The Second Son: A Novel (12 page)

It was like climbing through sifted dust. The heat smelled of the sea, but it was only a tease. Worse was the sand that kicked up from the path and clung to the skin like dying ants. Mueller seemed to be enjoying it.

“I’m not impressed,” Hoffner said, as Mueller continued to hum. “You’re baking in this the same way I am.”

Mueller placed his good hand on the rock face and ducked around a jutting stone. “How’s that valise holding up?”

Mueller had been kind enough to rig a few ropes around the thing, with the satchel tied on at the back. Hoffner was wearing them like a rucksack, although the valise was far too long for his back.

“Fine,” he said.

“I’m sure it is.”

They had left the plane fifteen minutes ago. Mueller had waited for first light before bringing them low into the coast. It was clear that this was the usual drill, a strip of beach south of the city, far enough removed to be of no practical use to anyone except the truly gifted. Hoffner had kept his eyes closed for the last two minutes of the flight, certain that the water or the rocks would be making quick work of them. Instead, Mueller had brought them down, with two short bumps and a quick turn. Even with his eyes opened, Hoffner had been unable to fathom the speed, drop, and length of the landing. He had been equally amazed to discover the sand-colored tarpaulin awaiting them in a nearby cave: five minutes to drape the Arado; another five to rig the valise. Now, from a vantage point high above the beach, Hoffner had no hope of finding the plane.

“It’s up here,” said Mueller, as they came to the top of the scarp. Something resembling a road lay a few meters off, with a thick copse of trees beyond it. Mueller started through the shrub grass. It was only then that Hoffner remembered the limp.

“You make that climb look easy, Toby.”

“Rocks are uneven,” said Mueller. “We balance each other out.”

There was no such luck under the trees: roots and branches were particularly rough on Mueller, but he said nothing. Twenty meters in they came to an opening and a second tarpaulin. Mueller pulled it off to reveal an old Hispano-Suiza: a four-seat, open-back saloon with two oversized front lights and an undercarriage that poked out beyond the grille like a giant tongue. The windscreen was folded down onto the bonnet and gave the entire thing the look of a long-faced priest caught in a state of permanent terror.

“ ’Twenty-two Torpedo,” said Mueller. “Not bad for fifteen years.”

“Bit stingy of Radek.”

“Why?” Mueller said, tossing the tarpaulin into the back and propping up the windscreen. “She runs better now than she did when I got her.” He slid behind the wheel while Hoffner disentangled himself from the valise; his shirt was a thin layer of perspiration. “We pass through a few towns; then it’s open road for about an hour. After that it’s walking again, just outside the city.”

He started the engine as Hoffner settled in.

“You might want to have your pistol on your lap,” Mueller said. “Up to you. I don’t mind if you sleep.” He put the car in gear and maneuvered them out through the trees.

*   *   *

Talk of the gun had been a joke. The coast road to Barcelona was empty, not that there was any safety in it. The thing snaked above the water like curled twine and clung to the shrubland and rock as if any sudden movement might spill it into the sea. The glare was no less daunting and made anything more than a few hundred meters ahead fade into the rust and sand-washed rise of the hills. There might have been a rifle—or two, or twelve—fixed on them from above; then again, there might have been nothing.

Mueller kept his good hand on the wheel, his other limp in his lap. Changing gears required a sudden explosion of energy, good foot and bad foot tangoing along the pedals, while the gap-filled hand struggled to find its grip on the gearshift. Hoffner was glad for the few stretches of straight road.

The first signs of life appeared around one of the curves. A line of ageless women walked in twos along the siding, each carrying a large straw basket, eyes locked on the plodding regularity of their feet: if there was a civil war some thirty kilometers up the road, they had yet to hear of it. Mueller took the car wide, and Hoffner stared back as two of the women glanced up. Their lips were parched and red and full with unknowable smiles. There was a heat to these women that seemed to mock the sun. One of them waved, and Hoffner brought an awkward hand up.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Mueller said, his eyes fixed on the road.

