“Yeah, mmmm, they have something, Harry.” The agent licked the tips of his long fingers.
“Wait until you hear what it is they have. On a scale of ten—an eleven. Possibly a twelve.”
A café waiter appeared at their table, a red cloth draped over his arm. Harry ordered Calvados and a big piece of apple-and-raisin kuchen.
“Big, big piece,” he made a moon-and-stars motion with his hands. “If the pieces are small, bring two of them.”
As soon as the waiter walked away, J.B. Burns produced a packet of black-and-white photographs. Burns’s family home photos, they looked like. With a yellow Kodak mailer-envelope.
“Take a look at this beauty. A definite photo-contest winner.”
The first dog-eared picture was of a society-type woman. Brunette. Thirty-eight or so. It appeared to have been taken at some sort of ball or ritzy dinner dance.
“All right, I give up. Who is she?”
“Believe it or not, she’s one of the Storm Troop operators. Rachel Davidson. Code name Housewife. She’s a New York City lawyer.”
Burns’s tanned, manicured hand dealt out another photograph.
Harry was beginning to feel a little bit like Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. What was he supposed to do now? Find the missing oil painting of the sister of the brunette Rachel Davidson?
The second photograph showed the same woman.
This time she was standing beside an older man whom Callaghan recognized immediately. In fact, seeing this particular man in the photograph sent Harry Callaghan’s mind reeling. His presence was almost as disconcerting as that of the third person in the photograph: Mrs. Elena Strauss.
“This one was taken at Cherrywoods Mountain House. That’s Mrs. Elena Strauss. And you’ll probably recognize General Yagaal Ben-Zurev.”
“Oh shit!” Callaghan set the photo down.
“You bet, ‘oh shit.’ Mrs. Davidson, the Housewife, is Ben-Zurev’s niece.”
Stroking his Dutch cigar, Harry stared down at the photo.
Cherrywoods. Grandmother Strauss. Rachel Davidson. The Israeli general, Ben-Zurev
.
Callaghan’s mind was already working on a few dicey little scenarios involving the mysterious Storm Troop.
Blue smoke signals rose from the table as the German waiter, Calvados, and kuchen arrived.
“Anything else, J.B.?”
“Besides being a respected and successful lawyer, Rachel Davidson is an Orthodox Jew. She was very close to General Ben-Zurev. He was found dead in Washington late this spring.”
“Yes? I’m liking this story less and less as it gathers steam.”
“We’re getting reports that Ben-Zurev was helping to control the Storm Troop from Israel. His code name was Warrior. There was some kind of rift among their top leadership. The group had a vow of secrecy that they took very seriously. Ben-Zurev was killed. The Arabs have known about it for about a month. The pricks sat on it.
“We think Mossad leaked the information to Washington. Whatever the hell Dachau Two is, they don’t want it to come off. Very, very bad stuff. Everybody is very, very edgy, Harry.”
“Is this the Agency’s up-to-the-moment evaluation?”
Burns smiled. He pursed his lips.
“Those cagey bastards haven’t made an evaluation yet. Like to hear mine? It’s all in this little folder.”
Harry Callaghan crushed out his cigar into his kuchen. “The Storm Troop is a very elaborately conceived, very dangerous
Jewish
terrorist group,” Harry said.
“Or Israeli,” Burns added. “An Israeli Black September that has its roots way, way back. Maybe as far back as the forties. There was a commando group back then known as DIN. DIN attempted to poison a million Germans as
partial
retribution for the Holocaust.”
“And this group carries on, they masquerade as neo-Nazis.”
“Because
everybody
goes haywire when they hear about Nazis. Because
nobody
can evaluate Nazi data properly. There has to be loads more to it. That’s a start I can live with, though.”
“The terrorists are going to avenge the six million?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing something on that order.”
Harry stared from a third-floor window at an office building across the cobblestone street. The late-afternoon sun was making stars and lilac-blue rings around a flagpole.
“Harry,” J.B. Burns said, “doesn’t one thing strike you as a little odd? That Dr. David Strauss has somehow escaped two shooting attempts now?”
Callaghan looked back from across the street.
“I guess it does. A lot of things strike me as odd right now. Listen, I have a few things I’d like you to check for me. In a big, big hurry. Can you do me a few favors, J.B.?”
