The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  Herr Merizzi’s establishment was near the university; they actually had to cross into the International Zone to reach it. The shop was the first floor of a two-story building that looked as if it had been put up in the middle of the last century, in an architectural style that could only be described as Shoddy Imperial Baroque. The windows were separated by twisting pillars of broken, discolored cement. There were no lights on, of course—it was past the bourgeoisie’s bedtime. Christiansen pressed the electric doorbell with his thumb, leaning against it. He could stand the noise if the family could.

  Within forty-five seconds they could hear footsteps on a hall stairway.

  Herr Merizzi opened the door and stuck his head out. He was wearing a dark wool robe over his nightshirt, and he was angry.

  “Have you any idea of the hour?” he asked, sputtering. He was thin-faced and small, with a large mustache that somehow gave him a melancholy appearance. “My wife is. . .”

  The sentence just died—perhaps whatever his wife was or wasn’t seemed somehow less important with Christiansen’s pistol pointing at the center of his face.

  “We wish to do a little research,” Christiansen said softly, pushing his way inside. “There’s a point my friend and I wish to settle, and when we’ve done that we’ll leave. And you’ll be twenty American dollars richer. Do you understand? You can simply go back to bed when we’re finished. There will be no trouble, and tomorrow morning you can buy your wife a nice present.”

  A door opened at the top of the stairway, and Christiansen saw the murky outline of what must have been a large woman wearing her hair loose so that it looked like a shroud. He put his pistol back into his pocket, where she wouldn’t be able to see ft.

  “Fritz?”

  “Nothing, my dear—just business. Go back to bed.”

  The shape in the doorway disappeared soundlessly and the thin wedge of light collapsed to nothing.

  “You did well, Mein Herr.” It was the first time Mordecai had spoken, and the sound of his voice made Fritz’s head twist around on his shoulders with the suddenness of a mechanical toy. “Perhaps we could all go into your shop?”

  Merizzi’s place of business was a room hardly wider than the hallway that led upstairs to his apartment. The long walls were lined with bookcases, with little brass plates nailed to the shelves indicating the contents. Christiansen took down several boxes, the sides cut at an angle so one could read the spines of the scores they contained.

  “Symphonies—and Mozart’s piano concerti, just for insurance.”

  Mordecai nodded without much enthusiasm. He was standing with the proprietor, his back to the door so no one would get any flashes of inspiration. There was a desk in the precise center of the room. Christiansen sat down behind it, snicked on the light, and began sorting out the contents of the boxes. He hadn’t realized before how much the Classical masters had liked the key of C. Without half trying he turned up ten Haydn symphonies, four more by Mozart, and four concerti. Fortunately, not every one of them was in three-quarter time.

  It took him slightly more than an hour to find what he had been looking for.

  “Come take a look at this.”

  Herr Merizzi was asleep in a chair, his chin resting in the palm of his hand, so Mordecai tiptoed over to see what Christiansen had circled in heavy black ink.

  “See the first violins?” he asked, pointing to the top line of the string section. “Just like I remembered, an octave lower than the oboe. And there I was down in the basement, scraping out the tonic. Do you believe me now?”

  They both looked at Merizzi, who had probably been disturbed by the sound of Christiansen’s voice. He was coming awake again.

  “I believe you, but where does it bring us? What does it mean?’

  In answer, Christiansen closed the score. The cover read:

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  SINFONIE IN C

  (LINZER SINFONIE)

  He rolled up the score and put it under his arm. It was time to leave.

  Thank you, Herr Merizzi. Our apologies to your wife.” He took out his wallet and counted two ten-dollar bills into the man’s hand. Merizzi gazed up at him, blinking uncomprehendingly. “I’ll keep this if I may. Please go back to bed now, and forget any of this ever happened.”

  They managed to get four blocks without hearing any police sirens, so apparently that was precisely what he did do.

  “Does the curfew apply in the International Zone?”

