The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “And are you sure you can make it up the cliffs without being found out?”

  Christiansen wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. He felt rotten and his nerves were played out, and half an hour’s sleep and a little sex hadn’t worked their magic. He wasn’t up to being sardonic.

  “I’m not an idiot, Mordecai—I’m not sure of anything.” He took another drag on his cigarette, but it tasted so dead in his lungs that he put it out. “All I know is that some chance is better than none at all.”

  “Then talk to Faglin. He can help, and he’ll know enough not to say anything to Hirsch. Tell him you’re going climbing.”

  18

  Burriana, Spain: March 18, 1948

  He didn’t know exactly what had happened last night. He might even have decided to dismiss the whole subject from his mind, except there was still substantial evidence that Inar Christiansen was not the forgiving type. On that basis, Mordecai Leivick decided that it would probably be best to keep Itzhak out of the way for a while.

  In any case, the boy had served his turn, and Hagemann knew him by sight now and had made certain threats. There was nothing wrong with his nerve, but he had a mother who worried and Leivick would just as soon keep him out of harm’s way. What he needed was something to keep him pleasantly busy—too busy to think about Esther Rosensaft.

  Because Esther Rosensaft seemed to be gnawing at his insides like the Spartan fox.

  “Forget about her, boy. She’s not for you. Anyway, she’s not the sort of girl you could bring home to meet the family, is she.”

  They were having breakfast together in a little restaurant about half a mile from the hotel, just the two of them. Leivick wanted to have a talk, and it wouldn’t do for one of Hagemann’s thugs to see them together—their cover story was threadbare enough as it was. They were seated across from each other at a long table, at the end nearest the stove because it was a cold morning, and Itzhak was in a sulky sort of mood.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he said, in a voice that told Leivick he knew perfectly well what he meant. He had hardly touched his fried eggs. He was in a bad way.

  “She has a past, Itzikel. Your mother is a nice lady, but she knows even less about the world than you do. She wouldn’t understand about a girl who’s been an SS prostitute and God knows what else.”

  “In Israel no one will care about the past—we’ll only think about the future.”

  “That’s a good speech, but it isn’t so. When we forget our past in that brave new world we’re making, we’ll be finished. We’ll disappear, like morning mist. That girl isn’t ever going to forget, and neither would you. Leave her to Inar, boy. He’s been through enough to entitle him to forget for the both of them.”

  Leivick drank his coffee, wishing he had a cigarette—wishing that just once, sometime or other, life could work itself out to everyone’s satisfaction. He was tired of the mess and the trouble. If, God willing, they ever got their homeland, he thought perhaps he would retire to a kibbutz somewhere and spend the rest of his life picking oranges.

  “If you’re not hungry, let’s get out of here,” he said. As he rose from the table he dropped a handful of coins beside his plate. They clattered against the wood with enough noise to rouse the waiter from his slumbers.

  Outside, there was hardly any traffic. Women in heavy shawls carried their shopping home in net bags, and here and there one saw men in felt hats and business suits, their collars high and heavily starched. It was the middle of the morning, perhaps the quietest time in the day.

  Itzhak had a thick knitted scarf that went around his neck God alone knew how many times. Some female relative had made it for him, and it was his only concession to the time of year. He seemed positively to be enjoying his misery.

  They had walked nearly two blocks before Leivick found a tiny stall where he could buy a pack of cigarettes—not American cigarettes, but one had to learn to compromise. The girl behind the counter, who was probably every day of seventeen and looked at Itzhak as though she would have liked to make a meal of him, counted out his change and gave them both—Leivick found himself included, probably out of pure, simple-hearted generosity—a smile that should have set any man’s shirt buttons smoking. Itzhak hardly even noticed. It was a bad sign. That sort of selfabsorption could mean real trouble in their business.

