The Second Son: A Novel (5 page)

“I’ll be sorry to miss it.”

“Yes, I’m sure you will. I’ll pass on your regrets to the Obergruppenführer.”

At the door, Hoffner fought back the urge at sentimentality. Even so he heard himself say, “Be well, Edmund.”

The gesture caught Präger by surprise. He nodded uncomfortably, pulled a file from his stack, and began to read. For some reason, Hoffner nodded as well before heading off.

*   *   *

His office was unbearably neat. There were scuff marks along the walls where books and jars and shelves—now gone—had rested for too many years without the least disturbance. The bare desktop was an odd assortment of stained coffee rings and divots, the grain of the wood showing a neat progression from healthy brown—where the blotter had sat—to a tarlike black at the edges: it made Hoffner wonder what his lungs might be looking like. And along the floor, imprints from file books—either thrown away or shipped off to central archives—created a jigsawlike collection of misaligned rectangles. Someone would have a nice job of scrubbing those away.

There was nothing else except for a single empty crate that sat in the corner under the coatrack. It had the word “desk” scrawled on it in black ink.

Hoffner stepped over, tossed his hat onto the rack, and set the crate on his chair. He had left the drawers for last. He imagined there was some reason for it, but why bother plumbing any of that now. He pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the desk. Tipping over the middle drawer onto the desktop—a few dozen business cards, along with a string of pencils, spilled out to the edges—he then did the same with the side drawers, the last of them leaving several pads of paper on top. He placed the cards, pencils, and pads inside the crate and began to sift through the rest.

Most of it was completely foreign to him. There were various scrawled notes—some dating as far back as twenty years—which had somehow eluded filing and now lay crumpled in balls to be opened and tossed away: a list of streets—Münz, Oranienburger, Bülowplatz—several telephone exchanges underneath the word “Oldenburg”; the beginning of a letter to a Herr Engl, where the ink had run out; and endless names he had long forgotten. The usual assortment of Gern clips and pencil shavings fell to the desk with each new handful of paper, but it was the smell of tobacco-laced formaldehyde that was most annoying.

The only thing worthy of any real attention was the neatly rubber-banded stack of folded maps. There was no point in opening any of them: Hoffner knew exactly what each would show: a pristine view of Berlin, although probably no more recent than 1925 or 1926. He had stopped using them around then.

For twenty-five years, though, maps like these had been a mainstay in the Hoffner Approach to Detective Work. They had made him famous, albeit in rather limited circles. Young Kriminal-Assistents—now far higher up on the rungs than he—would stand at the doorway and watch as he traced his fingers along the streets and parks and canals in search of the variations. That was always the trick with Berlin. She was a city of deviation, not patterning, each district with its own temper and personality. It was always just a matter of keeping an eye out for what didn’t belong and allowing those idiosyncrasies to guide him.

These days, however, she was too sharply drawn, too meticulous, and too exquisitely certain of herself to make the subtleties of genuine crime appear in bas-relief. Those idiosyncrasies were no longer the results of human error: a miscalculation in the timing of a bread delivery truck, or the unfamiliarity with the newspapers most likely to be left on a bench after four in the afternoon (years ago, Hoffner had caught two very clever second-story men on just such slipups). Instead, the deviations were now self-constructed, printed in laws inspired by Munich and Nuremberg. They left Berlin no room for shading and made her no more impenetrable than the most insignificant little town on the distant fringes of the Reich. Why seek out differences when impurity was the only crime that mattered? Flossenbürg, Berlin—to Hoffner’s way of thinking, the two might just as well have been the same place.

He tossed the maps into the crate as a head appeared around the side of his door. “No one’s going to want it, you know.”

Hoffner looked over to see Gert Henkel stepping into the office. Henkel was fortyish and rather dapper in his Hauptsturmführer uniform, the double chevron and braided circle making him someone to be taken seriously, willingly or not. The insignia placed him somewhere between the old Kriminal-Kommissar and Kriminal-Oberkommissar designations—or maybe somewhere above them both; Hoffner had given up trying to follow it all. Oddly enough, for all his Nazi trappings, Henkel was a decent fellow. It was still unclear how much of the party line he swallowed: too good a cop not to see it for what it was, but too ambitious not to keep his mouth shut. Hoffner wondered how long that would last.

