The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  This time there was no joy in her flight. Her lungs ached with panic as she ran into the darkness. She saw the line of trees in front of her, crooked silver lines cutting through the black, and they filled her mind. Escape—she couldn’t even think it. There were no words, there was only the jolt of her feet striking the ground and the inferno behind her.

  As she passed, the naked branch of a tree cut at her face. She knew it had happened, knew precisely what it was, but felt nothing. There was no room.

  And suddenly she stopped—or something had stopped her. Her legs gave way beneath her. She could feel the thing that had hit her all along her chest, but she didn’t fall. She hung there suspended. It wouldn’t let her fall.

  It was an arm. She could feel the fingers clutching at her rib cage, digging into the flesh. A great black arm.

  A gloved hand came around and clamped over her mouth, and she twisted her head to see. His face was almost white in the moonlight, and his eyes glittered hard and blue. He was huge—she kicked her legs and found she wasn’t even touching the ground. He picked her up as if she were no more than a child’s doll. He didn’t speak at first; his face was like a cruel mask.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Not a word.”

  There was nothing left. Fear had pushed out everything else. She couldn’t even try to fight him. She let the cold darkness close in on her brain.

  10

  Vienna, Austria: March 5, 1948

  It was daylight. Motes of dust floated on the sunshine that came slanting in through the curtained window. There was a carpet on the floor, with spots where the pattern had been almost worn away, and the air carried the smells of cigarette smoke and cooking. Esther was lying in a bed. It had sheets and a down comforter and she felt buried in it.

  She turned her head a few degrees and counted the people in the room. There were two of them: a woman, sitting on the edge of the bed, cradling a coffee cup in her hands—Esther could feel the pressure of her body pulling on the blankets—and a man. The man was standing in the doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest and he looked angry. He was the same man who had caught her running through the trees.

  “You want something to drink, Liebling?” the woman asked, putting a hand behind Esther’s head and bringing the cup to her lips. “You had us worried there for a few hours.”

  Esther drank the coffee, which had grown quite cold, and tried to remember . There wasn’t much, just a few vague impressions—the inside of a car, part of a stairway, almost nothing else. She remembered being carried some of the way, and telling herself not to struggle, that to struggle was to invite death. She looked at the man in the doorway again and, curiously, discovered that she was no longer afraid of him, not the way she had been afraid of Filatov. He was not vicious. She just knew that; she couldn’t have said how. The coffee made her feel better. It cleared her mind, and she no longer felt so strangled.

  The woman took the cup away and set it on a small table beside the bed. Esther had the impression she had seen her somewhere before. The woman smiled, as if she could read her thoughts.

  “I saw you a couple of times in the yard,” she said. “You were Filatov’s little bird, somebody told me. I’ll bet right now he’s—”

  “He’s dead.”

  Esther’s voice sounded raspy with disuse. She was surprised it worked at all.

  “I’m glad to hear it. He’ll be no loss to the world.”

  “Why don’t you take a walk, Sonya. See if we’ve attracted any police.”

  The man’s voice was deep and quiet and gave the impression he meant to have his way. He uncrossed his arms and buried his hands in the pockets of an old pair of blue wool trousers. He was waiting.

  Sonya, who was so kind and who knew all about the life inside Mühlfeld, rose from the bed without turning to look behind her. Her expression, as she glanced down at Esther, seemed to counsel submission: Learn from my example to do as he says, and everything will turn out all right. We both know what men are like.

  When she was gone, and what sounded heavy enough to be an outside door had slammed shut behind her, the man who meant to have his way pulled a tiny wooden chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. For a long moment he was silent as he studied her face. It never seemed to occur to him that she might be just as curious.

  There had been a Ukrainian guard at Chelmno whom everyone called “Goliath”—he stood out in Esther’s memory as the biggest man she had ever seen. This man must have been just as big, perhaps even a shade taller, but strong and graceful-looking where Goliath had been merely heavy with huge, clumsy lumps of muscle. This man seemed all chest and shoulders inside his white shirt, and his enormous hands, one of which was covered across the back with a flat scar, were almost beautiful.