“For sure,” the blond man smiled. “Hey, why do you think I wore my roller skates today?”
“I was wondering about that.” Harry Callaghan shook his head and laughed. “Guccis, too, I noticed.”
James Burns’s office was a modishly furnished two-room walk-up in the West End business district of Frankfurt. The entire office consisted of Burns and a nineteen-year-old German girl named Sigi. It was he and Sigi against the world, James Burns liked to say whenever he was feeling put upon by Washington—which was often.
Like now.
Like the way they’d suddenly dumped all this terrorist crap in his lap and then fled for the hills.
As he climbed to the third floor of the prewar building, Burns heard loud music coming from above.
Goddamn Sigi was a Beethoven nut.
Once he got inside the office, though, he saw that the longhaired blond girl (James Burns liked to call Sigi his “very own California surfer in the Fozzerland”) wasn’t anywhere around.
A “While You Were Out” note was pinned to the telephone. A single word—“wife.”
Mildly annoyed, the American man carefully folded his suit jacket. He dialed his home phone number and then lit up a cigar.
While he waited for someone to answer, he stared at Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Humphrey Bogart on the office walls. Goddamn Sigi was also an American movie nut.
“Who dis?” Burns heard.
“Vee-gates, it’s the midget!” James Burns laughed into the telephone. “Is your mother home, midget?”
“Who dis?”
As he spoke on the phone, Burns also began to write out the things he had to do for Harry Callaghan before his workday was over.
“Dis ist Herr Burns, midget. The good-looking fellow mitt the blond hair.
Daddy
.”
Patricia Burns giggled. “Daddy? You’re silly.”
James Burns didn’t speak back to his little daughter. The door to the second room of the office had suddenly swung open.
Burns was looking at Sigi, neatly tied to a leather wing chair.
A man with a small Luger stepped into the doorway. James Burns understood why Beethoven’s Ninth was playing so loudly.
“Wait a minute,” James Burns said to the intruder, pulling out his own Smith & Wesson.
The Luger fired three shots into the blond agent’s chest.
Shaking his head over the unfortunate shooting, the Weapons Expert quickly went through J.B. Burns’s papers.
He tucked two manila folders into his own briefcase. The folders contained the preliminary intelligence findings on the Storm Troop. They contained a Mossad report on the probable identity of the secret group’s leader. Just as the group’s secret Washington contact had informed them it would.
The only problem was that the Weapons Expert had come for the folders an hour too late.
The Weapons Expert left the West End walk-up with the Telefunken stereo blaring Beethoven at 9++.
“Who dis? Who dis?” the voice from the telephone receiver continued to ask.
HERE IS THE GRAVE OF THE THOUSANDS UNKNOWN. …
HERE IS THE GRAVE OF ASHES. …
Alix’s mother was there somewhere.
Nina Rothman.
Alix was choking back hard sobs and tears as she ran past the memorial signposts.
Her nineteen-year-old mother. Kneeling before the gaping ditch with sixty-six others. Unthinkable mass murder. … Alix couldn’t even stop to visit now. She couldn’t even say a brief prayer.
She and David ran past THE PISTOL RANGE FOR EXECUTION.
THE EXECUTION RANGE WITH BLOOD DITCH.
Alix stopped running.
Oh my God! This was where! This was the place where it had happened! Suddenly Alix remembered so very much of it!
Then she was awake. She was inside an unfamiliar room. Where was she?
Alix screamed out in the darkness.
“I’m here, Alix. I’m right here with you. I’m here.”
Her eyes blinked open wider. At first she could not focus on anything.
Then the fuzzy black shadow of a man sitting beside her in bed.
David.
The Schlosshotel.
David reached for her and held her tightly.
He had never seen a nightmare like this before. The excruciating, unbelievable terror and anguish. The screaming, the cries, the thrashing—as if people had been trying to grab hold of Alix in her dreams.
David was terribly afraid for her. He understood now that there were real Nazi demons in her head. He pressed his body closer to hers. Very warm breasts and stomach. Heaving chest. He kissed Alix as gently as he could.
“I saw my mother’s murder,” she whispered. “I witnessed it. I was there.
“I remembered
everything
just now. A thousand small details I’d partly forgotten.
