The Second Son: A Novel (6 page)

Hoffner had told himself to wait until dinner to bring things up but, truth to tell, he had never been much good at waiting. He said, “I suppose I’ll just have to go and find him, then.”

“He’s up in your rooms,” she said. “Where else would he be? I think he’s got something special planned for you today.”

Hoffner waited and then said, “I wasn’t talking about the boy.”

It took her a moment to follow. When she did, she continued to ladle through the meat.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “You meant Georg. Going to Spain and bringing him back. Yes, that would be very nice of you. And some eggs while you’re out. We’re running low.”

“They’ve given me the sack at the Alex.” He waited for her to turn. “This afternoon,” he said. “It’s a few years early, but they think it’s for the best. After all, I’ve had such a nice career up until now.”

She was still holding the spoon. He noticed a glint of Georg’s empathy register in her eyes: it was nice to see it. She said, “I’m so sorry, Nikolai.”

He shook his head. “No reason. Not much police work going on at the place now, especially for a half-Jew cop.” She tried an awkward nod, and he said, “So I’ll go see this Wilson fellow tomorrow. The one who runs Georg’s office. He’s always seemed nice enough. Let him know what I’m planning to do.”

There was an uncomfortable silence before she said, “What?”

Hoffner continued easily. “I’m sure he knows where Georgi was filming last. No reason to put any of that in the notes. I’ll start there.” The spoon began to drip and Hoffner pointed. “You might want to watch that.”

Her silence turned to confusion. “You’re not being serious?” Chicken stock splattered to the tile but she ignored it. “You know, I don’t find this funny.” When he continued to stare at her, she said, “They may be pricks, Nikolai, but they’re right. He’s followed someone up into the hills. That’s what this is.” She found a dishrag and crouched down to clean up the spill. “He’ll get the footage he wants and come back down. And then he’ll come home.” There was an unexpected frailty in her need to believe what she was saying. “It’s the Spanish. Do they even have telephones?” She stood and turned on the faucet.

Hoffner watched as the dishrag now began to get the worst of it. He said, “We both know Georg’s never gone this long without a wire or a letter.” When she said nothing, he took hold of the envelope, pulled out the note, and—glancing through it—realized she had managed it almost verbatim: “mayhem,” “thrived.”

“ ‘Incomplete communications,’ ” he said, reading. “That’s a dangerous little phrase.” He waited and then added, “If you need me here, I won’t go.”

“Need you?” she said; he heard the first strains of anger in her voice. She turned off the faucet and said, “That’s not it and you know it.”

She continued to stare into the sink, and Hoffner suddenly realized how badly he had missed it. This wasn’t anger. This was fear. It was a cruel sort of stupidity that had let him think she might actually be encouraging, even excited at the prospect. All he had done was to make the danger acutely real for her.

He set the page back on the table. “No one else is going after him, Lotte. No one else wants to think they have to.” And for some inexplicable reason: “There’s probably a better story in it if they don’t.” He was too late in realizing how deeply this had cut her. Instead, he found a bit of grease on the table and began to rub his finger along the wood.

Her eyes remained on the faucet. “So you just get on a train and go to Spain, is that it?”

His fingers had become sticky. He looked for something to wipe them on. “I’ve a friend who can fly me in.”

“A friend?” she said in disbelief, turning to him. “So this has been in the works for some time.”

Hoffner let the silence settle. “Yes.”

“Of course it has,” she said. “And getting the sack from the Kripo—that just makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

“I was going anyway.”

She tossed over the dishrag. “I’m sure you were.”

“As I said, I won’t go—”

“Yes, you won’t go if I tell you I’m too weak to let you. Would that cause some real misgivings, Nikolai, a moment of genuine concern? But then I’ve never played the martyred wife with Georg, so why should I try it with you?”

At twenty-four, she already had more resilience than he would ever know in himself. And courage. It took a kind of courage for bitterness to stand up to fear. It was something he had seen only in women. Or perhaps it was what he provoked in them. Either way, it made him feel small in its presence.