  He was handsome in a brutal sort of way, but the brutality seemed to be more something that life had done to him than part of his own nature. It was a strong face—that was the word that kept corning into her mind as she looked at him. His hair was golden and a little too long, as it he had forgotten for some time to have it cut, and his cold blue eyes were at once fierce and quiet. His face was like a mask behind which he was waiting for the treachery of strangers.

  It occurred to Esther that this was the first time in many years she had been alone with a man inside the four walls of a room and did not feel herself to be in danger. It was as if he belonged to some different order of creation and had never learned to. . .

  “You had a visitor yesterday,” he said suddenly, in a voice that suggested nothing. “A lawyer named ‘Plessen.’ What did you have to say to each other?”

  Perhaps he didn’t mean to, but he made it sound as if he were accusing her of something. But of course the attorney Plessen had told lies, and perhaps not to her alone.

  “He said he was from my aunt in America—Trenton, New Jersey. He said he was appealing my case to the military governor.”

  “He was not from your aunt. He was from Egon Hagemann.”

  At first all she felt was the surprise—just a kind of stunned sensation, passionless, crowding out everything else like the noiseless white flash of an explosion. For an instant she couldn’t even grasp why she was so astonished. Even the name, at first, seemed connected to nothing.

  And then this cooled into fear and then, that almost forgotten emotion, shame.

  Yes, of course he was accusing her of something. She could feel her face going hot with shame as she realized that he must know all about Hagemann, all about the things that had happened at Waldenburg. She could see it in his eyes that were so careful to remain impassive as they searched her face. Of course he knew. Who could help knowing about Esther Rosensaft, the little whore who had stayed alive by letting the officers and men of the Waffen-SS do whatever they liked with her?

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t. . .”

  “Did he ask you anything? More important, did you tell him anything?”

  “No—I mean, yes.” Her voice was thickening and she felt an almost irresistible urge to begin sobbing. Why did this man, this particular man, have to know about Waldenburg? “I mean, what was there to tell him? He wanted to be sure I was the right Esther Rosensaft. There was a guard standing behind me the whole time. What could he have asked me?”

  “That s a good question.”

  He rose from the chair—he just seemed to go up and up—and stepped over to the window and glanced outside, as if he were expecting someone. The sun caught the planes of his face so that the cheekbones seemed to gleam.

  “I’m told Hagemann was pretty fond of you,” he said finally, not moving from the window. He seemed to be looking at nothing. “Is that why he wanted to get you out of Mühlfeld?”

  “Colonel Hagemann used to tell me about his other women—the ones he’d had in Russia and Poland before it became my turn. He liked to. . . They all died.”

  She sat up in bed and let her legs swing over the edge until she could touch the floor. It was something of an experiment; she would be glad to f
ind she could get up. She didn’t want to talk to this man about these things while lying back against a feather pillow.

  “He was going to kill me. He told me often enough—we would have little ‘rehearsals,’ except that I never knew if. . . I’m sure I would be dead now if the General had not intervened. No—” She shook her head bitterly, wishing she could find a way for once to hurt a man back. I don’t imagine Colonel Hagemann would rescue me from prison for sentimental reasons.”

  She would not cry. She had been through far worse moments than this, and she was weary of always giving men the satisfaction of their little victories over her, as if the only pleasure life held for them was to humiliate Esther Rosensaft. She would not cry.

  And when she was quite satisfied that she would not, she looked up and saw that this man was once again studying the view through the room’s only window. He hadn’t been watching. He had afforded her a moment of decent privacy, just as if she had a right to it. It was like a revelation.

  “What do you mean when you say the General “intervened’? Do you mean von Goltz?”

  “Yes, von Goltz—General von Goltz. He was not as bad as Hagemann.”

