The Second Son: A Novel

by Jonathan Rabb

Mila was now leaning against Hoffner’s shoulder, the heat from her back and neck full against him. She had shivered once or twice in sleep—from a dream or a memory—but now lay perfectly still.

  Hoffner said, “I’m sure Aurelio was impressed.”

  “She’s too slim for Aurelio to be impressed. You’d think he’d like them that way—little as he is—but he never does.”

  “I was talking about the gun.”

  “Anyone can pull a gun. It’s the shooting that makes the difference.”

  “And you think she can do that?”

  “What? Shoot a gun?” Gabriel took a pull on the cigarette. “Why not? Don’t worry. She’ll get through. She’s a doctor. Everyone needs a doctor.”

  “If they believe her.”

  “Why shouldn’t they believe her? It’s you they won’t believe.” Gabriel was baiting him.

  “You think I’m going with her?”

  Gabriel tried a laugh, but the pain in his cheek got the better of him. “No, of course not. You’ll be letting her slip into Zaragoza all by herself. By the way, did she sleep alone last night?”

  Hoffner let Gabriel sit with this one before saying, “I’ve no idea.”

  Again Gabriel snorted, and again the pain was too much. “I imagine she likes them older.”

  And Mila said, “I imagine she does.”

  Her eyes were still closed, her arms folded gently across her chest. Gabriel was lucky to have the road in front of him; Hoffner stared out as well and tried to piece together the last half minute. There was a chance he had made an ass of himself. Cleverness was never much of a virtue in his hands.

  Mila said, “Where are we?” Her eyes were open now as she straightened herself up.

  Gabriel said, “Coming up on Barberà.”

  She peered out. “And he likes a bigger woman, something to grab onto?”

  Hoffner expected a look of embarrassment from Gabriel, but all he saw was the smile underneath the mustache. The cheeks rose and Gabriel suddenly coughed through a laugh. This, evidently, was worth the pain. “Something like that,” he said.

  She looked at Hoffner. “Would you have guessed that, seeing how little he is?”

  She was giving him a way out. She might have been giving him more, but Hoffner knew not to take it. “He’s keen on guns,” he said. “A girl like that—more space to hide one.”

  Gabriel’s laugh became a throaty growl, and Mila said, “What happened to the headlights?” It was only now that she seemed to notice.

  Again Gabriel spat something out the window. “Not so good to advertise through here.”

  “I thought it was safe up to the Durruti line?”

  “It is—mostly. Just not through here.”

  “And they won’t hear us?”

  Gabriel downshifted and the truck began to climb. “They’ve been hearing us for the past ten minutes. Hearing, seeing—either way it’s not so good, but why take the chance? Even a blind pig finds the mud sometime.”

  “This is Republican territory,” she said.

  “Is it? My mistake. I must have missed the day they brought the mapmakers out, pictures for everyone nailed to the doors. You be sure to tell the boys guarding the church up ahead that they’re breaking the rules.”

  The road leveled off and the truck took on speed. There were lights somewhere in the distance—candles, judging by the flickering—but most impressive now was the moon. It was directly in front of them, its glare spreading out across the fields like foam on lifeless waves. It was only a momentary pleasure.

  “Duck down,” Gabriel said. “They won’t hit anything, but just in case.” He tossed his cigarette out the window and accelerated.

  Without thinking, Hoffner pulled Mila close into him and the two slid low on the seat. Gabriel held the wheel with two hands and angled his head back against the cab wall as far as he could take it. Hoffner imagined them caught like a rat in a lantern’s beam, scurrying toward the darkness and helpless against the naked light. Then again, a rat has an instinct for survival: not much chance of finding that in a truck heading west to the hills of Zaragoza.

  The first ping came from behind them, then beyond, then in a wild series that seemed to stretch out in all directions. Hoffner’s eyes darted aimlessly with the shots until he found himself fixed on a spot outside Gabriel’s window. It was off in the distance, turrets, ancient and stone, clawing at the sky like raised talons. He felt Mila’s body against him. She, too, was staring out.

