The Linz Tattoo (14 page)

“There was a law in Germany then that any
discovery with potential military applications had to be reported
to the government. Schrader found himself on a train to Berlin. He
had discovered, poor man, the very first nerve gas. He called it
Tabun.

The Wehrmacht, of course, fell in love with
it. It was odorless, colorless, and lethal. The pupils of test
animals’ eyes shrank down to nothing—hence the night blindness
Schrader had experienced. They foamed at the mouth and vomited.
They developed debilitating diarrhea. Finally, after five or six
minutes, they went into convulsions and died in extreme agony. It
worked on some chemical in the muscles, you see, throwing them into
violent and uncontrollable contractions. Nothing, no treatment
known to medicine, could save them. One perished from asphyxiation,
strangled to death from the inside.

“The substance could be absorbed through the
skin, so gas masks were no protection, and it killed in very small
concentrations. Tabun was the perfect, the ultimate weapon in the
arsenal of gas warfare. Schrader got a new factory, all his own, in
Elberfeld, and within a year be had developed a new compound, ten
times as powerful, which he called Sarin.

“Of course, by then the Nazis knew they would
be precipitating a European war within a year or two, so they
poured vast amounts of money into developing these two
gases—hundreds of millions of reichsmarks. When the war did begin,
huge factories were built in Poland. Even by 1943 the Germans had
stockpiled enormous quantities of Tabun and Sarin, enough certainly
to have convinced England to drop out of the war if they had used
them in bombing raids over London and a few other major cities.
Probably enough to end Russia’s resistance. The German General
Staff were cradling the fate of Europe in the hollow of their
hand.

“You are perhaps wondering how, then, the
Germans were ever restrained, why it was that they are not now
masters of the earth and we grinning corpses? You may wonder
indeed.”

He glanced back from the window, over his
shoulder to where Christiansen was sitting motionless on a small
gilt chair. He could feel the corners of his mouth twitching and
wondered how he must look.
Oh, Mordecai
, a voice said inside
his brain,
Oh, little brother, how did it ever come down to this
for you? Have you gone mad to be speaking of these things?

“The fact is, they lost their courage.”
Leivick shrugged his shoulders, as if refusing to take
responsibility for such foolishness, and moved away from the
window. He could feel Christiansen’s eyes on him, like gun sights,
as he paced off the distance from one wall to the other. “That, and
a certain fastidiousness on Hitler’s part, are the only reasons
anyone can imagine.

“Their Führer, you see, had been gassed in
the First War. He was blinded for a time and was in a military
hospital recovering when the Fatherland surrendered. His memories
of the experience, it seems, were vivid and unpleasant. He never
favored the use of gas in warfare.

“And then there was the question of what the
Allies were doing. Nothing, not a thing, as it turned out, but the
silence in American scientific periodicals concerning certain
substances convinced some key German scientists that the Allies
must be pursuing research on their own—actually, they were merely
developing DDT—and they, in turn, convinced Hitler. Work continued
in the secret factories, but plans to deploy the new weapon were
quietly dropped.

“By 1945, of course, the whole idea of
chemical warfare was also militarily unfeasible. There simply
weren’t any planes—the cities of the enemy had become forever out
of reach. When they knew the war was lost, the Germans tried to
destroy all trace of the whole research effort, but the factories
in Poland, by the sheerest chance, fell into Russian hands almost
intact. Our information is that they were dismantled and shipped
home. Probably, at this very moment, they are in full production
somewhere in the Urals.

“The end of the story? Not quite. Because,
you see, there was a third gas, many times more powerful even than
Sarin, described in the few surviving records as Trilon 238. The
substance was being mass-produced at Waldenburg, almost up to the
hour of its capture.”

“And Colonel Hagemann walked away with that
secret under his hat.”

It was the first time Christiansen had spoken
in almost half an hour. Leivick was startled by the sound, almost
as if someone had fired a pistol in the room.

“Not quite, God be praised.” Leivick smiled
thinly. “But he seems to believe he can put his hands on it. He
seems to have the Syrians pretty well convinced that he can.

