The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  By three-fifteen in the morning they had traveled just a little under two kilometers. They had been at it for over an hour. They had only their small electric torches, so it was necessary to move with some care in order to avoid making too much noise. They had crossed beneath the Danube some time back, so they could come up to the street whenever they wished. All they had to do was to find a storm drain with a grating that would yield without waking up the whole city.

  There were rats down here. One could hear them scurrying off and, from time to time, the torchlight would catch them basking on the filthy banks of the sewer main. They would blink and scratch themselves and nose casually into the water. It was a peculiarly disagreeable sight. Faglin would be glad to be back up at street level, where the danger would be greater but at least they would be men once more.

  For the hundredth time he readjusted his shoulder pack. He was carrying a change of clothes, some tools, his revolver wrapped up in an old pair of pajama bottoms, about seven pounds of plastic explosives, and various other odds and ends. He was tired and it had been a long time since dinner. Hirsch was carrying some sandwiches, but of course it was impossible in a sewer to think of eating. He could hear him walking about four meters behind. Hirsch never seemed to get tired.

  At twenty after, his torchlight fell across a line of steel rungs leading up the side of the sewer wall. They had found an exit.

  Hirsch took off his shoulder pack and handed it to Faglin, and then, while Faglin held the light, he made his way up the rungs to the storm drain cover. Soon only his feet were visible below the narrow gully.

  “Pass up the torch,” he murmured. A hand came down to accept it. Faglin stood below in the near-total darkness, trying to fight off the sensation of being at the bottom of a well.

  When Hirsch came down again his face was streaked, but he was grinning with pleasure. He took a moment to catch his breath.

  “It’s bolted in place,” he said finally. “From the inside—the damn Russians don’t trust anybody. A wrench and a few drops of cable oil, then give me fifteen minutes and we’ll be out of here.”

  It took him less time than that. One by one, the loosened bolts dropped down and embedded themselves in the muddy sewer bank, each time just missing Faglin, who stood below holding the light.

  “Can you see anything?” Faglin asked, straining his voice into a tense whisper. The only answer was the scrape of the drain cover as Hirsch lifted it out of his way. A moment later a hand came down again, and Faglin brought up Hirsch’s shoulder pack until the fingers closed around its strap. They were on their way up.

  When Faglin clambered to the mouth of the open storm drain, the first thing he saw in the light from the street lamps was Hirsch’s face. He looked demonic crouched there at the gutter’s edge. A line of filth ran down his nose and jaw and he was glittering with sweat; he might have been staring straight into his own death from the expression of half-crazed anxiety in his eyes. As soon as he had his shoulders out of the sewer pipe and was able to turn around and see behind him, Faglin could understand why. They had come out directly across the street from a police barracks. The lights behind the second-floor windows were on.

  Let’s get out of here.”

  The drain cover slid back into place with a noise that seemed loud enough to be heard by all the policemen in Vienna, but as the two men hurried away down the street no one shouted after them to halt. There were no shots fired. There was no sound at all except the slap of their shoe soles against the walkway.

  “I think we’ve just used up all our good luck,” Hirsch murmured tensely as they rounded the corner. “Let’s look for somewhere out of the cold where we can hole up until after curfew lifts.”

  They found a factory building with a basement door that would open to some slight persuasion. They were able to light the boiler, and within two or three minutes the whole room was deliriously warm. Hirsch took the sandwiches from his shoulder pack, where they had been cushioning a small, flat wooden box that held the detonators. Provided no watchman came to chase them off, they would stay right there until six in the morning, when they would no longer be subject to arbitrary arrest. There was a small cupboard containing a few cups without handles, a spoon, a metal pot. and a small canister of tea. they were able to brew some with the water from the boiler’s runoff valve. It tasted rusty, but it was tea.

  “All the comforts of home,” Hirsch announced, making a gesture with his arm that took in the whole room.

  Faglin merely shrugged. To his mind, Hirsch had a way of enjoying these little adventures that was almost indecent.

