The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  “The fact is, if the police don’t have him we’ve got a real problem. We can’t make a move on Hagemann’s villa in daylight—we can’t expect his patrols to be blind—and Mordecai knows Esther’s part in the code. He and I are the only ones who do. Hagemann can wring it out of him in an afternoon. He’s good at that sort of thing. Our only chance is if Hagemann has a few qualms about wearing thin his host country’s tolerance and he’s keeping Mordecai in a Spanish jail cell. He can do what he likes in Syria, but maybe not here.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right. Then maybe we can find out where Mordecai is being held and kill him before he has a chance to talk.”

  The silence that Hirsch had created seemed to hold everything suspended, like amber. No one moved. No one even appeared to live. Finally Christiansen reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Where did you learn to be such a bloodthirsty little bastard?” he asked, almost as if he were inquiring directions to the men’s room. His hands were busy lighting the cigarette. He hardly seemed to notice Hirsch. “Murder and apostasy—I thought those were the two great sins for a Jew: Better to die than to deny God or man.”

  “I’m not real big on the Tradition. The Tradition is part of what got us Yids into Auschwitz. But since when are you so heavy on the Jewish law? How ’bout it, Christiansen?”

  He put his stress on that first syllable of the name, and a thin little smile tightened Hirsch’s mouth. He was having a good time.

  “We find him and we kill him,” he went on, his voice strained and angry. “Believe me, Mordecai would understand. “

  “You do what you like, but I think maybe I’ll just go looking for him on my own. I think you’d be wise, however, not to get in my way, Hirsch.”

  Everybody knew that Hirsch carried a small, fiat automatic tucked into the waistband of his trousers. They all waited to see if now his hand would slip down toward his belt. It appeared, crazily enough, that it might actually come to that.

  But it didn’t. He picked up his coffee cup from where he had left it on top of the dresser, and the crisis seemed to pass away.

  Faglin stood up from his chair, looking slightly embarrassed, as if someone had mentioned a family scandal. He was only about a meter away from Hirsch. He gave the impression he would have liked to reach out and touch him on the sleeve but couldn’t quite muster the courage.

  “Really, Jerry, I think maybe we should talk about this. There’s room for compromise.”

  “Yeah, Jerry. You know, maybe Inar—”

  “You keep your mouth shut, Itzikel. You know the rules.” Hirsch looked as if he was ready to hit someone. “Mossad discipline—you know that goddamned well. With Mordecai gone, I’m in command, and I give the orders.”

  “You give any orders you like,” Christiansen said suddenly. He rose from his seat, seeming to fill the room. His voice was cold and quiet, like falling snow. “Just see to it you don’t give any orders to me, pal, since I plan to make my own arrangements. My understanding was with Mordecai. It still is.”

  “You fucking goyish bastard! Who do you think you are, you—”

  He never had a chance to finish, because Faglin’s fist caught him just under the floating ribs, causing the wind to gush out of him in a noisy wheeze. Before Hirsch had a chance to react, Faglin reached in under his belt and took out the automatic, throwing it across the room to Christiansen, who caught it with his left hand. Hirsch’s legs seemed ready to buckle under him until Faglin put an arm around his back to hold him up. He looked at Hirsch for a moment, as if to make sure he was really all right, and then turned his gaze toward Christiansen. He was smiling, but without much conviction.

  “What was it you had in mind?”

  . . . . .

  “What is in your mind, Colonel?”

  The smile on Faraj’s heavy, subtle face betrayed a certain uneasiness. Faraj had not enjoyed last night’s unscheduled performance at the Café Pícaro. Faraj was a weak and pathetic creature, the product of a decaying race, who hated all displays of violence, particularly public violence. The agile Herr Christiansen had made a profound impression on him.

  Hagemann took a sip of the ice water that was an accompaniment to all his meals and sighed, wondering whatever had possessed him to come back to the villa for lunch, since he could so easily have avoided this kind of close examination had he been content with a little wine and a plateful of greasy meat in town.