“There is going to be a war in the Middle
East, Mr. Christiansen. That much is obvious. The United Nations
has voted that Palestine shall be partitioned into Arab and Jewish
states, and that partition, as the Arab leaders have so noisily
declared, will be resisted. Israel will be born—we Jews will have
our homeland, provided we can hold it.

“Try to imagine, if you can, the applications
of such a toxic nerve gas in the sort of war our Arab brothers are
preparing to unleash on us. The distances that restrained Hitler in
1945 will not apply in Palestine. One doesn’t have to drop Trilon
238 from a plane—one can just as easily charge artillery shells
with it, and artillery shells are delightfully selective. The
Jewish sections of, say, Haifa could be saturated, killing probably
eighty or ninety percent of the population, and Arab families
living five or ten blocks away would hardly be inconvenienced at
all. Our troops might suffer similar losses before they ever had a
chance to engage the enemy. What is to save us then? We are
discussing the final annihilation of a people here, Mr.
Christiansen. What Chelmno and Auschwitz and Treblinka failed to
accomplish will be brought to perfection in the streets of
Jerusalem.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it. In a week
you can read about Hagemann’s death in the newspapers—with my
compliments.”

“It isn’t enough, Mr. Christiansen. I’m
genuinely sorry.”

“It’ll just god damned well have to be.”

Leivick wrapped his arms together, suddenly
cold. He understood exactly how the man felt. The sense of his own
powerlessness overwhelmed him.

“We must have not only Hagemann but his
secret, Mr. Christiansen. That terrible weapon must be buried
forever, or we will never be safe. After all we have suffered, have
we no right to live? This is our last chance. The few of us who
remain, some of whom have never known anything except war and fear
and the threat of extinction, we have one last opportunity. That is
why we must lay our hands on your Colonel Hagemann. That is why,
before he dies, we must find out from him what has become of his
terrible weapon. Will you help us, Mr. Christiansen, or does your
revenge take precedence even over this?”

For a moment there was only silence. There
was nothing to suggest that Christiansen had been moved by anything
Leivick had said . Then he picked up the pack of cigarettes from
where it was resting on the arm of his chair, extracted one with
his fingernails, put it in his mouth, and lit it. When finally he
did glance in Leivick’s direction, his face wore an expression of
scarcely contained anger.

“No, it doesn’t,” he said finally, as the
smoke wreathed around his head like a halo. “But when I’ve helped
you get what you want, Hagemann is mine. You people aren’t the only
ones he’s wronged.”

Leivick allowed the air to escape from his
lungs—slowly with almost sensual pleasure. He hadn’t realized that
he had been holding his breath.

“Of course, Mr. Christiansen—that goes
without saying. Now. You had mentioned something about ‘bait’?”

6

Vienna, Austria: March 1, 1948

The second great disappointment after their
arrival was the Danube, which was neither beautiful nor blue but a
chocolate brown, flecked here and there with garbage and rainbow
patches of floating oil. Christiansen had asked for a room with a
river view—which, not entirely coincidentally, meant that he had
only to look out his window for the best prospect of the Russian
Zone money could buy—but after all he decided that, except for
purposes of business, he would be just as happy to keep the blinds
drawn.

“It was just the same in Franz Josef’s day,”
Mordecai told him, shrugging his shoulders with amused sympathy.
“My father brought me here in 1912, and the river was just as dirty
then. I liked the giant ferris wheel at the Prater much
better.”

The first great disappointment was word that
Esther Rosensaft was going to spend the next decade or so in a
Russian slammer.

It was all there in the dossier which through
some mysterious agency was waiting for them when they arrived from
Munich. Mordecai bought a magazine at the newsstand in the railway
station, and the dossier was inside. There was even a
photograph.

“She looks like she could use a little
feeding up,” Christiansen had said, holding the photograph by a
corner. “Where did you get all this?”

“My dear Inar, you’ve been fighting the Nazis
all these years and you’ve never heard them mention the
International Jewish Conspiracy? I’m surprised at you.”

