Nick the Quick, the Marvelous, the Eloquent.
Heather and Elena dead.
Fourth-Reich Nazis operating again. Why? What in the name of God was going to happen? How could whatever it was be stopped? Where was Ben-Iban?
Alix, meanwhile, spotted the sign they’d been scanning the stainless-steel horizon for.
AUSGANG! it proclaimed.
A sparkling clean, white-on-royal-blue sign. Posted over a flank of stainless-steel escalators. Right next to a German security guard with a nasty-looking machine gun.
“Ausgang! That’s German for exit,” Alix whispered cautiously over the airport noise. “This way to the ovens, David.”
“It isn’t exactly wonderful to be in Germany, is it? Smiling faces. Pretty little blond children. Why do those little kids make me shiver, Alix?”
That very morning, they’d flown out of London’s Heathrow Airport on a Lufthansa 747. Harry Callaghan. Harris Tanana. David and Alix.
Now perhaps they’d find out if Nick and Beri might have uncovered something while making The Fourth Commandment. David hoped he would finally get to meet the Nazi-hunter Ben-Iban.
He hoped that Ben-Iban wouldn’t wind up like the last Nazi-hunter David had managed to contact. Ben-Iban would be able to help them somehow.
KINDER SCHOKOLADE? asked an almost edible candy poster inside Frankfurt am Main International Airport.
MARLBORO DIE ZIGARETTES?
HERTZ DAS AUTO?
“And so, the American doctor and the American actress returned to the Fatherland,” Alix whispered. “They were Jüden again.”
At Hertz, David rented a handsome, efficient BMW 2002.
Moments later, the group was out on a wide, swift autobahn—trapped among speed-crazed West Germans averaging nearly a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour in their spit-shined sedans. They were off to the Schlosshotel Kronberg, a combination thousand-year-old German castle and mansion ten miles or so outside Frankfurt.
Seated at the lovely turned ankle of the Teuton Mountains, the famous Schlosshotel (Prince Philip had supposedly come there for a few of his celebrated trysts away from Elizabeth) was to become their headquarters on what Callaghan and Tanana called “the Nazi Front.” With its stout towers and a few fortified rampart walls, the German hotel looked the part, too.
The Schlosshotel Kronberg was also where Nick and Beri Strauss had stayed while they were making The Fourth Commandment.
Until Michael Ben-Iban arrived back at his home base in Germany, David and Alix decided they would try to contact some of Nick’s film connections. They also began to retrace Nick’s steps while he was prepping and shooting the film in West Germany.
They began to pore over original source material both on the concentration camps and on the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Cramped together in a six-by-nine-foot bunker that was packed to the ceiling with yellowing papers, David and Alix closely studied the old Nazi records that clogged the Ludwigsburg Center for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes.
They used Nick’s actual prep notes, and soon found that the German Nazis were becoming an obsession with them, too. The grand abomination, the mass extermination, was becoming so real they could feel it all around them.
Daily they received courtesy pouches from the Berlin Document Center.
And they also studied New Nazis, whose criminal records were kept in slapdash order by the otherwise neurotically efficient Polizei of the State of Hessen.
David was certain they were getting close to some kind of explanation in Germany. The answer was so close, it was frustrating to think about.
From all the Nazi records and files (and with the expert technical help of three handsomely paid researchers from the German magazine Der Spiegel), David and Alix settled on five promising suspects for the Storm Troop leadership.
David wrote the names in half-inch-thick dust on one of the Ludwigsburg reading tables.
“Just look at this unbelievable shit.”
“Martin Bormann. Animal.
“Klaus Barbie. Butchering pig.
“Walter Rauff. Murderer of a hundred thousand Jews.
“Heinrich Muller. Gestapo head. Still walking free.
“Josef Heine. A twenty-nine-year-old neo-Nazi terrorist who was born right here in Frankfurt. Who Nick actually interviewed.”