  Gabriel swung the truck hard to the left and the turrets vanished. A last wave of shots flew by and then fell away. Hoffner waited another half minute before pulling himself up. Mila sat with him.

  “What was that?” he said.

  Gabriel tried his best not to mock. “Boys with guns?”

  “No,” said Hoffner. “On the hill. The turrets.”

  Gabriel flipped on the headlights, and Mila said, “Montblanc. The old city wall.”

  “And they don’t mind the shots at night?”

  Gabriel said, “No one’s shooting at them.” He downshifted, and the gears ground out with a sudden kick.

  “Besides,” said Mila, “they’ve had worse. They say it’s where Saint George killed his dragon. You live through that, you live through anything, don’t you?”

  A MAN IN THE GROUND

  At just after midnight, Gabriel shut off the engine. Three jars of gasoline remained, but he knew he would have to keep a watch on them. Gasoline had a tendency to go missing with so many militiamen roaming about. Not that they had much use for it—a fire burned better with wood, a kerosene lamp might explode from the added heat—but these were anarchists. They had spent a lifetime scavenging. Why should a bit of freedom get in the way now?

  Truth to tell, Osera de Ebro was not the most logical place to have set up the front. Zaragoza was still another thirty kilometers on, but this was as far as the weapons had taken them. Even so, Buenaventura Durruti—the great anarchist leader, the man who had given them Barcelona and would send Franco back into the sea—was insisting he could mop things up. The rebels had at most fifteen hundred troops inside the city. They were requetés—beret-wearing, priest-toting Navarrese monarchists who saw this as a last holy crusade—but why be daunted by that? Truth and fashion stood in equal measure on either side of the line. No, it came down to discipline and experience and weapons, and while these were all firmly in the hands of the requetés as well, Durruti still had one card to play. He had numbers, twice as many men—four times that by the end of the week—each fighting with something perhaps even more essential: a sense of the inevitable. Barcelona had proved that God had forsaken His own. Discipline and weapons be damned.

  Remarkably, even the requetés knew this of their foes. In fact, the only person who seemed unaware was a Colonel José Villalba. Sadly, Villalba was the leader of the Republican forces and spent most of his time shuttling back and forth between Barcelona and his Aragón headquarters in Bujaraloz. Bujaraloz was another thirty-five kilometers behind the Osera line; in order to reach it, Villalba chose to take the train. The railroads were still under the workers’ control, and he reasoned that he could use the time to study maps and charts and piece together what little information he had on the men who might be dying for him. Had he decided to look out the window he would have seen that the fighting along the way was more skirmish than full-on battle, but Villalba kept the curtains drawn. It was better for the heat, he said. Reading his reports, he decided it was too early to bring the other Republican columns up to the front. He told Durruti—a colonel telling a man who disdained rank, commissions, an equal among equals—that, valiant as he was, he had plowed on too quickly. They would have to strategize together. And so Durruti began to spend much of his own time shuttling back and forth between Osera and Bujaraloz in order to convince the colonel that the time was ripe. There were no trains this far out, which meant that, with all the driving, Durruti needed to get his hands on some gasoline.

  Gabriel decided to sleep in
the back of the truck.

  * * *

  The smell of day-old flesh woke him at just after six. Gabriel looked over at the dead German nearer him and noticed that a string of flies had made camp below the right eye. Odd that they would have begun there, he thought. The back of the head was so much easier a way in.

  He hoisted himself up and pulled back the flap. The heat had yet to take root, but it was already stale enough to bring a sheen to the face. Outside, the small square proved only slightly better in daylight. A few cars and motorcycles stood in a not-terribly-convincing line; two large guns—French 75s, he guessed—sat on the back of trucks, looking as if they hadn’t been fired since the last war; and surrounding it all was a huddle of two-story buildings, hunched and leaning toward defeat. It might have been the burden of insignificance or the thought that they might actually be called upon to serve some larger purpose, but either way they carried their future like the weight of an unwanted boon: Why us, why now—why?

