See How They Run

  The eleven-minute clip was then shown without interruption.

  The first five minutes of the film consisted of old black-and-white news and Nazi propaganda footage.

  The 1940s-style film presented the usual straight-arming, jackbooted marching scenes through Munich and Berlin. Then Hitler Youth and little Deutsches Jungvolk in Frankfurt, singsonging Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! It panned across crowds of German people screaming approval like Stuka dive-bombers. It flashed a sign on a Munich streetlamp: ACHTUNG JUDEN!

  Then the Führer appeared, the famous manic stare making him look more like Charlie Chaplin than Adolf Hitler.

  The Führer was shown driving a new black VW convertible through a crowd of 200,000 cheering Nazis.

  He was pictured after just having made monkeys of Daladier and Chamberlain.

  Most chilling of all, a brand-new, original piece of marching music had been composed and scored for the film.

  After the black-and-white segment, a tall, blond man, a recognizable film actor named Owen Landers, appeared on screen.

  This portion of the film was in slickly shot 35mm color. No expense seemed to have been spared in its filming.

  The pleasant-looking actor wore a charcoal business suit, starchy white shirt, striped red necktie. He looked very much like the president of some large, very successful company. On his right arm, the actor wore a red-and-white Nazi brassard.

  Very calm and reasonable, with the intensity and polish of a regular news commentator, the actor explained how misguided Jews now living throughout America were a major cause of the country’s social, economic, and, especially, moral problems. The Jews were America’s pornographers. Its slumlords. Its dissidents. The Jews were the moneyhoarders on one hand, the moneylenders on the other. The contentious Jews were the chief reason America had made enemies all over Europe and in the Middle East, of course. Because of their vast wealth, the Jews had unequal representation in Washington.

  The camera slowly crept in on the impressive-looking actor. “The time has come for all of us to look closely at the Jewish element in America. To carefully consider some fundamental questions about our country.

  “This does not mean any kind of violence directed against Jews. It simply means examination. Careful examination of the priorities of this country—and the reasons behind our priorities.

  “Those of you who agree, those of you who believe we should reexamine important issues at this time, I ask you to do one thing only. A simple, harmless gesture,” the actor said.

  A gesture.

  Almost too small a gesture it seemed.

  Curious.

  “Tomorrow at noon … simply honk your automobile horns. Tomorrow at exactly noon.”

  All along Fifth Avenue, every other car, or third car, or fourth or fifth car was honking its horn.

  Cars down near Forty-second Street and the library honked. Cars and trucks opposite Korvette’s, Brentano’s. Right in the heart of America’s most sophisticated city, they honked. Right in the middle of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world.

  Up near Saks and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, cars honked, and a fistfight had begun in the street. Past Central Park and the Plaza, on way up into Harlem—the shrill symphony of horns seemed even louder, more horrifying, and unbelievable.

  At about three minutes after twelve noon, the din began to lessen.

  A false silence came. Then a few late beeps. Angry personal statements.

  Then an eerie calm fell over New York, over Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, over any little highway where there were cars, and horns, and Nazis.

  On Fifth Avenue, a pretty, short-haired businesswoman wandered out of a soup shop called La Potagerie. The dazed woman sat down on the curb next to New York patrolman Michael Rosenberg.

  A stranger. Another Jew.

  The two young people held each other for a long, tender moment. They just held on and looked into the dark, passing automobiles.

  CHAPTER 25

  Automobile horns.

  Bleating against the thin skin of her eardrums. The hammer, anvil, stirrup, vibrating. Making Alix Rothschild feel nauseated and afraid.

  That evening the actress wandered south on Fifth Avenue from the Sherry Netherland, where she had her New York apartment. Down toward a violet shroud of smog and night that lay over the area of Manhattan known as Gramercy Park.

  11:15 P.M.

  Dark suits and long gowns were arriving home at the Plaza from A Chorus Line and Deathtrap. From expensive suppers at Sardi’s, Caravelle, Gallagher’s. A few late-night lights blinked off in the GM Building. Hispanic cleaning ladies; investment house and advertising-agency workaholics. Doubleday’s was just closing on the block between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh. A shopping-bag lady slept peacefully in the alcove of Elizabeth Arden.

