THE LINZ TATTOO
a novel by
Nicholas Guild
Published by Nicholas Guild at Smashwords.com
Copyright © 1986 Nicholas Guild
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Havana, Cuba: February 26, 1948
“I’m quite sure its him, even without his uniform. It hasn’t even been half a year, and that isn’t the sort of face one forgets.”
“I think he’s really quite good looking.”
Major Robert Briggs, late of His Majesty’s XXIst Army Group, glanced across the narrow cabaret table at his new wife and felt a sharp pang of something like jealousy—they weren’t very encouraging words to hear a mere four days after one’s wedding night.
But she was right, of course. The man he had pointed out to her, standing at the back of the tiny smoke-curtained stage, almost hidden behind six or seven other musicians and a huge double bass, was tall and strikingly handsome. His shoulders could have been a yard and a half wide, and his tarnished blond hair, which he wore rather long, made him look like every schoolgirl’s notion of a Viking prince.
It was his face, however, which had struck the chord in Briggs’ memory, the pitiless blue eyes—even at this distance one could see that they were a deep blue, like precious stones—and the hard, sharp, impassive features, as if the bones underneath were made of iron.
And, of course, across the back of the left hand, catching a gleam from the footlights as the fingers moved back and forth over the strings of his double bass, was a wide, flat scar. Briggs had noticed the scar the first time they had met, in a prison yard in Germany. There couldn’t be any doubt it was the same chap.
“I stood right next to him that god awful morning at Rebdorf. Seven big bloody Nazi generals took the drop in less than forty minutes, and he never even raised an eyebrow. I felt rather sick, I don’t mind telling you—no one looks his best after he’s been hanged, and a couple of them had bitten clean through their tongues at the last second, making quite a mess of themselves. It was a pretty horrible thing to watch, but he might as well have been waiting in line for his tea.”
“What was he doing there?”
Thelma smiled with interest. He had learned early that, like a lot of American girls, she rather liked gamy stories about the war. She was really quite a blood-thirsty little bitch, which was one of the reasons he had decided to marry her. But just at that moment he found himself wishing she would exhibit a little decent feminine squeamishness.
“Same as my sweet self, I suppose,” he said finally, making sure to look away as he spoke. “We were ‘official witnesses’ if you will, he for the Norwegians and me for the British. There were five or six of us. Yes, six. They served us coffee in tin cups while we waited for sunrise, and there were introductions all round. Probably we were all a bit nervous; the Russian, a great big cad of a fellow with a face as red as a radish, actually started to giggle, I remember. And then, after an hour, the executions began. I’m not likely to forget anything connected with that affair.”
The music from what presumably was supposed to be a Jazz combo was as bad as any Briggs had ever heard, even in his own country, which over the last several months he had come to regard with a certain distaste. Since moving to New York, where, on the strength of his war record and the profound respect every former colonial feels toward the British upper classes, he had gotten himself a very soft job as a sales representative for one of the big Manhattan advertising agencies, he had become a connoisseur of all things American. American music was louder and better to dance to, American women were more amusing in bed, and American food, well, there was simply no comparison. He was acclimatized and happy and on his honeymoon, so there was little enough to complain about. He simply wished Thelma hadn’t insisted on this absurd package cruise, and that the rum didn’t always taste like diesel fuel, and that sometime or other they could stumble across a band that didn’t make “Tea for Two” sound like the Guatemalan national anthem.
He was also rather beginning to wish that he hadn’t run into Christiansen—he was almost positive that had been the fellow’s name. Or at least that he had kept his mouth shut about it. Thelma was watching the stage with an attention in no way justified by the music being produced there.
“Ask him to come and have a drink with us,” she said, turning toward her husband and smiling as she brushed back a wisp of pale brown hair. It was an astonishingly seductive gesture. “Perhaps he’s noticed you too—it wouldn’t be very nice to let him think you were trying to snub him, would it?”
Briggs didn’t even allow himself time to hesitate.
“All right. If you like.”
He pinched back the sleeve of his coat to have a look at his watch. It was a quarter after two in the morning—in a few minutes they would be starting back to their ship where, if he hadn’t drunk too much, perhaps Thelma’s enthusiasm could be channeled into some more useful direction. It wouldn’t hurt anything if she ended the evening a bit spiky. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt anything.
“They seem to be taking a break. Shall I just pop over there and renew acquaintance?”
By the time he reached the bandstand, most of the musicians had already left it and were making their way among the closely packed tables to the bar. But Christiansen hadn’t stirred, his attention was absorbed by one of the strings of his gigantic instrument, which he seemed to be attempting to tune. He appeared even larger up close, his white dinner jacket stretched across his massive chest, and the expression on his lace registered a sullen concentration.
When he noticed Briggs moving around the edge of the stage, his blue eyes narrowed, reminding one of a wary animal.
