See How They Run

  Benjamin Rabinowitz folded his thin arms and moaned softly.

  “There is no time not to understand. If only I had made her see the terrible danger we know is there, Michael. The fault is mine. Oh, Moshe, no one but Jews will protect other Jews from our enemies. You know that.”

  Michael Ben-Iban nodded sadly. He knew. He knew it all too well.

  Ben-Iban also knew that the enemy was truly capable of anything now. Even a second Holocaust. Even a terrible bombing right there in Israel. For the first time in thirty-five years, Ben-Iban thought, the Jewish nation could be without an adequate defense. A defense manned by Jews who understood the grave, ever-present danger.

  As the two ancient survivors finished their drinks that sad afternoon, the Arab Imam was still wailing, still praying from his distant minaret.

  The priest’s prayer was that God would come and give him back his golden city.

  His prayer was that God would come down and kill all the Jews.

  One hundred seventy-four days later, it suddenly began to happen.

  On four continents across the civilized world.

  A heart-sinking plot that would be called Dachau Zwei.

  Dachau Two.

  Book I

  Dr. David Strauss

  Part 1

  CHAPTER 1

  Scarsdale, New York.

  April 24, 1980.

  One day before the beginning.

  Along the dark, gray country roads there were Tudor and Norman mansions with eight-foot-high hedges and pollarded trees. There was a striking chimney-red tennis court with high white referee chairs—where a rich adulteress named Norma Lynch had been shot to death in 1943.

  There were rigidly rectangular cream and lime-green tile swimming pools and trendy bumper stickers: Honk if you believe in tennis; and Post roads, James Fenimore Cooper streets, Leatherstocking lanes. …

  These things, in fact, were the rule of thumbing one’s nose in that part of Westchester County where Dr. David Strauss and Alix Rothman had grown up.

  Where the American part of the story has its beginnings.

  Where the nightmares begin.

  The April day that made the village infamous had a scratchy, nervous quality about it.

  It left an uncomfortable feeling in Vulkan’s mouth, like sweater fuzzballs under his tongue.

  Coughing into a crisp white handkerchief, Vulkan watched the others fan away from the wonderfully kept children’s playground.

  The Hausfrau (Housewife), a pretty, petite woman—also a fearsome, dedicated warrior—walked away alongside a picturesque fieldstone wall and weeping willow trees on Horse Guard Lane.

  The Soldat (Soldier) was forcing his great hulking body into a sleek MG Stag parked on Upper North Avenue.

  The Waffen-Fachmann (Weapons Expert) sat at a bus stop, a paperback, The Boat, pressed up to his face. He had on a beige raincoat, snap-brim hat, Weejuns … very American looking.

  The beadlelike Ingenieur (Engineer) had simply vanished—poof—blended into the residential backdrop like yet another Country Squire station wagon.

  Last, the Führer was marching off to a chauffeured limousine, which was relatively inconspicuous on the money-lined streets.

  The idea of their taking on World War II code names, meeting on this small-town American street in 1980, was preposterous and dangerous, Vulkan was thinking.

  Still, the final meeting had to be someplace, didn’t it?

  The final decisions had to be made before the Final Solution could begin.

  Vulkan took out a beautiful pocket watch, cradling it in the Palm of his hand. The man’s face was dimly reflected in the silver lid of the watch. His felt hat, tipped at a raffish angle, was reflected as well.

  It was all neatly superimposed over a grand, elegant inscription: Dachau Konzentrationslager. Sturmbannführer Mann. 1932—

  Agile, piano-player fingers now pried open the watch cover.

  Inside was a delicately balanced, silver and ruby-red swastika.

  The four crooked arms were pointed and feathered like an Eagle trout-fishing hook.

  Over the swastika itself, tiny black hands were ticking off the seconds, days, years.

  It was now time to begin.

  Again.

  The people who live in Scarsdale, especially the buck skinned, shaggy-haired boys and girls who attend the ivy-covered high school, often complain that nothing meaningful or exciting ever happens in the quiet, wealthy suburban town.

  The following night something terrible happened.

