“It’s part very sophisticated cocktail party.” Heather looked around at chiffon Empire gowns and tuxes; at Queen Anne side chairs; Cromwellian tables and cabinets; expensive art on every available wall space.
“And it’s part New York delicatessen service-crew reunion,” David smiled. “Knishes. Sour pickles. The herring in cream sauce.”
“Also, it’s part Irish wake, I think.”
“And part Indian suttee … and part United Jewish Appeal breakfast. Remind me to take you to one of those some time.”
Technically, it was Nick’s day. Only in the Strauss view of the world, that made it the whole family’s day, which meant that everyone attending the gala party was up for an Academy Award that night. The entire Strauss family.
After peeling off from yenta Aunt Frieda, from Uncle Milt (colonel in the Army Reserves; ten-million-a-year salesman for Prudential), David and Heather were roadblocked by Aunt Shirley Lehman, who was a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum even though she lived in Tarrytown now, and who was writing a chichi novel about East Side housewives called Pure Vanilla Extract. She sat Heather and David in front of Degas and Chagall, and kibbitzed and kibbitzed until they both felt amazingly at ease and almost welcome at the party.
In fact, after being there for half an hour or so, David began to feel a vaguely familiar glow inside.
He saw that Heather was being accepted into the family—and that Heather herself knew it.
David Strauss found himself smiling.
This was family, damnit! This was okay. It was better than okay.
They blew everything out of proportion all the time. They badgered you. They made you dance the horah. They cut you up, down, and sideways in incisive ways that went right to the bone marrow. But somehow—and David started to laugh out loud as he thought this—some way, they cared for you more than anybody else ever would. They loved Heather—because he loved her.
At one point, loud clapping started up around the huge, warm, familiar living room. People were clapping for David and Heather. Grandmother Elena’s wolfhound rolled around the carpet yowling and farting. David kissed Heather and he felt a little warm tear on her cheek.
“I’m really happy,” Heather whispered. “I’m never been happier, David.”
CHAPTER 7
“This reminds me of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief,” David whispered to Heather as they crossed the upstairs hallway.
“Or two of the little Japanese people in Godzilla Meets King Kong,” Heather said, suggesting another cinema image.
The two of them sneaked past the ancient ruins of David’s old bedroom. Past his father’s ten-thousand-book study. Then David was slowly twisting the glass knob on one of the closed bedroom doors.
The polished walnut door sprang open a thin crack. A blade of light sliced out into the hallway.
They could both smell lavender water and sachet, and a boyhood epiphany closed around David: expensive family cars that purred like cats: old family cats that made noises like broken-down cars.
Across a long, busily furnished bedroom they saw eighty-two-year-old Elena Cohen Strauss.
David’s grandmother.
Prominent in the woman’s very personalized bedroom were a dozen of her original paintings and etchings; a brace of cozy ottoman chairs; bedspread, drapes, and mirror frames all done in matching flowered cotton; a wall of hardcover books in German, English, Russian, and Hebrew—languages that Elena Strauss read and spoke.
“So come on in out of the cold.” Elena’s eyes grew wide and surprisingly alert.
“Your big brother is on the television any minute now. How are you, Heather dear? What a pretty blue dress. Very striking. Helloo, Davey! Come for some shmooz with your sick grandmother?”
Both David and Heather started to smile.
Since the 1971 automobile-crash deaths of David’s parents, Elena Strauss had once again taken control of the family’s eighty-odd million dollars. That meant being chairman of the board for Samel Industries (movie theaters, real estate, diamonds); chairman of the Cherrywoods Hotel Realty and Construction Company; director of White Plains Finishing Industries; and director of the Strauss Foundation for the Arts.
Besides being entirely capable of the jobs, Elena gave the task a Volpone/Scrooge McDuck spirit that David found refreshing and wonderful. His grandmother had a pioneer’s approach to life that was almost lost in America these days.
Even at eighty-two, David thought, she was more self-sufficient in many ways than he was.
