Until I Find You

But Jack and Alice’s contempt could never measure up to that of Jacob Bril. Bril had a palpable scorn for the prostitutes and their customers. He was full of contempt for Jack and his mom, too. It was because she was an unwed mother and Jack was an illegitimate child, Alice told her son.

Bril also disapproved of Alice because she was a tattoo artist; he said that it was not a decent woman’s business to touch half-naked men. Bril himself would not tattoo a woman—except on her hand or forearm, or on her foot or ankle. Any higher up her leg was “too high,” he said; any other part of a woman’s body was “too intimate.”

Women seeking religious tattoos on either too high or too intimate a part of their bodies were told to see Daughter Alice, although Bril disapproved of her giving religious tattoos. She was not religious enough to do them sincerely, he said.

Alice did a small, pretty cross with roses, which young women liked to tuck in their cleavage—as if the cross were an overlong necklace with an invisible chain. She did a Christ on the Cross that was shoulder-blade-size. (It lacked some of the agony and much of the blood of Bril’s dying Jesus.) And she did Our Savior’s head in His crown of thorns, usually on an upper arm or thigh, which Bril criticized because he found her Christ’s expression “too ecstatic.”

“Maybe my Jesus is already entering Heaven,” Alice explained.

Jacob Bril dismissed this with a violent gesture. He drew his forearm across his chest, as if he were about to give Alice a whack with the back of his bony hand.

“Not in my shop, Bril,” Tattoo Peter told him.

“Not around Jack.” (Alice’s usual refrain.)

Bril looked at the two of them with a venom he normally reserved for the prostitutes.

Jack and Alice never saw Jacob Bril leave Tattoo Peter’s, which he did every Saturday at midnight, when the red-light district was overflowing in the relentless pursuit of its principal enterprise—every girl was working. Jack would wonder later how long it took Bril to get back to the Krasnapolsky, passing every prostitute in every window and doorway.

Did his pace never slow? Was there ever a woman who made him stop walking? Did the fire and brimstone only leave his eyes when Bril was asleep, or did Hell burn even more brightly in his dreams?

Many Saturdays, because Alice disliked sharing Tattoo Peter’s otherwise warm shop with Jacob Bril, Peter would propose that she take her talents over to the Zeedijk and see if she could teach a thing or two to Theo Rademaker at The Red Dragon.

“Poor Tattoo Theo,” Peter would say. “I’ll bet he could use a break today. Or a lesson from Daughter Alice.”

The much-maligned Tattoo Theo was not in the category of a scratcher; he simply had the misfortune to share the red-light district with a tattoo artist as good as Tattoo Peter. Rademaker was by no means as bad as Sami Salo or Trond Halvorsen—it was judgment that he lacked, Alice said, not ability. And Alice liked Tattoo Theo’s young apprentice, Robbie de Wit. It was well known in the neighborhood that Robbie doted on her.

Jack and Alice skipped Jacob Bril’s company whenever they could. (Bril hardly missed them; he wanted them gone.) De Rode Draak was a welcome change of scenery for Jack and his mom—lots of tourists went there, especially on a Saturday. Some of those Saturdays, if Tattoo Peter had more clients than he and Jacob Bril could handle, Peter was generous enough to send his customers to The Red Dragon—cautioning them to ask for Daughter Alice.

Rademaker must have been grateful for the extra business, though it may have caused him some inner pain to hear a new client request Alice. Tattoo Theo liked Alice, and she liked him. For Jack and his mother, their life had a pattern again; their first weeks in the red-light district were not unlike their happiest days in Copenhagen with Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen.

Like Lars, Robbie de Wit made an effort to win Alice’s affection by being nice to Jack. While Alice liked Robbie, that was as far as it went. She shared Robbie’s fondness for Bob Dylan; they both sang along with the Dylan songs that drowned out the sound of the tattoo machines in De Rode Draak. Rademaker liked Dylan, too. He called Dylan by his real name, which he always said in the German way—as it would turn out, incorrectly.

“Shall we listen again to der Zimmerman?” Tattoo Theo would say, winking at Jack, who was in charge of playing the old albums. (In German, one listens to den Zimmerman.)

