The Linz Tattoo (17 page)

“No one will believe that. This woman isn’t
important. Who would go to the trouble?”

It was Fagiin who had spoken. He was lying
full length on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling through
exhausted-looking eyes. He seemed already to have made up his mind
that they were doomed to failure, but he had been like that even
before they had left Munich. Mordecai claimed he was merely
homesick.

“It is important, however, that we give them
no reason to believe anything else. Inar, my young friend, have you
any ideas? Perhaps more important, have you any cigarettes?”

It had become a ritual by now. Christiansen
took the pack from his shirt pocket, shook out two cigarettes, one
for himself and one for Mordecai.

“There are no medical facilities inside the
walls,” he said, feeling a curious sense of relief. He turned his
hand so that the smoke crept across the ball of his thumb before
snaking upward into the air. “If she were to become suddenly ill—if
she had an attack of appendicitis, for instance—they would have to
send her in an ambulance to one of the civilian hospitals. She’d be
within reach then.”

The stillness was almost palpable, as if they
suddenly had found themselves in the presence of a miracle and were
afraid to mention it for fear it might vanish. Dessauer, who was
sitting on the second bed, close enough to Mordecai that he could
have touched him, looked as if he would have liked to say something
but didn’t know what.

“We could slip her something,” he whispered
finally, his throat working nervously. “They must have visiting
hours. We could pretend we were relatives or something. . .

There was an odd clicking sound in the room,
which Christiansen at last determined was coming from the other
bed. Faglin was laughing.

“Such a sheltered life you’ve led, Itzekel.
Don’t you know what Russian prisons are like?” Slowly, with an
appearance of great effort, he turned his head the few degrees that
allowed him to look in that direction. “If they have a visiting
room, they make the prisoner sit in a steel mesh cage with a guard
right behind the chair. There will be one window into the room
where the visitor sits, and the visitor will have a guard too.
Sometimes there’s glass in the window and you talk through a
microphone, but even if there’s only more steel mesh you’re not
allowed to touch. You have to keep your hands in plain view, all
the time—it’s the rule. Nobody
slips
anyone anything.”

Dessauer was silenced. They were all
silenced. It seemed to be the moment of defeat.

And then Mordecai smiled his sad. ironic
smile.

“We don’t have an army inside,” he said
finally. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it as
if he wondered why it kept burning. “This isn’t Acre—Inar is right
about that. But people go into prisons as well as out. Perhaps we
could smuggle in just one little soldier.”

. . . . .

The plan was straightforward enough, Faglin
and Hirsch would take responsibility for getting the girl out of
Mühlfeld Prison and, while they served as a distraction for the
police, Christiansen would smuggle her back to the American Zone.
The three of them would rendezvous the day of the escape, but until
then they would keep clear of each other—It was safer that way.
Mordecai and Itzhak, thank God, would stay behind and out of harm’s
way.

The only thing was that while Christiansen,
the lucky devil, had a passport that allowed him to pass the
Russian checkpoints without challenge, Faglin and Hirsch had to
smuggle themselves in.

They would use the sewers, since the plans
were available at any of the city’s libraries and not even the
Russians could guard every manhole cover in the Brigittenau. The
water, which smelled bad but not as bad as they had expected, was
up to their calves and lumpy with ice. Even with rubber boots on,
Faglin could hardly feel his feet at all.

Faglin had been born on a kibbutz just south
of Caesarea. The sea was only half an hour’s walk away, and it was
never cold. Faglin, who hadn’t been home in eleven months, and then
only for a brief visit, hated the winters in Europe.

By three-fifteen in the morning they had
traveled just a little under two kilometers. They had been at it
for over an hour. They had only their small electric torches, so it
was necessary to move with some care in order to avoid making too
much noise. They had crossed beneath the Danube some time back, so
they could come up to the street whenever they wished. All they had
to do was to find a storm drain with a grating that would yield
without waking up the whole city.

