where Dr. David Strauss and Alix Rothman had grown up.
Where the American part of the story has its beginnings.
Where the nightmares begin.
The April day that made the village infamous had a scratchy, nervous quality about it.
It left an uncomfortable feeling in Vulkan’s mouth, like sweater fuzzballs under his tongue.
Coughing into a crisp white handkerchief, Vulkan watched the others fan away from the wonderfully kept children’s playground.
The
Hausfrau
(Housewife), a pretty, petite woman—also a fearsome, dedicated warrior—walked away alongside a picturesque fieldstone wall and weeping willow trees on Horse Guard Lane.
The
Soldat
(Soldier) was forcing his great hulking body into a sleek MG Stag parked on Upper North Avenue.
The
Waffen-Fachmann
(Weapons Expert) sat at a bus stop, a paperback,
The Boat
, pressed up to his face. He had on a beige raincoat, snap-brim hat, Weejuns … very American looking.
The beadlelike I
ngenieur
(Engineer) had simply vanished—poof—blended into the residential backdrop like yet another Country Squire station wagon.
Last, the
Führer
was marching off to a chauffeured limousine, which was relatively inconspicuous on the money-lined streets.
The idea of their taking on World War II code names, meeting on this small-town American street
in 1980
, was preposterous and dangerous, Vulkan was thinking.
Still, the final meeting had to be
someplace
, didn’t it?
The final decisions had to be made before the Final Solution could begin.
Vulkan took out a beautiful pocket watch, cradling it in the Palm of his hand. The man’s face was dimly reflected in the silver lid of the watch. His felt hat, tipped at a raffish angle, was reflected as well.
It was all neatly superimposed over a grand, elegant inscription:
Dachau Konzentrationslager. Sturmbannführer Mann. 1932—
Agile, piano-player fingers now pried open the watch cover.
Inside was a delicately balanced, silver and ruby-red swastika.
The four crooked arms were pointed and feathered like an Eagle trout-fishing hook.
Over the swastika itself, tiny black hands were ticking off the seconds, days, years.
It was now time to begin
.
Again
.
The people who live in Scarsdale, especially the buck skinned, shaggy-haired boys and girls who attend the ivy-covered high school, often complain that nothing meaningful or exciting ever happens in the quiet, wealthy suburban town.
The following night something terrible happened.
Murder was committed in Scarsdale,
The Nazis came to America.
Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City, April 25
.
The teenager lying center stage, Trendelenburg position on the hospital delivery table, was Katherine Hope O’Neill. Katherine was an anachronistic Irish-Catholic girl from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. She had a Kelly-green bow in her shiny black hair to prove it.
The underwhelming color in the Mount Sinai Hospital delivery room was green also. A slightly turquoise, sloshy, seasick green.
The hospital setup table was covered with sterile green gowns, green drapes, furzy green sponges. A wrinkled sheet was laid underneath the delivery table like a big green mistake. “The evaporating, dying Cookie Monster,” Dr. David Strauss had called it:
At 2:45
A.M
., with a cup of lukewarm New York regular and a stale Danish sloughing back and forth in his stomach, all that thirty-seven-year-old Dr. David Strauss could manage for the teenager was, “Well, Kath, I guess in about a week or so you’re going to have a baby.”
“Booo.”
The head nurse, Mary Cannel, managed a half smile.
“Hey, what do you guys expect at quarter to three in the morning? Robert Klein? Steve Martin, maybe?”
Katherine O’Neill’s cervix was fully dilated now and she was pushing hard to expel her baby.
“Push! Push! Push!” one of the nurses was chanting like a medieval midwife.
Just a little girl
, David Strauss was thinking as he stood over the delivery-room scrub basin.
Little teen-angel
. Soft white Madonna’s face framed in lovely rings of black hair.
Knocked up on the swinging East Side. Shit. What a waste
.
According to her chart, Katherine O’Neill was seventeen. Unmarried. Uninsured. And much too young to have babies, David Strauss would have added. Too tiny and narrow at the hips.
Which was probably why the fetal monitor read 101—about nineteen counts slower than it should have been.
David Strauss hurried into a loose-fitting scrub suit. He tugged his sewing-thimble cap over his thick black curls. Tied on the mask. Booties. And as he always did right about then, David Strauss suddenly felt a great wave of very adult responsibleness. For the next fifteen minutes or so, he was a doctor. He was an
adult
.
One of the nurses, who was busy listening to the O’Neill baby with a fetuscope, suddenly called out across the room.
“The heartbeat has stopped, David!”
David Strauss, the anesthetist, and the attending resident ran to the delivery table.
Katherine O’Neill was undergoing the most severe contractions.