“This friend of mine from New York,” David said in a soft voice. “He’s a surgeon over at Flower Fifth Avenue. His family was lost at Buchenwald. He says that he’s always had this terrifying fantasy. … In his fantasy, he’s dying of some incurable disease. So he goes back to Germany. He kills as many Germans as he can in the streets. This is the straightest, meekest man. Terrific doctor. Good friend. He’s partially ashamed of the fantasy, but he has no control over it. It’s a fact of his life as a survivor. Every time he walks up in Yorkville, it comes down on him like the Furies. Lately, I’m beginning to understand the feeling myself.
“Remember I told you about meeting with Benjamin Rabinowitz,” David continued. “I don’t know everything there is to know—far from it—but my grandmother was a contributor to a secretive Jewish group. Benjamin Rabinowitz was one of the group’s leaders. They were heavily involved in the search for Nazi criminals after the war. Elena was always a little vague with me about it. The group’s methods weren’t exactly orthodox or legal. That much I know about.”
David stood up and stretched out his arms. He was feeling terribly uncomfortable. He was saying everything but what he actually wanted to say. The words that were right on the tip of his tongue. Had been for about ten minutes.
They were both feeling uncomfortable now.
“My grandmother was also very close to a man named Michael Ben-Iban. Ben-Iban is in the secret Jewish group. He’s one of the Nazi-hunters still working inside Germany.”
Alix nodded. She was listening—intently listening to every word.
“Right now, Ben-Iban is apparently trying to stop whatever it is the Nazis are up to. Ben-Iban is in England at the moment. In London, his people told me.”
Finally, David felt he had to blurt the rest out. Get it over with. Say what had to be said.
“Now that Elena is dead, I think I’d like to help the Jewish group if I can.” David self-consciously lit up a cigarette. “Of course, I don’t know how much help I can be. Maybe it’s just money.” He clicked his lighter shut.
“There’s also a little unsolved mystery attached to my brother Nick’s film. Nick made about half of The Fourth Commandment in Europe. Germany, England, Paris. I’ve been reading through some of his production notes. He’d made contact with some of the old Nazis. Some wealthy men and women. Respectable European business people. It all sounds a little like Alfred Hitchcock right now, but—” David stopped in the middle of the sentence and smiled.
“I’m babbling. Why do you let me babble like this?”
“You’re trying to tell me something,” Alix whispered. “So tell me. What are you trying to say, David?”
David nodded. “All right. I have to go to Europe.” He finally said it. “I’d like to do … to be honest, I don’t know exactly what. I just have to go. I have to see Michael Ben-Iban. Talk to him in London. Hear what he thinks. For Nick, Elena, Heather. For myself, I guess. I have to try to find out more about the Nazis. I have to try and help.”
Alix swayed gently in one of the antique porch rockers. Horowitz was playing a Chopin sonata inside now. Alix’s heart was beating faster than the great pianist’s fingers.
She didn’t have time to stop and logically figure everything out. What made sense; what didn’t. Alix let her emotional side make the decision.
“David, if you’re going to ask me to stay with you, to go with you, I will,” she finally said.
“If you’re not asking me, then I’d like to ask you. Please?”
Alix Rothschild stood up. She walked over to David. For a moment they were both very quiet.
“I’m asking you to go with me,” David finally said.
They were holding hands again.
This time a little more tightly.
Alix was thinking that her own problems could wait. They could wait until she was certain David was ready to understand her nightmares, if such a time would ever come.
The following evening they were in London.
Nazi-hunting.
Part IV
CHAPTER 34
Nice. The French Riviera.
The Storm Troop began to march again during the final days of June.
In the most curious manner, and in some of the strangest locations.
The Soldier knifed his way through the snobby, tacky, zany crowd-mobbing Cote d’Azur Airport in the glittery, the still very fashionable French Riviera.
This particular day, the military man looked like a gangly Mediterranean playboy. He wore aviator sunglasses, Cardin accessories, a white silk shirt open down to his trim waist.
