Until I Find You

boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.

The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing—or only what his mom told him had happened, what she wanted him to remember.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn’t going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.

“Who is Jimmy Stronach?” the young man asked Jack.

Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn’t mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.

The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn’t heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. (“Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!” Jack imagined.)

Possibly Jack Burns had been a more aware four-year-old than Marja-Liisa’s little boy, but Jack doubted it.

The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father’s neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.

Jack opened the hotel-room door for them—hoping the husband wouldn’t give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.

As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: “I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in this movie.” Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.

Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he’d not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa’s son was a normal four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night—not a moment of it.

Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa’s name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.

Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.

“I wish you’d told me the truth,” Jack said.

“The truth!” she cried. “What do you know about the truth?”

It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.

He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he’d already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking—he’d had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn’t really want to go to Amsterdam, but that’s where the plane was going.

30. The Deal

Jack’s second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Grand—a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.

The blatancy of the prostitutes—in their underwear, in their windows and doorways—made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were advice-givers. (As Jack himself had been persuaded.)

No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.

The women would beckon to Jack, and smile, but if their smiles weren’t instantly returned—if he just kept walking or wouldn’t meet their gaze—they quickly looked away. He heard his name a few times, only once as a question. “Jack Burns?” one of the prostitutes asked, as he passed by. He didn’t turn his head or otherwise respond. Usually the Jack Burns seemed to be part of a declarative sentence, but one he couldn’t understand—in Dutch, or in some other language that wasn’t English. (Not many of the women were Dutch.)

Jack walked as far north as the Zeedijk, just to see for himself that Tattoo Theo’s old shop, De Rode Draak—the departed Red Dragon—was indeed gone. He easily found the small St. Olofssteeg, but Tattoo Peter’s basement shop had moved many years ago to the Nieuwebrugsteeg, a nearby street. Jack saw the new tattoo parlor, but he didn’t go in. When he asked one of the prostitutes what she knew about the shop, she said that someone named Eddie was in charge—Tattoo Peter’s second son, Jack thought she said.

“Oh, you mean Eddie Funk,” someone else would later tell Jack, suggesting that the Eddie in the new shop wasn’t actually related to Tattoo Peter. But what did it matter? Whoever Eddie was, he couldn’t help Jack.

Tattoo Peter—Eddie’s father or not—had died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1984. Or so Jack had read in an old tattoo magazine when he and Leslie Oastler were cleaning out Daughter Alice in Toronto.

“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