The Linz Tattoo (31 page)

“See the first violins?” he asked, pointing
to the top line of the string section. “Just like I remembered, an
octave lower than the oboe. And there I was down in the basement,
scraping out the tonic. Do you believe me now?”

They both looked at Merizzi, who had probably
been disturbed by the sound of Christiansen’s voice. He was coming
awake again.

“I believe you, but where does it bring us?
What does it mean?’

In answer, Christiansen closed the score. The
cover read:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

SINFONIE IN C

(LINZER SINFONIE)

He rolled up the score and put it under his
arm. It was time to leave.

Thank you, Herr Merizzi. Our apologies to
your wife.” He took out his wallet and counted two ten-dollar bills
into the man’s hand. Merizzi gazed up at him, blinking
uncomprehendingly. “I’ll keep this if I may. Please go back to bed
now, and forget any of this ever happened.”

They managed to get four blocks without
hearing any police sirens, so apparently that was precisely what he
did do.

“Does the curfew apply in the International
Zone?”

Mordecai shook his head. “No, I don’t believe
so.”

“Good—then let’s take the long way home. I
need a drink.”

The place they found was in a basement, not
fifty yards from the Burgtheater; it was like a hundred little
joints Christiansen knew in the New York theater district where
actors and musicians got together after the shows closed, too keyed
up even to think about sleep. It had just that atmosphere—the party
that has gone on just a little too long. They were shown to a table
by the stairway—the waiter, one gathered, had sized them up as
tourists and therefore best kept out of everybody’s way—and
Christiansen ordered a brandy and hot water. He could use the
anesthetic.

“Just coffee for me.” Mordecai said. When he
had the cup in front of him, he consented to take one of
Christiansen s cigarettes.

“So. Now we know where to look. From the
whole world we have narrowed our focus to the city of Linz—and all
because Mozart wrote a symphony there. Von Goltz went to all that
trouble just to tell us that one thing.”

“He’s telling us more than that.”
Christiansen took the cigarette out of his mouth and set it in the
huge glass ashtray that took up so much of their tiny table. He
unrolled the score and opened it to the place he had marked,
putting it beside Mordecai’s right hand. “You see how the section
is marked? ‘Trio.’ Why pick that section unless he wanted us to
know we should be looking for three things instead of just
one?”

“Three things?”

Mordecai took a pen from his breast pocket
and, at the top of the score, directly over the nine notes
Christiansen had circled, wrote out the number from Esther
Rosensaft’s arm: G4/3454641.

“What is the significance, do you suppose, of
the line?” he asked finally. As if to emphasize the question, he
wrote out the number a second time.

“It’s a bar line—look at the score. G, C,
then the rest follows in the next measure.”

“But it doesn’t, don’t you see? The final
note begins a new measure, so if von Goltz was being consistent he
would have put in a second line—here.” He drew it between the final
two numbers. G4/345464/1. “He must have had a reason. Von Goltz
could count just as well as you or I.”

Mordecai took a sip of his coffee, set the
cup down, and smiled. His discovery seemed to please him very
much.

“Perhaps your original thought was correct.
Perhaps 3454641’ is the number of a safe-deposit box. Then we would
have the box number and the city.”

“Do you have any idea how many banks there
must be in Linz?” Mordecai asked, still smiling through the haze of
his cigarette smoke. “We have two things—perhaps we have two
things—but we still need the third. What do you suppose ‘G4’ is
intended to tell us?”

Christiansen didn’t have the faintest idea.
He was tired of being clever. He was tired of guessing games. His
wounds hurt him and the brandy wasn’t helping at all. He wanted to
go back to the hotel and go to bed. His cigarette tasted like
burning newspaper.

He dropped a handful of coins onto the table.
One of them rolled over the edge.

“Let’s get out of here. We’ll have the walk
back in which to consider the matter.”

Mordecai bent over to pick up the coin from
the floor. He set it on the table with the others. Then he began to
get up.

“A map,” he said suddenly. He had to put his
hand down on the table to steady himself—that was how it took him.
“Every map I’ve ever seen has letters along the top and numbers
down the side. ‘G4’ must refer to a square in a map grid. That’s
our third thing.”

“There must be an official map of Linz—the
Nazis had an official everything.”

“Yes—we’ll have it checked. How much will you
wager that we’ll find only one bank with a street address within
those coordinates?”

Neither man spoke as they walked back toward
the university. After a few blocks, the only sound was from their
footsteps. Beyond the Maria Theresian Strasse, which marked the
northern limit of the International Zone, there weren’t even any
street lamps.

Von Goltz had deposited his legacy in a bank
in Linz. They had the account number, and they knew where to find
the bank. But they couldn’t claim the inheritance quite yet.

“There will be a key to the safe-deposit
box.” Mordecai spoke so softly that he almost seemed to be talking
to himself. “I think we can assume Hagemann will have that. And the
box will be in someone’s name. The bank will doubtless require a
signature. We have half the pieces.”

“And Hagemann has the rest.”

“Yes. And whoever finishes the game with them
all will be in a position to dictate the history of a nation.”

Mordecai stared down at his feet as they
walked along, his face tight and frowning.

“There are some things it is better not to
know,” he said finally, as if announcing some decision. “This is a
terrible weapon, the sort of secret that must corrupt anyone to
whom it is revealed. I could wish for the sake of my country
waiting to be born that neither side might have it. The Jews are as
human as anyone else. They will not be improved for possessing so
absolutely the power of life and death.”

