The Linz Tattoo

Havana, Cuba: February 26, 1948

“I’m quite sure its him, even without his
uniform. It hasn’t even been half a year, and that isn’t the sort
of face one forgets.”

“I think he’s really quite good looking.”

Major Robert Briggs, late of His Majesty’s
XXIst Army Group, glanced across the narrow cabaret table at his
new wife and felt a sharp pang of something like jealousy—they
weren’t very encouraging words to hear a mere four days after one’s
wedding night.

But she was right, of course. The man he had
pointed out to her, standing at the back of the tiny
smoke-curtained stage, almost hidden behind six or seven other
musicians and a huge double bass, was tall and strikingly handsome.
His shoulders could have been a yard and a half wide, and his
tarnished blond hair, which he wore rather long, made him look like
every schoolgirl’s notion of a Viking prince.

It was his face, however, which had struck
the chord in Briggs’ memory, the pitiless blue eyes—even at this
distance one could see that they were a deep blue, like precious
stones—and the hard, sharp, impassive features, as if the bones
underneath were made of iron.

And, of course, across the back of the left
hand, catching a gleam from the footlights as the fingers moved
back and forth over the strings of his double bass, was a wide,
flat scar. Briggs had noticed the scar the first time they had met,
in a prison yard in Germany. There couldn’t be any doubt it was the
same chap.

“I stood right next to him that god awful
morning at Rebdorf. Seven big bloody Nazi generals took the drop in
less than forty minutes, and he never even raised an eyebrow. I
felt rather sick, I don’t mind telling you—no one looks his best
after he’s been hanged, and a couple of them had bitten clean
through their tongues at the last second, making quite a mess of
themselves. It was a pretty horrible thing to watch, but he might
as well have been waiting in line for his tea.”

“What was he doing there?”

Thelma smiled with interest. He had learned
early that, like a lot of American girls, she rather liked gamy
stories about the war. She was really quite a blood-thirsty little
bitch, which was one of the reasons he had decided to marry her.
But just at that moment he found himself wishing she would exhibit
a little decent feminine squeamishness.

“Same as my sweet self, I suppose,” he said
finally, making sure to look away as he spoke. “We were ‘official
witnesses’ if you will, he for the Norwegians and me for the
British. There were five or six of us. Yes, six. They served us
coffee in tin cups while we waited for sunrise, and there were
introductions all round. Probably we were all a bit nervous; the
Russian, a great big cad of a fellow with a face as red as a
radish, actually started to giggle, I remember. And then, after an
hour, the executions began. I’m not likely to forget anything
connected with that affair.”

The music from what presumably was supposed
to be a Jazz combo was as bad as any Briggs had ever heard, even in
his own country, which over the last several months he had come to
regard with a certain distaste. Since moving to New York, where, on
the strength of his war record and the profound respect every
former colonial feels toward the British upper classes, he had
gotten himself a very soft job as a sales representative for one of
the big Manhattan advertising agencies, he had become a connoisseur
of all things American. American music was louder and better to
dance to, American women were more amusing in bed, and American
food, well, there was simply no comparison. He was acclimatized and
happy and on his honeymoon, so there was little enough to complain
about. He simply wished Thelma hadn’t insisted on this absurd
package cruise, and that the rum didn’t always taste like diesel
fuel, and that sometime or other they could stumble across a band
that didn’t make “Tea for Two” sound like the Guatemalan national
anthem.

He was also rather beginning to wish that he
hadn’t run into Christiansen—he was almost positive that had been
the fellow’s name. Or at least that he had kept his mouth shut
about it. Thelma was watching the stage with an attention in no way
justified by the music being produced there.

“Ask him to come and have a drink with us,”
she said, turning toward her husband and smiling as she brushed
back a wisp of pale brown hair. It was an astonishingly seductive
gesture. “Perhaps he’s noticed you too—it wouldn’t be very nice to
let him think you were trying to snub him, would it?”

Briggs didn’t even allow himself time to
hesitate.

“All right. If you like.”

He pinched back the sleeve of his coat to
have a look at his watch. It was a quarter after two in the
morning—in a few minutes they would be starting back to their ship
where, if he hadn’t drunk too much, perhaps Thelma’s enthusiasm
could be channeled into some more useful direction. It wouldn’t
hurt anything if she ended the evening a bit spiky. Perhaps it
wouldn’t hurt anything.

“They seem to be taking a break. Shall I just
pop over there and renew acquaintance?”

By the time he reached the bandstand, most of
the musicians had already left it and were making their way among
the closely packed tables to the bar. But Christiansen hadn’t
stirred, his attention was absorbed by one of the strings of his
gigantic instrument, which he seemed to be attempting to tune. He
appeared even larger up close, his white dinner jacket stretched
across his massive chest, and the expression on his lace registered
a sullen concentration.

When he noticed Briggs moving around the edge
of the stage, his blue eyes narrowed, reminding one of a wary
animal.

“I suppose you don’t recall me,” Briggs
began, allowing his mouth to stretch into what he realized had to
be a not-terribly-dignified grin. He extended his hand up toward
the double bassist, who stared down with what amounted to open
hostility. “We met that day at Rebdorf. The name is ‘Briggs.’ I was
the British officer—I stood right next to you.”

There was no response. The man appeared not
to know what he was talking about. The hand remained suspended in
mid air until finally Briggs started to feel just a trifle foolish
and allowed it to drop back down to his side.