  Automobile horns.

  Simply honk your horn, the Reich had commanded.

  The new Nazis. Countless thousands of them in New York; in Southern California; in Maine, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas.

  A cab honked in front of the St. Regis, and Alix nearly flew out of her skin! “God damn you stupid! …”

  Her long legs felt tired and rubbery all of a sudden. Her mind was bogged in a swamp of the blackest, foulest images. Her stomach was twisted into a tight, impossibly hard knot.

  Alix heard distant New York police sirens; she could almost hear the Gestapo cars wailing through the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich. The overhead streetlamps might have been the searchlights on the dark towers surrounding Dachau Konzentrationslager.

  The Nazis were marching again.

  The Nazis had never actually stopped marching.

  Alix Rothschild was struck by a severe blood-sugar rush on her walk down Fifth Avenue. A slight ringing in her ears grew into a shrill, head-splitting whistle. She gasped out loud for air, more oxygen.

  Finally, she had to stop walking altogether.

  The tall, slender, dark-haired woman leaned against the hood of a parked car. Her movements were like those of a drunk about to be sick. Out of the corner of her eye, Saks’s front canopy sign appeared to be spinning across the avenue.

  A familiar series of pictures went flashing through her mind. Out of control as they flew at her optic nerve. An old favorite nightmare album.

  A bloodred dawn shone across acres and acres of gray, muddy fields. The rising sun seemed to sit like a squashed red egg on top of a line of ghostly ash trees.

  Dark wooden walls interceded. Blackwashed turrets. High barbed-wire fences.

  A very early-morning parade in a bleak, smoking prison yard.

  A young woman seen from the waist up. Naked, emaciated—Nina Rothman.

  Alix’s mother.

  A German soldier, an SS captain, telling nineteen-year-old Nina Rothman to kneel down on the muddy, smoking ground. A smell a hundred times worse than the worst decaying smell of fish and uncleaned animals hung thick in the air. A heavy odor of human sweat, excrement, dysentery, spotted typhoid over everything. Nina seeming not to notice. Thinking in her fear-crazed mind that this is such a waste—such an incredible, stupid, horrible twist of fate.

  The erect SS captain sauntering away from the young Jewish woman. Down a long line of young women and teenage girls. The prettiest ones this morning—a few of the elite German Jews, the wealthy ones. Sixty-seven of them. Most past guessing what the Nazis wanted this time.

  This SS captain turned out to be their friend. A Nazi of unusual compassion. Almost no taunting and cruel delays. His right arm flashed quickly behind the sixty-seven backs.

  The squad of prison guards fired.

  The kneeling women toppled over into a three-foot-deep gully dug just in front of them. Young mothers and teenagers obliterated in seconds. Nearly buried as well.

  Some ragged camp children ran toward the long, gaping trench, and peered into tt. Alix Rothman saw! The large, bloody hole in Nina Rothman’s back.

  Her mother’s murder.

  Alix scre
amed out on Fifth Avenue. She couldn’t remember her vision: just the feeling of terror.

  She screamed words she wouldn’t remember a minute afterward. The horns. The death-camp visions.

  A few late-night strollers stopped to look at her. But no one came to help.

  The New York City policemen finally came on the run.

  Two heavy, Bronx- or Brooklyn-accented voices. Gruff. Very male and scary.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Alix was suddenly alert and embarrassed. She was trembling uncontrollably. She understood what had happened. What was about to happen now.

  “I’m all right now,” she managed. Her mouth was incredibly parched, sticky dry. “I’m all right. Thank you.”

  Then, one of the policemen suddenly recognized who she was. “Hey!” he said to his partner. “Do you know who this is?” His voice became high-pitched as he spoke to Alix. “Are you all right? … Miss Rothschild? Are you on any drugs, Miss Rothschild?”

  Alix shook her head. She tried to stand away from the parked car. … If they take me to Bellevue, she began to panic.