“I suppose you don’t recall me,” Briggs began, allowing his mouth to stretch into what he realized had to be a not-terribly-dignified grin. He extended his hand up toward the double bassist, who stared down with what amounted to open hostility. “We met that day at Rebdorf. The name is ‘Briggs.’ I was the British officer—I stood right next to you.”
There was no response. The man appeared not to know what he was talking about. The hand remained suspended in mid air until finally Briggs started to feel just a trifle foolish and allowed it to drop back down to his side.
“I remember you very well—Captain Christiansen, wasn’t it? Surely you can’t have forgotten the prison.”
“My name isn’t Christiansen, and I’ve never been in prison. What would I have been doing in prison?”
The voice was expressionless and rather gravelly, as if from disuse, but the accent was American. It had been American at Rebdorf as well—Briggs had wondered how a Norwegian could have learned to speak such perfect Yankee English. The startlingly blue eyes never wavered as the man who claimed not to be Captain Christiansen seemed to wait with patient resignation for whatever might come next.
Briggs hardly knew what to say—could he have been mistaken? No. There was still the scar. Everything, even the voice, could be explained away, but not the scar. It covered the back of Christiansen’s left hand like a bandage, the sort of scar that suggested a deep, crippling wound. This was Christiansen.
“We were there to witness the execution of some German war criminals,” he answered, with somewhat greater confidence. “You were the Norwegian representative. Surely you don’t deny it, old man.”
“My name is ‘Barrows.’ I’ve never been to G
ermany.”
One finger of the scarred hand glided slowly and delicately up a string of the double bass, as if measuring its tension. The action seemed completely unconscious; the man “Barrows,” who had never been to Germany, regarded the veteran of His Majesty’s XXIst Army Group with the closed expression of someone who expected that his answer would be taken as definitive.
“Well then, I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
What else was there to say? Briggs turned and started making his way back to the table where Thelma was waiting with what struck him as unseemly eagerness.
“It appears I dialed a wrong number,” he said, suddenly not very keen on explanations. It was late at night, he was tired, and, yes, he had drunk too much. By the time he sat down again he could see that most of the musicians had returned to the bandstand and the entertainment was about to resume. It was an appalling prospect.
“I thought you were so positive.” Thelma smiled. There was something just faintly contemptuous in her smile, as if he had displayed some sort of weakness. Briggs found himself wondering what she was going to be like to live with in another ten or fifteen years.
“Well, I still think it was him. Probably he was just embarrassed. It must be a bit of a comedown, after all, from officer and gentleman to playing backup in a cheese box like this place. The man’s entitled to his feelings—By God, he’s gone, isn’t he.”
Yes, he was. The double bass was resting quietly on its side, like a fat woman asleep in the sun, and the wall behind it was empty.
. . . . .
Christiansen had walked no more than a few blocks when the rain started. At that time of year it came down in torrents, as rhythmic as the bearing of a heart. It was impossible to go on; one simply had to run for cover and wait until the downpour ended.
He stood under the tin awning of an empty grocery store and lit a cigarette. First that damn fool Briggs and now this rain. It just didn’t seem to be his night.
Of course he remembered. Briggs had been within arm’s length of him there in the prison yard, quietly going green. Imagine anyone who had been through the war sicking up at the sight of a few men being hanged—one would have thought that by then everyone would have seen enough death and horror to render them immune for life, but maybe Briggs had been a clerk or something.
It had rained that night too. There had still been pools of water in the prison yard, and he remembered how in the hour before dawn, in the light from the guard towers, a team of German POWs had swept the walkways so their generals wouldn’t get wet feet walking to the gallows. He remembered how von Goltz had stood up there on the narrow wooden stage, his face expressionless, almost frozen, as they slipped the hood over his head. There had been no last words, just a kind of thud as the rope jerked tight. All things considered, it would hardly seem to have been enough.
Anyway, tonight wasn’t the occasion for talking over old times. The last thing in the world Christiansen needed was to get entangled with some nostalgic former comrade-in-arms—the fighting hadn’t been over even three years, but everyone seemed to have forgotten what it had been like. It was astonishing how sentimental some men seemed to have become about the lost opportunities of carnage.
But tonight there was only time for business. The business the war had left unsettled. Briggs and his reminiscences and his whiskey and his lady friend could wait.
After about twenty minutes the rain started to slacken and then, quite suddenly, it was just gone. Christiansen ground out his second cigarette under the toe of his shoe and started on again.
The note left at his hotel that afternoon had been as explicit as it needed to be: “If the man with the strings wishes to hear of mutual friends, he may join me for breakfast tomorrow morning at my home. Gerhart”
Gerhart Becker lived above his tobacco shop on the Calle de Machado under the name of “Bauer.” He had moved to Havana in 1946, coming from Argentina, and had paid to establish his new business enterprise with seventy-five hundred dollars in cash. Christiansen knew all about Gerhart Becker. The information had cost him most of his savings, two years of his life, and three murders. And now Herr Becker was offering a deal to avoid becoming Number Four.
