The Linz Tattoo (34 page)

Hagemann allowed his eyes to rest on the cold
Mediterranean horizon. He hated Faraj. The man was always at his
elbow; it was almost like being under arrest. He hated the constant
reminders that time was running out—as if be needed reminding.
Faraj was like an omen of failure.

There was a single boat out on the water, its
slim mast sticking up like a needle. Most likely it was some silly
English tourist out dragging the bottom for a few muddy-smelling
turbot. The Spanish fishermen were all comfortably back in their
berths by this hour.

“Perhaps it is the Norwegian,” Faraj broke in
suddenly. His unreadable smile was still in place when Hagemann
turned to look at him. He could even have been joking after his
macabre fashion. “Perhaps his intention is to climb up these cliffs
and murder you in your sleep.”

“That he plans to murder me I have no doubt,
but I’m sure Christiansen can think of some easier method of
approach.” Hagemann smiled in his turn—it was necessary constantly
to be reassuring the lesser races that one was not afraid. “After
all, he is an economical man.”

Nevertheless, Hagemann rather wished he had
thought to bring his field glasses with him.

He had had no indication of Christiansen’s
whereabouts for over a week, not since the news of Pilsner’s death
in Vienna. It had not been necessary to inquire into the
circumstances of that event.

One’s old sins came back to haunt one.
Hagemann did not have to ask himself why this Norwegian was hunting
him. Kirstenstad had been a turning point in both their lives.

Of course it was possible that Christiansen
was in Spain. It was even possible that he was collaborating with
the Jews, although that was not a conclusion that Hagemann rushed
to embrace about an enemy whom be had come to respect. Anything was
possible, but there was no immediate cause for alarm. Everything
would sort itself out now very quickly.

Yes, very quickly. Christiansen might hang
him in a broom closet, or the Syrians might lose patience and leave
him in a shallow grave somewhere with a bullet hole in the base of
his skull. Those were the alternatives to success, and he was not
quite as confident of success as he led Faraj to imagine. But it
was none of Faraj’s business if a cold, sick feeling settled in the
pit of his stomach every time he thought of. . .

“You should come to the Café Pícaro with me
this evening,” he went on, turning back to contemplate once more
the presence of that lone sailboat on the horizon. “You will be
able to see our Miss Rosensaft with your own eyes—along with her
new ‘husband.’ It will confirm for you how agreeably things are
progressing.”

“She is surrounded by an army of Jewish
agents—you said as much yourself.”

“That is perhaps overstating the case. All we
can say with conviction is that Leivick has been in Burriana for
several days. If he brought anything like an army with him, I’m
sure my own people would have detected them by now.”

The tops of the waves had long since been
dyed a smoky red, and it was growing cold. After so many months in
Damascus, Hagemann was glad to have returned to the chill dampness
of Europe, even as that was represented by Spain. Syria was a kind
of hell, fly-ridden and suffocating, unbearable winter or summer.
But the Syrians needed him. They had given him back his rank and a
reason for living.

Still, he hated them. The Syrians were all
like Faraj—corrupt and effeminate. The Jews, who were at least
Europeans, were a thousand times superior in every way. Leivick was
a man it was possible to respect, at least. But Faraj. . .

But Europe had been a dead world for him
since 1945, a place that had forgotten how to listen to the voice
of its own heart. It would not do to grow too contented here, where
the fascist police merely tolerated his presence for reasons of
sentiment. Syria commanded his loyalty now, and history had seen to
it that the Jews were his implacable enemies. One had to learn to
deal with the world as it was.

And now Esther had come back. What a shock it
had been when that shabby lawyer of von Goltz’s had turned up in
Beirut. Hagemann had fancied himself hidden from the whole world,
but the General had known precisely where to send his final
message: “Find Esther if you need something to trade for your next
meal. If you have an ear to listen with, she can tell you where to
find the process book.” Only those few sentences and a brass key.
the sort that might have fit a post office box or, much more
probably, a bank safe-deposit vault. What a delicious joke he must
have thought it, writing that note on a piece of stationery with
“U.S. Army, Provost Marshal’s Office” embossed on the
letterhead.