  “Why don’t you spend the day at the movies, Itzikel?” he said as he tried lighting a wooden match in the faint stirrings of the morning breeze. He finally had to take shelter against the corner of a building, almost burning his fingers in the process. Even with the first puff, he could feel his chest loosening. It was a lovely thing to have rediscovered a lost vice. “Take a seat in the last row, just so that no one can put an ice pick in your ear. You’ll be around people, so Hagemann’s thugs won’t feel free to kill you just to stay in practice. They can watch you—it will make them feel safe. Young husbands do sometimes spend the whole day at the movies when they’ve been fighting with their brides. Just make sure we know where to find you.”

  “Am I supposed to stay away so that Hagemann can have his chance with Esther?”

  “More or less—yes.”

  “I thought you told Inar to get ready to go after Hagemann in his villa.”

  “I did. We’re doing it both ways. It never hurts to have two plans.”

  Itzhak gave him a funny sidewise glance, as if he thought that somehow the thing wasn’t quite honest but was too polite to say so out loud.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” Leivick went on. The wind had stilled quite suddenly and he was surprised at how quiet everything was. In a week he had grown used to the Spanish street noises, but just at that moment there seemed to be nothing, not even the ever-present sound of a baby crying. It made him feel nervous for some reason. “We’ll set our trap as planned. Perhaps Inar is mistaken. If he is not, then we can do as he suggests. If the years have taught me nothing else, I have at least learned not to depend upon anything.”

  “Do you think he is mistaken?”

  “I don’t know. He might be—he has an interest to protect now. He isn’t the same, not like he was in Vienna. Perhaps you haven’t noticed it, but there’s a change. A man like that, who has been alone a long time, he meets a young girl. . . I’m not sure we can rely on his judgment anymore. Do you understand?”

  Did he? Who could say? Itzhak buried his hands in his trouser pockets, staring at the paving stones as they walked along together. It was perhaps only his sexual vanity that had been wounded, but did that matter, at his age? If Inar Christiansen could no longer be trusted, how could he?

  “That goddamn bitch, what’s she doing to us, Mordecai?” His face had tightened into a mask. He looked, poor boy, as if he might actually begin to cry. “Last night she. . . Oh, shit.”

  “That’s what some women are like. That’s why we went to so much trouble to bring this one here. Let’s just hope and pray the poison works as well on Colonel Hagemann.”

  It did the job, after a fashion. At least Itzhak no longer seemed on the verge of tears, which was not a good place for a nice boy from Tel Aviv to be. He didn’t look any happier, and his hands were still curled into fists in his pockets as he walked—perhaps he was merely cold—but now he had a little fiction he could believe, something more intelligible and less painful than the truth. Esther, that pathetic, abused little waif, could be his Theda Bara, the Siren to whom he must now learn to shut his heart. It was a story fitted to his capacities.

  And as for Mordecai Leivick, the Ibsen of comfortable lies, he had, as usual, eaten too much breakfast and was experiencing that intestinal melancholy that felt so much like a bad conscience. Or perhaps it really was a bad conscience. As he had so grandly informed Itzhak, he had learned enough of life to give up the idea of being sure.

  Did he really, for even a moment, believe that Hagemann would fall into their arms, rendered helpless by some twisted passion for little Esther Rosensaft? Yes, sometimes, just for a moment. But no
t as a working hypothesis. If Hagemann kept his appointment it would be for hard, pragmatic reasons—he knew Esther was the key to more than just his own happy fantasies of pain and humiliation and death. Hagemann was an adult, so, unlike Itzhak, he did not believe in love.

  Yes, they were both adults. Both of them, antagonists ever since the forests of Poland, growing more alike every hour. Mordecai refused to jolly himself along—he lied to Itzhak about Esther and used them both because that was what the builders of nations did. That was how politics on the grand scale was played, which was precisely what men like Hagemann have been telling themselves for the past thirty years, and doubtless even longer than that. He wondered if Hagemann ever felt this way after breakfast, but then Hagemann was probably more hardened to it.