  Gabriel saw a bit of movement across the square. It was inside the house that had promised beds for the German and the woman last night. He hopped out of the truck and headed over.

  * * *

  As it turned out, the beds were nothing more than a few flat sections of floor with a collection of equally disappointing straw mattresses laid over them; the word “mattress” might have been kind. There were perhaps eight of them placed at odd angles, with men strewn across in various states of sleep.

  Hoffner was just opening his eyes when he saw Gabriel step through the door.

  “Did you sleep?” said Gabriel.

  Hoffner propped himself on an elbow and shook his head.

  Gabriel said, “Is she up?”

  They had set up a small barricade around Mila’s piece of the floor. She said it was unnecessary—she would be sleeping in her clothes—but the woman whose house was now the makeshift barracks had insisted. It might be a new kind of war, but not that new.

  Hoffner pointed over to the chest of drawers—with the three chairs and blankets spread over them—and said, “She’s in the master suite.”

  Gabriel stepped over and rapped a hand against the wood. “Good morning, Doctor.”

  He rapped again, then a third time, and Mila’s voice came from behind him. He turned to see her coming through the front door. She was carrying a tray.

  “I’ve found some coffee,” she said, “and something that looks like cheese. They said it was cheese. I’m hoping it’s cheese.”

  Hoffner sat up. She looked clean, as if she had found a washbasin. The face, though fresh, showed the weight of the night, the age lines more creased as they edged out from the eyes. She had taken care with little else, her hair pulled back to mask its wildness, and the neck speckled pink from exhaustion or the sun. It was a completely unadorned Mila who maneuvered her way through the beds, and it was this careless, untended beauty that brought a tightening to the muscles in Hoffner’s gut.

  She set the tray down and handed him a cup. He found himself staring into the dark liquid.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “Four was early,” she said, as she gave another to Gabriel. “You didn’t hear the boy come in?”

  Hoffner shook his head.

  “He was whispering through the blanket before he finally pulled it back,” she said. “I think he was hoping to catch a glimpse of something.”

  “Did he?” Hoffner drank. The coffee tasted of cheese.

  “It was dark,” she said, “but let’s hope.” She pulled over one of the chairs and sat. “There was an arm that needed patching. They have a sniper—at night—somewhere up in the hills. It wasn’t so bad.”

  Hoffner said, “And they don’t have a doctor of their own?”

  “I’m guessing he likes his sleep.”

  This was something he would have to remind himself of. Places like this held no surprises for her, at least when it came to the doctoring.

  She picked up a wedge of cheese, sniffed it, and took a bite. “I told them I needed to get into Zaragoza. They said it was impossible. I mentioned you.” She sipped at the coffee as she stared at Hoffner. “They said they’re very eager to meet you.”

  * * *

  With no basin or water in the barracks, Hoffner was forced to do what he could to rub the sleep from his face. His eyes felt swollen and his mouth tasted of red onion as he followed Gabriel and Mila across the square and into a one-room shack. Funny, but he hadn’t had onions in days.

  The place was dirt-floored and smelled of cooking oil and something sweet—crushed sugarcane or three-day-old sweat, it was impossible to say which. A woodstove stood at the back, tin cups, and a coffeepot resting on top. The exhaust pipe drove up through a hole in the ceiling that was just too wide for its spout. Had it been raining, there would have been no point in lighting it. Then again, it was August; why light the thing at all?

  Three men stood leaning over a small table near the stove. Their backs were to the door, and they were pointing at various positions on a map. From the look of the clothes and the rank smell in the air, Hoffner was guessing they had been up all night.

  The tallest of the three was the first to turn. He was somewhere in his twenties with a handsome face, a wild, full beard—a beard that inspired confidence—and arms the size of unstripped logs. The hair was thick there as well, as were the tufts climbing up through the top of his open shirt. Two thin suspenders kept his trousers above his narrow waist.