He focused on the rag as he wiped off the grease. “It’s more chaos now than—” He stopped himself. Than what, he thought—killing? How much more could he possibly mangle this? He looked at her. “They haven’t drawn the battle lines. There aren’t any fronts to be held. They’re picking sides, and a man can get lost in that, no matter how noble his intentions. A man like that needs someone to come and find him.” And, perhaps trying too hard to redeem himself, he said, “If it were you, Lotte, I wouldn’t need to go at all. You’d be just fine.”

She held his gaze. It was a strained few moments before he caught the flicker of surrender in her eyes. Another moment and she pointed to the rag. “They’re still pricks,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, tossing it back. “They are.”

It was enough for both of them.

She turned to the pot and, with one more unexpected kindness, said, “He’ll be impossible if you don’t go up now. Just try not to get him too frantic before dinner.”

*   *   *

The walk across the back lawn to the carriage house was mercifully dry. Hoffner kept his head down, careful not to notice the tiny pair of eyes following him from the second-floor window. He pulled open the door, mounted the steps, and instantly heard the scurrying of Mendel’s little feet above him. At the top of the railing, Hoffner saw Elena, the boy’s nanny, who was standing behind a lamp. To a four-year-old, a woman of her size—thick in all the right places—could actually be hidden behind such things. There was a stifled giggle from the blanketed lump on the sofa.

“What a long day I’ve had,” Hoffner said. “How nice it is, finally to be alone. I’ll just stretch myself out for a nice rest.”

He tossed his hat onto a chair and began to ease himself down onto the sofa. Instantly, the boy’s hands gripped Hoffner’s shoulders with shrieks of “Not alone! Not alone! Not alone!”

Hoffner went through all the required confusion—“My goodness! Who’s that? The sofa’s alive! Help me!”—as they ran around the room, Mendel clinging tightly to his back. Finally, Hoffner pulled the boy around to the front and they both slumped back to the sofa with a smothering of kisses for Mendy’s neck and belly.

This was, with only minor variations, the routine every day, down to the last few gurgles of laughter before Hoffner finally let go. Mendel quickly leaped to the ground and raced over to the drawing table in the corner.

Elena, well practiced, now stepped out from behind her lamp and said, “We spent a good deal of time on this one, Herr Chief Inspector. A little trouble getting all the letters of your name to fit over your head, but we finally managed it.”

She was always very good with the prompting. Not yet forty, Elena might have been the perfect opportunity for a healthy father-in-law living within arm’s reach, but both of them had been smart enough not to play out that farce. Hoffner nodded, trying to catch his breath as the boy raced back to the sofa and thrust the page onto his lap.

The only thing even remotely familiar on the paper was the drawing of a silver-star badge—or at least that was how it was described. It had recently become Mendel’s signature piece and was about two-thirds the way up on a big black blob, which meant that the blob was Hoffner. A few weeks back, the boy had been given a book on cowboys from Lotte’s father, an insufferable fan of the American West. With very little encouragement, Hoffner had pointed out that a sheriff was a kind of policeman, whereupon Mendel had instantly assigned that role to him. Lotte’s father remained less than pleased.

As to the “letters” Elena had mentioned, there were various scrawled lines and curls above the blob, the nearest thing to German an upside-down
A
, that looked more like a capsized boat than anything else. Still, it was three little clumps of something, with the
A
at the end.

“ ‘Opa,’ ” said Hoffner, reading. “How wonderfully you’ve drawn it.”

The boy dug himself into Hoffner’s side as he peered at his own work. “And that’s your badge there,” he said.

“Yes, of course. I saw it at once. Thank you, Mendy. We’ll put this one up with the others.”

“Can I see it?”

This, too, was part of the ritual, the handling of the badge. Instinctively, Hoffner reached for his pocket before he realized his badge was no longer there. He might have felt a moment’s regret—his first and only for this afternoon’s events—but instead, he chose to ignore it. Even so, he had grown fond of watching the boy gaze at the thing, hold it up to his shirt, bark out orders. Pride required so little in the very young.

