See How They Run (21 page)
“Probably in the Moscow city morgue,” Harry said out of the corner of his mouth. “Rumor has it they don’t really care for Jewish people here in Russia. Not at all.”
“… And so, at railroad stations and on major highways,” Kupchuck went on, “at the Games themselves, there are nearly
ninety thousand
security people. That is three and a half times what the West Germans had at Munich. Or to express it another way, it’s a little more than four security people for every participant, coach, and delegation official in attendance here.”
“Not to mention there being five thousand or so security people for every Storm Troop member,” Harry said to David. “Or forty-five thousand each for you and me.”
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we are today. Our security people are very confident about capturing this Dachau Two team before any more harm is done: But that seems … an extremely dangerous attitude to me. Extremely dangerous.”
“We, of course, cannot cancel the Olympiad. Even if some of us would like to, we can’t.”
The second installment of the Security meeting began fifteen minutes after Kupchuck’s speech. Frock-coated waiters had meanwhile served tea, biscuits, and cherry preserves. Little veal cotelette sandwiches and Beluga caviar with onion and egg were served.
Thus far, the second segment of the meeting was all Colonel Alexander Belov of the KGB.
Smoking a Romeo y Julieta Churchill cigar, bluff and seedy, Belov was known to be tough, efficient, creative, even moderately fair in his investigations of crime in and around Moscow.
What Belov had to say on the afternoon of July 17, however, struck every person in the conference room as both monstrously unfair and incredibly inefficient. It struck David Strauss as typical and par for the disaster course.
“I must inform you of a disturbing situation.” Belov was continually relighting and puffing his cigar stub as he spoke to the gathering.
“You see, it is our decision that this investigation and search for the so-called Dachau Two terrorists be conducted exclusively by the Moscow Police, the KGB, and the Russian Army.
“It is our final decision that there be absolutely no interference inside Soviet Russia by the countries represented in this room.”
Belov rubbed out his cigar in a modern wooden ashtray. “No interference.
“Gentlemen, ladies, there is no need for all this hubbub. … You see, there have been few successful terrorist actions inside the Soviet Union to this point. In the next few days, I believe that all of you will see why this is so.
“I encourage all of you to go out of this room, and, as best you can, enjoy the athletic events. Enjoy the city of Moscow. I will personally see to the less-enjoyable side of the next few days.
“There is no way these terrorists can succeed here,” Colonel Belov said.
“Please remember”—the Russian man smiled—“we are the people who stopped both Napoleon and Hitler.”
“I think”—Harry turned to David—“that we’d better go back to the hotel and pray like hell for snow.”
It didn’t snow during the evening of July 17.
The temperature did go down to sixty-six, and there was a sprinkle of summer rain. A fine mist was blowing down from the mock-Gothic skyscrapers that tower over the Russian capital.
Their spirits undampened, more than a million tourists coursed along the absurdly wide boulevards of Moscow leading to Olympic Village.
Russian fur hats were everywhere. So was the Russian doll, Misha the Bear, selected to symbolize the Games. So were a surprising number of automobiles—what Nikita Khrushchev had once called “those foul-smelling armchairs on wheels.”
The sheer beauty of more than a million people gathered together to celebrate the possibility in the world for friendship and love was truly overwhelming.
That evening, gold medals were won by Muller, Nellie, Kim, Comaneci, and Keresty. Russia took an early lead in the coveted medal distribution. East Germany had a surprisingly strong hold on second place. The U.S. trailed in third, and sportswriters began to compose vitriolic features revealing how petty rivalries among American amateur organizations had severely crippled the present team.
The feature spots from NBC Sports made much ado about Moscow’s Gorky Street, dubbed “Broad-vay” by the hip, young Russians. The broad, glittery avenue was more like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, though. Especially down around Sverdlovsk Square, where brown bread was whiffed and vodka gulped with exaggerated “
pahs
”; where everyone’s clothes seemed to smell of smoked fish and diesel fuel.