  The man kept his eyes on Mila for a moment too long. Hoffner chanced a side glance and saw it in her face as well, a look of complicity, recognition in the light of day. Neither showed regret. Neither showed anything beyond this single moment.

  The man turned back and said to one of the others, “Tura. He’s here.”

  Hoffner chafed at his sudden feelings of betrayal. They were ludicrous. He had said nothing to her, nothing to himself about her, except perhaps that she was his to protect. And maybe that was most ludicrous of all. He forced himself to keep his eyes on the men at the table.

  The man called Tura continued to speak quietly to the third in their company: there was an occasional murmured response, a shake of the head, but this was how it passed for nearly a minute. Hoffner thought the big one might interrupt again, but instead they all stood waiting until the third man finally nodded and headed to the door. Only then did the one called Tura reach for his cigarette—a weedy, self-rolled thing propped on the edge of the table—and turn to the room.

  It was a hard face, square and lined, and with a day’s growth to make the cheeks seem even more brittle. There might have been something oafish to it—the wide brow and high forehead—but the eyes were too focused and the color too deep a brown to hide the raw intelligence. This was a stare of perfect conviction. It held Hoffner’s gaze even as the cigarette smoke drifted past him.

  “You’re the German,” the man said. It was a peasant voice, guttural and crackling.

  “And you’re Buenaventura Durruti.”

  Hoffner had seen too many of the posters across Barcelona, photographs in every newspaper from Moscow to London, not to know him at once. Strange to come face-to-face with the soured breath of an ideal.

  Durruti looked over at Gabriel. “Sleep hasn’t improved you, Ruiz.”

  Gabriel nodded. It was as much as he had brought to the conversation.

  Durruti took a pull on the cigarette. “So. You have a son in Zaragoza, and you’d like to find him.”

  Hoffner took a moment. “No,” he said.

  Durruti was not one to show surprise. The eyes moved to Mila, then back to Hoffner. Smoke trailed from Durruti’s nose. “You have a son?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not in Zaragoza.”

  “No.”

  Durruti took another pull and nodded. “I must have misunderstood.”

  “Yes.”

  Durruti finished the cigarette and dropped it to the floor. “And yet you’re eager to make your way into a city garrisoned with
more than a thousand rebel troops.” He crushed it out under his boot. “That would be reckless even by my standards.”

  Hoffner said, “The doctor has a brother—”

  “Yes,” Durruti said. “I know. The doctor and I are old friends.” He pulled back his shirtsleeve and showed the bandage; the bullet had hit him just below the elbow. “The fascists have good aim. They’re also smart with a target. I’ve been told they’re even better in daylight.” Stepping to the stove, he picked up the coffeepot; he kept his back to Hoffner as he poured. “So this son—the one not in Zaragoza—he knows something about guns. Tell me about these guns.”

  Hoffner looked again at the big one; he was standing by the map, his arms crossed at his chest. He, too, was forcing himself to keep his eyes on the table. Hoffner said, “I’d take a cup of that coffee if you have it.”

  Durruti handed him the one he had just poured and looked at Mila. “Doctor?” She shook her head, and Durruti went back for another. Again he kept his back to them.

  “They’re German,” said Hoffner.

  “Yes,” said Durruti, “I know.” He took hold of a can and dripped some thick milk into the coffee. “And they’re in Zaragoza?”

  “I told you, my son isn’t in Zaragoza.”

  “That’s right.” Even with something this simple, Durruti was taking no chances. He stirred the coffee. “But they do have guns in Zaragoza. German guns.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I would.” Durruti set the spoon down and turned. “That’s why I’m telling you—so when you take your doctor in to find her brother, you won’t be surprised when you get shot by one of your own.”

  Hoffner watched as Durruti drank. Hoffner said, “You know where they’re coming from?”

  “What, these German guns? My guess: Germany.”

  Anywhere else, Hoffner would have resented the taunt; here it seemed justified.

  He took a drink and then said, “Teruel. My son is in Teruel.”

  “With guns?”

  Hoffner said nothing.

  “And you know this for certain?”

  “No.”