The Second Son: A Novel (27 page)

“The boy,” she finally said. “Last night. He was young. I let him hold me.”

Hoffner focused on the twin line of ruts ahead of him. He felt his throat go dry. Again he nodded.

She said, “He was a chemist.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She looked at him. “Why do you think I’m telling you?”

Hoffner hesitated before turning to her. There was nowhere for the car to go but along the track.

Her face showed nothing, no longing or need. And yet it was strange to see this intimacy given so freely. It was the loss behind her eyes that reached out to him, and made plain—only now—why he himself felt the longing. It had never been about her beauty, raw and fine as it was. It was this. And while he could find nothing safe in it—its pull no less daunting than if she had offered him love—Hoffner let it take him. She placed a hand on his cheek. She held it there, then brought it down and looked out again to the road.

She said, “It’s your son who’s not here—the one you don’t follow—that makes you this way. Why is that?”

Hoffner stared at the powder on her cheek, the soft ridges she had failed to smooth. He turned, and his eyes settled on the fields in the distance. They swayed with a momentary wind.

“You know this for certain?” he said, trying to sound too cavalier.

“I do.”

There was no hope of distracting her.

“He’s called Sascha,” he said. “He hasn’t been a boy for quite some time.”

“And he knows the pain it gives you?”

“He thinks I’m not capable of feeling it.”

“But he tries anyway.”

“He did—once. Not for a long time now.”

“But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

They were halfway through a canteen of water. Hoffner picked it up and unscrewed the top. He drank. When he looked out again, he was relieved to see what Durruti had called the Ontinar Crossroads just over a rise—two or three houses and another dirt track coming in from the west.

Hoffner had kept his collar buttoned, his tie tight to the neck. The jacket was soaked through, down to the waist. Still, better to be the bitter German sweating his way through Spain than a man comfortable with the Aragón summer. He noticed the telephone wire sprouting from the roof of one of the small buildings. It was exactly as Durruti had described it.

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”

He slowed the car as they reached the buildings. It might have been due to the three Nationalist soldiers standing with their rifles raised, or the sandbag barricade that was clearly a recent addition. More likely it was the sight of the Renault tank perched behind them. The tank was old, maybe not even a match for the big guns back in Osera, but it made its point. Hoffner pulled up to the barricade and turned off the engine.

Two of the men kept their rifles raised as the third now walked over. He was wearing the green and tan uniform of a
requeté
, with the dual leather straps that cut across his shoulders and chest. The belt buckle was well polished, although the three leather bags that clung to the belt—ammunition, cigarettes, papers—looked as if they had seen better days. A silver crucifix was pinned just above the heart, with a red barbed X sewn onto the pocket. The jodhpur pants were narrow at the shin and looped over the boots. He wore a crimson beret angled to the forehead and without a hint of panache.

There was no mistaking these for soldiers. The one approaching pulled his pistol from its holster and cocked the barrel. He held it at his side.

“Out of the car,” he said, when he had positioned himself just beyond the grille.

Hoffner opened the door slowly, stepped out, and put his hand back for Mila as she slid across. He took her hand. The two stood and waited.

The man said, “This road is closed.”

“I have papers,” Hoffner said calmly. His Spanish was now simple, halting, and with a distinct German accent.

The man stared. “This road is closed.”

“I have papers.”

The man looked at Mila for the first time. Hoffner wanted to turn to her, but he kept his eyes on the man, who looked back and said, “How do you come to be on this road?”

“I am not a Spaniard,” said Hoffner. “I do not know these roads. I have come down from the north. My driving instructions were poor. I am going to Zaragoza.”

The man glanced again at Mila, then at Hoffner. He held out his hand. “Show me these papers.”

Hoffner slowly reached into his jacket pocket. He retrieved them and held them out. The man took them and, with the pistol still in hand, unfolded them. He read.

“Where did you get these papers?” he said.

“Berlin,” said Hoffner.

The man quickly looked up. Despite himself, he showed a moment’s uncertainty. “This is a Safe Conduct.”

“Yes.”

“Signed by Nicholas Franco.”

“Yes,” said Hoffner. “The General’s brother sent it by dispatch eight days ago.”

“To Berlin.”

“Yes.”

The man was finding himself well beyond his capacity, but still he held his ground. Durruti had been wise to be so precise with the story.

“Your passport,” said the man.

Again Hoffner reached into his jacket. He handed the papers to the man and chanced a look at Mila. Her face was moist from the heat, but she stood without the least sign of discomfort. It was a remarkable pose of submissive indifference.

The man looked up from the papers. “And the woman?”

Before Hoffner could answer, Mila said, “My papers are in my purse.” She turned to the car, but the man stepped over and raised his pistol.

“No, Señora,” he said. “Where is the purse?”

Mila looked at the man. Hoffner couldn’t be sure if this was genuine fear in her eyes or not. She said, “I was only trying to get them.”

“Yes, Señora. Where is the purse?”

Mila pointed to the seat and the man called over to one of the others. The second man quickly walked up, leaned his rifle against the car, and reached in through the passenger window for the small purse. He held it up, took his rifle, and brought it around.

The first man opened it. He looked through and brought out a small crucifix on a chain of prayer beads. He looked up at Mila.

“This is yours, Señora?”

She nodded and he held it out to her. She took it and kissed it.

“There are no papers, Señora.”

Mila’s look of panic was only momentary before she quickly turned to Hoffner. “You have them,” she said. “Remember? The man gave them both to you when we left the last post. You put them in the other pocket.”

Durruti had been very specific on this. A woman—a good Catholic woman—in distress was almost irresistible to a soldier of God. And the man able to save her—His obvious emissary.

Hoffner nodded, relieved, as if he had just remembered. He reached into his pocket. “Yes, of course. I’d forgotten. I’m sorry to have caused any trouble.”

