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

names. It didn’t seem very
likely.
    The records of Displaced Persons were
incomplete at best and were scattered all over the Western
Occupation Zones into the bargain. They also had the disadvantage
of being more or less voluntary. It had been easy enough to get
everyone’s name and city of origin in 1945, when these people were
all still pretty startled to discover themselves alive and were
completely dependent on the occupying armies for just day-to-day
survival, and some of them, hoping to make contact again with their
families, had continued to keep a current address on file. But if
finally they had given up hope that there was anyone left from home
to look for them, or if for some reason they didn’t want to be
found—and if Becker had been telling the truth and his Colonel
Hagemann was looking for her as well, it wasn’t so unreasonable
that Esther Rosensaft might just decide she wanted to stay
lost—then they just dropped from sight.
    Right now, however, Christiansen would settle
for some evidence that, as advertised, Esther Rosensaft had lived
through the war. If he could just establish that, then there might
be other ways of digging her out.
    A car went by on the street, a prewar sedan,
dark blue or black under its winter dirtiness. It had a tendency to
grind between second and third gears. There was a man on the back
seat trying not to be seen as he watched Christiansen through the
rear window. His arm was extended along the top of the backrest and
he was pressed so deeply into the corner that his head must have
been touching the doorpost. That made the third time today.
    It wasn’t a bad choice for a surveillance car
if you discounted the rattle, and a little oil probably would have
fixed that. But people had learned to live with their infirmities
since 1939—probably they didn’t even hear it anymore. So much the
worse for them.
    Christiansen didn’t try to decide who was
trailing him around town. That was one of those questions which had
a way of answering themselves after a while, and a couple of
shadowy figures in an old roadster didn’t provide many clues. If
they were the police, which was possible, they didn’t present any
problem because Christiansen hadn’t broken any laws except the
statutes against murder, which hardly even counted these days, and
if they were friends of Colonel Hagemann, which was also possible,
that only meant he was getting close enough to make the Great Man
nervous. That Hagemann would eventually try to have him put out of
his misery was something he took so completely for granted that he
had almost ceased to worry about it. Almost.
    He had spent the whole morning looking for a
“Rosensaft” on one of the hundreds of lists that were kept in no
particular order in tiles of everything from transportation
vouchers to military police reports. He hadn’t found one. Perhaps
General von Goltz hadn’t been quite so successful in ensuring her
safety as Becker had imagined.
    He had tried every variation in spelling he
could think of: “Rosenzap” and “Rothensapf” and “Roterschatt” and
even “Saft, Rosa.” It wasn’t as if clerks with probably only a
crash-course knowledge of German didn’t make mistakes like that—but
everywhere he drew a blank. Perhaps, if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed
them, there might still be some record at Waldenburg, but that was
in the Russian Zone and they weren’t sharing any secrets. Finding
Esther Rosensaft was proving as difficult as finding her boyfriend
the Colonel. Perhaps he should just forget about this particular
hot tip and go back to tracking down Hagemann’s old
men-at-arms.
    But there was still Linz and Vienna and
Stuttgart and—perish the thought—even Palestine before he ran out
of file folders to look through. He would be very scrupulous. The
nature of his task demanded it.
    On the eighth of June, 1945, the day after he
had formed part of the honor guard for King Haakon’s return to his
capital, Christiansen had