Then Colonel Essmann was standing in a flat-footed crouch, confidently waiting for David to move on him again.
David desperately wanted to strangle the dark-haired commando, but he understood that his real job was to keep from getting killed. The absurd phrase Float like a butterfly ran through his head and seemed like moderately good advice.
Stay away from him.
Survive.
Somehow.
Surprising both of them, David hit the terrorist with a good right hand to the lower jaw. It was six-foot-one and 190 pounds behind a shot that David would have described as just about his best punch.
The Israeli shrugged off the solid blow. He maneuvered even lower in his crouch.
David hit him again.
A cracking hard left jab to the nose.
“Come,” Ben Essmann whispered with excitement in his voice. He smiled at David, and the American understood that they were playing a game he didn’t understand.
“You love Alix still?” Colonel Essmann asked. “I love Alix as well. Come, David.”
The Israeli threw a sharp right cross and David’s head snapped back hard. So—he was a boxer after all.
David could taste thick, warmish blood in his mouth. His legs were feeling wobbly and unreal.
He tried to remember every boyhood street-fighting trick he’d ever known. Survive. Somehow. Anyhow!
David hit the Soldier’s forehead with a tremendous right hand, and he immediately wished he hadn’t. It was like trying to punch out a steel door.
Nevertheless, the other man’s knees buckled. For the first time, Essmann’s face showed doubt, fear. He’d hurt this man, David understood.
David attempted a quick combination, and very suddenly the Soldier exploded into his stomach, head and shoulder first. He chopped David across his collarbone and the American went down hard.
David tried to focus on the wet concrete. Pebbles. Russian cigarette butts. He couldn’t hold focus, and he couldn’t get up.
Then David Strauss was being pulled roughly to his feet.
“Stronger than you look.” The military man from Tel Aviv was short of breath, at least. Ben Essmann stared at David and seemed to make a difficult decision.
“Elena Strauss’s grandson! You want to come with me? You wish to see Dachau Two for yourself?” the fiery Soldier challenged.
David nodded weakly.
“So come … David. Son of Saul, King of all Israel. Jewish boy from America. I can’t kill you, and I can’t leave you. Come and meet the Führer. He’ll make the decision.”
David Strauss went along with the Israeli. He didn’t have a choice. Just questions, questions, questions.
Who was the Führer?
CHAPTER 75
6:15 P.M. inside Olympic Village.
“Happy Hanukkah!” Marc Jacobson from Los Angeles—the Medic—called out in his clear California schoolboy’s voice.
More than eighty women looked up from steaming platters of eggs and biscuits, from large beakers of bubbly milk and juices, from an extraordinary amount of juicy prime beef.
What these women saw was not one, but eight, very frightening terrorists, who had somehow gotten into their private cafeteria.
The intruders wore brown policeman’s uniforms or blue Olympic Village maintenance coveralls. Some of them carried duffel bags or toolboxes. They had handguns or Uzi machine gun pistols pointed in every possible direction around the dining room.
Standing in the midst of the seven terrorists, Alix tried to quickly take in the rows of frozen, petrified faces lining the cafeteria tables. All in all, there were eighty-three women and teenage girls inside Yuri Gagarin Hall when the Dachau team attacked.
All members of the United States Olympic Team. The U.S. Women’s Team.
“To put it in terms the Americans and others will understand,” the Führer had said just before the attack, “it is a five-hundred-million-dollar kidnap package. We have taken the best of their young people. Just as they once took the best of ours.”
As they stood grouped at the center of the dining room, the Führer asked Alix to speak to the teary and anxious American women.
Suddenly beginning to shake all over, Alix stepped forward.
“I am Alix Rothschild.” As she spoke, Alix was thinking that she was obviously as frightened as the young athletes. She wondered what they must be thinking about her. She tried to imagine their confusion right then.
