The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “It was just the same in Franz Josef’s day,” Mordecai told him, shrugging his shoulders with amused sympathy. “My father brought me here in 1912, and the river was just as dirty then. I liked the giant ferris wheel at the Prater much better.”

  The first great disappointment was word that Esther Rosensaft was going to spend the next decade or so in a Russian slammer.

  It was all there in the dossier which through some mysterious agency was waiting for them when they arrived from Munich. Mordecai bought a magazine at the newsstand in the railway station, and the dossier was inside. There was even a photograph.

  “She looks like she could use a little feeding up,” Christiansen had said, holding the photograph by a corner. “Where did you get all this?”

  “My dear Inar, you’ve been fighting the Nazis all these years and you’ve never heard them mention the International Jewish Conspiracy? I’m surprised at you.”

  It was simply that he hadn’t yet gotten over the first sharpness of his disappointment. Christiansen found it easy not to take offense.

  They sat in silence as the taxi drove them to their hotel. It was rather as if a practical joke had been played on them, and they had come all that way for nothing. No, Christiansen didn’t take offense.

  Mordecai had phoned the Jewish Agency’s central office in Geneva, and they had been able to report only that Esther Rosensaft had been alive as of July, 1947, and had given Vienna as her permanent address. There was also a suggestion—just a suggestion—that the lady had led a checkered life since the war’s end and that perhaps inquiries would most fruitfully be addressed to the Viennese police.

  Which, by some labyrinthine indirection, was naturally the source of the dossier.

  And it was all there, of course. Esther was your typical black market small-timer—one previous arrest, no conviction (had she sweet-talked somebody, or perhaps traded a little information?). She had held jobs as a bar girl, a waitress, even a letter carrier for a private mail service. She seemed to have a lot of unsavory friends. This was someone who had learned to get by in the big world.

  Until four months ago, when she had been arrested at a checkpoint on the Wallenstein Bridge with twenty thousand rubles in her corset. Fifteen years was a longish stretch, and the Russians didn’t believe in time off for good behavior.

  “The boys will be arriving tonight,” Mordecai announced quietly. “Perhaps they can think of something. This is more their line of country than mine.”

  Christiansen stared out of the hotel window, watching the Russian guards on the Gürtelbrücke as they searched the back of a dark green delivery truck, and wondered if he hadn’t led them all on a wild goose chase. The Russians controlled every stinking foot of ground east of the Danube and, barring a skyhook, there was no way to cross except over the heavily patrolled bridges. Esther Rosensaft, if they wanted to keep her, would be hard to smuggle out. And they wanted to keep her. Hell, they were holding her under lock and key.

  “Seien Sie doch mit meinem Cello vorsichtig,” he barked at the porter, who was about to hit the case against the door frame. “Ich verdiene damit meinen Unterhalt.”

  The poor man set the luggage down gingerly, leaning the cello against the bed and whimpering an apology. Christiansen, to salve his conscience, gave him a larger than usual tip and, as the porter was backing out of the room, began unstrapping the case to see how his darling had made the journey. It was his own fault—he shouldn’t have lost his temper. Usually he didn’t allow anyone to carry it except himself.

  “You shouldn’t shout at people like that, Inar,” Mordecai said quietly, with an amused expression playing over his face.

  “It’s a Guarnerius,” Christiansen answered, his voice hardly above a murmur. His hand slipped down the neck with a caressing gesture. “It’s an inheritance from my first teacher at Juilliard: when he died he passed over his own son to give this to me. God knows, it’s worth more than I am.”

  “But still, you shouldn’t shout at people. A man your size—you frightened that poor man half to death.”

  Christiansen didn’t answer. Mordecai was right of course, but the dumb bastard might have cracked the varnish.

  He would have liked to take it out and play for a while. He just wanted to hear the sound of it. But he felt embarrassed in front of Mordecai, who would probably have thought he was showing off or something. That was what he had always hated about recitals. If you loved, really loved the thing, then it shouldn’t be just a “performance.” He hated even the sound of the word.

  “And you weren’t being entirely truthful, were you. You don’t earn your living with your cello, although there isn’t any question you could. I wonder why it is you don’t.”

  It wasn’t an innocent question. Mordecai had a way of probing, of gently turning over the earth until all the roots were exposed. He seemed to think it important to understand everything—and, just possibly, he was right.

  “A concussion grenade tore open my hand,” Christiansen answered, holding it up so that the light from the window glistened against the scar. “It broke all the bones, every damn one of them. I still have tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded in the muscles—there was no way they could get them all out and leave me with enough finger control to unzip my fly. I cramp up if I play longer than fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “But you can manage the double bass for hours, it would seem.” Mordecai smiled, as if slightly ashamed. “I’ve seen you.”

  “That’s jazz—big sloppy chords you change every half hour. I could play that crap with my elbow.”

  Christiansen reclosed the lid and grabbed his coat from where it was lying across the back of a chair. Suddenly the room seemed too small for him.

  “I won’t be back for dinner,” he said, keeping his voice featureless. “I figure somebody should have a look at this prison of theirs.”

  . . . . .

