So many questions and feelings rushed into Alix’s mind that she didn’t know exactly where to begin.
“You look a little tired. But good,
habibi,”
Ben-Iban whispered to Alix. The old man began to smile like a harmless grandfather. He liked Alix Rothschild. He liked the young American woman a great deal.
“You will be glad to hear that everything is moving on schedule,” Ben-Iban went on with an expansive gesture. “Our brave people are safely in Moscow. There was a small airplane mishap as we tried to bring in some weapons … but Moscow is nearly ready for us now.”
As Ben-Iban spoke to her, Alix sat and quietly examined the old man’s face.
Survivor of Auschwitz. Nazi-hunter par excellence
. “Talmudic adventurer,” as Michael Ben-Iban preferred to call himself. A good man, Alix was certain. His face was a wonderfully aged, brown leather wallet. With eyes so clear, so alert.
They began to talk about the plan in Moscow. Details Alix had to know beforehand. They spoke about David Strauss. Whether it was entirely wise for Ben-Iban to meet with David now. Whether David could have any role in what was to come.
Then Alix asked the question that had been tearing at her insides since the spring. Did Ben-Iban have any idea what had happened to “Elena and Nicholas Strauss? How could that terrible thing have happened? How?
Ben-Iban groaned inwardly. The old man had been hoping to slip into this dangerous subject in his own time and manner.
He found that he didn’t want to lie to the young woman. He was certain that he was about to ruin everything.
“Alix. Aliza,” he finally whispered. “Elena was my dear friend. For more than thirty-five years she was my friend. …
The Reich,”
he stumbled. “Somehow …” He groaned again. This wasn’t working out. His usually quick mind was short-circuiting, showing blank spaces. He was tripping over his own words.
“The Reich must have learned that Elena was one of the great contributors to our group,” Ben-Iban finally managed. “The only thing that makes sense to me, Alix …”
Ben-Iban’s ability to lie wasn’t very good. His lying was in fact
terrible
, he was thinking. The murder of Elena and her grandson! Necessary. Yet so very painful.
Still
painful enough to bring on tears. The group itself had been dangerously split. Ben-Iban had voted
against
. Yet, he had gone along with the decision. Maybe it
was
better if Alix Rothschild
didn’t
know everything. Maybe that was the only way now.
“Alix.”
Ben-Iban’s eyes suddenly brightened. His eyes probed deeply into Alix’s.
“Nothing
can be allowed to stop what we are setting out to do,” Ben-Iban rasped. “Not the deaths of Elena or Nicholas Strauss. Not my death, or your death. You must try to understand that very clearly now.”
Alix shook her head. “I think I understand it. I’m prepared to make sacrifices if that’s what you mean.”
“In a few days, Alix, the most important statement since 1948 will be made.
“The secret truth about the wealthy Nazis who still go unpunished will finally be told. The truth about Russian Jews who suffer and die in slave-labor camps. The truth about Israel’s dangerous plight. The vicious and immoral Soviet and American arming of Syria, Iran, Egypt. To the point where they now have
more tanks and guns
than the United States it self!
Nothing
can be allowed to distract us from the importance of our message!”
Alix found that she was moved as much by Ben-Iban’s fervor, the inspired gleam in his eyes, as by what he had said. Alix was frightened, troubled, but she was also convinced they were doing the best thing. Her realization didn’t make the rest easy, but it made
it possible
at least.
Strange, unreal ideas. Everything so strange now. A whole new set of rules operating
.
“Alix, you must be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. To go to Moscow. To begin this final act.”
Suddenly Ben-Iban’s attention drifted to the front of the crowded Kleine-Garten.
A German policeman had stepped inside the front door. He was peering around the room of busy diners. The German police officer’s eyes seemed to pause at their table, then he continued his scan of the room. Finally he left.
Alix let out her breath. “For a moment, I thought …” Ben-Iban put his hand inside the baggy tweed jacket. Alix saw a large black handgun. A PK Walther. Her heart jumped again.
“Our enemies are everywhere. Especially among the German police,” Ben-Iban said. “Nothing can be allowed to stop us now. Promise me.”
