“Please, listen.” Alix turned back to Arnold Manning. On her face was a small child’s hurt look. Crestfallen green eyes. The slightest thin-lipped moue.
“I promise to do the three pictures for you. I promise. I owe you, Arnold. I also kind of love you, dear, sweet, dark, confusing, I forget the rest, man.”
Arnold Manning looked hurt now. The slightest fat-lipped moue. “You forget
sexy as hell
.”
For the first time in the morning, Alix smiled.
“Arnold, I need a little time to be by myself … This terrible Nazi scare, I … basically, I have to get away from being such a big deal to everyone I’m around. I need to think. I need to be a plain nobody for a while. No admirers. No catty detractors.”
Alix Rothschild smiled again. “And I’m aware, Mr. Manning, that at the rate I’m going, I could be a
nobody
for a long, long time to come.”
Arnold Manning began to laugh as if he were being tickled by chimps with pink feathers. The peculiar laugh grew until the stout, bald man let out a howl.
“So go away, Alix. I agree you have to relax. I agree you need some time by yourself. Everybody does. … I understand what this horrible neo-Nazi business must mean to you.”
Manning had waited just long enough. Now he was giving Alix back her own ideas, almost her own words. They both knew what he was doing, but that was fine. That was the secret of the relationship between Alix Rothschild and Arnold Manning.
“Where are you thinking of going, Al?” Mark Halperin was still nibbling his sunglasses. “Just in case your agent needs to get in touch.”
“That’s my Mark-up!” Alix put on a smile.
She was trying to be like her old self again.
Leave them laughing
, Alix had long ago learned on agency casting calls.
“I was thinking of going upstate for a while. In a week or so. I have an old friend up there … who knows how to treat me like I’m nobody. He still calls me Alix Rothman.”
Alix stood up, and the whole room of suits and sunglasses rose with her.
“I’ll be going to a place called Cherrywoods Mountain House. But I won’t be accepting any phone calls.”
On Sunday afternoon, David Strauss sat on a bench out along one of Cherrywoods’ prettiest nature trails. Beside him was the FBI agent, Harry Callaghan.
“I’m sorry about the other day. Our running debut,” Callaghan said. “I was trying to help—at least to let you know that I was available. I got mad when you shut me off.”
“I’m sorry about what happened, too,” David nodded. “You were right. What you were trying to tell me. I was being a shithead. … It’s just that I have this unbelievable hate building up inside me. No outlet for it. It’s hard to communicate exactly.”
“Not so hard. I can imagine at least some of what you must feel. I
would
like to help, though. That’s what I’m here for. My job. My vocation, you might say.”
From their spot on the woodlands trail, David and Callaghan had a perfect view west across the Roundout Valley to the Rip Van Winkle mountains.
“Hundreds of millions of years ago,” David said, “all the land around here was covered by a great inland lake. My grandfather used to tell me that every time the two of us came up here.” David Strauss smiled. “I guess I’m
still
off in my own world a little. Lots of family stuff floating around in my head.”
“Yeah. Well, when you come back down to earth, don’t forget what I’ve been trying to tell you. Please don’t get me confused with any of the Washington bureaucrat images that you probably have. Which I have, for God’s sake.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Really, I’m going to be fine,” David promised.
David couldn’t get the idea that
Heather was de$$$[MS PAGE NO 71]$$$
out of his mind.
That she was gone from his life
.
Forever and always
.
Never to be heard or seen by him again
.
Distractions helped, David had to admit. The m$$$[MS PAGE NO 71]$$$e peculiar the distraction, the better.
When he’d been an undergraduate at Princeton, David had begun a curious diary/journal that he called his Crapbook.
The Crapbook now contained such treasures as a visitor’s pass into Olympic Village in Munich; a college letter for sculling; one of his favorite first lines from a book—“Like most men, I tell a hundred lies a day.” All sorts of junk that antique people call “collectibles.”
To the more whimsical first half of the book, David now added an obsessive collection of clippings on the North Avenue Nazi attack. He pasted in news stories on other suspected Storm Troop activity: a synagogue bombing on Long Island; the grisly murder of an influential rabbi doctor in Chicago. He put in condolences on Elena’s and Nick’s murder from important Jewish leaders all over the world. And selected Naziana from his ever-expanding library.
