Until I Find You (7 page)

Given his youth, his alert presence, his bright future—he was teaching the organ to a few carefully selected students—Alice may have seen in Torén all the promise that William had once embodied. Jack thought at the time that it might have been hard for his mom to say good-bye to Torvald Torén. As Jack and Alice were leaving the Hedvig Eleonora, the boy saw his mother turning to look at that golden altar—and out in the snow, in what struck them both as Stockholm’s perpetual darkness, Alice kept glancing over her shoulder at the lighted dome of the church. But Jack had heard very little of Alice’s conversation with Torén; the church itself and the young organist’s appearance had completely captured the four-year-old’s attention.

Here they had yet to find Doc Forest, and William was already underground! But Alice believed that William was incapable of passing through a port without being tattooed, and somewhere in Stockholm there was at least one good tattoo artist. Just possibly, Doc Forest might know where William had gone. If only to distract himself from the pain, a man getting a complicated tattoo is inclined to talk.

In the meantime, while they were trying to find Doc Forest, Alice was spending a fair amount of money. They were staying at the Grand, which was the best hotel in Stockholm. Their room faced the Old Town and the water, with a view of the wharf where the boats to and from the archipelago docked. Jack would remember posing with one of those ships as if he were the captain, just stepping ashore. He knew the hotel was expensive because his mom said so on a postcard she sent to Mrs. Wicksteed, which she read out loud to him. But Alice had a plan.

The Grand was near the opera and the theater—people met there for drinks and dinner. Local businessmen had breakfast and lunch there, too. And the lobby of the Grand was both bigger and less gloomy than the lobby of the D’Angleterre. Jack lived in that lobby as if the hotel were his castle and he was the Grand’s little prince.

Alice’s plan was simple, but for a while it worked. Jack and Alice had few dressy clothes, and they wore them day and night; their laundry bill was expensive, too. Looking most unlike the solicitors they were, they ate a huge breakfast every morning. The buffet was included with the price of their room; it was their only complete meal of the day. While they gorged themselves, they would try to spot the tattoo-seekers among the well-heeled people eating breakfast.

They skipped lunch. Few people at the Grand ate lunch alone, and Alice knew that the decision to get a tattoo was a solitary one. (You didn’t make a commitment to be marked for life in the company of colleagues or friends; in most cases, they tried to talk you out of it.)

In the early evening, Jack stayed alone in the hotel room, snacking on cold cuts and fruit, while his mom checked out the potential tattoo clients at the bar. Later at night, after Jack had gone to bed, Alice would order the least expensive appetizer in the dining room. At the Grand, apparently, many hotel guests ate their dinners alone—“traveling businessmen,” in Alice’s estimation.

Her approach to a potential client was always the same. “Do you have a tattoo?” (She’d even mastered this in Swedish: “
Har ni någon tatuering?
”)

If the answer was yes, she would ask: “Is it a Doc Forest?” But no one had heard of him, and the answer to the first question was usually no.

When a potential client said he or she
didn’t
have a tattoo, Alice asked the next question—in English first, in Swedish if she had to. “Would you like one?” (
“Skulle ni vilja ha en?”
)

Most people said no, but some would say maybe.
Maybe
was good enough for Alice—all she ever needed was her pretty foot in the door.

When Jack couldn’t sleep, he recited this dialogue; it worked better for him than thinking about Lottie or counting sheep. Maybe what made Jack Burns an actor was that he never forgot these lines.

“I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (
“Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.”
)

“How long does it take?” (
“Hur lång tid tar det?”
)

“That depends.” (
“Det beror på.”
)

“How much does it cost?” (
“Vad kostar det?”
)

“That depends, too.” (
“Det beror också på.”
)

Jack would wonder one day at the line “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” Were those traveling businessmen, whom Alice solicited alone, ever confused by her intentions? The one lady who said she wanted a tattoo wanted nothing of the kind. Not only was she surprised to find a four-year-old in Alice’s hotel room; she wanted him to leave.

Alice refused to send Jack away. The lady, who was neither young nor pretty, seemed greatly offended. She spoke English very well—in fact, she may have been English—and she was the likeliest source of the hotel manager discovering that Alice was giving tattoos in her hotel room.

