Until I Find You

"What things?" Jack asked him.

Bimbo exhaled softly--so did the boy getting the broken-heart tattoo. The boy's lips were dry and parted; he was gritting his teeth. "Well, you should talk to someone who really knew her," Bimbo told Jack. "I just know what I heard."

"Ole had another apprentice--at the same time my mom worked here," Jack said.

"Sure--I know him," Bimbo said.

" 'Ladies' Man,' Ole called him. We also called him 'Ladies' Man Lars' or 'Ladies' Man Madsen,' " Jack said.

"You mean the Fish Man," Bimbo corrected him. "He's no Ladies' Man anymore. He's in the fish business--not that there's anything wrong with that."

Jack remembered that the Madsen family's fish business was not an enterprise the Ladies' Man longed to join. Jack recalled how Lars had rinsed his hair with fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Kirsten had been the tattoo on Ladies' Man Madsen's left ankle, the one entwined with hearts and thorns; in Jack's cover-up, he'd left Lars's left ankle with a confused bouquet. (It looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden--a shrub of body parts.)

"So Lars went back to the fish business?" Jack asked.

"I wouldn't have let him tattoo me," Bimbo said. "Not even the shading."

"My mom tattooed him," Jack told Bimbo. A blushing-red heart, as Jack recalled; where the heart was torn in two, the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name. There'd been some dispute about it, but Jack's mom had given Lars her signature on the white skin between the pieces of his torn heart--her very own Daughter Alice.

Jack began to describe the tattoo to Bimbo, but Bimbo cut him off. "I know the tattoo," the old maritimer said. "I covered up the Daughter Alice part."

So what were the things Alice did that were hard to love? Clearly Fish Man Madsen knew something about them; it seemed that the Ladies' Man had stopped loving Alice for some pretty good reason.

Bimbo said, "Tattoo Ole told me, 'If Jack comes back, tell him not to be too angry.' "

Jack thanked Bimbo for telling him this; Bimbo was also nice enough to interrupt his tattoo-in-progress to draw Jack a little map. Where they were on Nyhavn wasn't far from the Fiskehuset Hojbro--the fish shop where Lars Madsen worked, at Hojbro Plads 19. There was a statue of Bishop Absalon in the square, which was close to the Christiansborg Slot--the castle now occupied by the Danish Parliament. (Bishop Absalon was the founder of Copenhagen.) Jack could actually see the old castle from the fish market, Bimbo told him. According to Bimbo, the area was quite a popular meeting place nowadays--cafes and restaurants all around.

Jack almost forgot to show Bimbo the photographs, but he remembered as he was leaving. "Have a look at these," Jack said, handing Bimbo the two photos. "Does the tattoo look familiar?"

"I would know Tattoo Ole's work anywhere," Bimbo said, handing the photos back. "Ole told me he tattooed your mom." That was all the verification Jack needed.

Almost everything about the little shop seemed unchanged; even the radio was playing, if not the same radio. But that wasn't the way Bimbo saw things. As Jack was reaching for the door, Bimbo said: "It's all different now. In the late sixties and early seventies, you could recognize everyone's work. Your work was a kind of a signature. But not anymore; there are too many scratchers." Jack nodded. (He'd heard his mom say this--all the maritime tattooers said it.) "Twenty years ago," Bimbo said, "we had two ships a day in here. Now there's one a day," he said, as if that defined absolutely everything that was different.

"Thank you again," Jack told him.

It was a wet, windy afternoon. The restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. Jack could still distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. He could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for

the game, and those strong Danish cheeses. But he couldn't identify the restaurant where Ole and the Ladies' Man had taken him and his mom for their farewell dinner in Copenhagen. There'd been an open fireplace, and Jack thought he'd had the rabbit.

A place called Cap Horn at Nyhavn 21 looked vaguely familiar, but Jack didn't go inside. He wasn't hungry, and he couldn't wait to find Fish Man Madsen. Like Bimbo--even more than Bimbo, Jack imagined--the Ladies' Man was sure to be expecting him. And if Lars Madsen had covered up the Daughter Alice on his broken heart, he knew something Jack didn't know, and it must have hurt him.

Ladies' Man Madsen was still blond and blue-eyed; he had the same gap-toothed smile and busted nose, too. Jack was happy to see that Lars had lost the pathetic facial hair and had put on a little weight. The Fish Man was pushing fifty, but he looked younger. It seemed that the fish business had agreed with him, despite his earlier apprehensions--as if Alice's rejection had served Lars better than he'd expected, and his failure in the tattoo world had somehow preserved his innocence.

The Ladies' Man was married now; he and his wife had three kids. "You remember Elise?" he asked Jack, sheepishly.

"I remember covering up her name," Jack said.

Elise was the name he'd covered up on Lars's right ankle; she had formerly been attached to a chain-link fence, which Jack had mangled with his signature sprig of holly. (The result had called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration--"anti-Christmas propaganda," Ole had called it.)

"Well, she came back, Jack," Ladies' Man Madsen said, smiling. "You couldn't cover Elise up for good."

Although the rain had stopped, it was still too damp and windy to sit outside at the sidewalk tables, but the view across the wet cobblestones--the gray castle, now the Parliament building--was just fine from the fish shop.

"Sometimes you were my babysitter," Jack began.

"I thought she was working late, Jack. I didn't know she was seeing the kid--I swear."