The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  Christiansen sat at his window, waiting, suddenly grown very calm, almost disappointed. It was only a man after all, like himself. Perhaps this wasn’t even the one.

  But then the man in the shadow seemed to make up his mind about something and with a kind of shudder started toward the hotel. Or perhaps he hadn’t made up his mind; perhaps it had only been an impulse, one he didn’t know whether or not to regret. He walked slowly, as if he hardly knew himself where he was going, and then all at once, when he had come level with the polished revolving glass doors of the hotel’s main entrance, a few quick steps carried him through and out of sight.

  If this is the one, Christiansen thought, if this is the one he will only stop long enough to check behind the porter’s desk to see if my key is in its box. He knows the hotel, so he will know the room number. And he won’t wait around. As soon as he is sure that I’ve not returned he’ll come back outside and find himself a place from which to keep watch. If this is the one. . .

  And there he was. He stepped out into the circle of light from the hotel’s entrance and stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, looking as if he expected to see his worst enemy. Maybe he did.

  It was the first chance Christiansen had had for anything like a good look at him, and he was surprised to see that the man who had been tailing him hardly seemed old enough to have heard of Kirstenstad. He wasn’t wearing a hat, his hair was black and curly, like a poodle’s, and in need of cutting. It was a thin face, handsome and dark but suggesting a certain lack of decision. Long, rather delicate hands dangled from the sleeves of his overcoat. In a few years, if he was lucky, he might grow into a real fanatic, but nobody believes in much of anything at twenty.

  And he was looking straight up at Christiansen’s little second-story window.

  Christiansen remained sitting on his packing case, as immobile as if he were part of the building. He was intellectually convinced that there was no way anyone could see him from across the street—he told himself that it was impossible, and he nearly even believed it—but he was not foolish enough to move. He would wait and see what happened next.

  Nothing. The boy with the curly hair continued to stare up at his window, and then he glanced back inside the lobby of the hotel, and then down at the sleeve of his overcoat. He was a long time deciding.

  But in the end he walked across the street. Christiansen knew, with an instinct he couldn’t have explained, that in another two minutes this guy would be coming up those shaky, dust-covered stairs and through the door. And Christiansen had nothing in his pocket except a coil of fiddle string.

  Could he have seen him through the window? Perhaps, if he knew what he was looking for. But how could the kid have known, when Christiansen himself hadn’t known until perhaps half an hour ago? It wasn’t as if this ruined movie house were somewhere he haunted like a shadow.

  Christiansen could hear him now. The office door was open about an inch, and he was down below, in what had once been the lobby, climbing over fallen pieces of timber. He wasn’t exactly being quiet about it, so perhaps he didn’t know that Christiansen was upstairs. Or perhaps he realized the futility of trying to make one’s way through such a place in silence. Or perhaps he just didn’t care whether Christiansen heard him or not.

  There was no time to waste—he was on the stairway. Christiansen rose from the packing case and stepped lightly across to the doorway. It was almost completely dark now. He waited by the door, hardly daring to breathe.

  All at once he stopped hearing the sound of footsteps on the stairs. For perhaps as long as fifteen seconds there was perfect quiet and then, finally, a slow, cautious creak of dry wood as the man outside resumed his climb. Only now he was being very careful.

  The door swung open. He didn’t come in, not right away. And then a half step—one foot over the sill, and a huge revolver in his right hand swept over the room like a searchlight.

  There wasn’t time to think. The two men were hardly more than half a yard apart, and in a fraction of a second he would see Christiansen and fire the revolver. He had only to turn his head.

  Christiansen made a grab. His fingers snapped shut over the cylinder just as the revolver stopped in its arc. It was pointed straight at his belly. He didn’t know—if the thing was already cocked, he was dead.

  They stood there like that for what seemed most of the night, looking directly into each other’s eyes. There was surprise; there was fear. Neither of them moved.

  And then Christiansen felt the revolver twisting in his grasp. The fellow was trying to pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t fire because the cylinder couldn’t turn. The gamble had paid off.

