The Linz Tattoo

by Nicholas Guild

  It was over. She was quiet again, but you could read it in her eyes—that terrible, burning sincerity of youth. Of course she had been telling the truth.

  Leivick knelt down beside her, took her right arm in his hands, and pushed the sleeve back as gently as if he were uncovering a fresh wound. She didn’t try to resist him.

  “I’ve never seen such a number,” he said. “‘G4/3454641.’ There were only a few thousand prisoners at Waldenburg—even at Auschwitz the numbers didn’t get above five digits. I’ve never seen one that begins with a letter, or carries a stroke mark. What does the ‘G’ stand for? Was the Herr General signing his work?”

  She glared at him. She hated him at that moment, and why not? Leivick couldn’t find it in his heart to blame her.

  “He did this to you himself? He did it?”

  She didn’t even have to answer. Leivick let go of her arm, and it dropped back into her lap like something dead.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” It was Christiansen who had spoken. He had risen without being heard and was standing beside the sofa. He put his scarred hand on the girl’s shoulder. “‘Hagemann always undervalued the beautiful.’ ‘That’ll make two little jokes I’ve played on him since our parting.’”

  Yes, of course. It was perfectly obvious. That was why Esther Rosensaft hadn’t died at Waldenburg—she was the bearer of a message. Leivick stood up and looked at Christiansen, smiling a trifle uncertainly.

  “Yes, of course. The number—it’s some kind of a code.”

  12

  A message—yes. But to whom, and about what? How much was it possible to know about a cipher tattooed across a girl’s arm?

  “It may not even be a code,” Mordecai said, not looking very happy with his discovery. “It may be nothing more than a number—a safe-deposit box number perhaps. We are talking about how von Goltz decided to transmit the instructions for a technical process—a formula, if you wish. There will be papers—procedural notes, perhaps even blueprints. He had to have stored them somewhere safe. A bank, probably. Somewhere in the western military zone, I should think.”

  They were alone. Dessauer was on guard duty outside Esther’s bedroom door while she took a nap—she was still a trifle punchy from all the narcotics she had had pumped into her—so Christiansen had suggested he and Mordecai step across the street to a Kaffeehaus for a quiet word or two. They sat hunched over their cups, on either side of a small table next to a plate-glass window through which the pale sun of a fine, cold late winter’s afternoon was shining like a promise. Each of them was smoking one of Christiansen’s American cigarettes.

  “One thing’s for sure—we’ll have to have that tattoo removed. We don’t know whether Hagemann knows what he’s looking for or not, but we can’t very well take the chance. We’ll have to have it cut out. I think she’ll be just as happy about it.”

  Mordecai nodded in agreement. He probably already had a doctor in mind. Mordecai always seemed to know just the right people for any little thing that needed doing.

  “And we shall have to have a watch on her at all times,” he said. “She is the key to everything now—well, certainly one of them.”

  He smiled. He was making a joke. Christiansen, who had had enough riddles for one day, merely waited

  “There is a real key. of course. At least there is if my theory about the safe-deposit box is correct. I should imagine Hagemann has that. How much else he knows we shall have to find out.” He shrugged his shoulders; he was not underestimating the difficulty. “We have our piece of the puzzle, and he has his. And, of course, his standing with his Arab backers, perhaps even his life, depends upon his acquiring both.”

  “She’s expecting me to take her shopping this afternoon. You were the one who suggested it—you can be the one to tell her it’s too dangerous.”

  Mordecai shook his head.

  “No, we must go ahead with it. I doubt if Hagemann even knows she’s out of Mühlfeld yet and, besides, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to do anything that might kill the golden goose, if you will pardon the expression. If we begin treating her like a prisoner, she will begin to think like one again—she is accustomed to that role. We can’t risk that. We will need her willing cooperation later.”

  He looked out the window, watching the people crossing back and forth on the sidewalks, and it was almost as if he envied them. He seemed to have aged even in the past few days.

