The Linz Tattoo (30 page)

When he stopped he closed his eyes for a
moment and then looked up at her, no longer smiling.

“That was Bach,” he said. His hand seemed to
pain him; he let it slip down the neck until it rested on the
cello’s wide, feminine shoulder. “You didn’t get your new clothes
today, did you. I’m sorry—we’ll go back in the morning. Have I
thanked you yet for saving my life? I honestly think you did, you
know.”

“Does it really hurt where he shot you?”

“Yes, it really hurts. That just means it
won’t kill me.”

“I love you.”

She could feel her eyes flooding with tears
again. She felt humiliated by the way he was looking at her, as if
she had admitted to an act of shameful cowardice. No, of course he
didn’t want to hear. But she couldn’t help herself. It seemed as
natural to tell him so as to love him, and as natural to love him
as to breathe.

“I’m no prize, kid,” he said finally, shaking
his head in resignation. “All you’re going to buy yourself is a bad
time.”

Was it really possible, after all? She
pressed her hands down into her lap—it was the only way she could
keep from reaching out to touch him. She wanted to touch him, to be
touched by him. To feel his strong fingers pressing against her
body.

“I love you.”

It seemed all she was able to say.

He got up and carried the cello over to its
case. All the time he was putting it away he never looked at her.
He seemed to be waiting for her to disappear.

Finally, after the lid was closed, he turned
around.

“I killed a man today.” His eyes hardly
seemed alive at all. “I seem to be doing that quite a lot lately. I
don’t much enjoy it. So don’t tempt me, Esther. I’d like nothing
better than to crawl inside you and hide for a few hours, but it
wouldn’t work out. I can’t give you anything you really need. I’ve
got the mark of Cain on me.

“So have I.”

She pushed up her sleeve to show him. At that
moment she was almost glad—the numbers seemed to give her a kind of
right. They meant she was one of his own kind.

There was just a second when she thought she
had won. She could feel his tenderness, like the warmth of his
body. Yes. of course, he understood everything.

And then, in an instant, his face
changed.

“Go upstairs,” he said, almost shouting. His
eyes had a cold blue light in them, and he almost seemed to be
trembling. “Tell Mordecai to come down here. Wait—just a
minute.”

He took her by the arm. turning it around so
he could look at the tattoo, holding it up to the light. He was
tremendously excited; she could feel the tension through his whole
body. He had forgotten all about her.

“Damn you. Damn you, you bastard. You. .
.”

But she couldn’t finish. She could only sob.
And he wasn’t listening anyway. There was a desk next to his bed.
Still holding her by the arm, he dragged her over to it, opened the
drawer, took out a piece of paper and a pencil, and copied out the
number. G4/3454641. She wasn’t even there for him, only the
number.

Finally, he let her go.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Get
Mordecai—go on!”

. . . . .

G4/3454641. He wondered how he could have
missed it, how he could have been so stupid.

“
Hagemann always undervalued the
beautiful.”
Von Goltz’s own words—and Christiansen had been
dumb enough to think he had been talking about Esther. Perhaps he
even had, but not only. The key had been there all the time.
“I
play the violin, did you know? Nothing in comparison with yourself
of course, but not too badly for a soldier.”

And von Goltz had put those numbers on her
arm himself. With the Russians only a few hours away, he had taken
the time.

“
I play the violin, did you know?”

Well yes, it was all so fucking obvious. The
General had made Esther the bearer of his last message to the
world, his will and testament. It was a code, just as Mordecai had
guessed. But numbers can stand for letters, which can stand for
notes. The tattoo stood for a phrase of music—a little joke.
Ein
Musikalischer Spass.

G4/3454641. What was the G for? A treble? Why
would von Goltz want to indicate a clef? A key signature? The
numbers, obviously, were intervals, but from what? G? Were the
intervals chromatic or part of a scale? At least there was a limit
on the number of possibilities.

Christiansen picked up his pencil again and
sketched a hasty five-line staff, trying the chromatic Intervals
from G, G, B, B-flat, B, C, B, C-sharp (call it D-flat and keep it
in the family), B, A-flat. Key of A-flat major, more or less. It
didn’t look very promising, and it would probably sound like
shit.

