The Linz Tattoo (25 page)

Itzhak, who was still wearing a piece of tape
across his nose, was already measuring teaspoons into the pot,
which was resting on their illegal hot plate like a memorial bust
on its pedestal. He had been remarkably talkative and cheerful all
night, as he always was when Hirsch and Fagiin weren’t around—they
hadn’t a lot of patience with him, but they were out of the city,
lying low in case the Russians should launch any inquiries. After
all, he was merely a boy.

It was difficult sometimes to be sure of
one’s own motives. Perhaps it would have been best if Leivick had
yielded to his scruples and sent Itzhak home. There were a dozen
ways he could justify his decision to himself—after all, everyone
has to begin somewhere; every agent has to learn his trade—but he
knew that the real reasons were more personal. Itzhak was the
grandson of an uncle, one of the earliest Zionists, something of a
scandal in that family of German-speaking assimilationists, and,
beyond that, there was the fact that he was just the same age as
Leivick’s own boy, who had disappeared into the gas chamber at
Treblinka. There was no resemblance, but the parched heart of a man
in his late middle age doesn’t require more than a hint. So if it
meant so much to Itzhak that he be allowed to prove himself, then
so be it.

The coffee had just begun to boil when there
was a knock on the door. Not an ordinary knock—someone was kicking
it with the point of his shoe. Leivick took his revolver from the
dresser drawer.

“Let’s not be rude,” he said, aiming the
pistol at the center of the door. “Let them in.”

But it was only Christiansen. Leivick felt a
trifle foolish pointing a gun at him, especially since his arms
were full of a young woman in a black dress, fast asleep, whom one
assumed was Esther Rosensaft. She was cradled against his chest
with one arm hooked around his neck like a child being taken
upstairs for the night.

Itzhak was staring at the girl’s face, which
was half hidden against Christiansen’s shoulder.

“Get some blankets. She’s been having fits of
shivering all the way up the stairs.”

It was really true. They wrapped her up like
an Indian papoose and laid her out on Leivick’s bed, and she buried
her head in the pillow, trembling with cold. She seemed only half
conscious. Christiansen sat beside her, his massive hand covering
her eyes as if to shade them.

“Good God! Itzhak, get her some coffee—make
it strong.”

“No.” Christiansen shook his head without
turning around. His whole attention seemed absorbed by the girl’s
fitful, troubled rest. “She’s been pumped full of junk for the past
thirty-six hours. I think we should just let her sleep it off.”

But Itzhak brought the coffee anyway, if only
to have an excuse for coming close to the bed. Leivick took the cup
from his hands, without tasting it.

“How did you get her through the lobby?” he
asked.

“She walked, right past the desk and up the
stairs. The clerk might have suspected she was a little the worse
for drink, but she did it fine. God alone knows where she found the
strength—she collapsed as soon as we turned the first corner.”

Christiansen smoothed down the girl’s hair,
his hand almost covering her head. It seemed to quiet her.

“The van is parked across the street. I think
it would be a good idea to lose it somewhere.” He was looking
straight at Itzhak, and the expression on his face was almost
angry. He held out the keys. “Take it into the International Zone.
Walk back—no cabs. Don’t be seen.”

“You ought to be nicer to him,” Leivick said
after the door had slammed shut. “He’s not a bad kid, and you can’t
possibly hold a grudge over that business in Munich. Feuds are bad
for efficiency.”

Christiansen looked at him as if he couldn’t
imagine what he was talking about, and then his blue eyes seemed to
cloud over with anguish.

“She hasn’t seen or heard from Hagemann since
forty-five,” he said suddenly, in the voice of a man making his
confession. “She doesn’t even know what was going on at Waldenburg,
Mordecai. I don’t think she knows a goddamned thing.”

. . . . .

The next morning she was almost as good as
new. She sat up in bed, breakfasting on sweetened tea and rolls
with orange marmalade, reading with almost feverish excitement a
two-day-old newspaper that had happened to be lying around. She
seemed to be looking for articles on Palestine.

“Feeling better are we, dear?”

