Do you understand?
Answer if you understand
. …
“In Odessa,” the shocked, wounded man began to chant, “there is a man named Andrei Sergeevich Pavlov. Pavlov is one of us. …”
Where in the name of God was Michael Ben-Iban?
Both David and Alix had begun to worry about the old Nazi-fighter. Three times they’d actually gone to Ben-Iban’s Jewish Studies Centre in Frankfurt. Even Ben-Iban’s secretary was concerned now.
Could they have gotten Ben-Iban, too?
Killed the Nazi-hunter the way they’d murdered Benjamin Rabinowitz and Elena?
Still more questions were added to the nasty, bulging catalogue of mysteries and catastrophes.
For the time being, David and Alix decided to spend one last day with Nick’s movie. The two of them flew to Munich, where the final scenes of the documentary feature had actually been shot.
David and Alix went to the location where the single most affecting scene in
The Fourth Commandment
had been filmed.
A long-forgotten chant that David and Alix had sung as smart-aleck twelve-year-olds popped into both of their heads as they rode from Munich Airport.
“Hitler had only one big ball,”
they’d once upon a time harmonized on public buses, in schoolyards, outside the mock-Tudor railroad station in Scarsdale.
“Goering had two but they were small
Himmler had something simmler
But Goebbels had no balls at all.”
It was all flashing back to them now. Hateful, sinister floods of it. A villainous Christmas when someone had thrown gift-wrapped bags of manure against the Strausses’ front door. A time when David and Nick had gone as guests to the country club, and then been told they had to leave by the club president. “You’re the two Strauss boys, aren’t you? You boys aren’t allowed here.” A bad, bad rush of old persecution nightmares.
At noon on July 8, David and Alix stared up at the pocked and nicked gray stone walls of a onetime World War I munitions factory. They were at their final destination outside Munich.
A bright yellow sun was peeking half its smiley face around the dark, heavy building blocks and watchtowers.
“It’s unbelievable,” Alix mumbled under her breath. Her body was shaking.
David surveyed the blackened walls. “It’s almost indistinguishable from the ordinary world now. One thousand by nineteen hundred eight feet of pure hell.”
David and Alix had come to Dachau One.
They read the sign.
WILKOMMEN.
Because the former scene of flogging, pole-hanging, gassing, infecting women and children with malaria, whooping cough, and cholera was such a popular summer tourist attraction—nearly a million visitors a year—Alix had chosen dark glasses and a peasant’s kerchief to disguise her looks.
Because he, too, was beginning to be recognized, David wore sunglasses, a floppy hat, a heavy windbreaker.
As a result, the two Americans felt relatively anonymous as they hiked down Dachau’s infamous Turnpike to Hell.
Inside the infernal walls, they went through various chapels and sterile memorial museums. They walked into gas chambers, and alongside the shooting ranges. They were looking for the resting place of Alix’s mother—the Grave of Ashes.
Contrary to Eisenhower’s orders to leave the camp exactly as it was when liberated, the West Germans had made the former
Konzentrationslager
much too pretty.
At least David and Alix thought so.
That day in particular, Dachau brought to mind well-intentioned but phony Memorial Day parades in America. There were all sorts of brassy commemorative plaques. Crisp scrolls. Hundreds of bright-colored flags. Willow trees grew all around the outer walls.
David and Alix stopped at a museum where the History of the Rise of Anti-Semitism was supposedly captured in artsy black-and-white photographs. They visited the Christ in Agony chapel. Then a nondenominational chapel marked for meditation.
A large plaque in German, English, and Russian read:
THOUSANDS OF OUR BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND PARENTS WERE KILLED WHERE YOU ARE NOW STANDING. THIS HAPPENED BETWEEN 1933 AND 1945. BY THE MURDEROUS NAZIS.
David Strauss shivered involuntarily. “Right now. As I stand right here, I’m finally out of touch with the idea that I was ever a medical doctor. A simple-minded, somewhat old-fashioned American doctor in New York. Will you please explain to me what I’m doing here? What the hell is happening to us?”
Alix shook her head. A glassy-eyed daze had come over her. She seemed in mild shock.