  “Today was very bad. The horns … I’m sorry that I screamed out. I was just very afraid.”

  She didn’t know how much she was going to have to explain. Thank God, they seemed to understand.

  The two policemen brought Alix back to Fifty-ninth Street in their cruiser. They were gentle and they tried to be understanding. One of them was Kevin Stapleton, a St. John’s graduate. The other was Howie Cohen, a young fallen-away Jew from Brooklyn. They had both seen Sara, Sara, and they told Alix that she was a tremendous actress. An artist.

  In the car with them, Alix slowly regained her self-control. … She was thinking that she couldn’t allow herself to get this out of control again. She promised herself she wouldn’t let it happen ever again. No matter what.

  The officers accompanied Alix inside the gold-and-Italian-marble lobby of the Sherry Netherland. They escorted her up to the lacquered birdcage elevator bank. Doormen, bellmen, deskmen, wealthy European and Texan hotel guests stared curiously. Impossible not to. Their strange images reflected off the nearby windows of Le Petit Café.

  Patrolman Cohen made her promise to see a doctor.

  Alix promised.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and then went upstairs to the safety of her room.

  Part III

  CHAPTER 26

  “The new ROTHSCHILD look. Now you can have it, too!” proclaimed the front cover of Vogue.

  “The ROTHSCHILD Only Her Masseur Knows,” squealed a subhead on Cosmo.

  ROTHSCHILD AND REDFORD bellowed a hundred-foot-long movie poster over Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, just north of Times Square.

  That year, Alix Rothschild was the living legend in America. At least Alix was as close as she wanted to being a legend.

  It had begun when she was twenty-one years old, 1964, with Alix quietly establishing herself as one of the world’s more successful commercial models. In the next few years, Alix had done everything from the latest shampoo to Russian Crown fur. Both men and women seemed to like her sensual face, her figure, the way she moved, especially her smile.

  Then Alix had segued into film acting. One of the more successful model-to-actress transitions, it turned out.

  Alix had been nominated for Critic’s Circle awards for her first two films. She’d won an Oscar for her fifth film. Alix already had her own bronze star on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Film number 6 had been a hugely successful television movie tracing Jewish Arab roots in Palestine. Number 7 had grossed in excess of ninety million dollars. So far, there had been no eighth film—just an endless stream of gossip broadcast from Chasen’s and the Polo Lounge.

  Alix and David Strauss had three important connecting points in their pasts.

  First—Alix and David were either third or fourth cousins, both of them always forgot which. From the time they were six or seven years old, they had been thrown together at a variety of bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. David, in fact, had been one of the first children Alix had been able to successfully relate to after she’d come to America.

  Second—Alix and David had been teenage lovers at Scarsdale High School. They’d suffered through the traditional ring and letter-sweater transferrals, the loss of virginity at fifteen inside the Pound Ridge Reservation, the awful nicknames for each other—Franny and Zooey, from the J.D. Salinger novella.

  Third—they had been lovers in college. David at Princeton. Alix, a two-hour car ride away at Vassar.

  Then Alix had mysteriously left Vassar in the middle of her senior year. She’d gone to the Ford Agency in New York, and then to Wilhelmina during the “Model Wars.” And finally to William Morris as she launched off into film.

  Alix admitted to interviewers again and again that she was neurotically driven, obsessively motivated to be one of the best actresses in the world. Most of all, Alix revealed in the interviews, she had to feel that her life had purpose. … Otherwise, she might as well have died with the others back in Germany.

  David, meanwhile, had decided that he wanted to be a doctor. He was also certain that he was over Alix Rothschild, or Alix Rothman, as he’d known her back in Westchester.

  Every so often one of them sent off a letter or telegram—To FRANNY … TO ZOOEY (usually when one or the other of them was in trouble, or when one needed a sympathetic shoulder), but that was the extent of it.

  THE END, in movie terms.

  CHAPTER 27

  David spotted Alix from high up on his fifth-floor sun porch at Cherrywoods. It was late on a sparkling, blue-skied Saturday, less than a week after the mysterious death of Benjamin Rabinowitz.