Hoffner watched as the last of the faces slipped behind the curve. “What?”

“They were laughing at you. You know that, don’t you?”

Hoffner settled back in. “Were they?”

“The wave.” Mueller smiled. “That was precious, Nikolai.”

The car began to climb, and Hoffner realized how raw the scars would always be with Mueller: an unseen kindness taken for betrayal, a woman’s smile the prelude to humiliation. There was no escaping that kind of self-damning.

Hoffner peered into the haze of the sky. “It’s a different sun now.” Even the blue of the water seemed to pale under it.

“Is it?” Mueller snorted. “More of a punch here than on Droysenstrasse? Wait till you head inland.”

Mueller downshifted, and a village appeared in the distance around another turn. Hovering behind it was a wide surge of rock—Herr Wilson’s balding pate in limestone and brush—which rose some two hundred meters from the base of the hills and made the houses below look like tiny pieces of bone tumbling from a shattered skull.

“Not Berlin,” said Hoffner. “Here. Different from what it was. Different from the way a boy sees it.”

For the first time Mueller glanced over. He saw the sweat peeling down Hoffner’s cheek and neck. He turned back to the road. “Never pictured you as a boy.” Hoffner said nothing, and Mueller added, “Take a drink, Nikolai. You’re going red.”

The road began to dip, and Hoffner heard the waves over the churning of the engine. “We came in the summers,” he said. “A month at a time.” He found the canteen. “Calella. It’s about two hours north of here.”

“I know the place.”

“It was for my mother’s health, I think—or mine. I don’t remember anymore.” Hoffner took a swig. “The Kripo gave that kind of time back then. They didn’t pay, but they let my father go.”

Mueller took the canteen. “Long way to come for health.”

“Yah.” Hoffner was still staring out.

“He had a girl in Calella, your father? Waiting for him?” Mueller drank.

Hoffner nodded absently.

“You knew?”

Hoffner caught sight of a bird diving into the water. The wings and beak drew to a fine point and then were gone. An instant later the bird reappeared and flew off. “I suppose,” he said. “Not much need for discretion with an eight-year-old.” He took the canteen and drank deeply.

“And your mother?”

Hoffner screwed the cap on until it was tight. He remembered her standing in a doorway, her arm bloodied, the sun streaked across her face as she stared out through dry, unfeeling eyes. There was nothing else to it—no moment before or after to give it meaning—save perhaps a boy’s untried compassion. Even now Hoffner couldn’t tell if he was recalling or inventing it.

“I ate a lot of rice,” he said. “And fish. And I learned how to bend hooks for the fishing boats. You can’t imagine your fingers so raw.”

Hoffner was too late in realizing what he had said, and Mueller said, “No, I suppose I can’t.”

The sea disappeared behind a rise in the earth, and within a minute the road had narrowed to a single lane. The first hovels appeared on either side, with the smell of sour milk in the air. Hoffner recalled that, too, and wondered how he had ever managed to forget it.

*   *   *

“Jesus!”

Mueller jammed his foot on the brake as they took the next curve. A small barricade, made up of chairs, rugs, and whatever else had been scraped together, stretched across the road. A man with a rifle over his shoulder—his face pale from the heat—emerged from one of the crumbling houses, his hand raised in an unpolished authority. He pulled up to the car as a second figure stepped out from the doorway. Both were in shirtsleeves, with suspenders to draw the trousers high on the waist and red neckerchiefs tied loosely at the throat. The man kept his rifle on his back as he held out his hand.

“
Vale
,” he said, as if this were a formality.

Hoffner expected a spray of broken Spanish from Mueller, the offer of a thick wad of bills. Instead, Mueller reached into his pocket and, no less casually, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Hoffner sat amazed.

Mueller handed the paper to the man and said in a perfect Spanish, “You’ve moved it up the hill. That’s a bit rough. I might have driven right into it.”

The man continued to glance at the page. He handed it back and nodded over at Hoffner. “Another German
socialista
come to fight?”