Of course, he had hardly needed von Goltz to
remind him of Esther.

Only an imbecile would mention the word
“love” within the context of a slave labor camp, but Esther had
meant something to him nevertheless.

What had there been about the war that could
have made him into what he had become? Nothing, except its terrible
cruelty—and the need to keep from going mad. He had known enough
men who had finally had enough, walked quietly to their tents, and
shot themselves through the roof of the mouth. He had decided very
early that he would not be among the ones who ended that way.

But Esther had defeated him. One could
embrace cruelty, making it into the religion of a cruel age, but
finally a girl hardly into her teens turns to one with dark,
frightened eyes and all resolution simply fades into nothing.

All the great conquering nations of history
had included women in their booty. From Achilles to Genghis Khan
the victorious warrior had carried off the wives and daughters of
his slaughtered enemies. It was a traditional right. Esther had
been no different; she was part of the spoils of war, and he had
felt himself free to do with her as he liked. There had been others
before her. There was nothing different about Esther.

Except, of course, that in the end he had
accepted with relief when the General had said, “Don’t distress
yourself about the girl. Leave her to me, and I shall see to
everything. There will be nothing left for the Russians.” Except,
of course, that von Goltz hadn’t had any intentions of killing
her.

Had she ever understood the power she
exercised over him? Was that something a woman was born knowing? Of
course, she had hardly been a woman. She had hardly been more than
a girl, but she might have seen him with a woman’s eyes. When she
had pretended to be so afraid, had she merely been playing on his
vanity?

The war had left him with many such
questions. The war had been like fire from heaven, a mad time.

Before—and in all the time since, hiding from
what had become the law—he had never thought to do such things,
think such things, as the war had made seem so natural, the
accustomed pattern of human life. It had been like no other time,
and he both missed it and was glad it would never come again. The
war had been such freedom as perhaps no man should have.

In May of 1918, Hagemann had come home from
the Ardennes on his one and only leave, and everything had been as
he had left it. His mother was still alive then, still keeping up
the tiny house in which he had been raised. By then he had already
killed four men in combat, one of them with a broken bayonet, but
she still treated him like a child home from school.
“It will be
all right,”
she had told him, over and over, stroking the side
of his shaven head with her soft, warm hand.
“I’m sure your
officers look out for you and wouldn’t allow such a young boy to
come to harm.”
Behind the lines, Germany was unchanged,
unchangeable.

And then, of course, it had changed. Defeat
had brought with it the moral chaos of socialist governments and
revolutions and soldiers who had to beg for bread. Hagemann could
remember how, straight after demobilization, still in his
sergeant’s uniform, he had wandered around the streets of Munich,
his heart black with anger. All the suffering and death of the
Great War, and this was how it had ended. How he had hated Germany
then.

“
It will all come right of its own—you’ll
see,”
his mother had told him while she struggled to keep them
both alive on his mustering-out pay, money suddenly worth next to
nothing.
“Only they shouldn’t have sent the Kaiser away like
that. It wasn’t respectful of them.”

And she would watch him as he drank his
ersatz coffee, feeling his rage without understanding it. For her,
somehow, the world still made sense—that world of Sunday services,
her little home, her son somehow mercifully spared from the war.
She felt no need to go searching after something to light the
darkness inside.

“Believe, Obey, Fight!” Hitler had told him.
What more did he need? What more was there? It had filled the
vacuum in his soul. It had given him back his honor and his reason
for living. It had led him, step by step, to his terrible
awakening, to this place and this web in which he found himself
tangled.

From September of 1939 until the very last,
he had never been out of his uniform. Germany was a place he
traveled across in a troop train. The war had been the whole of
life. France, Norway, Russia, Poland—and, finally, Waldenburg. He
had been a different person.