  But the fact was that he felt safer at the villa. Christiansen had made an impression on him as well.

  “Would it please you to go back to Damascus, Faraj? Yes, I rather imagined it would.” He refolded his napkin and set it down next to the plate in a way his Spanish servant understood to mean that he was finished. As the dishes were taken away, he studied Faraj’s reactions—or, more accurately, his lack of them—wondering to himself which would finally come to seem the more dangerous, Christiansen with his pistols and his strangling cords or this pudgy, effete little politician. Yes, of course it would please Faraj to go back to Damascus.

  “Might I know when your Excellency plans for us to depart—and, if it is not too much to ask, why?”

  “Because I have what I came here to obtain. Or very nearly. I think you will agree that Leivick can be more conveniently interrogated in Syria.”

  “Will the young lady be accompanying us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are within reach of your solution?”

  “Yes.”

  After lunch Hagemann took a walk around the grounds. It was a chance to be alone, since Faraj liked to lie down as soon as he had eaten—he said that exercise didn’t agree with him. Hagemann was just as pleased.

  His mother would have liked this place—the gentleman’s house overlooking the sea. She had never wanted her son to be a soldier. She had never understood that this was a decision taken not by him but by history. “The war is over,” she had said. “You can go on to the university now, just as you always planned. You can study to be a lawyer.” So merely to please her, and because he had felt himself adrift, he had begun to attend the lectures in jurisprudence. The world was falling to pieces—what conceivable difference could the law make?—but he had had nothing else to do. And now the soldier’s life had brought him to a villa overlooking the Mediterranean.

  “Stay away from those men. What are they except hooligans?” “They are right, and they will remake the world.” “What is so bad about the world as it is?’“ How could he have expected that good, simple woman to understand his answer?

  Within six months she was dead; her heart simply stopped beating. She had been Hagemann’s last attachment to the orderly old world of his boyhood, and the day following her funeral he resigned from the university to give himself over full time to the Party.

  And in the end nothing had turned out as they expected, so perhaps his mother had not been so simple after all.

  He was tired—it was nothing more than that. He had been living too long on nerve alone. But it would all be over soon, and then there would be time to rest and think idle thoughts. But not now.

  He wanted to go over the plans in his mind, looking for flaws. A perfect plan led to a perfect result. It was a law of nature.

  Except, of course, for the inevitable imponderables. Leivick was now safely locked away in a cell at the Civil Guard station, but Leivick most certainly had not come to Burriana alone. A general must have his soldiers.

  Leivick was a cunning old badger, content to rest in his hole until the darkness came. Like Hagemann himself, he would have others to deal with the uglier side of affairs. The difficulty was that, aside from that boy, that little Jewish pimp who had so conspicuously served as Esther’s “husband”—did she let him sleep with her, the bitch?—all the rest of Leivick’s troops had so far managed not to be detected.

  Unless, of course, one could count Christiansen. Could one? It was a distasteful idea. Christiansen was of the right sort, an Aryan and a soldier. It wa
s unpleasant to think of him hunting with the Mossad. Nevertheless, it was a possibility that could not be discounted.

  Hagemann had seen the bodies of his men last night. After the nightclub had been cleared the three corpses had been lined up beside the bar, covered with tablecloths until the ambulances came to carry them to the police morgue. Weichbrodt, the idiot, had had most of his head shot away. Imagine rushing into the office like that. It had served him right. And poor Ernst. It had been several hours before he could be brought even to speak. They had fed him straight gin by the tumblerful until he calmed down, and it required a great deal to frighten Ernst.

  Three men dead, and Hagemann could have been among them except that Inar Christiansen had decided to wait. When would he decide he had waited long enough?

  Hagemann was tired of pretending not to be frightened. He was glad he was alone, even if the cold, strangely impersonal terror washed through his chest like ice water. It was almost a relief. Yes, of course he was afraid. Leivick had been right—it was only reasonable to be afraid. Christiansen was going to kill him, and had wanted him to know there was no safety.

