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

the practice rooms, where, if you stopped to notice, little
wisps of what everyone was playing would squeeze out under the
doorways and blend together into a chaotic but somehow strangely
integrated and comforting symphony. It was a kind of game that had
something to do with the scribbled-over sheets of music paper he
kept in his desk, with those first hesitant steps toward learning
how to write something that didn’t sound like a bad parody of
Brahms, and also with learning to be in this strange city, so far
from home, and to think of it as his own place.
    Anyway, he had come to recognize, on some
level or other, when the harmony had been broken. Sometimes, for no
reason he could have explained to anyone, he would know that
something was wrong, turn around, and see a fistfight starting
under the shadow of a restaurant awning, or a woman lying on the
sidewalk where she had fainted of sunstroke. Once, when some drunk
in a taxicab had come lurching right up over the curb at him, it
had probably saved his life.
    He had listened even harder all during the
war, and it had saved his life more than just once.
    And now, in the Year of our Lord nineteen
hundred and forty-eight, standing in the Marienplatz, eating a
sausage amidst the ruins of conquered Germany seven years and ten
months after the whole wonderful experience of his student days in
New York had suddenly become as remote and unreal as the court life
of ninth-century Japan, Inar Christiansen, late of the Juilliard
Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Norwegian Army, and the human race,
was wondering where he had heard the sinister little grace note
that quavered out its warning.
    Well, he decided, all things would be
revealed at the proper time.
    . . . . .
    The man at the United Nations office was very
cordial, asked no probing questions, and conducted Christiansen
back to a file room where the case histories of several thousand
Displaced Persons filled up shelf after shelf of file boxes. There
were six or seven other people searching through the same material,
and tables had been set aside for the sleek, complacent-looking
lawyers who were researching reparations claims and the anxious men
and women who still, after all this time, were trying to track down
the mother or husband or daughter they fancied might still be alive
somewhere. This office, and all the other places just like it
Christiansen had been to, seemed haunted by ghosts.
    He dropped his hat on the table in front of
an empty chair and started in. It was going to be a long day.
    Just after noon he broke off for a while and
went around the corner to a tavern where, for the equivalent of
about thirty cents, you could buy a glass of beer and a plate of
stew made with stolen U.S. Army Spam. The walls were whitewashed
and decorated with posters for soccer matches and bicycle races,
and most of the other men there were wearing work clothes. The
patroness was about fifty, with a big bosom and reddish hair cut
long in the style of American bobby soxers; the metal bracelets
around her wrists tinkled with every movement. She seemed to know
everybody, even Christiansen, whom she had never seen before in her
life.
    Christiansen took his plate of stew and
looked around for a quiet corner where he could sit down and eat
it. His fellow patrons had stared at him for a few sullen seconds
when he came in, as if they were prepared to take offense at having
lost the war, and then lost interest.
    When he was finished he went outside into the
fresh air for a cigarette. There was a vacant lot in the next block
where the rubble had been cleared away enough to allow the grass to
grow, and some children were playing a noisy and incomprehensible
game that was rather like hockey except that as far as Christiansen
could make out, there was no ball. He watched for a while, sitting
on part of a ruined brick staircase that led up to nothing, nursing
his cigarette and wondering if he was ever going to get anywhere
checking file folders full of