The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  He dropped his hat on the table in front of an empty chair and started in. It was going to be a long day.

  Just after noon he broke off for a while and went around the corner to a tavern where, for the equivalent of about thirty cents, you could buy a glass of beer and a plate of stew made with stolen U.S. Army Spam. The walls were whitewashed and decorated with posters for soccer matches and bicycle races, and most of the other men there were wearing work clothes. The patroness was about fifty, with a big bosom and reddish hair cut long in the style of American bobby soxers; the metal bracelets around her wrists tinkled with every movement. She seemed to know everybody, even Christiansen, whom she had never seen before in her life.

  Christiansen took his plate of stew and looked around for a quiet corner where he could sit down and eat it. His fellow patrons had stared at him for a few sullen seconds when he came in, as if they were prepared to take offense at having lost the war, and then lost interest.

  When he was finished he went outside into the fresh air for a cigarette. There was a vacant lot in the next block where the rubble had been cleared away enough to allow the grass to grow, and some children were playing a noisy and incomprehensible game that was rather like hockey except that as far as Christiansen could make out, there was no ball. He watched for a while, sitting on part of a ruined brick staircase that led up to nothing, nursing his cigarette and wondering if he was ever going to get anywhere checking file folders full of names. It didn’t seem very likely.

  The records of Displaced Persons were incomplete at best and were scattered all over the Western Occupation Zones into the bargain. They also had the disadvantage of being more or less voluntary. It had been easy enough to get everyone’s name and city of origin in 1945, when these people were all still pretty startled to discover themselves alive and were completely dependent on the occupying armies for just day-to-day survival, and some of them, hoping to make contact again with their families, had continued to keep a current address on file. But if finally they had given up hope that there was anyone left from home to look for them, or if for some reason they didn’t want to be found—and if Becker had been telling the truth and his Colonel Hagemann was looking for her as well, it wasn’t so unreasonable that Esther Rosensaft might just decide she wanted to stay lost—then they just dropped from sight.

  Right now, however, Christiansen would settle for some evidence that, as advertised, Esther Rosensaft had lived through the war. If he could just establish that, then there might be other ways of digging her out.

  A car went by on the street, a prewar sedan, dark blue or black under its winter dirtiness. It had a tendency to grind between second and third gears. There was a man on the back seat trying not to be seen as he watched Christiansen through the rear window. His arm was extended along the top of the backrest and he was pressed so deeply into the corner that his head must have been touching the doorpost. That made the third time today.

  It wasn’t a bad choice for a surveillance car if you discounted the rattle, and a little oil probably would have fixed that. But people had learned to live with their infirmities since 1939—probably they didn’t even hear it anymore. So much the worse for them.

  Christiansen didn’t try to decide who was trailing him around town. That was one of those questions which had a way of answering themselves after a while, and a couple of shadowy figures in an old roadster didn’t provide many clues. If they were the police, which was possible, they didn’t present any problem because Christiansen hadn’t broken any laws except the statutes against murder, which hardly even counted these days, and if they were friends of Colonel Hagemann, which was also possible, that only meant he was getting close enough to make the Great Man nervous. That Hagemann would eventually try to have him put out of his misery was something he took so completely for granted that he had almost ceased to worry about it. Almost.

  He had spent the whole morning looking for a “Rosensaft” on one of the hundreds of lists that were kept in no particular order in tiles of everything from transportation vouchers to military police reports. He hadn’t found one. Perhaps General von Goltz hadn’t been quite so successful in ensuring her safety as Becker had imagined.

  He had tried every variation in spelling he could think of: “Rosenzap” and “Rothensapf” and “Roterschatt” and even “Saft, Rosa.” It wasn’t as if clerks with probably only a crash-course knowledge of German didn’t make mistakes like that—but everywhere he drew a blank. Perhaps, if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed them, there might still be some record at Waldenburg, but that was in the Russian Zone and they weren’t sharing any secrets. Finding Esther Rosensaft was proving as difficult as finding her boyfriend the Colonel. Perhaps he should just forget about this particular hot tip and go back to tracking down Hagemann’s old men-at-arms.

  But there was still Linz and Vienna and Stuttgart and—perish the thought—even Palestine before he ran out of file folders to look through. He would be very scrupulous. The nature of his task demanded it.

  On the eighth of June, 1945, the day after he had formed part of the honor guard for King Haakon’s return to his capital, Christiansen had borrowed a car from a friend and had driven north to Kirstenstad. He knew all about what had happened there; intelligence on the incident had been very complete, and he had even managed to interview a couple of the survivors after they were smuggled over to England. He just wanted to have a look for himself.

  The only part of his parents’ house one could see from a distance was a piece of broken chimney. Otherwise, there was only the doorstep, upon which his father and mother had died, and the outline of the exterior wall. Even the cellar was filled in with rubble, and grass grew where his mother had had her sitting room.

  Everywhere else it was just the same. Nobody lived in Kirstenstad now. Nobody could. Nobody ever would again.

