The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “But the important thing,” he went on, breaking his sentence with a sharp intake of breath, “the important thing is that none of those men were ever heard from again.”

  He made a dismissing gesture with his left hand.

  “Of course, in those days that was not an uncommon fate. The number of people who disappeared from Europe between 1939 and 1945 runs into the millions, and I don’t suppose there is any great mystery about what happened to our brewers and professors of anatomy. There is a trench, about fifty meters long, just inside the eastern perimeter of Waldenburg concentration camp; the Russians dug it to bury the corpses of the inmates, who had been machine-gunned to the last man just two days before they would have been liberated. Doubtless that is where one would search for them.”

  For an instant Christiansen looked as if someone had struck him. His eyes widened suddenly and he actually flinched—one could have imagined he felt the ghosts of those machine-gun bullets passing through his own body. The hand lying on his left thigh clenched and then relaxed, as if of its own accord. For the first time Leivick noticed the broad, flat scar and wondered how it had come to be there.

  And it came to him with the force of a revelation that even in this short time he had grown quite fond of Christiansen, that, if it proved to be necessary, it would cost him no small amount of pain to order his death.

  “So perhaps now the connection becomes dear to you?” he said, smiling coldly, a little astonished at the tone his voice had assumed. “The SS were in the game for high stakes—they couldn’t afford any witnesses. But there was one, of course. There always is at least one.”

  “But not among the camp inmates?”

  “No, not among them. They had all been silenced.”

  There was a clock ticking somewhere. Leivick resisted the temptation of looking for it—probably Christiansen had some sort of alarm on his night table, and, in any case, it wasn’t important. By now, Faglin and Hirsch were probably wondering what had happened to him. In a while he would have to telephone them, or they might come to break down the door.

  “No, but there were the soldiers themselves, the men-at-arms of the Fifth Brigade. And soldiers of a routed army have a way of being captured by the enemy. It was from one of these that I learned what had happened to General von Goltz and his men—and got my first inkling of how they had been occupying themselves at Waldenburg.

  “It was early April of 1945. The Russians were already in possession of the Berlin suburbs, and the German defenses had nearly evaporated. I was with an armored unit about twenty miles from Dresden. I had the job of interrogating prisoners. The poor little fool was trying to make his way home to Gorlitz and his mother when we nabbed him. He had gotten rid of his uniform right enough but had carelessly retained his SS identity papers—Private Hugo Scheidemann, Fifth Brigade. He was as good as dead as soon as he fell into our hands.

  “But you know the SS—at every level, they always think they can arrange something for themselves. ‘What will happen to me?’ he asked. ‘I expect you will be shot in an hour or two,’ I told him pleasantly. ‘We don’t mean to be rude, but we’re in a hurry.’

  “I remember he grabbed my sleeve with a kind of spasm. It made me look at him, actually look at him. for the first time. I suppose he was about twenty-one or -two, with silvery brown hair and the face of a schoolboy.

  ‘I know a secret.’ he told me, in a stifled, panting voice, and I thought to myself, Yes, I’ll bet you do. The SS had turned them into passing fair butchers sometimes even before they had learned to shave. Yes, I had no doubt he knew more secrets than just one.

  “‘Why don’t you keep your secret,’ I told him. ‘Carry it with you to the grave, where it will be safe.’ I couldn’t help myself. I kept wondering if he could have been one of those who had made such sport of hunting down my comrades from Treblinka, God forgive me.

  “‘But I know about Waldenburg,’ he answered, his eyes pleading. ‘Surely you must have heard of Waldenburg—they were up to something important there. I could tell you. Surely the Russians will be interested enough to. . .’

  “He couldn’t finish his sentence, of course. He hung his head, as if suddenly grown ashamed. I said nothing. I merely waited in silence, thinking of those two stony interrogators from the NKVD, wondering if I was about to learn why they had been so concerned with everything I could tell them about the Fifth Brigade.

