The Linz Tattoo (43 page)

“Was it Hagemann’s boys or the Spanish
police?” Hirsch asked. He seemed impatient, even angry, as he stood
by the dresser drinking coffee out of a tin cup. He was the only
man there still in his shirt sleeves.

“I don’t know—Spanish, I
guess. They called him ‘
Señor
.’”

“That doesn’t make them the police,” Faglin
noted calmly. As usual, he was sitting in a corner, as
inconspicuous as a piece of furniture. “Our friend might prefer to
use local talent for a job like this—it might create fewer problems
for him with the authorities.”

“And the logical extension of that reasoning
is that he would use the local police to cart off Mordecai. He’s
got that kind of drag. Didn’t he get them to decoy Itzhak out of
his friend’s club last night?”

It was Christiansen—huge, impassive as
granite. He glanced at Faglin and the two men exchanged a nod.

“The fact is, if the police don’t have him
we’ve got a real problem. We can’t make a move on Hagemann’s villa
in daylight—we can’t expect his patrols to be blind—and Mordecai
knows Esther’s part in the code. He and I are the only ones who do.
Hagemann can wring it out of him in an afternoon. He’s good at that
sort of thing. Our only chance is if Hagemann has a few qualms
about wearing thin his host country’s tolerance and he’s keeping
Mordecai in a Spanish jail cell. He can do what he likes in Syria,
but maybe not here.”

“Let’s hope you’re right. Then maybe we can
find out where Mordecai is being held and kill him before he has a
chance to talk.”

The silence that Hirsch had created seemed
to hold everything suspended, like amber. No one moved. No one even
appeared to live. Finally Christiansen reached into his shirt
pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes.

“Where did you learn to be such a
bloodthirsty little bastard?” he asked, almost as if he were
inquiring directions to the men’s room. His hands were busy
lighting the cigarette. He hardly seemed to notice Hirsch. “Murder
and apostasy—I thought those were the two great sins for a Jew:
Better to die than to deny God or man.”

“I’m not real big on the
Tradition. The Tradition is part of what got us Yids into
Auschwitz. But since when are you so heavy on the Jewish law? How
’bout it,
Christ
iansen?”

He put his stress on that first syllable of
the name, and a thin little smile tightened Hirsch’s mouth. He was
having a good time.

“We find him and we kill him,” he went on,
his voice strained and angry. “Believe me, Mordecai would
understand. “

“You do what you like, but I think maybe
I’ll just go looking for him on my own. I think you’d be wise,
however, not to get in my way, Hirsch.”

Everybody knew that Hirsch carried a small,
fiat automatic tucked into the waistband of his trousers. They all
waited to see if now his hand would slip down toward his belt. It
appeared, crazily enough, that it might actually come to that.

But it didn’t. He picked up his coffee cup
from where he had left it on top of the dresser, and the crisis
seemed to pass away.

Faglin stood up from his chair, looking
slightly embarrassed, as if someone had mentioned a family scandal.
He was only about a meter away from Hirsch. He gave the impression
he would have liked to reach out and touch him on the sleeve but
couldn’t quite muster the courage.

“Really, Jerry, I think maybe we should talk
about this. There’s room for compromise.”

“Yeah, Jerry. You know, maybe Inar—”

“You keep your mouth shut, Itzikel. You know
the rules.” Hirsch looked as if he was ready to hit someone.
“Mossad discipline—you know that goddamned well. With Mordecai
gone, I’m in command, and I give the orders.”

“You give any orders you like,” Christiansen
said suddenly. He rose from his seat, seeming to fill the room. His
voice was cold and quiet, like falling snow. “Just see to it you
don’t give any orders to me, pal, since I plan to make my own
arrangements. My understanding was with Mordecai. It still is.”

