Free The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild Page A

shattered brick staircase and, without bothering to look
around, started back to his table in the record room. If these
people who were keeping such careful track of his movements were
Hagemann’s men, there was little enough he could do about it. Let
them roam about the streets waiting for him to come out again—it
would do them no harm to spend the rest of the afternoon growing
restless and apprehensive. He would know how to deal with them when
the moment came.
    Upon his return he discovered that the tables
were less crowded. The lawyers were gone and those few souls left,
the dogged and determined remnant, were turning the pages of the
files with a melancholy fatalism, as if they had lost all real
expectation of finding whatever names they were looking for.
    And they were probably right. By a quarter
after four, Christiansen had satisfied himself that Esther
Rosensaft had never registered with the United Nations office in
Munich. There was nothing left to do except to return to his
hotel.
    The U.N. building had a back entrance, but
there seemed no good reason why his shadows should have it pointed
out to them that they had been detected. They would merely find
themselves another car or, if they had the resources, put a
different team on him. He went down the stairs into the bleak
winter sun and started back the way he had come.
    Sure enough, within four blocks the roadster
had pulled up behind him and driven past. Christiansen could hear
the rattle of the gearbox as it shot ahead. He was careful not to
look after it.
    What did they want? To kill him probably, but
then what were they waiting for? And why suddenly now?
    Had Becker been one too many for them? It
seemed unlikely—he was a small fish. Had they picked up on him
already in Nuremberg? In Havana?
    There was a string quartet playing in the
lounge that evening; it was a regular Wednesday feature at the
hotel, something straight out of Edwardian times. The notice on the
bulletin board had mentioned Debussy—obviously the management was
making a concerted effort to let bygones be bygones—and
Christiansen had busted his tail on that piece for his first group
recital at Juilliard. So he had rather thought that after dinner he
would carry his coffee with him and join the eight or ten other
people who usually put in an appearance at these sorts of affairs,
to have a listen and see if the fourth movement was really the
bitch he remembered. He could use the distraction.
    But first he had to make it back in one
more-or-less contiguous piece.
    Because, you see, the car had dropped back
and there was a man on foot behind him now. Either they entertained
some suspicions that he had tumbled to them and had decided on that
account on a change in tactics, or they were moving in for the
kill. It didn’t matter—Christiansen had made up his mind it was
time to force the issue with these jokers, so if they weren’t ready
to go to extremes now they would be soon enough. One can’t allow
oneself to be followed all over Europe by such people. Eventually
they would start to get in the way.
    By the time he reached the Marienplatz the
sun had already disappeared behind the half-ruined Rathaus, and
with it had gone the tourists and the hucksters and even the
police. The pushcarts had vanished and the wooden doors of the
stalls were locked tight. There was nothing left but the emptiness
and the ruins and the shadowed darkness. As he walked across that
vast, hollow plaza, listening to the echoes of his footfalls
against the paving stones, Christiansen was painfully aware how
easy it would have been for someone with a rifle, or even a
decently accurate pistol, to. . .
    Or perhaps they were waiting. Doubtless they
knew he was on his way back to the hotel—they could anticipate his
route. Perhaps they would catch him in some narrow sidewalk, step
out from behind the corner of a building, and then, when they were
close enough to make quite sure. . .
    But this wasn’t the first time he