Until I Find You

ever seen a fish swim without water?” he asked Jack.

“No,” the boy replied.

While his dress was formal—a dark-blue suit and necktie—his manner was that of a clown. Lindberg may have looked like a man attending a funeral—worse, like a skeleton dressed for an overlong coffin—but in presenting himself to a child, he took on the magical promise of a circus performer.

Mr. Lindberg removed his suit jacket, which he handed to Alice—both politely and presumptuously, as if she were his wife. He ceremoniously unbuttoned one sleeve of his white dress shirt and rolled it up above his elbow. On his forearm was the aforementioned fish without water; actually, it was an excellent tattoo, and the fish looked very much as if it belonged there. The fish’s head curled around Lindberg’s wrist, the tail extending to the bend at his elbow; the tattoo covered most of his forearm. It was almost certainly of Japanese origin, though not a carp. The colors alternated between an iridescent blue and a vibrant yellow, blending to an iridescent green, which turned to midnight black and Shanghai red. As Torsten Lindberg tightened the muscles of his forearm, and slightly rotated his wrist and lower arm, the fish began to swim—undulating in a downward spiral, like a fantail diving for the palm of Lindberg’s hand.

“Well, now you have,” Mr. Lindberg said to Jack, who looked at his mother.

“That’s a pretty good tattoo,” she told Lindberg, “but I’ll bet it’s no Doc Forest.”

He replied calmly, but without hesitation: “It would be awkward to show you my Doc Forest in a public place.”

“You know Doc Forest!” Alice said.

“Of course. I thought you did!”

“I only know his work,” Alice answered.

“You obviously know something about tattoos!” Lindberg said, with mounting excitement.

“Put your fish away,” Alice told him. “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (In retrospect, it disappointed Jack that he and his mom never learned the Swedish for “Put your fish away.”)

They took Torsten Lindberg to their hotel room, where Alice showed him her flash and set up her outlining machine. The latter action was premature, as it turned out. Torsten Lindberg was a connoisseur; he wouldn’t get any tattoo on the spot.

First of all, he insisted on showing Alice his other tattoos—including the ones on his bum. “Not around Jack,” Alice said, but he assured her that the tattoos were safe for children to see.

It was no doubt the crack in Lindberg’s ass that Jack’s mom hadn’t wanted him to see. But a thin man’s bum is only a mild shock, and Lindberg had nothing more offensive than an eyeball on the left-side cheek and a pair of pursed lips on the right. The eye appeared to be glancing sideways at the crack in his scrawny ass, and the lips looked like a kiss that had been newly planted there—when the lipstick was still wet.

“Very nice,” Alice said, in a way that let Mr. Lindberg know she disapproved of his display. He quickly pulled up his pants.

But he had other tattoos—in fact, many. The public life of an accountant is generally conducted in clothes. Possibly none of Mr. Lindberg’s business associates knew that he was tattooed—certainly not that he had an eyeball on his ass! He also had a Tattoo Ole, which Alice recognized right away; it was Ole’s naked lady with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. There was something a little different about this naked lady, however. (Jack couldn’t tell what was different about it, because his mother wouldn’t let him have a closer look.) And Torsten Lindberg had a Tattoo Peter from Amsterdam and a Herbert Hoffmann from Hamburg as well. But even among this august company, it was the Doc Forest that most impressed Alice.

On Mr. Lindberg’s narrow, sunken chest was a tall clipper ship in full sail—a three-masted type with a fast hull and a lofty rig. Under its bow, a sea monster was cresting. The serpent’s head was as big as the ship’s mainsail; the beast rose out of the sea on the port side of the bow, but the tip of its tail broke water off the starboard side of the stern. The doomed ship was clearly no match for this monster.

Alice announced that Doc Forest had to have been a sailor. In her view, the sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg’s chest was better than that HOMEWARD BOUND vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow. Torsten Lindberg knew where Doc Forest lived—he promised to take Jack and Alice to meet him. And the following day Lindberg would make up his mind about what kind of tattoo to get from Alice.

