“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 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.