Текст книги "The Second Son"

Автор книги: Jonathan Rabb

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Hoffner took a moment before turning to Vollman. Vollman was almost 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 Tetuan. 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 Tarancon 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 Tarancon, 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.

More trucks passed, more soldiers, until Hoffner recognized the town of Coria. This time it was the church, the shops, a few houses, and finally the prison fortress. The camera continued to pan across the square until it came to a sudden stop on an image. Hoffner’s hand tightened on the crank. It was by the well. Hoffner couldn’t be sure he had seen it correctly, and he began to move the crank slowly as the camera drew closer. He was almost to it when the film went black. Hoffner reversed and saw the image again.

Standing by the well and staring at the camera was Sascha.

His son. Sascha.

Nine years since Hoffner had seen him, yet he couldn’t deny it. The hair was all but gone, and the body too thin, but it was the same face, the same look of empty defiance. Sascha gave an awkward wave and the film cut out.

Hoffner closed his eyes, even as the boy remained in front of him.

My God, he thought. The two of them together.

The throbbing returned to his head, and Hoffner felt his head lighten and his body go limp.

6

Sascha

In the winter of 1919, at the age of sixteen, Sascha Hoffner took his mother’s maiden name and left Berlin as the newly minted Alexander Kurtzman. It was an act of unrepentant hatred and was meant to make certain that he would never have to see his father again.

Four years later, Kurtzman beat a man to death.

The killing was of no real consequence, except to the man himself, who had arrived in Munich the day before from somewhere in the Congo. The man was on his way back to Stockholm, and while he had already been traveling for several weeks, he decided to take a few days to wait for a more direct train heading north. November in Munich had always held a certain charm for him, and the man-a radical, and a great believer in the Congolese and their future-was not averse to conveying his political and social views to anyone willing to listen. Not of Africa himself, he nonetheless claimed to understand the soul of the black man. Sadly, he was not quite so savvy when it came to the men of Munich’s streets and her beer halls. The great putsch erupted on November 8, and the man-like any good radical-found himself incapable of stepping to the side. The man’s words were his weapons and, while the young Kurtzman was by no means an imposing figure, he had been fighting in the streets with the Freikorps for two years and knew well enough how to crack a skull against a brick wall. Hitler ranted from a table, General Ludendorff-war hero, and Hitler’s great supporter-turned a pale green, and Kurtzman took the man into a back alley and finished him. It was Kurtzman’s good fortune to come out relatively unscathed, so much so that he was able to make it back inside by the time Ludendorff stepped up to speak. A day later, Kurtzman watched with unimagined anguish as his heroes were sent off to prison.

Those were hard days indeed, the party disbanded, the best of them locked away. For a time Kurtzman followed his commander, the elusive and homosexual Ernst Rohm, to Bolivia-a useless place for useless men-but by then such men, such beautiful men, had become a way of life for Kurtzman. Even so, things tended to end badly on that front, and by 1926 he was back in Munich, eager to make up for lost time. He rejoined the party, redoubled his efforts with the Freikorps, and made the lucky acquaintance of a young writer and journalist. When, a few months later, the journalist was asked to take the party’s message to Berlin, Kurtzman found himself invited along as the man’s chief assistant. Overwhelmed and overjoyed, Kurtzman agreed at once and followed his new mentor, Joseph Goebbels, north to the promised land.

It was a period of unparalleled happiness and, save for one very brief episode in the winter of 1927, Kurtzman learned to love Berlin again. He lived his poverty with pride, and when the tide began to turn, he found himself a girl-on Goebbels’s insistence-and even managed to get her pregnant. He married her first, of course, and while he showed the face of a devastated husband when both she and the baby died during childbirth, Kurtzman knew that Berlin had stepped in to save him. He had accommodated respectability. He was now free.

Goebbels moved up, and Kurtzman moved with him. When Hitler finally took the chancellorship in 1933, Kurtzman celebrated with the rest, watched the Reichstag burn, and accepted his post at the Ministry with a sense of quiet destiny.

It was all as it was meant to be, until the day he was told that the whole thing had come crashing down. He was no longer a member of the party. He could never be a member of the party. He was filth: a Jew. A dirty Jew. They had discovered his secret. In a matter of hours, the once untouchable Alexander Kurtzman was forced to resume his role as the reviled and pathetic Sascha Hoffner. His life, as he had made it, was no longer his. The humiliation and despair might have killed a weaker man. Not so with Sascha. His own death was only of minor concern.

An image of that sixteen-year-old boy-before Goebbels, before the Freikorps-sat with Nikolai Hoffner as he cradled an empty glass in his hands.