While the scrapbook helped David maintain some balance of sanity, what seemed to help more were the medical clinics he offered every weekday afternoon.
A general practitioner for the first time in his career, David suddenly found himself treating asthma, roseola, croup, enlarged prostate, insomnia, and peptic ulcers.
Most important, while he was treating one of the hotel staff, David felt useful again. Inside his office at the hotel, Dr. David Strauss could just about feel alive.
Late one afternoon while he was treating a gardener’s child for a raging case of poison ivy, the head of the FBI team dropped by at his office.
Callaghan sat on the edge of David’s examining table. He ran his finger across the bottom of young Neal Becton’s foot.
The boy started to giggle. Callaghan grinned, too, and it was the first time David had seen any sign of humor coming from the FBI agent.
“We’ve just gotten a strange report.” Callaghan tamped down on his pipe, then lit it. “The report says that Bormann may have recently entered the United States through Miami. Did your family ever have any contact with that bastard, David? In the concentration camps in Germany? Even the most remote contact?”
As he dabbed Albolene cream onto Neal Becton’s inflamed legs, David began to feel slightly whimsical, a bit light-headed. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced since the Westchester attack.
“Reichsführer Martin Bormann? Short, squat man? Yeah. Sure we knew him. He used to come to breakfast at our house when I was just a boy. My Grandmother Elena would serve Nova and bagels, and he’d get all sorts of pissed off.”
Just the far corner of Harry Callaghan’s mouth broke. Half a smile showed.
“The other thing,” Callaghan went on without giving David the satisfaction of a real laugh. “One of the few American Nazi-hunters has been in contact with us. Benjamin Rabinowitz? A friend of your grandmother’s.”
David nodded. He’d heard quite a bit about Rabinowitz. For years, Elena had been a contributor to Rabinowitz’s efforts, in fact. She’d contributed to Rabinowitz in America and to Michael Ben-Iban’s Centre for Jewish Studies in Europe, David knew.
“Rabinowitz has some interesting theories I’d like you to react to. The only slight catch …” Callaghan began to relight his pipe, “is we’d have to leave the hotel for a few hours tomorrow. Rabinowitz doesn’t want to be seen with you. He actually seemed somewhat paranoid. Frightened.”
David felt a chill shoot up his spine. He had an ominous feeling that maybe something was going to happen now. Maybe the Nazi-hunter would have some new and important information.
Something
revealing about the Nazi Storm Troop.
“I’d like to meet Mr. Rabinowitz very much,” he said. “Tomorrow is fine with me. I’d be glad to meet him anywhere.”
David Strauss didn’t realize it as he stood in his doctor’s office that afternoon, but his personal hunt for the neo-Nazis had just begun.
The Sans Souci Restaurant, Washington, D.C.
The Führer and the Warrior were eating rare steaks and sipping red wine, enjoying as amiable and lighthearted a supper as was evident anywhere in the clubby, chatty Washington, D.C., dining room.
“A pleasure, as it always is here.” The Warrior sipped his burgundy, letting the fine red roll on his tongue. He then wiped his crinkly, puffed mouth.
The Führer smiled in agreement. “A very decent steak. Even at approximately twenty-five dollars a pound.”
Their attentive waiter, Randolph, came with two snifters of Courvoisier.
“I believe it is time now,” the Warrior said. “You have wined me and dined me most graciously. Now we must talk.”
For the next fifteen minutes, the Führer was alternately a graceful diplomat, a moralist, a harsh military strategist.
The complete plan for the operation known as Dachau Two was revealed to the Warrior.
The plot was mercilessly torn to shreds and then rebuilt from the remnants. Truly terrifying and unassailable this time.
Black coffee was ordered by the Warrior. The face and broad neck of the white-maned man had grown bright scarlet red over the intense quarter of an hour.
“Finally,” the Führer said in a nerveless monotone that was chilling, “my group will strike. The effect will be like nothing ever seen. An extraordinary blitzkrieg, even in this age.”
