The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “It was not, he decided, a question he much liked being asked. He wouldn’t answer it Perhaps he couldn’t.

  “I think just maybe you carry this ‘tainted woman’ nonsense a little far,” he said finally. “Lots of people came out of the war with memories they’d just as soon bury. The war turned everything upside down, so we all had to behave like devils just to stay alive. You never did anyone any harm.”

  “Didn’t I? Not even myself?”

  She guided his hand up so that his fingers rested just below the elbow of her right arm. Even through the fairly heavy material of her blouse, he could feel the angry little welt that marked where her tattoo had been. A doctor had removed it in Vienna, but the scar remained. Well, they all had their scars.

  She had told him all about the camps, all about von Goltz and Hagemann, much more than he cared to hear. He knew all about her version.

  “You were a prisoner, and your jailers were the worst this world has to offer.” He could only shrug his shoulders, as if to say, What can I tell you that you don’t already know? “You might try to bear in mind that nobody was giving you any choice.”

  “Weren’t they? Haven’t I a choice now?”

  . . . . .

  Christiansen stood on the platform, watching the train slide away, wondering why he felt so relieved. He was fond of Esther—he wasn’t sure how much further than that he was prepared to go, but he was reasonably certain that if he gave himself half a chance he could work up a real sentimental enthusiasm for her. Anyway, he was glad that for a few hours at least he wouldn’t be seeing her.

  “Would it offend you?” She didn’t even have to put the question into words. It was always there. It constituted the atmosphere of their relationship. He just didn’t have an answer.

  But for a while now he was at liberty to think about something else.

  Was that why men went off to war, to get away from the ambiguities of their womenfolk? Was that what he was doing? Just then it seemed to him the theory had a lot to recommend it.

  Once you got outside the train station, Barcelona looked like a nice enough place. There weren’t any bombed-out buildings—that was it. There was plenty of open ground, but it wasn’t covered with rubble. Just trees and plastered walls and sidewalks. Ordinary life. Of course, Spain had had nine years to clean up the wreckage from its war; maybe the whole of Europe would look this way before long. Anyway, the city was a pleasant surprise.

  Until you noticed the crowds of Civil Guards standing around, with their crisp black uniforms and their lacquered hats. They all carried little pistols in their patent leather holsters, and they were everywhere. It seemed the current regime wasn’t taking any chances.

  Like almost everyone else in the civilized world, Christiansen had developed an allergy to snappy tunics and gold braid—he didn’t like the fancy-dress ball through which soldiers tried to intimidate the rest of the human race. He didn’t like government policemen.

  And all these guys standing around with their hands on their belts were friends of Colonel Egon Hagemann. Old-line Nazis were very popular in Franco’s Spain—it was a point to remember.

  It was cold. There was still a little of winter left, even in Spain, and Christiansen dug the rabbit-fur-lined gloves out of his overcoat pocket as he crossed the plaza in front of a massive Gothic cathedral, its central doors open and gaping like the mouth of a dead monster. A few elderly women were coming down the steps.

  Away from the plaza, the buildings crowded together and the streets were not as clean. Carpets and bed sheets hung from the iron balconies on the upper stories. There was hardly any noise—like all northern Europeans, Christiansen somehow expected Latins to conduct affairs at the top of their lungs—and everyone moved quickly and furtively. It was almost like walking through a city under military occupation.

  On the other side of the Ramblas was a district known as the “Barrio Chino”—one could only guess why, since there weren’t any Chinese anywhere in sight. There also weren’t any women leaning suggestively against the lampposts and no one approached him with photographs of his kid sister, but Christiansen didn’t have to have it explained to him that he was in what passed locally for the red light district. It was one of those places where you seemed to see only other men on the sidewalks, and everyone was very careful to pretend everyone else was invisible. Even at this hour of the morning, the bars were open. One of them was called the “Hotel Goya.” That was what the sign in the window said. It was Jerry Hirsch’s idea of a joke.