“Once upon a time, I, uh, I made a movie called Sara, Sara.” Somehow, Alix was managing to produce a soft pleasant speaking voice. She was thinking that she didn’t want these women and little girls to be so afraid. She didn’t want them to suffer any more than was necessary.
“We”—Alix gestured around to the other Dachau team members—“we are part of a Jewish army. We’re here partly because of terrible things that happened many years ago. Things that you’ve heard about, read about. And we’re here partly because of terrible things that are happening right now in the world. Things that you don’t realize are happening. None of this has to concern any of you right now, though. All you have to remember now is that you must obey any orders that are given to you.”
“I am also Jewish.”
A thin girl with red, frizzy hair—a twenty-two-year-old gym monkey from Houston—had broken the petrified silence inside the dining hall.
“And I think you’re all shit. All terrorists are shit! You, too, Miss Rothschild!”
Alix nodded in the direction of the wiry, red-haired girl. “I don’t completely agree with you,” she said simply. Already, Alix knew, she was winning over some in the group. Already some of the girls trusted her. The famous Rothschild smile was overtaking reality one final time.
Alix and the others now began to strip off their coveralls and police uniforms.
The Dachau team men wore conservative suits. The women had on loose white blouses and dark pants. The men now pinned on ritual Jewish skullcaps.
“We would like all of you to please get up slowly,” Alix spoke again. “Table by table. Please, please, don’t attempt to be heroic. If these machine guns are fired, people will die. Please be careful.
“We’re going upstairs to the bedrooms and suites on the third, fourth, and fifth floors only. This table first. You girls here.
“No one will be hurt, I promise you,” Alix said, and regretted it immediately.
Between 6:15 and 6:30, while diversions were going off all over Moscow, separate attacks were made on three other Olympic Village dormitory sections.
The West German Women’s Dorm was taken with relative ease.
At the Russian Men’s Dormitory, a gun battle claimed the lives of nine Red Army soldiers and two terrorists.
On two floors in the Pushkin Center—where Syrian and Egyptian athletes were being housed—the entire raiding team was killed by Moscow police and Red Army marksmen.
The mysteries of Dachau Two, of Alix Rothschild, of the Strauss family murders, were about to unfold, David understood as he was pushed past two terrorist guards and entered the hostage section of Olympic Village.
Astonishingly, the main subject was what it had been right from that first terrible night on Upper North Avenue in Westchester.
Nazis.
In 1980.
CHAPTER 76
The first of the demands was met with deceptive speed and a sense of cooperation.
A blue Soviet police van came weaving up to the hostage dormitory like a New York City cab in rush hour. There was a dramatic screech of tires as the van stopped.
Every newscaster in Moscow immediately began to speculate about the police van’s contents. Finally, the Russians announced that a sophisticated videotaping unit had been delivered to the hostage dorm.
They were going to make an important movie inside 110 Yuri Gagarin.
Once the equipment had arrived, the camera and lights were quickly set up. It was time for Alix to perform, to read a concentrated version of the demands for the huge TV audienc
e. Somehow, Alix had to make them all understand now.
“In your hearts,” Alix began as she’d rehearsed it so many times with Arthur Silver, “you must know that the Nazis didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1933. The Nazi ideas didn’t suddenly disappear in 1945.
“You must know that what is happening today was inevitable unless drastic reforms were made.”
Alix Rothschild spoke softly. She spoke humbly, sadly.
During the fourteen-minute speech she was often eloquent.
“Sometimes I’ve wondered if a number such as six million killed is too difficult to grasp, too abstract in a strange way. Think about the murder of just two human beings for a moment. My mother and father were murdered in Nazi death camps. They were good people, they never hurt anyone, and then they were murdered. Worse than murdered. They were tortured, they were disgraced, they were dehumanized.
“The men and women who did this, men who killed a hundred thousand human beings apiece, walk free today!
“Jews are suffering in concentration camps again. Right now. Right here inside Soviet Russia.