Henkel said with a smile, “When was the last time you cleaned the place?”

If not for the glaring shine on Henkel’s boots, Hoffner might even have called him friend. “How old are you, Henkel?”

Henkel kept his smile. “A good deal younger than you.” When Hoffner continued to wait, Henkel offered, “Forty-two.”

Hoffner nodded and went back to the crate. “Then I’d say the last cleaning was just before you set off for Gymnasium.” Hoffner tossed several more scrawled-on pads onto the pile. “You did go to Gymnasium, didn’t you, Henkel? Or are you one of those uneducated but terribly hardworking little butcher’s sons who caught the eye of some well-meaning cop and so forth?”

Henkel’s smile grew. “Never took you for an elitist, Nikolai.”

Hoffner picked up the last of the pads. “I’m not. I just like a bit of schooling. Your uniform can be rather misleading on that.”

Henkel snorted a quiet laugh and stepped farther into the office. “My God, you’re getting out just in time, aren’t you?”

“Too late to turn me in, then?”

“Not my style.” Henkel settled in one of the chairs along the wall.

Hoffner continued to flip through his pad. A photograph of Martha with Sascha at five or six years of age had somehow wedged itself into the pages. It was a dour-looking thing, mother and son both moodily sunburnt, probably taken at the beach one of those summers before Georg had come along. Still, she had been pretty.

Hoffner slid the photo back in and placed the pad in the crate. He looked over at Henkel. “Not your style? You might want to ask yourself why sometime.”

Henkel spoke easily. “That was your generation, Nikolai. It’s answers now, not questions.”

Again Hoffner bobbed a nod. “Is that meant to be clever or charming? I’m never quite sure with all these new rules.”

Henkel looked momentarily less charmed before the smile returned. “I’d never really taken you for a Jew.”

How quickly word traveled, thought Hoffner. “Neither had I,” he said. “But that’s just it. Your boys have left me no choice.”

“Early pension, and at full pay? They’re actually doing you a favor at the moment.”

“It’s not this moment that worries me.”

Henkel snorted another laugh. “Gloom and doom. I was wrong. You really are a Jew.” When Hoffner said nothing, Henkel pressed. “Oh, come on, Nikolai, don’t take it so personally. No one’s going to let an old bull cop like you get caught up in any of this.” The humane Henkel was making an appearance. “It’s just putting things in order. They make a show with a few of the more arrogant types, and then everyone settles in. Better for the Jews to live their own lives, anyway. Probably what they want themselves.” He smiled. “Now, if you happened to own a shop or, God forbid, actually had a little money, then…”

Hoffner tossed another handful of scraps into the wastebasket. “I might need to take it a bit more personally?”

“No, Nikolai, you wouldn’t.” Henkel leaned forward. “This is politics. They’re saying what they know people want to hear. So they’ve taken it a bit far. They’ll pull back. Trust me, six months from now, no one will be talking about any of this.”

Hoffner swept the remaining clips into his hand and deposited them in his pocket. “They,” he said, as he brushed the grit from his palms. “Your friends might not like hearing that from someone wearing their uniform.”

Hoffner thought he might have overstepped the line but Henkel was in too good a mood. “It’s me, Nikolai,” Henkel said, sitting back again. “I’m the one who’s getting it. I’ll probably have to bring in a fumigator, but who wouldn’t want the great Nikolai Hoffner’s office? There was quite a pool for it. Somehow I won.”

For the first time, Hoffner smiled. “Somehow,” he said. He took his hat from the rack. “Then I suppose it’s yours to enjoy.”

He started for the door, and Henkel said, “You’re forgetting your crate, Nikolai.”

Hoffner stopped and looked back. He stepped over and pulled out a pen. Scratching out the word “desk,” he wrote “trash” below it. He then pocketed the pen and moved out into the hall.