Jack liked the wisp of whiskers on Robbie de Wit’s chin, which reminded him of Ladies’ Man Madsen’s efforts to grow a beard in the same place. Because Jack’s creche figures, including the Baby Jesus, still smelled like pot, he recognized the sweet scent of marijuana in Robbie’s hand-rolled cigarettes, but the boy didn’t keep count of how many times his mother might have taken a toke. She said it helped her to follow the tune when she sang along with Bob.

Rademaker had worked on a fishing boat one summer off the coast of Alaska; an “Eskimo tattooer” had given him the tattoo of the seal on his chest and the one of the Kodiak bear on his back.

Relatively speaking, Jack and his mother were happy—or so it seemed to Jack.

His mom sent another postcard to Mrs. Wicksteed. At the time, Jack didn’t know that Mrs. Wicksteed had sent them money; that they continued to stay in hotels above their means was, in part, Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea. She was a good Old Girl, all right. (Maybe Mrs. Wicksteed believed that a good hotel was as much a safeguard of Alice’s future as losing her Scottish accent.)

The postcard was of one of Amsterdam’s narrow canals; of course you couldn’t see the prostitutes in their windows or doorways in the picture. “Jack sends his love to Lottie,” Alice wrote. Jack wouldn’t remember if there was more to the message. He drew a smiling face next to Lottie’s name; there was just enough room beside the face for him to write the initial J.

“Lottie will know who it is,” his mom assured him.

Off to Toronto went the postcard with Jack’s happy face.

But what about that little boy whose capacity for consecutive memory, when he was three, was comparable to that of a nine-year-old? What had happened to Jack’s retention of detail and understanding of linear time, which, when he was four, were equal to an eleven-year-old’s?

Not in Amsterdam, where Jack imagined he had lived with his mother for a couple of months before they ever set foot in the Oude Kerk and heard that vast organ. In reality, of course, Alice wouldn’t have waited a week to go there.

The Oude Kerk, the Old Church in the center of the red-light district, was probably consecrated in 1306 by the Bishop of Utrecht and is the oldest building in Amsterdam. The church survived two great fires—the first in 1421, the second in 1452—and the altars were badly damaged in the iconoclastic fury of 1566. In 1578, when Amsterdam officially became a Protestant city, the Oude Kerk was stripped of its Roman Catholic decoration and renovated to suit the Protestant religious service. The pulpit dates from 1643, the choir screen from 1681. Rembrandt’s first wife is buried in the Old Church, and there are five tombs in commemoration of seventeenth- century Dutch sea heroes.

The organ, which Kari Vaara correctly called vast, is also old. It was built by Christian Vater of Hamburg, Germany, in 1726. It took Vater two years to build the huge and beautiful instrument of forty-three stops, which went immediately out of tune the moment more than one register was pulled. The organ’s failure was also vast—for eleven years, it was out of tune. Finally, a man named Muller was assigned the task of dismantling the Vater organ to investigate the problem. It took him five years to fix it.

Even so, the organ in the Oude Kerk continued to be out of tune most of the time; it is tuned before every concert because of the temperature in the old building—the Oude Kerk cannot be heated properly.

It was cold in the Old Church that day, and Jack and his mom sat on the organ bench with the junior organist—a dough-faced kid who was too young to shave. He was a child prodigy, apparently. Alice said she was told all about the youngster’s talent by the senior organist, Jacob Venderbos, who’d been too busy to see her. (Venderbos also played the organ at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, and at churches in Haarlem and Delft.) Alice got to talk to his fifteen-year-old apprentice instead.

The young genius’s name was Frans Donker, and he was as afraid of Alice as any boy that age could be. Like Andreas Breivik, he couldn’t look at her when he talked. As near as Jack could tell, what his mother learned from the frightened child prodigy was that Kari Vaara had been wrong to think that his father had been hired to play the organ in the Oude Kerk—he’d been hired only to keep it in tune. For this ongoing and demanding service, William was permitted to practice on the vast instrument. It was indeed a special organ, Frans Donker told Jack and Alice