David and Heather hadn’t gotten halfway across the room when the big-time small talk began.
“The reason I’m not joining the party, why I couldn’t go out to California—I’m feeling awfully, terribly sick, Heather and David. Dizzy spells. Brain not always so connected with my muscles. What’s wrong with me, Davey? You’re the doctor.”
David and Heather pulled up two of the ottoman chairs.
“A high-priced consultation,” Heather kidded.
“You’re eighty-two years old, Elena,” David answered his patient’s question. “You smoke, you drink, you fool around.”
Elena nodded in an exaggerated fashion. Her mouth made a perfect little red circle.
“Aahhh! Thank you, doctor. And how much will that be?”
“She’s been working like a charwoman for seventy-one years. You see, Elena personally watches out for the health and welfare of every living Jew in the world,” David informed Heather. “Also, she still futzes around up at our family hotel … because nobody else can run Cherrywoods, right? Not like you and Grandpa Sam could.”
David bent in closer to his grandmother. “Tell me one thing, Nana?”
“Anything, my dear sweet bokher.”
“Bokher, Heather, is like a little brown-nose kid at yeshiva classes. Listen, Elena, are you and your dizzy spells planning to go up to the hotel for spring cleaning this year?”
Elena started to laugh. David and Heather watched smile cracks form in her powder plaster. Intimations of a much-younger woman, a Madchen back in Berlin, showed in her clear brown eyes.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who can tell about these things? Gypsy fortune-tellers?”
“Listen, Nana. Seriously. Why don’t you take it easy? Don’t go to spring cleaning this year.”
The elderly lady got very serious for a moment.
“Davey, Heather, in this country, everything is to be young. Have lots of money. Have a Pepsi-Cola life. Why should an old woman retire? Only to die. Don’t you think so, Heather? Davey?”
“You don’t have to retire,” Heather said.
“Saying doesn’t make it so. I will retire from the hotel someday,” Elena shrugged. “Do you know when? Davey knows when.”
Davey knew, all right. Davey nodded. Davey knew what was coming next, too.
“I will retire if ever our enemies come back. Only if they should attack Israel or something terrible. Nineteen thirty-four,” Elena said to Heather. “I was a young woman in Berlin. The whore and drunk capital of all Europe. Now? The same thing here in New York. Nineteen thirty-four. Terrible economy in Germany. Always blaming the Jews. Nazis marching in small towns, then in bigger towns, finally right in Berlin. Do you know Jabotinsky, Heather?”
“I know Jabotinsky,” David nodded. “Zev Jabotinsky. Great guy. The Jewish Garibaldi.”
“You should read Jabotinsky, Heather. Zev J-A-B-O-T-I-N-S-K-Y. That Jabotinsky understands the enemies of Jews like nobody ever has.”
David placed his hand over Elena’s on the arm of her chair.
“All right, we’ll both read Jabotinsky. Now tell us how you’re feeling, Nana. Seriously.”
The old woman shrugged her narrow shoulders. She sagged back into her ottoman chair.
Elena stopped being playful and gave David one of her wise-old-woman looks. For the moment, his grandmother was clearly being the head of the family.
“Read Jabotinsky,” she said. “Seriously.”
As she spoke the words, the
color television winked. The bedroom lights flickered.
“Probably Nazis up on the roof,” David deadpanned, then winked at his grandmother.
“As a comedian,” the old woman winked back, “you could be in serious trouble, bokher. Even with my incredible contacts. Even in the Catskills, which I practically own.”
CHAPTER 8
10:35 P.M.
In a terminal part of Scarsdale, near the ancient railroad station, Vulkan walked into Monaghle’s Bar & Grill.
Monaghle’s was a drab, dusty parlor that hadn’t changed a drink coaster since the death of Sean Monaghle’s wife.
Three men in oil-stained work clothes and a woman in a satin-doll party dress were hunched over red vinyl barstools up in front. On a semiregular schedule, the union bartender served up some draft beers, or a port wine for the lady, or a Robt. Burns Black Watch cigar for the man with “Witte” marked on his work shirt.