There were rats down here. One could hear
them scurrying off and, from time to time, the torchlight would
catch them basking on the filthy banks of the sewer main. They
would blink and scratch themselves and nose casually into the
water. It was a peculiarly disagreeable sight. Faglin would be glad
to be back up at street level, where the danger would be greater
but at least they would be men once more.

For the hundredth time he readjusted his
shoulder pack. He was carrying a change of clothes, some tools, his
revolver wrapped up in an old pair of pajama bottoms, about seven
pounds of plastic explosives, and various other odds and ends. He
was tired and it had been a long time since dinner. Hirsch was
carrying some sandwiches, but of course it was impossible in a
sewer to think of eating. He could hear him walking about four
meters behind. Hirsch never seemed to get tired.

At twenty after, his torchlight fell across a
line of steel rungs leading up the side of the sewer wall. They had
found an exit.

Hirsch took off his shoulder pack and handed
it to Faglin, and then, while Faglin held the light, he made his
way up the rungs to the storm drain cover. Soon only his feet were
visible below the narrow gully.

“Pass up the torch,” he murmured. A hand came
down to accept it. Faglin stood below in the near-total darkness,
trying to fight off the sensation of being at the bottom of a
well.

When Hirsch came down again his face was
streaked, but he was grinning with pleasure. He took a moment to
catch his breath.

“It’s bolted in place,” he said finally.
“From the inside—the damn Russians don’t trust anybody. A wrench
and a few drops of cable oil, then give me fifteen minutes and
we’ll be out of here.”

It took him less time than that. One by one,
the loosened bolts dropped down and embedded themselves in the
muddy sewer bank, each time just missing Faglin, who stood below
holding the light.

“Can you see anything?” Faglin asked,
straining his voice into a tense whisper. The only answer was the
scrape of the drain cover as Hirsch lifted it out of his way. A
moment later a hand came down again, and Faglin brought up Hirsch’s
shoulder pack until the fingers closed around its strap. They were
on their way up.

When Faglin clambered to the mouth of the
open storm drain, the first thing he saw in the light from the
street lamps was Hirsch’s face. He looked demonic crouched there at
the gutter’s edge. A line of filth ran down his nose and jaw and he
was glittering with sweat; he might have been staring straight into
his own death from the expression of half-crazed anxiety in his
eyes. As soon as he had his shoulders out of the sewer pipe and was
able to turn around and see behind him, Faglin could understand
why. They had come out directly across the street from a police
barracks. The lights behind the second-floor windows were on.

Let’s get out of here.”

The drain cover slid back into place with a
noise that seemed loud enough to be heard by all the policemen in
Vienna, but as the two men hurried away down the street no one
shouted after them to halt. There were no shots fired. There was no
sound at all except the slap of their shoe soles against the
walkway.

“I think we’ve just used up all our good
luck,” Hirsch murmured tensely as they rounded the corner. “Let’s
look for somewhere out of the cold where we can hole up until after
curfew lifts.”

They found a factory building with a basement
door that would open to some slight persuasion. They were able to
light the boiler, and within two or three minutes the whole room
was deliriously warm. Hirsch took the sandwiches from his shoulder
pack, where they had been cushioning a small, flat wooden box that
held the detonators. Provided no watchman came to chase them off,
they would stay right there until six in the morning, when they
would no longer be subject to arbitrary arrest. There was a small
cupboard containing a few cups without handles, a spoon, a metal
pot. and a small canister of tea. they were able to brew some with
the water from the boiler’s runoff valve. It tasted rusty, but it
was tea.

“All the comforts of home,” Hirsch announced,
making a gesture with his arm that took in the whole room.

Faglin merely shrugged. To his mind, Hirsch
had a way of enjoying these little adventures that was almost
indecent.

“Come on, Amos—cheer up. We’ve got two whole
hours ahead of us with nothing to do but relax. That’s as good as a
lifetime.”

“Sure. It’s the Ritz bar.”

