The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  Leivick didn’t like the way they were all staring at him. It was on occasions like this that he wished he had emigrated to America and gone into the jewelry business with his late wife’s cousin. But no, he had to be a nation builder—and now they were all expecting an answer.

  Well, they were right to expect it. After all, he took his orders from Tel Aviv, but they took theirs from him.

  “Maybe we should ask him,” he said finally, wondering if he hadn’t taken leave of his senses.

  . . . . .

  Having allowed himself to be captured by the wild hope that there might be someplace along his route where he could buy something to eat, Leivick was crushed with disappointment to find that, for the most part, the street lights hadn’t been turned on. But what should he expect in a city under military occupation? Most of the buildings had been gutted by the Allied bombing—people had other things to think about besides nightlife.

  Leivick had seen ruined cities before. They gave him no feeling of satisfaction, even when they were German. He wasn’t awed, or even oppressed. He was merely hungry.

  Perhaps Christiansen, if he didn’t kill him or call the porter to have him thrown out of that fancy hotel where he was staying, could be prevailed upon to order up a couple of sandwiches from room service.

  Would Christiansen kill him? He thought not. Itzhak Dessauer had gone after the man with a gun and hadn’t suffered anything worse than a broken nose—and richly deserved too. And less than three hours later, Hirsch and Faglin had seen him quietly sipping his coffee and listening to the hotel’s evening entertainment. He hadn’t spared Itzhak because he was afraid of retribution—according to Hirsch, he didn’t seem the type to be afraid of anything. He just wasn’t a homicidal maniac.

  So Leivick wasn’t worried about his life, he was merely worried. Mr. Christiansen, if that was really his name, was an imponderable.

  It was over an hour’s walk to the hotel, and as he pushed through the revolving door Leivick was glad to be in out of the wind.

  It was like a different world inside. The carpets were clean and the brass polished, there was an air of prosperity and fashion such as Leivick had almost forgotten was possible. He crossed the lobby—glad, under the watchful eye of the concierge, that he had thought to wear his best suit—and began his assault on the stairway. Christiansen’s room, as they had already established, was on the fourth floor.

  In Prague, before the war, when he had been an attorney for the Ministry of Public Works, sometimes he and his wife would come to a hotel like this for dinner. Life had been comfortable in Prague, very agreeable, right up to 1938. Right up to Treblinka.

  Now he wondered how he could ever have been so naive.

  He was tired by the time he reached the final flight of stairs, tired in both flesh and spirit. It had been a long day, and he was fifty, and everything seemed a trifle unreal. Perhaps he simply disliked being reminded that there were places where the old life still continued. Perhaps, finally, that was why he had turned down his wife’s cousin’s offer and had gone instead to Israel, where they were building a whole new order of existence, where there were no ghosts except among the living.

  And then, suddenly, he felt better. He stood there with his hand on the balustrade, and a strange, sad, somehow comforting emotion took possession of him, and he lost the sense of wandering through emptiness. It was several seconds before his conscious mind took note of the music.

  No more than a wisp of sound, it floated through he still corridor, hanging in the air like smoke. A cello, full of melancholy dignity. Someone was playing the radio.

  And then suddenly the melody broke off in middle of a phrase, and the phrase was repeated, shaped just a little differently. It wasn’t a radio—one of the guests was playing to himself, and not at all badly either.

  Leivick listened, hardly breathing, entranced. The grandeur of the prelude, full of double stops and quavering trills, gave way to a jolly, dancelike tune that transformed itself, without so much as a pause for breath, into a sinuous aria executed at blinding speed, the notes slipping eerily into one another as if all played on a single string.

  I wonder how he manages it, Leivick thought. And then it occurred to him that the music was coming from behind Christiansen’s door. It had stopped even before he raised his hand to knock.

  “Come in—it isn’t locked.”

  Leivick tried the knob, which turned easily in his hand. Hotels always kept their doors locked, simply as a matter of habit; one had to press the button on the mortise plate or the door would lock automatically as soon as it had swung shut. Therefore, he had been expected. He pushed the door open, but didn’t cross the threshold. He would wait and see.