  Mordecai shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Good—then let’s take the long way home. I need a drink.”

  The place they found was in a basement, not fifty yards from the Burgtheater; it was like a hundred little joints Christiansen knew in the New York theater district where actors and musicians got together after the shows closed, too keyed up even to think about sleep. It had just that atmosphere—the party that has gone on just a little too long. They were shown to a table by the stairway—the waiter, one gathered, had sized them up as tourists and therefore best kept out of everybody’s way—and Christiansen ordered a brandy and hot water. He could use the anesthetic.

  “Just coffee for me.” Mordecai said. When he had the cup in front of him, he consented to take one of Christiansen s cigarettes.

  “So. Now we know where to look. From the whole world we have narrowed our focus to the city of Linz—and all because Mozart wrote a symphony there. Von Goltz went to all that trouble just to tell us that one thing.”

  “He’s telling us more than that.” Christiansen took the cigarette out of his mouth and set it in the huge glass ashtray that took up so much of their tiny table. He unrolled the score and opened it to the place he had marked, putting it beside Mordecai’s right hand. “You see how the section is marked? ‘Trio.’ Why pick that section unless he wanted us to know we should be looking for three things instead of just one?”

  “Three things?”

  Mordecai took a pen from his breast pocket and, at the top of the score, directly over the nine notes Christiansen had circled, wrote out the number from Esther Rosensaft’s arm: G4/3454641.

  “What is the significance, do you suppose, of the line?” he asked finally. As if to emphasize the question, he wrote out the number a second time.

  “It’s a bar line—look at the score. G, C, then the rest follows in the next measure.”

  “But it doesn’t, don’t you see? The final note begins a new measure, so if von Goltz was being consistent he would have put in a second line—here.” He drew it between the final two numbers. G4/345464/1. “He must have had a reason. Von Goltz could count just as well as you or I.”

  Mordecai took a sip of his coffee, set the cup down, and smiled. His discovery seemed to please him very much.

  “Perhaps your original thought was correct. Perhaps 3454641’ is the number of a safe-deposit box. Then we would have the box number and the city.”

  “Do you have any idea how many banks there must be in Linz?” Mordecai asked, still smiling through the haze of his cigarette smoke. “We have two things—perhaps we have two things—but we still need the third. What do you suppose ‘G4’ is intended to tell us?”

  Christiansen didn’t have the faintest idea. He was tired of being clever. He was tired of guessing games. His wounds hurt him and the brandy wasn’t helping at all. He wanted to go back to the hotel and go to bed. His cigarette tasted like burning newspaper.

  He dropped a handful of coins onto the table. One of them rolled over the edge.

  “Let’s get out of here. We’ll have the walk back in which to consider the matter.”

  Mordecai bent over to pick up the coin from the floor. He set it on the table with the others. Then he began to get up.

  “A map,” he said suddenly. He had to put his hand down on the table to steady himself—that was how it took him. “Every map I’ve ever seen has letters along the top and numbers down the side. ‘G4’ must refer to a square in a map grid. That’s our third thing
.”

  “There must be an official map of Linz—the Nazis had an official everything.”

  “Yes—we’ll have it checked. How much will you wager that we’ll find only one bank with a street address within those coordinates?”

  Neither man spoke as they walked back toward the university. After a few blocks, the only sound was from their footsteps. Beyond the Maria Theresian Strasse, which marked the northern limit of the International Zone, there weren’t even any street lamps.

  Von Goltz had deposited his legacy in a bank in Linz. They had the account number, and they knew where to find the bank. But they couldn’t claim the inheritance quite yet.

  “There will be a key to the safe-deposit box.” Mordecai spoke so softly that he almost seemed to be talking to himself. “I think we can assume Hagemann will have that. And the box will be in someone’s name. The bank will doubtless require a signature. We have half the pieces.”

  “And Hagemann has the rest.”

  “Yes. And whoever finishes the game with them all will be in a position to dictate the history of a nation.”