  In the next cross street a dark green car of a make Leivick had never seen before slowed almost to nothing as it approached the center of the intersection and then shot away, almost as if the driver had been frightened.

  “Itzhak, go over to the other side of the road and lose yourself in a doorway. Go on, be a good boy. I think we’re beginning to attract someone’s interest.”

  “What do you want me to do if we have?” he asked. He really was a good boy—all business when it came to it.

  “If they’re just looking, find your way home. Forget you know me. If they want you, play the injured tourist; but I’m afraid you’ll have to let them have you. If they want me, don’t be heroic—just disappear.”

  It was the standard drill, and Itzhak had been trained. He ducked his head in a quick nod and cut across the street. Within a few seconds not even Leivick knew where he had hidden himself.

  It was probably nothing, probably just someone looking for a street number, a stranger like himself. Probably, in the tail end of his middle years, he was simply becoming paranoid. The decades wither you up, and you lose your courage. It was a common enough phenomenon.

  Leivick lit another cigarette, wondering if he would have the opportunity to finish it in peace. He wished he had brought his revolver and then was glad he had left it behind in his suitcase. He might have been tempted to use it, and they had had enough publicity of that kind lately. He was a docile old Jewish gentleman, taking the sea air for his health. If they wanted to kill him there was very little he could do about it.

  No, he wasn’t paranoid. The stillness was almost deafening. After ten years of fascist rule, the Spaniards had learned about avoiding trouble. If it was the police, or possibly even Hagemann’s people, who seemed to enjoy something like the same status, probably the whole neighborhood knew about them and had simply retired behind their locked shutters.

  He didn’t turn around when he heard the sound of automobile tires hissing on the wet street. He just kept walking.

  It was one of those rare moments when experience takes on a peculiar, almost painful clarity. The pale, paper-colored wall of the building next to him, with its water stains and its peeling plaster. The damp air with its smells of cooking and engine grease and sea salt. The scrap of newsprint that jigged down the sidewalk, driven on by currents of wind too subtle to make themselves noticed any other way. It was like the time at Treblinka, the instant after the grenades had gone off, the gasoline fires winding up the watchtowers—it was like that. The heart stops. Only the senses live. These few seconds, perhaps all that remains.

  A car door slammed. Then another. They were very close. Leivick turned around now—it was permitted. Even old Jewish gentlemen interested in the sea air have a right to look.

  “Señor. . .”

  They were big men, in dark blue overcoats, clean shaven, with the hollow, uncaring eyes of professionals. They moved toward him together, shoulder to shoulder, as if it was something in which they had been schooled.

  One of them grabbed for Leivick’s arm. He pulled away, which turned out to have been a mistake. The second man, with remarkable dexterity, caught him on the point of the elbow with a small truncheon, hardly bigger than an after-dinner cigar. The pain was exquisite, paralyzing. Leivick could feel it all the way into his chest, so that he could hardly breathe.

  A short, sharp blow to the abdomen—he had no idea who had hit him this time—and he was helpless. He hardly noticed when a handkerchief was held over his mouth and nose, its sickly sweet smell blending in with a blunt, nauseating ache that seemed to fill him up. He was slipping away. It was almost a relief.

  Itzhak, get the hell away from here. Go tell them—Inar was smarter than any of us. Inar was. . .

  . . . . .

  He hadn’t really expected to wake up. He had assumed they were murdering him, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He was alive. He was conscious of that, merely that, even before he began the excruciatingly painful process of opening his eyes. He began to wish they had murdered him.

  He was lying down, which was probably just as well. He was quite sure he would die if he tried to move, so there was no temptation to be anything else. They must have given him something like chloroform, probably without being too terribly precise about the dosage. It had left him with an appalling headache that seemed to take up his entire body. When he finally did manage to open his eyes he had to close them again immediately. The light was blinding.

  He could wait on finding out where they had taken him. Just then it didn’t seem so very important.

  And the worst of it was that he felt such an idiot. Hadn’t he been warned? Now the trap had been sprung, but only on himself.