  It was a small, dark room. Just inside the shelter of the doorway, a huge green parrot eyed Christiansen suspiciously through the bars of its cage, twisting its head around as if to whisper over its shoulder. There were no confidences here, it implied, nowhere in out of the storm.

  Hirsh was sitting at a table in the rear, nursing a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in a couple of weeks. The women in their tight satin dresses who were taking up space around the bar looked up hopefully as Christiansen pushed aside the beaded curtain that formed a kind of second entrance, but their enthusiasm died almost at once as they saw Hirsch raise his hand in recognition—another damned inglés who wasn’t interested in girls, it seemed.

  “Did Itzikel and the girl get away all right?” Hirsch asked almost before Christiansen had had a chance to sit down. Hirsch had a way of referring to “the girl” as if she were an item you took off the grocery store shelf. Hirsch didn’t waste a lot of time cultivating his charm.

  “They’re fine.”

  “Good—then that’s taken care of.”

  It was impossible to tell what he might have meant, so Christiansen decided not to try. But he would be just as happy when this business was over, and with it the need to stay on civil terms with Hirsch.

  “Do you think it would be possible to get some breakfast in a place like this? I haven’t eaten yet”

  “Yes. They cater to every appetite here.” Hirsch turned and caught the bartender’s eye. “I’ll join you, if you don’t mind. I think my prestige with the management could use the lift.”

  Five minutes later a fat, breathless little woman with the sleeves of her white blouse rolled up high on her arms had brought them two plates of food so hot the steam rose up and hit them in the face. In Spain, one gathered, they didn’t kid around—there was rice, beans in heavy brown sauce, lumps of meat the size of a child’s fist. There was coffee sweetened with a local brandy and a wooden bowl filled with dried apricots.

  “Maybe we should have just asked for cornflakes,” Hirsch murmured, grinning with a parody of horror as the good lady, who was presumably the bartender’s wife, retired back into her kitchen.

  “Tell me about Hagemann.” Christiansen spoke quietly. Anyone watching would have supposed his attention was entirely absorbed by the food in front of him. “What have you found out? Have you seen him?”

  “I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him nearly every night for the past week.”

  Hirsch smiled, lifting a heavy forkful of meat to his mouth. He seemed to be enjoying some private irony, with Christiansen as the principal victim. They weren’t really enemies—it was almost as if they understood each other too well.

  “There’s a club he favors, a kind of cabaret. You know the kind of place—the emcee tells dirty jokes you might have heard from your mother, and the girls up on stage never quite manage to take their clothes off. The band is terrible. Anyway. Hagemann likes it. He goes there every couple of nights and stays until around midnight. The place is run by a fellow named “Ernesto” Lutz—born ‘Ernst,’ Tübingen, 1901; also old-school SS, in case you hadn’t guessed. The management keeps a table for the exclusive use of our friend and his entourage. Did I mention that? Hagemann never goes anywhere without three or four bodyguards—they wrap him up like a baby with the croup.

  “The local authorities act as if he’s incognito royalty or something, so we’ve had to exercise a little discretion. The one place we do have under control is our h
otel, the Casa General Moscardo. Faglin and I have both got jobs there. We created a few vacancies.” He smiled again. He was just full of good cheer. “We’ll nab our friend there, when he comes to relive old times with Mrs. Dessauer.”

  “You really are an unpleasant son of a bitch, Hirsch.”

  “I know it.”

  “What about the house?”

  “Oh, that.” Hirsch pushed away his half-empty plate with a look of unconquerable distaste. No one, he seemed to imply, could eat that much food. “I think you can just forget about the house. He’s got the sea on three sides—the compound is on an outcropping of rock, with seventy-foot cliffs, straight up and down. You can’t even get near it from that direction. For the rest he’s got a chain-link fence, and of course it’s all patrolled. He’s got a regular platoon of bodyguards, and they live on the grounds in a barrack of their own. The regular servants are all Spanish nationals and go home at night, but the boss treats them pretty well and the police have got the hell scared out of the whole town, so we haven’t been able to get near any of them. What goes on up there is a closed book to us. Forget the house. We’re going to have to put the touch on him in town.”