The tattoo machines, the pigments, the power pack, the foot switch, the little paper cups, the alcohol and witch hazel and glycerine, the Vaseline and paper towels—there was such a lot of stuff! Yet everything was put away, completely out of sight, when the maid came. As underground as tattooing was in Stockholm, Alice knew that the Grand would not have been happy to discover she was earning an income at that enterprise there.

Though he later suspected that the trouble with the hotel manager probably came from the English-speaking lesbian, at the time, Jack wasn’t aware of the negotiations that transpired between his mother and the manager. He simply observed that his mom’s attitude toward the Grand abruptly changed. She began to say things like, “If I don’t get a lead on Doc Forest today, we’re out of here tomorrow”—although they continued to stay. And Jack often woke at night to find her absent. He was too young to tell the time, but it seemed to him that it was very late at night for anyone to be having dinner in the dining room. So where was Alice on those nights? Was she giving a free tattoo to the hotel manager?

They were lucky to meet the accountant. Jack would soon wonder if, in every town, his mother needed to meet someone in order for them to be saved. It was a little anticlimactic to be rescued by an
accountant,
especially after encountering such a hero as the littlest soldier. Naturally, not knowing he was an accountant, Jack and his mom spotted him in the Grand at breakfast.

Torsten Lindberg was his name, and he was so thin that he seemed in need of more than a meal. But breakfast was a huge event for him, as it was for Jack and Alice. They’d noticed him
not
because he looked like a potential tattoo client, but because he had heaped on his plate a platter-size serving of herring—Jack and Alice hated herring—and Lindberg was making his way through the fishy mound with remarkable relish. With no thought of asking this tall, lugubrious-looking man if he had a tattoo or wanted one, Jack and his mother watched him eat, spellbound by his appetite. They couldn’t help but wonder if the breakfast buffet at the Grand was
his
only complete meal of the day, too. At least in his appetite, if not in his taste for herring, he seemed a kindred soul.

Probably they were staring; that would explain why Torsten Lindberg began to stare at them. He said later that he couldn’t help but notice how much
they
were eating—just not the herring. As a shrewd accountant, he might have guessed that they were trying to keep their expenses down.

Jack had carefully removed the mushrooms from his three-egg omelet; he’d saved them for his mom. She’d finished her crêpes and had saved her melon balls for him. Lindberg plowed on, devouring his archipelago of herring.

Whoever thinks accountants are penny-pinchers and emotional misers, not to mention joyless in the presence of children, never met Torsten Lindberg. When his great meal was finished—before Jack and Alice were through with their breakfast, because they were still scouting the café for potential tattoo clients—Lindberg paused at their table and smiled benevolently at Jack. He said something in Swedish, and the boy looked to his mom for help.

“I’m sorry—he speaks only English,” Alice said.

“Excellent!” Lindberg cried, as if English-speaking children were in special need of cheering up. “Have you ever seen a fish swim without water?” he asked Jack.

“No,” the boy replied.

While his dress was formal—a dark-blue suit and necktie—his manner was that of a clown. Lindberg may have looked like a man attending a funeral—worse, like a skeleton dressed for an overlong coffin—but in presenting himself to a child, he took on the magical promise of a circus performer.

Mr. Lindberg removed his suit jacket, which he handed to Alice—both politely and presumptuously, as if she were his wife. He ceremoniously unbuttoned one sleeve of his white dress shirt and rolled it up above his elbow. On his forearm was the aforementioned fish without water; actually, it was an excellent tattoo, and the fish looked very much as if it belonged there. The fish’s head curled around Lindberg’s wrist, the tail extending to the bend at his elbow; the tattoo covered most of his forearm. It was almost certainly of Japanese origin, though not a carp. The colors alternated between an iridescent blue and a vibrant yellow, blending to an iridescent green, which turned to midnight black and Shanghai red. As Torsten Lindberg tightened the muscles of his forearm, and slightly rotated his wrist and lower arm, the fish began to swim—undulating in a downward spiral, like a fantail diving for the palm of Lindberg’s hand.

“Well, now you have,” Mr. Lindberg said to Jack, who looked at his mother.

“That’s a pretty good tattoo,” she told Lindberg, “but I’ll bet it’s no Doc Forest.”