  “Come on, Amos—cheer up. We’ve got two whole hours ahead of us with nothing to do but relax. That’s as good as a lifetime.”

  “Sure. It’s the Ritz bar.”

  “You just miss that little wife of yours back in Haifa.” Hirsch laughed and clapped him on the back. “You family types, all very admirable but no thanks. For me, now, women are like marzipan—a piece now and again is tasty, but they cloy. That’s the best way to feel if you’re a soldier.”

  “You’ll marry, just like everybody else. Just wait until the war is over, then you’ll see things the other way.”

  But Hirsch merely shook his head, as if a child had said something foolish. He took a sip of his tea, made a face, and pitched the rest onto the basement floor, where it made a fan-shaped pattern on the cement.

  “This war won’t ever be over,” he said finally, setting the empty cup down beside his right foot. “Not for us, anyway. We’ll still be fighting the Arabs fifty years from now. If we live, you and I will be at this until we’re old men.”

  “If we live. If Hagemann can be stopped, and we aren’t all peppered with nerve gas in the first artillery barrage.”

  They allowed the subject to drop.

  After about twenty minutes. Hirsch drew a pack of cigarettes from his trousers pocket and lit one. The match popped into life with a kind of scratching cough, filling the air with the smell of sulfur

  “I think Mordecai must be losing his grip to trust this big Swede as far as he seems to.” The basement room was gloomy enough to be an antechamber to Hell, so the end of Hirsch’s cigarette threw an oddly sinister glow over the lower part of his face as he spoke. “I think it would be better if we tried to smuggle her out ourselves. He has his own game to play—what’s to keep him from simply disappearing with her after we’ve delivered her to him like a bouquet of roses?”

  “You sound like you think he’s a god damned Nazi. You saw the report—the man’s got more battle ribbons than teeth. He’s a hero. Besides, he’s not a Swede, he’s a Norwegian.

  “He’s a goy.”

  “You sound like Itzikel.”

  “Well. Itzikel was right. The only difference is that I’m not dumb enough to call the man names to his face. If there’s anything Jews should have learned since 1933, it’s the difference between us and them. And Christiansen is definitely one of them.”

  “I had the impression you find of liked him.”

  “Who said I didn’t like him?” Hirsch asked irritatedly, picking a loose piece of tobacco from the end of his tongue. “I just don’t trust him, that’s all.”

  . . . . .

  At the first hint of gray light through the basement windows, the two men washed their faces and hands in the water from the boiler tap and changed their clothes—one felt better and was considerably less conspicuous for not smelling of three hours in the Viennese sewers. They waited until they had heard three or four sets of footfalls before they ventured outside, where there was a cold, persistent wind and the clouds that hung low in the sky were tarnished to a flat gray.

  “Let’s check Weber Strasse first,” Faglin murmured tensely. He felt dreadfully exposed; he was carrying a revolver tucked under his belt and there were still fifteen pounds of explosives in his shoulder pack. It seemed the most logical thing imaginable that either the police or one or another of the omnipresent Russian patrols would any second now come rush
ing in at them, shouting “Jew terrorist!” at the tops of their lungs. What could be more reasonable?

  “All right. It’ll be a damn nuisance if there turns out to be anything there.”

  It was the sort of thing one couldn’t tell from the street map they had purchased the afternoon before—in the whole district there were only two small red crosses to indicate the presence of a hospital. The one on Weber Strasse was nearly twice the distance from the prison, but they had to be sure. They had to know where the Russians would call for an ambulance if they had an emergency with one of their convicts.

  It was a small brick building taking up only one corner of the block. They went all the way around. The rear entrance was just that, a doorway in the back. There were no special provisions for emergency care. The sign in front read: “Frauenklinik.” Faglin swallowed hard and made his decision. The Russians weren’t going to bring anyone here, and there had to be a limit even to Mossad thoroughness. The Jewish State would not make war on newborn babies. They were not going to blow the place up.

  “It would only have been the gas main or something,” Hirsch announced consolingly, “just enough to put them out of operation for a while.”

