For their sins, Wild Bill Donovan recruited Orland Buck and my grandfather into the Office of Strategic Services. They were sent to study mayhem and spycraft at Area B, an OSS training facility in the Maryland mountains on the present-day site of Camp David. The U.S. military had long disavowed the practice of espionage and deception as beneath its gentlemanly dignity; many of the instructors at Area B were Brits. They had spent their lives subverting insurrections and infiltrating rebellions. They did not care if you forgot to salute them. They thought that training to shoot at a target while standing straight up with your arm sticking out like a turnstile was about as useful as learning how to joust. They were unobtrusive and ferocious men whom my grandfather could not fail to admire.
He learned to work with a compass, a garrote, and a onetime cipher pad, and to crawl a long way on his belly under live machine-gun fire. He learned to forge and alter documents, to hide intelligently, and to parachute off the top of a ninety-foot platform (though he never jumped from an actual plane). For a while he was the target of Jew hate by a couple of bigots in the class. Buck pleaded with him to get a little bit carried away just this once. The next day during hand-to-hand training, my grandfather broke the jaw of one of his tormentors, and after that the other ran out of things to say.
On graduating Buck and my grandfather were given three days’ leave in Baltimore, where Buck got my grandfather so drunk that he was able to directly experience, if not to communicate, some of the unlikelier effects on time and space called for by Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity. They said goodbye at Baltimore Penn Station, where they boarded trains bound in opposite directions, Buck for New York City, my grandfather for Washington. A week later Orland Buck was dropped by parachute into Italy to cause trouble ahead of the Allied invasion. This he did, moving north and east with violence and aplomb until December 1944, when he and some Titoist partisans inadvertently blew themselves up along with a bridge on the Kuba River.
One of the few people ever to have really seen my grandfather’s potential, Bill Donovan had “something different” in mind for the other principal in the Key Bridge Affair. In a memo recommending him to the deputy director for special projects, Stanley Lovell, Donovan portrayed my grandfather as “capable, it might be, of genius-level thinking, [ . . . ] calm and analytical in temperament, if bloody-minded.”
With the invasion of Italy under way and plans for the invasion of Normandy being drawn up at COSSAC headquarters in London, Donovan foresaw a need for men qualified to go in behind the eventual invasion force and pick Germany’s pocket. The prize would be German scientists, engineers, and technology—miles ahead, in many areas of research, of anyone or anything in the U.S. at the time. The ideal agent would have both the technical knowledge necessary to fathom the secret laboratories and proving grounds of the Reich and the operational skill to find and loot them. My grandfather, Donovan wrote, “suited to a ‘T,’” but until the invasion could be arranged, he would need to be “distracted, his mind kept activated, lest he get himself killed out of sheer boredom.”
From the middle of 1943 until just after D-day, when he was assigned to one of the new “T-Force” units and sent to London for training in the high arts of plunder, my grandfather worked for Stanley Lovell in research and development, which occupied the cramped basement of the OSS campus at Twenty-third and E. Donovan had recruited Lovell, a chemist and patent lawyer, to equip clandestine OSS operatives in Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. Lovell and his R&D team set to work devising the fountain-pen pistols, lipstick cameras, and cyanide-filled shirt buttons that have featured ever since in the panoplies of movie and television spies. They found new approaches to infiltration, sabotage, and secret communication. They hit on ways to kill the enemy with cunning and panache, with exploding pancake flour and incendiary bats.*
I jotted down some of the names of the devices and tools my grandfather remembered having contrived during his time at Twenty-third and E. It was a fairly long list, with many annotations, scrawled inside the front cover of the book I was reading that day, Salinger’s Nine Stories. Decades later, having recommended “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” to my elder daughter, I went looking for Nine Stories, one of a number of titles that had been duplicated on the shelves of my first marriage, in graduate school. At the sight of the cover with its grid of colored blocks, the memory of that afternoon returned to me: a slant of submarine light through the eucalyptus outside the guest bedroom, my grandfather’s brown face against a white pillow, the sound of his Philadelphia vowels at the back of his nose like a head cold. But when I opened the book, the inside cover was blank. In making our terminal inventories, my ex-wife and I must have exchanged copies. I had lost to estrangement and carelessness the only document I possessed of the week I am now trying to reconstruct. And I can recall only five of the projects my grandfather claimed to have originated:
My grandfather enjoyed his time with Lovell, for the most part; kept out of the action once again, he welcomed the chance to lose himself amid solutions to the novel technical problems that crossed his desk every day. It was important work, in its curious way. But ultimately, it was an office job in the world capital of office jobs, a city whose bureaucratic fecklessness my grandfather once dreamed of repaying with conquest and shame. No one was more thrilled than my grandfather when the news came from Omaha Beach that it was time at last for his war, for his life, to begin.