Mila was next to him. Wilson leaned against the counter. Vollman stood by the door. They had finished the bottle of whiskey. They had let him drink in silence.

Hoffner set his glass down. He looked over and saw the canisters of film and the viewing machine in a crate by the door. He couldn’t recall when any of that had happened.

Mila was drinking water. She pushed her glass toward him, and Hoffner took it. He drank. It tasted of rust and sand, and he saw a few pieces of grit swirling at the bottom. They were the same color as the one he had brushed from Georg’s ear. Why that? he wondered.

Wilson said, “You saw something?”

The sound of the voice startled Mila. She looked up, and Hoffner set the glass on the table. He tapped at it, sending it across in little bursts of movement. He might have sent it over the edge had Mila not grabbed it and pulled it back.

Hoffner’s head remained unnervingly light as he stared at the table. “I saw what you saw,” he said. “Spain, guns-a well.”

“And that last image?” Wilson missed nothing.

“It went by quickly.”

“Not too quickly.”

“No,” said Hoffner, “not too quickly.” Wilson waited. Finally Hoffner turned to him. “It was my son,” he said. “My older son. Sascha. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.” Hoffner felt Mila’s eyes bore through him.

Wilson said, “You’re telling me that was Kurtzman?”

The word jarred. “How do you know his name?”

“We’re not likely to take a man on and not know everything about his family.” Wilson reached for the jug of water and poured himself a glass. He drank. “Kurtzman is in the Propaganda Ministry. Why would he be in Spain?”

The numbing at the back of Hoffner’s head returned; he welcomed it. “You saw his face,” he said, “the way he was dressed.” His eyes drifted back to the table. “You think this has anything to do with the Ministry?”

Wilson needed a moment. “So he’s here for the guns?”

Hoffner felt the first taste of acid in his throat. He took hold of Mila’s glass and held it. “No,” he said. “He’s not here for the guns.”

“How do you know that?”

Hoffner drank. He felt the water course through his chest.

“He’s no longer in the party,” he said. “He’s no longer a Nazi. They found his Jewish blood-from his grandmother-three weeks ago. And they threw him out.” Hoffner set the glass down but continued to hold it. His mind was emptying. “He’s not here for the guns or the Ministry.”

Wilson wasn’t convinced. “I thought you hadn’t seen him in quite some time.”

“I wouldn’t need to see him to know such things.”

Wilson looked as if he might press it. Instead he said, “Then why is he here?”

Hoffner heard the voices from Teruel, from Tarancon, from a part of himself he refused to listen to– An unusual German … he had death in the eyes-and said, “You say it’s not the way the SS kills a man.” There was nothing in his voice. “Perhaps you’re right.”

Wilson’s uncertainty turned to quiet disbelief. “What?”

Hoffner said nothing, and Wilson continued, “You can’t believe that.” He waited for an answer. When none came, he said, “You understand what you’re saying?”

Hoffner stared at the glass. He had nothing else. “You’re asking if I understand how my son could have killed his brother. Tell me. How could I possibly understand that?”

Wilson refused to hear it. “Even if it’s remotely true, he could have killed him in Berlin. Why follow him here?”

Hoffner had no answer, nothing but the face of Sascha staring back at him through the lens of a camera. “My son is dead. My other one is here.” He felt his throat constrict, his eyes grow heavy. “If only the world were made of such coincidence…”

Wilson looked across at Vollman. He saw his own disbelief staring back. He looked again at Hoffner. “You’re talking about your own son.”

Hoffner felt his own rage and despair like wet rope coiling around his throat. “Yes,” he said quietly, “my own son,” and the glass shattered in his hand.

It was nearly half a minute before he realized he was bleeding.

Mila was already pressing down on his wrist, pulling pieces of glass from his skin, as Hoffner stared down at the hand and saw one long cut. A single thick shard rocked easily on the table, while tiny grains of glass shimmered across his palm. Mila picked and brushed, and Hoffner felt nothing. It was a hand, not his own, until she finally took a cloth from Vollman and pressed it into the flesh. Instantly, Hoffner felt the pain shoot up through his arm like the twisting of raw muscle. He heard himself groan, and realized it was the burning of alcohol coursing into his skin. His throat constricted and he coughed.

“Bring over that bucket,” Mila said, and Hoffner angled his head as she continued to work on him. Only once did he come close to vomiting, but the acid stayed in his throat, and his hand began to throb with its own isolated pain.

Hoffner’s head cleared. He swallowed and looked over to see his hand encased in thick gauze. Wilson had produced a second bottle. He filled a glass with whiskey and held it out to Hoffner.

“He’s had enough,” Mila said.

