See How They Run (16 page)
“No Nazis today,” Alix said.
Then she was suddenly tightrope-walking gracefully out on the fallen tree trunk.
For a moment, David just sat and watched her. Tight athletic legs and back muscles. Full breasts jutting straight ahead as she ran toward a smoky summer sun winking across the water at them.
“C’mon you!” Alix had turned and was calling back to him. “Mr. hotshot water sportsman.”
In a flash David was up on the fallen tree trunk. His toes were gripping old slippery oak bark. The hot sun was beating on his neck and well-muscled shoulders.
“I don’t believe how beautiful this is. I feel like shouting. I
will
shout. Hooray for us!”
Three-quarters of the way out on the tree trunk, Alix executed an impromptu cannonball dive.
She saw David upside-down just before her head pierced the black ripples of the lake.
“No!”
David yelled.
Then, year of surprises!
The lake water was actually a bearable temperature. At least sixty-eight degrees. Bottle green and clear down ten feet to eelgrass waving gently on a mud bottom.
“Wunderbar!”
Alix’s shiny black hair broke the surface again, and she saw that David was now in the water, too.
They held each other gently. Their long legs tangled and rubbed together sensuously. They began to make love in the water.
Every so often, David found it hard to believe that he was back with Alix again … Alix Rothman … “Franny” … ROTHSCHILD … It was like being with somebody clearly unattainable. Sometimes it made David feel a little unreal himself.
“I love Dr. David Strauss,” Alix whispered as they floated with the lake current. She couldn’t quite believe that she’d said it. The words had just slipped out.
David found himself just staring into her eyes—beautiful green eyes that were so expressive.
“Say something.” Alix managed an embarrassed smile. She wanted to make it all a joke now.
“You’re okay. Not bad.” David grinned.
It was so damn good for them to be on the pretty lake. Just floating like air bubbles. Being alone together.
Just then, David spotted a man watching them from the woods. The man was standing just over Alix’s left shoulder, in a clump of evergreens.
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
When he saw David catch sight of him, the man did nothing to conceal himself. He lit up a cigarette, reached down and picked up a rifle, and started to come forward.
David and Alix could do nothing but watch him come.
The lake current rippled under their chins as they watched his slow walk. Their bodies were covered with large goose pimples. Suddenly they were aware of a chill breeze blowing across the water.
The man was tall and dark, and wore a checked hacking jacket. He walked right out along the fallen oak tree.
“You look surprised,” he said.
“Yes. We
feel
surprised, too. Who the hell are you?”
“I thought Harry would have told you. You’re back under surveillance, Dr. Strauss. I’m Ray Cosgrove. Hey, how’s the water?”
The forest-green BMW sounded like one of Dr. Diehl’s famed German watches. All precise little ticks, no disconcerting rocks. As Alix piloted the purring sports car through the countryside, the late-afternoon sun threw coins of light onto the BMW’s windshield.
It was just like expensively shot movies she’d appeared in.
Nestled in the snug driver’s seat, Alix listened to the beautiful engine; to the sound of four-and-twenty blackbirds chirping outside; to Otto Klemperer conducting
Finlandia
on the AFN radio network.
Alix could barely feel the autobahn beneath her.
Not even when the gold-rimmed speedometer tipped 150, then 160 kilometers.
More than a hundred miles an hour.
Taking solitary automobile rides was something Alix had found herself doing more and more since she had first moved out to California. San Diego Freeway rides late at night. Pacific Coast Highway rides. Also, long jogging sessions. Around and around the lovely, secluded roads of Bel Air, where she had lived for nearly six years.
The running sessions were very California actressy, Alix had realized, and felt self-conscious. Yet the hectic movement had seemed necessary whenever she’d begun to think about the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. About being a survivor. About any of a hundred different Hollywood lifestyle frustrations.
Near a natural-wood exercise
Plotzen
along the roadside, Alix pulled the BMW over onto the apron.
She rolled all four windows down and inhaled the clean, fresh-smelling air. She let her hair fall out of a flower-print kerchief.