Hoisting himself up, Hoffner said, “I think it’s time we get you your own badge, Mendy. A deputy’s badge. What do you say to that?”

So much for not riling up the boy. The moment of primal excitement quickly gave way to an equally deep despair as Mendy was told that the promised badge was, as yet, unpurchased. Hoffner’s only recourse was to give in to the nightly plea: eating dinner with the boy, or least sitting with him while he struggled to master a fork.

Fifteen minutes later, Mendy sat on a high stool at the kitchen table—Hoffner seated by his side—as Elena put the last of the little meal together. Mendy placed his hands on the table and began to teeter himself back and forth. Instantly, Hoffner grabbed hold of the stool.

“I won’t fall,” said the boy. “I’m balancing.”

Hoffner kept his hand on the stool. “Not a good idea, Mendy.”

“But I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”

Elena set a plate of tiny chicken pieces, potatoes, and spinach in front of the boy. She then placed a glass of beer in front of Hoffner.

“Eating time, Mendy,” she said. Her tone was one that everyone in the house had learned to obey; Hoffner quickly took a sip of his beer. “If I see you balancing again,” she said, “we go to the quiet place. Understood?”

Hoffner had never visited the quiet place—a closet under the stairs—although he had heard tales of it. According to Mendy it was filled with shadows, creaking wood, and even a few monsters. Mendy, however, had learned not to mention the monsters. They had not impressed Elena.

“Is it good?” said Hoffner, as the boy speared a second piece of chicken and shoved it into his mouth. Mendy had a remarkable talent for fitting an entire plate’s worth of food inside his cheeks before starting in on the chewing. Hoffner saw the boy going in for a third, and said, “I’d work on those before taking another, don’t you think?” Hoffner bobbed a nod toward Elena, who was at the sink washing up. “You wouldn’t want to … you know.”

Mendy thought a moment, then nodded slowly as he pulled back his fork. Chewing, he said, “She likes it when I finish quickly.”

Hoffner said, “She likes it when you don’t choke.”

This seemed to make sense. Mendy nodded again and, continuing to chew, said, “Did Papi have a quiet place when he was little?”

It was always questions about Georg these days—badges, forks, trips away: did Opa go away quite so often when Papi was little? This happened to be a particularly reasonable one. The trouble was, Hoffner had never spent much time with Georg at this age—at any age, truth to tell. It made the past a place of reinvention.

“Yes,” said Hoffner, “I think he did. Right under the stairs, as a matter of fact.” There had been no stairs in the old two-bedroom flat.

Mendy swallowed and whispered, “Did it have monsters?”

Hoffner leaned in. “Not after we got rid of them.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Hoffner nodded quietly. “Maybe you and I can do that sometime.” Before Mendy could answer, Hoffner plucked a piece of chicken from the plate and popped it into his own mouth.

Mendy said loudly, “Opa is eating my food.” Hoffner put on a look of mock panic as Elena, without turning, said, “Opa can go to the quiet place, too, if he’s not careful.”

Mendy stabbed at a clump of spinach, studied it, and shoved it in. “If she sends you, I’ll go with you,” he whispered. “That’d be good for both of us.”

Hoffner brought his hand to the boy’s face and drew his thumb across the chewing cheek. Mendy continued unaware and drove in another piece of meat.

It was all possible here, thought Hoffner. His only hope was to find his way to dying before he learned to disappoint this one.

*   *   *

Hoffner’s suggestion that he have dinner out was met with little resistance. Lotte’s parents—the Herr Doktor Edelbaums—had called to say how concerned they were with Georg still out of the country: wouldn’t it be best if they all dined together, Friday night after all? They would be over in half an hour.

Together, of course, meant just the family. There was always that moment of feigned surprise from the Herr Doktor when the “lodger”—Edelbaum’s infinitely clever title for Hoffner—put in an appearance: “No murders to be solved tonight, Herr Sheriff? So you’ll be joining us?”