“I don’t know, David. I don’t know.”
Feeling an overwhelming sense of unreality, the American couple finally walked to the brick-walled, ivy-covered gas chambers and ovens.
“This building doesn’t feel right,” Alix said as they approached it along a low-fenced gravel walk. “It’s too pretty. All this ivy. I feel like I’m visiting some college English department.”
Right inside the front doorway, they were immediately confronted with six ovens directly across a deep, wide room. The ovens were all neatly shined. Lined up against redbrick walls that smelled of household disinfectant
“It’s like a little Arnold’s Bakery,” Alix said.
Then something terrifying about the spick-and-span, efficient little room began to affect them.
Over a brown side door they read: THINK ABOUT WHO DIED HERE.
Alix and David thought about it. They thought about the Jews, and about the Nazis.
On a ceiling beam: PRISONERS WERE ACTUALLY HANGED FROM HERE.
On one of the brick walls: PRISONERS WERE FLOGGED HERE.
Under the shiny ovens that looked a little like resuscitation chambers: THE ACTUAL OVENS USED AT DACHAU.
David was finding it difficult to breathe. Vicious waves of nausea came over him.
A family from America was posing for a photograph in front of one of the ovens. All the neatly groomed family members were smiling for the instant camera. They have no idea what happened here, David thought. They couldn’t have any idea.
“I don’t know why, but I can feel the whole thing now, Alix. What happened in Germany forty years ago.”
Tears were rolling down Alix’s face. The American father was carefully directing his photograph session. David and Alix both felt a terrible need to be in some private place for a few moments.
Arm in arm, holding each other tightly, they walked outside next to some gray administration buildings. George Santayana was quoted in German and English:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Remember
was an odd, maybe even a poor choice of a word, David was thinking. …
Was the quotation true, though
, he couldn’t help wondering—partially feeling like some fool who takes secret messages from songs on the radio.
Could the whole thing happen again? Could it repeat itself all over again? What did the Storm Troop want?
Alix, meanwhile, was beginning to question whether she could ever tell David all the things whirling around in her mind.
God, it was so complicated. All of her past experience told her that only other concentration-camp survivors truly understood the nightmare, the hatred
.
David’s private thoughts, Alix’s thoughts, were suddenly interrupted by a strangely familiar
whirring, buzzing, clicking
sound.
“Oh, God, David. Oh no.”
An ugly, longhaired man with a sloth’s body and ferret’s face was responsible for the noise.
Whirring, buzzing, clicking.
Whirring, buzzing, clicking.
The human mole was shooting professional 35mm photographs of them.
“Hey, Rothschild.” The man growled as Alix tried to shield her face. “Give me one for
Komet
. I’ve come all the way from Frankfurt.”
From out of the gray prison-camp walls and shrubs, other people with cameras now began to appear. An old, slop-bellied burgher. A young woman with a telescope-nosed Nikon.
“Please don’t,” David said into the long lens of an expensive Rolliflex. “Please, not here.”
“
Kuchemal da!
Alix Rothschild!” A middle-aged German man shouted and pointed at them.
“Das ist Rothschild?”
David and Alix heard from the rear.
They began to walk at a fast clip. Then they ran.
Across the promenade and into Dachau’s formal gardens. Down a path surrounded by more ceremonial plaques. More waving Memorial Day flags. Dachau’s only sign actually written in Hebrew:
HERE IS THE GRAVE OF THE THOUSANDS UNKNOWN.
HERE IS THE GRAVE OF ASHES.
Alix’s mother was there somewhere.
Nick had filmed powerful interviews there with young, bitter survivors.
Alix herself was choking back sobs and tears as she ran past the memorial signpost. Her nineteen-year-old mother. Always and forever nineteen years old. She couldn’t even stop to visit now … to say some prayer.
She and David streaked past THE PISTOL RANGE FOR EXECUTION.
THE EXECUTION RANGE WITH BLOOD DITCH.
“Strauss und Rothschild sind dauber!”
It was like trying to escape from the prison itself. It was as if there were guards and terrible dogs coming up from behind.
Finally, they arrived at the front gates.