“You fucking
goyish
bastard! Who do
you think you are, you—”

He never had a chance to finish, because
Faglin’s fist caught him just under the floating ribs, causing the
wind to gush out of him in a noisy wheeze. Before Hirsch had a
chance to react, Faglin reached in under his belt and took out the
automatic, throwing it across the room to Christiansen, who caught
it with his left hand. Hirsch’s legs seemed ready to buckle under
him until Faglin put an arm around his back to hold him up. He
looked at Hirsch for a moment, as if to make sure he was really all
right, and then turned his gaze toward Christiansen. He was
smiling, but without much conviction.

“What was it you had in mind?”

. . . . .

“What is in your mind, Colonel?”

The smile on Faraj’s heavy, subtle face
betrayed a certain uneasiness. Faraj had not enjoyed last night’s
unscheduled performance at the Café Pícaro. Faraj was a weak and
pathetic creature, the product of a decaying race, who hated all
displays of violence, particularly public violence. The agile Herr
Christiansen had made a profound impression on him.

Hagemann took a sip of the ice water that
was an accompaniment to all his meals and sighed, wondering
whatever had possessed him to come back to the villa for lunch,
since he could so easily have avoided this kind of close
examination had he been content with a little wine and a plateful
of greasy meat in town.

But the fact was that he felt safer at the
villa. Christiansen had made an impression on him as well.

“Would it please you to go back to Damascus,
Faraj? Yes, I rather imagined it would.” He refolded his napkin and
set it down next to the plate in a way his Spanish servant
understood to mean that he was finished. As the dishes were taken
away, he studied Faraj’s reactions—or, more accurately, his lack of
them—wondering to himself which would finally come to seem the more
dangerous, Christiansen with his pistols and his strangling cords
or this pudgy, effete little politician. Yes, of course it would
please Faraj to go back to Damascus.

“Might I know when your Excellency plans for
us to depart—and, if it is not too much to ask, why?”

“Because I have what I came here to obtain.
Or very nearly. I think you will agree that Leivick can be more
conveniently interrogated in Syria.”

“Will the young lady be accompanying
us?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are within reach of your
solution?”

“Yes.”

After lunch Hagemann took a walk around the
grounds. It was a chance to be alone, since Faraj liked to lie down
as soon as he had eaten—he said that exercise didn’t agree with
him. Hagemann was just as pleased.

His mother would have
liked this place—the gentleman’s house overlooking the sea. She had
never wanted her son to be a soldier. She had never understood that
this was a decision taken not by him but by history.
“The war is over,”
she
had said.
“You can go on to the university
now, just as you always planned. You can study to be a
lawyer.”
So merely to please her, and
because he had felt himself adrift, he had begun to attend the
lectures in jurisprudence. The world was falling to pieces—what
conceivable difference could the law make?—but he had had nothing
else to do. And now the soldier’s life had brought him to a villa
overlooking the Mediterranean.

“
Stay away from those
men. What are they except hooligans?” “They are right, and they
will remake the world.” “What is so bad about the world as it
is?’“
How could he have expected that
good, simple woman to understand his answer?

Within six months she was dead; her heart
simply stopped beating. She had been Hagemann’s last attachment to
the orderly old world of his boyhood, and the day following her
funeral he resigned from the university to give himself over full
time to the Party.

And in the end nothing had turned out as
they expected, so perhaps his mother had not been so simple after
all.

He was tired—it was nothing more than that.
He had been living too long on nerve alone. But it would all be
over soon, and then there would be time to rest and think idle
thoughts. But not now.

He wanted to go over the plans in his mind,
looking for flaws. A perfect plan led to a perfect result. It was a
law of nature.

Except, of course, for the inevitable
imponderables. Leivick was now safely locked away in a cell at the
Civil Guard station, but Leivick most certainly had not come to
Burriana alone. A general must have his soldiers.

Leivick was a cunning old badger, content to
rest in his hole until the darkness came. Like Hagemann himself, he
would have others to deal with the uglier side of affairs. The
difficulty was that, aside from that boy, that little Jewish pimp
who had so conspicuously served as Esther’s “husband”—did she let
him sleep with her, the bitch?—all the rest of Leivick’s troops had
so far managed not to be detected.