Hoffner took the glass and drank. Wilson set the bottle on the table and retreated to the counter. Vollman was back by the door as Mila sat silently.

Finally Wilson said, “You’re saying this has nothing to do with the guns or Franco?”

Hoffner kept his eyes on the glass. He flexed his fingers. He could still move them. “Not everything shatters the world as a whole, Herr Wilson. This one shatters just mine.”

Wilson started to answer, and Hoffner said, “He left the film. He wanted it found. He wanted me to know.”

Wilson was still struggling. “But why?”

Hoffner heard the question in his own voice. “Because I’m his father.”

It answered nothing and brought a silence to the room.

Finally Wilson said, “I could help you.”

“No,” said Hoffner. “You couldn’t.” He felt the need to stand. He pushed back his chair and steadied himself against the table. “Thank you, Herr Wilson. Thank you for Doval, the doctor”-the word caught in his throat-“Georg. I imagine you’ll be leaving Spain now.”

Wilson showed a genuine sympathy even if he understood nothing. He nodded slowly.

Hoffner extended his good hand. Wilson hesitated, then took it. Vollman followed suit. It was a bizarre moment of protocol, until Vollman said, “You’re going to try and find him.”

Hoffner said nothing.

Vollman added, “I have a plane-for another two days. It has room for four.”

Mila stood, and Wilson said, “He’d be heading west. Portugal would be my guess.”

“He’ll be in Badajoz,” Hoffner said, his voice empty, his eyes distant: it was as if he were speaking to himself. “He found enough about Hisma to track Georg. He’ll know Badajoz is where the last of the guns are going. And he’ll think it’s where he can find his way back.”

Wilson hesitated. “His way back?”

Hoffner looked directly at him. It seemed as if he might answer. Instead, he took Mila’s arm and moved them to the door.

They buried Georg in the first light, in a field just beyond the last of the houses. Wilson had offered to take the boy to Berlin-he, too, had a plane-but Hoffner said no. He thought of Mendy and Lotte, standing through the taunts-those roving packs of boys who waited outside the cemetery gates, jeering while a Jew was laid in the ground. Why put them through that? It was quiet here, and simple. Whichever way things went in Spain, it would be better than in Germany.

The priest stood off to the side while Hoffner mouthed ancient words whose meaning he had never learned. He had no idea if this was the place or the time for them, but they were all he knew. His mother had insisted he say them for her. He said them now for his son.

When he finished, Hoffner took a clump of earth and tossed it onto the sheeted body. Mila did the same, then Wilson and Vollman. She held his arm.

The sun had climbed to the horizon as they stood and waited for Wilson in the square. He had gone to see Doval. Mila hadn’t let go of his arm. Vollman smoked through the silence.

Wilson appeared from the prison gate, and Hoffner said to Mila, “He’ll fly you to Barcelona. It’s the least he can do.”

Mila said nothing, and Wilson drew up.

“I told him it’s a direct request from the Admiralty,” Wilson said. His shirt was damp through at the back. “He’s promised no interference. You have two days. After that-”

“After that,” said Hoffner, “Doval gets to finish what he started.”

Wilson said nothing, and Vollman tossed his cigarette to the ground. “I can wait. I can fly on the fifteenth. That gives you enough time.”

There was no reason to answer.

Wilson said, “We’ll go get the car, then. Vollman and I.” It was a moment of unexpected chivalry: he was giving Hoffner a last few moments with Mila. It took Vollman another few seconds to catch on.

“Right. Yes.” Vollman gave an awkward nod, and followed Wilson off. Mila and Hoffner watched them go.

“They hid you in the church?” Hoffner said. It was first time he could ask.

“I’m not going to Barcelona.”

“There are good priests everywhere. All this must make them shudder. It’ll be the same in Germany one day-”

“I’m not going.” She waited until he was looking directly at her. “You don’t have to do this, Nikolai. If he was capable of killing Georg, what is there possibly to gain?”

Hoffner saw the vulnerability in her eyes. “And what if he wasn’t capable?”

“You don’t believe that.”

Hoffner waited. “No. I don’t.”

“So you go for-what? To let him finish this, to let him free you from whatever you think you deserve?”

“He killed his brother.”

“It makes you a coward.”

He hadn’t thought her capable of causing this kind of pain. Or maybe it was only now that he let himself feel it.

His voice remained low and calm. “He doesn’t get to walk away. If that makes me a coward, so be it.”

