See How They Run (5 page)
Heather Strauss could hear everything from Elena’s bedroom. She tried not to show her fear. She had to make a decision immediately.
“Nana, can you come with me? If I help you walk?” Heather gasped out.
“Someone wants to hurt us, Nana. Please.”
Nodding weakly, dazed and horrified, Elena Strauss let herself be pulled up from the bed. She felt Heather’s hands go around her back, up under her arms.
Elena and Heather finally made it out into the dim upstairs hallway. Heather went to turn right.
The old woman tried to scream, but no sound came
.
Heather saw the two men in the hallway. But it was too late. She started to push Elena the other way. She couldn’t believe this was happening, couldn’t understand how it could possibly be.
The Soldier fired just as Heather Strauss stepped in front of the old woman.
The young doctor crumpled down onto the hallway runner. For a second, Heather desperately wanted David to be there. Then she wanted nothing at all.
As Elena Strauss began to fall, second and third shots rang out in the bizarrely lit hallway. Three more shots were fired.
Then it was unnaturally quiet upstairs in the Strauss house.
“Outside! … Everyone outside. Move quickly there. Move! Move, I say!”
Downstairs, the Strauss family was being marched single file out onto the dark side lawns.
The confusion was surreal. Terrible memories began to come back for some of the family members.
David Strauss was being helped to his feet. Holding his broken, bleeding nose, he was being led forward with the others.
Suddenly, the two other Nazi intruders appeared from another side of the house.
“Let’s go,”
the Soldier called out.
“This way! Now!”
The four Nazis ran north into the thickest estate woods. Dogs began to bark at all the neighboring houses. Police sirens could be heard howling in the direction of the village of Scarsdale.
Amazingly, everyone outside seemed to be unharmed. The attack appeared to be over.
The Strauss family members began to weep, to hug and kiss one another. The
wrow, wrow, wrow
of the sirens got closer. Wide-eyed neighbors were running across North Avenue in housecoats and pajamas.
Suddenly, David’s Aunt Shirley was pointing back toward the gardens.
Everything became deadly quiet. Everyone just stared.
David turned and stared, too. In front of Grandpa Sam’s pear and boxwood trees. Right in front of an old gazebo brought down from the Cherrywoods Hotel.
“Rotten, pathetic,
filthy
bastards!” David Strauss spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Oh you rotten sons of bitches.”
They had burned a five-foot-square swastika on the estate lawns.
Later that night, a sixty-eight-year-old man, former SS Colonel Hermann Rinemann, sat in his old world décor New York City apartment. He tried, unsuccessfully, to be reasonably calm.
Colonel Rinemann watched the ABC television replays of the Academy Awards slayings, then the Scarsdale attack.
Rinemann then tried to watch a movie until the next news report at two-thirty.
At two-thirty, he watched the last news on Channel 9.
At three-thirty, he watched the final news on ABC.
At four-thirty, he walked his dog on the empty, steaming streets of upper East Side Manhattan.
When he returned from his walk, he fixed himself toast and tea with lemon—but he found he was too excited to eat once he had prepared the food.
Something called
Not For Women Only
was on TV. At 7:00
A.M
., CBS began its morning news with more clips from the previous night.
Finally at eight, New York time, Hermann Rinemann made a long-distance phone call.
To La Paz, Bolivia.
A manservant answered the phone.
Rinemann inquired if Senor Eliazer was up at his usual hour. If Senor Eliazer was available to come to the telephone.
Yes, it was very, very important. Yes, he would wait
.
The next voice Colonel Rinemann heard was that of Senor Eliazer. Senor Eliazer—who had once been known by another, much more famous and powerful-sounding name.
In a hushed voice, Hermann Rinemann began to describe in great detail what he was watching on the
Today
show’s eight-o’clock news.
The raids
.
The warning
.
Dachau Zwei
.
Henri Bendel’s, New York City.