Alix had thought she was immune to inspirational moments, to pep talks of any kind. She was wrong. She understood now.
“I promise you, Rabbi,” the American woman whispered. “I promise you, as I’ve promised my murdered mother and father, nothing will stop us!”
Ben-Iban looked to the front of the restaurant again.
This time he took out his gun.
The American and German policemen began to surround the small, ornate family, restaurant like bees around a fallen hive.
Kleine-Garten.
The name was destined to become famous in German newspaper annals.
The bizarre Kleine-Garten incident in Frankfurt!
Neighborhood people were peeking through frilly window curtains. Families were rushing in off nearby front porches.
Pedestrians began to race up the street to get far away from the shiny black riot shields, the pith helmets, the submachine guns.
“What is happening here?” An old burgher tugged at a policeman’s leather jacket sleeve. “Someone is going to be hurt here? No?”
David was feeling as disconnected from reality as he had at any single moment in his life.
At first, all he could do was watch.
A shiny swarm of black Opels noiselessly spilling down the peaceful, tree-lined West End cul-de-sac.
Right behind the Opels, a scary parade of white Frankfurt police cruisers. Bugs and Volkswagen station wagons with their sirens off, their dome lights rotating silently.
Broken toys
, David thought.
Inside the front sedan, Harry, David, Harris Tanana, and Raymond Cosgrove sat like a crack team of catatonics. Like the plastic dummies they use in automobile company test crashes.
Something truly awful was about to happen, David understood in every electrified bone and muscle of his body.
His heartbeat was so loud—cavernous church bells throbbing inside his chest—that he could hear it clearly as he stepped out of the police cruiser. Crunching pebbles underfoot seemed like small explosions. David’s aorta was pumping blood so fast and furiously that it threatened to blow precious vessels and arteries all over downtown Frankfurt.
Harry and his people were behaving like policemen now.
They were professional and very scary with their sawed-off shotguns, their drawn cowboy pistols, their crouched shooting poses.
Raymond Cosgrove and Harris Tanana ran into dark alleyways on either side of the vine-and-trellis-covered restaurant.
Kleine-Garten!
Harry Callaghan, meanwhile, was leading David right up to the front door.
“What’s going to happen?” David finally whispered.
Harry Callaghan pushed open the front door as any customer might. There was, a thick smell of wursts, vinegar, and sauerkraut. A heavy, sickening odor.
The freckled
Hausfrau
inside the doorway should have been a Hummel on some other
Hausfrau’s
shelf. She was posted in front of a dessert case full of
Nusse, Trüffel
, and
Sacher tortes
.
The blond woman looked like a doll in her ruffled. Blue-and-white outfit. She was smiling, and holding out large, colorful dinner menus, as if David and Harry Callaghan had come in to eat with their .38 Smith & Wessons drawn.
“Was passiert hier?”
The Fräulein finally got her nose out of her breasts and noticed the guns.
“Vhat is disAmerikaners?”
Startled diners stopped in the middle of tiny
Sulze
and
Ochsen-maul
salad bird-bites.
Forks and brimming soupspoons all around the restaurant paused under trembling lips.
David’s eyes ran wildly around the room searching for Alix.
“This is the police!” he heard at the same time.
Back near the exit sign, David finally saw a frightened-looking old man. The man was pointing a big, black pistol across the crowded dining room.
“Watch the rear door!” David heard.
“Fire!”
The bizarre
Police Gazette
illustration suddenly came to life.
The old man in back fired his gun. Someone else in the restaurant shot off a small cannon. The pretty front window shattered, the restaurant lettering slowly collapsing into the street.
David saw Alix.
“Get down!”
she screamed at him, a target herself.
The poor old people at the twenty or more dining tables began a slow-motion dance toward the spotless linoleum. Silverware clattered loudly.
Plates full of veal shank,
Rippchen, Leber Klose
fell and splattered.
“Polizei! Polizei!”
some of the disoriented patrons were shouting.
The little family restaurant was turned into an insane carnival shooting gallery.
