The Second Son: A Novel (40 page)

“He’s had enough,” Mila said.

Hoffner took the glass and drank. Wilson set the bottle on the table and retreated to the counter. Vollman was back by the door as Mila sat silently.

Finally Wilson said, “You’re saying this has nothing to do with the guns or Franco?”

Hoffner kept his eyes on the glass. He flexed his fingers. He could still move them. “Not everything shatters the world as a whole, Herr Wilson. This one shatters just mine.”

Wilson started to answer, and Hoffner said, “He left the film. He wanted it found. He wanted me to know.”

Wilson was still struggling. “But why?”

Hoffner heard the question in his own voice. “Because I’m his father.”

It answered nothing and brought a silence to the room.

Finally Wilson said, “I could help you.”

“No,” said Hoffner. “You couldn’t.” He felt the need to stand. He pushed back his chair and steadied himself against the table. “Thank you, Herr Wilson. Thank you for Doval, the doctor”—the word caught in his throat—“Georg. I imagine you’ll be leaving Spain now.”

Wilson showed a genuine sympathy even if he understood nothing. He nodded slowly.

Hoffner extended his good hand. Wilson hesitated, then took it. Vollman followed suit. It was a bizarre moment of protocol, until Vollman said, “You’re going to try and find him.”

Hoffner said nothing.

Vollman added, “I have a plane—for another two days. It has room for four.”

Mila stood, and Wilson said, “He’d be heading west. Portugal would be my guess.”

“He’ll be in Badajoz,” Hoffner said, his voice empty, his eyes distant: it was as if he were speaking to himself. “He found enough about Hisma to track Georg. He’ll know Badajoz is where the last of the guns are going. And he’ll think it’s where he can find his way back.”

Wilson hesitated. “His way back?”

Hoffner looked directly at him. It seemed as if he might answer. Instead, he took Mila’s arm and moved them to the door.

*   *   *

They buried Georg in the first light, in a field just beyond the last of the houses. Wilson had offered to take the boy to Berlin—he, too, had a plane—but Hoffner said no. He thought of Mendy and Lotte, standing through the taunts—those roving packs of boys who waited outside the cemetery gates, jeering while a Jew was laid in the ground. Why put them through that? It was quiet here, and simple. Whichever way things went in Spain, it would be better than in Germany.

The priest stood off to the side while Hoffner mouthed ancient words whose meaning he had never learned. He had no idea if this was the place or the time for them, but they were all he knew. His mother had insisted he say them for her. He said them now for his son.

When he finished, Hoffner took a clump of earth and tossed it onto the sheeted body. Mila did the same, then Wilson and Vollman. She held his arm.

*   *   *

The sun had climbed to the horizon as they stood and waited for Wilson in the square. He had gone to see Doval. Mila hadn’t let go of his arm. Vollman smoked through the silence.

Wilson appeared from the prison gate, and Hoffner said to Mila, “He’ll fly you to Barcelona. It’s the least he can do.”

Mila said nothing, and Wilson drew up.

“I told him it’s a direct request from the Admiralty,” Wilson said. His shirt was damp through at the back. “He’s promised no interference. You have two days. After that—”

“After that,” said Hoffner, “Doval gets to finish what he started.”

Wilson said nothing, and Vollman tossed his cigarette to the ground. “I can wait. I can fly on the fifteenth. That gives you enough time.”

There was no reason to answer.

Wilson said, “We’ll go get the car, then. Vollman and I.” It was a moment of unexpected chivalry: he was giving Hoffner a last few moments with Mila. It took Vollman another few seconds to catch on.

“Right. Yes.” Vollman gave an awkward nod, and followed Wilson off. Mila and Hoffner watched them go.

“They hid you in the church?” Hoffner said. It was first time he could ask.

“I’m not going to Barcelona.”

“There are good priests everywhere. All this must make them shudder. It’ll be the same in Germany one day—”

“I’m not going.” She waited until he was looking directly at her. “You don’t have to do this, Nikolai. If he was capable of killing Georg, what is there possibly to gain?”

Hoffner saw the vulnerability in her eyes. “And what if he wasn’t capable?”

“You don’t believe that.”

Hoffner waited. “No. I don’t.”

“So you go for—what? To let him finish this, to let him free you from whatever you think you deserve?”

“He killed his brother.”

“It makes you a coward.”

He hadn’t thought her capable of causing this kind of pain. Or maybe it was only now that he let himself feel it.

His voice remained low and calm. “He doesn’t get to walk away. If that makes me a coward, so be it.”

“No,” she said. “You’re a coward because you go alone.” It was an anger he had never imagined, raw and bitter, and doing nothing to hide its fear. “You’re going to stop thinking there’s something noble to be done, or that you could possibly know what it would look like. You don’t. All you do is hurt me with this and show how weak you are. I know how weak you are, and I know what terrifies you. Your boy is dead, but not because of you. And your Sascha—” She stopped. The words were tight in her throat. “You don’t get to throw yourself away because you want to believe that. There’s more to it now. You don’t get to do this alone.”

“I do it to protect you.”

