“Yes,” said Wilson, “I have. There has to be someone who steps back and sees what’s really happening.”
“And that is?”
Wilson blinked several times. The sweat had caught in his eyelashes. He wiped it away, and said, “Can’t you see it, Inspector? We’re simply not ready to call the Nazis’ bluff. We’re not all that eager to see if they’ll pull back. It’s not Franco and Mola we have to worry about. If they destroy Spain—unsavory a choice as that might be—so be it. We can debate ethics another time. But if we start exposing gun routes and secret companies and drop-off points, we humiliate our German friends and everyone starts posturing. Then it’s Europe that hangs in the balance.”
Hoffner was tasting the bile in his throat. “And it’s only in the last twelve days that you’ve realized you have this ethical dilemma?”
Wilson’s jaw momentarily tightened. “I wouldn’t play that card, Inspector. You’re the ones who elected these people three years ago. I think we’re well beyond questions of ethics. You want me to admit it, fine. Our fighter bombers aren’t up to par just yet. We haven’t the stomach to dive back into full-on war quite so soon. So it’s the practical dilemmas we worry about. Twelve days ago the word came down from the Admiralty to step back. Do nothing to embarrass our German friends. The Admiralty knew Georg was in. They knew he’d taken a camera, and they were very insistent that nothing on that film find the light of day. So they needed someone to bring him back.”
This last bit seemed laughable. “And I just happened to walk into your office?”
For the first time Wilson showed confusion. Just as quickly his expression turned to muted amusement.
“You?” he said. “You think we would have crossed our fingers and hoped you knew what you were doing? I think Herr Vollman here was a slightly better candidate, don’t you?”
It took Hoffner a moment to let this sink in. He looked at Vollman. The man was crushing his cigarette against the leg of the table. He dropped it and brushed off his hands.
Hoffner said, “You really are working nicely together, aren’t you?”
Vollman said, “Our aeroplanes and tanks aren’t quite up to standard yet, either. The anarchists are going to find that out very soon.”
Hoffner tried to forget that Mila was hearing every word of this.
Wilson said, “We knew the Russians had sent Vollman in. We knew he was looking for the same things we had sent Georg to find—German guns. And we knew the two of them had made contact in Barcelona. So we approached the Russians and told them it would be best if their man found Georg and pulled him out. And while we were waiting for their response, you walked into my office.”
Hoffner would have liked to have had some booze in his glass. “And yet you sent me in after him anyway.”
“Yes,” said Wilson. “I did.”
Hoffner knew there was only one reason for it. He turned to Vollman and motioned for a cigarette. Vollman handed him one and lit it. Hoffner felt the smoke at the back of his throat.
“I was the decoy,” Hoffner said.
Wilson had the bottle and was pouring out another two glasses. “Yes. You were.”
“You send me in. If anyone is interested in Georg, they start following me, leaving Vollman here free to do what he wants.”
There was no need to answer. Wilson handed the glasses to Mila and Hoffner.
Hoffner said, “And what if I hadn’t figured it out in your office—you and the Admiralty?”
Wilson finished pouring for himself, then Vollman. “You really think that was going to happen? I’m surprised it took you so long to come to me in the first place.” He handed Vollman his whiskey. “To tell the truth, I never imagined you’d be as good at this as you were. Spanish and Catalan. And links to Gardenyes and his crew. Who knew? And then finding the Hisma outposts.” He raised his glass. “Well done.” Wilson drank.
Hoffner hated Wilson for his glibness. “So you knew about Hisma—knew that it was a company—even before I left Berlin.”
“We had an inkling. We found it through Langenheim.” He lit a cigarette.
Langenheim, thought Hoffner. The one name in Georg’s wire Hoffner had never figured out.
As if reading his thoughts, Wilson said, “Langenheim heads the Ausland Organization in Morocco. Consul general of sorts in those parts. He eats well and promotes the Reich. Always hardest to track down an obscure bureaucrat. That’s a piece I don’t think you had.”
It was time for Wilson to show how clever he was. Hoffner hadn’t the strength to stop him. “The Ausland reports to the SS,” Hoffner said.
“Yes.”
“So Bernhardt is SS?”