At the rear of the narrow room, Vulkan observed doors for public toilets, a tinny phone booth, a color TV that seemed to sparkle in the dull room.
A portrait of John Kennedy and his wife sat beside the cash register, presumably safeguarding Monaghle’s cash from the union bartenders.
Vulkan bought a glass of brandy, then sat in an empty booth facing the color TV.
He began to watch the Academy Awards.
At eleven o’clock, station identification for NBC, he bundled himself into the phone booth and shut the metal-and-glass door tight.
He dialed general information for America’s largest newspaper, the New York Daily News.
A young woman answered “New York News” in a subdued, businesslike speaking voice.
“You are to write down exactly what I tell you,” Vulkan instructed the young woman.
Back at the News offices, meanwhile, Mary Gargan’s first thought was “nut,” then “screwball,” then “What’s a nice girl like me doing answering phones late at night in New York City?”
“Sir?” she said. “Excuse me?”
“Then you are to call Mr. Harold Ney, editor-in-chief of your newspaper. Mr. Ney can be reached at eight-two-six-oh-three-five-nine, his mistress’s number at the River Bend apartment building. This is the message you’re to read to Mr. Ney.”
The man called Vulkan paused, both to catch his own breath and to let what he’d said so far take effect. He then read Mary Gargan a short, prepared statement.
Slowly.
Sentence by sentence.
“Today in our country there are approximately six million Jews among us.
“Tonight, measures are being taken against the powerful Jews living here in America. These Jews are being taken care of by methods once employed at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau. Jews such as the Kleins, the Strausses, the Shapiros, the Cohens, the Loebs.
“Tonight marks the beginning of an important action called Dachau Zwei … Dachau Two!”
CHAPTER 9
On the color television in Monaghle’s Bar & Grill, on more than thirty million sets across the country, Nicholas Strauss and his wife, Beri, were running into the wide-angle lens of an RCA-TV camera.
The attractive couple was racing down the far-right-side aisle of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Hollywood.
Among those who turned and clapped for them were a shaggy, bearded Jack Nicholson; Jacqueline Bisset, wonderfully backlit by the stage lights; George Burns; Joseph Levine; Robert De Niro; and hordes of opera-glass renters.
For Nicholas and Beri, the Oscar for best feature-length documentary film was the well-deserved climax to two singularly uncompromising careers. The Strausses were known to work under one idealistic and therefore somewhat unrealistic show-business philosophy: If we don’t believe in it, why should we expect anybody else to?
Their film, The Fourth Commandment, had taken only twenty-four days and two hundred thousand dollars to shoot and edit, but it had been in preparation and preproduction for more than seven years. An unusual and unexpected tour de force, the film somehow communicated to 1980s America a “you-were-there” feeling for 1940s Germany. “The Fourth Commandment is a sane, surprisingly objective, and I must say, moving depiction of an intelligent, sophisticated and civilized country brought to lower depths than any other in modern history,” the critic for the Los Angeles Times said at the time of the film’s release. “In my mind, it is a wise and knowing portrait of an era we ought not to forget.”
Nicholas Strauss was actually shaking as he stood behind the stage microphone and podium, and looked out on the faces of the most powerful show-business people in the world.
“I have an unconscionably long list of people I want to thank,” the longhaired filmmaker said.
“But we don’t want all of you to suffer through it,” his wife, Beri, added, brandishing their golden award proudly. “So we won’t name all the names here tonight. You know who you are. You are wonderful, wonderful people. We love you a lot. More than I think we could do justice to right now, shivering and shaking as we are.”
As Nick said a few final words, an unreal scenario began to develop at the Chandler Pavilion.
Shrieks came from the velvet tuxedos and see-through dresses out in the audience.
A paunchy, balding man, Siegfried, had broken through the casual, tuxedoed security, and was now actually walking onto the stage.