  One of the whores was standing by the doorway, trying to feed pieces of bread to the parrot. It was a big bird with a beak that could do a lot of damage to a lady’s fingers, so she was a little nervy as she held out the bread through die cage bars. She had a high-pitched giggle and she kept glancing back at her friends for moral support. Apparently it was a slow morning in the Barrio Chino.

  When Christiansen decided he had had enough breakfast, he took out a cigarette and lit it with the nickel-plated lighter Esther had bought for him during their one-day stopover in Lyon. He felt uncomfortable, as if he had been awake too long.

  “Why don’t I just kill him for you?” he asked suddenly. He smiled, but he wasn’t kidding. “You people have your side of the code, so Hagemann can’t put his hands on his secret weapon—you’re safe. All you need to make it all come out right is for me to walk up behind him at that special table of his and put a pill in his car.”

  “You d never get away with it. His boys would cut you down before you had your hand out of your pocket. And even if you succeeded, how would you ever get out of there alive?”

  “That would be my problem.”

  “No it isn’t—it’s ours.” Hirsch glanced nervously toward the doorway as if the parrot worried him. “Nobody is safe until friend von Goltz’s recipe hook is in the custody of the Mossad. The only way we can guarantee that Hagemann won’t get it is if we have it ourselves, and that won’t happen unless we take Hagemann alive so we can squeeze him.”

  “He won’t get it if he’s dead”

  The cigarette had burned down almost to Christiansen’s fingers, so he crushed it out against the side of his plate. Hirsch watched him. and finally sighed and shook his head.

  “That would settle everything for you, wouldn’t it, brother.” He laced his hands together over his stomach and leaned back in his chair, frowning like a judge. “That’s the difference between us—some Nazi kills a few dozen of your friends and relations and you go all huffy about it. All of a sudden it’s a blood feud, just like the Hatfields and the McCoys. All you can think about is how good it’s going to feel when you make the son of a bitch start bleeding through his ears. Shit. Hagemann butchered thousands of my people, but when you’re a Jew you learn to take a broader view of these matters.

  He wasn’t finished—he showed his teeth in a joyless grin. He looked relaxed enough, except that the joints of his fingers were slowly turning purple.

  “So what if you kill him?” he went on, finally. “What difference will that make? We don’t know how much von Goltz may have told him or who else the Colonel may have taken into his confidence. If he doesn’t get Esther Rosensaft to tell him he may figure the whole thing out for himself some other way, but at least with Hagemann we know where we are. You kill him and I guarantee another will spring up to take his place. Revenge solves nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering when the poison gas canisters will start raining down on my apartment building. I want that formula.”

  . . . . .

  It had started to rain by the time Christiansen left the Hotel Goya. He could hear them pinging against the metal awnings over the shop windows, big wet drops like tears. When he felt the rainwater going down the back of his neck, he turned up his overcoat collar. Norwegians were supposed to be immune to the coldest, wettest weather; they weren’t supposed to catch pneumonia on the Spanish Mediterranean—it was a question of national honor. He decided he had better find somewhere in out of the damp before he disgraced himself, but first he wanted to get out of this tangle of cat houses and bars.

  Making a dash through the traffic, he crossed the Ramblas, reaching the curb just ahead of a great sheet of water thrown up by a passing taxi. He waited under the cement balcony of a hotel until the rain subsided. It didn’t take long.

  Hirsch had offered him a lift into Burriana, but he thought it might be better if he found his own way. After all, Hagemann had the cooperation of the local police, and Hagemann might be halfway expecting the arrival of a large Norwegian with a scarred left hand—he had given plenty of indication that he knew all about Inar Christiansen. There was no percentage in compromising the Mossad’s end of things as well. Christiansen would get there by himself.

  Besides, Hirsch made him nervous.

