John Irving - Until I Find You

“Listen to this,” he remembered saying to Mrs. Oastler. “Tattoo Peter was born in Denmark. I never knew he was a Dane! He actually worked for Tattoo Ole before moving to Amsterdam.”

“So what?” Leslie had said.

“I never knew any of this!” Jack had cried. “He drove a Mercedes-Benz? I never saw it! He walked with a cane—I never saw the cane! I never saw him walk ! His wife was French, a Parisian singer ? People compared her to Edith Piaf!”

“I think Alice told me he stepped on a mine,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “That’s how he lost his leg.”

“But she never told me !” he’d shouted.

“She never told you fuck-all, Jack,” he remembered Leslie saying.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk in the falling rain, but he didn’t go inside. He didn’t know why he was procrastinating. The kindergarten next to the Old Church looked fairly new. There were more prostitutes than he remembered on the Oudekerksplein, but the kindergarten children hadn’t been there when Jack and his mom had traipsed through the district.

Jack had no difficulty finding the police station on the Warmoesstraat, but he didn’t go inside the station, either. He wasn’t ready to talk to Nico Oudejans, assuming Nico was still a policeman and Jack could find him.

Jack walked on the Warmoesstraat in the direction of the Dam Square, pausing at the corner of the Sint Annenstraat—exactly where he and his mom and Saskia and Els had encountered Jacob Bril, who had the Lord’s Prayer tattooed on his chest. There was a tattoo of Lazarus leaving his grave on Bril’s stomach. There were some things you didn’t forget, no matter how young you were when you saw them.

“In the Lord’s eyes, you are the company you keep!” Jacob Bril had told Alice.

“What would you know about the Lord’s eyes?” Els had asked him. Or so Jack remembered—if any of it was true!

The Tattoo Museum on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal—maybe a minute’s walk from Jack’s hotel—was a warm and cozy place with more paraphernalia and memorabilia from the tattoo world than Jack had seen in any other tattoo parlor. He met Henk Schiffmacher at noon, when the museum opened, and Henk showed him around. Henk’s tattoo shop was also there—Hanky Panky’s House of Pain, as it was called. Whoever Eddie was, in the new Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.

Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker’s beard and long hair. A female death’s head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.

He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. ( Irezumi means tattoo in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.

While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy’s neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing “Rock of Ages” on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he’d heard his mother say. “A place where every desire is forgiven,” Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn’t Jack’s mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or had he? (Jack thought that he couldn’t forgive her.)

“Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?” Jack asked Hanky Panky.

“Nico? He’s still the best cop in the district,” Henk said. “Nico’s a frigging brigadier. ”

On Jacob Bril’s bony back was his favorite tattoo, the Ascension—Christ departing this world in the company of angels. As Jack walked through the red-light district to the Warmoesstraat police station, he remembered Bril’s version of Heaven as a dark and cloudy place. It had stopped raining, but the cobblestones were greasy underfoot and the sky—like Jacob Bril’s Heaven—remained dark and cloudy.

Jack Burns heard his name a few more times. Wherever they were from, some of the women in the windows and doorways were movie-goers—or they had been moviegoers in a previous life.

Jack crossed the bridge over the canal by the Old Church and came upon the small, foul-smelling pissoir—a one-man urinal—where he remembered peeing as a child. It had been dark; his mom had stood outside the barrier while he peed. She kept telling him to hurry up. She probably didn’t want to be seen standing alone in the area of the Oude-kerksplein at night. Jack could hear drunken young men singing as he peed; they must have been singing in English or he wouldn’t have remembered some of the words in their song.

They were English football fans, his mother would tell him later. “They’re the worst,” she’d said. There’d been a football game, which the English team had either lost or won; it seemed to make no difference, in regard to how their fans behaved in the red-light district. They were “filthy louts,” Jack remembered Saskia saying; filthy louts wasn’t in his mom’s vocabulary.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk once more, on the side where the new kindergarten shared the street with the whores. Someone was following him; a man had fallen into step behind him at the corner of the Stoofsteeg, almost as soon as Jack had left the Tattoo Museum and the House of Pain. When Jack slowed down, the man slowed down, too—and when Jack sped up, the man picked up his pace again.

A fan, Jack thought. He hated it when they followed him. If they came up and said, “Hi, I like your movies,” and then shook his hand, and went on their way—well, that was fine. But the followers really irritated Jack; they were usually women.

Not this one. He was a tough-looking guy with a dirty-blond beard, wearing running shoes and a windbreaker; his hands were shoved into the pockets of the windbreaker as he walked, his shoulders thrust forward as if it were still raining or he was cold. A guy in his fifties, maybe—late forties, anyway. The man didn’t make the slightest effort to pretend he wasn’t following Jack; it was as if he were daring Jack to turn around and face him.

Jack doubted that the bastard would have the balls to follow him into the police station, so he just kept walking.

Jack was one small street away from the Warmoesstraat when a brown-skinned prostitute stepped out of her doorway in her underwear and high heels; she almost touched him. “Hey, Jack—I’ve seen you in the movies, ” she said. She had a Spanish-sounding accent; she might have been Dominican or Colombian.

When she saw the man who was trailing Jack, she immediately put up her hands as if the man were pointing a gun at her; she quickly stepped back inside her doorway. That was when Jack knew that the man following him was a cop. Clearly the Dominican or Colombian woman knew who the cop was; she didn’t want any trouble with him.

Jack stopped walking and turned to face the policeman, whose eyes were still a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone was the small, identifying scar like the letter L. The beard had fooled Jack. When the cop had been in his late twenties or early thirties, when Jack had first met him, Nico Oudejans didn’t have a beard. Jack had always thought that Nico was a nice guy; he’d been very nice to Jack when the boy was four. Now, in his fifties, Nico looked just plain tough.

“I’ve been expecting you, Jack. For a few years now, I’ve had my eye out for you. I keep telling the ladies,” Nico said, with a nod to the Dominican or Colombian prostitute, who was smiling in her doorway, “ ‘One day Jack Burns, the actor, will show up. Give me a call when you see him,’ I keep telling them. Well,” Nico said, shaking Jack’s hand, “I got half a dozen calls today. I knew at least one of the ladies had to be right.”