“Do you remember the first incredible stories of the death and torture camps in the 1940s? Do you remember how no one wanted to hear? I’m telling you now. All of you! There are concentration camps for Jews inside Russia today. This is not speculation. This is not television drama. This is the truth! Are you going to sit and do nothing about it a second time?
“I am personally afraid. I have nightmares that the next Holocaust will take place in Israel.
“I am desperately afraid that nuclear bombs will be dropped on the state of Israel. Three million more Jews will die in the fires.
“I am convinced this will happen unless drastic reform is undertaken now. I am certain of it. The bombings are inevitable as things stand right now.
“Please understand. Please listen and understand.
“As another human being, I ask this of you.”
For at least fifteen minutes, people all over the world listened and understood. Inside Russia, all over Europe, in the United States, down through South America. For once, the world listened.
CHAPTER 77
“Oh Jesus.” David shook his head and whispered hoarsely. “You bastard. You incredible, pathetic bastard.”
Some delicate balance mechanism inside his head was doing flip-flops, awful, 360 degree spins and loops. Blood raced to David’s face. Adrenaline swept through his body like a flash flood.
“You bastard.”
One of the final pieces of the puzzle had just dropped into place, severely jarring David’s psyche, warping what remained of his sense of reality.
“Sit?” David asked. “May I? Am I allowed?”
The Führer nodded. “Smoke? Coffee? I would like to say one thing only, David. We pleaded both with Elena and your brother. They chose to break our vows. They threatened everything we solemnly believe in.”
David accepted a cigarette. As he lit it, an elaborately detailed scene from the past was flooding over him like a loss of consciousness. In the scene, Harry Callaghan was stepping into a dark sedan. The ceiling light inside the car apparently didn’t work The agent Thomas Hallahan turned the car’s ignition over once. David was looking into a tilting, smiling face that was backlit by a reddish gin-mill sign.
Now the same face was looking into his eyes again.
Benjamin Rabinowitz, the American Nazi-hunter, the Führer, was sitting across from him in the U.S. Women’s Team Dormitory. The man most responsible for the deaths of his wife, his brother, his grandmother.
“I truly appreciated your concern for my life back in Wallkill,” Rabinowitz said. “You screamed out several times after the gunshot. Right then, I knew that you were a good man. Concerned about life and death. A true grandson of Elena. At the time, I needed to know how much you knew about our group. After that, I had to disappear from sight. I’m sorry for the scare, David. I’m sorry for a great many things.”
David had a jumble of questions about the Wallkill incident, but he slowly let them slip out of his mind. He simply stared into the old Nazi-hunter’s eyes.
“Tell me about Dachau Two,” David finally whispered. “What are you people going to do here? What is all this leading up to?”
Rabinowitz shook his head back and forth. “Not right now, Dr. Strauss. You’ll understand the whole thing soon enough. If you stay here with us.”
David caught a quick movement going on to his side. He looked toward the doorway of the Olympic Village suite and saw Alix.
She looked much the same as she had during the TV appearance. Alix looked very pretty, very serious.
“I’m sorry, David,” she said tentatively. “I’m just sorry.”
Benjamin Rabinowitz rose up from his chair.
“If David wants to leave here, Alix, we may let him go. Whatever he wants. Let him read through our demands. Answer any of his questions. I think Dr. David Strauss wants to leave, though.” Rabinowitz shook his head. “We’re a little too Jewish for him.”
David stared back at the old man. “Actually, you’re a little too Nazi for me.”
As soon as Rabinowitz had left the room, Alix began speaking very rapidly to David. At the same time, she tried to avoid looking into his eyes.
“I tried to tell you so many times when we were together, David. Ben-Iban had told me to tell no one … I’m sorry. …
“I want you to leave here, David,” Alix said. “Come with me. Right now. Ben Essmann only got you in here to let you die. He believes all good Jews ought to be ready to die today. He thinks this is Armageddon day.”