  Just to be on the safe side, he took a taxi to the International Zone and walked across at the Salztorbrücke. He had a Norwegian passport, and the guard apparently hadn’t been instructed to regard all Norwegians as spies. Christiansen explained that he was a tourist and that he wanted to see the Augarten. The guard shook his head, but not in disbelief.

  “Is very no good.” he said, in probably the most appalling German Christiansen had ever heard. “Fräuleins very no nice, and very too. . .”

  He groped for the word, swinging his hand about in a tight little circle. It seemed to irritate him vastly.

  “Kostspielig?” Christiansen ventured helpfully. Anything to end the suspense.

  “Da. . . Ja.” The Russian nodded vigorously, four or five times. “Too very much money. And like pigs—fat. Stink too. Americans and British get all very good ones. Very most Americans. . . capitalist bastards.”

  He looked as if he would have liked to spit on the pavement for emphasis, but just then his officer came up. The officer, who looked like a provincial schoolmaster and was probably all of twenty-five, stood just out of effective reach, frowning like a deacon while Christiansen had his papers returned to him with all the hasty rudeness anyone could have expected. You didn’t have to be in occupied Europe very long to figure out that the Russians really weren’t such bad fellows. It was simply that they were more frightened than anyone else.

  It was late afternoon and cold. A damp, faintly unpleasant smell hung in the air, a little reminder that this was an island between the made-man canal and a narrow, wandering branch of the Danube.

  Several of the trees lining the Augarten were nothing more than dead logs sticking out of the ground. Russian fire on the city had been particularly intense during the last few days of the war, but it hadn’t been flattened like Munich. Still, the trees had been burned up. The grass looked scorched too, but that was probably just the time of year. It all made a dismal impression.

  Even in their short acquaintance, Christiansen had decided that he liked Mordecai Leivick a good deal. They had gone to first names almost at once, almost
the way the Americans did. They got along well; perhaps someday they might even become friends, if they had the chance and it didn’t get in the way.

  Still, he wished Mordecai would stop asking him personal questions. For one thing, he knew perfectly well that it was all going into a dossier in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or wherever the Jews would make their capital after partition. He didn’t think it was any government agency’s god damned business how he felt about having his hand shattered and not being able to tour the world as the Norwegian Casals. He didn’t think it was anybody’s god damned business. He was all kinds of things now, some of which he didn’t like very much, but at least he wasn’t a child prodigy anymore.

  “You must send him abroad,” Professor Skram had told his father. “He knows everything I can teach him. You must send him to one of the great maestros—in Germany perhaps or France. He has a duty to his genius, and so do you “

  For three years, twice every week, his father had driven him into Oslo for private lessons with the first cellist of the Royal Symphony Orchestra, the dean of the conservatory. It was a two-hour journey in each direction, and while the instruction was taking place the mayor of Kirstenstad would sit out in the entrance hall on a hard wooden chair. He was a busy man with no great passion for music, but Inar was his only child and would one day astonish the world.

  So on the way home from that last lesson, father and son sat together in the car without a word.

  For three days the subject was never once raised, but the atmosphere in their little home was heavy with this unsettled question. Inar knew that at night, alone in their bedroom, his parents were trying to decide what they should do—he knew from the anguished way his mother looked at him, as if she feared for his life. And finally, at Sunday dinner, his father told him he was to go to America, to live with the family of his younger sister in a place called “White Plains, New York.”

  “I have written to her,” he said, in his calm magistrate’s voice. “We will of course compensate her for your maintenance, and you will study in New York City, where, I am assured by your professor, there are many fine opportunities for a young man who wishes to improve himself. It must be New York I’m afraid, and not Berlin or Paris as perhaps you had hoped. You are still very young and must have someone responsible to look after you.”

  Yes, of course. He was just thirteen years old. He loved them both, but from that moment on they almost ceased to be his parents. They must have realized that was what it would mean.

  So he had gone off to live with Auntie Inger, to attend American high school and study at Juilliard and run around with his teen-aged cousins. God, how he had loved America. And how bored he had been the three times he had gone back to Norway to spend a month with his mother and father in Kirstenstad. His life was simply elsewhere—in his music and in the excitement of New York—and he couldn’t wait to get back to it. He wondered now if his parents had guessed, and what they must have thought then of the sacrifice they had made to his “genius.”

  And then they had died without him, shot to death at their own front door, and his hand had been ripped open by a piece of shrapnel from a concussion grenade, and that had been the end of that. There was a kind of retributive justice in those two transactions which he couldn’t quite define but which was there just the same.

  It would have been even tidier if he had honestly staked his heart on a concert career, but he hadn’t. His parents, it seemed, had given him up for nothing because by the time he was in his third year at Juilliard he had decided that he didn’t want to be a virtuoso—he just wanted to compose. He would hole up somewhere, he had decided, in some little college maybe, and write music that didn’t sound like film scores or twelve-tone squeaks, music that had a life both on and off the page. Perhaps he could have learned everything he needed for that at the Conservatory in Oslo—he didn’t know.

  What would his parents have thought? He didn’t know because he had never asked them. It had never occurred to him to ask them.