“You just miss that little wife of yours back
in Haifa.” Hirsch laughed and clapped him on the back. “You family
types, all very admirable but no thanks. For me, now, women are
like marzipan—a piece now and again is tasty, but they cloy. That’s
the best way to feel if you’re a soldier.”

“You’ll marry, just like everybody else. Just
wait until the war is over, then you’ll see things the other
way.”

But Hirsch merely shook his head, as if a
child had said something foolish. He took a sip of his tea, made a
face, and pitched the rest onto the basement floor, where it made a
fan-shaped pattern on the cement.

“This war won’t ever be over,” he said
finally, setting the empty cup down beside his right foot. “Not for
us, anyway. We’ll still be fighting the Arabs fifty years from now.
If we live, you and I will be at this until we’re old men.”

“If we live. If Hagemann can be stopped, and
we aren’t all peppered with nerve gas in the first artillery
barrage.”

They allowed the subject to drop.

After about twenty minutes. Hirsch drew a
pack of cigarettes from his trousers pocket and lit one. The match
popped into life with a kind of scratching cough, filling the air
with the smell of sulfur

“I think Mordecai must be losing his grip to
trust this big Swede as far as he seems to.” The basement room was
gloomy enough to be an antechamber to Hell, so the end of Hirsch’s
cigarette threw an oddly sinister glow over the lower part of his
face as he spoke. “I think it would be better if we tried to
smuggle her out ourselves. He has his own game to play—what’s to
keep him from simply disappearing with her after we’ve delivered
her to him like a bouquet of roses?”

“You sound like you think he’s a god damned
Nazi. You saw the report—the man’s got more battle ribbons than
teeth. He’s a hero. Besides, he’s not a Swede, he’s a
Norwegian.

“He’s a
goy
.”

“You sound like Itzikel.”

“Well. Itzikel was right. The only difference
is that I’m not dumb enough to call the man names to his face. If
there’s anything Jews should have learned since 1933, it’s the
difference between us and them. And Christiansen is definitely one
of them.”

“I had the impression you find of liked
him.”

“Who said I didn’t like him?” Hirsch asked
irritatedly, picking a loose piece of tobacco from the end of his
tongue. “I just don’t trust him, that’s all.”

. . . . .

At the first hint of gray light through the
basement windows, the two men washed their faces and hands in the
water from the boiler tap and changed their clothes—one felt better
and was considerably less conspicuous for not smelling of three
hours in the Viennese sewers. They waited until they had heard
three or four sets of footfalls before they ventured outside, where
there was a cold, persistent wind and the clouds that hung low in
the sky were tarnished to a flat gray.

“Let’s check Weber Strasse first,” Faglin
murmured tensely. He felt dreadfully exposed; he was carrying a
revolver tucked under his belt and there were still fifteen pounds
of explosives in his shoulder pack. It seemed the most logical
thing imaginable that either the police or one or another of the
omnipresent Russian patrols would any second now come rushing in at
them, shouting “
Jew terrorist!
” at the tops of their lungs.
What could be more reasonable?

“All right. It’ll be a damn nuisance if there
turns out to be anything there.”

It was the sort of thing one couldn’t tell
from the street map they had purchased the afternoon before—in the
whole district there were only two small red crosses to indicate
the presence of a hospital. The one on Weber Strasse was nearly
twice the distance from the prison, but they had to be sure. They
had to know where the Russians would call for an ambulance if they
had an emergency with one of their convicts.

It was a small brick building taking up only
one corner of the block. They went all the way around. The rear
entrance was just that, a doorway in the back. There were no
special provisions for emergency care. The sign in front read:
“
Frauenklinik.
” Faglin swallowed hard and made his decision.
The Russians weren’t going to bring anyone here, and there had to
be a limit even to Mossad thoroughness. The Jewish State would not
make war on newborn babies. They were not going to blow the place
up.

“It would only have been the gas main or
something,” Hirsch announced consolingly, “just enough to put them
out of operation for a while.”

“And maybe twenty or thirty of the weaker
ones would have frozen to death in their cribs. I’m glad—I wouldn’t
have wanted it on my conscience.”