and a man Jack assumed was the organist.
Alice was screaming hysterically. Jack worried that she would think this was all his father’s fault. In a way, it
Then Jack saw him, the littlest soldier. He’d not been among the first of the soldiers to arrive; maybe Anker Rasmussen had fetched him from one of the barracks. He wasn’t in uniform—only in his long underwear, as if he’d been asleep or was sick and had been convalescing. He was already shivering as he started out across the ice to Jack—inching his way, as Jack imagined all soldiers had been trained to do, on his elbows and his stomach. He dragged his rifle by its shoulder strap, which he clenched in his chattering teeth.
When the soldier had crawled to the hole Jack had made in the ice, he slid the rifle toward Jack—butt-end first. Jack was able to grasp the shoulder strap in both hands while the soldier took hold of the barrel at the bayonet-end and pulled the boy out of the water and across the ice to him.
Jack’s eyebrows were already frozen and he could feel the ice forming in his hair. When he was on the surface again, he tried to get to all fours, but the littlest soldier yelled at him.
“Stay on your stomach!” he shouted. That he spoke English didn’t surprise Jack; the surprise was that he didn’t have a soldier’s voice. To Jack, the soldier sounded like a fellow child—a boy, not yet a teenager.
As if Jack were a sled, he lay flat and let the littlest soldier pull him across the frozen moat to the rampart’s edge, where Alice was waiting. His mom hugged and kissed him—then she suddenly slapped him. It was the only time Jack Burns remembered his mother striking him, and the second she did so, she burst into tears. Without hesitation, he reached for her hand.
Jack was wrapped in blankets and carried to the commandant’s house, although he didn’t remember meeting the commandant. The littlest soldier himself found clothes for Jack. They were too big for him, but Jack was more surprised that they were civilian clothes—not a soldier’s uniform.
“Soldiers also have off-duty clothes, Jack,” his mom explained—not an easy concept for a four-year-old.
When Jack and his mother were leaving Kastellet, Alice kissed the littlest soldier good-bye; she had to bend down to do it. Jack saw him standing on his toes to meet her kiss halfway.
That was when Jack got the idea that his mom should offer his rescuer a free tattoo—surely soldiers, like sailors, were fond of tattoos. Alice seemed amused at the notion. She approached the littlest soldier again, this time bending down to whisper in his ear instead of kissing him. He was certainly excited by what she said; her offer clearly appealed to him.
It turned out that Jack and Alice had more reason to go to Stockholm than to meet the talented Doc Forest. Anker Rasmussen told Alice that the organist at the Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm, Erik Erling, had died three years ago. He’d been replaced by a brilliant twenty-four-year-old, Torvald Toren. Toren was rumored to be looking for an assistant.
Alice expressed surprise that William would seek a position as an assistant to an organist younger than he was. Anker Rasmussen took a different view: William was clever and talented enough to be a good organist; now was the time for him to travel, to play on different organs, to pick up what he could learn or steal from other organists. In Rasmussen’s opinion, it was not just the trouble with women that kept motivating William to move on.
Jack’s mother told him that she was disconcerted by Anker Rasmussen’s theories; she had fallen in love with William Burns because of how he played the organ, yet she’d not considered that the instrument itself had seduced him. Did William restlessly need to be around a bigger and better organ, or at least a different one? Was it in the tradition of the way a young girl can love horses? (No doubt it further disconcerted Alice to realize that William might have liked trading mentors as much as he liked trading women.)
Jack assumed they would be leaving for Stockholm right away, but his mother had other ideas. Through the Christmas holiday, there was much money to be made at Tattoo Ole’s. If a tattoo artist as good as Doc Forest was working out of his home in Stockholm, tattooing was barely legal there. Alice decided that it wouldn’t be easy for her to make money in Stockholm; she thought she should take advantage of the holiday season at Tattoo Ole’s before she and Jack continued their journey.
At Nyhavn 17, they said a prolonged good-bye. Jack didn’t remember posing for a photograph there, on the street in front of Tattoo Ole’s, but the sound of the camera shutter was overfamiliar to him. Obviously someone was snapping pictures.
Alice was so popular with the clients, many of them sailors on Christmas leave, that she worked until late at night. Ladies’ Man Madsen was less in demand. He often walked Jack to the D’Angleterre while Alice tattooed on.
Lars would sit on the bed in Jack’s room while the boy brushed his teeth; then the Ladies’ Man would tell Jack a story until Jack fell asleep. Madsen’s stories never kept Jack awake for long. They were self-pitying tales of Lars himself as a child. (Mostly misadventures with fish, which struck Jack as easily avoidable; yet these catastrophes were of immeasurable importance to Lars.)
While the boy slept in the narrower of the chambermaids’ rooms, which was divided from his mother’s bedroom by a bathroom with two sliding doors, Ladies’ Man Madsen read magazines on the toilet. Jack sometimes woke and saw Lars’s silhouette through the frosted glass of the bathroom door. Often he fell asleep on the toilet with his head on his knees, and Alice would have to wake him up when she came home.
At his request, Alice gave Lars a tattoo. He wanted a broken heart above his own heart, which he claimed was broken, too. Alice gave him a blushing-red heart, torn in half horizontally; the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name, but both Alice and Tattoo Ole urged Ladies’ Man Madsen against a name. The ripped-apart heart, all by itself, was evidence enough of his pain.
Lars, however, wanted Alice’s name. She refused. “Your heart’s not broken because of
“What I meant,” said Ladies’ Man Madsen, summoning an unexpected dignity, “was that I wanted your
“Ah—a
“Well, okay—that’s different,” Alice told Lars.
On the very white skin between the pieces of his torn heart, she needled her name in cursive.
For his thoughtful care of Jack, Alice was grateful to the Ladies’ Man. “There’s no charge,” she told him, as she bandaged his broken heart.
Jack didn’t know what gift his mom might have made to Ole. Perhaps there was no gift for Ole—not even Alice’s coveted Rose of Jericho, which Tattoo Ole much admired.
Their last night in Copenhagen, Ole closed the shop early and took them to dinner at a fancy restaurant on Nyhavn. There was an open fireplace and Jack had the rabbit.
“Jack, how can you eat Peter Cottontail?” his mom asked.
“Let him enjoy it,” Lars told her.
“You know what, Jack?” Tattoo Ole said. “That can’t be Peter Cottontail, because Danish rabbits don’t wear clothes.”
“They just get tattooed!” cried Ladies’ Man Madsen.
When no one was looking, Jack scrutinized the rabbit for tattoos but didn’t find any. The boy went on eating, but he must not have had enough Christmas beer.
That night, very late, he had a nightmare. He woke up naked and shivering. He had just fallen through the ice and drowned in the Kastelsgraven. More terrible, Jack was joined in death, at the bottom of the moat, by centuries of soldiers who had drowned there before him. The cold water had perfectly preserved them. Illogically, the littlest soldier was among the dead.
As always, the light in the bathroom had been left on—as a night-light for Jack. He slid open the two doors of frosted glass and entered his mother’s bedroom. Whenever he had a bad dream, he was permitted to crawl into bed with her.
But someone had beaten him to it! At the foot of his mom’s bed, which was as narrow as his own, he saw her upturned toes protruding from the bedcovers. Between her feet, Jack saw the soles of two more feet—these
