Until I Find You

Ole had transferred some Christmas music by Bach to William’s right shoulder, where the tattoo lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. Either Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium or his Kanonische Veranderungen uber das Weihnachtslied, Alice guessed; she knew many of the pieces the young organist liked to play. And in the area of William’s kidneys, an especially painful place to be tattooed, Ole had reproduced a rather lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel.

“More Christmas music,” Ole said dismissively. Alice wondered if it came from the Christmas section in the Messiah.

Tattoo Ole was critical of two of William’s previous tattoos—not Aberdeen Bill’s work, of course. (Ole much admired the Easter hymn on The Music Man’s right thigh.) And there was what appeared to be a fragment of another hymn, which wrapped his left calf like a sock missing its foot. This one had words as well as music, and Ladies’ Man Madsen had been so struck by the tattoo that he even remembered the words. They are sung throughout the Anglican Communion: “Breathe on me, breath of God.”

Alice knew the rest. It sounded more like a chant than a hymn, but she called it a hymn, which she said was simply a prayer put to music. (She had sung it to Jack; she’d even practiced it with William.) By both Ole’s and Lars’s high esteem of the breath-of-God tattoo, Alice surmised this would have been Charlie Snow’s or Sailor Jerry’s work; her old friends had spared her the details of the tattoos they’d given William in Halifax.

Lars was less critical of The Music Man’s two bad tattoos than Tattoo Ole was, but the Ladies’ Man agreed that the needlework was not impressive. There was more music on William’s left hip, but the tattooer had not anticipated how the bending of William’s waist would scrunch some of the notes together.

On the slim evidence of this description, Alice decided he’d been to see Beachcomber Bill in Toronto— although she later admitted that the Chinaman was also capable of such a miscalculation. The second mistake, where some notes were lost from view because they curled around the underarm side of William’s right biceps, could have been committed by either of those men.

From Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, Jack and his mom had a pretty good idea of The Music Man’s body-in-progress. He was an ink addict, all right—a collector, as Aberdeen Bill had predicted.

“But what about his music?” Alice asked.

“What about it?” Tattoo Ole replied.

“He must be playing the organ somewhere,” Alice said. “I assume he has a job.”

Jack Burns remembered the silence with a fair amount of accuracy, if not the conversation that followed. For one thing, it was never what you would call quiet in Tattoo Ole’s shop. The radio was always tuned to a popular-music station. And at the moment Jack’s mom raised the issue of his dad’s whereabouts, which (even at four) Jack recognized as the centermost issue of her life, there were three tattoo machines in operation.

Tattoo Ole was working on one of his naked ladies—a mermaid, without the inverted eyebrow that Alice disapproved of. The recipient, an old sailor, appeared to be asleep or dead; he lay unmoving while Ole outlined the scales on the mermaid’s tail. (It was a fishtail with a woman’s hips, which Alice also disapproved of.)

Ladies’ Man Madsen was also hard at work, shading one of Ole’s sea serpents on a Swedish man. It must have been a constrictor, because it was squeezing a bursting heart.

Alice was applying the finishing touches to her signature Rose of Jericho. This one was a beauty that half covered the heart side of a boy’s rib cage. To Alice, he looked too young to know what a Rose of Jericho was. Jack was much too young to know what one was. The way it had been explained to him was that a Rose of Jericho was a rose with something hidden inside it.

“A rose with a mystery,” his mother had told him.

Concealed in the petals of the rose are those of that other flower; you can discern a vagina in a Rose of Jericho, but only if you know what you are looking for. As Jack would one day learn, the harder to spot the vagina, the better the tattoo. (And in a good Rose of Jericho, when you do locate the vagina, it really pops out at you.)

Three tattoo machines make quite a racket, and the boy getting the Rose of Jericho had been audibly crying for some time. Alice had warned him that the pain of a tattoo on the rib cage radiates all the way to the shoulder.

But when Alice said, “I assume he has a job,” Jack thought the electricity had failed; even the radio fell quiet.

How can three tattooers, without a word or signal to one another, take their feet off their respective foot switches simultaneously? Nevertheless, the three machines stopped; the flow of ink and pain was halted. The comatose sailor opened his eyes and looked at the unfinished mermaid on his reddening forearm. The Swede getting the color in his heart-squeezing serpent—over his heart, of all places—gave Lars a questioning look. The weeping boy held his breath. Was his Rose of Jericho, not to mention his agony, finally over?

Only the radio started up again. (Even in Danish, Jack recognized the particular Christmas carol.) Since no one had answered her, Alice repeated her inquiry. “He must be playing the organ somewhere,” she said again. “I assume he has a job.”

“He had one,” Tattoo Ole said.

With that change of tense, Jack wondered if they had once more arrived too late to catch his dad, but the four-year-old might have misunderstood; he was surprised that his mother didn’t betray her disappointment. Her foot was back on the switch and she went on about her business, hiding the rose-red labia among the flower petals. The Rose-of-Jericho boy commenced to moan; the old sailor, who was patient about acquiring his mermaid, closed his eyes; Lars, forever engaged in coloring-in, saw to it that the serpent’s grip on the heart over the Swede’s own heart appeared to tighten.

The walls of Tattoo Ole’s shop were covered with stencils and hand-painted drawings. These possible tattoos were called “flash.” Jack occupied himself by staring at a wall of flash while Ole elaborated on the absconding-father story. (This was one of those moments when the boy’s attention wandered.)

“He was playing the organ at Kastelskirken,” Ole said. “Mind you, he wasn’t the head guy.”

“The assistant organist, I suppose,” Alice ventured.

“Like an apprentice,” Lars offered.

“Yes, but he was good,” Tattoo Ole said. “I admit I never heard him play, but I heard he was quite the player.”

“Quite the ladies’ man, too, we heard …” Lars began.

“Not around Jack,” Alice told him.

The area of flash on the wall that had caught Jack’s eye was what they called Man’s Ruin. They were all tattoos on the theme of various self-destructions peculiar to men—gambling, drink, and women. The boy liked best the one of a martini glass with a woman’s breast, just the nipple, protruding from the drink like an olive; or the one that similarly portrayed a woman’s bare bum. In both cases, floating in the glass—like ice cubes—were a pair of dice.

Jack’s mother did a swell Man’s Ruin, a little different from these. In her version, a naked woman—seen, naturally, from the back side—is drinking from a half-full bottle of wine. The dice are in the palm of the woman’s hand.

“So there was some trouble at Kastelskirken?” Alice asked.

Ladies’ Man Madsen nodded enviously.

“Not around Jack,” was Tattoo Ole’s answer.

“I see,” Alice said.

“Not a choirgirl,” Ole offered. “She was one of the parishioners.”

“A military man’s young wife,” said Ladies’ Man Lars, but Jack must have misheard him; the boy was still staring, open-mouthed, at the woman’s nipple in the martini glass, as dumbstruck as if he were watching television. He didn’t see his mother give Lars a not-around-Jack look.

“So he’s left town?” Alice asked.

“You should inquire at the church,” Ole told her.

“I don’t suppose you heard where he went,” Alice said.

“I heard Stockholm, but I don’t know,” Ole answered.

Lars, who had finished with the Swede’s sea serpent, said: “He won’t get a decent tattoo in Stockholm. The