And now he was working for the Syrians, quite
an ordinary military commander. He ordered men killed and sent
others to their deaths, but that was no more than every commander
did. He carried everywhere the knowledge of what was possible for
him, but he was once more a man like other men.

And now Esther was back. It would be strange
to see her.

“You will see,” he said, almost as if to
himself. Faraj had to crane his fat, nimble little neck to hear. “I
will have the girl back within twenty-four hours, and then, very
soon, we will know everything.”

“Will we? You were always most convincing in
Damascus, but some of us have come to wonder if perhaps you weren’t
depending too much on a scribbled note from a man about to be
condemned to death. Von Goltz might have been playing with us
all—what would he have to lose or gain?”

Faraj looked up at him, smiling like a cat.
One might have supposed he was merely posing a hypothetical
question, of no real interest to anyone.

“You did not know him, so how could you
possibly understand?”

The sun was almost gone now. In a few minutes
it would be dark. It was time to go back to the house, but Hagemann
found that he was unable to bring himself to move. The white mast
of the little sailboat caught the last of the light and glistened
as it pitched to and fro.

“The General was a curious man,” he went on,
forcing himself to look away from that distant patch of water. He
returned Faraj’s smile, hating him. “He has set us a riddle, but by
his understanding of the rules the riddle must have an answer. He
no doubt expected that I should fail—he always underestimated me.
But if I solve it—when I solve it—then it shall be as he said. When
we have the girl, you shall have gained your victory over the
Jews.”

“But at this moment it is the Jews who have
this Miss. . . What did you say her name was?”

“Rosensaft. Esther Rosensaft. But, of course,
she is only part of the answer.

“What? You mean she can’t tell you after
all?”

Faraj took off his hat and wiped his brow
against his coat sleeve. When he was excited or panicky, his eyes
bulged and his neck had a way of swelling, as if it might burst any
second.

“Consider, my friend.” Hagemann put his hand
on the man’s shoulder, giving the impression he expected he might
otherwise topple over, like a plank of wood. “Would the Jews put
this girl so easily within my reach if the answer were really hers
to give with a word? I told you, we are in the presence of a
riddle.”

Yes.
“If you have an ear to listen with,
she can tell you. . .”
Poor Esther—one could not simply wring
the answer out of her, like water from a damp rag. The General had
been too clever for that.

But Karaj couldn’t appreciate the charm of
the situation. Faraj could only stand there, rubbing his hands
together, his throat puckering in distress.

“When we have her, we shall have to exercise
a little intelligence, that is all. She is important—more
important, I think, than even an old fox like Mordecai Leivick
appreciates—but in herself she is hardly more than a medium. I
doubt if von Goltz ever actually told her anything.”

“Colonel, if you have led us this far and she
is. . .” Faraj returned his hat to his head and allowed the implied
threat to hover wordlessly between them, like an uninvited guest.
The sentry was coming back. Even Faraj understood the necessity of
not arguing in front of a subordinate.

Hagemann stood with his back turned. He could
hear the sentry’s foothills on the pine needles behind him. He
wanted to ignore his existence.

The sentry already had his flashlight on.

“Leave these matters to me, Faraj. I won’t
fail.” The words seemed to come from between clenched teeth.

As if the sentry’s flashlight had been a
signal, the sound of an outboard motor insinuated itself across the
water. The little sailboat wheeled about and began making its busy
way back to the harbor at Burriana.

Well, of course. He wouldn’t have lingered so
long if he had to depend upon the wind to get him home.

“Come with me tonight.” Hagemann turned
around—he could hardly see Faraj s face, the light had grown so
dim. “Come and enjoy the cabaret. Forget your Moslem principles for
a single evening and we shall drink a bottle of champagne together,
and you can see for yourself how the net closes around your hated
Jews.”

16

“He may not come this evening. Don’t let
yourself expect him. Don’t look for him. Plan nothing. Let him make
all the moves, solve all the difficulties. Pretend nothing. Above
all else, we must do nothing to make him suspect that he is not in
perfect control of events.”