Leivick sat down on the edge of the bed and
smiled. At first she seemed frightened and then she glanced up at
Christiansen, who was standing in the doorway, and apparently found
that reassuring.

“Are you one of the Jews?” she asked.

“Yes, God help us. I’m one of the Jews.”
Leivick shrugged his shoulders, suggesting that he found it a
questionable distinction.

“Were you in the camps?”

“Yes, dear. Treblinka. Like you, I lost
everyone.”

For an instant she seemed frozen. Only her
eyes seemed alive as they filled with tears, and then, on what was
obviously a sudden impulse, she threw her arms around Leivick’s
neck and kissed him on the face.

“That’s all right now,” he said after a few
seconds. He took her wrists and gentry pulled her away. He looked
up to Christiansen and showed his teeth in a rather sheepish grin,
but there was no disguising the fact that this little incident had
moved him. Christiansen might as well not have seen; he was
actually turned a little to one side, as if trying not to be there
at all.

“You mustn’t cry, my dear,” Leivick went on,
holding the girl’s hands in his own, almost as if he didn’t trust
them. “We can’t change anything with tears, now can we?”

It seemed to work. Three minutes later,
anyone might have supposed that nothing had happened. Esther
Rosensaft, still in the long-sleeved black dress because there was
nothing else for her to wear, was like a pensive little widow—the
strain of the last few days was still etched into her face, but she
was perfectly calm.

“Now you must have guessed, Esther—may I call
you Esther?—that we didn’t go to all the trouble of arranging your
escape from Mühlfeld Prison simply from impulses of Jewish
solidarity. Do you understand that, Esther? Do you have any idea
why you have such importance for us?”

She shook her head. She was silent, weighed
down, it seemed, with a sense of futility. She stared down at
Leivick’s hands, which still held her own.

“Does it have to do with Hagemann?” she asked
finally, looking up, her eyes darting between Leivick and
Christiansen. “That lawyer—you said he came from. . . Will he tell
Hagemann where to find me?”

“He won’t tell anyone anything. He’s dead.”
Christiansen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He
sounded almost bored. “But Hagemann won’t have to be told.”

“That’s quite true, my dear. After all this
time, the Colonel seems quite eager to have you back, and you know
even better than we do what that probably means.”

Leivick squeezed her hands and smiled rather
thinly. He found it difficult to remember all this girl had been
through, she seemed such a child. But, of course, she realized that
to fall into Hagemann’s clutches was to die. She knew all about
Colonel Egon Hagemann.

“It comes down to this, Esther. We’re not
keeping you prisoner. You’re free to leave when you like and go
anywhere you think best. But as long as Hagemann is alive you’ll be
a hunted animal. He means to find you—we can’t even begin to guess
why—and if he finds you he’ll kill you just as soon as he’s got
whatever it is he wants. Do you see that?”

The girl took back her hands and hid them
under the blanket that was covering her legs. Something in her
thin, ravaged face seemed to harden, as if it had just occurred to
her that now there was no one she could trust except herself.

“I think you know why Hagemann wants me
back,” she said, her voice even, almost tranquil. “In forty-five,
when the Russians came, he forgot I was even alive. I was nothing.
I was not even worth the trouble of shooting. And now I am so
important, and I want to know why. Please don’t tell me you don’t
know.”

“Be happy in your ignorance, my dear.”
Mordecai rose from the bed. He felt old and worn through to the
bone. “We know what Hagemann wants, but not from you. Your place in
this is, believe me, a mystery.”

With what seemed a common impulse, they both
turned to look at Christiansen, who was still standing in the
doorway, which was almost hidden behind his enormous shoulders.

“You can go one of two ways,” he said, his
cold blue eyes fixed on the girl. “You can help us to get Hagemann,
to put him out of business once and for all, or you can spend the
rest of your short life wondering when he’s going to catch up with
you. And Hagemann has a long reach.”

It was as if the room had turned suddenly
colder. They all felt it, even Christiansen, whom Leivick was
beginning to imagine must live in a universe of just that
temperature. The girl even drew her arms together over her thin
chest.

“I guess that’s no choice at all,” she
said.