  With a short, deft movement, Christiansen brought up the heel of his left hand and snapped it into the man’s face. There was a sound like a lock clicking shut as the nose broke, and then there was a great deal of blood. It streamed out of the nostrils and the man clapped his free hand across his mouth and nose as though he wanted to keep himself from screaming.

  Still keeping his hold on the revolver, Christiansen threw his weight against him, sending him sprawling into the door. In an instant he was down; Christiansen kicked him once in the pit of the stomach, and all resistance was at an end. The man had even let go of his gun.

  Christiansen put it in the pocket of his greatcoat and began searching for papers and additional weapons. There was no hurry now—whoever he was, he had other things to think about than fighting back. He lay there on the floor, groaning quietly, as helpless as a baby. Christiansen found a wallet and a passport.

  The wallet was full of British pound notes, and the passport, which was registered to the British mandate in Palestine, was filled out in the name of one Itzhak Dessauer, resident at 276B Hagesher Street, Tel Aviv.

  Terrific. It would be worth something to know what he had done to bring that crowd down on his back.

  But there were consolations. Unless things had changed a great deal since the last time he had checked, at least he didn’t have to worry that anyone with a name like “Itzhak Dessauer” was working for Hagemann.

  4

  When Itzhak came back that night, the first thing Mordecai Leivick did was send for a doctor—a Jewish doctor, who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut—and the second thing he did was to inquire, in the politest possible way, how little Itzikel, who was such a tough guy that it was all his mother could do to keep him from running off to join the Stern Gang, how a formidable fellow like that had managed to lose his gun and get his nose broken for him on a simple shadowing job. He was a regular miracle was this boy, a real demon.

  After the doctor, that good man, had finally left, Mrs. Dessauer’s little son sat on a wooden chair in the center of their rented room, slumped slightly forward and resting the points of his elbows on his thighs, looking like a battle casualty with his two black eyes and the dried blood around the nostrils of his puffy, bandaged nose. But his distress was more likely mental than physical. He had made a first-class fool out of himself and, for once, he had the good sense to know it.

  “I saw the footprints in the dust on the stairs,” he said morosely. He drew himself up straight and then subsided again into a dejected slouch, as if he was beginning to realize the futility of striking attitudes. “I had my gun out, but he jumped me.”

  “And how did he contrive to do that?”

  Leivick, who was leaning against the door with his arms folded across his chest, smiled kindly. His eldest boy, had he lived through Treblinka, would have been just about Itzhak’s age, and he liked the little pisher, but there was no room in this for sentiment.

  The expression in the boy’s blackened eyes was genuinely pathetic.

  “He just reached out and grabbed the gun,” he said finally. “I didn’t come through the door right away. I’m sorry, Mordecai.”

  “And what were you doing going after the man with a gun in the first place—you want to tell me that? If you knew he was up there, why didn’t you just tiptoe back down the stairs and lea
ve him in peace, eh? You had orders maybe to shoot him? We don’t have enough troubles with the local authorities, is that it?”

  “I thought maybe I could pull him in and we could squeeze him a little. I thought I could . . .”

  “You thought?” Leivick scratched his heavy forearm through the shirt sleeve, wondering if miracles would ever cease. “You were supposed to follow the man and report, Itzhak, not to think. Leave the thinking to me—the Mossad doesn’t pay a squirt like you to think.”

  “The Mossad doesn’t pay me at all.”

  “My very words.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to—Itzhak knew the rules now. He would keep his creative outbursts in check.

  It was almost possible to feel sorry for him. After all, his heart was in the right place.

  “I still think he’s one of Hagemann’s thugs,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he stared down at his hands with sullen concentration. “God knows, he looks the part.”

  Leivick ran a hand over his scalp, which was perfectly bald, and sighed. He had already missed dinner by about two hours, something that couldn’t help but add to his impatience, and now it seemed that he had a congenital idiot to deal with. He wished the other fellows would hurry up and come back; the strain of listening to such rubbish was beginning to get him down.

