He wanted to touch her. More than almost anything, he wanted to feel his hands on her thin, young shoulders. She was young—she couldn’t be more than twenty, probably not even that. He hadn’t realized until that moment how he had yearned for her, but it was not to be, not now. This was not Waldenburg.
“What have you done with my husband?” It was merely a question—she asked it in the calmest voice.
“He is with the police. Presently they will discover that there has been a terrible misunderstanding, and they will drive him back here and return him to you with a handsome apology. How did you happen to come to this place, Esther?”
Yes, she was very good. There was no tiny start of surprise; for a moment she seemed not even to have heard the question. And then she looked up at him with a painful smile.
“It was close to the hotel—I’m on my honeymoon, you know, and he wanted a bit of nightlife. Where else could we possibly have gone?”
“Yes, of course. Where else?”
The boy who played the trumpet was threading his way among the tables, exchanging a word here and there with the regular customers, careful not to spill the tapered beer glass he carried. The intermission was nearly over.
“I could take you back to your hotel myself, Esther. Where are you staying?”
No, the first panic was over now. She merely shook her head.
“I don’t like your husband, Esther. I don’t like the way he touches you.”
“Is that surprising? He is my husband and, like me, a Jew. Why should you like him? He’ll survive without your good opinion.”
“Will he?”
“You wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t. . .”
“Wouldn’t I?” He smiled. They were playing an old game and they were both perfectly familiar with the rules. He allowed himself the luxury of drawing a shade closer to her. She didn’t pull back. “What have I ever not dared, Esther? Shall I kill your husband? Or shall I simply tell him why he had so little difficulty with your maidenhead?”
“You are a bastard!”
Yes, it was just like the old times now. She was cornered and full of hate. Her eyes burned. Now she no longer had the burden of choice.
“I won’t be happy until I’ve seen you again, Esther.” He allowed his hand to come to rest over her arm. “In fact, I must insist on it. Tomorrow night, I think—at your hotel room. Don’t trouble yourself with the details. I’ll see to it that your young husband is safely out of the way.”
. . . . .
The Café Pícaro was very proud of its theatrical effects. Sometimes the dancers would perform bathed in pink light, or the curtain in the rear would be a swirl of golden flecks. It was all achieved with the aid of a few colored lenses and an arc lamp worked from a cramped little space under the roof, where the ceiling dropped about three feet directly behind the stage.
A man would sit up there, watching through a tiny window no one even noticed was there.
“Just change the lens every so often, Señor, and everyone will be quite satisfied. It makes no difference—one must simply keep the eye from becoming bored.”
That was what the man said. The space was entered through a door above the stage. There was a stairway. The man had a key to the building and came so early and left so late that hardly anyone even remembered what he looked like. For a consideration, he was perfectly willing to disappear for an evening and allow another to fill his place. One of Ernst Lutz’s waiters, a Spaniard of carefully concealed Republican sympathies, had told Christiansen all about him.
So, with the exchange of a few hundred pesetas, Christiansen found himself in possession of the best seat in the house. It wasn’t the show that interested him, however; it was the audience.
From the moment of his arrival, at about ten minutes after nine, Egon Hagemann, former colonel in the Waffen-SS, former commander of the Fifth Brigade, was within easy pistol reach. All that would have been necessary was to break out the little window and start firing with the revolver Christiansen carried in the pocket of his coveralls. It would have been a dead cinch.
Of course, Hagemann had his bodyguards, and the minute they saw the holes starting to pop open all over their leader’s shirt front they probably would make it pretty hot for the man locked up in a space not much larger than a packing case. Still, he might conceivably survive. It wasn’t the fear of death that restrained him. For one thing, Esther was down there. Hagemann’s goons, realizing the boss had been set up, would certainly see to her as well. And then there was the fact that he had, after a fashion, given his word.
So he crouched up there, sweating, miserable and unseen, for close to two hours. He had come to observe, to confirm his worst fears or, just maybe, to learn something useful, not to settle his private score.
Besides, something new had entered into the equation. He was discovering that Hagemann had to share his hostility with, of all people, Itzhak Dessauer.
For close to half an hour before Hagemann even arrived, they sat at their little table, in plain view of the whole room, and drank champagne. Esther, cold as ice, as if she were waiting in line at the post office, and Itzhak, with his face full of longing and his damn hands all over her.
He had left them at the Barcelona station only this morning—had it really been so short a time?—like a couple of children in a dancing class, the introductions barely over, uneasy in their new clothes, uncertain about the steps, embarrassed, hating the whole business and each other into the bargain. Itzhak particularly—the boy had acted as if he was made out of wood. And now, only a few hours later, they had that indefinable air of people who understood each other’s secrets.
Nobody had to draw Christiansen a diagram.
What he couldn’t understand was why he was taking it so hard. It didn’t matter, after all. It wasn’t as if Esther were his property; or even, for that matter, his girl. They had had a little interlude, which now, it seemed, was over. What of it?
The little bitch.
Of course, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned him. “I will do what is necessary—no more. . . Would it offend you?” She had understood what was coming. He could have stopped her with a word, but he hadn’t thought to speak it. “Would it offend you?”
