The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  He made a curt gesture in Esther’s direction. It was like being dismissed from existence.

  “Itzikel, why don’t you take Esther back upstairs? I want to have a little talk with Inar.”

  Herr Leivick rose from his chair and slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He seemed to be thinking about something else as he smiled at her, as if she had stirred some memory.

  On the stairway and in the two-room suite that Herr Leivick and Esther divided between them, Itzhak was morosely silent. He hardly even looked at her. He seemed angry, or at least resentful. For twenty minutes together he stood leaning back against the dresser, his arms folded across his chest, staring at nothing.

  “You should go to bed,” he said finally. What could she possibly have done to offend him?

  “I don’t feel like it.” She shook her head. “I’m not tired—I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  It was not an answer that pleased. The silence continued until Herr Leivick returned.

  “I shouldn’t think of going down there just yet,” he said, looking at Itzhak and shrugging his shoulders helplessly. “I don’t think you’d find it particularly restful—our friend seems to be in something of a mood. He’s playing his cello.”

  “He’s what?” Itzhak was frankly incredulous. He seemed on the verge of laughing out loud until he saw the expression on Herr Leivick’s face.

  “Why not? You’ve seen the case often enough—did you imagine he carries it around with him merely for the exercise? He’s quite good. Besides, music is very soothing to the nerves. He’s had a hard day. I’m only telling you because I think it would be wise if you slept up here tonight”

  Itzhak s mouth compressed into a thin line.

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like I was a kid, Mordecai.”

  “You are a kid.”

  “I wasn’t such a kid this afternoon, with that Nazi.”

  “I know—Inar told me about it. He said you did very good work. But you still have to learn to be a little tactful, Itzikel. You won’t he grown up until you learn that other people have souls as well as you—even overgrown, golden-haired goyim like Inar Christiansen.”

  “Would it be all right if I went?” Esther asked suddenly. It was an impulse—she hardly knew where she found the courage. “I could just sit outside his door and listen. I wouldn’t disturb him.”

  Herr Leivick turned to her with a curious, measuring narrowness of the eyes. He almost seemed to have expected something of the sort. Finally he held out the room key for her, waiting until her fingers closed around it.

  “Go ahead,” he said, with the deliberateness of a man who has hit upon an idea and isn’t sure whether he is pleased with it or not. “Go down and listen, if you want to. Who can say? It might be just the sort of disturbance he needs. Itzhak, just walk her down and make certain there aren’t any unfamiliar men loitering around in the halls, would you?”

  Itzhak didn’t seem at all pleased with the assignment, but he stuck the pistol back into his belt, pulled his sweater back down to cover it, and opened the door for her.

  Already, at the foot of the stairwell, one could hear the whisper of music that seemed simply to be part of the atmosphere. like the scent of flowers in an empty room. She sat down on the last step—Inar’s door was only a few feet away—and looked up at Itzhak, smiling.

  “You’ll be safe enough here,” he said, looking nervously away. The sound of the cello seemed to upset him, as if it hinted at the existence of things he would just as soon not know about. “Do you want me to come down for you later?”

  She shook her head. No, she didn’t want that.

  When he was gone, and she was alone there in the hallway with that strangely human voice, she was almost a little ashamed of her own sense of relief. Itzhak was a nice boy and. as he had pointed out to her more than once, one of her own kind, but he seemed to be waiting for something—something he almost seemed to demand as a birthright—that she couldn’t possibly have brought herself to give him. She didn’t love him, could never love him, could never want to love him, even if “love” amounted to no more than giving him freely what she had given to so many men already, and all because they too had demanded it as a birthright. Itzhak wasn’t anything like them, but somehow that didn’t make any difference. It didn’t matter that he was her own kind, because she didn’t have a kind anymore. She wasn’t a nice Jewish girl whose father could speak for her while she hid in the next room. Her father was dead, and there wasn’t anything nice about her. Itzhak would have to look elsewhere.