  “And maybe twenty or thirty of the weaker ones would have frozen to death in their cribs. I’m glad—I wouldn’t have wanted it on my conscience.”

  “Besides, it leaves us with that much more for our big bang.”

  Faglin once more adjusted the straps of his shoulder pack, wishing as he did it that Hirsch wouldn’t talk that way. He started to say something but saw that Hirsch was grinning at him.

  “Come on, Amos, Relax,” he said. “Time for lunch.”

  The Russian Zone was not very accommodating to the casual tourist—there were hardly any restaurants at all, and the few food stalls were almost empty of goods and jammed with customers trying to barter furniture and old clothes for a few ounces of coffee or half a dozen shrunken little apples. Everyone seemed to have plenty of money, it just didn’t seem to be worth very much.

  But Faglin’s parents had come from Vilna, so he had grown up speaking good enough Russian to convince any Austrian that he was probably a plainclothesman in the NKVD. Added to that, he had British money. The combination proved irresistible to a grocer on the Blumauergasse who, after a few minutes of hectoring, disappeared into his back room and returned with a paper bag containing several large hard rolls, lemonade in an old wine bottle, and a sausage that must have weighed close to four pounds, and all for the ridiculously low figure of two pounds ten—enough to buy dinner for four in almost any restaurant in London. The grocer was frightened of Faglin, so he only robbed him a little.

  “Can we steal an ambulance?” Hirsch asked, using his American jackknife to carve off a large piece of the sausage as they walked along.

  “Yes, that will be easy. We know approximately when the call will be coming in, so we can wait outside near the loading dock. Perhaps, if the ambulances have radios, all we’ll need to do is listen. If not, we’ll know when the stretcher bearers come running. In either case, we stop them—quietly—and take their places. Surely there will be someplace in the ambulance to hide the bodies; we want the police to find the correct number of corpses, so we’ll have to take them along.”

  “Then it’s a good thing the weather is cold.”

  “You have a twisted sense of humor, Jerry.

  “If you think so, then let’s sit down here and eat.

  “You worry too much about corpses, my friend. They have too much reality for you.”

  They sat with their legs over the edge of the canal embankment, the bottle of lemonade between them as Hirsch hacked away at bread and sausage with the rough efficiency of a stonecutter. It was almost ten in the morning, and the milky sunlight hardly seemed to warm them at all. Now and again they saw Russian soldiers patrolling in twos along the Handels-Kai or over the bridges, but this deep inside the Zone no one was interested.

  “Then let’s go to the prison first,” Faglin said abruptly, as if announcing the results of some inner dialogue. “We can leave the hospital until later. The less we show ourselves around there the better.”

  “But first finish eating, Amos. You look like a scarecrow. Didn’t your mama ever tell you to eat?”

  “She hardly ever told me anything else.”

  . . . . .

  Mühlfeld Prison was as forbidding as Christiansen had led them to expect. The back gate was massive, even taller than the surrounding stone wall, and behind it there was a chain and behind that a parked troop carrier. No one was coming in or out without the Russians’ approval

  But at least now they knew where to bring the ambulance.

  “They will send a guard with her,” Hirsch said. They were walking by on the opposite side of the street, hunched inside their overcoats like men who were in a hurry to be someplace warm. The soldiers, of course, paid no attention. “It will be a problem if they send more than one.”

  Faglin laughed out loud. A gray squirrel, startled by the sound, glared at them from the safety of a tree as they passed.

  “And why should they do that, do you suppose?” The laughter subsided into a cough as he shook his head at the absurdity of the idea. “A girl doubled up with stomach pains, who doesn’t weigh fifty kilos to start with—what do they need, an army?”

  “You know how they are about security. Every prisoner is a counterrevolutionary, and every counterrevolutionary is either Trotsky or the Czar. It’s a matter of prestige, I suppose. We have to make plans for a second guard.”