  “Itzikel, please allow me to remind you of something. The SS don’t like Jewish people, not even nice boys like you. If that had been one of Hagemann’s men you would not be sitting here feeling your nose throb. You would be dead, probably with embellishments. Okay? We made a mistake—the man isn’t a Nazi assassin. He s something else, so live with it”

  Dessauer looked less than convinced, but Mordecai Lelvick had almost ceased to care. These young Sabras, they seemed to live in a dream world where every Gentile who wasn’t an Arab had to be Martin Bormann.

  As soon as he heard footsteps in the hallway outside, Leivick reached into the top drawer of the room’s battered old dresser and pulled out a duplicate of the British army revolver which earlier that evening Itzhak Dessauer had so ignominiously lost. He was reasonably certain who it was, but there were such things as necessary precautions.

  “Mordecai, it’s us,” was followed by two sharp raps on the door. The pistol went back inside the dresser drawer, and Leivick walked over and threw the catch on the door lock.

  The two men who came inside were both in their middle thirties and carried with them that indefinable suggestion of having seen it all. They were old campaigners: Jerry Hirsch, who had grown up in America and emigrated to Palestine with his parents in 1929, had joined the Haganah in 1934, at the age of twenty, and served with the Palmach in Syria during the war. Since the truce with the British authorities had lapsed he had been spending most of his time in Italy, getting survivors of the Final Solution past the blockade—that was where he had met Mordecai, in June of 1945. He was a short, compact man and tended to sway at the shoulders when he walked, like an American. He looked like no one in particular and had participated in the Exodus affair. The current reward for his capture was fifteen hundred pounds, which made him the sixth most wanted man on the British Army Authority lists.

  Amos Faglin, who closed the door behind them, was taller and thin to the point of uneasiness. His face was crowded with difficult angles—the cheekbones and the shelf over his eyes seemed to jut out like the corners of carved stone blocks, and his jaw could have been drafted with a straightedge and a pair of calipers. He had blue eyes that never seemed to rest. His wife and two daughters lived in Haifa, but he hadn’t seen them in nearly a year. Like Hirsch. he had fought in Syria with the Palmach and, like Hirsch, he was a smuggler. His specialty, however, was weaponry—he was an expert in small arms and explosives, which he regularly shipped in boxes marked Agricultural Implements to his father-in-law’s warehouses in Jaffa. Unlike Hirsch, he was not a celebrity. The British, so far as was known, remained unaware of his existence.

  “Did you have your look?”

  “Yes, and so did he.”

  Jerry Hirsch was standing beside a small table beneath the room’s only window; his hand rested on the lid of the portable coffee pot that was kept there, as if he were testing to see if it could still be warm. It wasn’t—nobody had made any coffee since that morning, and it was a quarter to ten at night—so he lifted his fingers away with great delicacy.

  “He was sitting out in the lounge in his dinner jacket, listening to a crowd of fiddle players. He had us spotted the second we came into the room. He seemed to know all about us; we might as well have had “Haganah” printed in white letters down the lapels of our jackets. He watched us watching him for a minute or so, and then he seemed to get bored and turned back to his concert. I’ll give him that—he doesn’t rattle easy.”

  Dessauer visibly brightened. It seemed to make him feel better that Hirsch had been impressed by the man who had taken away his gun and broken his nose. He was about to say something when a glance from Leivick made him close his mouth with a snap.

  “He is not small,” Faglin added as he sat down on the bed. He took off his hat and set it beside him on the coverlet, quite as if he hoped to stay there forever. “I would hate to feel those hands around my neck. Shall we kill him?”

  The expression on his face suggested it was not something to which he looked forward.

  “We are not murderers, Amos. We don’t even know if this man poses a threat to us.”

  “He certainly posed a threat to Gerhart Becker.” Jerry Hirsch laughed soundlessly at his own joke. He was crouched on the floor, pawing through the contents of his suitcase until he came up with a carton of American cigarettes. “What a way to kill a man—do you suppose he was trying to make it look like a suicide?”