  Murder was committed in Scarsdale,

  The Nazis came to America.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City, April 25.

  The teenager lying center stage, Trendelenburg position on the hospital delivery table, was Katherine Hope O’Neill. Katherine was an anachronistic Irish-Catholic girl from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. She had a Kelly-green bow in her shiny black hair to prove it.

  The underwhelming color in the Mount Sinai Hospital delivery room was green also. A slightly turquoise, sloshy, seasick green.

  The hospital setup table was covered with sterile green gowns, green drapes, furzy green sponges. A wrinkled sheet was laid underneath the delivery table like a big green mistake. “The evaporating, dying Cookie Monster,” Dr. David Strauss had called it:

  At 2:45 A.M., with a cup of lukewarm New York regular and a stale Danish sloughing back and forth in his stomach, all that thirty-seven-year-old Dr. David Strauss could manage for the teenager was, “Well, Kath, I guess in about a week or so you’re going to have a baby.”

  “Booo.” The head nurse, Mary Cannel, managed a half smile.

  “Hey, what do you guys expect at quarter to three in the morning? Robert Klein? Steve Martin, maybe?”

  Katherine O’Neill’s cervix was fully dilated now and she was pushing hard to expel her baby.

  “Push! Push! Push!” one of the nurses was chanting like a medieval midwife.

  Just a little girl, David Strauss was thinking as he stood over the delivery-room scrub basin. Little teen-angel. Soft white Madonna’s face framed in lovely rings of black hair. Knocked up on the swinging East Side. Shit. What a waste.

  According to her chart, Katherine O’Neill was seventeen. Unmarried. Uninsured. And much too young to have babies, David Strauss would have added. Too tiny and narrow at the hips.

  Which was probably why the fetal monitor read 101—about nineteen counts slower than it should have been.

  David Strauss hurried into a loose-fitting scrub suit. He tugged his sewing-thimble cap over his thick black curls. Tied on the mask. Booties. And as he always did right about then, David Strauss suddenly felt a great wave of very adult responsibleness. For the next fifteen minutes or so, he was a doctor. He was an adult.

  One of the nurses, who was busy listening to the O’Neill baby with a fetuscope, suddenly called out across the room.

  “The heartbeat has stopped, David!”

  David Strauss, the anesthetist, and the attending resident ran to the delivery table.

  Katherine O’Neill was undergoing the most severe contractions.

  The girl was sobbing, calling out a boy’s name. The small breasts under her hospital tunic were hard fists with sharp tiny points.

  A pair of forceps appeared in Dr. David Strauss’s hand.

  Glinting in the overhead kettledrum lights, the forceps descended between Katherine O’Neill’s trembling legs.

  Then David was hoisting a baby girl up into the lime-light, letting its blood rush back for nourishment.

  The umbilical cord was carefully snipped. David whacked the baby’s bottom extra hard.

  “Prolapsed cord.” The young doctor tried to sound calm and usual. A “prolapsed cord” meant that the umbilical cord had been compressed between the baby’s head and the mother’s pelvic bone. Oxygen had totally been cut off.

  The baby girl still wasn’t breathing.

  Strauss’s six-foot one-inch frame wa
s bent in half over the blue, suffering infant. He gently blew into a tracheal catheter, trying to force oxygen into the baby’s lungs.

  “More heat!” He wanted the Infant Table Warmer.

  “Adrenalin,” the resident tersely instructed at Strauss’s side.

  In the terrible machine-quiet of the Mount Sinai delivery room, David Strauss underwent nearly fifteen minutes of the tensest, most draining exercise and strain he could imagine.

  Finally, his dark thick head of curls flew back. David Strauss moaned. He looked down on the O’Neill baby. She looked like a sleeping little doll.

  “Oh screw me,” David said. “Just screw everything.”

  He walked over to the delivery table and leaned down toward the seventeen-year-old. David Strauss then hugged Katherine O’Neill—something that was so absolutely forbidden by hospital rules, it wasn’t even covered in the regulations.

  “Oh Doctor, Doctor, Doctor,” the little girl sobbed into his hair. “I just want to die, too.”

  It was 3:09 A.M. on April 25.