“No,” she said. “You’re a coward because you go alone.” It was an anger he had never imagined, raw and bitter, and doing nothing to hide its fear. “You’re going to stop thinking there’s something noble to be done, or that you could possibly know what it would look like. You don’t. All you do is hurt me with this and show how weak you are. I know how weak you are, and I know what terrifies you. Your boy is dead, but not because of you. And your Sascha-” She stopped. The words were tight in her throat. “You don’t get to throw yourself away because you want to believe that. There’s more to it now. You don’t get to do this alone.”

“I do it to protect you.”

“You do it to protect yourself.”

She stared across at him, her strength like shattered glass. It hung from them both and fell aimlessly to the ground. Hoffner’s hands ached, and still he gathered up the shards. He knew what it was he deserved, knew with every breath he took. It was the weight of this love-brutal and free and untethered from a lifetime of self-damning-and yet meaningless if he chose to run from his past now.

“Then you come,” he said.

The little Ford from Toledo appeared from a side street. Hoffner and Mila waited while Wilson and Vollman drove up.

The two men got out. There were a few awkward exchanges, a moment of surprise. Someone might have mentioned luck.

The car had been stripped down and searched, the rear cushioning all knife tears and disgorged stuffing. The front bench was much the same. Mila laid a blanket across it so they could sit. Even so, they felt the springs in every jolt and bump. Hoffner let Mila drive. He slept. And he dreamed.

He was sitting in a cool meadow, with the sound of flapping wings overhead. He saw a baby lying in the grass, its tiny feet kicking at the sky. Hoffner tried to stand but his legs were too heavy. He pulled at his thighs, and his hands were filled with a thick, wet tar, the smell of it like camphor oil, and he was suddenly holding flames in his hands. Mila pulled him back from the fire, and Hoffner saw her against the night sky. She was older and her body had been burned, her arms peeling in thin flakes of flesh. He reached for her, but she stepped back. He reached for her again and his eyes opened.

They were at an outpost. Twenty Republican soldiers stood off in the distance, each with a rifle and a cap. Mila was talking with a man who was holding their papers. Hoffner heard the sound of mortar fire somewhere in the distance, and he watched as each of the men ducked his head. The sound was too far off to pose any danger, but these were men not yet tested by battle. They flinched and gripped their rifles.

Hoffner pushed himself up and opened the door. His hand had stiffened, and his eye felt as if it had been squeezed shut. He could barely swallow. He forced his legs out, and he stood.

Mila and the soldier looked over while a second barrage erupted. Hoffner made his way to them, his stride unsteady, with the booze in his stomach and a scorching sun to contend with.

He drew up and thought to say something, but his mouth was too dry. He spat, and the man offered him his canteen. Hoffner drank.

“The prison in Coria,” the man said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

Hoffner nodded and finished the canteen.

“You don’t want to go south,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to explain it to the senora.”

“The doctor,” Hoffner corrected, and spat again. “The senora is a doctor.”

“Yes. The doctor. Yague has half of Africa marching up from Seville. They’re already pressing in from Merida. It’s not going to be good in Badajoz. It won’t be good here in a day or so, but we’re not going to think about that.”

If Hoffner had any inkling who Yague was or where Merida might be, he might have known enough to show some concern. Instead, he told himself not to vomit in front of the soldiers.

Another explosion rattled behind them, and Hoffner nodded his thanks.

“We’ll take our chances.”

He took Mila by the arm and walked with her back to the car.

Father And Son

An untamed terror now lived in the towns and hillsides surrounding Badajoz. Hoffner had felt tremors of it in Teruel, isolated echoes in the screams behind Coria’s prison gates, but it was only here that it penetrated the smallest of gestures: a backward glance from a woman on a cart, the sudden silence from a flock of birds perched penitently in the trees, the grinding of tires on a ground too slick and too beaten down by hooves and trucks and rain to be passable. The men who walked along the roads strode with more purpose than was warranted. It was the surest sign that they meant to meet death on their own terms. Fear makes a man cower. Terror gives him strength.

Like a pouch bag, everything was getting pulled in, barricades and guns and horses to ring the approach from the south and the east. Yague was well beyond Merida. It would come tomorrow or the next day. That was what they were saying. No one was permitted to pass after sunset.

“I have to get through.”

Hoffner tried to show his papers again, but the man with the thick beard and the rifle shook his head. It was a gentle shake, one reserved for overeager children.

“If there’s still a road to be taken,” the man said, “you can take it in the morning. No one moves after dark.”

They were in a village called Villar del Rey, thirty kilometers from Badajoz. The man motioned to one of the houses along the square. It was two or three rooms, one bare bulb, the rest lit by candles, with a whitewashed courtyard in front. The sky had streaked into strips of pink and deep blue, and there was a boy of thirteen or fourteen leaning against its front wall. He was long and pale, and he held his rifle in arms taut with new muscle.