(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “Listen to this,” he remembered saying to Mrs. Oastler. “Tattoo Peter was born in Denmark. I never knew he was a Dane! He actually worked for Tattoo Ole before moving to Amsterdam.”

  “So what?” Leslie had said.

  “I never knew any of this!” Jack had cried. “He drove a Mercedes-Benz? I never saw it! He walked with a cane—I never saw the cane! I never saw him walk! His wife was French, a Parisian singer? People compared her to Edith Piaf!”

  “I think Alice told me he stepped on a mine,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “That’s how he lost his leg.”

  “But she never told me!” he’d shouted.

  “She never told you fuck-all, Jack,” he remembered Leslie saying.

  Jack walked around the Oude Kerk in the falling rain, but he didn’t go inside. He didn’t know why he was procrastinating. The kindergarten next to the Old Church looked fairly new. There were more prostitutes than he remembered on the Oudekerksplein, but the kindergarten children hadn’t been there when Jack and his mom had traipsed through the district.

  Jack had no difficulty finding the police station on the Warmoesstraat, but he didn’t go inside the station, either. He wasn’t ready to talk to Nico Oudejans, assuming Nico was still a policeman and Jack could find him.

  Jack walked on the Warmoesstraat in the direction of the Dam Square, pausing at the corner of the Sint Annenstraat—exactly where he and his mom and Saskia and Els had encountered Jacob Bril, who had the Lord’s Prayer tattooed on his chest. There was a tattoo of Lazarus leaving his grave on Bril’s stomach. There were some things you didn’t forget, no matter how young you were when you saw them.

  “In the Lord’s eyes, you are the company you keep!” Jacob Bril had told Alice.

  “What would you know about the Lord’s eyes?” Els had asked him. Or so Jack remembered—if any of it was true!

  The Tattoo Museum on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal—maybe a minute’s walk from Jack’s hotel—was a warm and cozy place with more paraphernalia and memorabilia from the tattoo world than Jack had seen in any other tattoo parlor. He met Henk Schiffmacher at noon, when the museum opened, and Henk showed him around. Henk’s tattoo shop was also there—Hanky Panky’s House of Pain, as it was called. Whoever Eddie was, in the new Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.

  Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker’s beard and long hair. A female death’s head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.

  He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. (Irezumi means tattoo in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.

  While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy’s neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing “Rock of Ages” on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he’d heard his mother say. “A place where every desire is forgiven,” Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn’t Jack’s mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or had he? (Jack thought that he couldn’t forgive her.)

  “Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?” Jack asked Hanky Panky.

  “Nico? He’s still the best cop in the district,” Henk said. “Nico’s a frigging brigadier.”

  On Jacob Bril’s bony back was his favorite tattoo, the Ascension—Christ departing this world in the company of angels. As Jack walked through the red-light district to the Warmoesstraat police station, he remembered Bril’s version of Heaven as a dark and cloudy place. It had stopped raining, but the cobblestones were greasy underfoot and the sky—like Jacob Bril’s Heaven—remained dark and cloudy.

  Jack Burns heard his name a few more times. Wherever they were from, some of the women in the windows and doorways were movie-goers—or they had been moviegoers in a previous life.

  Jack crossed the bridge over the canal by the Old Church and came upon the small, foul-smelling pissoir—a one-man urinal—where he remembered peeing as a child. It had been dark; his mom had stood outside the barrier while he peed. She kept telling him to hurry up. She probably didn’t want to be seen standing alone in the area of the Oude-kerksplein at night. Jack could hear drunken young men singing as he peed; they must have been singing in English or he wouldn’t have remembered some of the words in their song.

  They were English football fans, his mother would tell him later. “They’re the worst,” she’d said. There’d been a football game, which the English team had either lost or won; it seemed to make no difference, in regard to how their fans behaved in the red-light district. They were “filthy louts,” Jack remembered Saskia saying; filthy louts wasn’t in his mom’s vocabulary.