The little bitch.
It was hot up there with the arc lamp. There was hardly enough room to sit, and nobody seemed to have done any cleaning up in this little hole any time in the last several months. There was a thin coat of dust over the window, which was probably just as well—nobody could have seen in anyway, but camouflage was always nice. What would Esther have thought if she could have looked up and seen him scowling down at her? Christiansen decided he wasn’t having a very entertaining time.
And then, after a while—after he had had a moment to recover from his self-pity—he figured out that neither was she.
She was allowing herself to be handled, like a woman in a doctor’s office. It was Itzhak who had changed, not Esther. She just didn’t seem to care, poor little bitch.
She was used to this. Men had been pressing their fingers into her flesh for years—probably she just didn’t care anymore. She was dead inside. It was sad, but there it was.
God, he felt rotten. He felt like a man coming off a long drunk. The dust seemed to have settled over his eyeballs, over the whole fucking world: “yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” What was that from? He couldn’t remember.
And then Hagemann had arrived, behind his wall of bodyguards. Yes, that was the man from the cliff.
It was the first time Christiansen had ever seen him close up, this man who had murdered his parents. As he sat down at his table, and the waiter came to stand by his chair, bowing and smirking, he looked straight up at the window above the stage, almost as if he knew he was being watched. Possibly the small, dark man beside him had made some sort of joke. Hagemann stared at the window and smiled, as if he understood everything.
And then, when the fellow in the tuxedo, who was probably Lutz, had lured Itzh
ak away, Hagemann came and sat down beside Esther. And then it was Christiansen’s turn to read the truth in her face.
Yes, darling, he thought to himself, yes, I can see now. It was my fault, and I’m the one to ask for pardon.
He took out his revolver, pointing it at the pane of glass, lining up the sights on the handkerchief in Hagemann’s breast pocket, wondering if he would have the nerve not to pull the trigger.
17
It was part of the plan that Christiansen at some time or another should provide a distraction, something to keep Herr Hagemann’s mind occupied while Mordecai and his boys crept up with their butterfly nets. After all, he seemed to know all about Christiansen—enough, at any rate, to be sending all kinds of unpleasant types out to kill him.
So it was time to let Hagemann know that he wasn’t being neglected. If he wasn’t going to kill him—not right away, not this minute—Christiansen figured he could at least allow himself the consolation of throwing a good scare into him.
He waited until there was something agreeably noisy going on out front, then he gave them all a shower of pink snowflakes on the back curtain to look at and crept down the rickety little stairway, left his coveralls neatly folded on a packing case, and let himself out through the stage door. In about three minutes he had circled around and found a nice dark alleyway where he could be sure of his back and had an unobstructed view of the café entrance. He would wait until Esther and her escort had left.
That happened almost as soon as the police brought Itzhak back and, with a great show of politeness, escorted him inside. Five minutes later the door opened again and Itzhak came back out with Esther on his arm. They were walking fast and Esther, even from a distance of some twenty-five yards, looked not so much frightened as haunted, as if she had already seen the worst and was trying to accustom herself to it.
Almost as soon as they were gone, swallowed up in the darkness, another man came out of the cafe, looked around warily, and then set off after them. That was to be expected—Hagemann would have them tailed back to their hotel just as a precaution. The man wasn’t rushing. He wasn’t even trying to catch up with them, so it didn’t seem very likely he was part of any plan to waylay the young couple before they reached home. Anyway, Mordecai had doubtless taken a few precautions of his own. They’d both be safe enough.
So that just left Hagemann, sitting at his special table with his bodyguards and the little Arab gentleman for company, considering what a clever fellow he was and what he ought to do next to amaze the world. He probably felt invulnerable.
The Colonel had had a lovely time this evening. Poor little Esther, perched there alone in the midst of strangers, and who comes to help her finish off the champagne? Just like old times back at Waldenburg, and he had enjoyed every second of it, the son of a bitch.
Christiansen stepped out of the darkness and crossed the street to the entrance of the Café Pícaro, where he pushed open the door and went inside.
“Una mesa, Senor?”
Lutz smiled primly at him but his eyes had a worried look, as if he realized this was a face he should know from somewhere. He glanced behind the bar, where the man in the white jacket polishing glasses put down his dish towel and started to reach for something in his back pocket.
“I don’t have a reservation, but I’m expected,” Christiansen said in German. He was standing no more than eight or ten inches from Lutz. He let his left hand drop down, allowing the fingers to sweep open his jacket so that the pistol in his waistband was out in plain sight. “And if I don’t see your friend’s hands on the bar this minute you’re dressed for your funeral, understand?”
Lutz looked at the butt of Christiansen’s revolver, and then at the bartender, and shook his head. He was the reasonable sort. He wanted to stay alive to enjoy his prosperity.
“I quite understand, sir. We are at your service.”
“We’re going to have a chat with Colonel Hagemann, and you’re going to make the introductions. How does that sound?”
It sounded fine. The smile on Lutz’s face went suddenly crafty—it had something to do with the lines around his mouth. And, yes, by then he had made the connection. The big Norwegian with the private grudge could be left to the Colonel’s bodyguards, who were experts. All Lutz had to do was to contrive to stay out of the way.
