See How They Run (28 page)

Then a hoarse voice came from the other side of the room. Essmann was in the kitchen. He called out to David. He called out in Hebrew.

“Yes, surely I am that—a Nazi! Now why don’t you tell me the nice story about the young Israeli boys who died at Munich, Doctor? Then tell me about Auschwitz and Buchenwald! All about Maidanek, where forty in my family died in slaughtering pens.”

“That happened forty years ago!” Alix found herself screaming.

“He’s in the far right corner,” David whispered.

At the same time, he remembered that judging the true direction of sound could be terribly deceiving in the dark. That thought gave David the most awful moment of doubt and panic.

But there really wasn’t any time for doubt now. He’d already made up his mind.

David quickly swept his arm out along a row of hanging pots and pans in front of them.

The resultant loud clatter, the sudden crashing of pots to the floor, was unexpected and disorienting. It was like missing a step in a dream.

At the same time, David’s right hand shot down under the heavy wood cutting table directly in front of him and Alix.

“Here’s something from Heather and Nick!” David called out. He grabbed Alix roughly around the waist. He threw her to the floor.

A bright gold flash illuminated the entire kitchen for a millisecond.

One of the Medic’s white phosphorus grenades ripped a gaping hole of light in the overwhelming darkness.

A flat, thunderous
bang
pierced the skin of David’s and Alix’s eardrums.

Then they were scrambling to their feet. David and Alix were running to the other side of the kitchen.

Alix pulled open refrigerator doors and they could see Colonel Essmann in a terrible slice of cold light. The Israeli man was dead. A bloody, insignificant heap on the floor.

David ran to the black generator and he reversed each toggle switch. He tried to reverse everything that had been done. As a second step, he turned off the kitchen ovens. Alix turned off the air-conditioning unit in the kitchen. She turned off anything that was electrical.

Then the terrifying room was quiet and still.

Neither of them was sure, but they thought Dachau Two was over.

“Will you please hold me?” Alix whispered, and began to cry softly.

Epilogue

The morning after, Moscow awoke to severe postbattle conditions: a light, sticky drizzle; fog and cardboard-gray clouds hanging over the city like a wet, dripping blanket; thousands of tourists wandering the streets like war orphans. …

In the final accounting of the incident,
Tass, Izvestia
, and
Pravda
reported that twenty-four athletes and twenty-nine Olympic security people and tourists died during the thirteen hours of the takeover. All but a few of the casualties were Russians, Germans, Syrians, or Egyptians. All but two of the terrorists—the Russian Architect, and the Dentist—were also killed.

Overall, though, the deaths and injuries were far less than had been feared and expected. No small thanks to Dr. David Strauss and to Alix Rothschild, it was said. Also to the fact that in one of the three captive dormitory sections, the Architect had refused to kill innocent young athletes. The microwave apparatus had never been turned on.

The worst of it was twelve athletes from the West German team. They were found dead in two adjacent rooms on the third floor of their dormitory. “May these young men and women be the last Holocaust casualties,” the chancellor of West Germany said at the state funeral in Bonn.

In November, agent Harry Callaghan was assigned to a desk job at FBI headquarters in Washington. He left the post after less than six months. Harry is now writing a memoir about the intelligence community, under contract with a New York publisher.

As for Alix Rothschild and David Strauss, the evidence is scattered, vague, and mostly inconclusive.

Their escape from Olympic Village was never completely explained by the Russians—who are not great information purveyors anyway. One version had them getting out through the maze of tunnels and roadways underneath the dormitories themselves.

Another story (
Jerusalem Post
) was that during the chaos and confusion in front of the liberated dormitory—with American women athletes streaming out onto the streets, with other athletes running up to congratulate them, with joyous spectators and newspeople breaking through the police barricades (and the Russian police doing a bit of rejoicing in the streets themselves)—David and Alix had somehow slipped into the amorphous, unmanageable crowd.

Subsequent rumors (the
London Observer
and the
Times
) about their living on a farm outside Eilat in Israel were proven false. So was the story (
New York Post
) that they were both prisoners in the Potma Labor Camp inside Soviet Russia.

Still another rumor had them going their separate ways after Moscow. In this version, David Strauss is now working as a doctor somewhere inside Israel.

A French photographer recently claimed to have a photograph of the two of them taken in the Algarve. The shot appeared in an American men’s magazine, but it was difficult to tell if the two swimmers pictured were actually David and Alix.

A California actress claimed she saw Alix in Los Angeles.

Alix was said to be pregnant and “matronly-looking.” She no longer seemed to be
Rothschild
.

In late November, Nick and Beri Strauss’s movie
The Fourth Commandment
played to an enormous TV audience across America.

The film is soon due to be seen in Great Britain, Israel, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan.

The movie will also be shown all through South America and West Germany.

As the winter of 1980 settled in, there was a final development. …

Early in December, SS General Richard Glucks, Dr. Ludwig Hahn, and the former Nazi SS commander of Auschwitz, Walter Rauff, were enjoying a choice morning sun and ocean breeze on the white stucco dining porch of the Hotel Mercedes Bleu.

The war criminals were luxuriating over French croissants, over hot and delicious Blue Mountain blend coffee. Dr. Ludwig Hahn was lighting up his first Havana Corona of the day.

Four men in khaki trousers and shirts broke the perfect mood of the peaceful terrace setting.

The intruders fired gas-operated rifles on the casually attentive bodyguards sunning their faces at a table not six feet away from the Nazis.

One bodyguard flipped back over the terrace railing. A second man crashed into a cart, sending rolls and biscuits flying in twenty different directions.

The white-tile floor was stained with blood the bright red color of bougainvillea.

Richard Glucks stood up, screaming at the invaders in Portuguese.

“We have agreements with your government. Does the minister know that you’re here?”

A dark-skinned man who passed for Brazilian, showed his brilliant white teeth to the old Nazis. The man then spoke to the Germans—first in Hebrew, then in stilted German. The man, Benny Netanyahn, was a former major in Mossad; also an “Avenger,” reawakened by the demands of Dachau Two.

“You scaly old bastards, you worms, are accused of crimes against the human race, of which I am a part,” he announced. “You can have no agreement with any legitimate government! Your names are
Nazi
Richard Glucks,
Nazi
Ludwig Hahn,
Nazi
Walter Rauff. Among the three of you, you are responsible for more than two hundred thousand murders.

“You will be hanged at eleven today. No further discussion is necessary. Tie their arms! Keep them out of my sight until eleven!”

The hangings didn’t take place until closer to noon. Wealthy hotel patrons, native gardeners and maids, Nazi mistresses from Rio—were forced to stand out in the lush gardens and watch.

They were made to look up at the glistening, bone-white terrazzo. Buzzards flew high over the terrace like minute black glider planes.

The sun was a bleached-white circle of fire—

Suddenly, the three heavy hemp ropes jumped out; then they snapped to rigid, straining attention.

The three Nazis were left hanging in the sun like slack-bellied sides of aging meat—like the Jews in the
Konzentrationslagers
of another era.

Similar scenes were enacted.

In a sybaritic fourteen-room suite inside a Vienna, Austria, luxury hotel.

On the roof of an apartment building in Lefrak City, Queens.

On the front lawn of a millionaire’s house in the Bel Air section of Beverly Hills.

In Rio, an entire street, an expensive sector of the city where German emigrants had settled, was razed to the ground.