The Linz Tattoo (3 page)

There was always so much that had been left
undone and unsaid. All the small sins of a thoughtless, selfish
childhood accumulate like dust in an unused room.

No, he wasn’t any worse than anyone else. He
was merely an exile. The fourteenth day in June, 1942—it was as if
they had cut something away with a sharp knife, burning the wound
closed so it wouldn’t bleed. Not flesh and bone, just a part of his
life.

A slight tremor went through Christiansen’s
body, like a reproach, and he pushed himself disdainfully away from
the wall. He was finished with being human.

Because somewhere under his feet Gerhart
Becker was waiting with a gun and a mighty fear of death, and it
was time to settle old scores. Christiansen picked up one of the
chairs, holding it by the back like a club, and pitched it as far
out into the darkness as he could manage. It came down with a great
crash against the wooden gate that separated the garden from the
alley behind. The gate was left standing partially open and the
lights from the house clicked on, staining the ground a lurid
electric yellow.

Come on out, you bastard.
The words
formed in Christiansen’s mind, and his lips moved soundlessly.
Otherwise he was still as marble. Ten seconds, then fifteen. . .
Nothing. Then the garden fell into darkness again, as if the light
had shrunk back into its source out of simple dread.

Becker wasn’t as stupid as all that. He would
be expecting some sort of trap—he would have to have his look
around first.

Christiansen listened with almost painful
attention, but he couldn’t hear the sounds of footsteps inside the
house. He tried to visualize the man’s movements—was he still on
the second floor, or had he gone downstairs? It was an awkward
business, shooting at someone from above, so Becker would want to
be right there in the doorway when the moment came. He would check
the front first, just to be sure no one was trying to come at him
from behind, and then he would be back. There was nothing in the
garden—he had seen that with his own eyes—and pretty soon he would
begin wondering what had made all the noise. An animal, maybe?
Havana was full of stray dogs. He would want to know, he wouldn’t
be able to stand not knowing. And the continuing quiet would make
him bolder. He would come back. It only needed a little
patience.

Below a certain latitude there is no such
thing as silence, and that subtropical night was filled with tiny
sounds. Splashes of rainwater were still falling from tree branches
and telephone lines, and the dull, scraping noises of insects rose
and fell like a bad radio signal. It was a question of listening
for the one slight suggestion of a human presence in all the chaos
of overlapping, patternless murmurs.

Christiansen tried not to move. He didn’t
want to create any distractions, not even so much as the whisper of
his coat sleeve as it brushed against the side of his dinner
jacket. He would have liked to stop breathing.

And then, there it was. Some twenty feet
below him, the screen door strained slightly on its hinges. Becker
was standing there behind it, his hand pressing against the wire
mesh, wondering if he had the nerve to step outside and check to
make sure there were no unpleasant surprises waiting for him in his
back yard.

When the lights went back on, Christiansen
could hardly keep himself from starting. But he was patient. He
almost didn’t breathe as, slowly, the screen door opened and Becker
stepped out from the protecting walls of his house.

What can you tell about a man from looking
down at the top of his head? Becker’s hair was thinning—that was
about all. The light shone against his scalp as he stood with his
left arm akimbo. For the rest, he was simply a blank.

He was still too close to the house. He was
waiting—he wanted to feel safe before he began moving out into the
garden. Christiansen could see the pistol in his right hand.

And then, one pace. And then, two. The screen
door closed quietly behind him. He was out now, looking around. In
another second he would turn back to the house. There was no time
to lose.

Christiansen picked up the second chair,
lifting it all the way up over his head. He had only the one chance
to make good.

Perhaps Becker heard something, because at
the last instant he glanced up. The chair caught him across the
face and shoulders, knocking him to the ground, but Christiansen
didn’t wait to see—he was already over the side of the building,
his hands clamped around the metal downspout as he began sliding to
the ground. He hit the earth with a thump, the impact almost making
him lose his balance. As he turned around, he saw Becker trying to
push himself up with his hands. He was looking at Christiansen with
eyes that flickered fearfully in the yellow light. The gun he had
dropped in falling wasn’t more than a foot from his right elbow. It
would have been little enough trouble to pick it up again.