The black door of a car was thrown open for them. A groan went up from the crowd.
Cameras flashed in unison. Alix suddenly thought she could remember the Dachau tower searchlights. So much horrible detail was flooding back. She was feeling the way she’d felt in New York City. Before Cherrywoods and David.
“Nehmen wir … bitte … nach Flughaven.”
David struggled with his German.
“Take us to Munich Airport, please.”
Suddenly, one of the taxi’s doors flew open again.
“David!”
Alix screamed.
“Get him out of here, please.”
The troll.
The terrible inhuman photographer was there with his ratty vinyl jacket, with his Nikon aimed for one last, dramatic shot.
“Nooo.” Alix was sobbing. “Nooo, David.”
David Strauss leaped out across the taxi’s backseat.
Before he knew what he was doing, he had the photographer crushed underneath his body on the parking-lot gravel.
David punched the German man in the chest. A hard, crunching blow. Somehow he avoided the temptation to keep hitting the troll. He got up and smashed the camera against a metal signpost. All the while, David Strauss was repeating a single word over and over.
“Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. Nazi.”
Shaking all over, David fell back into the taxi. Alix pressed into him and held on tight. The cab then bolted away from the terrible, confused scene at the pickup depot.
In the rush and confusion, neither David nor Alix seemed to notice a second Munich taxi.
The black car left the gates of Dachau just behind them. It, too, went straight to Munich Airport.
The Führer had just paid a visit to Dachau One also.
That same afternoon, a beautiful one during which the temperature reached a dramatic eighty-four degrees all over Germany, agent Harry Callaghan coolly waded through assorted
Herren
and
Fräulein
mobbing the
botikish
Sachenhausen district of Frankfurt am Main.
Harry was chomping on a greenish Dutch cigar.
The FBI agent was feeling pretty good as the rich tobacco and aromas of local German cooking mixed in his lungs. He was feeling a little like Gregory Peck, whom people occasionally said he looked like.
The Sachenhausen part of Frankfurt consisted of old restored buildings crowding narrow streets. Harry observed cafés, bakeries, dress shops, chic pieds-à-terre—all apparently built on a slant with the cobbled road.
No autos were permitted here. (No poor people seemed to be permitted anywhere in Frankfurt.) There were plenty of Coca-Cola culture Germans, soldiers, and well-to-do tourists, though. Eating lots of kuchen. Buying strudel and sausages. Selecting cuckoo clocks and women’s clothing.
As he wandered the pretty streets, Harry began to be reminded of Georgetown in Washington … His divorce six years ago from Betsy. His son Martin, now a senior at Pitt. God, how it all was flying by. A life. How very much he’d given up to be
a good investigator
. “One of our very best. I mean that,” the director had once said to Harry’s face, knowing the praise would drive the proud man more than any amount of criticism.
Callaghan forced himself to think only about the job. Only about David Strauss and Alix Rothschild.
Something about the way the two of them seemed to belong together made Harry suddenly smile on the crowded streets of Frankfurt.
There was something special about David Strauss and Alix Rothschild.
Something
. That was one reason they’d made front-page news right from the start. There was just
something
about David and Alix together, Harry was thinking as he walked.
A big, blond man—James Bacon Burns—was sitting at a small wrought-iron table in one of the buzzing outdoor cafés. The Schlag.
The agent was doing his best to look like an American tourist, Harry noticed, as he turned into the café. A very handsome sort of American tourist. One who might easily pick up an unattached
Fräulein
, or perhaps even a
Herren
.
Harry vaguely remembered Burns from an earlier encounter in New York. Burns still wore the same patent-leather shoes with cute little gold buckles. A light gray diplomat’s suit. One of those dumb blue dress shirts with the stark-white collars. J.B. Burns: also known as Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“J.B., you brought me here to show me how good you have it. Nice, cushy assignment in Europe.” Harry offered Burns a broad smile and friendly handshake.
“So. They finally have something on the Strauss thing.” Harry sat down, finger-combing back his own slightly thinning brown hair. “It’s about time. Wouldn’t you say it’s about time?”
J.B. Burns laughed a little too loudly. He then took a big dripping bite of blue-plum kuchen.