They were all very old men except for Heine. All proven dead at one time or another. (Bormann, it was claimed, was buried in Frankfurt—a flagrant violation of the Nuremburg War Crimes regulations—which clearly stipulated that Nazi war criminal remains be burned and distributed to the wind.)
“Ah, that old Nazi magic,” David said as he, Alix, and the researchers sat among the dusty Nazi records. “How unbelievably absurd it all seems when you get close enough to really observe the sleight of hand. Some terrible Fourth-Reich coup in the offing. The Strausses connected somehow. Why can’t we figure any of it out?”
Peter Ostraeur of Der Spiegel then constructed an interesting hypothesis.
“Please, David, don’t discount the possibility that all these bastards are involved. All of the ones still alive, anyway.
“Die Spinne, The Spider, has been threatening to go public for years,” the researcher said. “Of course, most of these Nazi bastards are very old now. But because of that fact, they must be suspected and feared more than ever before.
“Do not forget, young people, the Fourth Reich will die, literally die, if the living Nazis don’t act very soon. You see what I’m getting at? It is difficult for young people to grasp this. Young people don’t believe that there ever really existed Nazis.”
David and Alix understood the German researcher’s point … they understood it … a little.
CHAPTER 39
As he stepped from a funereal Austin cab to the grassy apron of St. James’s Park, the Führer knew that he had to prepare quickly to match wits with the Ambassador, the General, and the Chancellor.
The three important Council members were awaiting him in the agreeably disarming park. They sat in a neat row on a green bench centered among waves of chrome-yellow tulips. At their backs, very art-directed nannies pushed baby prams along the crisscrossing sidewalks.
Across the way, the gentleman with a tightly rolled umbrella and a bowler read the pink Financial Times.
It was all very London, thought the Führer.
“The murder of the Warrior has created an unfortunate international situation.” As expected, the portly Chancellor had the first word.
“The Americans especially are incensed. They’re all over the Middle East searching out answers. In their own inimitable manner, they’ll probably stumble upon some things they shouldn’t.
“If the Warrior had lived, Dachau would not have survived.” The Führer spoke in a soft whisper. “He told me as much himself. He was more of a threat to us than the Strausses. If you three don’t agree, I will be glad to step aside now. I’d be more than happy.”
The tall thin man, the Ambassador, spoke up. This Council member had a somewhat silky, patrician look. He wore Dunhill suits. His silver hair was styled twice a week at Smile in Knightsbridge. “The Strauss boy is poking about in Germany. He’s trying to contact the Nazi-hunter Michael Ben-Iban.”
The Führer shrugged.
“You have to leave all of the incidental details to me now. After this afternoon, we won’t be able to meet again. Probably, we shall never meet again. Watch your television sets in the middle of July.”
The General and the Chancellor exchanged concerned looks.
“Good luck then,” the Ambassador finally said. “You’re very correct in reminding us there is no turning back now. Just refining, extreme carefulness, intelligence. As has always been the case, we place our full trust in your judgment.”
The Ambassador reached out and took the Führer’s hand. The other two then shook the Führer’s hand as well.
As expected, the portly Chancellor had the final word.
“The black case is for you.”
/> The Führer walked off with the black leather satchel that had been brought by one of the three powerful Council members.
Once out of their sight in the park, the Führer rudely thrust open the case.
Inside were fourteen stacks of hundred-dollar American bills. Nearly seven hundred thousand dollars.
They were getting so very close now. Nothing could be allowed to stop Dachau Two.
Now all that remained, the Führer began to think, were those few incidental details he’d promised to take care of.
Like Dr. David Strauss and Alix Rothschild.
CHAPTER 40
Odessa, Russia.
When the Cessna 172 began its strange evening flight, a yellow-and-burnt-orange sunset painted the gentle waves of the Black Sea.
Even the stuporous Turkish pilot was impressed enough to animate his face, to whistle between blackened and roughly serrated teeth.
The beginning of the Final Solution, the second Holocaust, now lay just across the flat, navy-blue waterway. A five-hundred-kilometer ride from Zonguldak in Turkey to Kolesnoye, southeast of Odessa in Soviet Russia. Then a Russian truck north to Moscow, site of the twenty-second Olympiad.
