The Linz Tattoo by Nicholas Guild

before his
conscious mind took note of the music.
    No more than a wisp of sound, it floated
through he still corridor, hanging in the air like smoke. A cello,
full of melancholy dignity. Someone was playing the radio.
    And then suddenly the melody broke off in
middle of a phrase, and the phrase was repeated, shaped just a
little differently. It wasn’t a radio—one of the guests was playing
to himself, and not at all badly either.
    Leivick listened, hardly breathing,
entranced. The grandeur of the prelude, full of double stops and
quavering trills, gave way to a jolly, dancelike tune that
transformed itself, without so much as a pause for breath, into a
sinuous aria executed at blinding speed, the notes slipping eerily
into one another as if all played on a single string.
    I wonder how he manages it, Leivick thought.
And then it occurred to him that the music was coming from behind
Christiansen’s door. It had stopped even before he raised his hand
to knock.
    “Come in—it isn’t locked.”
    Leivick tried the knob, which turned easily
in his hand. Hotels always kept their doors locked, simply as a
matter of habit; one had to press the button on the mortise plate
or the door would lock automatically as soon as it had swung shut.
Therefore, he had been expected. He pushed the door open, but
didn’t cross the threshold. He would wait and see.
    What he saw was a man sitting in a chair—and,
yes, he was every bit as big as Faglin had claimed. His sleeves
were rolled up over arms matted with blond hair, and his left hand
held both the neck of the cello that rested against his knees and,
between the first and middle fingers, the bow. In his right hand
was a British army revolver of familiar pattern. It was pointed
straight at Leivick’s chest.
    “You play very beautifully, Mr. Christiansen.
Shall I come inside, or do you plan to shoot me from this
distance?”
    “I said, ‘Come in.’”
    With some misgivings, Leivick stepped forward
a few paces and allowed the door to close behind him. Christiansen
didn’t move; the pistol continued to line up on Leivick’s chest.
Nothing had changed, except that now he was firmly inside the trap.
He held on to his hat brim with both hands, as if to give assurance
of his good behavior.
    “Mr. Christiansen,” he said finally, “do you
suppose I could prevail upon you to put that thing away? If I had
meant you any harm I would hardly have come here alone.”
    “Are you alone?”
    Even sitting, Christiansen managed to convey
the impression of being extremely tall. There was something
intimidating about his very stillness—he hardly seemed even to be
breathing. The eyes in his hard, handsome face were as impassive as
ice.
    “Yes. I’m alone. Quite alone. Do you imagine,
Mr. Christiansen, that we would storm you in your hotel room?”
    “I haven’t any idea.”
    The muzzle of the pistol came up a fraction
of an inch, as if he were correcting his aim—now, Leivick
concluded, the bullet would probably catch him square in the
throat.
    “All I know is that suddenly you people are
crawling all over me. The kid I took this off of didn’t give the
impression he wanted my autograph.”
    Now the pistol wasn’t pointing at anything.
It was simply lying in the palm of his hand, an exhibit. He set it
down on a small table beside his chair.
    “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what I’ve done
that I’ve got a Palestinian Jew following me around with a gun in
his pocket.”
    “Perhaps you’d like to explain to us your
sudden interest in Displaced Persons.”
    “I asked first.”
    It was hot in the room. Leivick began
unbuttoning his overcoat. Finally he found himself a small, rather
ornate chair that had been hiding out of sight behind a dresser,
moved it to the center of the room, and sat down. The two men were
facing each other directly, across perhaps seven feet of rather
fanciful Persian carpet.
    “You were in Havana ten days ago,” he said,
as if stating a neutral fact. “You