Until I Find You (91 page)

The knock on the door was quiet at first, then more insistent. It was not a Sami Salo kind of knocking, but one Jack was able to incorporate into his dream—in the dream, Jack was a father.

“Marja-Liisa, are you there?” said a man’s voice in the hall. Then he must have asked the same question in Finnish.

The pregnant aerobics instructor had gone. Jack woke up alone in the bed; he went into the bathroom and wrapped a towel around his waist. There was a Hotel Torni envelope stuck to the mirror with a dab of his toothpaste. It was a clever way for her to have left him a note. He realized now that he must have been talking in his sleep.

My name is Marja-Liisa, not Michele. Who’s Michele?

Jack crumpled up the envelope and threw it in the bathroom wastebasket. Clutching the towel around his waist, he went to see who was at the door. Jack had a bad feeling that he already knew who it was. “Marja-Liisa—I know you’re there,” the man was saying, only a little more loudly.

Until Jack opened the door, he didn’t know that the man had brought the four-year-old with him. But what else could the poor guy have done? If you were a responsible father, you didn’t leave a four-year-old alone.

There was no question in Jack’s mind that the young man with the dark-blond hair was Marja-Liisa’s husband—not her
dead
husband, either. (Nor did the young man look like an
anonymous
sperm donor.) Any doubts Jack might have had were dispelled by the boy; the four-year-old had his dad’s dark-blond hair, but the child’s oval face and almond-shaped eyes were exactly like his mother’s.

“I knew it,” Marja-Liisa’s husband said. “You’re Jack Burns. Marja-Liisa said she saw you at the gym.”

“She’s not here,” Jack told him.

The unhappy husband looked past Jack into the disheveled room. The little boy wanted his dad to pick him up; the child was wearing slipper-socks with reindeer on them, and a ski parka over his pajamas. Jack stepped back into the room and the father carried his son inside. The pillows and bedcovers were all in a heap; the young husband stared at the bed as if he could discern the imprint of his pregnant wife’s body on the rumpled sheets.

Marja-Liisa had told her husband that she had a late-night aerobics class at the gym, but he found her gym bag in her closet after he’d put the four-year-old to bed; he had been tidying up the apartment and went to her closet to put some article of her clothing away, and there was the gym bag.

The young man showed Jack the piece of paper he’d found in the bag
—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—
but he’d guessed all along that Jimmy Stronach was Jack Burns.

“She kept telling me, ‘There’s a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!’ You’re not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn’t matter,” her husband said.

The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.

“She didn’t want a second child,” Marja-Liisa’s husband told Jack. “The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children.”

The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn’t speak English, and therefore couldn’t understand them—not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they’d been speaking in Finnish.

He’s only four,
Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn’t remember this adventure—being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family’s history, which Jack hoped it wouldn’t.)

“She’s probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other,” Jack told Marja-Liisa’s husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.

“He wants to use the bathroom,” the husband told Jack.

“Sure,” Jack said.

There was more Finnish—both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa’s husband didn’t want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.

The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing—or only what his mom
told
him had happened, what she
wanted
him to remember.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn’t going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.

“Who is Jimmy Stronach?” the young man asked Jack.

Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn’t mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.

The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn’t heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. (“Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!” Jack imagined.)

Possibly Jack Burns had been a more
aware
four-year-old than Marja-Liisa’s little boy, but Jack doubted it.

The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father’s neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.

Jack opened the hotel-room door for them—hoping the husband wouldn’t give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.

As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: “I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in
this
movie.” Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.

Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he’d not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa’s son was a
normal
four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night—not a moment of it.

Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa’s name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.

Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.

“I wish you’d told me the truth,” Jack said.

“The
truth
!” she cried. “What do
you
know about the truth?”

It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.

He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he’d already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking—he’d had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn’t really want to go to Amsterdam, but that’s where the plane was going.

30

The Deal

J
ack’s second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Grand—a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.

The blatancy of the prostitutes—in their underwear, in their windows and doorways—made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were
advice-givers.
(As Jack himself had been persuaded.)