  “He gave the orders.” He was looking at her now, and the muscles in his jaw were visible under the skin.

  “Did you know him?”

  “I arrested him. I watched him hang.”

  His blue eyes were no longer so cold now. Now they seemed to want to burn through her, as if he had hated her all his life.

  “I—he saved me. Twice. What you say is true, but he is dead now and I have no right to kill him all over again.”

  “You were his mistress.”

  “Yes. I had no choice about that either, except between that and death.”

  She looked into his face, his hard, implacable face, and felt a strange kind of grief, as if this were the first time she had been brought to see everything she had forfeited by allowing herself to be taken out of that winding column of the condemned at Chelmno. He was no one to her, but she had lost him—that day, now. She had traded her decency for her life, and now she felt sick with remorse.

  “I’m sorry—I wasn’t there, so I have no business passing judgment on you. Probably no one does.”

  “Are you one of the Jews?” she asked. Suddenly it seemed the most important question in the world.

  “No.”

  . . . . .

  Esther had just finished her bath and was drying herself with a large white towel—it was one of the most voluptuous experiences of her life—when a clock tower that must have been several blocks away struck twelve. She could only just hear it. It made a little puffing sound, like someone hitting the soft earth with his fist.

  When she came back out into the bedroom, she found that Sonya had brought her some clean underwear and was sitting on the chair, doing her nails with a file.

  “You want to borrow it later?” she asked, flourishing the thing in the air. “Inar brought it to me yesterday from the International Zone. It’s such a fight to put oneself back in order after a stretch in jail. I still haven’t got the smell of that prison soap out of my skin.”

  “Inar?”

  Sonya held the nail file level about a foot above her head and scowled to indicate whom she meant. It was enough—Esther nodded and murmured a little assenting sound.

  “And, no, he’s not my boyfriend, so you don’t have to look so miserable. He was just being considerate. He’s actually a very kind man, although you’d never believe it to look at him.” Sonya laughed as she blew on the nail of her little finger. “Don’t worry, he’ll get around to you when he’s had a chance to relax a little. I’d give another five months in Mühlfeld—well, at least another three—if he’d show half as much interest in me.”

  “He wants me for something else. He doesn’t even know I’m alive, not in that way.”

  “Oh yes he does.”

  Esther couldn’t have brought herself to make a reply. She had imagined the capacity for simple embarrassment, that mingling of confusion and something almost like pleasure, was a thing that had died in her a long time ago, but it seemed not.

  “You just give him a little time to breathe,” Sonya went on, her attention complacently absorbed with the details of her manicure. “He doesn’t think there’s enough of him left for all that now, but he’s as human as any other man. I saw the way he sat watching by your bed last night, looking down at you as if into a mirror. Maybe he doesn’t know it yet, but it wasn’t all just revenge or politics or whatever in hell he thinks he wants. There was something else too. But take my advice and let him figure it out for himself before you set the hook in him.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was all that Esther could think to say. “I didn’t mean. . .” She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up a piece of the clean underwear, looking at it as if she had never seen its like before. She let it slide over her fingers and into her lap.

  Sonya seemed to think she was being very comical.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, trying not to smile too widely. “He’s not really my type. Not that I’d turn him down—I wouldn’t say no to having those hands sliding up my dress one time. But you could say he doesn’t fit into my plans. I want a man who’s close to forty and about ten pounds overweight, a man who makes a salary and likes to garden. If he’s been married before and has a couple of children, that would be another point in his favor—I’m not sure I’m still young enough to have any children of my own. I’ve got to look out for my retirement. I’m too old to have time for white knights like Inar.”

  . . . . .

  +The hardest part was maneuvering the casket down the stairwell. Christiansen had carried it up on his back, but there hadn’t been a body in it then.

  “You’re going to be Sonya’s mother, all packed up for burial in the family plot in Konstanz. I have the death certificate, the export license, even a receipt from the cemetery for a down payment on the grave site. If they’ve been told to look out for a woman, they’ll have Sonya to look at.”