  Jack walked around the Oude Kerk once more, on the side where the new kindergarten shared the street with the whores. Someone was following him; a man had fallen into step behind him at the corner of the Stoofsteeg, almost as soon as Jack had left the Tattoo Museum and the House of Pain. When Jack slowed down, the man slowed down, too—and when Jack sped up, the man picked up his pace again.

  A fan, Jack thought. He hated it when they followed him. If they came up and said, “Hi, I like your movies,” and then shook his hand, and went on their way—well, that was fine. But the followers really irritated Jack; they were usually women.

  Not this one. He was a tough-looking guy with a dirty-blond beard, wearing running shoes and a windbreaker; his hands were shoved into the pockets of the windbreaker as he walked, his shoulders thrust forward as if it were still raining or he was cold. A guy in his fifties, maybe—late forties, anyway. The man didn’t make the slightest effort to pretend he wasn’t following Jack; it was as if he were daring Jack to turn around and face him.

  Jack doubted that the bastard would have the balls to follow him into the police station, so he just kept walking.

  Jack was one small street away from the Warmoesstraat when a brown-skinned prostitute stepped out of her doorway in her underwear and high heels; she almost touched him. “Hey, Jack—I’ve seen you in the movies,” she said. She had a Spanish-sounding accent; she might have been Dominican or Colombian.

  When she saw the man who was trailing Jack, she immediately put up her hands as if the man were pointing a gun at her; she quickly stepped back inside her doorway. That was when Jack knew that the man following him was a cop. Clearly the Dominican or Colombian woman knew who the cop was; she didn’t want any trouble with him.

  Jack stopped walking and turned to face the policeman, whose eyes were still a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone was the small, identifying scar like the letter L. The beard had fooled Jack. When the cop had been in his late twenties or early thirties, when Jack had first met him, Nico Oudejans didn’t have a beard. Jack had always thought that Nico was a nice guy; he’d been very nice to Jack when the boy was four. Now, in his fifties, Nico looked just plain tough.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Jack. For a few years now, I’ve had my eye out for you. I keep telling the ladies,” Nico said, with a nod to the Dominican or Colombian prostitute, who was smiling in her doorway, “ ‘One day Jack Burns, the actor, will show up. Give me a call when you see him,’ I keep telling them. Well,” Nico said, shaking Jack’s hand, “I got half a dozen calls today. I knew at least one of the ladies had to be right.”

  When they turned onto the Warmoesstraat, the policeman put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and steered him to the right—almost as if Nico didn’t trust Jack to remember where the police station was. “Were you coming to see me, Jack?”

  “Yes, I was,” Jack said.

  “So your mom’s dead?” Nico asked.

  Jack assumed that Nico had read about Alice’s death; because she was Jack Burns’s mother, her death had been reported in most of the mov
ie magazines. But Nico Oudejans didn’t read those magazines. The policeman had just guessed that Jack wouldn’t have come back to Amsterdam if Alice were still alive.

  “Why?” Jack asked him.

  “I’ll bet your mom would have talked you out of coming,” Nico said. “She sure would have tried.”

  They went into the Warmoesstraat station and climbed the stairs to a bare, virtually empty office on the second floor. There was just a table and three or four chairs, and Jack sat across the table from the policeman; it was as if Jack were going to be questioned about a crime. Jack thought it was funny that Nico left the office door open, as if they couldn’t possibly have had anything private to discuss. Jack got the feeling that every cop in the building not only knew in advance everything he might ask Nico Oudejans—they had all the answers, too.

  Maybe because he was with a cop, Jack just started talking. He told Nico everything. (As if all the deceits and deceptions of Jack’s childhood were his crime, not his mother’s; as if what he’d only recently learned was a story Jack had somehow concealed from himself.)

  Jack didn’t even pause, or interrupt himself, when another policeman came into the office and put some money on the table in front of Nico; after that cop left, a second and a third policeman came in and did the same thing. Maybe five or six cops did this—some in uniform, others in plainclothes like Nico—before Jack even got to the Amsterdam part of the story.