He replied calmly, but without hesitation: “It would be awkward to show you my Doc Forest in a public place.”

“You know Doc Forest!” Alice said.

“Of course. I thought
you
did!”

“I only know his work,” Alice answered.

“You obviously know something about tattoos!” Lindberg said, with mounting excitement.

“Put your fish away,” Alice told him. “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (In retrospect, it disappointed Jack that he and his mom never learned the Swedish for “Put your fish away.”)

They took Torsten Lindberg to their hotel room, where Alice showed him her flash and set up her outlining machine. The latter action was premature, as it turned out. Torsten Lindberg was a connoisseur; he wouldn’t get any tattoo on the spot.

First of all, he insisted on showing Alice his other tattoos—including the ones on his bum. “Not around Jack,” Alice said, but he assured her that the tattoos were safe for children to see.

It was no doubt the crack in Lindberg’s ass that Jack’s mom hadn’t wanted him to see. But a thin man’s bum is only a mild shock, and Lindberg had nothing more offensive than an eyeball on the left-side cheek and a pair of pursed lips on the right. The eye appeared to be glancing sideways at the crack in his scrawny ass, and the lips looked like a kiss that had been newly planted there—when the lipstick was still wet.

“Very nice,” Alice said, in a way that let Mr. Lindberg know she disapproved of his display. He quickly pulled up his pants.

But he had other tattoos—in fact, many. The public life of an accountant is generally conducted in clothes. Possibly none of Mr. Lindberg’s business associates knew that he was tattooed—certainly not that he had an eyeball on his ass! He also had a Tattoo Ole, which Alice recognized right away; it was Ole’s naked lady with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. There was something a little different about this naked lady, however. (Jack couldn’t tell what was different about it, because his mother wouldn’t let him have a closer look.) And Torsten Lindberg had a Tattoo Peter from Amsterdam and a Herbert Hoffmann from Hamburg as well. But even among this august company, it was the Doc Forest that most impressed Alice.

On Mr. Lindberg’s narrow, sunken chest was a tall clipper ship in full sail—a three-masted type with a fast hull and a lofty rig. Under its bow, a sea monster was cresting. The serpent’s head was as big as the ship’s mainsail; the beast rose out of the sea on the port side of the bow, but the tip of its tail broke water off the starboard side of the stern. The doomed ship was clearly no match for this monster.

Alice announced that Doc Forest had to have been a sailor. In her view, the sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg’s chest was better than that
HOMEWARD BOUND
vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow. Torsten Lindberg knew where Doc Forest lived—he promised to take Jack and Alice to meet him. And the following day Lindberg would make up his mind about what kind of tattoo to get from Alice.

“I am inclining toward a
personalized
version of your Rose of Jericho,” he confessed.

“Every tattooed man should have one,” Alice told him.

Mr. Lindberg didn’t seem convinced. He was a worrier; it was the worrying, more than his metabolism, that kept him thin. He was worried about Alice’s situation at the Grand, and about Jack’s well-being in particular.

“Even in the Swedish winter, a boy must have exercise!” Did Jack know how to skate? Lindberg asked Alice.

Learning to skate had not been part of Jack’s Canadian experience, Alice informed him.

Torsten Lindberg knew the remedy for that. His wife skated every morning on Lake Mälaren. She would teach Jack!

If Alice was at all alarmed at how readily Mr. Lindberg offered his wife’s skating services, she didn’t say—not that Jack would have heard what his mother said. The boy was in the bathroom. He had a stomachache, having eaten too much for breakfast. He missed the entire skating conversation. By the time Jack came out of the bathroom, his winter exercise had been arranged for him.

And it didn’t strike the four-year-old as odd that his mother spoke of Lindberg’s wife as if she’d already met the woman. “She’s as robust as Lindberg is lean,” Jack’s mom told him. “She could keep a beer hall singing with her relentless good cheer.”

Alice further explained to Jack that Mrs. Lindberg had no desire to be tattooed herself, although she liked them well enough on Lindberg. A big, broad-shouldered woman who wore a sweater capable of containing two women the size of Alice, Mrs. Lindberg took Jack skating on Lake Mälaren as her husband had promised. Jack noted that Agneta Lindberg seemed to prefer her maiden name, which was Nilsson.