The key of G was no help—it only had one
sharp and that an F, so a progression in which the highest interval
was a 6 would never reach it. G was the dominant of C, so maybe the
key was C.

Chromatic intervals were a washout, so he
would try a straight scale. Okay, from G that went G, C, B, C, D,
C, E, C, G.

He looked at his little clef full of notes
and decided this was a considerable improvement. Now, if those were
the pitches, what were the note values? For the moment he would
assume they were all equal, so that only left the time
signature.

He had his cello out of its case and was just
about to begin playing when Mordecai walked through the still-open
door.

“What did you do to that poor girl? She’s
practically hysterical.”

“Just listen to this.”

Christiansen played his nine notes, and
immediately they sounded like something he had heard before—they
were even pretty. But the timing was off. What did the stroke mean?
A bar line? Okay. Then the rhythm could be either da-da-DUM or
Dum-da-Dam-da. He tried the first. No. that wasn’t right.
DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da. Paydirt.

“What we have here is a musical phrase,
probably in the key of C, definitely in three-quarter time. Listen
again.”

It sounded just as right the second tune
through. Mordecai sat on the chair so lately vacated by Esther
Rosensaft, his head cocked a little to one side.

“It’s very nice,” he said, without giving any
indication of being overwhelmed. “What is it?”

Christiansen laughed—he couldn’t help
himself.

“What is it? You ask, what is it? I’ll tell
you what it is. Its G-4-3-4-5-4-6-4-1, that’s what it is. It’s what
Goltz put on our Esther’s arm. It’s your code, you goddamn
idiot!”

He swallowed hard, surprised at his own
vehemence. He wasn’t angry with Mordecai—what the hell was the
matter with him?

“It may or may not be my code. You’ve been
able to turn a series of numbers into a little tune, which by
itself proves nothing How does that make it a code?”

Yes, of course he was offended. Mordecai’s
face was as blank as the wall behind him, but that didn’t mean he
liked being called names. And now he was demanding some kind of
proof.

Christiansen played the phrase again. Nine
little notes—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
He didn’t care who he offended. He was right.

“I know this piece,” he said,
matter-of-factly. “I can hear it in my mind, an oboe solo with the
violins playing an octave lower,
sempre piano
. When you play
the cello in a student orchestra you have a lot of time to sit on
your backside and read the stuff everyone else is playing. If we
can track down the score those nine notes came from, we’ll know
everything von Goltz put into that tattoo. Let’s go find ourselves
a music store.”

Lifting the instrument from his shoulder,
Christiansen rose from the bed as if he wanted to leave that
minute. He put the cello back into its case, parked the case in the
closet, and closed the door. Mordecai hadn’t so much as taken his
hands from his knees.

“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” he said
finally. “There is a curfew in this city. Where are we supposed to
find a music store?”

He smiled, so at least he had forgotten about
being insulted. He was a practical man pointing out a practical
consideration. The whole business could wait until tomorrow
morning.

No, it couldn’t. Christiansen began hunting
around for a clean shirt big enough to go over his bandages.

“Come on. Mordecai. We’re going to need that
International Zionist Conspiracy of yours now. We’ve got to find a
music store!”

“You might bear in mind, there are very few
Jews left in Vienna these days.”

Christiansen stopped with his arm halfway
into a shirt sleeve. He turned around to look, just to be sure his
ears hadn’t been playing tricks on him. Mordecai still hadn’t
gotten out of his chair. He was very still and serious. Apparently
it hadn’t occurred to him that Christiansen wasn’t kidding
either.

“Do I have to remind you what it is we’re
looking for here? Do you remember the picture you painted for me of
what Hagemann and his Syrian friends would be able to do with even
a small quantity of von Goltz’s precious nerve gas? I’m not
indulging a whim, Mordecai. Find me a music store, or in a month’s
time there may not be very many Jews left in Tel Aviv either.”

