The Second Son: A Novel (8 page)

“
Girl Crazy
,” Rolf corrected. “And, no, it’s not. This is ‘Night and Day’ from
The Gay Divorce
. Cole Porter.” Rolf took a drink of beer and swallowed.

Radek watched as Rolf dug back in. “I have the phonograph,” Radek said.

Rolf nodded. “Good. Then you have the phonograph of
The Gay Divorce
by Cole Porter.” He raised his hand to a waiter, made some indecipherable gesture with his fingers, and went back to his plate. “I’m getting the spätzle, Nikolai, if you want some.”

This, evidently, was the way an evening with Berlin’s most dangerous trio took shape: elementary economics and Tin Pan Alley.

With anyone other than Rolf or Franz, Radek would have found a reason to press things, even when he knew he was wrong. He had once told Hoffner it was good for a man to learn how to cower every now and then. This wasn’t cruelty. It was therapeutic, even better if the man recanted the truth just so as to save himself. Radek called it the psychology of order: men liked knowing where they stood; they liked even better being told where to stand. No wonder he was finding Berlin so comforting.

“Finish up,” said Radek. “We’re heading west. I’ve got a treat for you.”

*   *   *

Half an hour later, all four were crammed into the back of Radek’s Daimler saloon, Franz and Rolf perched precariously on the two jump seats.

“You were a fencer, weren’t you?” said Radek.

Hoffner tapped his cigarette out the window and watched as a floodlit Unter den Linden raced by. The avenue had once been famous for its dual column of trees down the center. Not now. The Nazis had insisted on building a north-south U-Bahn to impress their Olympic guests. That meant digging and destruction and the temporary loss of the trees. But not to worry. There were always plenty of flagpoles and light stanchions at the ready to take their place, row after row of perfectly aligned swastika banners fluttering in the rain.

Berlin was now nothing more than an over-rouged corpse, gaudy jewels and shiny baubles to distract from the gray, fetid skin underneath.

Hoffner said, “It’s going to smell like this for a while, isn’t it?”

The avenue was jam-packed with the city’s esteemed visitors, guzzling their beer and munching their sausages—most of them good little Germans, small-town folk, who had been arriving by the trainload for the past week. The foreign contingent—all that promised money from abroad—had proved something of a disappointment. Still, at least most of these knew how to speak the language.

Radek said, “Gives it a nice rustic feel, doesn’t it?”

They drove past the Brandenburg Gate, and the light in the car intensified. Hoffner said, “So how much have they laid out for all this?”

“Why?” said Radek. “You thinking of chipping in?”

Hoffner turned to him. “How much?”

Radek shrugged. “No idea.”

“Really.”

Radek shook his head. “I’m telling you, we had the stadium—that’s it. The electrics went to Frimmel. The Sass brothers took the village complex. They get catering on that, so they’ll be making some nice money, although they’ve had to deal with the Wehrmacht, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And Gröbnitz got waste disposal.”

Franz, who was staring out the window, laughed quietly to himself.

“Franz likes that Gröbnitz will be up to his arms in it,” Radek said. “What Franz doesn’t realize is how much money there is in shoveling someone else’s shit.”

Hoffner said, “Refreshing to see all the syndicates working so nicely together.”

“It’s the Olympic spirit,” said Radek. “Everyone’s been asked to sacrifice.”

“And in your pocket?”

Radek smiled. “Isn’t there a little pride somewhere in there, Nikolai? Something for the German greater good?”

“Tremendous amounts,” said Hoffner. “How much?”

Radek’s smile grew as he bobbed his head from side to side, calculating. “A hundred thousand seats in the stadium … Maifeld—that’s over twenty-eight acres of open ground—the practice facilities … Maybe”—he shot a glance at Franz—“what do you say, Franz? Twelve, fifteen million?”

“Twenty-seven,” Franz said blandly, as he continued to stare out.