Unless, of course, one could count
Christiansen. Could one? It was a distasteful idea. Christiansen
was of the right sort, an Aryan and a soldier. It was unpleasant to
think of him hunting with the Mossad. Nevertheless, it was a
possibility that could not be discounted.

Hagemann had seen the bodies of his men last
night. After the nightclub had been cleared the three corpses had
been lined up beside the bar, covered with tablecloths until the
ambulances came to carry them to the police morgue. Weichbrodt, the
idiot, had had most of his head shot away. Imagine rushing into the
office like that. It had served him right. And poor Ernst. It had
been several hours before he could be brought even to speak. They
had fed him straight gin by the tumblerful until he calmed down,
and it required a great deal to frighten Ernst.

Three men dead, and Hagemann could have been
among them except that Inar Christiansen had decided to wait. When
would he decide he had waited long enough?

Hagemann was tired of pretending not to be
frightened. He was glad he was alone, even if the cold, strangely
impersonal terror washed through his chest like ice water. It was
almost a relief. Yes, of course he was afraid. Leivick had been
right—it was only reasonable to be afraid. Christiansen was going
to kill him, and had wanted him to know there was no safety.

The wind had dropped. In the afternoon
stillness, among the pine trees that fronted on the cliffs so that
one could look in any direction and hardly know whether one faced
the sea or the land, Hagemann walked along, listening to the
scraping sounds of his footsteps against the soft, sandy ground. A
dozen yards behind him followed a pair of bodyguards, rifles slung
casually over their shoulders as they kept pace. He had grown so
used to their constant presence that he couldn’t even have said
what they looked like.

Hagemann felt in the pocket of his overcoat
for one of the thin cigars he had taken to smoking lately, usually
after a large meal or before going to bed. In the SS and as a
serving officer in wartime, he had scorned all such petty vices,
but he was growing soft now, middle-aged and soft. He knew it
perfectly well. There seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He
put the cigar between his lips and lit it with a Ronson lighter,
made in America, that someone had given him—he couldn’t remember
who. He was turning into jelly, like Faraj. And, like Faraj, he had
learned to be wily. Perhaps it was a form of compensation. As
strength and courage and youth all deteriorated together, cunning
increased.

Five years ago he wouldn’t have been so
afraid of Christiansen. He would have welcomed the challenge. Five
years ago, death had seemed neither so terrible nor so near.

But five years filled with defeat, then
flight, then a slow gathering of strength had taught Hagemann to
think more, to look inside himself, and that sort of reflection was
no friend to the martial virtues. So now he smoked thin cigars and
worried about fat Arab politicians and was frightened of a man like
Christiansen.

Well, then, perhaps that meant that he would
survive them all. Warriors should die young, their ideals intact,
and since he had been denied that fate perhaps he would be spared
to live to a ripe age, having buried all his enemies.

There was a house outside of Damascus,
beside a grove of date palms, belonging to a lieutenant colonel
posted to the war ministry, a paper soldier from an influential
family, the sort of man who was easily moved aside. Hagemann had
had his eye on the house for a long time. It would serve as his
place of honorable retirement after he had provided the Syrians
with the means of annihilating their Zionist enemies. In their
gratitude they would give it to him. They would give him whatever
he wanted.

He would live there with Esther. Now that
Leivick was a prisoner, her part in this affair was merely
incidental. At the right moment, she would do as she was told and
that would be all that would be required of her. She would not have
to be tortured for information—Leivick would serve very well in her
place. She would come through without a mark on her.

Would she consent to stay with him? At
first, perhaps not. He would not allow her consent to matter, not
at first. But Esther had always been a reasonable sort of girl. In
the end she would even come to forgive him. In the end she would
remain of her own free will.

Yes, he had missed her. He hadn’t realized
how badly, not until last night. And now, in another few hours, she
would be here, and they would never be parted again. She probably
hated him and, excepting his mother, he had never loved any woman,
but that was unimportant. Esther and he had no need to concern
themselves with love. Each of them found something in the other
without which they stood incomplete.