The Linz Tattoo (15 page)

“But you can manage the double bass for
hours, it would seem.” Mordecai smiled, as if slightly ashamed.
“I’ve seen you.”

“That’s jazz—big sloppy chords you change
every half hour. I could play that crap with my elbow.”

Christiansen reclosed the lid and grabbed his
coat from where it was lying across the back of a chair. Suddenly
the room seemed too small for him.

“I won’t be back for dinner,” he said,
keeping his voice featureless. “I figure somebody should have a
look at this prison of theirs.”

. . . . .

Just to be on the safe side, he took a taxi
to the International Zone and walked across at the Salztorbrücke.
He had a Norwegian passport, and the guard apparently hadn’t been
instructed to regard all Norwegians as spies. Christiansen
explained that he was a tourist and that he wanted to see the
Augarten. The guard shook his head, but not in disbelief.

“Is very no good.” he said, in probably the
most appalling German Christiansen had ever heard.
“
Fräuleins
very no nice, and very too. . .”

He groped for the word, swinging his hand
about in a tight little circle. It seemed to irritate him
vastly.

“
Kostspielig
?” Christiansen ventured
helpfully. Anything to end the suspense.

“
Da. . . Ja
.” The Russian nodded
vigorously, four or five times. “Too very much money. And like
pigs—fat. Stink too. Americans and British get all very good ones.
Very most Americans. . . capitalist bastards.”

He looked as if he would have liked to spit
on the pavement for emphasis, but just then his officer came up.
The officer, who looked like a provincial schoolmaster and was
probably all of twenty-five, stood just out of effective reach,
frowning like a deacon while Christiansen had his papers returned
to him with all the hasty rudeness anyone could have expected. You
didn’t have to be in occupied Europe very long to figure out that
the Russians really weren’t such bad fellows. It was simply that
they were more frightened than anyone else.

It was late afternoon and cold. A damp,
faintly unpleasant smell hung in the air, a little reminder that
this was an island between the made-man canal and a narrow,
wandering branch of the Danube.

Several of the trees lining the Augarten were
nothing more than dead logs sticking out of the ground. Russian
fire on the city had been particularly intense during the last few
days of the war, but it hadn’t been flattened like Munich. Still,
the trees had been burned up. The grass looked scorched too, but
that was probably just the time of year. It all made a dismal
impression.

Even in their short acquaintance,
Christiansen had decided that he liked Mordecai Leivick a good
deal. They had gone to first names almost at once, almost the way
the Americans did. They got along well; perhaps someday they might
even become friends, if they had the chance and it didn’t get in
the way.

Still, he wished Mordecai would stop asking
him personal questions. For one thing, he knew perfectly well that
it was all going into a dossier in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or
wherever the Jews would make their capital after partition. He
didn’t think it was any government agency’s god damned business how
he felt about having his hand shattered and not being able to tour
the world as the Norwegian Casals. He didn’t think it was anybody’s
god damned business. He was all kinds of things now, some of which
he didn’t like very much, but at least he wasn’t a child prodigy
anymore.

“
You must send him abroad,”
Professor
Skram had told his father.
“He knows everything I can teach him.
You must send him to one of the great maestros—in Germany perhaps
or France. He has a duty to his genius, and so do you “

For three years, twice every week, his father
had driven him into Oslo for private lessons with the first cellist
of the Royal Symphony Orchestra, the dean of the conservatory. It
was a two-hour journey in each direction, and while the instruction
was taking place the mayor of Kirstenstad would sit out in the
entrance hall on a hard wooden chair. He was a busy man with no
great passion for music, but Inar was his only child and would one
day astonish the world.

So on the way home from that last lesson,
father and son sat together in the car without a word.

For three days the subject was never once
raised, but the atmosphere in their little home was heavy with this
unsettled question. Inar knew that at night, alone in their
bedroom, his parents were trying to decide what they should do—he
knew from the anguished way his mother looked at him, as if she
feared for his life. And finally, at Sunday dinner, his father told
him he was to go to America, to live with the family of his younger
sister in a place called “White Plains, New York.”