“I’ve had the dream before, David. I always wake up crying, but I could never remember everything about the dream.
Tonight I remembered
.”
“I’m here,” David whispered, as Alix’s voice rose higher.
“My mother is killed with other Jewish prisoners, David. All young women.
“They fall over into a three-foot-deep ditch. Like the Blood Ditch that we saw today.”
David wanted to soothe her somehow. To do something to stop the pain. But he could think of nothing to say. Everything he thought of would sound trivial by comparison.
Alix began to hug him. She clutched his arm until it hurt.
Shadows of the moon through an old oak tree were playing on the bedspread. Moonbeams making a hanging man. A fast polka among stick figures.
“My aunt had photographs. Sepia photographs of my mother.
“My mother had long dark hair. She let it fall, flow down onto her shoulders. She always wore either a colorful ribbon or a kind of ivory barrette. To set her hair off.
“The barrette always made me sad. I could imagine something of what my mother was like because of the barrette. I knew she liked to be pretty for other people. How sad to think of.”
David’s mouth was quivering, his teeth hitting together. He had never felt so tender toward Alix, so afraid for her. He had never understood the camp experience until now. Not even that afternoon at Dachau—where he thought he’d reached a new level of knowing.
“They cut all her hair off before they could kill her, David.
“I always believed that no one would have been able to kill my mother with her long hair and the barrette.
“That was always my thought as a little girl. I would daydream about that when we were in school back in Scarsdale. Whenever the teachers made us lay our heads down.
“She weighed less than seventy pounds when they killed her. How could anyone do that, David?” Alix began to sob uncontrollably. She was crying just like a little girl, David saw. “How could they kill my mother like that, David?”
David couldn’t hear Alix. He felt tears coming. Rage building. He had finally
begun
to understand the insidious damage that had been done to Alix Rothschild.
As he lay there holding her, David thought that the nightmares
were
Alix—the
dreams
were who Alix really was. The actress that the world knew was a front, a counterfeit. The
actress Alix Rothschild
was a Hollywood fantasy.
David was holding the real Alix, and holding her made him very afraid
The morning of July 9 Alix and David packed a haversack with cheeses, wine from Sachenhausen, the fussy local
Schweinemetzeger’s
best wursts, pork sausage,
Kalbs
medallion. After too many days chronicling and experiencing Nazi atrocities, they’d promised each other a day off.
They began their
Wanderjahr
around ten-thirty, heading up into the cool Hansel-and-Gretel forests directly behind the Schlosshotel.
Don’t think about Nazis, they kept reminding each other. You’re allowed one day without the camps, without war criminals, without blitzkriegs.
They walked into the foothills, where there was nothing but tall cedar trees and the most beautiful blue spruce and poplar saplings. Under their footsteps, rusty-looking fir needles and duff made up a smooth carpet for the entire forest. It was as if they had stepped into one of the Gobelin tapestries that hung on the walls of the Schlosshotel.
Beyond a steep, pretty brush slope, David discovered a silver-blue stream. The stream curled up the mountain like a tricky icicle, and they followed it.
Several kilometers deeper into the woods, the stream’s source appeared quite magically at the top of a steep hill.
It was a small, sparkling pond, closed in by tightly packed cedars. With the clean smell of fresh mint everywhere.
Jagged forest reflections from either shore stretched to meet at the center of the gorgeous water mirror. A single gray-and-brown mallard sat on the shadow-fault like a fat little emperor of the lake.
David and Alix stopped walking, threw down their back-packs, and cheered and bowed for the duck.
On the near shore, a great-grandfather oak had fallen halfway out into the pond. It lay stretched out over the water for seventy feet or more. Long limbs and leafless boughs holding strong-armed Volga boatmen.
Alix pointed toward the fallen tree.
“All this beautifulness, Donald Duck, plus a perfect diving board. Our luck must be changing a little, Herr Hansel.
Maybe
a little?”
For just a few hours it was going to be 1959 again and they were both younger. It was like the feeling children get skipping dreary school classes for a day. They sat on sloping granite boulders and began to take off their clothes. Unlacing hiking boots, tugging at wide leather belts, kicking off trousers and woolen socks. David set his .38 on top of their pile of clothes.