Not on each arm, but close enough to look like it, were two bosomy women in their late twenties. They were the Nurse and the Legal Secretary, both of them important weapons experts in the burgeoning plan for Dachau Two.
From the crowded little airport they went by “Acapulco Jeep” to a pink stucco villa a few kilometers up the Riviera coast at Menton.
The appointed house was about a mile from the nearest neighbor, a two-star, four-crossed knife-and-fork restaurant. The pink villa belonged to the restaurant owner, a wealthy businessman from Paris. The Banker.
The pretty house was visible only for an instant as Renaults and Citroens, headed for Italy, made a long sweeping turn around the spectacular Moyenne Corniche.
The Engineer, the Accountant, the Newspaperman, and the Lawyer were already unpacked and waiting inside the villa when Colonel Essmann and the two women arrived.
By Wednesday, June 28, all those who were coming had settled in at the curious Riviera villa. The fun and games, the eating at Le Bec Rouge and Colombe d’Or were ended abruptly. A very serious meeting was called among the conspirators.
“Because of the need for complete secrecy, because of the extreme importance of this project,” the Soldier, a surprisingly dramatic speaker in front of the Storm Troop group, said, “none of you knows precisely why he’s here sunbathing, playing baccarat with someone else’s money, getting fat on rich French food down in Monaco and environs.”
There was scattered laughter from the group.
“I say that you don’t know the precise reason … because I’m certain all of you know or suspect the general reasons.
“To begin at the beginning, an extraordinary commando attack has been authorized … on the Olympic Village.”
The Soldier paused to let the import of his statement take its full effect. He waited until the villa room was completely still. Then he continued.
“This plan—Dachau Two—has been conceived to produce maximum results through the use of the best people. Yourselves. You and a few other experts have been carefully chosen to execute the military portions of this important plan.”
Once again the Soldier paused for effect.
“First of all, my sincere congratulations. This is history you are partaking in, I can assure you. Second, though, my condolences, because the chances of this turning into a costly, unprecedented disaster are very high indeed.”
Cheering exploded in the fancy villa’s living room. There was loud clapping and shouting. The conspirators embraced and kissed one another. Bottles of French wine were popped open. The meeting then went on through most of the night.
The Storm Troop was preparing a coup that would astound the world.
CHAPTER 35
A sweet frisson carried the smell of sea and pines up from the Mediterranean.
At six-thirty the next morning, a Frenchman—a farm-implements salesman from Lyon—got to watch a most bizarre and unexpected spectacle from high up on the Moyenne Corniche.
As the middle-aged Frenchman paused for a casual roadside relief stop, he gazed down at a luxurious villa.
He saw a band of suntanned men and women in bikinis converging on the villa from the nearby woods.
They were all running fast. Some of them carried long pine or olive branches, which reminded the French salesman—of what? Make-believe rifles? African spears?
The salesman wiped his brow with a red han
dkerchief.
He squinted his eyes and bent for a closer look.
Inside the villa, he could catch glimpses of the people racing from room to room. Working their way upstairs, quickly and efficiently.
Finally, they all came out on the sunroof, which was covered with candy-striped lounge chairs and bright beach towels. They started to laugh and slap palms like athletes from America.
The French salesman didn’t understand this. Not at all.
What an amazing life to be able to play King of the Castle at six-thirty on a Thursday morning, he thought. No wonder he had to pay more than thirty thousand francs for his piggy little Renault. These silly rich bastards were probably part of the idiot government of that pretender to the throne, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
Merde.
Double merde.
As he zipped up, the salesman no longer had to worry about the travails of modern France. He felt a sharp pain in his back.
An Italian stiletto was plunged between his shoulder blades. It was twisted hard and driven forward until it nearly came out of the Frenchman’s burly chest. Then it was pulled back out in the manner of a corkscrew. The salesman’s body convulsed and he was dead in seconds.