It was simply that he hadn’t yet gotten over
the first sharpness of his disappointment. Christiansen found it
easy not to take offense.

They sat in silence as the taxi drove them to
their hotel. It was rather as if a practical joke had been played
on them, and they had come all that way for nothing. No,
Christiansen didn’t take offense.

Mordecai had phoned the Jewish Agency’s
central office in Geneva, and they had been able to report only
that Esther Rosensaft had been alive as of July, 1947, and had
given Vienna as her permanent address. There was also a
suggestion—just a suggestion—that the lady had led a checkered life
since the war’s end and that perhaps inquiries would most
fruitfully be addressed to the Viennese police.

Which, by some labyrinthine indirection, was
naturally the source of the dossier.

And it was all there, of course. Esther was
your typical black market small-timer—one previous arrest, no
conviction (had she sweet-talked somebody, or perhaps traded a
little information?). She had held jobs as a bar girl, a waitress,
even a letter carrier for a private mail service. She seemed to
have a lot of unsavory friends. This was someone who had learned to
get by in the big world.

Until four months ago, when she had been
arrested at a checkpoint on the Wallenstein Bridge with twenty
thousand rubles in her corset. Fifteen years was a longish stretch,
and the Russians didn’t believe in time off for good behavior.

“The boys will be arriving tonight,” Mordecai
announced quietly. “Perhaps they can think of something. This is
more their line of country than mine.”

Christiansen stared out of the hotel window,
watching the Russian guards on the Gürtelbrücke as they searched
the back of a dark green delivery truck, and wondered if he hadn’t
led them all on a wild goose chase. The Russians controlled every
stinking foot of ground east of the Danube and, barring a skyhook,
there was no way to cross except over the heavily patrolled
bridges. Esther Rosensaft, if they wanted to keep her, would be
hard to smuggle out. And they wanted to keep her. Hell, they were
holding her under lock and key.

“
Seien Sie doch mit meinem Cello
vorsichtig,”
he barked at the porter, who was about to hit the
case against the door frame.
“Ich verdiene damit meinen
Unterhalt.”

The poor man set the luggage down gingerly,
leaning the cello against the bed and whimpering an apology.
Christiansen, to salve his conscience, gave him a larger than usual
tip and, as the porter was backing out of the room, began
unstrapping the case to see how his darling had made the journey.
It was his own fault—he shouldn’t have lost his temper. Usually he
didn’t allow anyone to carry it except himself.

“You shouldn’t shout at people like that,
Inar,” Mordecai said quietly, with an amused expression playing
over his face.

“It’s a Guarnerius,” Christiansen answered,
his voice hardly above a murmur. His hand slipped down the neck
with a caressing gesture. “It’s an inheritance from my first
teacher at Juilliard: when he died he passed over his own son to
give this to me. God knows, it’s worth more than I am.”

“But still, you shouldn’t shout at people. A
man your size—you frightened that poor man half to death.”

Christiansen didn’t answer. Mordecai was
right of course, but the dumb bastard might have cracked the
varnish.

He would have liked to take it out and play
for a while. He just wanted to hear the sound of it. But he felt
embarrassed in front of Mordecai, who would probably have thought
he was showing off or something. That was what he had always hated
about recitals. If you loved, really loved the thing, then it
shouldn’t be just a “performance.” He hated even the sound of the
word.

“And you weren’t being entirely truthful,
were you. You don’t earn your living with your cello, although
there isn’t any question you could. I wonder why it is you
don’t.”

It wasn’t an innocent question. Mordecai had
a way of probing, of gently turning over the earth until all the
roots were exposed. He seemed to think it important to understand
everything—and, just possibly, he was right.

“A concussion grenade tore open my hand,”
Christiansen answered, holding it up so that the light from the
window glistened against the scar. “It broke all the bones, every
damn one of them. I still have tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded in
the muscles—there was no way they could get them all out and leave
me with enough finger control to unzip my fly. I cramp up if I play
longer than fifteen or twenty minutes.”