Free See How They Run by James Patterson Page A

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 screamed 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