He handed the papers to the man, who quickly glanced through them.

“Another Safe Conduct.”

“Yes,” said Hoffner.

The man continued to look through them. “How did you get on this road?”

Hoffner waited for the man to look up. “There was gunfire,” Hoffner said. “I was stopped and told to drive around. The soldier said it would meet up with the first road. He was mistaken.”

The man held the papers out to Hoffner. “And why do you go to Zaragoza?”

Hoffner took them, placed them in his pocket, and said, “That I cannot say.”

This, more than anything, seemed to convince the young
requeté
. He said, “We’ll need to check the car.”

Three minutes later, Hoffner drove them past the barricade and into Nationalist Spain.

*   *   *

Augustus Caesar, born Gaius Octavius Thurinus, son of the she-wolf Atia Balba Caesonia, adopted nephew of the tyrant Gaius Julius Caesar, husband of the harridan Livia Drusilla, and first Emperor of Rome, hated Spain. He had fought there against Pompey as a boy, at the side of his uncle, and had developed a “horrible burning” in his
meatus urinarius
after an evening spent with two young women from the Tarraconensis province. The burning eventually subsided (a doctor familiar with the women suggested a combination of herbs and minerals), but young Octavian never forgot his days of agony in the city of Salduba. In later years he even went so far as to blame his inability to produce an heir on the peoples of Hispania. That Rome would have to suffer through the likes of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero was hardly the fault of two welcoming young virgins (or so they described themselves), but who was really to say? In an act of contrition, and with the hope that Spain might seem more than a cauldron of filth and whores to the people of Rome, the men of Salduba renamed their city after the young Octavian when he ascended the throne. They called it Caesaraugusta, which, over time—and due to dialect and the influence of the conquering Moors—became Zaragoza. It seemed highly unlikely that now, under the watchful gaze of the
requetés
, the city might offer a glimpse into that distant past. Then again, Zaragoza was filled with soldiers. Even the holiest of men needed something for which to repent.

Hoffner brought the car to a stop. A barricade stretched along the entrance to an ancient-looking bridge, with the thick brown water of the Ebro swirling below it. Wide enough for perhaps two trucks to pass, the bridge was six stanchions in limestone brick—a pristine nod to Rome in the vaulted archways in between—and looked untouched by the recent fighting. Not that there had been much to speak of. Zaragoza had followed the Seville approach to self-defense: Let the soldiers take what they will and never—never—hand a rifle to a worker. It had saved the city from any real scarring, though not so much the workers. Those who had fought with their shouts of
¡Viva la Libertad!
had been rounded up, shot, or worse. It was a terrible blow to Zaragoza, as the city had always been known as a hotbed of CNT activities. Passion without guns, though, has a tendency to end badly. It had in Zaragoza, and it was why the Puente de Piedra—after five hundred years surviving Moors and floods and the occasional rumble from the French—stood whole. Perhaps it had been saving itself for this unit of
requetés
now standing atop it.

Watching them from the car, Hoffner suspected that the young soldiers making their way over were thinking much the same thing.

“Señor,” one of them said. “Papers, please.”

Things were more relaxed here. They were twenty kilometers inside Nationalist territory, with fifteen hundred armed men just the other side of the bridge. A cordial “Señor” was the least one of them could offer.

Hoffner handed both sets of papers to the man and waited. If the boys at the Ontinar Crossroads had used their telephone correctly, this would be a quick stop, after which Hoffner would be ushered through to meet someone with real questions. If not—well, “if not” wasn’t something to dwell on these days.

The man with the papers told the others to wait while he returned to the small shack by the barricade. At just after three o’clock, Hoffner and Mila drove across the bridge.

*   *   *

It was good to be out of the open country; the sun through the windscreen had made the air almost unbreathable. Now looming above them and providing shade—perhaps for the province as a whole—was the basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, a massive and unwavering reminder of God’s bountiful dominion. Palatial walls sat below four fortresslike towers, each standing sentry over the Roman dome and tiled cupolas within. If this was a place to inspire quiet devotion, it was for a God dressed in full armor. Hoffner suspected that even had the bombs exploded, the spires themselves would have risen up to slap the aeroplane from the sky.

Mila stared up as they drove. “Welcome to Aragón.”

A motorcycle led them into the plaza, which stretched out behind the basilica. The square was large enough to land a plane, the buildings surrounding it a collision of Roman and Moorish design, with a few that seemed forever lost in the struggle. At the far end stood a second cathedral—why a square should need two was something only Zaragoza could answer—and a church tower that made the hunched houses of Osera seem perfectly upright by comparison. A line of military trucks was parked at the center, with two more of the Renault tanks thrown in for good measure. There was a starkness to it all, and not for the presence of the guns. It was the emptiness. A few soldiers stood at various posts, but the heat and God and common sense were keeping the rest of Zaragoza indoors. If this was victory, thought Hoffner, it was a far cry from the kind he had seen in Barcelona.

The motorcycle pulled up in front of a building and the soldier kicked out his stand. The place was one of the newer ones on the square, eighteenth or nineteenth century, and with the wrought-iron balconies and ornate stonework of a municipal courthouse. Two soldiers with rifles flanked the entrance. Hoffner turned off the engine, and the motorcyclist led them through and into the enclosure of a wide receiving hall.

It was all stone and wood, vaulted ceilings—and surprisingly cool. Doorways and corridors led off toward more doorways and corridors, while a staircase climbed along the walls to the upper floors. Peppered throughout were men in uniform who moved with a look of deep concentration. This was the hushed feel of newly minted authority—muffled conversations and telephone bells ringing from above. Hoffner might have been mistaken, but he thought he caught the smell of sweet incense drifting down from on high.