The Warrior answered slowly, with grave consideration showing in every line of his face.
“If it was anyone other than you who asked this of me—I would say
no, no, no
. The risks of your plan are almost unconscionable. Because it is
you
who ask, however, I must give my tentative approval.”
The Führer started to speak, but the Warrior slowly raised his hand.
“Not
approval to proceed, my friend, approval to seek further guidance from the other Council members. You now have one negative vote. My vote is
no.”
The Führer’s head remained bowed for several seconds. Words finally came with obvious difficulty and great emotion.
“I have to tell you a most difficult thing now. You see, I have already approached the other members of the Council. I have all five votes. Yours is the only negative vote.”
The Warrior nodded. “I must fight you then,” he said. “I will use all of my resources.”
Outside the Washington, D.C., restaurant, the Warrior and the Führer got into separate black limousines, one with bulletproof windows, the other with DPL license plate.
As one of the limousines crossed Victory Bridge, the black car sparked suddenly, like a match being lit in a stiff wind.
There was a bright red-and-yellow flame at the center or the famous bridge. Then dark metal fell on the Potomac like huge raindrops.
Back at the Shoreham Hotel, the Führer made a single-sentence phone call.
“Begin Dachau Two.”
Rusted, off-white farms—evidence that upstate New York is really part of the Midwest—lined either side of Route 32 South going toward Wallkill.
Stone-pocked mailboxes were designed for Browns, Grays, Halls, and the
Kingston Freeman
. An ocean of tea-green and silver leaves filtered the low late-May sky. Hay fever grew high along the roadside. Spring sang “Come Build a Maypole under My Apple Tree.”
An agent named Hallahan suggested to David that traveling under armed bodyguard was like “being a little bait fish, with some other bait fish trying to protect you from mako sharks.”
“That must be comforting as hell for David to hear now,” Harry Callaghan said. “Not inaccurate, though,” he added, puffing on his pipe.
“It does have an eerie quality to it,” David offered from the backseat of the government Lincoln. “It feels like, oh, when you leave a movie matinee and walk out into bright sunshine. Or like the first time you go outside after a shitty flu.”
David was extremely aware of the smallest details on the trip. The different bird sounds along Route 32: some melodic, others shrill and electric. The muted colors of the landscape. Shadow shapes. Fresh earth smells coming in his open window.
It was ridiculous, he was sure, but his heartbeat was a steady
thump thump
for the entire forty-minute trip to meet the Nazi-hunter Rabinowitz.
Small apple farms shot by on either side of the road. Then the Wallkill Correctional Facility—a slate-gray building in the center of a raving-yellow cornfield.
Then came the unincorporated village of Wallkill, New York.
Pimply teenage boys and girls stood around Main Street in Wallkill Central jackets and engineering boots.
The Lincoln cruised past Fescoe’s Feed & Grain. Frank’s Beauty Salon for Women. Western Auto. State Farm.
Nazi-hunters
, David thought in a daydream.
Dachau Two. Total insanity
.
Halfway down the main drag, the Lincoln slipped into a diagonal space in front of Robt. Hatfield’s Wallkill Inn. “Good food and grog,” the wooden sign read. “My beer is Rheingold.”
A strange thought occurred to David—at least something hit him the wrong way as he got out of the car in the haggard, peculiar farm town.
Inside this little bar was America’s
premier Nazi-hunter
.
This much was documented everywhere.
Through the late 1960s and ’70s, the man most responsible for bringing Nazi war criminals living in America to justice wasn’t a sharp U.S. federal attorney or FBI department head. The man was a shy, skinny U.S. postal worker named Benjamin Paul Rabinowitz, a survivor of Auschwitz
Konzentrationslager
.
Working nights and weekends out of his Secaucus, New Jersey, studio apartment, it was Rabinowitz who had uncovered the fact that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had actually been protecting former Nazis for more than twenty-five years. The State Department had refused to turn Nazi mass murderers over to the Justice Department for prosecution. That high-ranking congressmen, the CIA, and maybe even a U.S. president had used special influence to get important Nazi files transferred around The System so fast and so frequently that they never seemed to be in one place, and thus were effectively closed to public scrutiny.