  The wind had dropped. In the afternoon stillness, among the pine trees that fronted on the cliffs so that one could look in any direction and hardly know whether one faced the sea or the land, Hagemann walked along, listening to the scraping sounds of his footsteps against the soft, sandy ground. A dozen yards behind him followed a pair of bodyguards, rifles slung casually over their shoulders as they kept pace. He had grown so used to their constant presence that he couldn’t even have said what they looked like.

  Hagemann felt in the pocket of his overcoat for one of the thin cigars he had taken to smoking lately, usually after a large meal or before going to bed. In the SS and as a serving officer in wartime, he had scorned all such petty vices, but he was growing soft now, middle-aged and soft. He knew it perfectly well. There seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He put the cigar between his lips and lit it with a Ronson lighter, made in America, that someone had given him—he couldn’t remember who. He was turning into jelly, like Faraj. And, like Faraj, he had learned to be wily. Perhaps it was a form of compensation. As strength and courage and youth all deteriorated together, cunning increased.

  Five years ago he wouldn’t have been so afraid of Christiansen. He would have welcomed the challenge. Five years ago, death had seemed neither so terrible nor so near.

  But five years filled with defeat, then flight, then a slow gathering of strength had taught Hagemann to think more, to look inside himself, and that sort of reflection was no friend to the martial virtues. So now he smoked thin cigars and worried about fat Arab politicians and was frightened of a man like Christiansen.

  Well, then, perhaps that meant that he would survive them all. Warriors should die young, their ideals intact, and since he had been denied that fate perhaps he would be spared to live to a ripe age, having buried all his enemies.

  There was a house outside of Damascus, beside a grove of date palms, belonging to a lieutenant colonel posted to the war ministry, a paper soldier from an influential family, the sort of man who was easily moved aside. Hagemann had had his eye on the house for a long time. It would serve as his place of honorable retirement after he had provided the Syrians with the means of annihilating their Zionist enemies. In their gratitude they would give it to him. They would give him whatever he wanted.

  He would live there with Esther. Now that Leivick was a prisoner, her part in this affair was merely incidental. At the right moment, she would do as she was told and that would be all that would be required of her. She would not have to be tortured for information—Leivick would serve very well in her place. She would come through without a mark on her.

  Would she consent to stay with him? At first, perhaps not. He would not allow her consent to matter, not at first. But Esther had always been a reasonable sort of girl. In the end she would even come to forgive him. In the end she would remain of her own free will.

  Yes, he had missed her. He hadn’t realized how badly, not until last night. And now, in another few hours, she would be here, and they would never be parted again. She probably hated him and, excepting his mother, he had never loved any woman, but that was unimportant. Esther and he had no need to concern themselves with love. Each of them found something in the other without which they stood incomplete.

  Tonight then. There would be a Syrian merchant ship waiting forty kilometers off shore. In the small hours of the morning they would join her. Then everything would be as it had been before the defeat. Everything.

  There was a break in the trees, a small clearing where one could stand by the sheer stone cliffs and look out at the Mediterranean, as calm as any lake. Hagemann always stopped here—he had no idea why, since the view always made him feel uncomfortable. The sea was his avenue of escape—it had been in 1945 and would be again tonight—but somehow, looking down on it from this height, it seemed shrouded in menace. He would stand there, sometimes for several minutes at a time, feeling the dread crawl through him like maggots.

  “Herr Oberst.”

  He turned around and saw with some slight sensation of relief that it was Gerstein, the captain of his bodyguard.

  “Yes, Rudi, what is it?”

  “It is almost time to go into town, Herr Oberst.”