Her thick black hair blazing like the mane of a Thoroughbred, Alix Rothschild struck a New York
Vogue
pose beneath the rich brown-and-cream canopy of Henri Bendel’s on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Behind Alix, in Bendel’s glossy window, the arms and legs of several mannequins were strewn on top of broken lightbulbs and colorful bazaar streamers. In a second window, there was a much-tastier display from Bailey-Heubner, one of the boutiques on the ground floor inside the building.
When Alix had been ten, she remembered, her Uncle Benny had bought her a white beaver topper from this very same, wonderfully screwy, department store.
Now Alix was shivering in a summery Halston gown. She was also falsely representing a cloying new women’s fragrance called Tricot—(the French word for knitted sweater, she hoped someone at the Madison Avenue perfume factory realized).
For three magazine ads and two television commercials, Alix Rothschild would receive $250,000 to promote Tricot, a scent very much like Rive Gauche, Charlie, Wind Song, Cachet, Babe. A touch less alcohol; a smidgen more jasmine. And Alix Rothschild!
All around the dark-haired actress there were flashing Mylar reflectors on aluminum tripods.
No more than an arm’s length away was an expensive troupe of makeup, fashion, and hairstylists.
Dabbing, blotting, curling. Crimping, glossing, spraying, powdering
.
Making certain that Alix Rothschild looked perfect.
Which Alix did.
An art director, photographer, assistant director, and account executive told her so. The crowd gathered around Alix showed it with their approving smiles and wide eyes. Even Bendel’s ancient doorman, Buster, looked mildly animated, or at least, amused.
“Gorgeous, darling.” “Perf, Alix.” “Sexy kitten now.”
Alix heard the shop talk among the reflectors.
“Varushka got herself preggers in New Hampshire. Yes, she did, too. I heard it from Kimberly over at Elite.”
Alix’s mind, meanwhile, was drifting.
Whenever the crowds and bright klieg lights suggested to Alix that she was someone special—her own tremendous guilt, her terrible visions, came rushing in to countermand the pleasant experience.
This time it was worse than it had ever been
, Alix realized.
Instead of chic, expensive perfumes, she could smell putrefying corpses.
Instead of the wealthy Fifth Avenue crowd, she saw a line of stick-limbed, bent-over prisoners in striped prison garb, with big yellow stars branded on their backs and chests.
Thirty-five years before, Alix Rothschild’s mother had died horribly on one of those terrifying lines. At Dachau
Konzentrationslager
. Her father had died in Buchenwald. Alix was one of nearly a million concentration camp survivors in the United States.
Lately, she’d become obsessed.
Ever since the Nazi raid in Westchester. Ever since the threat of some kind of uprising by the Reich, Alix had been able to think of nothing else.
On May 7, 1945, church bells, fire alarms, and air-raid sirens had tolled and pealed all through ravaged Western Europe, inside Russia, all the way to America
.
The terrible war in Europe was finally over.
Winston Churchill had said: “This moment is a signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.”
What Alix Rothschild remembered was a long, grim line of German civilians. The American Army had forced them to come and visit Dachau after the liberation.
Their heads hanging low, protesting their innocence, the Germans were led through the rotting barracks filled with dying men, women, and children.
The Germans were shown the rows of gallows, where men, women, and children had been hanged; the torture racks and laboratories; the crematoriums still packed with human ashes, the last attempts to exterminate a few more.
It was UNRRA that eventually found shelter for some two hundred Dachau children at the Kloster-Indersdorf monastery, due north of the death camp.
Among the children survivors was three-year-old Alix Rothman.
The monastery experience was a sad and unreal one, too.
Little bald children, their stomachs swollen from malnutrition, followed the UNRRA people around constantly—telling their personal stories over and over. Though there was sufficient food at Kloster-Indersdorf, the children continued to steal.
The Dachau children said they couldn’t help it. A few of them who broke the habit early would leave the dining refectory proudly showing the nurses that they had empty hands and pockets.