“
I have written to her,”
he said, in
his calm magistrate’s voice.
“We will of course compensate her
for your maintenance, and you will study in New York City, where, I
am assured by your professor, there are many fine opportunities for
a young man who wishes to improve himself. It must be New York I’m
afraid, and not Berlin or Paris as perhaps you had hoped. You are
still very young and must have someone responsible to look after
you.”

Yes, of course. He was just thirteen years
old. He loved them both, but from that moment on they almost ceased
to be his parents. They must have realized that was what it would
mean.

So he had gone off to live with Auntie Inger,
to attend American high school and study at Juilliard and run
around with his teen-aged cousins. God, how he had loved America.
And how bored he had been the three times he had gone back to
Norway to spend a month with his mother and father in Kirstenstad.
His life was simply elsewhere—in his music and in the excitement of
New York—and he couldn’t wait to get back to it. He wondered now if
his parents had guessed, and what they must have thought then of
the sacrifice they had made to his “genius.”

And then they had died without him, shot to
death at their own front door, and his hand had been ripped open by
a piece of shrapnel from a concussion grenade, and that had been
the end of that. There was a kind of retributive justice in those
two transactions which he couldn’t quite define but which was there
just the same.

It would have been even tidier if he had
honestly staked his heart on a concert career, but he hadn’t. His
parents, it seemed, had given him up for nothing because by the
time he was in his third year at Juilliard he had decided that he
didn’t want to be a virtuoso—he just wanted to compose. He would
hole up somewhere, he had decided, in some little college maybe,
and write music that didn’t sound like film scores or twelve-tone
squeaks, music that had a life both on and off the page. Perhaps he
could have learned everything he needed for that at the
Conservatory in Oslo—he didn’t know.

What would his parents have thought? He
didn’t know because he had never asked them. It had never occurred
to him to ask them.

His teachers, of course, had believed he was
demented.
“You go on the concert circuit and in fifteen years
you can retire to a house on Lake Lucerne and write all the music
you like. You have the gift, boy, but give yourself a chance to
grow up first. At twenty, everyone thinks he wants to be
Stravinsky.”

Well, he sure as hell had grown up, and now
he didn’t have to worry. His future was Colonel Egon Hagemann.
Everything after that was a blank.

Anyway, he just wished Mordecai would stop
worrying about his sensitive artistic nature and keep to
business.

. . . . .

The prison faced onto the Heine Strasse, but
you couldn’t tell much about the building from the pavement. There
were a couple of uniformed goons with automatic weapons posted at
the entrance in a high stone wall, and behind that the Russians had
built another wall, just boards nailed end to end up to a height of
about seven or eight yards, apparently with no other purpose than
destroying the view. Possibly at one time the place had been a
ladies’ academy or a post office or even a private home for someone
with a lot of money and a taste for fortress architecture. The
point was that nobody just passing by was about to find out.

The wall—both walls, to be precise—ran all
the way around the block. Christiansen took the long way around to
the back for a look. There were no adjoining buildings, just the
prison complex itself, so everyone could just forget about moving
in next door and punching through with a few dozen sticks of
dynamite. There wasn’t going to be any easy way. Nobody was getting
in there with anything less than an artillery company.

Christiansen hunched his shoulders inside his
heavy civilian overcoat, but the sensation of cold that had settled
in his throat and chest had little enough to do with the
temperature. Despair was beginning to cling to him like sodden
wool. He could almost smell it.

There was simply no way anyone was going to
spring Esther Rosensaft from her cell and then make a dash for the
American Zone. It would take an army, and the Russians were the
ones with the army. It was hopeless.