“But better them than the Syrians—isn’t that
what you think?” Christiansen didn’t know himself quite what the
question meant.

“What I think is, better no one at all.”

There was simply nothing more to say. They
parted on the steps of the hotel.

“Aren’t you coming inside?” Christiansen
asked. But Mordecai shook his head.

“No. I must make a telephone call, and it’s
better that I don’t use the hotel lines. You understand. I shall
see you again in the morning.”

So Christiansen went inside alone. His room
was on the third floor, and the elevator had been out of order
since the day of their arrival. He had the stairway all to
himself.

He supposed, really, that he ought to be
extremely pleased with himself. After all, they had figured
everything out. What was left except to get a key and some
information from a man who went around with a bodyguard even Stalin
might have envied? It should be easy. Sure it should.

And if it wasn’t, why should he care? He
would kill Hagemann or Hagemann would kill him—it seemed to make
remarkably little difference.

He was tired, that was all. You get tired,
and it makes you sick of life. He was tired all right. He wished. .
.

Oh, the hell with it.

He unlocked his hotel door and let it swing
shut behind him before he switched on the light. Esther Rosensaft
was sitting up in his bed, naked, resting on one elbow, the sheet
covering her up to the arms. She looked at him through dark,
serious, unsmiling eyes. The duplicate of his room key was lying on
the night table. God damn Mordecai.

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said. “I guess
I gave you a pretty rough time. I guess I do that a lot.”

“Yes. But I’ve decided to forgive you.”

14

Barcelona, Spain. March 17, 1948

In an hour they would be in the station.
Christiansen took out a cigarette and lit it, using only his right
hand because Esther had long since taken possession of the left and
was playing absentmindedly with his fingers. The quartet score
spread out over his knees, which he had bought during a three-hour
stopover in Zürich simply to have something to read, had long since
ceased to be very interesting.

Since yesterday morning Esther had been very
quiet. Up until then anyone would have supposed she was having a
marvelous time—she was in love, to hear her tell it, and on a kind
of honeymoon trip and, barring the locked cattle car that had
transported her and her family to the extermination camps, this was
the first time she had ever been on a train. Now she just sat
there, without speaking, staring out through their compartment
window as the scenery slipped by, with Christiansen’s left hand
held palm up in her lap.

In Barcelona, Christiansen would leave the
train and Itzhak Dessauer would take his place.

It was an elaborate plan—too elaborate to
Christiansen’s way of thinking. They were staging a little domestic
drama. Dessauer was to be the bridegroom, taking his new wife on a
marriage trip to the Spanish Mediterranean. That was how the bait
was to be displayed to Egon Hagemann. The young couple would stay
in a hotel in the resort town of Burriana, where Hagemann
maintained a villa overlooking the coast. The idea was to make him
forget himself long enough that he would risk venturing out beyond
the protection of his fortified enclosure and his bodyguards, on
the theory that not even Hagemann would think to bring an army into
a lady’s bedroom. Mordecai and his people were taking a hell of a
lot for granted.

“Hagemann will never buy it. He’ll know he’s
being set up. He knows Esther was in Mühlfeld. By now he certainly
must have heard that Plessen is dead. And a couple of days after
that episode, not half a dozen miles away, I killed one of his
soldiers. He’s bound to draw the appropriate conclusions.”

“Of course, but what choice do we have?”
Mordecai had shrugged his shoulders, smiling in a way that
suggested he found the whole situation faintly ludicrous. “For that
matter, what choice will Hagemann have? His ambitions—his survival,
from everything we hear—are all predicated on gaining possession of
the girl, so he will have to try for her whether he suspects a trap
or not. He will take his precautions, needless to say. Everything
will hinge upon which of us has been the cleverer.”

Mordecai and his boys had been in Burriana
for over a week now, keeping watch to learn how Hagemann spent his
time and settling the details. And since everybody seemed to know
all about him, Christiansen was supposed to wait until the last
possible moment before putting in an appearance. He was intended to
serve as the distraction.

But in the meantime there had been the
journey, and Esther, and it had been almost possible to forget
about Egon Hagemann, Kirstenstad, revenge and the fate of the Jews.
Christiansen had been escorting his new lady on a leisurely tour
across southern Europe, learning all over again how to enjoy
himself. It wasn’t hard.

Esther couldn’t seem to get enough of him—she
would sit on the other side of the table in restaurants, watching
him eat as if the sight of a man shoveling food into his race were
somehow the most enchanting spectacle she could ever hope to
witness. And bedtime kept getting earlier and earlier.

Women, he had discovered, could be very
intimidating—at least, this one could. That first night, in his
narrow hotel bed in Vienna, he had kept her cradled in his arms
while she wept as if her heart would crack. She would take that
comfort from him, even while she begged him to despise her, to
remember always and forever that she was no better than a street
whore. What had they done to her in those places that love should
be such a confession of self contempt? To kill the body or cripple
the soul, if not both then one or the other. To make life a
bitterness and a humiliation, in itself a kind of death.

He had been lonely and womanless too long—he
knew that—and her warm, soft, hungry young body was pressed up
against him as if all she wanted was to disappear inside his flesh,
but at that moment, listening to her sobbing confessions, even his
lust had given way before an enormous and unmanning pity.

“It’s all right,” he had whispered, stroking
her hair with the palm of his hand, conscious that he was lying but
not knowing what else to say. “It’s all right. None of that will
ever come back.”

And then she had dug her fingernails into his
chest, to remind him why she was there.