* * *
After Glenn Miller’s set—one of the last the bandleader played before his plane went down over the English Channel on December 15, 1944—Lieutenant Alvin Aughenbaugh returned to the billet he shared with my grandfather, the smallest flat with the fewest windows on the highest floor of the Mount Royal Hotel, Oxford Street, London. He was whistling “Moonglow,” and there was a telltale bulge at the hip pocket of the cardigan his sister had knitted for him. They were orphans, Aughenbaugh and his sister; she was like a mother to the guy. He took off the sweater only when directly ordered to do so. The commanding officer of their unit was regular army, but he understood that he had been put in charge of a bunch of oddballs, and for the most part the sweater never left Aughenbaugh’s body. It had a shawl collar, toggle buttons, and a sash that Aughenbaugh left untied because he felt self-conscious about having womanly hips. When he wore it, he looked, fittingly, like an engineer with a Ph.D. in food production from the University of Minnesota. His field of expertise before the war had been the mass manufacture of donuts, or what Aughenbaugh called “industrial-grade edible tori.” He spoke German and French, read Russian and Latin. He was two hundred pages into the writing of an analytical biography of August Kekulé done entirely in limericks, entitled A Rolling Autophagous Snake. Apart from one or two professors at Drexel, he was the first intellectual my grandfather had met who was not a pool hustler, a criminal, or a rabbi.
“Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy,” Aughenbaugh said. “So put down the pornography, Rico.”
My grandfather put down the book he was reading, a bound edition of the Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie for 1905 containing a key text in the history of gas warfare chemistry, J. F. Haber’s Uber Zündung des Knallgases durch Wasserstoffatome. He lay uniformed but for necktie and shoes. “Find something good?”
“I only drink the best.” Aughenbaugh’s alcoholism was riddled with morality. He believed it was less sinful to drink good liquor than to drink hooch. “As you know.” The supply of good liquor, like the supply of everything else, was subject to gluts and shortages. Lately, it had been tough to come by. “Given a choice.” He fished a fifth of something out of the hip pocket of the sweater his sister had knitted.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I distilled it myself, as a matter of fact.” Aughenbaugh uncapped the bottle, stuck it under his nose, inhaled. “From a fine mulch of bomb debris and uneaten portions of creamed mock kidney on toast.”
Aughenbaugh often resorted to false cheeriness in the bleak hours between dusk and inebriation. He was by nature a cheerful man, but he was homesick. He missed his dog, his cat, his books, his record collection, ice fishing, and his sister, Beatie. The world had been plunged into fire and darkness, and a scarcity of good liquor imperiled his soul. On top of all that there was English wartime cuisine, which substituted plentiful inedibles for scarce ones with vile inventiveness. In the canteen at lunch today, in the maze of Great Cumberland Street where their mission was headquartered, the role of creamed kidneys had been played by something called neeps, seethed in a cornstarch slurry.
“Best neeps yet, I thought,” Aughenbaugh said.
“The neeps were top-notch.”
“I would have sworn those kidneys were unmock.”
“Well, they use real urine,” my grandfather said. “Gives it that tang.” He folded his hands behind his head and flexed his toes pleasurably in his regulation socks. Unlike cornstarch and neeps, grain coffee, or beetroot fudge, Aughenbaugh’s ersatz cheer was a reasonably effective substitute for the real thing.
“Speaking of urine,” Aughenbaugh said, “it’s time for your sample, Rico.”
He looked around in vain for something to pour the whiskey into. The firm that supplied the Mount Royal with glassware and crockery had been hit by a doodlebug. The flat’s ration of monogrammed MR glasses had been pilfered by a WAAF of my grandfather’s brief acquaintance named Marigold Reynolds. Beakers were requisitioned from a lab at Great Cumberland Street, but then Aughenbaugh had needed them for an ongoing in-house experiment aimed at devising a cure for airsickness. He had spent the flight over from Langley with his face in a pail and the color of his uniform shirt, making sounds that were variations on the theme of his last name. He was dreading the short hop to Paris tomorrow.
“Oh, shish kebab,” he said. “I meant to swipe a couple of glasses from the bar.”
Shish kebab. Sugarloaf. Sheboygan. Whenever life called for foul language, Aughenbaugh broke into a reserve of quaint midwestern euphemisms. There seemed to be hundreds, rarely repeated. My grandfather had met few Lutherans. He wondered if they were handed some kind of list to memorize as children.
