The Second Son: A Novel (39 page)

Wilson’s tone was cold when he spoke. “No. We’re the ones trying to preserve the body so you can bury him.” Wilson pushed himself up and began to open cabinets, peer inside, close them. It was restlessness, nothing more. “We thought at first it might have been someone from the fire in Tarancón, someone who had followed him, but Georg wasn’t the one who set it, so that didn’t make much sense.” He moved to the drawers, and his frustration spilled out. “We have absolutely no idea why Georg has a bullet in his skull.”

“Not that the bullet killed him,” Vollman said. He was dropping a cigarette to the ground. He crushed it out under his foot. “He was strangled,” he added, no less casually. “Then shot. That’s not the way the SS does it.”

Hoffner sat one floor above his dead son and knew there had never been any hope of saving him. That was agony itself, but to hear he would never know why the boy had died—that was even more unbearable.

Wilson tried sympathy. “I can’t imagine how this must be for you, but you have to understand it’s no less maddening for us.”

Hoffner stared at the table. He tried to find his voice. “So you have nothing.”

“We have the camera,” Wilson said, “and we have the film. There’s nothing in either of them.”

Hoffner continued to stare. The table was chipped wood, and there were burn marks across it. He set his thumb on one. It was strangely smooth.

“You’re sure of that?” he said.

Wilson watched as Hoffner rubbed deep into the wood. “I am,” he said. “But you’re welcome to take a look.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later Hoffner sat with three film canisters in front of him. Wilson had set the first of the reels on a device with a crank that ran the film past a lens and a light. It was crude but effective.

“This is the only one with anything on it,” Wilson said, as he stepped back.

Hoffner had watched aimlessly—the wires for the battery, the threading of the film, anything to keep his mind distracted.

The first sequences came quickly, images of Barcelona, the games, the little street where Han Shen stood. There were workers with guns down by the docks, militiamen in marching lines of disarray, trucks filled with anarchists shouting their way out of the city. Hoffner saw fields, a single aeroplane along the horizon, and the long drive up into the hills of Teruel—the same priest, the same glasses, the same fountain.

There were other towns, other priests, and in Toledo Hoffner recognized the soldier who had stood sentry at the gate. The man marched with great seriousness, back and forth, back and forth, before he broke into sudden laughter and aimed his rifle up into the trees. He did a strange, wild dance, laughed again, and then walked quickly to the camera and disappeared.

The next pictures were from a different hand, and Hoffner slowed the reel. The motion of the film jerked, and Hoffner then saw Georg standing at the gate. The boy was wearing the soldier’s hat. He held the rifle on his shoulder. He marched and turned, marched and turned, before glancing over and smiling for the camera.

Hoffner stopped. He stared at the ragged clothes, the misheld rifle, and the quiet smile of a boy he would never know again. The picture began to lose focus, and Hoffner rubbed his eyes. His hand was wet when he took hold of the crank.

More trucks passed, more soldiers, until Hoffner recognized the town of Coria. This time it was the church, the shops, a few houses, and finally the prison fortress. The camera continued to pan across the square until it came to a sudden stop on an image. Hoffner’s hand tightened on the crank. It was by the well. Hoffner couldn’t be sure he had seen it correctly, and he began to move the crank slowly as the camera drew closer. He was almost to it when the film went black. Hoffner reversed and saw the image again.

Standing by the well and staring at the camera was Sascha.

His son. Sascha.

Nine years since Hoffner had seen him, yet he couldn’t deny it. The hair was all but gone, and the body too thin, but it was the same face, the same look of empty defiance. Sascha gave an awkward wave and the film cut out.

Hoffner closed his eyes, even as the boy remained in front of him.

My God, he thought. The two of them together.

The throbbing returned to his head, and Hoffner felt his head lighten and his body go limp.

6

SASCHA

In the winter of 1919, at the age of sixteen, Sascha Hoffner took his mother’s maiden name and left Berlin as the newly minted Alexander Kurtzman. It was an act of unrepentant hatred and was meant to make certain that he would never have to see his father again.

