The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  He reached into his coat pocket and took out his cigarette lighter, holding it up for Jerry to see and then throwing it to him. It landed on the ground at his feet.

  “Burn the file, Jerry. It isn’t going to solve anything if I have to shoot you and then burn it myself. At least if you do it you won’t imagine there’s been some sort of conjuring trick played on you. Come on, burn it.”

  “God damn it, Christiansen, you’re out of your fucking mind!” Jerry was almost beside himself. He held the papers in his good hand, shaking them threateningly as if they were a weapon. “God damn it, don’t you know we’ll have a war on our hands in just three goddamn weeks? Burn it!?”

  “Burn it. You can fight your war without using nerve gas, Jerry. The Syrians won’t know any better—bluff them. I’m not going to let you make it easy for yourself at the price of committing a wholesale massacre. You’ll have to find some other way.”

  “It isn’t your decision to make, Christiansen. Jesus Christ, it isn’t any of your damn business!”

  “It’s my business. If I turn my back on this, and you use this junk to murder innocent people, there’s no way I can avoid the responsibility. I will have handed this to you.”

  “You made a deal, Christiansen. And now you’re welching on it. “

  The two men stood staring at each other in silence, Jerry’s accusation hanging in the air like a pall. Finally Inar shrugged his shoulders, as if abandoning the attempt to make himself understood.

  “My ‘deal,’ as you call it, was with Mordecai. Not with the Mossad, and not with you—with Mordecai. I have the impression I’m keeping faith with that.” He lowered the muzzle of his pistol and let the hammer back down. “We got Hagemann, Jerry. He and his friends butchered half of Europe, but we finally got them. That’s all finished. If you and your brand new country want to grow up to be just like them, that’s up to you. I don’t think that’s what Mordecai would have wanted, but he’s dead so it’s up to you. Just don’t expect any help.”

  “You really mean it.”

  “Yes, I really mean it. I have enough blood on my conscience.”

  Jerry reached down and picked up the cigarette lighter. Then, holding the file by one of its stiff covers, he lit the last page at the corner. They stood there watching while, one by one, the sheets began to burn. Finally Jerry had to let it drop. It lay spine up on the ground until at last even the covers had caught fire. In all, it took about five minutes before the flames disappeared and there was nothing left except smoke and ash.

  “The ultimate weapon,” Jerry said at last. “The little country’s atomic bomb, and I burned it. I can’t believe this.”

  “There’s just one more thing.”

  Inar tossed his pistol into the air and then caught it again so that he was holding it by the barrel. Then he took two steps forward and offered it to Jerry Hirsch, who took it probably without thinking.

  “Now or later, you’ll want to settle up for this. It might as well be now.”

  “No, Inar, please. . .” She took his arm and buried her face in it. There had been enough now. She would never forgive him for this. “Please. Inar—please think of me a little.”

  But he only stood his ground, hardly even breathing. He really was prepared to die.

  And Jerry Hirsch was just as ready to kill him. He raised the pistol, taking careful aim at Inar’s heart. The process seemed to take forever.

  “You have this coming,” he said. “If ever anybody earned it, you sure as hell. . . Aw, shit!”

  And then, suddenly, he pulled back his arm and threw. The pistol hit Inar square in the chest and bounced off. He hardly seemed to notice it.

  “You goddamn sentimental goyish bastard. You’ve ruined everything.”

  Inar reached over and picked up the pistol, putting it out of sight under his coat.

  “What will you tell your bosses back home?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” There was real anguish in Jerry’s face. “I guess it’ll have to be that we both agreed to this, and I decided not to take the chance of soiling the Jewish national honor with possession of a genocidal weapon. Anything would be better than confessing I was dumb enough to let myself get jumped like a goddamn school kid. Isn’t that a choice phrase, ‘Jewish national honor’? Tel Aviv is filled with bleeding hearts, so maybe they’ll even buy it.”

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “Like hell it was.” He swallowed hard and made a disgusted gesture with his right hand. “This won’t be a nice war, Christiansen. A lot of raw things will get themselves done; and just once, just once, I’d have liked to see the atrocities happen to somebody else besides the Jews. Of course you wouldn’t be able to understand that, would you.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You weren’t in the camps, “ Esther found herself saying. No one could have been more surprised than she, but the words seemed to come of themselves. “I was, and so I have a right to care what is done in my name. I think Herr Leivick would have agreed. It is a blasphemy to invoke the dead to justify such things. Jews of all people should know the value of clean hands.”

  As they walked back to the car, Inar put his arm over her shoulder and drew her to him. He smiled in that way she had seen only a few times, the way that meant he was really happy.

  “You didn’t tell me,” she said, trying to sound angry. “You didn’t trust me.”

  “I didn’t want you to have to decide between one loyalty and another. It didn’t have anything to do with trust—you might have thought I was doing the wrong thing.”

  “I don’t think you did the wrong thing.”

  “But now you won’t ever have to question your part in it. Nobody gave you a choice, so you’re off the hook. It’s better this way.”

  They continued on in silence. Esther was almost too happy to. talk. It really was over now. The past was dead. She felt as if she had just turned sixteen, as if Inar were the first man to come into her life. Perhaps in a way he really was. At any rate, she felt free. That was love, to feel free.

  And then something occurred to her. She had seen the little announcement in the Munich newspapers, so she didn’t know why it suddenly came as such a surprise.

  “Inar,” she said, “did you know that today is Purim?”

  “Now how would I have known that?”

  About the Author

  NICHOLAS GUILD was born in 1944 in Belmont, California. He received a B.A. degree in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles and an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Since then he has divided his time between teaching and writing. He is the author of critical articles on 17th Century poetry and 20th Century fiction, along with twelve novels, several of which have been international best sellers and which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Czech.

  Presently he lives in Frederick, MD

  Visit his website: http://www.nicholasguild.com/

  Discover other titles by Nicholas Guild at Smashwords.com:

  Angel

  The Assyrian

  The Blood Star

  The Summer Soldier

  Old Acquaintance

  The Favor

  The President’s Man

  Chain Reaction

  The Berlin Warning