Free The Second Son: A Novel by Jonathan Rabb

the planners from immortalizing both the place and the moment of the century’s first spilling of Aryan warrior blood. The caverns sit under the Maifeld grandstands and directly below the bell tower. Someone had suggested early on that they call it the Führer Tower, but Hitler himself had vetoed that. Why overstate things?
    The place was oddly quiet as the car pulled up. Hoffner noticed the requisite guards and policemen roaming about. There might have been more security elsewhere, but no one would have been stupid enough to stop Radek’s Daimler. These were his grounds; even the SS knew to leave him alone.
    The car stopped and the four men stepped out onto Olympischer Platz. Somewhere off in the distance a crackling light from a welder’s torch cast shadows against a far column. Hoffner wondered if perhaps Werner March himself might be somewhere about, chiseling out the last bits and pieces. March had promised a dedication ceremony for early May. Instead, he had quietly announced the stadium’s completion about two weeks ago: AND NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON , the BZ headline had read. The editors had hoped to run a cartoon of March holding up the back of the stadium on his shoulder, a wide smile on his sweating face, but they had received a note from the Reich’s Propaganda Office advising them that such a display—“humorous as it was”—might be seen as beneath the paper’s dignity. How anything might be seen as beneath the BZ ’s dignity remained open for debate.
    Radek stepped around to the back of the car, pulled open the boot, and removed a bag. “The boys are going to stay here,” he said, refastening the latch, then bobbing his head toward the gate. “How’d you like to see the stadium, Nikolai?”
    They walked in silence along the lamplit arcade: the place seemed to demand that kind of reverence. Flags from the competing countries hung limply from their poles. Searchlights shone high onto the stadium’s façade, arching up and over and misting into the gray of the sky.
    Hoffner stared up as they passed under the gate. A few stars had managed to break through the cloud cover, but for the most part it was just swirls of black hovering above the iron rings.
    Two or three guards strolled along the plaza beyond; all were careful not to notice Radek and his companion.
    Hoffner said, “Do you smell that?”
    “What?”
    “Bad beer and piss.”
    “I do,” said Radek.
    “And that’s not a problem?”
    “Not much they can do about it when the wind shifts.”
    Hoffner was surprised at the ease of the answer. “So this happens all the time?”
    “Three times a day.”
    Hoffner was waiting for an answer.
    “Strength Through Joy Village,” Radek finally said. “The thing’s about half a kilometer from here. It’s even got its own train station.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “Would I joke about that?”
    They made their way between the central columns and into the stadium’s main entryway. Their footfalls began to echo.
    Radek said, “It comes equipped with Strength Through Joy Beer Halls, Strength Through Joy Children’s Tents, Strength Through Joy Crappers. There might even be some Strength Through Joy Tits thrown in, but I think those girls are reserved for the pure Aryan clientele. That’s something you don’t get on the cruises.”
    The Strength Through Joy recreation camps and holiday cruises had been set up by the Reich as a thank-you to the working class of Germany. The simple folk were, after all, the very spirit of the Reich. And such spirit—pungent as it was—deserved a little knockwurst and dancing on the cheap.
    “Your boots are good?” said Radek. “It’s going to be wet.”
    They mounted a stairway, arrived on the second level, and then moved down a short tunnel. Somewhere toward the middle of the tunnel, the stadium grounds began to come into view.
    If Hoffner had hoped to find something clever or demeaning to say, he couldn’t. The place was overwrought, militaristic to a