Four years later, Kurtzman beat a man to death.

The killing was of no real consequence, except to the man himself, who had arrived in Munich the day before from somewhere in the Congo. The man was on his way back to Stockholm, and while he had already been traveling for several weeks, he decided to take a few days to wait for a more direct train heading north. November in Munich had always held a certain charm for him, and the man—a radical, and a great believer in the Congolese and their future—was not averse to conveying his political and social views to anyone willing to listen. Not of Africa himself, he nonetheless claimed to understand the soul of the black man. Sadly, he was not quite so savvy when it came to the men of Munich’s streets and her beer halls. The great putsch erupted on November 8, and the man—like any good radical—found himself incapable of stepping to the side. The man’s words were his weapons and, while the young Kurtzman was by no means an imposing figure, he had been fighting in the streets with the Freikorps for two years and knew well enough how to crack a skull against a brick wall. Hitler ranted from a table, General Ludendorff—war hero, and Hitler’s great supporter—turned a pale green, and Kurtzman took the man into a back alley and finished him. It was Kurtzman’s good fortune to come out relatively unscathed, so much so that he was able to make it back inside by the time Ludendorff stepped up to speak. A day later, Kurtzman watched with unimagined anguish as his heroes were sent off to prison.

Those were hard days indeed, the party disbanded, the best of them locked away. For a time Kurtzman followed his commander, the elusive and homosexual Ernst Röhm, to Bolivia—a useless place for useless men—but by then such men, such beautiful men, had become a way of life for Kurtzman. Even so, things tended to end badly on that front, and by 1926 he was back in Munich, eager to make up for lost time. He rejoined the party, redoubled his efforts with the Freikorps, and made the lucky acquaintance of a young writer and journalist. When, a few months later, the journalist was asked to take the party’s message to Berlin, Kurtzman found himself invited along as the man’s chief assistant. Overwhelmed and overjoyed, Kurtzman agreed at once and followed his new mentor, Joseph Goebbels, north to the promised land.

It was a period of unparalleled happiness and, save for one very brief episode in the winter of 1927, Kurtzman learned to love Berlin again. He lived his poverty with pride, and when the tide began to turn, he found himself a girl—on Goebbels’s insistence—and even managed to get her pregnant. He married her first, of course, and while he showed the face of a devastated husband when both she and the baby died during childbirth, Kurtzman knew that Berlin had stepped in to save him. He had accommodated respectability. He was now free.

Goebbels moved up, and Kurtzman moved with him. When Hitler finally took the chancellorship in 1933, Kurtzman celebrated with the rest, watched the Reichstag burn, and accepted his post at the Ministry with a sense of quiet destiny.

It was all as it was meant to be, until the day he was told that the whole thing had come crashing down. He was no longer a member of the party. He could never be a member of the party. He was filth: a Jew. A dirty Jew. They had discovered his secret. In a matter of hours, the once untouchable Alexander Kurtzman was forced to resume his role as the reviled and pathetic Sascha Hoffner. His life, as he had made it, was no longer his. The humiliation and despair might have killed a weaker man. Not so with Sascha. His own death was only of minor concern.

*   *   *

An image of that sixteen-year-old boy—before Goebbels, before the Freikorps—sat with Nikolai Hoffner as he cradled an empty glass in his hands.

Mila was next to him. Wilson leaned against the counter. Vollman stood by the door. They had finished the bottle of whiskey. They had let him drink in silence.

Hoffner set his glass down. He looked over and saw the canisters of film and the viewing machine in a crate by the door. He couldn’t recall when any of that had happened.

Mila was drinking water. She pushed her glass toward him, and Hoffner took it. He drank. It tasted of rust and sand, and he saw a few pieces of grit swirling at the bottom. They were the same color as the one he had brushed from Georg’s ear. Why that? he wondered.

Wilson said, “You saw something?”