  Mordecai stared down at his feet as they walked along, his face tight and frowning.

  “There are some things it is better not to know,” he said finally, as if announcing some decision. “This is a terrible weapon, the sort of secret that must corrupt anyone to whom it is revealed. I could wish for the sake of my country waiting to be born that neither side might have it. The Jews are as human as anyone else. They will not be improved for possessing so absolutely the power of life and death.”

  “But better them than the Syrians—isn’t that what you think?” Christiansen didn’t know himself quite what the question meant.

  “What I think is, better no one at all.”

  There was simply nothing more to say. They parted on the steps of the hotel.

  “Aren’t you coming inside?” Christiansen asked. But Mordecai shook his head.

  “No. I must make a telephone call, and it’s better that I don’t use the hotel lines. You understand. I shall see you again in the morning.”

  So Christiansen went inside alone. His room was on the third floor, and the elevator had been out of order since the day of their arrival. He had the stairway all to himself.

  He supposed, really, that he ought to be extremely pleased with himself. After all, they had figured everything out. What was left except to get a key and some information from a man who went around with a bodyguard even Stalin might have envied? It should be easy. Sure it should.

  And if it wasn’t, why should he care? He would kill Hagemann or Hagemann would kill him—it seemed to make remarkably little difference.

  He was tired, that was all. You get tired, and it makes you sick of life. He was tired all right. He wished. . .

  Oh, the hell with it.

  He unlocked his hotel door and let it swing shut behind him before he switched on the light. Esther Rosensaft was sitting up in his bed, naked, resting on one elbow, the sheet covering her up to the arms. She looked at him through dark, serious, unsmiling eyes. The duplicate of his room key was lying on the night table. God damn Mordecai.

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. “I guess I gave you a pretty rough time. I guess I do that a lot.”

  “Yes. But I’ve decided to forgive you.”

  14

  Barcelona, Spain. March 17, 1948

  In an hour they would be in the station. Christiansen took out a cigarette and lit it, using only his right hand because Esther had long since taken possession of the left and was playing absentmindedly with his fingers. The quartet score spread out over his knees, which he had bought during a three-hour stopover in Zürich simply to have something to read, had long since ceased to be very interesting.

  Since yesterday morning Esther had been very quiet. Up until then anyone would have supposed she was having a marvelous time—she was in love, to hear her tell it, and on a kind of honeymoon trip and, barring the locked cattle car that had transported her and her family to the extermination camps, this was the first time she had ever been on a train. Now she just sat there, without speaking, staring out through their compartment window as the scenery slipped by, with Christiansen’s left hand held palm up in her lap.

  In Barcelona, Christiansen would leave the train and Itzhak Dessauer would take his place.

  It was an elaborate plan—too elaborate to Christiansen’s way of thinking. They were staging a little domestic drama. Dessauer was to be the bridegroom, taking his new wife on a marriage trip to the Spanish Mediterranean. That was how the bait was to be displayed to Egon Hagemann. The young couple would stay in a hotel in the resort town of Burriana, where Hagemann maintained a villa overlooking the coast. The idea was to make him forget himself long enough that he would risk venturing out beyond the protection of his fortified enclosure and his bodyguards, on the theory that not even Hagemann would think to bring an army into a lady’s bedroom. Mordecai and his people were taking a hell of a lot for granted.

  “Hagemann will never buy it. He’ll know he’s being set up. He knows Esther was in Mühlfeld. By now he certainly must have heard that Plessen is dead. And a couple of days after that episode, not half a dozen miles away, I killed one of his soldiers. He’s bound to draw the appropriate conclusions.”

  “Of course, but what choice do we have?” Mordecai had shrugged his shoulders, smiling in a way that suggested he found the whole situation faintly ludicrous. “For that matter, what choice will Hagemann have? His ambitions—his survival, from everything we hear—are all predicated on gaining possession of the girl, so he will have to try for her whether he suspects a trap or not. He will take his precautions, needless to say. Everything will hinge upon which of us has been the cleverer.”