  “All right. One will go in the back with the girl, right? I’ll take care of him. If there’s another, we’ll say it’s too crowded and have him sit up front with you. Have a pistol taped under the dashboard. Just give me a chance to take care of mine first. I don’t want him jumping out of his skin at the sound of gunfire.”

  “How will you do it?”

  “How do I always do it?”

  That seemed answer enough. Hirsch nodded soberly and they continued along their walk. It amused Faglin to think that even twenty years ago they might have been a pair of rabbis out to take the air and dispute a passage of Torah. Now they were soldiers, plotting a raid on a Russian prison. It constituted progress of a sort.

  They took the long route, going several blocks out of their way in order to approach the prison from a different direction, so they could have a look at the front entrance.

  “Well drive around this way to the Heine Strasse,” Faglin said, looking out at the broad, almost empty boulevard. Petrol was difficult to find in the Russian sector. “It’s quicker to the hospital, so it’ll be what they expect. After you’ve turned the corner onto Tabor Strasse, I’ll kill my guard. I forgot to ask—will you have any trouble shooting with your left hand?”

  “I am left-handed.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten.”

  “Will you look at that?”

  They were at the corner, some thirty meters from the checkpoint at the prison’s main gate. A rather pudgy man in a green suit, carrying his overcoat across his arm, was having his briefcase searched as he came out. He looked nervous, although obviously there was nothing for the guards to find, he kept running the flat of his hand across his thin, rather oily-looking hair, glancing around as if he would have liked to take flight but didn’t quite have the courage. It was impossible to tell whether he had seen them or not.

  “You recognize the face, of course,” Hirsch said, putting his hand on Faglin’s arm and gently pulling him around so that their backs were toward the checkpoint.

  “Of course. It’s Plessen.”

  It was a terrible thing to have happen, worse even than putting the Russians on the alert. The Russians, after all, were not very active antagonists, but Plessen was the enemy incarnate. Faglin struggled to regain his composure, cursing himself for being surprised. After all, what could be more natural than for Hagemann to have tracked Esther Rosensaft to the gates of Mühlfeld Prison and then send his tame
lawyer sniffing around?

  “Perhaps he didn’t recognize us.”

  “Don’t be daft.” Hirsch tightened his grip as they walked slowly back to the shadow of the building. “He’s not a fool. Besides, I had a little run-in with him in Naples once—he tried to denounce me to the police. We can’t take the chance. We have to kill him.”

  Yes, they would have to kill him.

  They split up at the next corner, where they were well out of sight of the prison, and Faglin set off down the street at a dead run. Plessen was heading back toward the Augarten, where he might have a car parked, so they had to intercept him before then. Hirsch would go back to the Heine Strasse and follow him from the opposite side of the street, making himself suitably conspicuous—the idea was to herd him straight into Faglin’s waiting arms. But first Faglin had to be there, so he had to hurry.

  One thing, at least they didn’t have to worry about. Plessen, no matter how scared he was, wouldn’t go rushing back to Mühlfeld to throw himself on the protection of the Russians. His had not been a blameless life. One word would be enough to ensure that Plessen disappeared into a Soviet labor camp forever, and he knew it.

  As soon as he reached Tabor Strasse, Faglin started north. His way was parallel to the Augarten, and if he looked to his left he could see the bare back of one of the old palace buildings. By the time he crossed the Heine Strasse his breathing was nearly normal again. Plessen was nowhere in sight.

  Plessen wouldn’t get away—Hirsch was right behind him, and Hirsch had a pistol. If he met anyone, or tried to enter a car or board a bus, Hirsch would shoot him dead. It would be noisy and dangerous, but that wouldn’t do Plessen any good. Hirsch was an excellent shot.

  Still, the Russians weren’t going to be lulled to sleep by having people murdered on the streets of their sector. It wouldn’t make anything any easier.

  Faglin glanced around nervously, resting his head on the back of a bench where, possibly right up to the final bombardment of the city, people had sat waiting for the bus to come. The green wooden slats on one side had been torn to splinters, probably by a piece of shrapnel, and the absence of legs on that side made the whole structure tilt like a gangplank.