The sound of the voice startled Mila. She looked up, and Hoffner set the glass on the table. He tapped at it, sending it across in little bursts of movement. He might have sent it over the edge had Mila not grabbed it and pulled it back.

Hoffner’s head remained unnervingly light as he stared at the table. “I saw what you saw,” he said. “Spain, guns—a well.”

“And that last image?” Wilson missed nothing.

“It went by quickly.”

“Not too quickly.”

“No,” said Hoffner, “not too quickly.” Wilson waited. Finally Hoffner turned to him. “It was my son,” he said. “My older son. Sascha. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.” Hoffner felt Mila’s eyes bore through him.

Wilson said, “You’re telling me that was Kurtzman?”

The word jarred. “How do you know his name?”

“We’re not likely to take a man on and not know everything about his family.” Wilson reached for the jug of water and poured himself a glass. He drank. “Kurtzman is in the Propaganda Ministry. Why would he be in Spain?”

The numbing at the back of Hoffner’s head returned; he welcomed it. “You saw his face,” he said, “the way he was dressed.” His eyes drifted back to the table. “You think this has anything to do with the Ministry?”

Wilson needed a moment. “So he’s here for the guns?”

Hoffner felt the first taste of acid in his throat. He took hold of Mila’s glass and held it. “No,” he said. “He’s not here for the guns.”

“How do you know that?”

Hoffner drank. He felt the water course through his chest.

“He’s no longer in the party,” he said. “He’s no longer a Nazi. They found his Jewish blood—from his grandmother—three weeks ago. And they threw him out.” Hoffner set the glass down but continued to hold it. His mind was emptying. “He’s not here for the guns or the Ministry.”

Wilson wasn’t convinced. “I thought you hadn’t seen him in quite some time.”

“I wouldn’t need to see him to know such things.”

Wilson looked as if he might press it. Instead he said, “Then why is he here?”

Hoffner heard the voices from Teruel, from Tarancón, from a part of himself he refused to listen to—
An unusual German … he had death in the eyes
—and said, “You say it’s not the way the SS kills a man.” There was nothing in his voice. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Wilson’s uncertainty turned to quiet disbelief. “What?”

Hoffner said nothing, and Wilson continued, “You can’t believe that.” He waited for an answer. When none came, he said, “You understand what you’re saying?”

Hoffner stared at the glass. He had nothing else. “You’re asking if I understand how my son could have killed his brother. Tell me. How could I possibly understand that?”

Wilson refused to hear it. “Even if it’s remotely true, he could have killed him in Berlin. Why follow him here?”

Hoffner had no answer, nothing but the face of Sascha staring back at him through the lens of a camera. “My son is dead. My other one is here.” He felt his throat constrict, his eyes grow heavy. “If only the world were made of such coincidence…”

Wilson looked across at Vollman. He saw his own disbelief staring back. He looked again at Hoffner. “You’re talking about your own son.”

Hoffner felt his own rage and despair like wet rope coiling around his throat. “Yes,” he said quietly, “my own son,” and the glass shattered in his hand.

It was nearly half a minute before he realized he was bleeding.

Mila was already pressing down on his wrist, pulling pieces of glass from his skin, as Hoffner stared down at the hand and saw one long cut. A single thick shard rocked easily on the table, while tiny grains of glass shimmered across his palm. Mila picked and brushed, and Hoffner felt nothing. It was a hand, not his own, until she finally took a cloth from Vollman and pressed it into the flesh. Instantly, Hoffner felt the pain shoot up through his arm like the twisting of raw muscle. He heard himself groan, and realized it was the burning of alcohol coursing into his skin. His throat constricted and he coughed.

“Bring over that bucket,” Mila said, and Hoffner angled his head as she continued to work on him. Only once did he come close to vomiting, but the acid stayed in his throat, and his hand began to throb with its own isolated pain.

Hoffner’s head cleared. He swallowed and looked over to see his hand encased in thick gauze. Wilson had produced a second bottle. He filled a glass with whiskey and held it out to Hoffner.