“Something like that,” said Mueller. He reached under the seat and pulled out a bottle of brandy. He handed it to the man. “I’m guessing there’s still that ban on alcohol.”

The man said, “And it matters?” He turned and tossed the bottle to his friend, who caught it and pulled back part of the barricade—room enough for a car to drive through. The man then turned to Mueller. “The stamp on your pass comes due tomorrow. A cartload of brandy won’t help you then.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

The man stepped back. “They’ve moved the checkpoint on the other side as well.” He nodded for Mueller to drive on. “Don’t run into that one.”

Mueller put the car in gear, and Hoffner waited until they were out of earshot. “Old friend of yours?” he said.

Mueller remained silent as he continued to stare ahead. He took them down into the town square, where a pious if haggard-looking church stood at one end, immune to the filth and disarray of the skiffs and fishing nets lazing at the other. The sea and the docks opened up beyond them, but there seemed to be no sound coming from the waves. It was just the smell of salt and wet fur. Lines of drying sheets blew in the breeze, but the place was strangely empty. Mueller followed the street up to where the second barricade appeared, just beyond the last of the houses. Another bottle, and they were back on the coast road.

Hoffner said, “They’re not going to win this thing if all it takes is a few bottles of booze.”

Mueller reached for the canteen. “That’s a courtesy, Nikolai.” He had the spout to his lips. “You and I don’t have that piece of paper, we’re lying on the side of the road back there, a single bullet hole through the back of the skull for each of us.” He drank.

“Good that you had it, then.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re selling these pieces of paper in Marseilles?”

Mueller held the canteen out to him. “You haven’t met these boys, Nikolai. These are the true believers. Nothing’s for sale with them.”

Hoffner took a drink. “So you just asked for one and they gave it to you?”

Mueller stared ahead, his smile at once coy and obvious. “Some of us didn’t have to ask.” The road straightened, and Mueller pressed down on the accelerator.

*   *   *

It was nearly an hour before they turned in from the coast, a dirt path that ran through thick grassland dotted with carob, olive, and fig trees. They were heading up toward Montjuïc—Jew Mountain, according to Mueller—one of those ancient hills on which ancient cities plant themselves. Mueller had promised a fortress at the top that had seen ancient Romans or Muslims or whichever invading conqueror the Catalans had so bravely sent back into the sea, time and time again. Hoffner had always thought cities like this too comfortable in their pasts to make any present-day swagger seem more than a borrowed vanity: the fading libertine—wrinkled, bronzed, and smelling of a too-sweet cologne—drawing strength only from memory.

And yet it wasn’t all that long ago that the hill had known sheep and cows and goats and, somewhere off in the distance, those long stalks of yellow wheat that a woman could thresh and grind into whatever might keep a family alive: twelve hundred years of tradition rooted out by a city once again desperate to move beyond itself. The world had come to Barcelona in 1929, and sheep and cows and goats were not what the world was meant to see. Instead, it was a mechanical fountain that swayed under the lights; a grand palace to rival any of the most lavish in Europe; pavilions to tease with tastes of Galicia, Valencia, and Andalucia; and views of the city to make even the worst kind of frippery seem worthwhile.

The World’s Fair had transformed Montjuïc, or at least that part of the hill which faced the city. It was now a glowing tribute to Barcelona’s past, present, and future. For Hoffner, though—coming up on it from the backside—it was little more than a rise of brush and thick trees, with a few tracks leading nowhere.

“Bit of a risk, leaving the car up here,” Mueller said, as he downshifted and willed the old sedan up the slope. They were well into the tree cover now, grateful for a respite from the sun. “We’ll do a little painting before we go. Find it a good spot.”

It was impossible to mount Montjuïc head on. Instead, they lumbered up one of the slaloming paths until, about fifty meters from the top, they stopped. Mueller pulled up hard on the hand brake before stepping out to find a few rocks. He wedged a handful behind each of the wheels and then headed back to the boot.