“I am inclining toward a personalized version of your Rose of Jericho,” he confessed.

“Every tattooed man should have one,” Alice told him.

Mr. Lindberg didn’t seem convinced. He was a worrier; it was the worrying, more than his metabolism, that kept him thin. He was worried about Alice’s situation at the Grand, and about Jack’s well-being in particular.

“Even in the Swedish winter, a boy must have exercise!” Did Jack know how to skate? Lindberg asked Alice.

Learning to skate had not been part of Jack’s Canadian experience, Alice informed him.

Torsten Lindberg knew the remedy for that. His wife skated every morning on Lake Malaren. She would teach Jack!

If Alice was at all alarmed at how readily Mr. Lindberg offered his wife’s skating services, she didn’t say—not that Jack would have heard what his mother said. The boy was in the bathroom. He had a stomachache, having eaten too much for breakfast. He missed the entire skating conversation. By the time Jack came out of the bathroom, his winter exercise had been arranged for him.

And it didn’t strike the four-year-old as odd that his mother spoke of Lindberg’s wife as if she’d already met the woman. “She’s as robust as Lindberg is lean,” Jack’s mom told him. “She could keep a beer hall singing with her relentless good cheer.”

Alice further explained to Jack that Mrs. Lindberg had no desire to be tattooed herself, although she liked them well enough on Lindberg. A big, broad-shouldered woman who wore a sweater capable of containing two women the size of Alice, Mrs. Lindberg took Jack skating on Lake Malaren as her husband had promised. Jack noted that Agneta Lindberg seemed to prefer her maiden name, which was Nilsson.

“Who wouldn’t agree that Agneta goes better with Nilsson than it does with Lindberg?” Alice said to her son, putting an end to that conversation.

What most impressed Jack was how well the large woman could skate, but that Agneta became so quickly out of breath bothered him. For someone who skated every morning, she got winded in a hurry.

The personalized Rose of Jericho that Torsten Lindberg had selected might be a three-day job—given his limited availability. The outlining would take nearly four hours; perhaps the shading of the cleverly concealed labia would require a fourth day.

It was unfortunate that Jack’s mother didn’t let him take a close look at the finished tattoo, for had the boy seen what Lindberg meant by a personalized version of Alice’s Rose of Jericho, he might have realized that there were other things that were not as they seemed.

Lake Malaren is a large freshwater lake that discharges itself into the Baltic Sea right next to the Old Town at a place called Slussen. When it doesn’t snow too much, the lake is perfect for skating. Despite his experience with the thin ice on the Kastelsgraven, Jack had no fear of falling into Lake Malaren. He knew that if the ice could support Agneta, it could easily hold him. And when they skated, she often took his hand in hers—as assertively as Lottie had. While Jack learned how to stop and to turn, and even how to skate backward, Alice completed the Rose of Jericho on Torsten Lindberg’s right shoulder blade. It was the shoulder that he turned toward his wife when they were sleeping, Jack’s mom told him. When Agneta opened her eyes upon her husband in the morning, there would be a vagina hiding in a flower. When he was older, Jack would wonder why a woman would want to wake up to that—but tattoos were not for everybody. Without the Torsten Lindbergs of this world, Jack’s mother wouldn’t have become such a successful Daughter Alice.

When Mr. Lindberg’s Rose of Jericho was finished, he took Jack and Alice to meet Doc Forest. Where Doc lived was no place special, but for the walls of flash in the small room where he’d set up his tattoo practice. Alice much admired Doc. He was a compact man with forearms like Popeye’s, a neatly trimmed mustache, and long sideburns. He was sandy-haired with bright, twinkling eyes, and he had indeed been a sailor. He’d gotten his first tattoo in Amsterdam from Tattoo Peter.

Doc regretted that he couldn’t hire Alice as his apprentice, but it wasn’t easy for him to find enough work to support himself; in fact, he was looking for a benefactor, someone to help him finance a first shop.

As for The Music Man—because, of course, William Burns had found Doc Forest—this time it had been either