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.
CHAPTER 45
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
CHAPTER 46
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.
“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.
&
nbsp; “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?”
CHAPTER 47
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.
CHAPTER 48
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.