No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.

The women would beckon to Jack, and smile, but if their smiles weren’t instantly returned—if he just kept walking or wouldn’t meet their gaze—they quickly looked away. He heard his name a few times, only once as a question. “Jack Burns?” one of the prostitutes asked, as he passed by. He didn’t turn his head or otherwise respond. Usually the
Jack Burns
seemed to be part of a declarative sentence, but one he couldn’t understand—in Dutch, or in some other language that wasn’t English. (Not many of the women were Dutch.)

Jack walked as far north as the Zeedijk, just to see for himself that Tattoo Theo’s old shop, De Rode Draak—the departed Red Dragon—was indeed gone. He easily found the small St. Olofssteeg, but Tattoo Peter’s basement shop had moved many years ago to the Nieuwebrugsteeg, a nearby street. Jack saw the new tattoo parlor, but he didn’t go in. When he asked one of the prostitutes what she knew about the shop, she said that someone named Eddie was in charge—Tattoo Peter’s second son, Jack thought she said.

“Oh, you mean Eddie Funk,” someone else would later tell Jack, suggesting that the Eddie in the new shop wasn’t actually related to Tattoo Peter. But what did it matter? Whoever Eddie was, he couldn’t help Jack.

Tattoo Peter—Eddie’s father or not—had died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1984. Or so Jack had read in an old tattoo magazine when he and Leslie Oastler were cleaning out Daughter Alice in Toronto.

“Listen to this,” he remembered saying to Mrs. Oastler. “Tattoo Peter was born in Denmark. I never knew he was a Dane! He actually worked for Tattoo Ole before moving to Amsterdam.”

“So what?” Leslie had said.

“I never knew
any
of this!” Jack had cried. “He drove a Mercedes-Benz? I never saw it! He walked with a cane—I never saw the cane! I never saw him
walk
! His wife was French, a Parisian
singer
? People compared her to Edith Piaf!”

“I think Alice told me he stepped on a mine,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “That’s how he lost his leg.”

“But she never told
me
!” he’d shouted.

“She never told you
fuck-all,
Jack,” he remembered Leslie saying.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk in the falling rain, but he didn’t go inside. He didn’t know why he was procrastinating. The kindergarten next to the Old Church looked fairly new. There were more prostitutes than he remembered on the Oudekerksplein, but the kindergarten children hadn’t been there when Jack and his mom had traipsed through the district.

Jack had no difficulty finding the police station on the Warmoesstraat, but he didn’t go inside the station, either. He wasn’t ready to talk to Nico Oudejans, assuming Nico was still a policeman and Jack could find him.

Jack walked on the Warmoesstraat in the direction of the Dam Square, pausing at the corner of the Sint Annenstraat—exactly where he and his mom and Saskia and Els had encountered Jacob Bril, who had the Lord’s Prayer tattooed on his chest. There was a tattoo of Lazarus leaving his grave on Bril’s stomach. There were some things you didn’t forget, no matter how young you were when you saw them.

“In the Lord’s eyes, you are the company you keep!” Jacob Bril had told Alice.

“What would you know about the Lord’s eyes?” Els had asked him. Or so Jack remembered—if
any
of it was true!

The Tattoo Museum on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal—maybe a minute’s walk from Jack’s hotel—was a warm and cozy place with more paraphernalia and memorabilia from the tattoo world than Jack had seen in any other tattoo parlor. He met Henk Schiffmacher at noon, when the museum opened, and Henk showed him around. Henk’s tattoo shop was also there—Hanky Panky’s House of Pain, as it was called. Whoever Eddie was, in the
new
Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.

Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker’s beard and long hair. A female death’s head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.

He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. (
Irezumi
means
tattoo
in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.

While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy’s neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing “Rock of Ages” on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he’d heard his mother say. “A place where every desire is forgiven,” Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn’t Jack’s mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or
had
he? (Jack thought that
he
couldn’t forgive her.)

“Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?” Jack asked Hanky Panky.