The rain and stiff winds came with pitch-black darkness out over the sea.
The two engines of the tired old Cessna began to bitch and moan like a squadron of Waring blenders. The plane’s wings looked as if they were held on by piano wire. Somewhere in the fuselage, metal scraped against metal, making a high-pitched squeak that was worse than five hundred pieces of chalk scraping blackboards.
In the cramped rear seats, a man and woman from West Germany sat in cranky silence.
This was the Nurse and the Teacher. Both in pinch-tight wire-rimmed eyeglasses and corduroy jackets and slacks. Impressively convincing as the taciturn married couple—Olympic tourists—they would soon portray on the streets of Moscow.
These two made up the advance team for Dachau Two.
They were professionals who would be able to buy the necessary small arms and rifles in Moscow’s black market and who would take care of hotels and cars for the remainder of the strike team. They would arrange the final escape back out of Russia.
Sitting beside the beret-wearing pilot, meanwhile, the Soldier tried to concentrate all of his attention on small details inside the cramped cockpit.
An ancient twelve-gauge instrument dial. Fuel pump on. Speed: 150 knots. The Turkish pilot’s nasty habit of spitting into a small can, his motorman’s companion.
Colonel Essmann finally turned his attention outside.
Drops of rain were catching on the plastic window, holding, then suddenly sliding down into the crack. The airplane’s propellers were a vague gray blur out of the window.
“Before we see the coast,” he said, turning to the Nurse and the Teacher, “if we see the coast in this terrible rattletrap … we should make one final review of everything.”
He turned back to the front windshield and could feel the young people’s eyes burning into his neck. How many times did they have to review this plan? he knew they must be thinking. Well, the Soldier considered, it wasn’t just a matter of how many times. Obviously, they would review, they should review, right until the time when the real thing occurred.
Otherwise, somewhere along the way, someone would make the mistake that would kill them all. It was that basic and simple.
“Who wishes to begin?” The military expert spoke without looking back at them again. “In Odessa, there is a man named Andrei Sergeevich Pavlov.”
“Pavlov is one of us,” the Nurse and the Teacher said in unison. “Pavlov will be wearing a black hat and a red jacket,” the two young people said in singsong.
Yes, and Pavlov may very well save both of your lives. The Soldier sat up front with a deep frown over his face.
Ten miles from the Russian coast, the Turk brought the sobbing two-engine plane down below Soviet radar, down extremely close to the black water with its thin headdress of whitecaps.
The sea winds continued to whip the Cessna around without mercy. The little plane constantly thumped and bumped, as if chunks of flying debris were ripping apart its tail and fuselage.
Somewhere very near to the coast the plane seemed to be losing even more altitude. It was as if the plane were being pushed down by a great flat hand. The Soldier could feel the same large palm pushing down on the back of his neck.
Down below them, the sea was a great black hole.
Paper-thin clouds were shredding and falling away before their eyes. The Cessna’s wing lights were like toy flash-lights in the storm.
The tough young German girl finally threw up all over her back window. Spitting and coughing, she cursed the plane, pilot, Teacher, Soldier and herself.
“Is this the normal way in?” the Teacher complained loudly, snapping off his wire-rimmed glasses.
“No much trouble. No much trouble,” the pilot kept yelling over the plane and wind noise. In truth, the dark little man had made the illegal and very dangerous trip many times, even in the dead of Russian winter.
This time, though, dark unidentifiable shapes were flashing past the cockpit.
“Birds!” the pilot screamed out.
“You’ve passed the coast!” Colonel Essmann shouted suddenly. “You’re flying straight into Soviet Russia, you damn fool. We’ll be shot down!”
Just then, the Soldier thought he saw jagged rock not two feet from his window.
Suddenly the rocks and trees were all tilted crazily, almost sideways.
“My God, no!”
The Cessna was clotheslined by a long, strong pine limb.
The plane’s tail fell off and sailed away under the cockpit.