Wilson shook his head. “Bernhardt’s a businessman. He’s just after the money. About ten days ago he and Langenheim flew from Morocco to Bayreuth to meet with Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. It’s where they presented the bare bones of their idea for the dummy corporation to ship in the guns. We knew that Bernhardt had been a personal acquaintance of Franco’s for some time. He’s also chummy with several of the other Spanish generals. Obviously, Hess was impressed. He took Bernhardt and Langenheim to see Hitler himself—between curtains of the Meistersinger, I hear—and they signed the agreement. Hitler gets to send his guns to Franco without ruffling any international feathers. The Spaniards sign over most of their raw materials to Hitler as thanks for the guns. And Bernhardt and Langenheim make a great deal of money. It’s all rather ingenious.”
“And the nephew?”
“Little Bernhardt?” Wilson gave a mocking smile as he took a long pull on the cigarette. “Not so ingenious choosing a heroin addict and his Chinese friends to ship in guns and ammunition. I imagine two weeks ago that made sense. Apparently your Nazis are learning as they go.” He took a last pull and let the cigarette fall to the floor. “The nephew’s dead. The SS took care of that themselves. I don’t imagine Bernhardt Senior was too terribly put out by it. But what you managed to do by compromising those outposts”—again Wilson raised his glass in genuine admiration—“that was a little tougher for them to swallow.” He drank.
Hoffner drank as well. Things were coming clearer by the minute. “So the Hisma outposts in Cuenca and Tarancón—”
“And the one in Toledo?” Wilson nodded. “Bit difficult to ship in guns when there’s no one there to receive them. Amazing how you managed that. I hear Franco was rather upset. We, of course, were delighted.” He noticed the cigarette still lit on the floor and crushed it out under his boot. “You’ve slowed them down. Franco is actually going to have to earn this, which will keep our Nazi friends occupied for a bit longer and give us some time to work on our own aeroplanes and tanks.”
Hoffner couldn’t help a momentary bitterness. “How very nice for you.”
“Not to worry. Franco’s resilient. It’s all going to come through Morocco now, or Portugal in the next day or so. He’ll get his guns and tanks, and someone to fly in his men. He’s a pragmatist. Franco will make do.”
Hoffner sat with this for a few moments, and tried to piece it together backward in his head—Toledo, Teruel, Zaragoza. He had been right in Barcelona. It was a boy’s playground game. And he had been elected the class fool.
“Georg’s wire,” Hoffner said, “with the names and the contacts. He never sent it, did he? That was a little invention of your own.”
Wilson finished his glass. He took his time setting it on the floor. “We had to give you something to go on. Couldn’t have you wandering about without something real to draw their attention. I decided to give you the names. It seemed the best choice.”
“So where is Georg?” It was the most obvious question, and the one Hoffner had taken too long to ask. He stared across at both men.
Wilson stared back. He was about to answer when Vollman said, “You know, it’s less than three hours in a plane from Aragón to Morocco. If you can find someone stupid enough to make the flight.”
Hoffner took a moment before turning to Vollman. Vollman was a
lmost through his second cigarette. He took a pull and waited while the smoke speared through his nose. He stared down at the plume.
“It’s not the landing or the takeoff that’s the difficulty,” Vollman said. “There are plenty of places you can do that. The real problem is holding on to the plane once you leave it on the ground. Best not to be around if and when the Legionnaires find it. Not that a single-propeller four-seater is going to bring the Army of Africa over to Spain, but that’s not really the point. So you have to hide the plane well, and that takes time and money—for some reason, the Republican loyalists in Morocco like their money—and you have to hope that the plane will be there when you get back. Luckily mine was.”
Vollman finished the cigarette and pulled out his next. His tone was more pointed when he spoke again.
“You see, by the time I flew down, your Germans were already doing most of the work, and a little four-seater was hardly worth their time. They had all those Junker 52s and Heinkel fighter-bombers sitting in Tetuán. And there was a fellow named von Scheele, nice enough, who came with a group of German tourists from Hamburg the week before. Except this von Scheele was a major in the Wehrmacht, and his tourists were the men sent to fly the planes.” He lit up. “So you can see how a boy with a camera and his devoted father might not have been our primary concern at that point.”
Hoffner watched as Vollman reached for the nearest glass. There was still a bit of whiskey in it, and Vollman tossed it back. He poured himself another and drank. Wilson was oddly quiet.
“So where is he?” said Hoffner. Wilson remained silent. “Did I manage to distract the SS well enough for you?”
Vollman said, “The SS wasn’t following this.”