MENDEL

It had taken some getting used to, living among the refined. Even now, Hoffner could feel the eyes from across the street with their tidy disdain—sneering at the brown suit, brown hat, brown shoes. Brown was not a shade for the rich, at least not the brown Hoffner was sporting. Still, it was good to have a successful son. Georg’s house was large, his lawn well-kept, and his flowers always a jaunty yellow or maroon, even after too much rain: remarkable how wealth could absorb even the dullest of colors.

The one blemish on the otherwise flawless façade was a tiny streak of fresh paint on the doorjamb. Hoffner stepped up to the veranda, lowered his umbrella, and stared at the spot where the mezuzah had hung. Not that Georg had grown up with anything remotely Jewish—he had grown up with nothing—but the boy had fallen in love with a girl, and such girls demanded these things. She had even gone so far as to demand (ask, hope) that Georg might move himself up on the Judaic ledger from quarter Jew to full-fledged. Only twenty at the time, Georg had submitted without a blink, a year’s worth of preparation happily weathered to make him fit for marriage. Hoffner was now sandwiched between a dead mother and a practicing son, both of whom had returned to their roots without a single thought to the living family tree. Odd how, thus far, Hoffner was the only one to have paid for his lineage.

The mezuzah had come down after the latest spate of street beatings. Until recently, the punch-ups had always taken place in the seedier parts of town or outside synagogues. Even so, all but a few of the houses along the street were now festooned in swastika flags: national pride, they said, the German Olympic spirit on display. Those conspicuously unadorned—the Nazis had forbidden Jews from flying the Reich colors—drew stares enough. Why advertise beyond the obvious?

Hoffner pushed through the front door and into the foyer. He slid his umbrella into the stand and then opened the door to the house. Almost at once the smell of boiled chicken and potatoes wafted out to meet him.

Luckily, Georg’s Lotte was an excellent cook. Hoffner followed the smell past the sitting and dining rooms (too much velvet and suede), along the carpeted corridor (very Chinese), and into the white-white tile of the kitchen. At least here there was something of the familiar. Lotte was at the stove, standing beyond the large wooden table and leaning over a pot that seemed to be sending up smoke signals. Very quietly, Hoffner said, “Hello.”

She was known to jump. Several meals during his early days in the house had spilled to the floor with the simplest of greetings. Hoffner cleared his throat and again spoke in a calming tone. “Smells very nice.”

“I heard the door,” she said, without turning. She continued to stir. “A messenger came with another note. That makes three. It’s on the table.”

Hoffner saw the ripped-open envelope with the now-familiar Pathé Gazette rooster in the top corner. The note was stuck halfway back in.

“And?” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting.

She seemed to take comfort in the heat on her face. “They don’t feel there’s any need for alarm, at this point.” The last phrase held just the right touch of resentment. “ ‘It’s mayhem,’ ‘what Georg thrives on,’ ‘the only one who can get it on film,’ so forth and so on.” She dug through for a piece of something, scooped it up, and tossed it into the sink. “They’re doing what they always do. They’re being pricks.”

Hoffner liked this most about Lotte. In fact, he liked almost everything about her. She was lovely and fine-boned, very good to Georg, and so clever when it came to seeing things as they really were. Georg had needed a girl like this, a girl just as clever as himself. And while Georg might have had a bit more empathy for the world beyond them—Lotte was never one to suffer fools—it was only a bit. By some miracle, the world had allowed them to find each other.

It was her mouth, though, that Hoffner marveled at. There was an honesty to the way she used words like “prick” and “shit-brain.” They weren’t meant to shock, just define. Hoffner imagined it was her precision that made her so endearing.

He said, “I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose.”

“Of course they’re not doing it on purpose,” she said, stirring again. “That’s what makes them pricks. They know exactly where he is. They just don’t want to tell us.”

Hoffner nodded and asked, “Is the boy about?”

“Still,” she went on, “I imagine they’re expecting some really wonderful reels of war-torn Barcelona, bodies and red flags, rifles in the air. And all by the end of the week. Isn’t that exciting?”