“Right, then.” Aughenbaugh set the bottle down on a dresser. “See if I can’t scare us up a couple of tankards, what?” he said, putting on his C. Aubrey Smith voice. “Do something about that beastly sobriety of yours.”
“Just one tankard,” my grandfather said. He patted the Zeitschrift. The Haber paper was eight pages long. He had been reading it for a month. Each of its sentences, dense with formulae, was a mile that must be crawled across shards of glass. My grandfather was on page six. “Got to keep my wits about me. I might need to conjugate the future perfect of deisobutanisieren.”
“Nonsense, old boy, wouldn’t hear of it.”
Aughenbaugh went back out to the flat’s sitting room, where the experiment in antiemesis was under way. My grandfather heard him say, “Fudge-bucket.”
“I’d suggest you just drink from the bottle,” my grandfather called. “But I wouldn’t want civilization to collapse.”
Stoppers popped. A pipette chimed. Glass clinked against glass like a lovers’ toast. Aughenbaugh came back into the bedroom holding three beakers, each half-filled with sludge of varying translucence and color, from roast beef drippings to crank case fluid. One key stage in the preparation of the antiemetic had involved boiling some old ginger snaps with a handful of weeds Aughenbaugh had found growing in a bomb site.
“Is it ready?”
“Has to be.” Aughenbaugh set the beakers down on the dresser beside the bottle of whiskey. He poured off the contents of two beakers into the third, leaving their bottoms tinged with a glaze of anti-puke formula.
“How was the show? Glenn say hi?”
Whenever he and his wartime band of soldier musicians came through London, Major Glenn Miller also lived in the Mount Royal Hotel and played nightly. Over the past few months Aughenbaugh had managed to engage his hero in two or three short conversations, all touching on the London weather, about which of course it was best to say nothing. For Aughenbaugh these had been encounters with a mahatma. They brightened his existence for days afterward.
“The show was depressing,” Aughenbaugh said. “To be honest. I can’t explain why, exactly.”
“Playing was off?”
“Note-perfect. The great Jerry Gray arrangements, those pop-popping short phrases. Everything as tight and good-sounding as that time at the Mayflower.” He poured two precise fingers of whiskey into each of the beakers. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’d almost say the heart seems to have gone out of old Glenn. You better have a word with him, Rico. Set him straight.”
Training with their T-Force unit, my grandfather, as was his habit, had offered very little in the way of information about himself, even to Aughenbaugh. The tale of his career before his recruitment to this arm of U.S. intelligence was a farrago of quarter-truth and rumor. It was said that he had worked as an enforcer for various New York and Philadelphia gangsters; that, as a rite of Mob initiation, he had shot himself in the stomach with a bullet rubbed with raw garlic to make the wound more painful. He had been known, it was reported, to bite off the ears of his enemies and feed them to stray dogs. And if he ever smiled at you—this rumor was Aughenbaugh’s personal favorite—that smile would be the last thing you ever saw. Aughenbaugh had made my grandfather smile often enough to laugh at this hyperbole and with enough intimacy to tease him for the seed of truth it contained. There might or might not be something menacing in my grandfather’s reticence—that was really up to you—but when he did speak or show emotion, it had a persuasive effect. It was Aughenbaugh who had nicknamed my grandfather after Cagney’s gangster hero in The Public Enemy. As far as I know, this was the only nickname my grandfather was ever given, or ever tolerated.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, realizing that the heart might be going out of Aughenbaugh and wondering what he could do.
“Now, then,” Aughenbaugh said, giving each beaker of whiskey a stir with the pipette to mix in the dash of airsickness dope. He handed a beaker to my grandfather. “Drink up.”
My grandfather took the beaker and set it down on the nightstand between his bed and Aughenbaugh’s. He picked up Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie.
“Darn it, Rico, now, come on.” Aughenbaugh tugged the book out of my grandfather’s hands and tossed it over his shoulder. It opened in flight with a rustle of indignation and smacked against the wall. The wallpaper was patterned with moderne circles and lines that often tormented my grandfather by seeming to diagram the structures of impossible aromatics and polymers. “You’re seeing phantom heterocyclics in the wallpaper again, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“I’m serious, man. Any other night. Not tonight.”
“What’s special about tonight?”