  But with Inar it was different. It wasn’t simply that he too had been through the fire, although that was part of it—that he knew the worst of her and could imagine all the rest was a relief to her conscience. It wasn’t that he had saved her from dying piece by piece in that Russian prison. She wanted him. It was a new experience for her—she wanted to feel the weight of his body over her. She wanted that helplessness. It would be the first time any man had had her because for that moment and that moment alone she needed it. It didn’t make any difference that he didn’t care anything about her. Why should anyone care anything about her? She wasn’t anybody. He could throw her out tomorrow morning, but she would still have had something she could keep for the rest of her life. It was what she imagined virgins must feel like.

  And he played the cello too. The sound of it made her so happy she felt like crying.

  General von Goltz had played the violin, keeping time by tapping his foot on the floor. B, D, B, C-sharp, A—just notes. He liked a piece with plenty of double-stops and trills. He would play them over and over, each time exactly the same. He liked an audience. The music that this man was playing in the solitude of his hotel room was nothing like that. It almost wasn’t music at all. It was almost like the sound of someone speaking, except that the words were lost. It was like something from childhood . It was like Isaiah prophesying in the wilderness.

  And it was beautiful. Unearthly—just a long melodic line that never repeated itself, going on and on, tragic and beautiful. A lament for Israel—for Esther Rosensaft. Except, of course, that Inar Christiansen was not a Jew and hardly knew Esther Rosensaft was alive. Still, it didn’t seem to make any difference. There was room in that sadness, even for her.

  And then, suddenly, it stopped. A second later the door opened, and Inar was looking out at her with a puzzled expression on his face. It was only then that she realized she really had been crying.

  “Have you come down to complain about the noise?” he asked. It was hard to tell whether he was joking or not.

  “What was that you were playing?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just doodles. It keeps the shoulder muscles from stiffening up.” He glanced up and down the corridor and then back at her, and then smiled. It seemed so strange to see him smiling.

  “Come in.”

  He stood a little aside for her and then closed the door again. She stood in the center of the room, not quite sure what to do with her hands, until he made a curt gesture toward a small wooden chair standing against the wall. His cello rested against the bed

  “Play something else,” she said as she sat down. “Something that isn’t so sad.”

  At once she felt like an idiot, but he merely smiled again. He seemed to have taken the attitude that she was a child who must be entertained, so he sat down once more on the bed, hoisted the neck of his instrument up to his shoulder, and began to play.

  “What was that?”

  “‘Little Brown Jug.’ It’s an American song.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not—that’s what it’s called. I’m sorry.”

  He looked as if he were about to say something else, but then he stopped, lowered his head, and began to play again. This time he was concentrating, and the tone was caressing and rich. The heavy, strong fingers of his left hand danced back and forth across the strings. He hardly seemed to realize anyone was there.

  When
he stopped he closed his eyes for a moment and then looked up at her, no longer smiling.

  “That was Bach,” he said. His hand seemed to pain him; he let it slip down the neck until it rested on the cello’s wide, feminine shoulder. “You didn’t get your new clothes today, did you. I’m sorry—we’ll go back in the morning. Have I thanked you yet for saving my life? I honestly think you did, you know.”

  “Does it really hurt where he shot you?”

  “Yes, it really hurts. That just means it won’t kill me.”

  “I love you.”

  She could feel her eyes flooding with tears again. She felt humiliated by the way he was looking at her, as if she had admitted to an act of shameful cowardice. No, of course he didn’t want to hear. But she couldn’t help herself. It seemed as natural to tell him so as to love him, and as natural to love him as to breathe.

  “I’m no prize, kid,” he said finally, shaking his head in resignation. “All you’re going to buy yourself is a bad time.”

  Was it really possible, after all? She pressed her hands down into her lap—it was the only way she could keep from reaching out to touch him. She wanted to touch him, to be touched by him. To feel his strong fingers pressing against her body.