  Mordecai and his boys had been in Burriana for over a week now, keeping watch to learn how Hagemann spent his time and settling the details. And since everybody seemed to know all about him, Christiansen was supposed to wait until the last possible moment before putting in an appearance. He was intended to serve as the distraction.

  But in the meantime there had been the journey, and Esther, and it had been almost possible to forget about Egon Hagemann, Kirstenstad, revenge and the fate of the Jews. Christiansen had been escorting his new lady on a leisurely tour across southern Europe, learning all over again how to enjoy himself. It wasn’t hard.

  Esther couldn’t seem to get enough of him—she would sit on the other side of the table in restaurants, watching him eat as if the sight of a man shoveling food into his race were somehow the most enchanting spectacle she could ever hope to witness. And bedtime kept getting earlier and earlier.

  Women, he had discovered, could be very intimidating—at least, this one could. That first night, in his narrow hotel bed in Vienna, he had kept her cradled in his arms while she wept as if her heart would crack. She would take that comfort from him, even while she begged him to despise her, to remember always and forever that she was no better than a street whore. What had they done to her in those places that love should be such a confession of self contempt? To kill the body or cripple the soul, if not both then one or the other. To make life a bitterness and a humiliation, in itself a kind of death.

  He had been lonely and womanless too long—he knew that—and her warm, soft, hungry young body was pressed up against him as if all she wanted was to disappear inside his flesh, but at that moment, listening to her sobbing confessions, even his lust had given way before an enormous and unmanning pity.

  “It’s all right,” he had whispered, stroking her hair with the palm of his hand, conscious that he was lying but not knowing what else to say. “It’s all right. None of that will ever come back.”

  And then she had dug her fingernails into his chest, to remind him why she was there.

  And after that, strangely enough, everything had been fine. She seemed to like it when he made love to her. It seemed to make her happy, even through the tears with which she still regularly wetted his
shoulders. But what, finally, it meant to her he couldn’t have said. He didn’t even know what, if anything, it meant to him.

  This is just kind of a vacation, he kept saying to himself. I need it, and she needs it. But pretty soon it will have to stop or it will begin to get in the way. She’s a poor little thing and she likes me and she’s fun in the sack, but that’s all there can ever be for either one of us.

  All of which, as he perfectly well knew, had nothing to do with anything. The fact was the little minx had gotten under his skin with more than her fingernails.

  “What is this?” she asked, closing the score that lay unattended on his knees so she could read the cover.

  “What is says: ‘Bartók, String Quartets.’”

  “Are they good?”

  “Yes. He was a great genius. My composition teacher introduced me to him when he first came to America in 1940, a frail little man who hardly spoke. It was right after the German invasion of Norway, so all I could think about was getting to England and joining what was left of the army—I’m afraid I didn’t pay him much attention. I didn’t care so much about genius in those days.”

  “Could you play them for me?”

  “It takes four people to play them. You probably wouldn’t like them anyway—they don’t sound a thing like ‘Little Brown Jug.’”

  It was their private joke. They smiled, and she leaned against his shoulder. And then suddenly she was very serious again.

  “When will I see you after Barcelona?” She was looking down at his hand, still cradled in her lap, and as she spoke she ran the tip of her little finger across the scar that covered its back.

  “I don’t know. I’d be around, but people are going to be watching you. Try to remember—you’re supposed to be married to Dessauer.”

  “Will I have to sleep with him?”

  “It isn’t part of the plan, no.” He smiled again, but less easily. The subject made him faintly uncomfortable. “Whether or not it’s part of Itzhak’s plan, I couldn’t say.”

  “I will do what is necessary—no more. Perhaps he won’t even want me. I am a tainted woman, but you are the Righteous Gentile. He will not want to offend you. Would it offend you?”