Until I Find You by John Irving Read Free Book Online

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 He’d been replaced by a brilliant twenty-four-year-old, Torvald Torén. Torén 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