But Christiansen didn’t give him a chance to
remember about weapons. He covered the distance between them in a
few quick strides and, with a kick like the stroke of a piston,
caught Becker precisely on the side of the head.

. . . . .

The basement was small, square, astonishingly
deep, and permeated with the smell of tobacco. There were a few
packing crates around made of dark rough wood with what might have
been the names of plantations burned into the slats, so perhaps
Becker stored his wares down here.

Becker was still unconscious, hanging from a
sewer pipe by a rope that looped around his chest and under his
arms. His hands were tied behind his back and his head was drooping
down forlornly. He would twist clockwise through a slow quarter of
a turn and then gradually stop and then begin slowly twisting
counterclockwise. He looked like a corpse on a gibbet.

There was a double strand of heavy catgut
around his neck, knotted just behind his left ear. It was hanging
loose for the moment; as gradually Becker began to come back to
himself, he seemed not even to know it was there. He shook his head
and looked down at the chair that had been placed about six inches
beneath the points of his toes. He stretched out one foot, trying
to touch the flat seat, but he couldn’t quite reach it.

Christiansen, who was sitting on an old
steamer trunk only a few yards away, watched unsympathetically.

“Let me down from here,” Becker whispered
hoarsely. He had probably been a strong man once, but in his middle
thirties, and after only a few years of peace, his face had begun
to take on a doughy appearance. The color in his checks and across
the bridge of his nose was blotchy, and his small, close-set brown
eyes seemed wet and nearsighted. He was streaming with sweat; it
collected in the creases around his mouth and made the bald crown
of his head gleam like a polished window.

“For God’s sake, let me down.”

“All right.”

Christiansen got up slowly and took the
pocketknife from his trousers. He smiled as he opened it, as if he
were looking forward to drawing the blade across Becker’s throat.
He wanted Becker to be afraid. A frightened man was easier to
manipulate.

Becker’s eyes widened as he watched—the knife
blade held them as if by some enchantment.

“If you want down, you can come down,”
Christiansen said, stepping up beside Becker and resting a hand
delicately on his shoulder. With a slight pressure he set him
rocking back clockwise at the end of his rope, which creaked
against the sewer pipe as Becker swayed back and forth and then
came to rest. Christiansen reached up and cut the knot.

Becker’s heels hit the chair’s wooden seat
with a loud smack, and a panicky gurgle escaped him as the catgut
noose tightened on his windpipe. He lost his balance almost at once
and, as his knees buckled, he tried to scream for help, but the
sound was cut short. His face went a deep purplish red as slowly he
began to strangle.

For a moment Christiansen merely watched. The
faint smile had never left his face and his cold, pitiless eyes
narrowed slightly, as if he found the spectacle amusing. Then,
finally, he grabbed Becker by the arms and helped him to regain his
footing. For the moment, Becker was worth more alive.

“Stand up straight— that’s it.” Christiansen
sat down again on the steamer trunk and crossed his legs. He took a
half-empty packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his dinner
jacket and lit one. “The noose will slacken of its own so long as
you keep the pressure off. But, of course, if you relax a little. .
.”

He made a vague gesture with his right hand,
as if to suggest that he couldn’t he held responsible for the
inevitable, and the smoke from his cigarette drifted through the
air in a ragged line. Becker, who was filling his lungs in quick,
heavy gasps, watched him with an expression of undisguised
horror.

“Of course, it’s only a matter of time until
you grow tired, isn’t it. One can’t keep at attention forever. You
could try switching your weight from one leg to the other—you might
last a little longer that way—but it’ll all come out the same in
the end. You’ve been a soldier. You’ve seen men faint on parade,
just keel over from one minute to the next. Or your muscles will
cramp up and you’ll lose your balance again. Only next time I won’t
come to your aid. I’ll merely sit here and watch.”

The two men understood each other perfectly.
Becker knew that no one was kidding, and that was fine.
Christiansen allowed himself the luxury of a shrug.