“Twenty-seven million?” Radek’s disbelief was matched only by his cynicism. “Really? That much? Just imagine getting a cut of that.”

“Yah,” said Hoffner. “Just imagine.”

“They want to throw away the city’s money on this, Nikolai, I’m happy to help them.” Hoffner tossed his cigarette out and Radek said, “So you didn’t think of pulling out the old saber? Helping the great German cause?”

The thought of dragging his ancient legs onto the strip forced a dismissive snort from Hoffner. “I think Fräulein Mayer rounds out the token half-Jews on the team, don’t you?”

It had been in all the papers, the girl’s “special dispensation” from the Reich’s Committee. Mayer, a former world champion now living in America—and a Jew only in name—had been made an “honorary Aryan.” It seemed demeaning, no matter which way one leaned.

“She’s not doing them any favors,” said Radek.

“Who,” said Hoffner, “the Jews or the Reich? My guess, she wins something, she’ll have to give it back anyway.”

*   *   *

The Reichssportfeld sits on over three hundred acres of Grunewald forest in the far west section of town. From central Berlin, it is a relatively easy trip past the Tiergarten if one makes sure not to take the truck roads out to the Halske or Siemens factory sites—unless, of course, one is desperate for a rotary engine or any number of other electrical engineering devices. If one keeps to the low roads, the first behemoth to appear on the horizon is the stadium itself. It looms at the end of the wide Olympischer Platz, stone and granite leading all the way up to the double columns of the Marathoner Gate, with the five rings pitched in between. Though ostensibly the brainchild of the March brothers—Werner and Walther—the entire complex has the feel of an Albert Speer design, the thick limestone and wide columns telltale of the Reich’s architectural wunderkind. There was a rumor that the Führer, on hearing of Werner’s plans to create a modern wonder—steel, glass, and cement—said he would rather cancel the games than have them take place in “a big glass shitbox.” But that was only rumor.

Next are the Maifeld parade grounds—vast, wide, green, resplendent—surrounded by nineteen meters of elevated ground, two meters higher than the stadium itself. Originally slated to hold over 500,000 people, it manages only half that (much, again, to the Führer’s dismay), but there is the hope that, with the new health incentives—and the aim at a “fitter, sleeker, trimmer” German—the grounds might actually squeeze in close to 300,000 in the not-too-distant future.

And finally there are all those squares—August Bier Platz and Körnerplatz and Hueppeplatz (absolutely vital to name one of them after the German Football League’s first president)—but the real gem is the Langemarck-Halle. It is a series of cavernous rooms built to commemorate the gallant singing student soldiers (
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”
) who gave their lives in the early days of the war, charging in full chorus against the hordes of ravaging Belgians, who were bent on destroying the mythic German spirit. That the battle took place at Bixchote (so much harder to spell, and not really all that German-sounding) never deterred the planners from immortalizing both the place and the moment of the century’s first spilling of Aryan warrior blood. The caverns sit under the Maifeld grandstands and directly below the bell tower. Someone had suggested early on that they call it the Führer Tower, but Hitler himself had vetoed that. Why overstate things?

The place was oddly quiet as the car pulled up. Hoffner noticed the requisite guards and policemen roaming about. There might have been more security elsewhere, but no one would have been stupid enough to stop Radek’s Daimler. These were his grounds; even the SS knew to leave him alone.

The car stopped and the four men stepped out onto Olympischer Platz. Somewhere off in the distance a crackling light from a welder’s torch cast shadows against a far column. Hoffner wondered if perhaps Werner March himself might be somewhere about, chiseling out the last bits and pieces. March had promised a dedication ceremony for early May. Instead, he had quietly announced the stadium’s completion about two weeks ago:
AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON
, the
BZ
headline had read. The editors had hoped to run a cartoon of March holding up the back of the stadium on his shoulder, a wide smile on his sweating face, but they had received a note from the Reich’s Propaganda Office advising them that such a display—“humorous as it was”—might be seen as beneath the paper’s dignity. How anything might be seen as beneath the
BZ
’s dignity remained open for debate.

