Free The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild Page B

had had to
face the prospect of a man with a gun waiting to kill him. That was
what the war had been all about. And that had been the daily
possibility ever since he had set himself the task of squaring
things for Kirstenstad.
    Still, nothing prevented him from admitting
to himself that he didn’t like it. The war had taught him the
stupidity of imagining that you weren’t afraid.
    The Marienplatz was no more dangerous than
any other hundred or so meters between here and the hotel. He kept
going, resisting the temptation to slow down, listening all the
time for any sound that kept pace with his own footsteps.
    When he reached the other side, he ducked
into a shadow and waited.
    There was nothing. He had imagined the whole
business—the car with the bad gears, the man behind him, the whole
sorry spectacle. He was getting paranoid; it happened to people
with bad consciences. He felt in his shirt pocket for his pack of
cigarettes.
    He already had the book of matches in his
hand when he saw a gray shape, a man in a dark overcoat, come onto
the plaza, hesitate for an instant, and then go to the left and
disappear around the side of the Rathaus. Apparently Christiansen
wasn’t the only one with a bad conscience.
    So. That much he hadn’t imagined—he was being
followed. Nice people with no malice in their hearts didn’t find it
necessary to be so furtive. The son of a bitch was taking the long
way around because he couldn’t work up the nerve to expose himself.
He liked shadows, this boy did. He liked narrow streets and the
shelter of crowds. He wasn’t going to walk straight across the
Marienplatz, not all by himself, not on your life.
    Christiansen lit his cigarette and glanced
around him, wondering what he was supposed to do. The enemy had no
face—he could be anyone. He probably had a gun, and Christiansen
wasn’t carrying anything except the coiled length of catgut that
went with him everywhere. The odds were decidedly uneven.
    It was necessary to find out what this one
looked like. He would have to be forced into showing himself.
    There was a half destroyed row of shop
buildings across the street from Christiansen’s hotel. A few had
survived the war without enough damage to force them into closing
down, but most were just shells, walls of dead brick that broke off
in a ragged line in the middle of the window frames, waiting to be
bulldozed. One of them had been a cinema and still contained the
ruin of a second story where doubtless the manager had had his
office. There was a small window facing out onto the street where
perhaps he had stood and watched the patrons queuing up to buy
tickets. Christiansen would wait there to see who came to wait for
him.
    Which meant he had to get there first. He
threw his cigarette down on the paving stones—they were a nasty
habit he had picked up during the war, and he kept intending to
give them up—and broke into a run. He had a head start. He wouldn’t
try to be devious—he would leave that to the man behind him. That
was the great disadvantage to shadowing people; you always had to
take the long way around and you couldn’t afford to crowd.
Christiansen didn’t have those problems. He intended to be there
waiting when the other guy started to panic that he had dropped out
on him.
    The distance was probably a shade over half a
mile. Christiansen made it in under four minutes and slowed down
only as he crossed the Odeonplatz and rounded the corner to his
hotel. The front door to the cinema was padlocked, but that meant
remarkably little since the whole back of the building was blown
out. He climbed over the rubble and up the rickety stairway that
led to the deserted office. No one had troubled to lock that
door.
    The little room was hardly fifteen feet
square. There were pieces of the ceiling on the floor and very
little else. Except for a calendar on one wall—giving the date as
August 22, 1944—and an empty packing case by the little window,
everything had been taken