The terrible daydreams were coming on a regular basis now. Quite uncontrollable. She would be watching naked mothers and children being marched to the showers. She could smell the scorched flesh, the stench of disease.
In the rearview mirror there was a young German man in a trendy jumpsuit holding a red pail. He was washing his precious convertible. It was a semihumorous phenomenon Alix saw constantly while traveling around Frankfurt.
Something else, though …
Alix felt that she was being followed.
Right palm lightly touching the shift stick, she gunned the sports car and it popped out in front of a speedy clique of oncoming cars.
Alix turned up AFN.
“Horst Wessel”
was playing now.
Boom, rah, rah, boom. Sis, rah, rah, boom
.
She glanced into the rearview mirror and saw nothing to alarm her.
A big black truck marked
Sturn
. A plum-red Audi full of German mothers and school-age children.
Then the great, gray city of Frankfurt began to replace overhanging fir trees in the BMW’s front windshield.
Powerful, shimmering new office buildings stood above shorter, older ones. Commerzbank, Dredner Bank, Deutsche Bank she read on the skyscrapers. Construction sites were everywhere Cranes—like giant giraffes in the middle of the city. Billboards for Nivea Mitch suntan products, for Mercedes-Benz.
The German and American dreams were fusing together, it seemed to Alix. Strange … and then not so strange, when you thought about it. An era of multinational businesses and governments was dawning on a half-asleep world.
The German radio was starting to get a little irritating now.
“Achtung! A sale is now going on at—”
Alix twisted the thing off.
Driving alongside the gray-blue Main, which was crowded with colorful pleasure boats that balmy afternoon, Alix began to think about David and herself. She tried to review what had happened to them so far that summer. Alix tried to understand exactly what was going on in the arena of her heart. How much was schoolgirl excitement? How much was atmospheric pressure? How much was something else altogether?
Her attention was temporarily diverted to city-driving problems, such as how to park the damn car in downtown Frankfurt.
A city policeman in a pigeon-gray uniform was waving and whistling, looking like a piece in a cuckoo clock …
Are you waving at me? Aah-ha! A long parking space in front of a narrow bakery.
Alix put two wheels of the BMW up on the curb, the way everybody seemed to park in Frankfurt. Then once again she felt that someone was following her.
Maybe someone had recognized Alix Rothschild the Actress? Maybe someone had recognized Alix Rothschild the Jew?
Alix spun around quickly.
No one unusual was to be seen anywhere. Silly paranoid squirrel, she thought. God!
It was 5:47 on a grimy Bavarian clock over a Deutsche Bank branch.
Alix got out of the sports car, fluffed her long black hair, and flipped on sunglasses. Then she walked straight ahead in the direction of the Main.
Drawing stares and a few wolf whistles, she sat on a bench with a pleasant view of the towering Henninger Turm. Then, on impulse it seemed, Alix hopped aboard one of the dull yellow Strassenbahn trams that stopped at the street corner.
She heard the whistle and screech of the overhead tram cables as the trolley pulled away.
There, stupid, no one got on the damn train with you, did they?
Train rides in general were poison for Alix. She began to think of the concentration camps immediately.
She imagined bumping trains going to Dachau, Treblinka, Belsen. She saw her mother again. Then her father. She saw human legs and rib cages strewn in a field …
Stop!
STOP!
HALT! A big blue sign alongside the tracks had caught her attention. In a flash, Alix jumped off the tram—just before it crossed the barge-cluttered Main.
The young woman hesitated on the high wooden platform over the river. She seemed to change her mind about something.
Then Alix jumped back on the same train—past the somewhat befuddled conductor—and hurried to her seat.
She continued the ride all the way to Hauptbahnhof, Frankfurt’s large, distinctive railroad station.
Outside the station, Alix walked along the famous Munchner Strasse.
As she turned away from the Bahnhof, the frenetic Munchner district began to look something like Times Square back around 1960. Frankfurt itself was getting fuzzy—mephitic yellow—as the sun set over local three- and four-story buildings. A crazy-sounding flugelhorn was blowing somewhere.
As she walked, Alix stared at American soldiers from the Rhine-Main base. She saw German prostitutes standing like racks of cheap dresses in front of red- and blue-lit doorways.
