Free The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild

borrowed a car from a friend and had
driven north to Kirstenstad. He knew all about what had happened
there; intelligence on the incident had been very complete, and he
had even managed to interview a couple of the survivors after they
were smuggled over to England. He just wanted to have a look for
himself.
    The only part of his parents’ house one could
see from a distance was a piece of broken chimney. Otherwise, there
was only the doorstep, upon which his father and mother had died,
and the outline of the exterior wall. Even the cellar was filled in
with rubble, and grass grew where his mother had had her sitting
room.
    Everywhere else it was just the same. Nobody
lived in Kirstenstad now. Nobody could. Nobody ever would
again.
    Christiansen had stopped his car at the ruins
of the post office—in a tiny hamlet like Kirstenstad, only a
crossroads in the middle of farmlands, the post office was a kind
of boundary, a line drawn in the dirt to say “here is where we
begin”—and walked the rest of the way, listening to his boot soles
crunch against the gravel roadbed. He kept thinking, “All of the
people who lived here are dead now. It’s all gone.” He hadn’t
really believed it could have happened, not until that moment, as
he looked at the weeds bowing gracefully in the wind where the
blacksmith’s house had been, where Madame Koht, the rector’s widow,
had taught him to read music and to play the wooden flute, where
the store had stood that had been successively a bakery, a
haberdasher’s, and a second-hand bookshop before standing idle for
the last two years prior to his departure for America. He hadn’t
really believed it, but he believed it now. As he stood on the
threshold of his home, where the snows of three winters had cleaned
away the traces of his parents’ blood, something seemed to freeze
shut inside him. He turned around and started walking back to the
car, faster and faster, until he was nearly running. It seemed as
if he couldn’t breathe until he got away.
    A week later, when he knew what he had to do,
he wrote a letter to the King asking to be allowed to resign his
commission. There was no difficulty, since he was officially
invalided anyway, and he didn’t want to be anybody’s agent now
except his own. He was going to find General von Goltz.
    “You’ll end up just like all the other
vigilantes,” a friend had told him. Nils Rynning was his brother
officer, his roommate for the two years prior to Normandy, and the
only person to whom he had confided his intentions. Nils had pale,
almost whitish hair and no taste for revenge. For him, the war was
over.
    “They aren’t masters of Europe anymore,
remember? They’re on the run. I Just want to give them something to
run from.”
    Captain Rynning, who still wore his army
greens and had spent every day since liberation taking advantage of
the patriotic fervor of Oslo’s female inhabitants, leaned across
the table toward him and frowned. He was a thin, wiry man, given to
sudden movements that those who didn’t know him might have ascribed
to nerves. They would have been mistaken. Captain Rynning had made
thirty-six crossings as a commando and had taken part in the
Finnmark operation. Captain Rynning didn’t have any nerves.
    “Yes,” he said, tapping rapidly at the rim of
his glass with the nail of his middle finger, as if the sound it
made fascinated him. “We have driven the dog back into its hole,
where it will lick its wounds and whine. Perhaps, eventually, it
will even die there. But still it would be just as well not to
stretch one’s arms down into the darkness after it. Its jaws are
still filled with perfectly serviceable teeth.”
    Of course. Everyone he knew offered the same
warning, as if it had never occurred to Christiansen that the men
who had razed Kirstenstad still knew how to defend themselves.
    Which brought him back to the problem of the
muddy roadster.
    . . . . .
    Christiansen ground out his cigarette against
the