In bizarre contrast to the actual DP camps, a photo essay appeared in
Life
magazine in 1945. In eighteen photographs, two pretty little “Heidi-types” were shown having a “typical” camp experience. The girls were then followed across Europe as they bravely hitchhiked (with their
Life
photographer, of course) back to their homes. The pretty blond girls were shown “making friends with an American doughboy”; having a medical exam—“their hair is washed and well brushed”; being given an “extra hot chocolate” before they began their cross-country jaunt.
No wonder that so many Americans came to believe that the death camp and DP camp horror stories had to be bizarre exaggerations.
When Alix was three and a half, her aunt and uncle finally came to Kloster-Indersdorf to claim her. They took the little girl to America, the land of
Life
magazine. Where Alix was told “to blend into the melting pot”; where she was told “to forget all those terrible things that happened”; where she became Rothschild instead of Rothman.
“I just can’t do this anymore,” Alix muttered to herself, standing in front of Bendel’s. Then, suddenly, she announced it to the large commercial crew.
“Do what, love?” The director started to walk toward her.
“I can’t sell any more perfumes. Or wash-your-hair-once-an-hour shampoos. Or automobiles. Or anything. I’m sorry.”
Alix began to push her way out through the film crew.
“Please excuse me. Please. Please
don’t touch me
.”
With that, the actress hurried away down Fifty-seventh. She turned onto Fifth Avenue in her Halston gown.
A spring wind was coming up the street. Alix was feeling a little better now, able to breathe at least. She tried to forget about Dachau and Buchenwald.
As she walked, Alix looked down at her feet—size 10-B—and she wondered why she had ever thought they looked good in white “rowboats” from Charles Jourdan.
Alix Rothschild also wondered why people thought she was at all pretty.
Nestled midway between Albany and New York City, ten miles northwest of beautiful Mohonk and Minnewaska, the famous Strauss Family Hotel was set high in the Shawangunk Mountains. The multiwinged and turreted hotel was somebody’s fantastic idea for an American-style castle.
With more than 550 rooms, Cherrywoods Mountain House was actually
two
great, sprawling hotels, one building on either side of three-hundred-foot-high shale cliffs separated by a shimmering black lake.
Because they were originally constructed in stages over sixty years’ time, the “Houses” combined several conflicting styles of European and American architecture. In fact, approaching the Mountain House from the main gravel road, the near wing and livery stable looked not so much like one style, but rather like ten or twelve different styles, and the buildings were in different colors.
Most awesome and beautiful, however, were the grounds of the resort hotel.
More than two thousand acres of gardens, grape arbors, barber-cut lawns, and virgin woods, which hotel guests were encouraged to tour on foot, or even in a horse-drawn buck-board.
From most rooms there was a breathtaking view over the evergreens and apple farms that stretched nearly to Newburgh, some thirty miles distant on a thin blue ribbon that turned out to be the Hudson River.
Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, and Kennedys had had the wind knocked out of their sails by the Cherrywoods Mountain House view. “The finest view on the Atlantic Coast,” travel editors raved.
“Someone really ought to make a scary movie here,” Nick Strauss had always said, and once had shamelessly suggested to hotel guest Roman
Rosemary’s Baby
Polanski.
Maybe someone
would
make a horror film there, Dr. David Strauss thought as he surveyed the land one overcast and particularly graphic afternoon.
For it was at Cherrywoods Mountain House where the members of the Strauss family were sequestered under specially arranged-for FBI protection, and where they waited in safety, hoping that their lives would soon return to normal.
In the beginning of David’s stay—the three weeks before the hotel reopened for regular guests (just a trickle of Cherrywoods’s normal spring business, though)—he rarely went out of his suite of rooms on the fifth floor of West House.
David Strauss was obsessed with his grandmother’s, his brother’s, and his wife’s murders. David was particularly obsessed with memories of his and Heather’s life together before the evening of April 25 in Scarsdale.
Once he began to go out on the hotel grounds, David tried to lose himself in a flurry of physical activity.
Mornings at dawn, he rowed a modified scull around and around Lake Arrow. He went for long solitary swims and long jogs through the pine forests.