  Esther had taken it all in, saying nothing, solemnly working away at the carton of ice cream he had brought her—she needed a little spoiling after four months in the slammer, and the poor little chit looked like she could also use the calories. Her eyes were large and full of misgivings.

  “What if they want to look inside?” she asked finally, pointing with her spoon at the black wooden casket that lay on the hearth rug like a corpse in its own right.

  “You’ll be made up to look old—I have a rubber mask and coverings to make your neck and the backs of your hands convincingly withered. You’ll be deep asleep, so deep they won’t even be able to see you breathing. We’re going through the checkpoint at night, so they’ll only have klieg lights. Everyone looks dead under klieg lights. You’ll make a very plausible cadaver. “

  He tried to smile, probably without much success. She was right to think it was a screwy idea—more right than she could ever imagine.

  “Will they be looking for me?”

  “Difficult to say.” Christiansen shrugged and began to light a cigarette. “They will have found three bodies in that burnt-out ambulance, but between twenty-five pounds of plastic explosives and a full gas tank those three will probably be a little difficult to identify, even as to sex. We’re hoping the Russians will be a few days figuring out that you weren’t incinerated too. We’re hoping that for now they won’t have any clear idea what last night’s explosion was all about.”

  That line of conversation didn’t seem to be making her any happier. Apparently, in spite of everything, Esther Rosensaft hadn’t yet learned to be indifferent to killing. It was probably a point in her favor. Christiansen decided to change the subject.

  “You haven’t finished your ice cream,” he said. “What’s the matter, didn’t you like it?”

  “It was fine. I just seem to have lost my appetite. I’m sorry—it was very kind of you.”

  It was late afternoon, and she had been up
and walking around for hours. Now she looked tired. She sat in the chair, her shoulders slumped, her skinny little arms dangling in her lap. She was like a weary child—the short black hair, the eyes, the whole bit. It took an effort to remember that she was not a child, that she knew her way around men and a good deal else, that she was probably perfectly aware of the sort of impression she could make on a big, dumb Norwegian by playing cute and helpless and full of finer feelings. It was worth reminding oneself that getting sentimental about Esther Rosensaft wasn’t going to help trap Colonel Egon Hagemann. Esther Rosensaft, after all, was supposed to be the bait.

  “Finish it anyway. I don’t want your stomach to start growling at the wrong moment.”

  He spent what was left of the daylight attending to the lady’s makeup.

  Mordecai had found the mask and all the rest of it. Mordecai was better at finding things than anyone Christiansen had ever known, even in the army. All that was left was to fix the hair and blend in the edges.

  It was decided not to use a wig. A wig was too easily detected and, besides, they only wanted to make her look around sixty. Christiansen decided to strip some of the color out with lye and leave the rest.

  “Where did you learn to do this?” she asked. She was in her slip, sitting between his knees while he worked on her hair. She kept glancing up at him, which didn’t make the work any easier.

  “In New York, playing the theaters. I was a musician, but you learned to do a little of everything”

  The theaters? Are they nice?”

  “They’re not bad—hold still.”

  “You were a musician? What did you play?”

  “Just hold still. Well save the confessions for another day.”

  The mask was very good. A little spirit gum, a little grease pencil, and Esther looked wrinkled and ravaged. When she closed her eyes, she looked dead.

  “I’m going to give you a shot,” he told her. “You’ll feel a trifle cold just at first, and then you’ll just drift off—there’s no pain. When you come around, you’ll be in the American Zone.”

  Without a word, and as obediently as a child, she lay down in the casket. Her eyes never left his face, as if the sight of him was all that gave her the courage to be silent. Christiansen inserted the needle in a vein on the inside of her upper arm, where the sleeve of her dress would cover it. After a few seconds, she closed her eyes. In less than a minute her hands were white and cold. It gave him a peculiar feeling to look at her.