  For David Strauss, the death of the O’Neill baby wasn’t the worst thing that would happen to him that day.

  It wasn’t even in the top ten.

  CHAPTER 3

  Scarsdale, April 25.

  Winding along the pretty duck pond and tree-infested Bronx River Parkway that night, feeling familiar, pleasant vibrations rising up from their ’64 Mercedes 190 (their New York City shitkicker—“the Gray Ghost”), David Strauss couldn’t help thinking that he and his wife, Heather, basically had most of the things they wanted in life.

  Sometimes—after the death of young Katherine O’Neill’s baby, for example, David wondered if he and Heather didn’t have too much of a good thing.

  Less than two months earlier, David was thinking as he maneuvered the too-skinny Parkway lanes, he and Heather had bluffed their way past the stuffed-shirt, bluestocking Coop board of the Beresford Building on Central Park West. They were now the comparatively young landlords of a high-ceilinged, eight-room park-and-river-view penthouse in one of New York’s landmark, snobbier apartment buildings.

  Right in the lobby of the forty-seven-year-old building, David also owned a neat, oak-paneled office, where he wore a white shirt and Brooks Brothers striped tie every day; where he practiced efficient, sometimes inspired medicine for women ranging from a world-renowned fifty-one-year-old playwright quietly having an illegitimate (“I like to think of her as ‘fatherless,’ David.”) baby on the twenty-second floor, to the more conventional problems of Pap smears, pelvic examinations, yeast infections, menopause, and Premarin dispensation.

  Heather, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, preferred working out of Mount Sinai on 100th and Madison, but she, too, loved their apartment in the Beresford.

  That night, Heather had worn a formal Yves St. Laurent dress from Saks. She’d also had her long blond hair tipped and sensor-permed at Suga. Heather was looking very spiffy, David was thinking, as the two of them sped along.

  “Tell me something, David,” Heather kept saying as the Gray Ghost got closer and closer to Scarsdale. “Are the rest of the Strausses ever going to like me? At least to put up with me? Seriously, David?”

  Which was a funny question in a way, because Heather was one of the most likable people David had ever met.

  Everyone liked Heather Strauss.

  Patients, even the most irascible bastards; New York City cabdrivers; the monsignori-venerable doormen and elevator operators at the Beresford.

  But.

  Were the Strausses ever going to like Heather? Well, David thought, even he was puzzled over the answer to that one.

  All for three, simpleminded, medieval, and pretty stupid reasons: (a) on Sunday mornings, maybe twelve times a year, Heather attended services at St. John the Evangelist Church; (b) she ate Oscar Mayer and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs; (c) she identified with characters out of Captains and the Kings and John Updike, instead of Seventh Avenue and Chaim Potok.

  In other words, Heather Duff Strauss was a blond-haired, sparkly blue-eyed, wonderfully human and lovable shiksa.

  David’s wife, his best friend, “the top,” as the old Cole Porter song had so nicely put it.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Housewife was just finishing her fourth surveillance walk past the mesmerizing lights of the Strauss mansion in Scarsdale.

  She strolled past the rolling front lawns of the moon-flooded estate and down alongside a long stone wall trailing geranium vines. She approached a copse of maple trees loitering at the end of the block, like a shadowy street gang.

  In front of her on a taut chain leash, a perky young Irish setter—bought earlier that evening in White Plains—excitedly sniffed its first bed of pachysandra and relieved itself on the leafy plants.

  With her pretty dog, her navy riding jacket, her gypsy kerchief, the Housewife blended neatly into the suburban night scene.

  The chic-looking woman estimated that there were now sixty to seventy people attending the large Strauss affair.

  Quiet Upper North Avenue was an impressive parking lot for Lincolns, Cadillac Sevilles, Mercedes 280 Es, Jaguar XJs, and other expensive automobiles.

  “We almost have a full house,” the Housewife whispered into a transmitter clipped onto her riding jacket.

  As she passed a side view of the house, the woman fingered round, bumpy objects in a special pouch pocket sewn into her sports jacket.