A bright red fire exploded all over the second engine. The Cessna made a strange scraping sound like automobiles skidding in gravel.
Then it was plowing through a forest of Russian birch and fir trees.
The Turkish pilot was screaming and steering insanely.
A fir tree exploded through the cockpit.
An enormous black shape flew over the passengers like a steel blanket. A loud rumbling noise was everywhere and deafening. The entire cockpit was twisted savagely to the extreme left.
The pilot screamed in terrible agony as airplane metal and tree passed through his chest and stomach. The young Nurse was decapitated by a window stanchion. There was a loud boom. The roaring explosion sounded like the end of the world.
The Soldier was desperately trying to throw himself out of a burning flat door.
He stumbled over a smoking, burning wing and thudded onto the ground.
He ran past the Teacher, who had been thrown up into a tree. He was dead. Eyes gray and bulging like a fish.
A third, tremendously loud explosion came as wet leaves began to slap his face.
A plume of bright flames shot up at least thirty feet, lighting the treetops and the low Russian sky. The precious explosives they had been smuggling in had blown the plane apart.
Then there was only the sound of water falling on a small fire in the deep, dark forest and the lonely sound of the Soldier’s ammunition boots on the wet leaves and twigs.
The strangely driven Soldier forced himself to look back.
He stood still and dripping, and stared into the insignificant-looking blaze.
The work of thirty-five years, he whispered.
The advance team is dead, he told himself, trying to sort out information and understand. You are now your own advance team. Do you understand, Colonel?
Do you understand?
Answer if you understand. …
“In Odessa,” the shocked, wounded man began to chant, “there is a man named Andrei Sergeevich Pavlov. Pavlov is one of us. …”
CHAPTER 41
Where in the name of God was Michael Ben-Iban? Both David and Alix had begun to worry about the old Nazi-fighter. Three times they’d actually gone to Ben-Iban’s Jewish Studies Centre in Frankfurt. Even Ben-Iban’s secretary was concerned now.
/>
Could they have gotten Ben-Iban, too?
Killed the Nazi-hunter the way they’d murdered Benjamin Rabinowitz and Elena?
Still more questions were added to the nasty, bulging catalogue of mysteries and catastrophes.
For the time being, David and Alix decided to spend one last day with Nick’s movie. The two of them flew to Munich, where the final scenes of the documentary feature had actually been shot.
David and Alix went to the location where the single most affecting scene in The Fourth Commandment had been filmed.
A long-forgotten chant that David and Alix had sung as smart-aleck twelve-year-olds popped into both of their heads as they rode from Munich Airport.
“Hitler had only one big ball,” they’d once upon a time harmonized on public buses, in schoolyards, outside the mock-Tudor railroad station in Scarsdale.
“Goering had two but they were small
Himmler had something simmler
But Goebbels had no balls at all.”
It was all flashing back to them now. Hateful, sinister floods of it. A villainous Christmas when someone had thrown gift-wrapped bags of manure against the Strausses’ front door. A time when David and Nick had gone as guests to the country club, and then been told they had to leave by the club president. “You’re the two Strauss boys, aren’t you? You boys aren’t allowed here.” A bad, bad rush of old persecution nightmares.
At noon on July 8, David and Alix stared up at the pocked and nicked gray stone walls of a onetime World War I munitions factory. They were at their final destination outside Munich.
A bright yellow sun was peeking half its smiley face around the dark, heavy building blocks and watchtowers.
“It’s unbelievable,” Alix mumbled under her breath. Her body was shaking.
David surveyed the blackened walls. “It’s almost indistinguishable from the ordinary world now. One thousand by nineteen hundred eight feet of pure hell.”
David and Alix had come to Dachau One.
They read the sign.
WILKOMMEN.
Because the former scene of flogging, pole-hanging, gassing, infecting women and children with malaria, whooping cough, and cholera was such a popular summer tourist attraction—nearly a million visitors a year—Alix had chosen dark glasses and a peasant’s kerchief to disguise her looks.
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