See How They Run Page 22

  “You will be hanged at eleven today. No further discussion is necessary. Tie their arms! Keep them out of my sight until eleven!”

  The hangings didn’t take place until closer to noon. Wealthy hotel patrons, native gardeners and maids, Nazi mistresses from Rio—were forced to stand out in the lush gardens and watch.

  They were made to look up at the glistening, bone-white terrazzo. Buzzards flew high over the terrace like minute black glider planes.

  The sun was a bleached-white circle of fire—

  Suddenly, the three heavy hemp ropes jumped out; then they snapped to rigid, straining attention.

  The three Nazis were left hanging in the sun like slack-bellied sides of aging meat—like the Jews in the Konzentrationslagers of another era.

  Similar scenes were enacted.

  In a sybaritic fourteen-room suite inside a Vienna, Austria, luxury hotel.

  On the roof of an apartment building in Lefrak City, Queens.

  On the front lawn of a millionaire’s house in the Bel Air section of Beverly Hills.

  In Rio, an entire street, an expensive sector of the city where German emigrants had settled, was razed to the ground.