The Second Son

Reluctantly, Prager opened the drawer and pulled out the bottle. “It’s the walking dead in Braunschweig, Nikolai,” he said, as he poured Hoffner a half-glass and returned the bottle to the drawer. “How would you learn to make a friend?”

Hoffner smiled and then drank. “I’ve managed this long.” He set the glass down and stood.

“You should take in some of the games,” said Prager, retrieving the glass and filing it. “You like sport.”

“I prefer my chest-thumping in private.”

“Then you won’t be disappointed.” Prager closed the drawer. “It’s no uniforms at the stadium. The memo just came down. Supposedly they had a rough go of it last winter for the skiing. All those foreigners outside Munich thinking they were in a police state. Imagine that? Even the SS will be in mufti.”

Hoffner took a momentary pleasure in picturing the discomfort that would cause. “So how much of it are they having you attend?”

“It’s not all that bad,” said Prager. “The opening thing tomorrow and then some of the ru

“I’ll be sorry to miss it.”

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

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

The gesture caught Prager 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-Munz, Oranienburger, Bulowplatz-several telephone exchanges underneath the word “Oldenburg”; the begi

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? Flossenburg, 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 Hauptsturmfuhrer 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.”