  “‘I saw people killed there,’ he went on, and then paused again, perhaps this time for dramatic effect.

  “I don’t suppose I looked terribly surprised—why should I have been? Why should anyone have been surprised at anything in those days, let alone that the SS had killed people at a place called ‘Waldenburg’? I should have been surprised to hear the name of yet one more death camp to add to so many others? No, it was a trifle late for that. At any rate, whatever reaction he had been waiting for, he didn’t get it.

  “‘But not in the ordinary way—nor with bullets, or anything like that.’ He shook his head. Clearly he put great importance on this one point. I was beginning to entertain the idea that perhaps his wits were turned. ‘They had a special chamber—it was an experiment, do you see? They would do people in batches of five.’

  “‘Do’ people. That was just the way he expressed it.

  “‘A friend of mine took me to see one day. I didn’t know anything about it before that. I only found out by accident.’ Yes, of course. The poor boy, how could I have imagined anything else?

  “‘But the way they looked when they came out. . .’

  “A tremor seemed to pass over him. I don’t believe he was acting. I don’t believe he was that clever. The memory seemed to rise up before his eyes like Banquo’s ghost, so perhaps he did have a conscience, although, finally, it seemed to have made very little difference.

  “‘You and I have seen enough dead bodies.’ he said, taking me into his confidence. It was a delicious moment if one had a taste for farce. ‘The corpses came out stiff, like iron pokers—just rigid, and with their arms and legs all twisted.’ He paused for a moment and caught his breath, and suddenly, at that moment, I knew I wouldn’t even try to save him. I didn’t want to. His confidence in my influence was misplaced, so it made no difference, but in an instant I had come to hate him for the way he seemed to be trying to number himself among the victims—for that, and for burdening me with his horror.

  “‘And their eyes—yes, their eyes.’ His hand was still resting on my sleeve, and he began, in the most tentative way possible, to pull me toward him, as if he wished to whisper this last and most significant detail directly into my ear. ‘A dead man’s eyes get large—the black part in the middle, I mean—but not these. Their eyes were shrunk to nothing, as if they had been staring into the sun for hours. As if their eyes had clouded over altogether.’

  “‘Yes. That’s very interesting,’ I said—or something like it I suppose. ‘I’ll see the division commander hears of it right away.’ It did no harm to let him live in hope for another hour.

  “I think he was proud of himself, in some perverse way. As if he had demonstrated that his powers of observation were of a very high order and therefore he deserved to live. I felt rather differently about the matter. You see, he had just imparted to me a secret that would, if I was less than careful, end my life as well as his.

  The soldier who was standing beside me spoke no German, for which I was suddenly grateful. I smiled at the promising youth, turned to my companion, and said to him in my villainous Russian, ‘See to it that this one is shot with the first batch. There’s nothing to be learned from him.’

  “Are you surprised, Mr. Christiansen? No, I don’t suppose you are. War makes us all very practical. Still, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “That night I borrowed a truck. No one minded—the fighting was winding down almost to nothing. I told the duty officer I had business in Dresden and would take my chances going through the lines. I was very mysterious about it. He merely shrugged his
shoulders. I was associated in his mind with Intelligence, and hence the NKVD, so he wasn’t interested in asking questions. I went straight down the main road, dodging around the bomb craters. I never encountered a single German soldier who thought fit to challenge me, not once, all the way to Bayreuth. As soon as I got there I changed out of the Russian uniform I had been wearing and became, once more, a refugee. The truck had enough petrol to take me to Wurzburg, where I knew I would be safely inside the American zone. I was not interested in taking risks.”

  Leivick stood up—his knees felt as if they might crack under the strain, but he couldn’t have sat still another moment. It had been a long and anxious day and he was tired, tired and frightened. Because now the moment was upon him when he would have to tell the final, terrible secret. He wondered where they would all be in an hour’s time.