What the poor man had accidentally witnessed had been the first rough rehearsal for Dachau Two.
The Frenchman’s killer, Colonel Ben Essmann, had very closely watched the first draft maneuver as well.
Very soon, nearly two billion people around the world would get to watch it.
Greatly polished, of course.
With frightening Kolnikov and Dragunov assault rifles instead of scrub pine branches. With formal business suits and swastika armbands instead of bikini bathing suits.
CHAPTER 36
At midnight on June 29, David and Alix bumped along in one of two funereal Austin cabs tootling down Knights-bridge in London.
A quick night tour, as it were.
The cabs beetled past Harrods and Hyde Park. Under a few unfortunate billboards they read Beenz means Heinz. Drink your daily pinta! Past the perdurable Claridges, and the Edwardian Connaught on sleepy Carlton Square.
Finally, the cabs stopped in a Chelsea square, which looked very much like New York’s Gramercy Park.
They stopped in front of a gilded hotel awning that read “Rosecraft Gardens Inn.” “A sort of an elegant English safe-house,” Harry Callaghan called it.
Inside the Rosecraft Gardens, David and Alix observed a certain majesty to the high-ceilinged, chandeliered lobby. Yet there was intimacy as well.
A log-burning fireplace. Comfy sitting chairs filled with comfy-looking Britishers. Floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the square and nearby Thames.
Grace. Standards. Civilization. And a few neo-Nazis, of course.
Because the Nazi-hunter Michael Ben-Iban couldn’t be located that first weekend (his Frankfurt secretary confirmed that Ben-Iban was on business in England), David and Alix thought they would uncoil in London.
With no Fourth-Reich Nazis.
No nerve-racking interviews.
No nothing.
Silly, romantic touch, but each day they stayed on in London they bought each other a present.
On Friday it was a riding jacket from Sterling Cooper for Alix, a silly bowler from Harrods for David. Then a bottle of port from Berry Brothers and Rudd. Dinner and a night on the town. Then a stickpin from Hatton Garden, tied to a clip of heather from a Chelsea gypsy (“Good luck, Dearie,” she’d promised David). An enormous Winston Churchill cigar.
Also on Sunday afternoon, Alix and David received a surprise present of sorts from Harry Callaghan.
Harry let them go for a day trip around London. Without any bodyguards.
CHAPTER 37
“Relax,” they told each other.
“Try not to think about the Nazis.”
London was in marvelous full bloom.
“It feels so strange to be out here alone,” David said, as they roamed the handsomely landscaped streets between Chelsea and Knightsbridge. “It feels very good, doesn’t it!”
Two tall, impressive Yanks.
Alix was wearing a bluestocking disguise: long skirt, cashmere sweater, scarf, Chelsea Cobbler pumps, dark glasses, sheer blue stockings. David looked smart in charcoal slacks and a loose, preppy crew-necked sweater.
The loose sweater neatly covered a .38 Smith & Wesson.
Pretty much, they stuck to the great, mindlessly funky sights of the city.
Buckingham Palace with its redbrick road, Coldstream Guards, large, safe crowds. Westminster—where a colorful busker tap-danced and mimicked the Queen of Sheba to elbow taps and music from his portable record player. Madame Tussaud’s, where Alix found herself fashioned in wax and gruesome dyes.
“In my heart of hearts, I know that Harry’s secretly sent some of his men along.” Alix looked at David over the tops of her dark glasses. “But just not seeing them is great. Isn’t this the strangest sensation, David? We’re actually being tailed by the FBI, aren’t we?”
David suddenly stopped short along the crowded London sidewalk. He nearly created a twenty-pedestrian chain-reaction accident.
He waved to the front of him and Alix. He waved to any of Callaghan’s pavement artists lurking behind.
“Now I feel a little silly.” David began to blush as they continued to walk. “I wonder if they are watching us.”
Alix jumped up and tried to click her heels.
“Oh I hope they are. I hope they’re taking photographs for their sacrosanct files in Washington, too.”