  “She likes you,” he said, turning back to Christiansen with a smile that no longer had anything of pleasure in it. “I think she has a bit of a . . . Sie hat sich ganz in Sie vernarrt. How would you say that in English?”

  “She has a crush on me.”

  “A ‘crush’? What a way to put it. But why not? She has spent several months locked away in a woman’s prison. She is young, and you have been kind to her. How many men have been kind to her in her life, eh? She probably thinks of you as her savior, as Sir Galahad on his white horse. Why shouldn’t she have a ‘crush’ on you? It would not be the worst thing in the world if you were to cultivate those feelings in her. They may be useful later on.”

  “Mordecai, you’re an even bigger son of a bitch than I am.”

  “Yes. I know.” He took a sip of his coffee and set the cup back down noiselessly on its saucer. “I have chosen to be a nation builder instead of a jeweler or an accountant, and nations are built on the unwilling sacrifices of the innocent. It is a cruel necessity.”

  And so, at a few minutes before four that afternoon. Christiansen changed into his army uniform and his greatcoat and, with Mordecai’s big British service revolver in one pocket, took the little lady out to see about refurbishing her wardrobe. She made a comical sight; she was wearing Dessauer’s raincoat over her black dress, and it reached within a few inches of the ground.

  Dessauer, like an idiot, was proving how tough he was in nothing but an ancient tweed jacket. Dessauer was being a surly little bastard, but it was possible to feel sorry for him because he had a point. Children should fall in love with other children. What Mordecai had said made Christiansen feel a little ashamed of himself, although he didn’t quite know why. It wasn’t as if he had done anything.

  “You look nice in your uniform,” Esther said, putting her hand on his sleeve. “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

  “I haven’t been a soldier since the war’s end. I should have thought you had had your fill of soldiers.”

  What could have made him say a thing like that? She let her hand slip from his arm, and the pleasure died out in her eyes. Christiansen had decided he wouldn’t encourage her. There was no place for anything like that in his life right now and, for all the wisdom of Mordecai’s sly little suggestion, he didn’t want to hurt this girl any more than was necessary for the accomplishment of their business. She had had enough of that in the past several years.

  But perhaps there was some less brutal way of putting an end to all these touching symptoms of young love.

  They walked down the stairway together, the three of them abreast. Dessauer, like a well-brought-up young man, offered her his arm, and she took it. Perhaps that was the best plan—just stay out of the way and let nature take its course.

  “There’s a place not three blocks from here that does a good business in secondhand clothes. I’m afraid that’s the best we’ll do outside of the International Zone, and we can’t risk taking you there. The Russians have powers of arrest there.”

  “I see. Secondhand will do quite well, so long as they are warm.”

  They exchanged a glance that seemed to settle everything. There would be no more gushes of girlish admiration. Things would stay on a business footing, and she could save herself for someone who had the time.

  . . . . .

  The weather seemed to be warming up a bit—perhaps they would even have a drop of rain by evening. The clouds overhead were high and sparse but the color of tarnished pewter.

  People on the sidewalks, the women with their net shopping bag
s and the men with their hands buried deep in their overcoat pockets, didn’t give the impression they were in any hurry to get back within doors. It was a pleasure to breathe the moist, still air and to feel the sun’s soft heat. There was a certain animal comfort to the way the light seemed to blunt the sharp edges of naked tree limbs and the corners of buildings.

  Since the walkway was a trifle narrow, Christiansen fell behind a few paces and left Dessauer and Esther to go on together. Dessauer was being very gentlemanly and correct and, aside from the odd polite murmur, they didn’t seem to have a lot to say to each other. Christiansen contented himself with keeping a nervous watch on the faces of the other pedestrians. He couldn’t rid himself of a nagging suspicion that he was being watched. His hand slipped into the pocket of his overcoat and closed around the butt of Mordecai’s pistol. It was only a feeling. . .

