"How do you know what it feels like?" the girl asked. When she stood up, she was so tall that Jack barely came to her waist.
"Better put a little moisturizer on it," he told her.
She bent over him, as if she were going to kiss him again. Jack clamped his lips tight together and held his breath. He must have been trembling, because Ingrid put her big hands on his shoulders and said: "Don't be afraid--I'm not going to hurt you." Then, instead of kissing him, she whispered in his ear: "Sibelius."
"What?"
"Tell your mom he said, 'Sibelius.' It's all he thinks about. I mean going there," she added.
She opened the door to the hall, just a crack. She peered out as if she had a recent history of being careful about how she left hotel rooms.
"Sibelius?" Jack said, testing the word. (He thought it must be Norwegian.)
"I'm only telling you because of you, not her," Ingrid Moe said. "Tell your mom."
Jack watched her walk down the hall. From behind, she didn't look like a child; she walked like a woman.
Back in the hotel room, the boy cleaned up the little paper cups of pigment. He made sure the caps on the glycerine and alcohol and witch hazel were tight. He put away the bandages. On a paper towel, Jack laid out the needles from the two tattoo machines--what his mom called the "Jonesy roundback," which she used for outlining, and the Rodgers, which she used for shading. Jack knew his mother would want to clean the needles.
When Alice finally came out of the bathroom, she couldn't hide the fact that she'd been crying. While Jack had always thought of his mother as a beautiful woman--and the way most men looked at her did nothing to discourage his prejudice--she was perhaps undone to have tattooed the breast and golden skin of a baby-faced girl as young and pretty as Ingrid Moe.
"That girl is a heart-stopper, Jack," was all she said.
"She said, 'Sibelius,' " Jack told his mom.
"What?"
"Sibelius."
At first the word was as puzzling to Alice as it had been to Jack, but she kept thinking about it. "Maybe it's where he's gone," the boy guessed. "Where we can find him."
Alice shook her head. Jack took this to mean that Sibelius was another city not on their itinerary; he didn't even know what country it was in.
"Where is it?" Jack asked his mother.
She shook her head again. "It's a he, not an it," she told him. "Sibelius is a composer--he's Finnish."
Jack thought she'd said, "He's finished"--meaning that the composer was dead.
"He's from Finland," Alice explained. "That means your father has gone to Helsinki, Jack."
Helsinki was definitely not on their itinerary. Jack didn't like the sound of it one bit. Not a city with Hell in it!
Before leaving for Finland, Alice wanted to have a word with Trond Halvorsen, the bad tattooer who'd given William an infection. Halvorsen was what Tattoo Ole would have called a "scratcher." He worked out of a ground-floor apartment in Gamlebyen, in the eastern part of Oslo; what passed for a tattoo shop was his kitchen.
Trond Halvorsen was an old sailor. He'd been tattooed "by hand" in Borneo, and--again without the benefit of a tattoo machine--in Japan. He had a Tattoo Jack (Tattoo Ole's teacher) on his right forearm and one of Ole's naked ladies on his left. He had some simply awful tattoos, mostly on his thighs and stomach; he'd done them on himself. "When I was learning," he said, s
howing Alice and Jack his myriad mistakes.
"Tell me about The Music Man," Alice began.
"I just gave him some notes he asked for," Halvorsen said. "I don't know what the music sounds like."
"I understand you gave him an infection, too," Alice said.
Trond Halvorsen smiled; he was missing both an upper and a lower canine. "Infections happen."
"Do you clean your needles?" Alice asked.