  “We have kept very complete records of the various camps,” he said, standing beside the window and looking out on the undulating sea of rubble that was just visible in the broken, piecemeal light that seemed to seep from the hotel like sap from a wounded tree. It was not a view he much admired. “We have our refugees, and friendly sources among the Americans, even the British—even, come to speak of it, among the Russians. We know what they were doing at Waldenburg. We know the whole history of the work carried on there.

  “It began in 1936. A German chemist named Schrader was trying to develop a new insecticide from organic phosphorus compounds. He found one that worked beyond his wildest dreams—so well, in fact, that it couldn’t possibly have been used in agriculture. In a solution of just one part per two hundred thousand, it was deadly. When he and his assistant began trying to produce the substance in quantity, they became ill themselves: they found they had difficulty breathing, and their eyesight became so poor that they couldn’t see at all by artificial light. Finally they had to abandon their research to save their lives.

  “There was a law in Germany then that any discovery with potential military applications had to be reported to the government. Schrader found himself on a train to Berlin. He had discovered, poor man, the very first nerve gas. He called it Tabun.

  The Wehrmacht, of course, fell in love with it. It was odorless, colorless, and lethal. The pupils of test animals’ eyes shrank down to nothing—hence the night blindness Schrader had experienced. They foamed at the mouth and vomited. They developed debilitating diarrhea. Finally, after five or six minutes, they went into convulsions and died in extreme agony. It worked on some chemical in the muscles, you see, throwing them into violent and uncontrollable contractions. Nothing, no treatment known to medicine, could save them. One perished from asphyxiation, strangled to death from the inside.

  “The substance could be absorbed through the skin, so gas masks were no protection, and it killed in very small concentrations. Tabun was the perfect, the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of gas warfare. Schrader got a new factory, all his own, in Elberfeld, and within a year be had developed a new compound, ten times as powerful, which he called Sarin.

  “Of course, by then the Nazis knew they would be precipitating a European war within a year or two, so they poured vast amounts of money into developing these two gases—hundreds of millions of reichsmarks. When the war did begin, huge factories were built in Poland. Even by 1943 the Germans had stockpiled enormous quantities of Tabun and Sarin, enough certainly to have convinced England to drop out of the war if they had used them in bombing raids over London and a few other major cities. Probably enough to end Russia’s resistance. The German General Staff were cradling the fate of Europe in the hollow of their hand.

  “You are perhaps wondering how, then, the Germans were ever restrained, why it was that they are not now masters of the earth and we grinning corpses? You may wonder indeed.”

  He glanced back from the window, over his shoulder to where Christiansen was sitting motionless on a small gilt chair. He could feel the corners of his mouth twitching and wondered how he must look. Oh, Mordecai, a voice said inside his brain, Oh, little brother, how did it ever come down to this for you? Have you gone mad to be speaking of these things?

  “The fact is, they lost their courage.” Leivick shrugged his shoulders, as if refusing to take responsibility for such foolishness, and moved away from the window. He could feel Christiansen’s eyes on him, like gun sights, as he paced off the distance from one wall to the other. “That, and a certain fastidiousness on Hitler’s part, are the only reasons anyone can imagine.

  “Their Führer, you see, had been gassed in the First War. He was blinded for a time and was in a military hospital recovering when the Fatherland surrendered. His memories of the experience, it seems, were vivid and unpleasant. He never favored the use of gas in warfare.

  “And then there was the question of what the Allies were doing. Nothing, not a thing, as it turned out, but the silence in American scientific periodicals concerning certain substances convinced some key German scientists that the Allies must be pursuing research on their own—actually, they were merely developing DDT—and they, in turn, convinced Hitler. Work continued in the secret factories, but plans to deploy the new weapon were quietly dropped.

