The Second Son: A Novel Read Free Page A

know why you’re here. And if the Spanish know—well, wouldn’t you think the Nazis would know as well?”
    Hoffner didn’t like the shift in tone. “And do the Nazis know why you’re here?”
    Despite himself, Vollman liked the answer. Again he smiled.
    “English, Russians,” he said, “Italians, Germans. Aren’t we all just waiting for the Spaniards to figure it out for themselves? And when they do”—Vollman shook his head with as much pathos as a man like him could muster—“that’s when we take sides. And that’s when the real games begin.” He took a last pull. He was oddly quick with a cigarette.
    Hoffner said, “You mean when they start killing each other.”
    Vollman hesitated even as he showed nothing. He tossed his cigarette to the ground and then bobbed a nod out at the city. “You keep on getting whatever it was you were getting. When you need more, you know where to find me.”
    Vollman started off.
    “It’s Paris,” Hoffner said.
    Vollman stopped. He turned.
    “The city of lights,” Hoffner said. “Not good to be confusing Paris and Barcelona these days.”
    Vollman waited. There was no telling what he was thinking. He said nothing and moved off. Hoffner watched as Vollman stopped for a few moments by the lute player, dropped a coin in the man’s hat, and headed for the stairs.
    *   *   *
     
    Back at his room, Hoffner was finishing his third glass of whiskey when he placed an empty sheet of paper on the desk. His head was spinning—from Vollman, from the booze—but there was always one place he could go to clear his mind.
    He began to write.
     
A ladder?
Brilliant, Papi. Make sure the gardener doesn’t take a shovel to your head the next time.
It’s past eleven. They’re all heading off for dinner, so you’re the best I can do for company. Don’t pat yourself on the back. I’ve had a few, and we both know what that does to my letters to Lotte. You won’t tell her.
I can’t promise coherence. Then again, there isn’t a lot about Spain these days that inspires it, so I think I won’t worry. Oh, and there’s nothing else to tell about the police, except that their hats are ludicrous. I’d try to draw you one, but it would come off looking like a dying bat or a headless peacock. Wonderfully appropriate but not terribly accurate.
So that leaves the politics. Yes, the politics. At last. Just for you. I can hear you laughing. I had a strangely unnerving conversation tonight—the place seems to thrive on strangely unnerving conversations—but there’s no point in going into that. Still, it put me in the frame of mind.
You’d feel right at home. It’s like Berlin after the Kaiser, except here the Lefties manage it without a dinner jacket or soap. They take the worker thing very seriously. Lots of shirtsleeves and bandanas. It’s Mediterranean Marxism, which has a kind of primitive feel to it—everyone sweating and opening shirt buttons and going without shoes. They have rallies all the time and write large, imposing posters with lots of dates on them. Women wear trousers a great deal, which seems to go counter to the whole heat-inspired politics of the Left. Wouldn’t a dress be cooler? It makes you wonder how much the cold had to do with paving the way for Hitler, but that’s for another time. (If the line above is blacked out by the censor, I probably deserved it, so don’t worry.)
I’ve met anarchists and socialists. I’ve eaten with Communists and anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist-nihilists, and something simply referred to as a non-Stalinist Soviet. I thought the person introducing me was talking about a kind of napkin until a very earnest young woman began to spew in a much-too-quick Spanish for me to follow. Best recourse is just to nod.
The bizarre thing is that they all seem to think they’re the ones running the show. Not together, of course. That would be asking too much. (At least Weimar got that right for a while.) The socialists hate the