  Christiansen had stopped his car at the ruins of the post office—in a tiny hamlet like Kirstenstad, only a crossroads in the middle of farmlands, the post office was a kind of boundary, a line drawn in the dirt to say “here is where we begin”—and walked the rest of the way, listening to his boot soles crunch against the gravel roadbed. He kept thinking, “All of the people who lived here are dead now. It’s all gone.” He hadn’t really believed it could have happened, not until that moment, as he looked at the weeds bowing gracefully in the wind where the blacksmith’s house had been, where Madame Koht, the rector’s widow, had taught him to read music and to play the wooden flute, where the store had stood that had been successively a bakery, a haberdasher’s, and a second-hand bookshop before standing idle for the last two years prior to his departure for America. He hadn’t really believed it, but he believed it now. As he stood on the threshold of his home, where the snows of three winters had cleaned away the traces of his parents’ blood, something seemed to freeze shut inside him. He turned around and started walking back to the car, faster and faster, until he was nearly running. It seemed as if he couldn’t breathe until he got away.

  A week later, when he knew what he had to do, he wrote a letter to the King asking to be allowed to resign his commission. There was no difficulty, since he was officially invalided anyway, and he didn’t want to be anybody’s agent now except his own. He was going to find General von Goltz.

  “You’ll end up just like all the other vigilantes,” a friend had told him. Nils Rynning was his brother officer, his roommate for the two years prior to Normandy, and the only person to whom he had confided his intentions. Nils had pale, almost whitish hair and no taste for revenge. For him, the war was over.

  “They aren’t masters of Europe anymore, remember? They’re on the run. I Just want to give them something to run from.”

  Captain Rynning, who still wore his army greens and had spent every day since liberation taking advantage of the patriotic fervor of Oslo’s female inhabitants, leaned across the table toward him and frowned. He was a thin, wiry man, given to sudden movements that those who didn’t know him might have
ascribed to nerves. They would have been mistaken. Captain Rynning had made thirty-six crossings as a commando and had taken part in the Finnmark operation. Captain Rynning didn’t have any nerves.

  “Yes,” he said, tapping rapidly at the rim of his glass with the nail of his middle finger, as if the sound it made fascinated him. “We have driven the dog back into its hole, where it will lick its wounds and whine. Perhaps, eventually, it will even die there. But still it would be just as well not to stretch one’s arms down into the darkness after it. Its jaws are still filled with perfectly serviceable teeth.”

  Of course. Everyone he knew offered the same warning, as if it had never occurred to Christiansen that the men who had razed Kirstenstad still knew how to defend themselves.

  Which brought him back to the problem of the muddy roadster.

  . . . . .

  Christiansen ground out his cigarette against the shattered brick staircase and, without bothering to look around, started back to his table in the record room. If these people who were keeping such careful track of his movements were Hagemann’s men, there was little enough he could do about it. Let them roam about the streets waiting for him to come out again—it would do them no harm to spend the rest of the afternoon growing restless and apprehensive. He would know how to deal with them when the moment came.

  Upon his return he discovered that the tables were less crowded. The lawyers were gone and those few souls left, the dogged and determined remnant, were turning the pages of the files with a melancholy fatalism, as if they had lost all real expectation of finding whatever names they were looking for.

  And they were probably right. By a quarter after four, Christiansen had satisfied himself that Esther Rosensaft had never registered with the United Nations office in Munich. There was nothing left to do except to return to his hotel.

  The U.N. building had a back entrance, but there seemed no good reason why his shadows should have it pointed out to them that they had been detected. They would merely find themselves another car or, if they had the resources, put a different team on him. He went down the stairs into the bleak winter sun and started back the way he had come.

  Sure enough, within four blocks the roadster had pulled up behind him and driven past. Christiansen could hear the rattle of the gearbox as it shot ahead. He was careful not to look after it.

  What did they want? To kill him probably, but then what were they waiting for? And why suddenly now?

  Had Becker been one too many for them? It seemed unlikely—he was a small fish. Had they picked up on him already in Nuremberg? In Havana?

  There was a string quartet playing in the lounge that evening; it was a regular Wednesday feature at the hotel, something straight out of Edwardian times. The notice on the bulletin board had mentioned Debussy—obviously the management was making a concerted effort to let bygones be bygones—and Christiansen had busted his tail on that piece for his first group recital at Juilliard. So he had rather thought that after dinner he would carry his coffee with him and join the eight or ten other people who usually put in an appearance at these sorts of affairs, to have a listen and see if the fourth movement was really the bitch he remembered. He could use the distraction.

  But first he had to make it back in one more-or-less contiguous piece.

  Because, you see, the car had dropped back and there was a man on foot behind him now. Either they entertained some suspicions that he had tumbled to them and had decided on that account on a change in tactics, or they were moving in for the kill. It didn’t matter—Christiansen had made up his mind it was time to force the issue with these jokers, so if they weren’t ready to go to extremes now they would be soon enough. One can’t allow oneself to be followed all over Europe by such people. Eventually they would start to get in the way.

