Until I Find You

Swedes come here to get tattooed.” Lars looked quickly at the Swede. “Isn’t that right?”

The Swede proceeded to pull up the left leg of his pants. “I got this in Stockholm,” he said.

There on his calf was quite a good tattoo—good enough to have been one of Tattoo Ole’s or Daughter Alice’s. A dagger with an ornate green-and-gold handle had been thrust through a rose; both the petals of the rose and the hilt of the dagger were edged with orange, and twisted around the rose and the dagger was a green-and- red snake. (Evidently the Swede was fond of serpents.)

Jack could tell by his mom’s expression that she admired the needlework; even Tattoo Ole agreed it was good. Ladies’ Man Madsen was speechless with envy, or perhaps he was imagining his near-certain future in the family fish business.

“Doc Forest did it,” the Swede said.

“What shop is he in?” Ole asked.

“I didn’t know Stockholm had a shop!” said Lars.

“He works out of his home,” the Swede reported.

Jack knew that Stockholm was not on their itinerary; it wasn’t on his mom’s list.

Alice was gingerly bandaging the boy with the sore ribs. He had wanted the Rose of Jericho on his rib cage so that the petals of the flower would move when he breathed.

“Promise me you won’t show this to your mother,” Alice said to the boy. “Or if you do, don’t tell her what it is. Make sure she doesn’t take a long look.”

“I promise,” the boy told her.

The old sailor was flexing his forearm, admiring how the contractions of his muscles moved the mermaid’s tail, which still needed to be colored in.

It was almost Christmas; the tattoo business was good. But the apparent news that William had escaped— to Stockholm, of all places—did little to lift Alice’s holiday spirits, or Jack’s.

And it was always dark when they left the shop on Nyhavn, even at four or five in the afternoon. Whatever time it was, the restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. By now Jack and Alice could distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. They could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for the game, and many of those Danish cheeses were strong enough to smell from a winter street.

For good luck, they always counted the ships moored along the canal. Perhaps because it was almost Christmastime, the lighted arch that stood over the statue in the square by the D’Angleterre seemed to them an abiding kind of protection; the hotel itself was decorated with lighted Christmas wreaths.

On the way to their chambermaids’ rooms, Jack and his mom often stopped for a Christmas beer. The beer was dark and sweet, but strong enough that Alice diluted Jack’s with water.

One of Alice’s clients at Tattoo Ole’s—a banker who had different denominations of foreign currency tattooed on his back and chest—told her that Christmas beer was good for children because it prevented nightmares. The boy had to admit that, since he’d been drinking it, the banker’s remedy for bad dreams seemed plausible: either he’d not had a nightmare in a while or he’d not had one he could remember.

In Jack’s dreams, he missed Lottie—how she had hugged him, without reservation, how they’d held their breath and felt their hearts beating chest-to-chest. One night at the D’Angleterre, Jack had tried to hug his mom that way. Alice had been impatient about holding her breath. Feeling the thump of her heart, which seemed to beat at a slower, more measured pace than Lottie’s, Jack said: “You must be alive, Mom.”

“Well, of course I am,” Alice replied, with more detectable impatience than she had demonstrated when he’d asked her to hold her breath. “You must be alive, too, Jackie—at least you were, the last time I looked.”

Without his knowing exactly how or when, she had already managed to extricate herself from the boy’s embrace.

The next day, before the sun was up—in Copenhagen, at that time of year, this could have been after eight o’clock in the morning—Jack’s mother took him to the Frederikshavn Citadel. “Kastellet,” the historic fortification was called. In addition to the soldiers’ barracks, there was the commandant’s house and the Citadel Church—the Kastelskirken, where William Burns had played.

Is there a boy who doesn’t love a fort? How exciting for Jack that his mom had brought him to a real one! He was more than happy to amuse himself, as Alice asked him to do.

“I would like to have some privacy when I speak to the organist,” was how she put it.

Jack was given the run of the place. His first discovery was the jail. It was behind the Citadel Church, where a prison aisle ran along the church wall; there were listening holes in the wall, to enable the prisoners to hear the church service without being seen. It was a disappointment to Jack that there were no prisoners—only empty cells.

The organist’s name was Anker Rasmussen—a typical Danish name—and according to Alice, he was both respectful and forthcoming. Jack later found it odd that the organist was in uniform, but his mother would explain that a soldier-musician was what one might expect to find in a citadel church.

During William’s brief apprenticeship to Rasmussen, the young man had mastered several Bach sonatas as well as Bach’s Praludium und Fuge in B Moll and his Klavierubung III. (Jack was impressed that his mom could remember the German names of the pieces his dad had learned to play.) William was quite the hand at Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel’s Messiah.

As for the seduced parishioner, the military man’s young wife, Jack’s mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn’t been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.

When Jack tired of the jail, he walked outside. It was freezing cold; the medium-gray daylight merely darkened the sky. While the boy was thrilled to see the soldiers marching about, he kept his distance from them and went to have a look at the moat.

The water around Kastellet was called the Kastelsgraven; to a four-year-old’s eyes, the moat was more of a pond or a small lake—and to Jack’s great surprise, the water was frozen. He’d been told in Tattoo Ole’s shop that the Nyhavn canal rarely froze, and that the Baltic Sea almost never froze; except in only the coldest weather, seawater didn’t freeze. What, then, was in the moat? It had to be freshwater, but Jack knew only that the water in the moat was frozen.

There are few wonders to a child that equal black ice. And how did the four-year-old know the water was frozen? Because the gulls and ducks were walking on it, and he didn’t think the birds were holy. Just to be sure, Jack found a small stone and threw it at them. The stone bounced across the ice. Only the gulls took flight. The ducks raced to the stone as if they thought it might be bread; then they waddled away from it. The gulls returned to the ice. Soon the ducks sat down, as if they were having a meeting, and the gulls walked disdainfully around them.

At times far away, at other times marching nearer, the soldiers tramped around and around. There was a wooden rampart near the frozen moat’s edge; it was like a thin wooden road with sloped sides. Jack easily climbed down it. The round-eyed staring of the gulls taunted him; the ducks just plain ignored him. When the boy stepped onto that black ice, he felt he had found something more mysterious than his missing father. He was walking on water; even the ducks began to watch him.

When Jack reached the middle of the moat, he heard what he thought was the organ in the Citadel Church— just some low notes, not what he would have called music. Maybe the organist was calling upon the notes to enhance a story he was telling Alice. But Jack had never heard notes so low on the scale. It wasn’t the organ. The Kastelsgraven itself was singing to the boy. The frozen pond was protesting his presence; the moat around the old fort had detected an intruder.

Before the ice cracked, it moaned—the cracks themselves were as loud as gunshots. A spiderweb blossomed at Jack’s feet. He heard the soldiers yelling before he felt the frigid water.

The boy’s head went under for only a second or two; his hands reached up and caught a shelf of ice above him. He rested his elbows on this shelf, but he hadn’t the strength to pull himself out of the water—nor would the shelf of ice have held his weight. All Jack could do was stay exactly where he was, half in and half out of the freezing moat.

The gulls and ducks were put to flight by the racket of the soldiers’ boots on the wooden rampart. The soldiers were shouting instructions in Danish; a bell in a barracks was ringing. The commotion had brought Alice