“But not out here in the open—I’m not that stupid. We’ll go to your office, and then you’ll pick up your phone and tell whoever’s listening that your patron has a call.”
The office was next door to the men’s room, along the same wall as the bar. It was well screened from Hagemann’s table, so there wasn’t any particular reason to suppose his thugs had spotted them yet. Lutz opened the door with his key, standing aside to let Christiansen pass through first—how dumb did he think the opposition came? Christiansen took a handful of his tuxedo jacket, just at the armhole, and shoved him inside.
It was a small room, poorly furnished, almost military. A metal desk, a couple of filing cabinets, two chairs—that was it. There was one window, with metal shutters that locked from the inside. They opened onto a courtyard lined around all four sides by trash barrels, but Christiansen already knew that. The stage door was just around the corner of the building. Narrow alleyways led off in four different directions. You couldn’t ask for anything more.
“Sit down.”
Lutz did as he was told. He had lost some of his sparkle. Christiansen did a quick body search and came up with a tiny Mauser automatic in a shoulder holster. It was almost like a Humphrey Bogart movie.
He unlocked the shutters and took a look outside. There was no one waiting. He pushed open the two halves of the window and listened. Nothing.
He took the coil of catgut out of his pocket and dropped it on the desk, where Lutz could look at it.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Could be. I haven’t decided. Will the Colonel have to come to the bar for his call, or can the phone be brought to him?”
“It can be brought to him. I have had an outlet installed there. He insisted.”
“Good—then that’s just how we’ll do it. Put your hands behind your back, would you?”
Lutz was only too glad. His eyes hadn’t once wandered from the coil of catgut. He had heard all the stories. He would rather have the stuff around his wrists than around his neck.
“If you are going to kill me, I would take it as a kindness if you would use the pistol. It’s more dignified.”
“We’ll see.”
When he had finished making sure that Lutz wouldn’t go wandering off, Christiansen picked up the telephone and held it up close to Lutz’s head.
“No tricks, or I’ll shoot three or four holes in your guts and let you die the hard way. Is that clear?”
“No tricks.”
“Tell your man at the bar to bring a phone over to Hagemann’s table,”
Lutz nodded stiffly and murmured something in Spanish into the receiver. His voice sounded as if it hadn’t been used in a week.
All that remained was to wait.
“What do you say we give him something to listen to, hmm?” Christiansen touched him on the back of his head with the muzzle of the pistol, and Lutz jerked to a kind of attention, sucking in a short, sharp breath through his nostrils. He wasn’t thinking about his dignity anymore.
Well, and why not? Once in a while a little selfindulgence was good for one, and Lutz wouldn’t be any great loss to the human family. He had all the right credentials to have earned getting his brains scattered around the room. And it was the sort of thing likely to make an impression on Hagemann the way a few whispered threats over the phone never would.
“Yes? What is it, Ernst?”
Christiansen didn’t have to be told whose voice it was. He had never seen Hagemann before today, and had never heard him speak a word, but there was a certain intimacy to that kind of hatred. He would have known the commander of the Kirstenstad operation in a thousand.
�
�It isn’t Ernst, Colonel. It’s Inar Christiansen. I’m going to kill you pretty soon—not just this second, but soon—and I thought you’d appreciate knowing that you’ve finally run out of places to hide.”
For a moment there was no answer, only silence. Hagemann probably had his hand over the mouthpiece. He was probably telling his goons to get moving, to make sure that nobody named Christiansen came out of that office alive. He knew no one was kidding, and he wasn’t a man to miss an opportunity.
“I don’t think I understand, Herr Christiansen. What reason could you have for wanting to kill me?”
That settled it. He was stalling, the son of a bitch. He was trying to give his boys time to get into position.
Christiansen glanced back toward the window, making a rough calculation as to how long it would take someone in a hurry to find his way around the building and into that back courtyard. He was willing to play along for the odd few seconds, but he didn’t relish the prospect of really letting himself be taken by surprise.
“You must pardon me, Herr Christiansen, since I am not sure what purpose you could have had in telephoning me.”
“I’m in your friend Lutz’s office, Colonel—as if you didn’t know. I’m not fifty meters from where you’re sitting. “ He swung the Mauser around so that the front sight was almost touching Lutz’s earlobe. “I want you to appreciate how close you have been to death this evening. I want you to sweat a little before you die. Listen to this.”
He set the telephone receiver down on the desktop. Lutz twisted his head around, saw the gun muzzle out of the corner of his eye, and looked away again, breathing in short little gasps.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Lutz.”
But he couldn’t do it. For some reason he couldn’t even begin to guess, he couldn’t bring himself to kill this man in cold blood. He had made the decision to do it; Lutz deserved to die, and it was the right move. Everything was there except the will.
“Aw, shit!”
Christiansen turned the barrel about an inch and fired. The bullet hit the wall, hurting no one, but Lutz made a faint gurgling sound and pitched forward face first onto the desk. He was alive unless the shock had killed him, but he was out cold, his eyes half open and staring at nothing.
The Linz Tattoo Page 28