He stood under the awning of what looked like
a ladies’ hairdresser—it was closed, of course; what the hell kind
of business was a ladies’ hairdresser going to do in the Russian
Zone?—wondering if there wasn’t somewhere he could get a cup of
coffee and something to eat. He was hungry and he needed to sit
down and do some thinking. If there was no way of reaching the girl
his deal with Mordecai would come unstuck and it would be every man
for himself again. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want the Syrians
bombarding the Jews with Hagemann’s nerve gas, but he also wasn’t
about to go quietly home to Norway with his parents’ murderer
living in luxury in Damascus. He wasn’t going to depend on the
Mossad to do the right thing. The Mossad might cut some deal of
their own, even with Hagemann. He couldn’t blame them. God knows,
no one had a right to blame them for looking out for their own
survival. But he had to see Hagemann with the blood pouring out of
his nostrils. He just had to, or he would never draw another easy
breath. So there had to be some way of getting that goddamn
girl.

Christiansen was on the other side of the
street from the guarded entrance, on the next block, a distance of
perhaps sixty-five or seventy yards. At first, when they snapped to
attention, he thought the soldiers were just being relieved, but
when the barren metal gate opened one of the two people coming out
was a woman.

The man who was holding her by the arm was
wearing his greatcoat, and therefore it was possible to tell only
from the pistol on his uniform belt that he was an officer. He
shook her a couple of times, like a storekeeper with a kid caught
stealing apples, and then pushed her out onto the sidewalk. It made
sense. People did get released from prisons, even Russian prisons,
and the Army of the Proletariat wasn’t likely to give them a hero’s
send-off, complete with flowers and a military band. The lady was
getting kicked out.

She staggered for a few seconds and then,
when she had found her feet, yelled at her tormenter, using an
expression that was presumably local and definitely outside
Christiansen’s vocabulary of German curse words. Even at that
distance he could hear the guards laughing.

When she started on her way she came in
Christiansen’s direction, so all he had to do to get a good look at
her was to wait quietly in the shadow of his awning. She was
wearing a flowered summer dress, probably the clothes in which she
had been arrested—leave it to the Russians to turn out their
prisoners without proper clothes, probably without the price of a
Kaffee mit Schlag
, and in the late afternoon so they
wouldn’t have a day to find themselves a place in out of the night
cold. She walked along with her arms wrapped around her slender
body, hunched over like an old woman, although probably she wasn’t
more than twenty-nine or thirty. When she passed in front of him on
the other side of the street he decided to give her a bit of a
lead, just in case any interested parties back at the slammer were
still watching, and then catch up with her. You never knew.

He followed for perhaps a quarter of a mile,
with the wind picking up from minute to minute. She didn’t seem to
be heading in any particular direction—she was just trying to keep
the blood pumping, hunting at random for somewhere warm. They were
well out of sight of the prison when Christiansen noticed that he
seemed to be part of a parade. There seemed to be someone else
interested in tracking the lady down.

Men betrayed themselves even through their
tastes in overcoats. This specimen favored navy blue, with wide,
pointed shoulders and a pinched-in waist. Christiansen was well
behind, but he would have bet anything the lapels were as pointed
as foxes’ ears. Nationality didn’t seem to matter—a certain class
of hoodlum always gave the impression their notions of sartorial
splendor came straight out of old Edward G. Robinson movies.

He was a big man. and he was in a hurry. His
hands were jammed deep into his pockets and he kept glancing around
as long strides carried him nearer and nearer to his quarry.
Finally he was almost running.

The woman turned her head. She must have
heard something, the sound of footsteps, but it was too late. A
gloved hand locked on her arm, just above the elbow, and pushed her
forward. A few more paces and they reached the mouth of a narrow
alley; a sharp tug and they disappeared inside. Christiansen had
never had a chance to see her face, but this wasn’t anybody she was
looking forward to meeting.

He didn’t wait for the screaming to start. In
his pocket was a coil of catgut—he never went anywhere without it.
The ends were knotted into handles. He look it out, holding it in
his left hand as he ran.