“I remember you very well—Captain
Christiansen, wasn’t it? Surely you can’t have forgotten the
prison.”

“My name isn’t Christiansen, and I’ve never
been in prison. What would I have been doing in prison?”

The voice was expressionless and rather
gravelly, as if from disuse, but the accent was American. It had
been American at Rebdorf as well—Briggs had wondered how a
Norwegian could have learned to speak such perfect Yankee English.
The startlingly blue eyes never wavered as the man who claimed not
to be Captain Christiansen seemed to wait with patient resignation
for whatever might come next.

Briggs hardly knew what to say—could he have
been mistaken? No. There was still the scar. Everything, even the
voice, could be explained away, but not the scar. It covered the
back of Christiansen’s left hand like a bandage, the sort of scar
that suggested a deep, crippling wound. This was Christiansen.

“We were there to witness the execution of
some German war criminals,” he answered, with somewhat greater
confidence. “You were the Norwegian representative. Surely you
don’t deny it, old man.”

“My name is ‘Barrows.’ I’ve never been to
Germany.”

One finger of the scarred hand glided slowly
and delicately up a string of the double bass, as if measuring its
tension. The action seemed completely unconscious; the man
“Barrows,” who had never been to Germany, regarded the veteran of
His Majesty’s XXIst Army Group with the closed expression of
someone who expected that his answer would be taken as
definitive.

“Well then, I’m sorry to have troubled
you.”

What else was there to say? Briggs turned and
started making his way back to the table where Thelma was waiting
with what struck him as unseemly eagerness.

“It appears I dialed a wrong number,” he
said, suddenly not very keen on explanations. It was late at night,
he was tired, and, yes, he had drunk too much. By the time he sat
down again he could see that most of the musicians had returned to
the bandstand and the entertainment was about to resume. It was an
appalling prospect.

“I thought you were so positive.” Thelma
smiled. There was something just faintly contemptuous in her smile,
as if he had displayed some sort of weakness. Briggs found himself
wondering what she was going to be like to live with in another ten
or fifteen years.

“Well, I still think it was him. Probably he
was just embarrassed. It must be a bit of a comedown, after all,
from officer and gentleman to playing backup in a cheese box like
this place. The man’s entitled to his feelings—By God, he’s gone,
isn’t he.”

Yes, he was. The double bass was resting
quietly on its side, like a fat woman asleep in the sun, and the
wall behind it was empty.

. . . . .

Christiansen had walked no more than a few
blocks when the rain started. At that time of year it came down in
torrents, as rhythmic as the bearing of a heart. It was impossible
to go on; one simply had to run for cover and wait until the
downpour ended.

He stood under the tin awning of an empty
grocery store and lit a cigarette. First that damn fool Briggs and
now this rain. It just didn’t seem to be his night.

Of course he remembered. Briggs had been
within arm’s length of him there in the prison yard, quietly going
green. Imagine anyone who had been through the war sicking up at
the sight of a few men being hanged—one would have thought that by
then everyone would have seen enough death and horror to render
them immune for life, but maybe Briggs had been a clerk or
something.

It had rained that night too. There had still
been pools of water in the prison yard, and he remembered how in
the hour before dawn, in the light from the guard towers, a team of
German POWs had swept the walkways so their generals wouldn’t get
wet feet walking to the gallows. He remembered how von Goltz had
stood up there on the narrow wooden stage, his face expressionless,
almost frozen, as they slipped the hood over his head. There had
been no last words, just a kind of thud as the rope jerked tight.
All things considered, it would hardly seem to have been
enough.

Anyway, tonight wasn’t the occasion for
talking over old times. The last thing in the world Christiansen
needed was to get entangled with some nostalgic former
comrade-in-arms—the fighting hadn’t been over even three years, but
everyone seemed to have forgotten what it had been like. It was
astonishing how sentimental some men seemed to have become about
the lost opportunities of carnage.

But tonight there was only time for business.
The business the war had left unsettled. Briggs and his
reminiscences and his whiskey and his lady friend could wait.

After about twenty minutes the rain started
to slacken and then, quite suddenly, it was just gone. Christiansen
ground out his second cigarette under the toe of his shoe and
started on again.

The note left at his hotel that afternoon had
been as explicit as it needed to be:
“If the man with the
strings wishes to hear of mutual friends, he may join me for
breakfast tomorrow morning at my home. Gerhart”

Gerhart Becker lived above his tobacco shop
on the Calle de Machado under the name of “Bauer.” He had moved to
Havana in 1946, coming from Argentina, and had paid to establish
his new business enterprise with seventy-five hundred dollars in
cash. Christiansen knew all about Gerhart Becker. The information
had cost him most of his savings, two years of his life, and three
murders. And now Herr Becker was offering a deal to avoid becoming
Number Four.

Or perhaps he was merely interested in
tricking Christiansen into some foolish mistake so he could
eliminate that threat once and for all.

Christiansen had no trouble finding the
tobacco shop. It look up the first floor of a two-story building
between a luggage store and a small hotel. There was a taxi stand
on the other side of the street, at the end of the block, and even
at a quarter to three in the morning there were still a couple of
cabs about, the interior lights on to show their drivers asleep
behind the steering wheels. Perhaps there was a cabaret or a
brothel somewhere about—Havana was like that—little clusters of
nightlife hiding out in what appeared to be the most respectable of
middle-class business districts.