  The proprietress of the secondhand clothing store opened the door for them even before Christiansen had a chance to touch the knob. She was a huge, withered woman with black eyes that looked as if someone had pressed them into her face like raisins into dough—the network of lines over her nose and cheekbones seemed to suggest something of the sort. She stood by the door, ducking her head and making little sighing sounds, all directed at Christiansen whom, from the fact of his uniform, she must have selected as the one with the money.

  “We need things for the young lady,” he said, taking Esther by the arm and pulling her forward into everyone’s line of sight. “A couple of dresses and a suit—yes, a suit, one with long sleeves. A good warm winter coat as well, and underwear. Can you oblige us with all that? Do you have any shoes that might fit?”

  They both looked down at Esther’s feet, which were still shod in a pair of prison clogs that were too big for her because she had had to borrow them from Sonya. The old woman scratched the soft, wrinkled folds of her thick neck and frowned.

  “A small foot,” she said, seeming, by the way she said it, to turn the matter into a philosophical issue. “She won’t be easy. In Vienna, all the women have big feet—in Vienna, we are all great ones for dancing.”

  “I haven’t danced in a long time.”

  Esther’s serious little face revealed nothing—she might even have accepted the proprietress’s stupid attempt at a joke as literal truth. In the silence created by her innocence, she looked up to Christiansen as if she wanted him to interpret for her.

  Well, what was so surprising? She was a child, really. Almost a newborn. She had spent most of her young life under one or another kind of arrest, and prisons weren’t the place where one learned how to understand a joke. Or how to dance either.

  “See if you can come up with something,” he said harshly, wondering why he was so angry with an old woman who obviously hadn’t meant any harm. “We aren’t looking for dancing shoes.”

  With hardly more than an uncomprehending shrug, she put her hand on Esther’s shoulder and guided her through a curtained doorway into a back room which, apparently, she regarded as a purely feminine sanctuary. Christiansen and Dessauer were left alone together among the dusty counters and the racks of men’s suits and overcoats.

  Christiansen took out a cigarette and lit it. The smoke felt dry in his lungs and he couldn’t taste it at all, but at least it gave him the appearance of an occupation. He had an excuse for not noticing the rather pointed rudeness with which Dessauer was staring at a wall shelf full of men’s and women’s hats—bowlers, huge Edwardian productions with purple feathers, cloth caps, silk opera hats of both the collapsing and the non-collapsing variety, all promiscuously jumbled up together. But young Itzhak wasn’t interested in these little fragments of social history, he seemed to be peering through to something on the wall’s other side. That, at least, was probably the impression he wished to convey.

  Dessauer didn’t like him. Christiansen knew all the reasons: he wasn’t Jewish; he had broken the lad’s nose for him; he seemed to hold some prior claim to the attention of Esther Rosensaft. There was nothing new about any of this. This was simply the first moment, as Christiansen suddenly realized, when that hostility had caused him any twinge of discomfort.

  It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to think in such terms—since that day in June, 1945, when he had stood amidst the ruins of Kirstenstad, looking down at the spot where his parents had died, he had imagined himself as having a human relationship with only two people on earth: Ulrich von Goltz and Egon Hagemann. There had been only the hatred of those two men, with nothing left over for anyone else. Having given himself up to the task of settling his blood debt, he really couldn’t bring himself to care what anyone else thought of him.

  But now, all at once, he would have been easier in his mind if this boy could have been made to like him. He didn’t want any more enemies. Nobody was giving Itzhak Dessauer any trouble over possession of Esther Rosensaft s fair young body, so the rotten little bastard didn’t have to be such a hard case all the time.

  Outside on the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, a man in a dark tan raincoat hurried by. His hat brim was pulled down, and he was walking with his head cocked to one side, as if the shop windows interested him, so it was impossible to see his face. He was gone in a minute. Christiansen turned away from the big plate-glass window with a feeling of desolation that was beginning to seem almost comfortably familiar.

  “When we’re finished here, I think it would be just as well if you took the girl through the back way,” he said, not quite looking in Dessauer’s direction. “I’ll give you about thirty seconds’ head start, and then I’ll shadow you back to the hotel. We seem to have attracted some attention.”