  Gerstein kept his face rigid and unsmiling. He was a tall, wide-shouldered boy with hair the color of butter, almost unchanged from the day in 1942 when, at the age of seventeen, he had been assigned to the Fifth Brigade as a private. He was a good soldier, brave and cruel, but somehow he had never stopped being that boy of seventeen. Hagemann always felt more at ease around Rudi.

  “And are we quite prepared here, Rudi? You know, even after we bring the thing off there will still be danger. We shall have to wait here until just before the rendezvous, and they are bound to try hitting back at us before then.”

  “You mean the Jews, Herr Oberst?” Gerstein allowed himself to smile, as if his commander had made a joke he was bound to acknowledge. “We will be ready for them. We are always ready for them.”

  “Good. I am glad to hear you say so.”

  Hagemann turned his eyes back toward the sea. It was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. What was he looking for? He hardly even knew.

  And then he remembered the little sailboat of yesterday afternoon.

  “Perhaps it is the Norwegian,” Faraj had said. “Perhaps his intention is to climb these cliffs and murder you in your sleep.” Sleeping or waking, what difference would it make to Christiansen?

  And, of course, it would be impossible to scale these cliffs without being detected. Nevertheless. . .

  He glanced at his trusted subordinate, whom he had trained, whom he had rescued from the insignificance and boredom of a conquered Germany, and he watched the smile die on those youthful lips. He meant to make it understood that there must be no miscalculation, no concession to arrogance. And, yes, Gerstein understood all that.

  “Rudi, I think it would be well if we doubled the patrols tonight, just as a precaution. And now perhaps we can go down to the car?”

  20

  It was a three-story brick building that looked as if it dated from the time of the Republic. Even for a small town Civil Guard station it wasn’t much, and Franco had inherited the old monarchy’s obsession with the grandeur of its public edifices. The only windows that were barred were on the top story, so that had to be where the holding cells were located.

  “It isn’t very wide,” Faglin said, cocking his head a little to one side, like a painter considering a landscape. “There’s probably only one big cage up there, somewhere to store the drunks of a Saturday night. What more would they need in a little fishing town like this?”

  “Nevertheless, we will have to know. “

  Christiansen’s cold blue eyes played nervously over the street, as if he were looking for someone. They, of course, were looking for him. Probably every policeman in Burriana had his nam
e and description by then.

  “You think maybe one of us should go in there and ask them?”

  “Don’t make jokes, Itzikel.”

  “He’s right. That’s precisely what one of us is going to have to do.”

  The icy gaze settled on Faglin. No, there was no chance that Christiansen was making a joke. Christiansen looked as if he had never made a joke in his life.

  “If Mordecai is in there, we’ll have to find a way of communicating with him, and I’m the one they’re so eager to lock up. I’ll just turn myself in.”

  “You can’t do that! It’s crazy—it’s. . .”

  But Faglin made an impatient gesture with his left hand and Dessauer fell silent.

  “Once you get inside, how will you let us know where you are?”

  “It’s not a problem. There are only two barred windows, one on each side of the building. You take one and Itzhak takes the other. If you see my left hand clutching one of the bars, I’m in the same cell with Mordecai. Are your eyes good enough to see my scar from that distance?”

  He held out his hand for them to look at. It was a huge scar, covering the width of all four fingers and reaching back almost to the wrist

  “Yes,” Dessauer said. For some reason the sight of it awed him. “No trouble.”

  “And if you’re not in the same cell?”

  “Then I’ll throw down a shirt button or something. If I can’t make contact, if I don’t think he’s being held up there at all, I’ll just give a shout and the pair of you can lose yourselves and live to try again another day.”

  “Don’t you think we’d try to get you out then?”

  From the way Christiansen’s eyes narrowed, Dessauer knew at once he had said something stupid. The silence of those few seconds was almost unbearable. Then Christiansen smiled faintly.

  “You might, but Faglin’s been around longer. No hard feelings.”

  Faglin shrugged his thin shoulders. “No, no hard feelings. I think it would be a good idea if we took another look around before you go pay your courtesy call.”