Radek stepped around to the back of the car, pulled open the boot, and removed a bag. “The boys are going to stay here,” he said, refastening the latch, then bobbing his head toward the gate. “How’d you like to see the stadium, Nikolai?”

They walked in silence along the lamplit arcade: the place seemed to demand that kind of reverence. Flags from the competing countries hung limply from their poles. Searchlights shone high onto the stadium’s façade, arching up and over and misting into the gray of the sky.

Hoffner stared up as they passed under the gate. A few stars had managed to break through the cloud cover, but for the most part it was just swirls of black hovering above the iron rings.

Two or three guards strolled along the plaza beyond; all were careful not to notice Radek and his companion.

Hoffner said, “Do you smell that?”

“What?”

“Bad beer and piss.”

“I do,” said Radek.

“And that’s not a problem?”

“Not much they can do about it when the wind shifts.”

Hoffner was surprised at the ease of the answer. “So this happens all the time?”

“Three times a day.”

Hoffner was waiting for an answer.

“Strength Through Joy Village,” Radek finally said. “The thing’s about half a kilometer from here. It’s even got its own train station.”

“You’re joking.”

“Would I joke about that?”

They made their way between the central columns and into the stadium’s main entryway. Their footfalls began to echo.

Radek said, “It comes equipped with Strength Through Joy Beer Halls, Strength Through Joy Children’s Tents, Strength Through Joy Crappers. There might even be some Strength Through Joy Tits thrown in, but I think those girls are reserved for the pure Aryan clientele. That’s something you don’t get on the cruises.”

The Strength Through Joy recreation camps and holiday cruises had been set up by the Reich as a thank-you to the working class of Germany. The simple folk were, after all, the very spirit of the Reich. And such spirit—pungent as it was—deserved a little knockwurst and dancing on the cheap.

“Your boots are good?” said Radek. “It’s going to be wet.”

They mounted a stairway, arrived on the second level, and then moved down a short tunnel. Somewhere toward the middle of the tunnel, the stadium grounds began to come into view.

If Hoffner had hoped to find something clever or demeaning to say, he couldn’t. The place was overwrought, militaristic to a fault, self-consciously classical, larger than any other space he had ever seen, and breathtaking.

The curve of the stands pressed up and outward like the perfect ripple of a stone dropped into a still lake. The color was somewhere between the cream white of porcelain and the rough green-gray of sanded limestone. Empty, the seats looked like flawlessly laid tracks—twenty, thirty, sixty of them, circling the field in a series of infinitely rising loops. Everything was bright from the overhead lights, and yet there was no glare. Most remarkable, though, was the field itself, broad and masculine, its grass tufted and thick, glistening from the rain as if its own exertions had produced this rugged sheen. The smell, full and green, lingered, with just a taste of polished stone in the mouth. Hoffner stood in silent wonder.

“It’s even better on the grass,” said Radek, as he started down the steps. Hoffner had no choice but to follow.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, both men stepped up onto the low wall and then jumped down to the field. Hoffner felt a slight twinge in his knee. He did what he could to ignore it as they made their way across the six lanes of cinder track and out to the infield. At the far end, the top of the bell tower loomed through the wide and solitary opening in the stadium wall. Even the sky seemed more immense here.

“That’s where he’ll be coming through tomorrow,” Radek said. “Arm up, strutting,
Heil Hitler!
” He flipped his hand in a mock salute. “We might even see a smile.”

“I thought you liked Berlin just now?”

“What’s not to like?”

They made it to the center of the field and Radek stopped. The silence and size of the place came together in a single rush; odd to feel dizzy without moving.

Radek set the bag down. “And despite what you’ve heard, he asks for girls.” He knelt down and opened the bag. “Young ones. You never want to know what he does with them. The girls never say a word after. It’s unpleasant, but he pays well.”