Trundling down Albemarle Street off Piccadilly, his arm protectively around Alix’s shoulder, David caught himself sneaking looks at the way her breasts were rolling against the soft front of her black cashmere sweater.
The nicely rounded points lifted and fell with great independence and spirit. Exactly like Alix’s swift model’s walk.
In front of The Bird’s Nest Pub, David started to get an erection, and he found that slightly embarrassing and funny on the very proper London avenue.
Halfway down the street of expensive galleries, tobacconists and sandwich shops, Alix burst into hysterical laughter.
“Typical gynecologist.” She grinned.
She’d caught David ogling her like an involuntarily celibate schoolboy. Then she pulled him, very swiftly, inside a handy, swinging brass, glass, and oak door.
“DUNS” was all David could make out on the door sign before it closed on him.
Moments later the two of them were padding down the fourth-floor hallway of the very proper and sedate hotel.
Alix pushed an overly solicitous hotel bellman back out of their room. She handed the efficient little man a pound note to get rid of him.
Then she closed the hotel door with her hip.
Now they were all alone inside a cozy spot full of tasteful Regency furniture, fresh-cut flowers, a big, brass-railed double bed. The famous Duns—on Albemarle Street.
Alix leaned back against the door, standing on one heel of her pumps.
“You can look at me all you like now.”
“Can I? Well then, I think I will.”
David started with the dazzling black hair and exquisitely sculptured face. High cheekbones. Full red lips. Sparkling green eyes that added the right touch of playfulness.
She was both Alix Rothman and ROTHSCHILD, he couldn’t help thinking. His eyes fell to her breasts, flat stomach, hips, long legs in sheer blue stockings.
“I think we’ve lost Callaghan’s people at least. That’s a positive start.”
Alix balanced carefully on the sides of her shoes, like an ice-skater with weak ankles.
“For just a little time, I’d like us to be all alone. Nobody but us.”
David felt as if he had a boxing glove lodged in his throat.
“I’d like that,” he managed to say. “Very much.”
Alix’s sweater started to come off. Kilowatts of crackling static electricity, which seemed like a good sound for the m
oment.
Alix blushed.
David pulled the hotel-room shades all the way, and they were left in the half-light coming from the tiny bathroom.
David kicked off his scuffed loafers. He unbuckled his belt and the .38 automatic strapped on as if he were Bullitt or somebody dangerous.
The pepper-gray skirt from Brown’s dropped around Alix’s ankles. She began to skim off the silk stockings.
Then suddenly David and Alix were rolling on hills of crisp, fresh-smelling Duns bedsheets.
Alix’s long hair was fanning out everywhere. She flashed a faraway scene in another hotel room somewhere. Long ago, when they were in college, or maybe it was even high school. There had been a special song, she remembered—“So Rare.”
The two of them began to arch up over the bed. David reached out and caressed her face and hair. He was locked in a soft bracelet of Alix’s legs.
She whispered to him so softly that it sounded almost like an apology.
“Please wait for me,” Alix said.
He did.
They waited for each other.
It was the best thing that had happened to either of them in a long, long time.
When they arrived back at the Rosecraft Gardens, David and Alix were hit with another surprise—this one not so pleasant as their freewheeling afternoon alone in London.
Michael Ben-Iban had contacted his secretary in Frankfurt. He was changing his itinerary—his immediate plans. Ben-Iban had a personal stopover to make, then he was reportedly heading back to West Germany.
Something was happening now. Something was going on
David even started to wonder if Michael Ben-Iban might be avoiding them.
He and Alix began to pack for Germany.
Clothing, maps, books. The .38 Smith & Wesson. Two pocket-sized Berettas.
The abrupt and unexpected shift of locales, the idea of going into Germany, was enough to make both of them sick with apprehension.
CHAPTER 38
Frankfurt, Germany.
My own goddamn, terrific brother dead. David found himself growing morbid again.