“How long do you think you can last?” he went
on, flicking the ash from his cigarette onto the basement’s cement
floor. “A few hours? More? I can wait—I don’t begrudge you the
time.”

“What do you want? I’ll give you anything you
want!” Becker’s head squirmed pleadingly in the noose, and the
white catgut disappeared into the folds of his neck. His eyes
seemed ready to start out of their sockets. “What is this
about?”

Christiansen frowned suddenly and threw his
cigarette to the floor. “You shouldn’t have tried to trick me. You
should have known it wouldn’t work. I don’t make deals with members
of the Fifth Brigade.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to me, Sergeant. Don’t compound
your mistake. There’s no limit to how hard I can make it for you to
die.”

“What do you want?”

For a moment Christiansen seemed to have lost
the power of movement. And then, as if something had just occurred
to him, he shook his head and laughed—or, at least, made a sound
that was something like laughter.

“Do you remember Kirstenstad, Sergeant? And
you can ask me what it is I want?”

“I wasn’t there. I thought you were. . . Oh
my God. you have to believe me—I wasn’t there!”

“You were there.”

Christiansen lit another cigarette and
waited. He had been through it all before. Three times in the last
two years he had looked into a man’s face, pronounced the name
“Kirstenstad,” and been witness to the change that was like a fall
from grace. And it was never simply a matter of some poor hunted
wretch realizing that his time had come, that he was finally in the
power of his deadliest enemy—that was a part, of course, but not
the whole. It was a kind of moral terror. No one who had been at
Kirstenstad that Sunday morning, who had had eyes to see what had
happened there, could fail to know that he had been delivered over
to the purest evil. Christiansen had learned as much as that.

“I want Colonel Hagemann, Sergeant. And you
can tell me where to find him.”

“I was only his orderly—I was. . .”

“Then you would have been standing beside him
that morning, wouldn’t you, Sergeant.” Christiansen’s face was
without expression. Only his eyes, cold and blue, like ice in the
sun, showed that he was still a man, with a man’s hatred. “You
would have seen the mayor of Kirstenstad, wouldn’t you, Sergeant.
He was a tall man, in late middle age, with a white moustache—quite
a dignified figure, Sergeant. Surely you must remember him. As the
trucks rolled up. he came out of his house to see what the
disturbance was, to see what the Waffen-SS could possibly want with
his little village, and your Colonel Hagemann had him shot down on
his own doorstep. It was one of those heroic moments destined to
live forever in the myths of the German people, Sergeant, so surely
you must recall the scene.

“And perhaps you remember his wife as well,
how she knelt in her husband’s blood, unable to understand what had
happened, and how the Colonel, that fearless paragon, doubtless to
set an example for his men, himself put a pistol to the back of her
neck and pulled the trigger. Did you clean the pistol for him that
night, Sergeant? Wouldn’t that have fallen within the scope of your
duties?”

The muscles in Christiansen’s jaw were
working rhythmically as he stared at his captive, precisely as if
he had never seen such an exotic creature before. For all its calm,
there had been something wild in his voice as he talked about that
morning in 1942. But when he spoke again, his tone was once more
empty, without inflection, almost dead.

“You soldiers of the Fifth Brigade, you
killed nearly everyone In the village that day,” he went on, like a
man reciting a story learned by heart. “Hardly a soul escaped. I
wish I could claim that I wanted to avenge them all, but I can’t. I
just want the man who murdered my parents.”

The cigarette in Christiansen’s hand had
burned down almost to his fingers—he seemed to have forgotten it
was there. Finally he put it out, grinding out the ember under the
point of his shoe. Becker watched the whole performance with a kind
of morbid fascination.

The strain was beginning to tell on him. It
had been three years since Becker had worn a uniform. He had lost
his soldier’s bearing, he looked faintly ridiculous standing there
at attention on top of a kitchen chair. His nose was beginning to
run, although he hardly seemed to notice it, and every so often, to
keep from falling, he would have to catch himself as he swayed a
few degrees to one side or the other. And now he was trembling—just
slightly, just enough that he couldn’t keep his shoulders
still.