  When Jack finally got to the Amsterdam part, he was pretty worked up. While Jack had talked, Nico had hand-rolled a few cigarettes. He had some dark-looking tobacco in a pouch, and he went on carefully rolling the cigarettes as if he were alone. Jack had the impression that putting a cigarette together mattered more to Nico than smoking it. But now Nico stopped making cigarettes. There were not more than three or four cigarettes on the table; the policeman hadn’t lit one yet.

  “I thought Mom did it for only one night,” Jack said. “I thought there was just one kid, probably a virgin. He broke her pearl necklace.”

  “Nobody does it for only one night, Jack. When I told her to stop, or I’d have her deported, she just kept doing it. With Alice, they were always virgins. At least they told her they were virgins, or they looked like virgins.”

  “But why’d she do it?” Jack asked. “She had a job, didn’t she? She was making money at Tattoo Peter’s and at Tattoo Theo’s.”

  Alice had two pretty good jobs, in fact, and William was giving her money for Jack’s expenses—this in addition to whatever Mrs. Wicksteed was sending her. Alice didn’t need money. However, the one way she hadn’t tried to make William come back to her was that she hadn’t exposed Jack to any risk; she hadn’t yet done something to herself that a child of his age shouldn’t see. But if she was a prostitute, Alice reasoned, and if Jack was exposed to that—well, how would it be for a boy growing up to remember his mother as a whore?

  “ ‘What if Jack remembers that this is what you did to me?’ she asked your dad,” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “ ‘Since you like prostitutes so much that you play for them, William,’ your mother said, ‘what if Jack remembers how I became a whore because you stopped playing for me?’ ”

  Nico told Jack that William played the organ for the prostitutes for strictly religious reasons. “He was a fanatical Christian, but the good kind of fanatic,” Nico explained. William had insisted that there be an organ service for the prostitutes—at that early hour of the morning when many of them stopped working. William wanted them to know that the Oude Kerk was theirs at that time, and that he was playing for them. He wanted them to come to the Old Church and be soothed by the music; he wanted them to pray. (William wanted them to stop being prostitutes, of course, but the music was the only way he ever proselytized to them.)

  Not everyone at the Oude Kerk was in favor of William’s playing the organ for the prostitutes, but he silenced most of his critics by citing the zeal of St. Ignatius Loyola. William Burns said that he’d encountered a greater evil in Amsterdam than St. Ignatius had met on the streets of Rome. Ignatius had raised money among rich people; he’d founded an asylum for fallen women. It was in Rome where the saint announced that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

  “Naturally, some of the higher-ups at the Old Church expressed their doubts—after all, Loyola was a Catholic,” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “Among Protestants, your dad was sounding a little too close to Rome for comfort. But William said, ‘Look, I’m not trying to prevent the sins of a single prostitute’—although, in his own way, he was. ‘I’m just trying to make these women feel a little better. And if some of them hear Our Lord’s noise in the music, what’s the harm in that?’ ”

  “ ‘Our Lord’s noise’?” Jack asked.

  “That’s what William called it, Jack. He used to say that, if you could hear God’s noise in the organ, you were at heart a believer.”

  “Did it work?” Jack asked. “Were any prostitutes converted?”

  “He made believers out of some of those women,” Nico said, “but I don’t think any of them stopped working as prostitutes—at least not until long after your mother started. Some of the prostitutes didn’t like your dad—they thought he was yet another Christian do-gooder who disapproved of them. William had just found an odd way in which to disapprove! But more of the ladies hated your mother. They wouldn’t let their own children anywhere near the red-light district, but your mom dragged you through it every day and night—just to drive your dad crazy.”

  “You told her you’d have her deported?” Jack asked. Another policeman came into the office and put more Dutch guilders on the table.

  “Prostitutes who weren’t Dutch citizens used to get deported all the time,” Nico said. “But your dad didn’t want her deported. He didn’t want to lose you, Jack. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to see you in this environment.”