Or perhaps he was merely interested in tricking Christiansen into some foolish mistake so he could eliminate that threat once and for all.
Christiansen had no trouble finding the tobacco shop. It look up the first floor of a two-story building between a luggage store and a small hotel. There was a taxi stand on the other side of the street, at the end of the block, and even at a quarter to three in the morning there were still a couple of cabs about, the interior lights on to show their drivers asleep behind the steering wheels. Perhaps there was a cabaret or a brothel somewhere about—Havana was like that—little clusters of nightlife hiding out in what appeared to be the most respectable of middle-class business districts.
The upper story, where, to all appearances, Becker was sleeping quietly, was curtained and dark. But Christiansen was putting little faith in appearances, so he found himself a convenient shadow to hide in and settled down to wait.
The rain had left the air feeling slightly clammy, and Christiansen kept his hands in the pockets of the blue overcoat he wore over his dinner jacket. He wished he could have had another cigarette, but of course that was impossible under the circumstances. He was watching the windows across the street.
A man walked by on the sidewalk in front of where Christiansen was standing. It wasn’t Becker, who had reddish hair and a round, rather Slavic face, but one of the natives, out, from the looks of him, for a little catting around. Under the wide brim of a light-colored felt hat, Christiansen could see a pencil-thin moustache, a narrow jaw, and two rather frightened-looking eyes. Perhaps he was aware that someone was there in the shadow of the archway that marked the entrance to a darkened restaurant, because his pace seemed to quicken slightly as he passed.
Christiansen was tired. He had been awake for something like twenty hours, and it seemed like a good deal longer than that since anything had passed his lips but cold coffee and cigarette smoke. And on top of everything else his hand felt as if it were stuffed with broken glass. It always throbbed after a night of playing, even the thump-thump-thump of a bass fiddle, but tonight it was worse. The surgeon had told him he would always have trouble with it. Anyway, there wasn’t any point in complaining—he should probably count himself lucky it was still attached to his wrist.
It was about ten minutes before four when he noticed that the inside edge of one of the curtains behind the middle window upstairs was no longer hanging quite straight. Someone had pulled it a little to one side in order to see out onto the street.
So, Herr Bauer—the former Herr Becker, the former Sergeant Becker, Ninth Occupation Division, Fifth Brigade, Waffen-SS, Norway—Herr Bauer was at home, and just as restless as everyone else. It would appear he wasn’t looking forward to the morning very much.
Or perhaps he was. From his point of view the strategy made a certain amount of sense. If he knew he was being hunted, why shouldn’t he take the opportunity of choosing the time and place for an encounter he probably realized was inevitable? Didn’t he have a life here, something worth defending? If he was sufficiently sure of himself—and this, after all, was his warren, not Christiansen’s—why should he run?
And when were the SS ever unsure of themselves?
And, of course, Becker was perfectly aware that he was being hunted. Christiansen had been no more than a little surprised that morning when he had returned from breakfast and the man at the desk had handed him a small buff-colored envelope in exchange for his room key.
“This was left for you a few minutes ago, Señor Barrows,” he had murmured, smiling his polite, inoffensive Latin smile. “The gentleman said he did not wish to disturb your meal.”
Becker wasn’t even bothering to be coy—the address of his shop was printed right on the flap. It was the sort of envelope that might accompany a box of gift cigars, and
even in Cuba it paid to advertise.
And why should it be so surprising that Becker would know he was being hunted? These men were all condemned, convicted in absentia for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by a Norwegian court. But more than that, the old boys’ network the SS maintained was probably humming with word that somebody was killing off the alumni of Colonel Hagemann’s command. People tend to get nervous and efficient after three of their own have been found hanged in lengths of catgut. Probably by now they knew all about Inar Christiansen, even down to the name on his forged American passport.
The slight hitch in the curtain disappeared. Christiansen waited for perhaps a quarter of a minute and then stepped quickly across the street to the hotel that stood pressed up against the tobacco shop like the next book on the shelf. He wanted to look at Becker’s garden.
It was astonishing how no one ever questioned the presence of a strange man in a hotel lobby at four in the morning—provided, of course, that he appeared to know what he was about and didn’t loiter. The night porter merely glanced up from his newspaper, perhaps wondering for an instant which of the resident ladies would still be receiving callers at such an hour. He had lost interest by the time Christiansen disappeared up the stairway.
The roof, of course, was deserted.
The hotel had only three stories, but Havana was a city of low buildings so it was possible to stand there on the parapet and look out over the whole broad tangle of streets, smeared here and there with colored light, all the way to the harbor. Above, the stars twinkled as brightly as if it had never rained, mocking in their indifference. If all this ceased in the next instant, they seemed to affirm, who would care? It was a strangely comforting idea.
Christiansen stared down into the tobacco shop’s back yard, which was partially illuminated by a light over the hotel’s rear entrance. Still, he wouldn’t have cared to walk around in it, since its owner had done a thorough job of booby-trapping almost the whole area.
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