“I’ve been saving this for you, Jack,” she said. The boy was too surprised to speak. His mother reproved him for not thanking the woman properly.
Most weekday mornings, when Jack and his mom walked through the red-light district on their way to Tattoo Peter’s, not many women were working—they went to work earlier on the weekends. At night, of course, every red light was on and the district was teeming; sometimes the prostitutes who knew and liked Jack and Alice were too busy to say their names, or so much as nod in their direction.
Even before the spring came, when the weather was still cool, the women were more often in their doorways than their windows; they liked to talk to one another. They wore high heels and short skirts, and blouses or sweaters with low necklines, but at least they wore clothes. And their friendliness—to Jack, if not always to his mother—enabled Alice to mislead her son about the nature of prostitution.
In those days, one saw only men visiting the prostitutes; Jack observed that the men looked most unhappy to be seen doing so. And when the men left, they were always in a hurry, which stood in sharp contrast to how slowly they had walked in the district (and how many times they’d passed a particular prostitute’s doorway or window) before they finally made up their minds about which woman to visit.
Alice explained that this was because they were unhappy and indecisive men to begin with. A prostitute, Jack’s mom told him, was a woman who gave advice to men who had difficulty understanding women in general—or one woman, such as a wife, in particular. The reason the men looked ashamed of themselves was that they knew they should really be having such an important and personal conversation with their wives or girlfriends, but they were inexplicably unable or unwilling to do so. They were “blocked,” Alice said. Women were a mystery to them; they could pour out their hearts only to strangers, for a price.
Jack didn’t know who paid whom, until his mom explained that the men did the paying. It was an awful job to have to listen to these miserable men, his mother said. She clearly took pity on the prostitutes, so Jack did, too; she had contempt for the men, so he also had contempt for them.
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 crèche 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.)