American jazz and fifteen-year-old rock ‘n’ roll blared from the cafés. Pixilated men and women in square Russian suits and dresses by Rudi of Poland danced in the avenues where they couldn’t get into jam-packed barrooms.
In his editorial that evening, the NBC commentator pronounced Moscow “a grand Slavic wedding reception going full tilt twenty-four hours a day. A modern reenactment of V-E Day.”
The Moscow State Circus delighted a full house up in the Lenin Hills.
Maximoya and Vassiliev performed
Don Quixote
for a crowd in excess of 70,000.
The Bolshoi was staged within walking distance of Olympic Village.
Not half a mile apart, both Alix and David looked out on the dim blue city streetlights and gay festivities below their rooms. Neither of them had been able to sleep.
They’d gone to their respective hotel windows to look for some small sense of peace and solace out there in the crowded Moscow night.
The tower bells in Red Square finally struck twelve—July 18.
In just a few hours, the plot known as Dachau Two would begin.
Directly in front of Alix, almost close enough for her to reach out and touch, the five stars on top of the Kremlin were truly beautiful.
Three hundred feet away, the grand Terem Palace was equally beautiful. It glowed in the silver steam of the fuzzy Russian dawn.
Meanwhile, everything else seemed to be crashing in on Alix.
A thousand different ideas and powerful images: a mental avalanche.
Scenes from Olympic Village.
Scenes from Munich.
David.
Dachau.
Hollywood.
David
Perhaps because of the imminent danger, the tension, the terrifying death-camp visions started to come one after the other.
Dachau. The barracks. Watchtowers.
Alix’s mother. Nineteen-year-old Nina
.
The pathetic lines of prisoners walking to their deaths
.
Everything was so sadly beautiful and still in the pinkish early-morning haze, Alix thought to herself as she walked. Off to her right, St. Basil’s looked like faraway Istanbul. Under her feet, Alix could feel the sound of the Moscow Metro.
The Nazi train doors had opened with a noise like rumbling thunder. The prison guards were screaming contrary instructions. Prison dogs were released and allowed to bite whomever they chose
.
All Alix had really wanted was a peaceful walk that morning.
Perhaps the consoling feeling that the events she was about to participate in were necessary and right. Some idea that she hadn’t been manipulated to come to Moscow, that her being there was a positive sign.
A chill, gritty wind picked up across the rough cobblestones of Red Square. The wind swirled dust up into her face. It brought the unwelcome smell of Soviet diesel from nearby Razin and Gertsen Streets.
Once the poisoned stench of the camps had gotten into your skin, your eyes, nose, hair, it was impossible to ever get it out. Alix remembered doing shampoo commercials and thinking about getting the stench out as they filmed her washing her hair. She remembered telling another actress, a Jewish girl, and how the young actress had stared at her as if she were mad
.
The hourly changing of the guard between the Savior Tower and the Lenin Mausoleum was just taking place.
Bells tolled in the tower of Ivan the Great, and the sound reminded Alix of her last days in Frankfurt with David. Black-and-white photos of Germany, then Scarsdale, then the Dachau images rapidly flashed through her mind. For a moment, Alix completely lost control.
Babies, the smallest babies, were stoked into a blazing furnace
.
Men, women, and children were hung like pathetic, tattered clothing down the Highway of Death
.
Who would ever think to do such things? Why did no one seem to understand or care? Not now. Not ever, really. How could they still tell jokes about the Jews? Didn’t they understand what the jokes revealed about themselves? About their own horrifying lives and minds?
Alix looked away from the Savior Tower. Her mind cleared of the terrible images.
She saw the Soldier striding into view.
Begun in the early thirties, the dazzling Moscow Metro system currently holds more gold and marble than there was in all the Romanov palaces together.
The subway fascinated Marc Jacobson and Anna Lascher nearly as much as a block-long Hollywood record shop where they’d once spent the better part of a week while out in California.