At precisely seven, the paraffin streetlamps on Münchner Strasse switched on. They spun out their golden strands of light like delicate spiderwebs.
A black American soldier seemed mesmerized by the neon lights from a dance club reflected in the street. A parrot-green building that Alix passed housed a maternity shop, a sex shop, a birth-control center.
Alix finally turned down a more pleasant side street, and headed toward the West End business sector. She looked back over her shoulder once, glanced at her wristwatch, then stepped inside a small restaurant called Kleine-Garten.
“Liebchen?”
Vulkan, Rabbi Doctor Michael Ben-Iban, lifted his tired eyes from one of the small dining tables.
“I’m sorry for being late,” Alix apologized. She was shaking all over. She could barely speak.
“I think they had someone acting as my bodyguard. Someone was following me while I was driving out in the countryside.”
“We don’t have much time to talk.”
Vulkan motioned for Alix to sit down.
Harry Callaghan and James Burns had come remarkably close with their seat-of-the-pants guesswork at the Schlag Café in Sachenhausen.
The Storm Troop was indeed a Jewish terrorist group: it was a well-financed, well-organized, very intense, and intelligent cell of fewer than a hundred soldiers. It was an offshoot of the original secret defense group formed by survivors in 1945. To this point it had existed to counterbalance and discourage violently anti-Semitic groups: disparate, evil organizations such as ODESSA, Die Spinne, the PLO, Black September.
Now the Jewish group was apparently ready to move against all of its dangerous enemies. One spectacular coup de grâce.
The group’s brilliant realpolitik Nazi ruse in America had not only succeeded in raising anti-Nazi sentiment among influential non-Jews, but it had simultaneously galvanized the defense group’s regular supporters to proffer their largest contributions ever.
As the summer began, concerned Jews everywhere, even those previously uncommitted to radical action, were seriously talking about stopping the Nazi Renascence once and for all time.
Which was exactly what the dedicated leaders of the group had in mind.
It had been their obsession, in fact, for thirty-five long and difficult years.
For the moment, though, on July 10 in Frankfurt, the problem facing Michael Ben-Iban/Vulkan, and the dilemma confronting the Führer, was how best to deal with Alix Rothschild. The Actress.
More precisely, the problem was how the sensitive and intelligent American woman might react once the full story was finally revealed to her.
Even worse, the problem was how Alix would view the unfortunate killing of Elena and Nicholas Strauss—a sad but necessary development once the Strausses had made their final decision to reveal the plot and break the defense group’s strict vow of secrecy.
“So, here we are at another difficult decision juncture. We need Alix Rothschild rather badly,” the Führer had been saying before the actress arrived at the Kleine-Garten. “Alix
has
to be with us in Moscow. We need our film star. When she speaks, the world has eyes and ears.”
“What would you have me do?” Michael Ben-Iban leaned across the small restaurant table. His thin hands were spread in a helpless, floundering gesture. “Are you asking me to lie to Alix now? What is it exactly that you want?”
The chief rubbed out a cigarette stub. There didn’t seem to be a need to answer Michael Ben-Iban’s question. The answer was obvious—at least it should have been.
“I just want you to make certain we don’t lose the young woman’s trust. To see to it that she is with us in Moscow. The method is entirely up to you.”
The mysterious Führer left the Kleine-Garten moments before Alix arrived. The success or failure of the difficult meeting was now in the hands of Michael Ben-than.
It was entirely up to Vulkan.
Alix found herself beginning to smile as she sat across from the famed Nazi-hunter.
What brought on the smile was Ben-Iban’s baggy tweed jacket, a faded brown overshirt, an ancient gray felt hat.
Besides that, it was just tremendously good to see Michael Ben-Iban again, Alix thought. After all that had happened in the past few weeks, it was especially good.
Alix felt wonderfully safe for a fleeting moment. She was happy to see Ben-Iban alive. At the same time, she was feeling very bad about David. She wished there had been a way she could have told him everything—but the risks of exposing Moscow had been too great. That had been the decision passed on to her by the group leaders.