  The bumpy objects were white phosphorus grenades, the kind that had been used to raze entire villages in Vietnam and Cambodia.

  At the corner of Post Road, the Housewife bent and patted the young setter’s soft smooth head.

  She whispered into the pup’s perked right ear. “Yes, yes, yes. That’s a good girl.” Then the woman clipped off the chain leash and released the small dog. Someone would care for it, she knew.

  I have killed before, the Housewife said to herself, but never quite like this. She looked at the pretty house—cozy North Avenue. It made her shiver to think of the rest.

  CHAPTER 5

  It looked like something out of an illustrated children’s book. High above the Strauss mansion’s steep, four-gabled roof a moon raced through a high ceiling of poplar and oak leaves.

  The estate grounds were a beautiful, smoky-gray painting that night. Close up, every object was finely etched in black.

  The skeleton of an old hickory tree.

  A horned owl perched on a garage.

  The strange, strange man in his dark pilot’s Windcheater looked like a highly skilled housebreaker.

  Which was one way to describe the Soldier.

  Pressed down close to the loamy, steaming ground, he ran as quickly and silently as his heavy backpack would allow.

  He trampled through formal gardens on the East Park side of the Strauss property. Past a red-barn-siding garage with its own private gas pump. Across a mushy bog that rose up to his shoetops. Over an unexpected brook and into what looked like an old world fruit and vegetable garden.

  The Soldier stopped and crouched low at a vine-covered gazebo that had seemed to be a small cottage from the brook.

  “There’s a single man out here,” he spoke into his transmitter.

  Watching the man—who had come out of the party for a smoke—the Soldier unstrapped his heavy pack and waited until the man from the party finally wandered back inside.

  Now the Soldier could begin.

  Inside the bag was a curious assortment of supplies. Knotted rags. Different lengths of copper pipe. An American-made Colt Python with four clips. Fuse. A full two-and-a-half-gallon Exxon gasoline can.

  Right in the heart of Westchester County, New York, the Soldier couldn’t help thinking as he set to work.

  In America.

  CHAPTER 6

  David and Heather climbed out of the dusty, rusted Gray Ghost. Arm in arm, they walked toward the imposing forty-one-room manor house where David had grown up.

  “Where’s the Sousa band and welcoming committee
you promised?” Heather whispered in David’s ear.

  “Inside.” David tapped his knuckle against the house shingles. “The other side of these great, half-timbered walls. With bells on their toes, I’ll bet.”

  Inside the grand Tudor house, the two of them were semiprepared to meet the mainstays of David’s immediate family: Strausses, Cohens, Hales, Loebs, Lehmans, Kleins.

  So many relatives. Also David’s older brother, Nick, who would be appearing on NBC-TV.

  On the fifty-second Academy Awards—which was the ostensible reason for the party.

  Just thinking about “Nick the Quick” brought a smile to David’s lips. Nick was what their grandmother Elena called a tummler, a big, lovable clown—who maybe was going to turn into a successful “alrightnik” out in Hollywood.

  The closer he got to the big house, though, the more serious second thoughts David had about the tricky evening ahead.

  For one thing, some of the people inside had actually boycotted his and Heather’s wedding two years before.

  Some of them still hadn’t met Heather Duff Strauss.

  “Hello. Oh, hi there, Mrs. S.”

  Heather was looking as pale as the Gray Ghost as she and David stood on the stone front porch.

  “Just practicing my act,” she assured David, both of them looking up at the great glazed bay windows.

  “Okay, let’s do it.” Heather took a deep breath. “Twang your magic plunker, Froggie. Bang the brass knocker, Davo. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  David couldn’t help smiling at his wife. Just then, though, the big wooden front door seemed to open by itself.

  “Aahh-ha,” said a flaming red mouth and fluttery blue eyes—David’s great-aunt Frieda. “Everybody! Everybody! David and his girlfriend are here … Oops!”

  “Oops is right, Aunt Frieda.” David held Heather’s arm tightly. “Frieda, this is my wife of two years, Heather. Heather, welcome to the North Pole.”

  Not unexpectedly, the exact tone of voice of the large catered party was difficult to pin down and isolate.