  His teachers, of course, had believed he was demented. “You go on the concert circuit and in fifteen years you can retire to a house on Lake Lucerne and write all the music you like. You have the gift, boy, but give yourself a chance to grow up first. At twenty, everyone thinks he wants to be Stravinsky.”

  Well, he sure as hell had grown up, and now he didn’t have to worry. His future was Colonel Egon Hagemann. Everything after that was a blank.

  Anyway, he just wished Mordecai would stop worrying about his sensitive artistic nature and keep to business.

  . . . . .

  The prison faced onto the Heine Strasse, but you couldn’t tell much about the building from the pavement. There were a couple of uniformed goons with automatic weapons posted at the entrance in a high stone wall, and behind that the Russians had built another wall, just boards nailed end to end up to a height of about seven or eight yards, apparently with no other purpose than destroying the view. Possibly at one time the place had been a ladies’ academy or a post office or even a private home for someone with a lot of money and a taste for fortress architecture. The point was that nobody just passing by was about to find out.

  The wall—both walls, to be precise—ran all the way around the block. Christiansen took the long way around to the back for a look. There were no adjoining buildings, just the prison complex itself, so everyone could just forget about moving in next door and punching through with a few dozen sticks of dynamite. There wasn’t going to be any easy way. Nobody was getting in there with anything less than an artillery company.

  Christiansen hunched his shoulders inside his heavy civilian overcoat, but the sensation of cold that had settled in his throat and chest had little enough to do with the temperature. Despair was beginning to cling to him like sodden wool. He could almost smell it.

  There was simply no way anyone was going to spring Esther Rosensaft from her cell and then make a dash for the American Zone. It would take an army, and the Russians were the ones with the army. It was hopeless.

  He stood under the awning of what looked like a ladies’ hairdresser—it was closed, of course; what the hell kind of business was a ladies’ hairdresser going to do in the Russian Zone?—wondering if there wasn’t somewhere he could get a cup of coffee and something to eat. He was hungry and he needed to sit down and do some thinking. If there was no way of reaching the girl his deal with Mordecai would come unstuck and it would be every man for himself again. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want the Syrians bombarding the Jews with Hagemann’s nerve gas, but he also wasn’t about to go quietly home to Norway with his parents’ murderer living in luxury in Damascus. He wasn’t going to depend on the Mossad to do the right thing. The Mossad might cut some deal of their own, even with Hagemann. He couldn’t blame them. God knows, no one had a right to blame them for looking out for their own survival. But he had to see Hagemann with the blood pouring out of his nostrils. He just had to, or he would never draw another easy breath. So there had to be some way of getting that goddamn girl.

  Christiansen was on the other side of the street from the guarded entrance, on the next block, a distance of perhaps sixty-five or seventy yards. At first, when they snapped to attention, he thought the soldiers were just being relieved, but when the barren metal gate opened one of the two people coming out was a woman.

  The man who was holding her by the arm was wearing his greatcoat, and therefore it was possible to tell only from the pistol on his uniform belt that he was an officer. He shook her a couple of times, like a storekeeper with a kid caught stealing apples, and then pushed her out onto the sidewalk. It made sense. People did get released from prisons, even Russian prisons, and the Army of the Proletariat wasn’t likely to give them a hero’s send-off, complete with flowers and a military band. The lady was getting kicked out.

  She staggered for a few seconds and then, when she had found her feet, yelled at her tormenter, using an expression that was presumably local and definitely outside Christiansen’s
vocabulary of German curse words. Even at that distance he could hear the guards laughing.

  When she started on her way she came in Christiansen’s direction, so all he had to do to get a good look at her was to wait quietly in the shadow of his awning. She was wearing a flowered summer dress, probably the clothes in which she had been arrested—leave it to the Russians to turn out their prisoners without proper clothes, probably without the price of a Kaffee mit Schlag, and in the late afternoon so they wouldn’t have a day to find themselves a place in out of the night cold. She walked along with her arms wrapped around her slender body, hunched over like an old woman, although probably she wasn’t more than twenty-nine or thirty. When she passed in front of him on the other side of the street he decided to give her a bit of a lead, just in case any interested parties back at the slammer were still watching, and then catch up with her. You never knew.

  He followed for perhaps a quarter of a mile, with the wind picking up from minute to minute. She didn’t seem to be heading in any particular direction—she was just trying to keep the blood pumping, hunting at random for somewhere warm. They were well out of sight of the prison when Christiansen noticed that he seemed to be part of a parade. There seemed to be someone else interested in tracking the lady down.

  Men betrayed themselves even through their tastes in overcoats. This specimen favored navy blue, with wide, pointed shoulders and a pinched-in waist. Christiansen was well behind, but he would have bet anything the lapels were as pointed as foxes’ ears. Nationality didn’t seem to matter—a certain class of hoodlum always gave the impression their notions of sartorial splendor came straight out of old Edward G. Robinson movies.

  He was a big man. and he was in a hurry. His hands were jammed deep into his pockets and he kept glancing around as long strides carried him nearer and nearer to his quarry. Finally he was almost running.