  After about five minutes he was able to nerve himself up to an attempt at moving. His right arm, for some reason, wouldn’t respond. He could bring the hand up only a few inches, up to about his waist, and then something stopped it. It was as if someone were holding him by the wrist.

  The left arm was better. Finally he managed to shade his eyes with his hand, and then it became possible to open them. When at last he was able to focus, he wondered why he should have gone to the trouble.

  He was in a prison cell—brick walls, an iron door, gray tile flooring. The war had made him an expert on prisons. He knew all about them.

  He was alone. It was a large room—the Germans would have had thirty men in a cell this size. There was no one else. Somewhere he could hear the drip, drip, drip of water, but not another sound. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to feel flattered.

  It was a plank bed they had him on. Just boards, chained to the wall—an antique. Perhaps it hadn’t been Hagemann at all. Perhaps he had run afoul of the Inquisition.

  Enough games. It was time to do something about sitting up. The idea itself was enough to floor him with nausea.

  It was while he was trying to sit up that he discovered that his right hand was manacled, riveted by a short chain to the end of the bed.

  When finally he made it, he felt better. The sum of his indispositions had reduced themselves to the sickening throb in his head. Otherwise, he felt weak but intact. Time to consider his position.

  He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t dead. Did Hagemann expect him to betray their plans for capturing him? It seemed unlikely.

  Anyone could be broken. No one dies with his secrets inviolate, not if his interrogators care to go to the trouble of digging them out. Leivick had seen enough people questioned under torture to have lost his trust in heroism. But that sort of thing took time. A determined man can’t be made to talk with threats, and torture is a tedious process. Time was something that Hagemann had very little of.

  At any rate, he would have all the answers he wanted soon enough. There was nothing to do in the meantime except to wait, and gather strength against whatever was to come.

  They had taken his wristwatch. That was a bad sign. Did they want to disorient him, to make him lose his sense of continuity? No—there was a window in his cell. All he had to do was look outside; the chain was long enough for that. Perhaps someone had stolen it. Perhaps they were afraid he might break the crystal and use the pieces to cut his wrists.

  He was considering the implications
of this when he heard the sharp click of a key in the door lock. The door swung open and Colonel Egon Hagemann himself walked in, just as if it were something he did every day. Leivick had to control the impulse to snap to attention.

  “I trust you are feeling better, Herr Leivick?” He smiled. He was a resplendent figure in his white suit, tall and rather cruelly majestic. His face was tanned and hardly lined by age. He was what every man wishes to be in the middle of his life and hardly ever is: untouched. In his right hand he was carefully balancing a heavy clay mug.

  “I have been better. How long have I—?”

  “Only about forty minutes. I was here when you arrived and have only been waiting until you came round. Drink this—it will take away some of the grogginess.” He held out the mug, which contained what appeared to be very strong tea. “Go ahead. There’s nothing in it except two spoonfuls of sugar.”

  “Thank you.”

  Leivick took the mug and drank from it. Certainly if Hagemann planned to drug him again he had no need of so roundabout an approach. And, yes, it did seem to be nothing except sweetened tea.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Perhaps it was only the lingering effects of the anesthetic, but Leivick found himself empty of all the emotions he might have expected to feel at this moment. Outrage, fear, unreasoning hatred—they simply were not there. All the misery this man had caused, this evil presence spreading back and forward in time, this monster who had profaned and destroyed everything that came in his way, who still might destroy the ragged remnants of a nation before it was even born, all that was an abstraction. Only the individual was real, standing here in the center of a prison cell floor, asking permission to sit down. A man like other men.

  Very well then, let him sit down. Leivick shifted himself to make room on the plank bed.

  “Thank you.”

  As if to establish a recognized border they could both respect, Hagemann took the tan felt hat he had been carrying and dropped it on the space between them. It was the sort of gesture that established his humanity—no, he was not the god of wickedness. There were no demons.