  “I love you.”

  It seemed all she was able to say.

  He got up and carried the cello over to its case. All the time he was putting it away he never looked at her. He seemed to be waiting for her to disappear.

  Finally, after the lid was closed, he turned around.

  “I killed a man today.” His eyes hardly seemed alive at all. “I seem to be doing that quite a lot lately. I don’t much enjoy it. So don’t tempt me, Esther. I’d like nothing better than to crawl inside you and hide for a few hours, but it wouldn’t work out. I can’t give you anything you really need. I’ve got the mark of Cain on me.

  “So have I.”

  She pushed up her sleeve to show him. At that moment she was almost glad—the numbers seemed to give her a kind of right. They meant she was one of his own kind.

  There was just a second when she thought she had won. She could feel his tenderness, like the warmth of his body. Yes. of course, he understood everything.

  And then, in an instant, his face changed.

  “Go upstairs,” he said, almost shouting. His eyes had a cold blue light in them, and he almost seemed to be trembling. “Tell Mordecai to come down here. Wait—just a minute.”

  He took her by the arm. turning it around so he could look at the tattoo, holding it up to the light. He was tremendously excited; she could feel the tension through his whole body. He had forgotten all about her.

  “Damn you. Damn you, you bastard. You. . .”

  But she couldn’t finish. She could only sob. And he wasn’t listening anyway. There was a desk next to his bed. Still holding her by the arm, he dragged her over to it, opened the drawer, took out a piece of paper and a pencil, and copied out the number. G4/3454641. She wasn’t even there for him, only the number.

  Finally, he let her go.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Get Mordecai—go on!”

  . . . . .

  G4/3454641. He wondered how he could have missed it, how he could have been so stupid.

  “Hagemann always undervalued the beautiful.” Von Goltz’s own words—and Christiansen had been dumb enough to think he had been talking about Esther. Perhaps he even had, but not only. The key had been there all the time. “I play the violin, did you know? Nothing in comparison with yourself of course, but not too badly for a soldier.”

  And von Goltz had put those numbers on her arm himself. With the Russians only a few hours away, he had taken the time.

  “I play the violin, did you know?”

  Well yes, it was all so fucking obvious. The General had made Esther the bearer of his last message to the world, his will and testament. It was a code, just as Mordecai had guessed. But numbers can stand for letters, which can stand for notes. The tattoo stood for a phrase of music—a little joke. Ein Musikalischer Spass.

  G4/3454641. What was the G for? A treble? Why would von Goltz want to indicate a clef? A key signature? The numbers, obviously, were intervals, but from what? G? Were the intervals chromatic or part of a scale? At least there was a limit on the number of possibilities.

  Christiansen picked up his pencil again and sketched a hasty five-line staff, trying the chromatic Intervals from G, G, B, B-flat, B, C, B, C-sharp (call it D-flat and keep it in the family), B, A-flat. Key of A-flat major, more or less. It didn’t look very promising, and it would probably sound like shit.

  The key of G was no help—it only had one sharp and that an F, so a progression in which the highest interval was a 6 would never reach it. G was the dominant of C, so maybe the key was C.

  Chromatic intervals were a washout, so he would try a straight scale. Okay, from G that went G, C, B, C, D, C, E, C, G.

  He looked at his little clef full of notes and decided this was a considerable improvement. Now, if those were the pitches, what were the note values? For the moment he would assume they were all equal, so that only left the time signature.

  He had his cello out of its case and was just about to begin playing when Mordecai walked through the still-open door.

  “What did you do to that poor girl? She’s practically hysterical.”

  “Just listen to this.”

  Christiansen played his nine notes, and immediately they sounded like something he had heard before—they were even pretty. But the timing was off. What did the stroke mean? A bar line? Okay. Then the rhythm could be either da-da-DUM or Dum-da-Dam-da. He tried the first. No. that wasn’t right. DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da. Paydirt.