Ten minutes later they were out on the
street, hoping they wouldn’t run into one of the American
patrols.

“He’s not a Jew,” Mordecai was saying, almost
under his breath. He still didn’t like this, but at least he had
gotten over the idea that he was being asked to play parlor games.
“His name is Merizzi—God knows, probably Austrian for the last four
hundred years. I picked him because his home address indicates that
he lives above his shop. We’ll just have to wake him up and hope he
doesn’t decide to call the police.”

It was very quiet outside, and cold.
Christiansen’s wounds hurt him, and he would have liked a cup of
coffee and a cigarette to steady his nerves—he knew he was still
strung out from this afternoon. But one had to bear with one’s
infirmities. They hadn’t passed a car or a lighted window in six
blocks.

I’ve been thinking—It must be late eighteenth
century.”

Mordecai turned around to look at him as if
he suspected a hint of madness.

“Haydn or Mozart. At Juilliard we played
Haydn and Mozart until our hair turned white. It’s third
movementish—funny how I can almost catch the rest of it, but not
quite. I’ll know it the minute I see it.”

Herr Merizzi’s establishment was near the
university; they actually had to cross into the International Zone
to reach it. The shop was the first floor of a two-story building
that looked as if it had been put up in the middle of the last
century, in an architectural style that could only be described as
Shoddy Imperial Baroque. The windows were separated by twisting
pillars of broken, discolored cement. There were no lights on, of
course—it was past the bourgeoisie’s bedtime. Christiansen pressed
the electric doorbell with his thumb, leaning against it. He could
stand the noise if the family could.

Within forty-five seconds they could hear
footsteps on a hall stairway.

Herr Merizzi opened the door and stuck his
head out. He was wearing a dark wool robe over his nightshirt, and
he was angry.

“Have you any idea of the hour?” he asked,
sputtering. He was thin-faced and small, with a large mustache that
somehow gave him a melancholy appearance. “My wife is. . .”

The sentence just died—perhaps whatever his
wife was or wasn’t seemed somehow less important with
Christiansen’s pistol pointing at the center of his face.

“We wish to do a little research,”
Christiansen said softly, pushing his way inside. “There’s a point
my friend and I wish to settle, and when we’ve done that we’ll
leave. And you’ll be twenty American dollars richer. Do you
understand? You can simply go back to bed when we’re finished.
There will be no trouble, and tomorrow morning you can buy your
wife a nice present.”

A door opened at the top of the stairway, and
Christiansen saw the murky outline of what must have been a large
woman wearing her hair loose so that it looked like a shroud. He
put his pistol back into his pocket, where she wouldn’t be able to
see ft.

“Fritz?”

“Nothing, my dear—just business. Go back to
bed.”

The shape in the doorway disappeared
soundlessly and the thin wedge of light collapsed to nothing.

“You did well,
Mein Herr
.” It was the
first time Mordecai had spoken, and the sound of his voice made
Fritz’s head twist around on his shoulders with the suddenness of a
mechanical toy. “Perhaps we could all go into your shop?”

Merizzi’s place of business was a room hardly
wider than the hallway that led upstairs to his apartment. The long
walls were lined with bookcases, with little brass plates nailed to
the shelves indicating the contents. Christiansen took down several
boxes, the sides cut at an angle so one could read the spines of
the scores they contained.

“Symphonies—and Mozart’s piano concerti, just
for insurance.”

Mordecai nodded without much enthusiasm. He
was standing with the proprietor, his back to the door so no one
would get any flashes of inspiration. There was a desk in the
precise center of the room. Christiansen sat down behind it,
snicked on the light, and began sorting out the contents of the
boxes. He hadn’t realized before how much the Classical masters had
liked the key of C. Without half trying he turned up ten Haydn
symphonies, four more by Mozart, and four concerti. Fortunately,
not every one of them was in three-quarter time.

It took him slightly more than an hour to
find what he had been looking for.

“Come take a look at this.”

Herr Merizzi was asleep in a chair, his chin
resting in the palm of his hand, so Mordecai tiptoed over to see
what Christiansen had circled in heavy black ink.