  “I’ve got a gun—I can manage.”

  Dessauer s voice was tight, as if he were coiled up like a spring inside. Yes, Christiansen could just imagine how he’d manage.

  “Nevertheless, we do it my way.”

  For the first time that day, the two men’s eyes met. And no, nobody was going to vote Christiansen Most Popular Man in Vienna.

  “How do you like it?”

  They both turned toward the curtained doorway. Esther was standing there, smiling, radiant, her arms held out to the sides. She wore a gray wool suit of a type that had probably been fashionable four or five years earlier, with sharp, padded shoulders and a skirt jagged with narrow pleats. She spun around for them, rising up on her toes, making the hem of her skirt flare out; she was obviously intensely pleased with herself. The old woman, who was immediately behind her, her hand resting on the frame of the doorway, smiled in approval. They all smiled. They couldn’t have helped themselves.

  “Isn’t it pretty? Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

  The questions were both directed at Christiansen, who felt something tugging at the inside of his throat and who wished he were somewhere else just at that moment. He didn’t want to be reached by this girl—he didn’t want to be reached by anyone; that sort of thing just wasn’t on the program—but she was reaching him whether he wanted her to or not. When she looked like that, when she was happy and it seemed to light her up from the inside, he just didn’t have any way of defending himself.

  “Yes. It’s very pretty—it makes you look very nice.”

  That, apparently, was all she needed to hear—or, what was just as likely, she saw more in his face than the bare confirmation of the words—because she danced across the ten or twelve feet of floor separating them and caught his hand. It was a perfectly spontaneous gesture, as automatic as a drowning man’s catching at the floating wreckage, but suddenly he found she had him. She tugged at his arm as if she wanted to pull him down so she could see herself reflected in his eyes.

  And then something changed. All at once, from one instant to the next, she seemed to have lost interest in him. She wasn’t even looking at him; she was looking at something else.

  “What is it? What—?”

  He never had a chance to finish. She cut him off with a wild scream, the sound of an animal, and threw herself into h
is arms. He felt the jolt of her tiny body against his own, and then the sound of broken glass coming from behind, from the store window, and then something like a small explosion. Of course he knew almost at once what had happened.

  His right hand went into the pocket of his overcoat, and with his left he swept the girl away from him. She was trying to shield him with her body, but in that fraction of a second all he felt was a certain annoyance; she was just something in the way. It wasn’t until he tried to move her aside that he noticed the first sharp little twinge of pain in his left shoulder. The gun was in his hand and he was bringing it around to aim when he heard the second shot. He assumed it would kill him.

  But it didn’t. In fact, it had come from inside the store. As he turned around, the first thing he saw was Itzhak Dessauer standing in the middle of the room, his huge British service revolver held in both hands, firing round after round through the shattered window. No one was outside, but, then, no one would be.

  “Dark raincoat? Hat? Itzhak!”

  Christiansen thrust his way toward the door, releasing the girl so that she collapsed to the floor in a little heap. Outside on the sidewalk he could see someone running, running because he had missed his chance and now two men with guns would be hot on his ass.

  Dessauer was still standing there, holding the revolver in front of him, motionless as stone. Christiansen grabbed his jacket lapel and shook him until he came out of his trance.

  “Get her out of here,” he shouted. Dessauer stared at him for an instant, and then nodded—he had come back to life. “Use the back way, but watch yourself. They might have someone waiting, so stay off the streets. Steal a car—do anything. Just get her back to the hotel. And thanks for saving my neck.”

  There wasn’t time for anything more. Their eyes met for just a second and then Christiansen hit the door, making the little bell jangle with panicky excitement. When he burst out onto the sidewalk, a couple strolling by turned to stare at him as, gun in hand, he went charging down the street like a hundred-meter runner. There were more people outside; it was the hour when offices began to close for the day. The man in the raincoat had about a seventy-yard head start and a crowd to hide in. If he had a car anywhere in the neighborhood, Christiansen would never catch him.