  “What we have here is a musical phrase, probably in the key of C, definitely in three-quarter time. Listen again.”

  It sounded just as right the second tune through. Mordecai sat on the chair so lately vacated by Esther Rosensaft, his head cocked a little to one side.

  “It’s very nice,” he said, without giving any indication of being overwhelmed. “What is it?”

  Christiansen laughed—he couldn’t help himself.

  “What is it? You ask, what is it? I’ll tell you what it is. Its G-4-3-4-5-4-6-4-1, that’s what it is. It’s what Goltz put on our Esther’s arm. It’s your code, you goddamn idiot!”

  He swallowed hard, surprised at his own vehemence. He wasn’t angry with Mordecai—what the hell was the matter with him?

  “It may or may not be my code. You’ve been able to turn a series of numbers into a little tune, which by itself proves nothing How does that make it a code?”

  Yes, of course he was offended. Mordecai’s face was as blank as the wall behind him, but that didn’t mean he liked being called names. And now he was demanding some kind of proof.

  Christiansen played the phrase again. Nine little notes—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. He didn’t care who he offended. He was right.

  “I know this piece,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I can hear it in my mind, an oboe solo with the violins playing an octave lower, sempre piano. When you play the cello in a student orchestra you have a lot of time to sit on your backside and read the stuff everyone else is playing. If we can track down the score those nine notes came from, we’ll know everything von Goltz put into that tattoo. Let’s go find ourselves a music store.”

  Lifting the instrument from his shoulder, Christiansen rose from the bed as if he wanted to leave that minute. He put the cello back into its case, parked the case in the closet, and closed the door. Mordecai hadn’t so much as taken his hands from his knees.

  “It’s one o’clock in the morning,” he said finally. “There is a curfew in this city. Where are we supposed to find a music store?”

  He smiled, so at least he had forgotten about being insulted. He was a practical man pointing out a practical consideration. The whole business could wait until tomorrow morning.

  No, it couldn’t. Christiansen began hunt
ing around for a clean shirt big enough to go over his bandages.

  “Come on. Mordecai. We’re going to need that International Zionist Conspiracy of yours now. We’ve got to find a music store!”

  “You might bear in mind, there are very few Jews left in Vienna these days.”

  Christiansen stopped with his arm halfway into a shirt sleeve. He turned around to look, just to be sure his ears hadn’t been playing tricks on him. Mordecai still hadn’t gotten out of his chair. He was very still and serious. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that Christiansen wasn’t kidding either.

  “Do I have to remind you what it is we’re looking for here? Do you remember the picture you painted for me of what Hagemann and his Syrian friends would be able to do with even a small quantity of von Goltz’s precious nerve gas? I’m not indulging a whim, Mordecai. Find me a music store, or in a month’s time there may not be very many Jews left in Tel Aviv either.”

  Ten minutes later they were out on the street, hoping they wouldn’t run into one of the American patrols.

  “He’s not a Jew,” Mordecai was saying, almost under his breath. He still didn’t like this, but at least he had gotten over the idea that he was being asked to play parlor games. “His name is Merizzi—God knows, probably Austrian for the last four hundred years. I picked him because his home address indicates that he lives above his shop. We’ll just have to wake him up and hope he doesn’t decide to call the police.”

  It was very quiet outside, and cold. Christiansen’s wounds hurt him, and he would have liked a cup of coffee and a cigarette to steady his nerves—he knew he was still strung out from this afternoon. But one had to bear with one’s infirmities. They hadn’t passed a car or a lighted window in six blocks.

  I’ve been thinking—It must be late eighteenth century.”

  Mordecai turned around to look at him as if he suspected a hint of madness.

  “Haydn or Mozart. At Juilliard we played Haydn and Mozart until our hair turned white. It’s third movementish—funny how I can almost catch the rest of it, but not quite. I’ll know it the minute I see it.”