The Linz Tattoo (45 page)

“Any of you speak English?” Faglin asked. He
almost seemed to be pleading.

“Yes,” the wife answered. “I work at
Gibraltar two year.”

She smiled tentatively, as if afraid she
might be thought to boast. She had a round, brown face and
remarkably large eyes.

“Then tell your family that we have no wish
to hurt anyone, that if everyone behaves himself we’ll be gone from
here in just a few minutes. Just do as you’re told and everything
will be fine. Understand?”

“
Si
—yes. “

She nodded emphatically two or three times
and then translated for her husband, who seemed less than
convinced. He looked first at Dessauer, and then at Faglin, and
then turned back to his wife, to whom he spoke in a low, anxious
voice.

“He wishes to know what you plan to do.”
Again the tentative, apologetic little smile.

“We have a couple of friends in the Guard
station. We’re going to get them out. There will probably be
shooting, so let’s see if we can’t find somewhere you and your
family will be out of the way.”

They were Spanish, and old enough to have
vivid memories of their civil war. They knew all about the virtues
of being out of the way.

“Please, then, will you tie us up?” the
woman asked. She held up her hands, the wrists together, as if to
explain what she meant. “The Guards, you must understand. . .”

Faglin nodded. They all knew all about
reprisals.

There seemed to be three rooms in the
apartment. In the front was the main living area, with a few
chairs, a sofa covered in worn rose-colored fabric, a dining table
and, crowded into one end, a kitchen. The two bedrooms were shallow
and wide and opened directly out into the main room, and both of
them had tiny windows. Faglin made a gesture toward the one on the
left.

“You’ll all be much safer in there—with the
door open. Just remember, the only way anyone can get hurt is if he
tries to be a hero. Keep your heads down, and in half an hour you
can get back to your lunch.”

The little boy got down from his chair and
took a few steps toward Faglin before his grandmother seized him
and held him to her. From the protection of her arms he continued
to regard the intruders with large, curious eyes he had obviously
inherited from his mother. When Faglin smiled at him he found no
difficulty in smiling back.

“Itzikel, take them in and tie them up—and
don’t make a big production of it. Let’s keep everybody
comfortable. “

Faglin took a coil of clothesline out of his
knapsack and watched through the door as Dessauer did his work. The
little boy seemed to think it was all great fun and could hardly
wait until it was his turn.

The other bedroom was apparently mama and
papa’s. There was a crib for the baby, a four-drawer dresser, and a
double bed, all crowded together in a space hardly twice the size
of the bed alone.

“Our flat in Haifa isn’t much bigger than
this,” Faglin said as they stood together just inside the doorway.
“One bedroom for the wife and me and one for the girls. At least we
don’t have to have mama out on the couch.”

He grinned, but in a way that suggested the
thought of his family caused him some pain.

“Come on. Let’s get to it.”

He crouched by the wall that adjoined the
Guard station, resting his hand against the plaster as if trying to
feel a pulse. Then he used the knuckle of his middle finger to tap
the surface.

“I’ll bet the builder saved himself a little
money,” he said finally. “I’ll bet this is a single layer of
faced-over brick, and he counted on the adjoining wall for
insulation and support. I’ll bet we can punch straight through,
like poking a hole in a loaf of bread with your thumb.”

“What are you going to use?”

Faglin ran his fingers down the wall once
more in a loving gesture. It was obvious he was enjoying this.

“A shaped charge. I’ll draw myself a little
circle with plastic explosives and bevel the edges so the broadest
side is flat against the wall. When she goes off, the force of the
blast will all go in that direction—right on through to the cell
next door. Nothing to it.”

He dumped out the contents of his knapsack
on the bed. There was a knife with a flat point, a battery pack
with two bare wires protruding and what looked like an egg timer
attached to it with black electrical tape, and about four meters of
something resembling window putty, a tube of the stuff, wrapped in
what might have been waxed paper. Faglin began peeling away the
wrapping. It was like watching a snake shed its skin.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Dessauer
asked, the fingers of one hand nervously tracing the crease in his
trousers. “I mean, isn’t there a chance the explosion will kill
them on the other side?”

