The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild Page A

Germany: February 26, 1948
    From the window of his hotel room, Inar
Christiansen could look out on an undulating sea of rubble. Here
and there part of a broken wall would rise a foot or so out of the
piles of shattered brick, like the crest of a wave, but mostly the
devastation was so complete that you might have imagined you were
looking at some harsh, stony landscape where no man had ever lived.
The bombing planes had done a pretty good job.
    But then there was the hotel itself, which
had come through without even a broken windowpane. The lobby was
filled with potted palms and red velvet love seats, and if you
ordered a drink a waiter in morning coat and white gloves would
bring it to you on a silver tray. Before the war, when it was still
safe, the place had been very popular with middle-level Nazis in
town for November Putsch anniversaries or a little patronage for
the wife’s brother—Party headquarters had been just a few streets
away. Now the paying guests all seemed to be the families of
American military officers. You hardly saw a German who wasn’t in
livery.
    That, at least, hadn’t changed. Germany was
still a country where you had to be wearing a uniform if you wanted
people to believe you weren’t just hanging around to see what you
could scrounge. That was why Christiansen had packed his army
greens.
    He had worn them only one other time since
demobilization, to watch General von Goltz hanged at Rebdorf. Now
he needed information, and information was always easier to obtain
if people imagined you had some official reason for wanting it.
    There were certain facts he had had to face
about himself, and one of them was that appearances were against
him. Big Nordic men weren’t terribly popular in Europe just at
present. Everyone had spent the last fifteen years listening to
Nazi propaganda about the Master Race, and they had a natural
tendency to jump to conclusions.
    It had happened to him before. “I’m looking
for information about possible survivors of the Waldenburg
concentration camp” says the blond-haired, blue-eyed civilian with
what is obviously a shrapnel scar across the back of his left hand,
and the little clerk at the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Office
is already thinking, Sure. You want to finish the job you
started on them there? Suddenly no one knows anything about
anyone.
    But in a Norwegian army uniform you were
Norwegian, and it was all right to be Norwegian. Why shouldn’t a
Norwegian be blond? What else should he be?
    When he had been hunting down Colonel
Hagemann’s loyal subordinates from the Fifth Brigade, he hadn’t
minded looking like someone who still carried his NSDAP membership
card next to his heart—it had worked to his advantage, more than
once. But he wasn’t trying to win over old Party boys anymore; he
wanted to find one of the victims now, if she was still alive, and
he needed to appear trustworthy to people who had spent the last
couple of years listening to horror stories. He would wear his
uniform.
    In the first few months after the war, while
everything was still a chaos, men and women who were fresh out of
Auschwitz and Mauthausen had been moving back and forth across
Germany in great unorganized herds. They would trudge along the
roads, from one Displaced Persons camp to another, hoping for word
of some relative or friend who might also have survived. They would
hitch rides with soldiers when they could, or else just drag
themselves over the ground, sometimes so sick and frail that you
wondered they could manage a hundred yards, and they would leave
little penciled messages on bulletin boards or the sides of
buildings: “If anyone knows the whereabouts of Cyla Rawicz, wife
of Dr. Henryk Rawicz of Biesko, Poland, please leave word with the
Jewish Committee in Linz.” It was all most of them had.
    Europe had been a madhouse in those days.
Nobody was where he belonged, and the DPs. for the most part, had
little enough reason to want to return to the places