Crouched behind the far end of the restaurant’s bar, David saw a German policeman fall, clutching his shoulder. Another shot kicked bric-a-brac off a side wall.
An old man was holding his face, one side stained with blood. A policeman yelled
“Scheiss!”
at the top of his lungs. Another crashed through a wide screen door and was wounded in the leg.
Hundreds of police and ambulance sirens could be heard approaching outside. David found that he was holding on to the rosewood bar as if it were a life buoy.
Standing up, he saw that the back door was open. Suddenly, he was following Harry Callaghan.
Outside the open door there was an alley full of wooden Henninger beer crates. There were greasy, banged-up garbage cans. And’ a cat, its shiny eyes catching and releasing light from the alley lamps.
“Oh son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” Harry was cursing for the first time that David could remember.
Not far from the door, a middle-aged German detective lay spread-eagled on the pavement, one of his knees bent upward, slowly tilting from side to side.
“She comes by here.” The wounded German man’s tongue was coated with blood. “Woman … I don’t know why … I hesitate.”
A little way farther down the alleyway, the agent who had followed David and Alix to their mountain lake retreat lay wounded also. Raymond Cosgrove had been shot twice. He was staring vacantly at the dark gray sky held between mottled, black-as-night building walls.
Oh goddamnit!
David Strauss chose one of the open alleyways and he simply began to run. David just goddamn ran. Sprinted. Screamed in his brain.
“David!”
He heard an echoing voice trailing behind him. Harry Callaghan was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Strauss! Stop! David!”
Then there was nothing except David’s own labored breathing going down the narrow passageways. The
splatsplat
of his loafers hitting the dark cement. A mind-splitting vision of Alix flying out ahead of him like a phantom he could never catch.
The alley he’d chosen got wider and wider. Old world houses with puny backyards began to show up on either side.
David raced by clotheslines sagging with underwear and work clothes. A yard full of apple trees. A chained-up police dog trying to chomp into his passing, pumping legs.
He was just going by some sort of shed or garage when a shadow fell. A dark shadow came hurtling down on top of him.
David yelled out, and fired the Smith & Wesson. A wild, poorly aimed shot at the flying, frightening bat shape.
A heavy body crashed into him.
David was thrown down hard onto his stomach and left shoulder. He tried with all of his strength to push the attacker away.
He was choking him with wire.
David shivered and gasped.
He could feel blood oozing where the wire was digging into his throat.
He managed to pull the .38 out and fired it. Straight back past his own face. The heavy body on top of him gave a shudder and went stiff. Then it slipped away from him.
David looked down at the twisted dying face of the old man from the German restaurant.
Calvaria broken
, he thought automatically. The old man’s skullcap had been shattered.
He’d killed one of them, David thought vacantly.
I’ve killed a man
.
When they found David, the German police immediately identified the man he’d shot in the alleyway. News bulletins would soon be going out all around the world.
The man was Michael Ben-Iban, the Jewish Nazi-hunter David had been trying to reach in Frankfurt.
The most technically efficient roadblocks, dragnets, and airport checks were set up to capture Alix Rothschild before she could get out of West Germany.
As of July 11, then July 12, then the unlucky 13, none of the very professional traps had succeeded.
Somehow, the actress had escaped.
The German police suggested that she must have had help. She had clearly been taken out of the country by professionals. The West Germans were especially sensitive to any suggestion that their apparatus for dealing with terrorists was anything less than the best in Europe.
Early on the morning of the thirteenth, a mystifying telex came to the Schlosshotel Kronberg.
It was read by Harry Callaghan and his people first.
Then David was given the note.
David read the message as he walked alone down the hotel’s long, pine-tree-lined front driveway. He then read the telex several times in the privacy of his hotel room.
David’s reaction was always the same.
Confusion. Depression
.
DAVID:
PLEASE. YOU’RE SAFE NOW. STAY OUT OF THE REST OF THIS. GO HOME TO NEW YORK. SOON YOU’LL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING. I BELIEVE YOU’LL UNDERSTAND.