The Medic and the Weapons Expert strolled at a leisurely pace through the crowded, underground cathedral. They examined mosaic masterpieces, towering colonnades and sculptures, the overhead chandeliers that overhung the bright tunnels.
They appeared to be tourists by actually being tourists. On their way to purchase a hoard of small arms, rifles, and plastique explosives.
Because it is a model restrictive police state, Moscow presented the attack force with unique tactical problems, of course.
Coming up out of the Metro, the Medic and the Weapons Expert hoped they were about to solve one of the biggest problems of all.
Holding hands and sometimes kissing, they went inside the GUM department store near Red Square.
Once inside, they sat down next to the famous mahogany-colored fountain situated at the center of the basement floor.
The two terrorists looked like lovers by actually being lovers. They looked like two obnoxious college brats ensconced in town for the Olympic Games.
High above their heads, in layered, two-hundred-meter-long shopping galleries, Muscovites and Olympic tourists were already standing on long queues, waiting to buy specialty foods, shoes, and clothes.
Before the day was over, nearly five hundred thousand people would have shopped in the large Moscow-style Macy’s.
Marc Jacobson and Anna Lascher looked straight up at the heavy Lenin Gothic bridges crossing between the galleries. They stared at the impressively high, all-glass roof.
GUM resembled a Middle Eastern souk, the English Weapons Expert observed. Which was perfect: it was proof that the dirty Russians were descended from the dirty Arabs.
The two men from inner-city Moscow finally arrived. The same two Colonel Essmann had met near the Rossiya Hotel.
Today they were carrying long canvas bags like the ones used to transport team sporting equipment across Moscow’s sprawling parks. The two men were Russian hoodlums, a human category one seldom reads about in
Pravda
or
Sputnik
. For unconscionably large fees, they had previously helped Soviet Jews to escape from Russia through the seaport towns. Now, for another prohibitively high price, they were going to help the Jews in a way they didn’t need or want to understand.
When the two men got up from their brief rest at the fountain, they left the canvas bags behind. They left stolen army rifles. They left enough plastic to raise Lenin Stadium right off the Moskva riverbank. In exchange for the bags, the two Russians walked away with more than eighty thousand rubles for their early morning’s labor.
The Dachau Two team was now armed to the teeth.
At 7:45 that morning, Alix and Colonel Ben Essmann, Gary Weinstein—the Engineer—and Rachel Ziegler crossed the lawns of Pushkin Mall.
A few blackbirds were out, pecking their beaks into the ground. A few female leaf-sweepers wandered about in their familiar bright yellow babushkas.
Otherwise, the Mall and the park were empty.
Beyond the park, Olympic Village looked nearly empty.
Above the jagged tree line, the famous Moscow Hills seemed deserted as well.
In the cold shadow of a row of fir trees, the four terrorists entered a public toilet marked with thick black Cyrillic letters and spread-legged stick figures representing a man and a woman.
Inside the rest rooms, four hirsute Russian men and three husky women stood in their stocking feet on the tile floor. These were
fartsovshchiks
—Russian black marketeers.
The seven Russians were quickly stripping down to their grimy underwear.
“Prieveton! Salute!”
A man with a black beard—a dancing bear straight out of the State Circus—grinned and raised his mitt in an earthy greeting.
“Welcome to toilets, comrades!”
Colonel Essmann and Alix smiled back at the Russians. Then they, too, began to strip off their clothes.
What they were now doing had already become commonplace at the Moscow Olympics. Several news stories had made note of the curious, sometimes humorous phenomenon.
In any wooded place, there was a chance you might suddenly come upon an American boy or girl shucking off his or her favorite dungarees or a man from Paris literally selling the designer shirt off his back.
From the Russian point of view, they were receiving Western clothing worth two or three times its retail value. They would subsequently be able to resell the clothes for two or three times what they had paid. And the Russians who eventually bought the illegal clothing would still be better off than those who bought suits and dresses at GUM or TSUM.
As for the Dachau Two team, they were interested only in the poorly made Russian clothes they would be getting in this deal.