  By the time he reached the Marienplatz the sun had already disappeared behind the half-ruined Rathaus, and with it had gone the tourists and the hucksters and even the police. The pushcarts had vanished and the wooden doors of the stalls were locked tight. There was nothing left but the emptiness and the ruins and the shadowed darkness. As he walked across that vast, hollow plaza, listening to the echoes of his footfalls against the paving stones, Christiansen was painfully aware how easy it would have been for someone with a rifle, or even a decently accurate pistol, to. . .

  Or perhaps they were waiting. Doubtless they knew he was on his way back to the hotel—they could anticipate his route. Perhaps they would catch him in some narrow sidewalk, step out from behind the corner of a building, and then, when they were close enough to make quite sure. . .

  But this wasn’t the first time he had had to face the prospect of a man with a gun waiting to kill him. That was what the war had been all about. And that had been the daily possibility ever since he had set himself the task of squaring things for Kirstenstad.

  Still, nothing prevented him from admitting to himself that he didn’t like it. The war had taught him the stupidity of imagining that you weren’t afraid.

  The Marienplatz was no more dangerous than any other hundred or so meters between here and the hotel. He kept going, resisting the temptation to slow down, listening all the time for any sound that kept pace with his own footsteps.

  When he reached the other side, he ducked into a shadow and waited.

  There was nothing. He had imagined the whole business—the car with the bad gears, the man behind him, the whole sorry spectacle. He was getting paranoid; it happened to people with bad consciences. He felt in his shirt pocket for his pack of cigarettes.

  He already had the book of matches in his hand when he saw a gray shape, a man in a dark overcoat, come onto the plaza, hesitate for an instant, and then go to the left and disappear around the side of the Rathaus. Apparently Christiansen wasn’t the only one with a bad conscience.

  So. That much he hadn’t imagined—he was being followed. Nice people with no malice in their hearts didn’t find it necessary to be so furtive. The son of a bitch was taking the long way around because he couldn’t work up the nerve to expose himself. He liked shadows, this boy did. He liked narrow streets and the shelter of crowds. He wasn’t going to walk straight across the Marienplatz, not all by himself, not on your life.

  Christiansen lit his cigarette and glanced around him, wondering what he was supposed to do. The enemy had no face—he could be anyone. He probably had a gun, and Christiansen wasn’t carrying anything except the coiled length of catgut that went with him everywhere. The odds were decidedly uneven.

  It was necessary to find out what this one looked like. He would have to be forced into showing himself.

  There was a half destroyed row of shop buildings across the street from Christiansen’s hotel. A few had survived the war without enough damage to force them into closing down, but most were just shells, walls of dead brick that broke off in a ragged line in the middle of the window frames, waiting to be bulldozed. One of them had been a cinema and still contained the ruin of a second story where doubtless the manager had had his office. There was a small window facing out onto the street where perhaps he had stood and watched the patrons queuing up to buy tickets. Christiansen would wait there to see who came to wait for him.

  Which meant he had to get there first. He threw his cigarette down on the paving stones—they were a nasty habit he had picked up during the war, and he kept intending to give them up—and broke into a run. He had a head start. He wouldn’t try to be devious—he would leave that to the man behind him. That was the great disadvantage to shadowing people; you always had to take the long way around and you couldn’t afford to crowd. Christiansen didn’t have those problems. He intended to be there waiting when the other guy started to panic that he had dropped out on him.

  The distance was probably a shade over half a mile. Christiansen made it in under four minutes and slowed down only as he crossed the Odeonplatz and rounded the corner to his hotel. The front door to the cinema was padlocked, but that meant remarkably little since the whol
e back of the building was blown out. He climbed over the rubble and up the rickety stairway that led to the deserted office. No one had troubled to lock that door.

  The little room was hardly fifteen feet square. There were pieces of the ceiling on the floor and very little else. Except for a calendar on one wall—giving the date as August 22, 1944—and an empty packing case by the little window, everything had been taken away by scavengers. Christiansen picked his careful way through the chunks of plaster and the shattered two-by-fours and sat down on the packing case. The window was broken in two of its four panes and caked with dust, but it provided an excellent view of the whole length of the street

  The hotel had its lights on. It looked quite festive, or would have if the structures around it hadn’t been uninhabited, ruined, lurching to this side and that as if time had stopped for them the instant prior to collapse. Munich had been gutted as badly as any city in Europe. It was a metropolis of corpses where anything like celebration was not only in poor taste but almost heartless. Christiansen decided he didn’t like his hotel, that he was looking forward to moving on.

  The packing case was not terribly comfortable, and it was a cold night. Fortunately the Norwegian army knew all about cold nights, and his greatcoat was proof against freezing to death anytime soon. Still, he would have preferred to be back in his own room, smoking a cigarette and changing for dinner.

  It was about a quarter to seven when he noticed the man in the charcoal gray overcoat standing nervously in the shadow of what had once been a furniture store. Christiansen might never have seen him at all, it was so dark, except that the fellow kept shifting his weight from one leg to the other with an impatient movement that reminded one of a child who needed to go to the bathroom. It was a cold night.