Read Online The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild - Free Book Online

surrounded by ruins. Only the church and the
Rathaus had survived total destruction; everything else had been
bulldozed. Life, however, was beginning to return to normal. Around
three sides men and women were doing a brisk business from stalls
and pushcarts. There were even a few tourists standing about to
watch the reconstruction of the clock tower. For almost the first
time since he had arrived yesterday morning from Nuremberg,
Christiansen had the sense that he was in a city instead of a
wasteland of shattered buildings.
    In five or six years, he thought to himself,
this will all be back the way it was. And that was all right. He
harbored no ill will toward the Germans. The score he had to settle
didn’t take on such grandiose proportions as that.
    “You can’t bring either of them back.” his
aunt had told him “Your father and mother at Kirstenstad, my son
Carl at Iwo Jima—the family has been thinned out enough by this
war. Let it rest, Inar. Men with nothing to lose are more dangerous
than all the armies in the world. Your parents wouldn’t have wanted
you to risk getting killed in this vendetta. You don’t owe this to
them.”
    “I think maybe I do.”
    Auntie Inger, who was almost his mother,
already getting old, her blond hair turning whiter almost from
month to month. To her the war had been like a natural disaster,
just something that had happened, terrible and guiltless. All she
wanted was to go back to the way things had been—or as close as
three deaths in the family would allow. After von Goltz’s arrest,
Christiansen had come home to the little house in White Plains
where he had grown to manhood, expecting to be understood.
    “This isn’t right, what you want to do. Even
if you succeed, you’ll never be the same again.”
    “I’ll never be the same again anyway.” He
smiled and got up from the overstuffed living room chair. He loved
his old Auntie, who had raised him up like her own son, but it had
been a mistake to come back here. The life he had lived within
these walls had nothing to do with him anymore. He was a stranger
now. It was time to leave.
    “I’ll keep in touch.”
    “No, don’t do that,” she had said, shaking
her head sadly. “I don’t want to wait for the letters to stop
coming. If you come back and the thing is finished, fine. If not,
then you will have died for me right here, now.”
    And that was how he had severed his last
contact with the past, so he would be free to settle his score. No,
he didn’t have anything against the Germans. He just wanted to kill
Egon Hagemann.
    He bought a plate of sausage from a
formidable gray-haired old woman with the neck and jowls of a
bulldog.
    “ Amerikanishes Geld, bitter?” she
asked, in a surprisingly sweet voice. Christiansen fished around in
his pocket until he found a fifty-cent piece and when she began to
make change for him he waved his hand and smiled. They were good
sausage, worth the money, and he too wasn’t interested in
collecting pocketfuls of the cheap little aluminum coins the new
German government in Bonn was trying to convince everybody were
legal tender. The woman offered him a fork, and he stood beside her
portable charcoal grill eating and watching the crowd.
    He had the uncomfortable feeling that
somewhere or other he had attracted somebody’s notice.
    It wasn’t much more than an impression, a
discordance so close to the limits of his senses that it would have
been the easiest thing to talk himself out of believing it was
there at all. He just felt edgy without knowing quite why.
    Back before the war, when he had been just a
kid in New York City with nothing more on his mind than learning
the Bach C-minor Courante and how to speak English like an
American, he used to walk the twenty-six blocks between his
boarding house and Juilliard twice a day, listening to the traffic
noises and trying to arrange them into sequences so they would
sound like twelve-tone or Haydn’s Creation or the corridor
outside