It was something that hadn’t occurred at the Awards ceremony in the past few years.
The last time, the gate-crasher had streaked naked past an only slightly nonplussed David Niven.
This time the intruder was screaming angrily and incoherently. Siegfriend was waving an automatic revolver that glinted steel-blue in the stage lights.
Halfway across the stage, the man began to scream at Nick and Beri Strauss. He screamed in guttural German.
“Ich representiere die Sturm Truppe. Ich bringe diese Nachricht die Dachau Zwei!”
I come from the Storm Troop. I carry this message of Dachau Two!
The revolver’s first four shots struck thirty-nine-year-old Nick.
The fifth and sixth shots struck Beri, who pulled down the stage podium as she fell.
With the seventh and eighth shots, Siegfried succeeded in killing himself.
Three thousand miles away, the long scream began for Dr. David Strauss and his family.
CHAPTER 10
Oh, my God, please no, please no.
David Strauss’s eyes were transfixed on the gleaming Zenith console television screen.
Slowly then, David became aware of something else gone wrong.
Elena was tottering forward in her stuffed chair. She was making a soft, gagging sound. His grandmother’s eyes were dilated and fluttering wildly.
“Oh Jesus, David. I think she’s having a stroke.”
Heather helped him move the old woman over to her bed.
“I’ll go for my bag. Are you all right here with her?”
Heather waved him away. “Yes, go. Hurry.”
David had never seen Heather in a medical emergency before. Heather Was a doctor now. He left her with his grandmother.
David rushed out into the upstairs hallway. He had to get himself under control. He was a doctor. He’d seen every kind of terrible emergency working in New York …
Nick! Beri! Elena! Oh, please God, no …
Then David heard windows breaking inside the Strauss house. Glass crashed and tinkled like an entire cabinet of crystal falling down. Wood split as if it had been struck by lightning in the west wing.
The upstairs lights suddenly flickered. David glanced up as the hall lights fizzled to a dim yellow-brown.
There was hoarse shouting and unbelievable screaming downstairs at the party. Children were beginning to cry out. Adults shrieked.
David Strauss ran toward the center-hall stairs to see what was happening.
Intruders burst into the crowded, expensively furnished living room.
They came through beautiful French doors leading out to formal gardens and a dining terrazzo.
A warning shot had been fired. Full attention was expected now.
In the flickering lights of the room, the Strauss family stared in horror at hooded figures with drawn revolvers and pump-action shotguns … What they then saw terrified them.
White-on-red Nazi armbands.
The dreaded, vile swastikas.
It was nearly impossible to believe that the next few minutes actually happened.
A German-accented voice was calling out commands.
“All of you people—down on the floor! Down on the floor … You! You there! Down on the floor!”
David had negotiated the last of the front stairs. He heard the incomprehensible instructions. “No one will be harmed if you obey orders.”
A black-gloved fist came out of nowhere.
David saw the gloved hand when it was too late to stop it. His nose smashed open.
Faded Persian carpeting came flying up at his face. Tiny Oriental birds flew toward him. Then there was nothing. Only blackness.
Heather Strauss could hear everything from Elena’s bedroom. She tried not to show her fear. She had to make a decision immediately.
“Nana, can you come with me? If I help you walk?” Heather gasped out.
“Someone wants to hurt us, Nana. Please.”
Nodding weakly, dazed and horrified, Elena Strauss let herself be pulled up from the bed. She felt Heather’s hands go around her back, up under her arms.
Elena and Heather finally made it out into the dim upstairs hallway. Heather went to turn right.
The old woman tried to scream, but no sound came.
Heather saw the two men in the hallway. But it was too late. She started to push Elena the other way. She couldn’t believe this was happening, couldn’t understand how it could possibly be.
The Soldier fired just as Heather Strauss stepped in front of the old woman.
The young doctor crumpled down onto the hallway runner. For a second, Heather desperately wanted David to be there. Then she wanted nothing at all.
See How They Run Page 3