“You do it to protect yourself.”

She stared across at him, her strength like shattered glass. It hung from them both and fell aimlessly to the ground. Hoffner’s hands ached, and still he gathered up the shards. He knew what it was he deserved, knew with every breath he took. It was the weight of this love—brutal and free and untethered from a lifetime of self-damning—and yet meaningless if he chose to run from his past now.

“Then you come,” he said.

The little Ford from Toledo appeared from a side street. Hoffner and Mila waited while Wilson and Vollman drove up.

The two men got out. There were a few awkward exchanges, a moment of surprise. Someone might have mentioned luck.

*   *   *

The car had been stripped down and searched, the rear cushioning all knife tears and disgorged stuffing. The front bench was much the same. Mila laid a blanket across it so they could sit. Even so, they felt the springs in every jolt and bump. Hoffner let Mila drive. He slept. And he dreamed.

He was sitting in a cool meadow, with the sound of flapping wings overhead. He saw a baby lying in the grass, its tiny feet kicking at the sky. Hoffner tried to stand but his legs were too heavy. He pulled at his thighs, and his hands were filled with a thick, wet tar, the smell of it like camphor oil, and he was suddenly holding flames in his hands. Mila pulled him back from the fire, and Hoffner saw her against the night sky. She was older and her body had been burned, her arms peeling in thin flakes of flesh. He reached for her, but she stepped back. He reached for her again and his eyes opened.

They were at an outpost. Twenty Republican soldiers stood off in the distance, each with a rifle and a cap. Mila was talking with a man who was holding their papers. Hoffner heard the sound of mortar fire somewhere in the distance, and he watched as each of the men ducked his head. The sound was too far off to pose any danger, but these were men not yet tested by battle. They flinched and gripped their rifles.

Hoffner pushed himself up and opened the door. His hand had stiffened, and his eye felt as if it had been squeezed shut. He could barely swallow. He forced his legs out, and he stood.

Mila and the soldier looked over while a second barrage erupted. Hoffner made his way to them, his stride unsteady, with the booze in his stomach and a scorching sun to contend with.

He drew up and thought to say something, but his mouth was too dry. He spat, and the man offered him his canteen. Hoffner drank.

“The prison in Coria,” the man said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Hoffner nodded and finished the canteen.

“You don’t want to go south,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to explain it to the señora.”

“The doctor,” Hoffner corrected, and spat again. “The señora is a doctor.”

“Yes. The doctor. Yagüe has half of Africa marching up from Seville. They’re already pressing in from Mérida. It’s not going to be good in Badajoz. It won’t be good here in a day or so, but we’re not going to think about that.”

If Hoffner had any inkling who Yagüe was or where Mérida might be, he might have known enough to show some concern. Instead, he told himself not to vomit in front of the soldiers.

Another explosion rattled behind them, and Hoffner nodded his thanks.

“We’ll take our chances.”

He took Mila by the arm and walked with her back to the car.

FATHER AND SON

An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.

Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yagüe was well beyond Mérida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.

“I have to get through.”

Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.

“If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”

They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.

The thick beard shouted over. “Julio. Your mother needs to make a bed for these two tonight. The woman is a doctor.”

The boy pushed himself up and nodded, and Hoffner followed Mila across the mud.

Inside, the house was old stone, the ceilings too low for a tall man to stand upright. Pots and pans hung from hooks and shelves, and a drinking trough of wood stretched along the back wall. Two young girls sat at a round table, with a few photographs in frames hanging behind them. One showed a man with a mule and a rifle.

The man was seated across the room on a low stool. He was rubbing a cloth along the rifle’s barrel. He looked up when the son called for his mother.

There was silence, and then the sound of an aeroplane from somewhere above. The man set his rifle against the wall and crossed to the doorway. He stepped outside, stared up for several seconds, and then looked out across the fields to the men in their caps and their uniforms—each of them staring up—before he returned. He took the rifle, sat on the stool, and began to rub it again with the cloth.

The mother appeared from the back room in an apron skirt and green blouse of coarse cotton. She was slender, and her hair fell from its ties in thin wisps of brown and gray. In any other place, she and Mila might have been sisters.

She spoke to the boy in a kind of Spanish Portuguese, only a few words making themselves known to Hoffner. The voice was deep and quiet, and she turned to Mila and continued to speak. Hoffner heard the word “
frango
” several times and thought she might be referring to the general, until Mila said, “She wants to know if we’ll eat chicken. I told her yes.”

Hoffner nodded, and the woman motioned to the two girls. They followed her out into the courtyard, and the boy sat where they had been. He found a cloth and began to rub his rifle in the way his father rubbed.

Hoffner said to Mila, “Tell him the boy is too young to have a gun.”

She knew why he said it; and she knew there was no point in repeating it.

The father, still focused on his rifle, said, “Will they make such distinctions in who they kill?”

Hoffner watched as the man continued to clean. “No,” said Hoffner. “They won’t.”

“It was a German plane,” the father said, “or Italian. Hard to tell in the dark. He was lost. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll drop his bombs here. For now he saves them for the city.”