  “By 1945, of course, the whole idea of chemical warfare was also militarily unfeasible. There simply weren’t any planes—the cities of the enemy had become forever out of reach. When they knew the war was lost, the Germans tried to destroy all trace of the whole research effort, but the factories in Poland, by the sheerest chance, fell into Russian hands almost intact. Our information is that they were dismantled and shipped home. Probably, at this very moment, they are in full production somewhere in the Urals.

  “The end of the story? Not quite. Because, you see, there was a third gas, many times more powerful even than Sarin, described in the few surviving records as Trilon 238. The substance was being mass-produced at Waldenburg, almost up to the hour of its capture.”

  “And Colonel Hagemann walked away with that secret under his hat.”

  It was the first time Christiansen had spoken in almost half an hour. Leivick was startled by the sound, almost as if someone had fired a pistol in the room.

  “Not quite, God be praised.” Leivick smiled thinly. “But he seems to believe he can put his hands on it. He seems to have the Syrians pretty well convinced that he can.

  “There is going to be a war in the Middle East, Mr. Christiansen. That much is obvious. The United Nations has voted that Palestine shall be partitioned into Arab and Jewish states, and that partition, as the Arab leaders have so noisily declared, will be resisted. Israel will be born—we Jews will have our homeland, provided we can hold it.

  “Try to imagine, if you can, the applications of such a toxic nerve gas in the sort of war our Arab brothers are preparing to unleash on us. The distances that restrained Hitler in 1945 will not apply in Palestine. One doesn’t have to drop Trilon 238 from a plane—one can just as easily charge artillery shells with it, and artillery shells are delightfully selective. The Jewish sections of, say, Haifa could be saturated, killing probably eighty or ninety percent of the population, and Arab families living five or ten blocks away would hardly be inconvenienced at all. Our troops might suffer similar losses before they ever had a chance to engage the enemy. What is to save us then? We are discussing the final annihilation of a people here, Mr. Christiansen. What Chelmno and Auschwitz and Treblinka failed to accomplish will be brought to perfection in the streets of Jerusalem.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself about it. In a week you can read about Hagemann’s death in the newspapers—with my compliments.”

  “It isn’t enough, Mr. Christiansen. I’m genuinely sorry.”

  “It’ll just god damned well have to be.”

  Leivick wrapped his arms together, suddenly cold. He understood exactly how the man felt. The sense of his own powerlessness overwhelmed him.

  “We must have not only Hagemann but his secret, Mr. Christiansen. That terrible weapon must be buried forever, or we will never be safe. After all
we have suffered, have we no right to live? This is our last chance. The few of us who remain, some of whom have never known anything except war and fear and the threat of extinction, we have one last opportunity. That is why we must lay our hands on your Colonel Hagemann. That is why, before he dies, we must find out from him what has become of his terrible weapon. Will you help us, Mr. Christiansen, or does your revenge take precedence even over this?”

  For a moment there was only silence. There was nothing to suggest that Christiansen had been moved by anything Leivick had said . Then he picked up the pack of cigarettes from where it was resting on the arm of his chair, extracted one with his fingernails, put it in his mouth, and lit it. When finally he did glance in Leivick’s direction, his face wore an expression of scarcely contained anger.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said finally, as the smoke wreathed around his head like a halo. “But when I’ve helped you get what you want, Hagemann is mine. You people aren’t the only ones he’s wronged.”

  Leivick allowed the air to escape from his lungs—slowly with almost sensual pleasure. He hadn’t realized that he had been holding his breath.

  “Of course, Mr. Christiansen—that goes without saying. Now. You had mentioned something about ‘bait’?”

  6

  Vienna, Austria: March 1, 1948

  The second great disappointment after their arrival was the Danube, which was neither beautiful nor blue but a chocolate brown, flecked here and there with garbage and rainbow patches of floating oil. Christiansen had asked for a room with a river view—which, not entirely coincidentally, meant that he had only to look out his window for the best prospect of the Russian Zone money could buy—but after all he decided that, except for purposes of business, he would be just as happy to keep the blinds drawn.