David pulled away from Alix.
He sat down and thrust his feet up on a chair. He stubbornly puffed his cigarette.
“You said in your little telegram to Frankfurt that I’d understand everything soon. So explain it all to me. I’d like you to make me understand all of this.”
Alix’s head dropped, and she sighed. Something had begun to go wrong. In the last few hours especially she’d begun to feel it. Something in the eyes of Rabinowitz.
“David, I can’t make you understand. I’m afraid of what they want to do here now. I’m afraid of Rabinowitz, Ben Essmann, the one called the Engineer. When I first became involved—one of the reasons I let myself get involved—no one was supposed to be hurt except for a few very deserving Nazis. That’s the truth. That’s what Dachau Two meant when Ben-Iban explained it to me. But David, I’ve been with Benjamin Rabinowitz all day today. He wants revenge! That’s all he seems interested in.”
Alix shook her head, and David thought that she looked bruised. The way she’d looked after they’d visited Dachau together. Alix looked terribly afraid now. Which was exactly the way David felt himself.
“I wanted to make people understand about the Nazis,” Alix said. “I wanted to avenge the murders of my mother and father. I wanted to stop the nightmares of thirty years. I don’t want to hurt innocent people.”
CHAPTER 78
1:00 P.M. Washington D.C.
“Yes, I’ve read the demands. … Yes … absolutely … I’ve read them over and over, in fact. Personally, Mr. Premier, I don’t see how we can do anything meaningful in the time allotted. Or even if we were given more time, to be frank. What are the others saying?”
“Oh, the same as yourself,” the premier of the Soviet Union said to the American president. Previous to this moment, their private telephone connection had been used by John Kennedy calling about Cuba; by Lyndon Johnson attempting to unravel the puzzle of Vietnam; by Nixon announcing that Mr. Kissinger thought he ought to make a visit to Peking.
“Do you have any idea what you plan to do, Mr. Premier?” The current American president, though often simplistic and parochial, was known as a sincere and honest man at least. His concern for the Olympic athletes was real, personal, somewhat touching.
“Yes, we have lots of ideas, Mr. President. All of them bad, I’m afraid. We are in a terrible bind, as you might well understand!”
/> “If there is anything any of our people can do … I’ll pray for you, and for all of our athletes,” said the president of the United States of America.
He hung up the telephone then. He swung around to look out over the Harry Truman porch, over the lonely White House lawns.
What would I do if the terrible decision were mine instead of the Russian premier’s, the president considered briefly.
The answer was painfully obvious, and the gray-haired American man shook his head sadly.
He knew that an attack would have to be ordered on the athletes’ dormitories.
CHAPTER 79
For an instant, Alix saw the David Strauss and a whole world she’d known in some other place, some other time. Familiarity and tenderness, regret, fear, all lumped together in her chest—at least something substantial and powerful was raging there. She’d realized that she did love David—probably, that she’d always loved him.
Only now it was too late. Now it didn’t even matter.
Still, Alix felt that David deserved to know a little of what had happened. …
What she didn’t know was that she had far more to learn than David did.
“Your grandparents, I suppose your father and mother, too,” Alix said, speaking in an embarrassed whisper, groping for the exact words, “had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the watchdog defense group. Much more money than you were ever told about. This went way back into the forties and fifties. The group was called DIN in the beginning, Dahm Y’Israel Noheam! ‘The blood of Israel will take vengeance!’
“DIN was eventually called the ‘Council of Leaders,’ or simply ‘The Council,’” Alix went on. “In the 1940s, some of the more radical members had plotted to poison more than a million Germans as retribution for the Holocaust. There was a brief financial sponsorship of ‘The Wrath of God,’ which Ben Essmann supervised. Chaim Weizmann and Moishe Dayan were supposedly members at one time. Several rich, well-intentioned Jewish-American families contributed heavily.”
“Like the Strausses,” David said.