  What he saw was a man sitting in a chair—and, yes, he was every bit as big as Faglin had claimed. His sleeves were rolled up over arms matted with blond hair, and his left hand held both the neck of the cello that rested against his knees and, between the first and middle fingers, the bow. In his right hand was a British army revolver of familiar pattern. It was pointed straight at Leivick’s chest.

  “You play very beautifully, Mr. Christiansen. Shall I come inside, or do you plan to shoot me from this distance?”

  “I said, ‘Come in.’”

  With some misgivings, Leivick stepped forward a few paces and allowed the door to close behind him. Christiansen didn’t move; the pistol continued to line up on Leivick’s chest. Nothing had changed, except that now he was firmly inside the trap. He held on to his hat brim with both hands, as if to give assurance of his good behavior.

  “Mr. Christiansen,” he said finally, “do you suppose I could prevail upon you to put that thing away? If I had meant you any harm I would hardly have come here alone.”

  “Are you alone?”

  Even sitting, Christiansen managed to convey the impression of being extremely tall. There was something intimidating about his very stillness—he hardly seemed even to be breathing. The eyes in his hard, handsome face were as impassive as ice.

  “Yes. I’m alone. Quite alone. Do you imagine, Mr. Christiansen, that we would storm you in your hotel room?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  The muzzle of the pistol came up a fraction of an inch, as if he were correcting his aim—now, Leivick concluded, the bullet would probably catch him square in the throat.

  “All I know is that suddenly you people are crawling all over me. The kid I took this off of didn’t give the impression he wanted my autograph.”

  Now the pistol wasn’t pointing at anything. It was simply lying in the palm of his hand, an exhibit. He set it down on a small table beside his chair.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what I’ve done that I’ve got a Palestinian Jew following me around with a gun in his pocket.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to explain to us your sudden interest in Displaced Persons.”

  “I asked first.”

  It was hot in the room. Leivick began unbuttoning his overcoat. Finally he found himself a small, rather ornate chair that had been hiding out of sight behind a dresser, moved it to the center of the room, and sat down. The two men were facing each other directly, across perhaps seven feet of rather fanciful Persian carpet.

  “You were in Havana ten days ago,” he said, as if stating a neutral fact. “You murdered a former SS sergeant named Gerhart Becker, living in that city under the alias of ‘Bauer.’”

  Astonishingly, there was no reaction. Christiansen never so much as blinked—they might as well have been discussing the railway schedule. It seemed that nothing about this man, absolutely nothing, was going to be easy.

  “Three months before that, in Sao Paulo, one Dieter Kurtz, also formerly of the SS, was found in a closet by his Brazilian girlfriend, hanging from one of the hooks. He had been strangled with a length of very heavy catgut, the E-string from a double bass to be precise.”

  He glanced at the cello which Christiansen was still holding delicately by the neck, but once again, the man m
ight as well not have been listening.

  “I happened to be in Sao Paulo just then,” Leivick went on. He had decided not to be impressed with this display of unnatural calm. After all, as Christiansen must have realized perfectly well, the Mossad was not exactly a police organization. “I was negotiating with Kurtz over a piece of information. He was badly frightened and, as it turned out, he had reason to be. If you had waited just one or two more days, Mr. Christiansen, you would have saved me a great deal of trouble.”

  “What makes you so positive any of this is my business?”

  “That was a double bass you were playing ten nights ago in Havana, wasn’t it, Mr. Christiansen? I was sitting rather far from the stage, but I don’t think I could have been mistaken.”

  The cold blue eyes narrowed slightly—the man was actually amused. Of course he had killed Gerhart Becker and Dieter Kurtz—and, could it be, one or two others about which even the Mossad remained ignorant?—and clearly he didn’t give a damn who knew it. All at once Leivick felt a certain helplessness.