  Alix was walking in front of the Sunset Lounge. She had on a pink shirt, faded jeans, and sandals hanging from a beaded belt. Her black hair was longer than ever.

  ROTHSCHILD!

  Even from that distance, David could see why she’d had such success everywhere. Somehow Alix managed to fuse the haut monde and the everyday one. She could be beautiful or down-to-earth—sometimes with just a turn of her head.

  After watching her for a few minutes, David retreated off the creaky wooden porch. He walked back inside his bedroom.

  As he put on a shirt, he mentally reviewed the distant past in his mind. Then David stopped and sat down hard on the edge of his bed.

  He stared at the collection of Nazi books and papers. He gazed out the porch screen door.

  Very slowly, David wandered back out to the porch again. Alix was gone.

  David’s eye drifted along with a canoe down on Lake Arrow. He saw two boys in red rubber swim masks and matching nose plugs playing on the diving float. Across the lake, an FBI agent sat in a high-perched gazebo, casually watching East and West Houses through binoculars.

  David raised an arm to the man. The agent seemed to wave back. “Cozy as hell,” David muttered. Why the hell hadn’t he just gone downstairs and said hello to Alix like a normal human being? Damn it!

  David stepped inside again and looked at the face in the mirror over his sink. Familiar enough. David frowned. Shook his head of curly black hair.

  “Ass,” he said to the image staring back at him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing anyway?”

  “Ass.”

  There was a knock on the door. Of course! Alix had come up to say hello to him. David started to laugh at himself. He had to laugh.

  “Shee-oot. You better snap to soon, son.”

  He pulled open the bedroom door.

  It wasn’t Alix after all.

  It was one of the hotel porters.

  A man named Johnny Williams, who lived in Pough-keepsie, and who used to take David and Nick to the YMCA basketball tourney on Market Street in Poughkeepsie every spring.

  David succeeded in blowing his opening lines anyway.

  “Oh! … Yes? … Uh … hi, John,” David managed.

  Johnny Wil
liams grinned. “Oh, excuse me … excuse me, Dr. Strauss.”

  Which finally forced Alix to step into the doorframe.

  Her hands were nervously smoothing her jeans. She looked terrified.

  She pushed hair away from her eyes.

  “Oh, damn it. I’m sorry. I was just afraid to come up alone, David. John volunteered. Well … I sort of volunteered John.”

  Then the two of them were hugging.

  Johnny Williams was patting both of them on their backs—as if to say that whatever they were doing was just fine. Alix was crying a little. She was mumbling condolences about Upper North Street, Elena, Nick, and everything.

  Finally, Alix stepped back and looked at David.

  “How are you doing?” Alix started to laugh. “I couldn’t just write this time. I had to come.”

  CHAPTER 28

  That evening, Cherrywoods’ Lake Lounge smelled of pine resin and wildflowers—also faintly of wood ducks and brown trout. Outside on the lake, a flotilla of sailboats looked like Indian tepees on the horizon.

  Heads at the bar began to turn and look at Alix and David.

  The two of them talked about how Cherrywoods hadn’t changed since they’d been teenagers coming up there every summer. Nothing too seriously revealing. Just nice-man-meets-nice-girl talk. Just two friends trying to remain sane during a particularly bad time. A time worse than either of them wanted to let on.

  At eight-thirty, they hiked to the hotel’s summer kitchen.

  That hectic eighty-by-sixty-foot food emporium was a chef’s wildest dream. To be more exact, the kitchen was everything a French Jew named Jules Stein could dream about, read in Gourmet magazine, hear on The French Chef, or outright steal on his annual six-week pilgrimage back to Provence.

  Alix’s eye traveled along wooden pegboards with cutting and spooning utensils, down past a fleet of stainless-steel pots and skillets.

  Even with the hotel less than a third full, at least forty loaves of brick-oven white, caraway rye, pumpernickel, and sourdough bread sat like adobe houses on butcher-block tables.