Faglin looked up from where he was sitting
on the bed. His face was masklike, and his fingers never stopped
stripping away the paper wrapper.

“Christiansen knows what’s going to happen,”
he said. “Let’s hope he’s smart enough not to belly up to this
particular wall. Beyond that, we just have to trust to luck.”

In about five minutes he had most of the
explosive free from its wrapping and coiled up in a pile on his
knees.

“That should do it—we don’t have to blow a
hole they can walk through.”

He twisted off the last piece and threw it
back into his knapsack. Then he stood up, stepped over to the wall,
and began pressing the long strip of explosive, as soft as modeling
clay, up against the plaster with his first finger and thumb. When
he had described a circle and blended the two ends together, he
took the knife and used the flat point to shape the edges. When he
was finished, the explosive was about three fingers wide against
the wall and its spine narrowed to a right angle. Faglin attached
the timer by the simple expedient of pushing the bare tips of the
two wires into the explosive near the bottom, so the battery pack
could rest on the floor.

“We’ll give it fifteen seconds,” he said.
“All the time in the world considering we only have to step into
the next room.”

He twisted the dial around a quarter of a
turn and took his hand away, just as if the thing had become white
hot. Dessauer thought the ticking it made was perhaps the loudest
noise he had ever heard.

“Let’s move it—fifteen seconds isn’t that
long.”

They went outside and closed the door.
Faglin took the pistol out of his belt and held it at the ready,
the muzzle pointing toward the ceiling. Both of them seemed to have
stopped breathing.

Was it really only fifteen seconds? Whole
minutes seemed to go by, and still nothing happened. Dessauer could
feel the blood pounding in his neck. He tried to count—one, two,
three—but his heart was going too fast.

“Itzikel, give me Christiansen’s gun.”

Faglin held out his hand and Dessauer put
the revolver down on the palm, where it looked awkwardly large and
out of balance.

“I suppose we—”

The explosion was not so much a sound as a
physical shock, like being struck in the chest with the points of
someone’s fingers. The whole room, in one instant, seemed to start
forward—plates, spoons, picture frames, a pair of silver
candlesticks that might have been a wedding present, all sorts of
loose objects suddenly dashed to the floor as if of their own
volition. And then, of course, when you had almost decided that it
would never come at all, the ghastly, tearing boom of the
explosion, like the sound of a giant clearing his throat, made you
want to clap your hands over your ears and sent a painful stab to
your eyes. The door to the bedroom flew off its hinges and hit the
table before bouncing to the floor.

Faglin didn’t waste any time. The bedroom
wasn’t a room anymore—it was simply the space that held a heavy
cloud of white plaster dust. But he threw himself inside, his body
cutting a slot through the chalky haze.

Dessauer followed him and in a few seconds,
after he had wiped his eyes, he could see what looked like the
mouth of a tunnel. The explosives had done their work. Bars of
light were shining through from the holding cell in the next
building.

“Christiansen, catch this!” Faglin shouted.
His arm went through a low arc and Dessauer heard something land
with a thud inside the hole. It was the revolver. Almost at once
there was the sound of a single shot.

A few seconds later, Mordecai’s head and
shoulders became visible as he crawled through from the other side
on his hands and knees. He looked up at Dessauer’s face, blinked in
the dusty light, and smiled. Dessauer reached out to take his hand
and pull him through. There was a handcuff around his wrist, but
the chain had been broken.

At almost the same moment there were several
more shots fired inside the cell, this time from more than one
weapon. One bullet came through and buried itself with a thud in
the plaster wall not a hand span from Dessauer’s right knee.

And then there was silence.

And then the light from inside the tunnel
went dark and Christiansen pushed the upper half of his huge body
through, his shoulders scraping against the ragged sides of the
hole. He threw out his arms.

“Help me out,” he shouted. “I don’t fancy
getting shot in the ass.”