  “It would seem that we’ve been following the same trail now for some time.” Leivick shrugged his shoulders, as much out of resignation as anything else. There was no point in threatening such a man. “We watched from a window across the street while you climbed down onto Becker’s roof. We watched you leave an hour and a half later. As a matter of fact, it was Becker who alerted us to you, when he delivered that note to your hotel.”

  “Had you been trying to make a deal with him too? I’m surprised you didn’t call the police the minute you were aware of his danger.”

  The very blandness of the remark carried a certain contemptuous irony—what business had anyone to hold commerce with vermin like Gerhart Becker? Christiansen rose suddenly from his chair, strode across the room to where his cello case was lying on the floor like an empty coffin, and, with touching delicacy, slid the instrument inside, like a father lowering his favorite child into the grave.

  “We had made a decision by then that you were the more promising lead. Did you know that for over a year now Colonel Egon Hagemann has been having his former associates from the Fifth Brigade assassinated? Under the circumstances, it was a natural enough mistake. We thought you might lead us back to him.”

  That, at least, elicited a reaction. As he stood up from buckling the case lid closed, the muscles in Christiansen’s jaw were working as rhythmically as a heartbeat. The unreachable man had at last been reached.

  Yes, this one too knew what it was to hate with soul-killing intensity. He was human after all, and a casualty.

  “Is all of this about Hagemann? Is that it?” Christiansen leaned back against the dresser, his arms folded across his chest, making him look even more massive. “Because if you have some private arrangement with Hagemann, you can just forget it. As soon as I find him, he’s a dead man.”

  Leivick, who had remained seated, threw himself back into his chair until it creaked distressedly. He was hungry past imagining, he felt as if the walls of his stomach would begin caving in on him at any moment.

  “Mr. Christiansen,” he said at last, glancing up at that enormous and angry man with an expression of great self-pity. “Mr. Christiansen, finding the Colonel is not the problem. If you would be so kind as to inquire if the kitchen would still be willing to send up something in the way of dinner, I will tell you precisely where you can find him. Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  . . . . .

  A quarter of an hour later a waiter arrived, pushing a wing table covered with an immaculate white cloth. When he had left there was a place setting for one, complete with a crystal water glass and a small arrangement of flowers. The meal consisted of melon, cold roast lamb, fennel hearts, sautéed potatoes, apricot mousse, and coffee. Leivick hadn’t seen anything quite like it in nearly ten years.

  “I trust you weren’t kidding about Hagemann,” Christiansen said as he sat down in his chair to watch Leivick eat.

  “No, I wasn’t kidding.”

  “Then?”

  Having killed the first big urge, Leivick felt able to pause for a moment and pour himself a cup of coffee.

  “He’s in Syria just now.” He looked up, smiling kindly at Christiansen, for whom at that particular moment he harbored only the warmest feelings. “He stays at the Hotel President Kuwatly in Damascus, in a suite on the top floor. In another week he will travel to Spain, where he owns a house, but in either case you would merely be throwing your life away if you attempted to kill him. He’s very well guarded by his own people and in both countries he enjoys the protection of the government—informally, but none the less impenetrably. As you see, however, locating him hasn’t been our difficulty.

  It was encouraging, if perhaps a trifle uncomfortable, to know that at least be had managed to secure Christiansen’s undivided attention. In his vast, almost morbid stillness, the man had a way of concentrating himself, of seeming to focus his will like sunlight through a lens, so that one had the sense that every corner of one’s mind was being opened to that merciless white glare.

  But Leivick wasn’t really bothered. Within limits, he was prepared to be candid—he would have to be, or they could end by having to fight Christiansen as well as the Nazis and the Syrians. He was not the sort of man anyone wanted for an enemy.

  “What we need to do is to lure him out,” Leivick went on slowly, filtering a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. “I have one or two pointed questions I should like to put to the Colonel, and if he could be gotten away from his bodyguard for a while he might be persuaded to answer them. After that, you could kill him with my blessing. My government—when, in a few months, we have a government, and when the Arabs give us a moment in which to catch our breath—my government would probably give you a medal for killing Hagemann. He is more our enemy now than ever, and he has had a long and gaudy career as an anti-Semite.”