  “If and when you do get this stuff, what will you do with it?” It hadn’t seemed such a naive thing to ask.

  “That’s a leadership decision,” Hirsch had answered, just a little too quickly. He shrugged his shoulders and his face went blank; Christiansen might have been talking to a plaster wall. “I’m just supposed to get it. It’s use is a political question.”

  Sure. Except that to Hirsch a weapon was just that, a weapon. Something to be used against one’s enemies. He planned to win this war of his. He didn’t care how; he just planned to win. Well, who could blame him? Where would he go—where would any of them go—if they lost?

  Talking to Hirsch always gave him a bad conscience. Hirsch had a way of lumping all Gentiles in with the Einsatzgruppen—there were only two kinds of people: Jews and people who murdered Jews. Or consented to their murder, or turned away with a shrug. That Inar Christiansen hadn’t been the commandant of Auschwitz was merely an accident of history.

  But Hirsch was right about one thing—in his heart, all Christiansen cared about was settling up for Kirstenstad. He wanted to kill Colonel Egon Hagemann. That was what was important to him personally, and he could be ashamed of it because he had no business putting one man’s death above the survival of thousands.

  So he would help them get their fucking formula, and then nothing on God’s earth would stop him from pulling Hagemann’s guts out an inch at a time.

  But first he had to get to Burriana.

  15

  Christiansen ran down the sail on the boat he had rented in Castellón de la Plana and tied it to the boom. He was about half a mile offshore, so he fished around in his kit for the pair of field glasses he had taken off the body of a dead German officer in 1943. He wanted a close look at an outcropping of rock that climbed up from the surf like a wall. It was late afternoon and he hadn’t more than an hour of daylight left. He didn’t want to waste it.

  The boat had an auxiliary motor, but there had been a good breeze blowing straight down the coast so he hadn’t felt the need to use it. Besides, the sail was quieter and attracted less attention. It was the irresistible prejudice of the machine age that sailboats were the province of harmless cranks. None of Hagemann’s army of sentries would be made nervous by a tiny triangle of white canvas bobbing up and down on the horizon.

  He was reasonably sure this was the right place. He couldn’t see a house, but the cliff faces matched Hirsch’s description and there didn’t seem to be anyplace like it near enough that he could have made a mistake. Burriana itself was o
nly about a mile and a half farther up the coast, its low whitewashed buildings twinkling in the sun. He could have pulled in there and asked, but that probably wouldn’t have been very bright.

  The cold waves lapped against the sides of the boat, and it rocked slightly with every move Christiansen made—it was only about twelve feet long. There was something strangely comforting about being out alone on the open water. As almost nowhere else, one really was alone.

  Christiansen scanned the cliff face through his field glasses, and, yes, it looked almost as formidable as Hirsch had warned. There were no tides to speak of in the Mediterranean, and the rock dropped straight down into the sea. There was no beach, no firm ground from which to mount an assault. And along the south wall, where the sunlight hit it, the face glistened. It was oozing wet, probably slippery as the sides of a fish. It could be climbed—anything could be climbed—but it would take time. Nobody was getting up there in a quick three minutes.

  Everything, of course, would depend on how heavily the crest was patrolled.

  He wondered what sort of a life Hagemann was leading up there in his seaside fastness—did he feel safe or were his nights tormented by dreams of retribution? It would have been nice to think so, but it wasn’t likely. There wasn’t much evidence that he had either the conscience or the imagination for anything like that. An intelligent man within certain limits, Egon Hagemann was otherwise your standard Nazi thug.

  It was all there in the Allied War Crimes Commission dossiers—quite a typical career for the sort of man who ends up running a death camp. Born February 3, 1899, in Günzburg, son of a primary school teacher. Drafted into the German army in July, 1917, and saw the war at close quarters as an infantryman along the Ardennes front. Wounded twice, received the Iron Cross, Second Class, mustered out as a sergeant in January of 1919. Briefly attended the university at Munich.