As soon as they were all through, and
Christiansen had stood up from his crouch, Faglin made a gesture
toward the door. Surely by then the Guards must have figured out
what had happened, and the four of them still had two flights of
stairs to get down before they even reached the street.

“You lead,” Christiansen said, putting his
hand on Faglin’s arm. “Then Mordecai, then Itzhak. I’ll pull up the
rear.”

Faglin nodded. It was almost as if they had
agreed on everything in advance. As he pushed through the door to
the outside landing, Dessauer thought he could hear the baby
crying.

They spaced themselves about five meters
apart as they started down. Christiansen waited by the open door,
his revolver already cocked, still watching the bedroom door to see
if any more Guards would have the nerve to come through from the
cell. The stairway shook under their weight, and the sound of their
footsteps on the wooden risers was a sullen roar.

Dessauer had already made the second landing
when a Guard with a rifle came around the edge of the building. He
brought his weapon up to his shoulders—it was aimed square at
Faglin—then there was a short, high-pitched bark of gunfire and the
Guard toppled over, dead before he hit the ground. Christiansen had
shot him from above, and the bullet had gone right through the top
of his head.

“That way!”

Pointing toward where they had left the car,
Dessauer looked up at Christiansen. But Christiansen waved him on,
as though he didn’t care. Two more Guardsmen were already on the
street, running for the cover of an alleyway. One of them lost his
hat, and it bounced against the cobblestones with a click. He was
carrying what looked like a machine gun.

Faglin and Christiansen both turned to fire.
The Guardsman who had dropped his hat went down, twisting around as
if he had been pulled from behind. Even as he died he clutched the
machine gun to him.

His friend had better luck. A final sprint
carried him to the mouth of the alley, where he found cover behind
a trash barrel. There was no time to worry about him. There was
only time to run. Christiansen, who was standing in the middle of
the street, the biggest target anyone could ask for, emptied his
pistol to give the others some cover, but it was too late. Within
two meters of safety, Mordecai suddenly collapsed.

There was no time for anything. Dessauer,
who was directly behind him, nearly stumbled over Mordecai’s body.
As soon as he caught himself, he reached down and took the old man
under the armpits and began trying to drag him out of the line of
fire. It was then that he saw the bullet hole in his side, just
under the elbow. The blood was welling out in a thick, heavy
stream. Dessauer looked back over his shoulder, hoping to see
Christiansen, hoping for help. He hadn’t a doubt that Mordecai was
dying. What he saw he wouldn’t have believed.

The man was crazy. Christiansen, his hands
empty, was charging down the cobbled street, straight at the
Guardsman and his trash barrel and his gun. Suddenly he started to
yell—not a word, just a sound, the sound of an animal in a blind
rage. He had maybe twelve meters to cover. He would never make it.
The Guardsman would kill him for sure.

But he didn’t. He never even fired. He even
stood up. He was in plain sight now; he looked as if he wanted to
know which way to run. He never had a chance to do even that.

Christiansen hit him hard, using
everything—head, shoulders, arms, everything. The Guardsman went
over backwards. They both disappeared into the alleyway and, a few
seconds later, Christiansen came out, carrying the rifle. It hung
in his hand like a club. He glanced around, his face dark. He
seemed to be looking for someone else to kill.

But there was no one—at least, no one else
came running at them from the direction of the Guard station.
Christiansen walked over, threw the rifle to Dessauer without even
troubling to look at him, and scooped up Mordecai in his arms.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Faglin was already backing the car up toward
them. Dessauer opened one of the rear doors, stepping out of the
way so that Christiansen and his burden could get inside. Then he
went around to the front. In a second the car lurched forward.

“Don’t try to talk, Mordecai. You’ll be
fine. Well get you to a doctor, and you’ll be fine.”

Christiansen was crouching over the rear
seat, cradling Mordecai’s head in the crook of his arm. There was a
quality of pleading in his voice.

“No time.” Mordecai licked his lips. He
seemed to be struggling to keep his eyes open. “Stop the car.
Finished with me. Listen. Stop the car.”