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?”
Frau Edelbaum was a good deal more pleasant, though without any of the tools necessary to inject some tact into the proceedings. She would smile embarrassedly, say how lovely it was to see him again, and sit quietly with her glass of Pernod while her husband-perched at the edge of Georg’s favorite chair-played trains with Mendy. Hoffner would look on from the sofa and try desperately to time the sips of his beer with any attempts to engage him. And while this was perfectly unbearable, it was Mendy’s departure for bed, and the subsequent dinner conversation, that took them over the edge. In the end, Hoffner was doing them all a favor.
He stood with Lotte in the foyer as he slipped on his coat.
She said, “They won’t be here much past ten,” smoothing off one of his shoulders. “I’ll make sure.”
“Not to worry. Gives me a chance to see a few friends.” He pulled his umbrella from the stand. “It’s not as horrible as you think.”
“Yes, it is. You detest him.”
Hoffner fought back a smile. “Tell him they let me go for being a Jew. That should cause some confusion.”
“He’s more frightened by all this than you know.”
Hoffner shook the excess water from the umbrella. “He has good reason to be.” He buttoned the last of his buttons. “I’ll be sorry to miss the chicken. You’ll save me a piece?”
“It’s already in the icebox.”
He leaned in and kissed her on both cheeks. “They won’t treat me nearly as well in Spain, you know.” He saw her wanting to find the charm in this, but it was no good. “I shouldn’t tell them about any of that,” he said. “I’d hate to have your father pretending concern for me just for your sake.” Not waiting for an answer, Hoffner opened the door and stepped out into the rain.
Rucker’s bar hadn’t changed in nearly thirty years. Any given night it was the smell of burned sausage and over-sauced noodles that wafted out to the street and made the last few meters to the door so familiar. The sounds from inside came a moment later, old voices with years of phlegm in the throat to make even pleasant conversation sound heated. Hoffner found something almost forgiving about walking into a place where he wasn’t likely to see a face younger than fifty. Even the prostitutes had the good sense not to be too young; teasing the old with what was so clearly out of reach would have been cruel. The new girls learned to steer clear quickly enough; the ripe ones came to appreciate a clientele that preferred to talk, have a few drinks or a laugh, before trundling upstairs for more sleep than sex. To an old whore, a night at Rucker’s had the feel of a little holiday. It might not be much in the purse, but it was easy and quiet and at such a nice pace.
The barman placed a glass in front of Hoffner and pulled the cork from a bottle of slivovitz.
“Let’s make it whiskey tonight,” said Hoffner.
The man recorked the bottle, reached for another, and smiled as he poured. Hoffner took his drink and scanned the tables.
Eight o’clock was still early for the usual crowd. Dinner with the wife, followed by all that endless chatter about a day spent up on the girders or underground digging new track, could keep a man home until almost half past eight. The ones without families knew it best to straggle in even later, keep the rest guessing as to where they might have gotten to in the last few hours. The smartest always had a hint of perfume on the clothes, that watered-down swill a man could buy for himself and spray onto a collar just before coming through the door. It was the surest way to get the conversation going: “What do you mean, what do you smell?” The quick sniff of the shirt, the look of surprise, the overeager laugh, and finally the confession: “Damn me if she doesn’t use the cheap stuff!” Roars of laughter after that, even if everyone knew the game. Still, why spoil a man’s last chance at pride?
Hoffner spotted Zenlo Radek sitting in the back. Two of his men were hunched over a series of plates piled high with beef, potatoes, and sausage, while Radek glanced through one of the newspapers stacked at his side. Radek might still have been somewhere in his early forties-maybe even late thirties-but his face had long ago given up on youth. It was its lack of skin, or rather the stretching of the skin across the bones, that made it so perfect for the surroundings: gaunt and pale blurred even the sharpest of eyes. Then again, it might have been his homosexuality. That aged a man, too.
Radek continued to read as Hoffner drew up.
“The streets won’t be nearly as safe now,” Radek said, flipping the page. He had unusually long thin fingers. “But I’m sure they sent you off with something nice. A cigarette case, a gold watch. Let you listen to the time slipping by.
Hoffner was never surprised by what information Radek had at his disposal. “Never took you for the sentimental type.”
“Don’t confuse pity with sentiment, Nikolai.” Radek closed the paper and looked up. A taut smile curled his lips, but the eyes told Hoffner how glad Radek was to see him. “And here I thought you might not be putting in an appearance before your trip.” Hoffner looked momentarily confused, and Radek said, “Toby Mueller. He’s got a plane all gassed up out at Johannisthal. Heading off to Spain, I hear, and with you in tow. Daring stuff, Nikolai.”
Or maybe there was room for surprise. Hoffner had to remind himself that as Pimm’s onetime second-and now boss of the city’s most notorious syndicate-Radek was tapped into every conduit in Berlin. Even the Nazis came to him when they needed information. There was talk, of course, that Radek had been the one to give Pimm up to the SS-“Make it quick, painless, a single shot to the head”-but that was absurd. It might even have been insulting. Truth to tell, Radek had never wanted this. He was simply too smart, and too loyal, not to be the one to take it all on in the end.
“Running the Immertreu,” he had once joked to Hoffner, drunk. “Tell me, if I’ve been spending all this time trying to kill myself, isn’t this a much better bet than the needle ever was?”
As it turned out, Radek had proved too resilient even for heroin. It was years now since he had lost himself to the attic rooms on Frobel and Moll Strassen. The rooms were long gone-who among the war-ravaged was still alive to fill them? — but Radek had given them a good try: veins streaked that deep pumping blue, boys at the ready for whatever was asked of them, and always the empty hope that he might somehow forget he was no longer a man-