. . . . .

The key, of course, was General von
Goltz.

“After the trial, he sent a note around to my
hotel room saying that he wanted to talk to me,” Christiansen said.
He was sitting in a comfortable-looking chair covered with gray
cloth, and he was smoking a cigarette. He didn’t seem so much
relaxed as discouraged. “I was all packed and ready to leave. I had
had the satisfaction of seeing him sentenced, and he would hang in
fifteen days. I would be back for that, but fifteen days was
fifteen days, and there didn’t seem any point in waiting around in
Rebdorf. I wanted to get back to looking for Hagemann.”

They were all there, in the little parlor of
the suite the Mossad was renting at the rate of twelve marks a day.
It was a few minutes after one in the afternoon, and the remains of
the lunch they had had sent up were still visible as a pile of
dishes stacked up on the writing desk. The girl was on one end of
the sofa, her feet tucked up under her so that she looked a little
like a nesting bird. Leivick was crouched on the divan, still
nursing a last cup of coffee which he held in both hands. Even
Itzhak was there, but obviously more interested in looking at the
girl from the other end of the sofa than in Christiansen’s story.
Christiansen, for some reason, had taken to blowing his cigarette
smoke out through clenched teeth. It made an odd impression. It was
like listening to a story told by a Chinese dragon.

“But it was not something I could just
ignore,” he went on, the smoke curling around his face. “I had been
the arresting officer, and there were other reasons. A relationship
had been established. You can’t hate a man and hound him to his
death without noticing that he is, in fact, a man and entitled to
certain decencies.

“The condemned cells at Rebdorf are in a kind
of dungeon. The prison used to be a castle, and it was a pretty
grim place. Down there, below ground, the walls sweat, and each of
the seven men who were awaiting execution was housed in a tiny
stone room with a ceiling so low that probably all of them had to
be careful about standing up straight. I felt like I was climbing
into a packing crate.

“And it was cold. No one was feeling very
compassionate toward these fellows—each one of them had done enough
to deserve hanging a dozen times over—but those cells. . . Von
Goltz and the others must not have been having themselves much of a
time down there.

“The guards that morning were French—I was
told it rotated every day, and that day it was the French. They’re
good haters; the officer on duty came with me to the cell door,
slid open the eye slit, and, with an expression of intense
satisfaction on his face, invited me to look inside. There wasn’t
anything to see but a middle-aged man in a black uniform sitting on
an unmade bed, but he seemed to get quite a kick out of it. It
wasn’t until he had actually opened the door that von Goltz even
bothered to look up. He smiled when he saw me, just the way his
jailer had.

“‘Come in,’ he said, motioning me toward him
with his arm. I’m afraid there’s not much I can offer you in the
way of entertainment, but you are very welcome.’ It was strange,
but he didn’t give the impression he was making a joke.”

He glanced around at the three of them, his
eyes finally coming to rest on Esther Rosensaft, as if the whole
story were being told for her benefit alone. Leivick found himself
wondering what was developing between those two, and if it was
likely to get in the way. Finally, Christiansen ground out the
cigarette in an ashtray he was balancing on his thigh and then went
through the ritual of lighting another. He did it with the quiet
attention that seemed to characterize all his actions.

“There was no chair, or even another piece of
furniture, and it was impossible to stand, so when von Goltz moved
over to make room for me on his narrow little bed I sat down beside
him. It didn’t seem strange at the time, but it does now. Somehow I
couldn’t feel any hostility toward him at that moment. Perhaps if
we had had our meeting in one of the interrogation rooms
upstairs—facing each other across a table, like opponents at
bridge—it would have had a very different quality. I don’t pretend
to know.

“‘You are wondering why I asked to see you,’
he said finally. He sat with his hands resting on his knees, half
twisted around so he wouldn’t have to address himself to the cell
door. He had lost a lot of weight since his arrest and he looked
sickly—it might just have been all that time indoors. I couldn’t
help thinking that that was probably how some of his prisoners at
Waldenburg had looked, but there wasn’t any anger in the idea. He
was already a dead man. I only hated him abstractly.