Until I Find You - Page 193

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 new Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.

Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker's beard and long hair. A female death's head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.

He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. (Irezumi means tattoo in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.

While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy's neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing "Rock of Ages" on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he'd heard his mother say. "A place where every desire is forgiven," Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn't Jack's mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or had he? (Jack thought that he couldn't forgive her.)

"Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?" Jack asked Hanky Panky.

"Nico? He's still the best cop in the district," Henk said. "Nico's a frigging brigadier."

On Jacob Bril's bony back was his favorite tattoo, the Ascension--Christ departing this world in the company of angels. As Jack walked through the red-light district to the Warmoesstraat police station, he remembered Bril's version of Heaven as a dark and cloudy place. It had stopped raining, but the cobblestones were greasy underfoot and the sky--like Jacob Bril's Heaven--remained dark and cloudy.

Jack Burns heard his name a few more times. Wherever they were from, some of the women in the windows and doorways were moviegoers--or they had been moviegoers in a previous life.

Jack crossed the bridge over the canal by the Old Church and came upon the small, foul-smelling pissoir--a one-man urinal--where he remembered peeing as a child. It had been dark; his mom had stood outside the barrier while he peed. She kept telling him to hurry up. She probably didn't want to be seen standing alone in the area of the Oudekerksplein at night. Jack could hear drunken young men singing as he peed; they must have been singing in English or he wouldn't have remembered some of the words in their song.

They were English football fans, his mother would tell him later. "They're the worst," she'd said. There'd been a football game, which the English team had either lost or won; it seemed to make no difference, in regard to how their fans behaved in the red-light district. They were "filthy louts," Jack remembered Saskia saying; filthy louts wasn't in his mom's vocabulary.

Jack walked around the Oude Kerk once more, on the side where the new kindergarten shared the street with the whores. Someone was following him; a man had fallen into step behind him at the corner of the Stoofsteeg, almost as soon as Jack had left the Tattoo Museum and the House of Pain. When Jack slowed down, the man slowed down, too--and when Jack sped up, the man picked up his pace again.

A fan, Jack thought. He hated it when they followed him. If they came up and said, "Hi, I like your movies," and then shook his hand, and went on their way--well, that was fine. But the followers really irritated Jack; they were usually women.

Not this one. He was a tough-looking guy with a dirty-blond beard, wearing running shoes and a windbreaker; his hands were shoved into the pockets of the windbreaker as he walked, his shoulders thrust forward as if it were still raining or he was cold. A guy in his fifties, maybe--late forties, anyway. The man didn't make the slightest effort to pretend he wasn't following Jack; it was as if he were daring Jack to turn around and face him.

Jack doubted that the bastard would have the balls to follow him into the police station, so he just kept walking.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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