  Jack asked about Frans Donker, the organ-tuner. Nico said that Donker had imitated, or had tried to imitate, everything William did. Donker had spent half his time trying to play the organ instead of tuning it. “And when your dad needed a good night’s sleep—when he was too tired to play for the ladies in the Oudekerksplein—Frans played for them. I think Frans Donker was a little simple; maybe someone had dropped him on his head when he was a baby,” the policeman speculated. “But your dad treated Donker like a helpless pet. William indulged Donker, he pitied him, he was always charitable to him. Not that Donker deserved it—that boy didn’t know what he was about.”

  “He put baby powder on his ass,” Jack remembered out loud.

  “Donker even imitated your dad’s tattoos, but badly,” Nico said. “Then he took a really stupid job—something only Donker would dream of doing—and we never saw him again in the district.”

  “I think I know what Donker did,” Jack told the policeman. “He took a job on a cruise ship, playing the piano. He sailed to Australia, to be tattooed by Cindy Ray.”

  “Yes, that’s it!” Nico Oudejans cried. “What a memory you have, Jack! That’s a detail even a cop like me had forgotten.”

  Jack also remembered the dark-brown woman from Suriname; she was one of the first prostitutes to speak to him. He’d been surprised that she knew his name. She’d been in a window on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat—not in the red-light district but in that same general area where Jack and his mom had met Femke. (And he’d thought that Femke was an unusual prostitute, when in fact she was a lawyer!)

  The Surinamese prostitute had given him a chocolate the color of her skin. “I’ve been saving this for you, Jack,” she’d said. And he’d believed, for years, that she must have been one of his dad’s girlfriends—one of the prostitutes who’d taken William home with her, and had slept with him, as Jack’s mother had led the boy to believe. But that wasn’t true.

  Jack’s father had not had sex with a prostitute in Amsterdam; William had only played the organ for them, a sound both huge and holy, which had compelled
them to just listen. As for some of them—those who’d managed to hear the Lord’s noise in the music—William may have saved them from the sins of a single night, albeit later in their lives, when a few of them did stop being prostitutes.

  “I called your dad the Protestant Loyola, which seemed to please him,” Nico Oudejans told Jack.

  Nico also told Jack that the Surinamese prostitute was one of William’s earliest converts to Christianity; she’d heard God’s noise in the organ and had become an overnight believer.

  Jack had lost count of how many policemen had come into the office and put their guilders on the table in front of Nico, but when another cop had come and gone, Jack asked Nico if he had won a bet on a game or a horse.

  “I won a bet on you, Jack,” the policeman said. “I bet every cop in District Two that one day, before I retired, Jack Burns would walk into the Warmoesstraat station, and we’d have this little talk about his mom and dad.”

  The next evening, Wednesday, Jack went with Nico to the Oude Kerk to hear Willem Vogel, the organist, rehearse. Vogel had officially retired from teaching and conducting, but he still wrote music for organ and choir—a CD of his compositions had recently been released—and he still played in the Oude Kerk, the long service on Sunday and the Wednesday-evening rehearsal. Willem Vogel was in his late seventies but looked younger. He had long, hairless hands and was wearing a sweater with sagging elbows; in the unheated church, a wool scarf was tied around his neck.

  Jack had correctly remembered the narrow, brick-lined stairs leading to the organist’s hidden chamber above the congregation. The wooden handrail was on one side as you climbed; a waxed rope, the color of burned caramel, was on the other. There was a bare, bright, unshaded lightbulb behind the leather-covered organ bench; it cast the perfect, shadowless light upon the yellowed pages of the music. Vogel’s well-worn shoes made a soft tapping on the foot pedals; his long fingers made an even softer clicking on the keys.

  Jack could hear only the drone of the choir, in the distant background, when the organ was soft or not playing. When Vogel played hard, you could barely hear the accompanying voices from the organ chamber. At a moment when the choir sang without him, Vogel opened a small piece of hard candy—neatly putting the paper wrapper in his pocket before popping the candy in his mouth.