“Really?” Hoffner needed one of them to look at him. “I saw two of them dead in the back of a truck in Barcelona.”
“Then they were the only ones,” said Vollman, still focused on his cigarette. “I would have seen them.”
“You’re wrong,” said Hoffner. His chest began to pound. “Alfassi mentioned a second German three days after you left Teruel. The man in Tarancón mentioned the same German. You must have missed him during all your flights back and forth to Morocco.”
“It wasn’t SS,” Vollman said. “The SS don’t kill a man the way Georg was killed.”
It was said with so little care, so little effort. It was said because it had been in the room all along.
Vollman took another pull and flicked his ash and his humanity to the ground.
Hoffner sat unmoving.
The taste of vinegar filled his mouth as images of the boy ran through his mind, stares of joy and disappointment and distrust. They vanished as quickly as they had come, leaving only a burning at the base of his throat. Hoffner followed the beads of sweat sliding down Wilson’s brow. He felt his own lips purse, his eyes grow heavy, but there was no hope of finding a breath. His chest suddenly collapsed on itself, and Hoffner gasped for air. He held it, waiting, until the breath slowly pressed its way through and out. There were tears, not his own, and he heard himself say, “You know this for certain.”
He felt Mila’s arms on him, her head against his chest, but there was no weight to her.
Wilson finally met Hoffner’s gaze. “Yes.”
Hoffner felt the blood drain from him. “You have the body?”
“Yes.”
“I need to see him.”
* * *
It was a room filled with ice, boarded-up windows, boxes and shelves. Wilson had said something about a church, the smell, this the only place to keep him. Hoffner had listened and walked and heard nothing. It was a room with breath in the air, and a boy laid out on a bier of planks and crates.
Hoffner stood over his son and looked at the chalk-white face. He placed a hand on Georg’s shirt and felt the scrape of frozen cloth, rigid and sharp. There was a single deep hole at the temple, the knuckles ripped and raw, the neck swollen and red. The blood on the face and shirt had gone black, with little ridges and mounds where it had caked from the freezing.
Hoffner leaned closer in, let his hand glide across the cheek—the skin was so cold and soft—and stared at the untouched face. Hoffner tried to hear words, recall the sound of his son’s voice, but it was already gone. How cruel, he thought. How cruel to stand so perfectly alone without even the comfort of memory. He imagined this was God’s great purpose, to hold off the solitude at moments like these. Perhaps Georg had died with that? Hoffner heard nothing.
His legs tightened, and his knees ached from the pain, but still he stared and knew there would never be anything beyond this room.
He saw a piece of grit at Georg’s ear and gently swept it away. He pressed his hand to the cheek again, held it, and then brought the cloth up and covered him.
Upstairs, Wilson and Vollman were standing and smoking in what passed for a kitchen. Mila sat at the table and drank from a chipped cup. It was coffee, and the sun was just coming up.
Hoffner took the last of the steps and moved through the doorway. All three looked over.
He pulled back a chair from the table and sat.
“I’ll take a cigarette,” he said.
Mila held his hand, and Vollman shook one from the pack. Hoffner reached for it and waited for a light. He barely tasted the smoke in his throat.
“When?” he said.
Wilson was leaning against a wooden counter. He finished his cigarette and dropped it to the floor. “Two days ago,” he said, crushing it under his boot. “He was left on the church steps.”
Hoffner stared.
Two days, he thought. Georg had been alive two days ago. The idea of it—sitting in his cell, the stupidity of having let himself get tossed away while the boy had been here—Hoffner had to push that torture from his mind. It was another few moments before he realized the strangeness of what Wilson had said.
“The church steps?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” said Wilson.
“Why would the Spaniards have put him there?”
Vollman said, “It wasn’t the fascists.” He took a pull.
Hoffner turned to him. “What do you mean, it wasn’t the fascists?”
“He means,” said Wilson, “they would have told us.”
Hoffner hadn’t the strength for this. “And you would have believed them?”
“Yes,” said Wilson, “I would.” He was trying his best at compassion. “They knew we were pulling him out. They knew we were playing along. What could they possibly have to gain by lying to us? We had more reason to kill him than they did.”
The carelessness of Wilson’s cruelty might have been impressive if not for the short pants and the knees. Hoffner tried to keep his focus. “And did you?” he said.
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.
The Second Son: A Novel Page 28