  “You can keep your medal, but maybe you’d better tell me why it’s so important to keep Hagemann alive long enough to answer questions. What questions?”

  Christiansen closed and opened his eyes with almost deathlike slowness. His enormous hands were folded together in his lap—he seemed indifferent to everything. It suddenly occurred to Leivick that this was a man who understood he was acting out his part in a tragedy.

  “Mr. Christiansen, fair is fair.” Leivick smiled wearily. The rest seemed to him inevitable, words rehearsed many times already. He wondered why Christiansen didn’t see even then that the thing was settled. “I have answered your first question—you know now why we’ve taken such an interest in you. Now you answer mine. What have you been looking for in the case histories of our surviving remnant? What do you expect to find among the DPs?”

  The silence was almost a third presence in the room. Life, hope, even the small, still hum of one’s own mind seemed to have stopped for good and all. And then, for no apparent reason, Christiansen turned his staring gaze to the wall behind Leivick’s head. His voice was empty, almost toneless.

  “The bait for your lure,” he said, and Leivick knew they were within striking distance of a bargain.

  “Mr. Christiansen, perhaps the time has come for me to tell you a story.”

  5

  “You seem a clever young man; you must have picked up all sorts of information about the Fifth Brigade while you were hunting down its old membership. Did you know they were garrisoned in Poland for a time?”

  “Yes.” Christiansen nodded solemnly. “During the second half of 1943, after their year of combat duty in Russia. It was the nadir of von Goltz’s career, that eastern period, a disciplinary bloodletting after. . . after Norway, and before the establishment of the concentration camp at Waldenburg. They lost about seventy percent of their numbers, without being permitted replacements. I don’t suppose they enjoyed themselves.”

  Leivick found himself studying the hard, impassive face, pondering the significance of what he had just witnessed there. Norway—yes, of course. He wondered why that ha
d never occurred to him before.

  “Precisely. After Norway.” He smiled faintly and shrugged his shoulders, doing his best not to imply that he was presuming to understand anything. “One gathers that the thoroughness and zeal with which they carried out their assignments in that country were a bit much even for the SS. After all, Norway is ‘Aryan.’ In Russia, on the other hand, they could behave any way they liked.

  “And, of course, that was even more the case in Poland. In Poland they didn’t even have to worry about the Red Army, only the odd rag-bag band of partisans.”

  He paused for a moment to give Christiansen a chance to say something, but that proved a fruitless occupation.

  “Colonel Hagemann and I have never met,” he went on finally. “I hope and pray he’s never heard of me, and during that part of the war I never troubled much with names. What did I care about the identity of the Regional Deputy Commander, SS? He was a German—that was the point. And the Germans were as impersonal as demons. Nevertheless, that was where we had our first contacts, in Poland.

  “He was a famous man in that sector. I had not the honor of being one of his victims, but I don’t feel slighted. The Fifth Brigade did its very best in the time given them. It has nothing to do with my current interest in him, but he has much innocent blood on his hands.

  “It was an accident of timing, really. The day we broke out of Treblinka, I had been there ten months. General von Goltz and his men were only recently posted to the region, so perhaps, if we do them justice, they had never even heard of the place. Even so, our paths crossed soon enough.

  “We made our escape in August, 1943. Six hundred men, more or less, out of the thousand or so still alive by that time. We knew we were slated to be killed within a matter of days; we were absolutely the last in line. The trains had stopped coming—there were other, newer camps by then, where the process of extermination was more efficient and, besides, Treblinka was not equipped to make use of slave labor for the armaments industry. We were burning the last of the bodies. We had ten thousand corpses to go, and in the arithmetic of that place ten thousand corpses meant a little less than two weeks. After that the Ukrainians would massacre us, to be massacred in their turn by the Germans. So we had to get out. It was a clear choice; escape or die.