  Mordecai shook his head. He had been giving the matter a good deal of thought since Itzhak had come back with his broken nose.

  “No—a man who hangs himself isn’t found with his hands tied behind his back. Is it your impression our friend would be careless enough to overlook a detail like that?”

  Now it was Hirsch’s turn to shake his head.

  “Precisely. And I have trouble with the idea that Hagemann would order one of his old subordinates—his personal servant, in fact—killed in such a manner. SS men deserve the courtesy of a bullet, and Hagemann is the type to be very scrupulous about observing such little niceties.”

  “Also there is the fact that he saw fit to spare our Itzekel.” Faglin treated the young man to a weary contemptuous smile. There was nothing personal in it. Like Leivick he understood that Dessauer had to be impressed with the magnitude of his failure if there was to be any hope of his developing into a dependable operative.

  “Yes, there is that.”

  Mordecai pushed himself away from the dresser and began measuring out teaspoons of coffee into the pot. He was dreadfully hungry. Except for the war years, he had always been a heavy man, and it might be tomorrow morning before any one of this crew thought about food. Coffee was better than nothing.

  “Which leaves us with the question, what does he want? Hagemann is murdering his old associates, but this one doesn’t seem to be part of that. And now we find him dressed up as a Norwegian army officer and checking into the records of Displaced Persons. What name, by the way, is he using at the hotel?”

  “Christiansen.” Faglin, who was watching with more than routine interest as Leivick made the coffee, glanced down at his hand, just as if he were checking a memorandum written across the back of his thumb. “Inar Christiansen.”

  “Good God! Well, what would you expect?”

  They all turned to look at Itzhak Dessauer, the source of this odd interjection. He was smiling behind his bandages, apparently quite proud of himself.

  “It may even be his real name,” Faglin went on, as if determined to ignore the interruption. “This is the first time we have been this near to him—perhaps we could manage a set of fingerprints.” He shrugged his shoulders wearily, as if he r
eally couldn’t imagine why they should bother.

  “Perhaps we could even ask him to pose for a portrait,” Jerry Hirsch added. His eyebrows were working up and down à la Groucho Marx—it was his method of signaling irony.

  “Jerry’s right. He’s been one step ahead of us ever since we first became aware of him last April in Brazil. He doesn’t bear toying with. Do you want some of this?”

  Leivick held out a coffee cup to Amos Faglin, grasping it by the rim with his middle finger and thumb. Faglin accepted it somewhat grudgingly.

  “Then what do you have in mind we should do about him, Mordecai? If he isn’t one of Hagemann’s thugs, then why does he do their work for them? He’s killed two members of the Fifth Brigade that we know of—he’s practically making a career of it.”

  “A man does not have to be working for Hagemann to have good reason for killing former SS men.” Leivick smiled and shrugged, as if admitting to some ludicrous family infirmity. “Who should know that better than us?”

  Faglin tasted his coffee and made a face as if either he didn’t like it or the subject of Inar Christiansen was beginning to bore him.

  “Then if he wants Hagemann himself, he’s competition. It could be we should kill him after all.”

  This was not a line of argument which Leivick wished to encourage, so he smiled.

  “As you said yourself, that might not be easy. Since the indications are he’s no amateur, anything of the kind could turn into an expensive proposition, and I’d hate to lose any of you boys.”

  “Then what?”

  Faglin and Hirsch, the men of action, exchanged an impatient glance. They shared the soldier’s view of things. They had little tolerance for dilemmas.

  Mordecai Leivick s smile began to take on a fixed quality.

  “Then what, Mordecai?” Hirsch also accepted a cup of coffee, but set it down on the dresser while he finished his first cigarette. He wasn’t an absent-minded smoker, he seemed to prefer savoring his vices in isolation. “He isn’t likely to go away, and we can’t ignore the man forever. What are we supposed to do about him?”