Aughenbaugh composed himself. His forebears, with patience and faith, had endured crop failures, cattle plagues, and iron winters. He could handle one exasperating Philadelphia Jew. “Well, let’s see. For one thing. Tomorrow they are strapping your Heinz 57 into a C-47 and shipping it off to a place called Germany, where, from what I’ve heard, it is very likely to encounter a large number of armed men who will try to decorate it with a swastika made out of bullets.”
“That’s tomorrow.”
“We are talking about one drink, for gosh sakes.”
My grandfather shook his head.
“Why not? And don’t give me that bullwhiz about how you don’t like to lose control.”
“I don’t.”
“There is no control.”
Aughenbaugh knocked back the beaker of whiskey. He sat on the edge of his bed and set the empty beaker on the nightstand. He picked up the one he had poured for my grandfather and toasted my grandfather’s health. He knocked that one back, too. He let out a sigh that did not sound entirely bereft of pleasure.
“Good?”
“Wonderful.” He put down the beaker and rose, looking heavy on his feet. He went to pick up the book that he had thrown. He smoothed its pages and handed it back to my grandfather. “It’s just the illusion of control,” Aughenbaugh said with his accustomed gentleness. “You know that, right? There is no actual control. It’s all just probabilities and contingencies, wriggling around like cats in a bag.”
“Yes, I know that,” my grandfather said. “But when I’m sober, I never have to think about it.”
There was a thump, a pressure felt somewhere deeper than the eardrums, rooted in the ground. It was like the turbulent boom that rumbled windows, walls, and floorboards when a bomb hit the house down the street, the office block next door, but it could not have been a bomb. A bomb gave warning of its approach. It heralded its own arrival. It fell whistling from the belly of a Junker, or keening, or humming, or with a yell of inhuman high spirits that got louder and more ecstatic as it fell. If it was a buzzbomb, a doodlebug, then it prowled overhead, restless and muttering to itself, before its counter hit zero and its servo was cut. Then you heard a loud silence as the doodlebug surrendered to gravity and fell to its appointment with fire and destruction.
My grandfather just had time to think rocket! when the unheralded explosion gave way to a roar and a clatter like the Central pulling in to Marble Arch station. A second boom unfurled across the neighborhood, an uncoiling peal of thunder with a stinger in its tail. At four times the speed of sound, the concussion and the turbulence of the rocket’s approach would always show up late for its detonation.
“We heard it,” said Aughenbaugh. “That means we aren’t dead.”
My grandfather laced up his boots and tied his tie. They got their topcoats and hats. Aughenbaugh grabbed a camera. They took the stairs down to the basement of the hotel to avoid whatever hysteria might be loose in the lobby. They went down a long hallway with a checkerboard floor. Through the open door at the end of the hallway you could feel the heat of the fire and the cold of the night. Cooks and dishwashers in their white coats and black trousers were going in and out, speaking French and Polish and English. Into the kitchen, out the door, out of the kitchen, into the street. It looked purposive, a relay, a bucket brigade, but they were just wandering around like idiots with nothing to do. A fat cook stood in the doorway looking out. There was firelight on his belly and his face. My grandfather pushed him out of the way. He and Aughenbaugh ran out into Oxford Street and unoriginally stood there like idiots with nothing to do.
The physics of the rocket’s detonation had sucked the show windows from the front of Selfridges. The windows had been decorated for the season with ice floes and ice mountains of pasteboard and sequins. A frolic of pasteboard Eskimos and penguins. The aurora borealis or australis in arcs of colored foil. A mannequin Father Christmas in Scott Expedition drag. Now the sidewalk was buried in snowbanks of shattered glass. Christmas trees lay scattered like tenpins. Their needles drifted down onto my grandfather’s hat and the epaulets of his greatcoat. When he hung up his trousers that night before bed, cellophane snowflakes snowed down from the upturned cuffs. Pasteboard Eskimos and penguins, headless, torn in half, continued their inaccurate cohabitation. Father Christmas was found the next morning in a dovecote on a nearby rooftop, intact and unharmed apart from a holiday frosting of pigeon shit.
Selfridges was not on fire, but the building beside it was. A fire brigade came around the corner in a wheezing old calliope of a pumper, followed by two teams of air raid wardens in Crossleys. The wardens in their shaving-bowl helmets made their way back along the street toward the corner, barking at hotel guests and patrons of the ballroom, telling them to get out of the way and please let the crews do their job. An ambulance nosed its way in among the bystanders and ruination. It was driven by a breathtaking young woman, blue eyes, black hair tumbling from under a narrow-brimmed hat, packed hastily into some man’s shirt and trousers under her green WVS coat. He never saw her again, but forty-four years later, my grandfather remembered her vividly, her necktie, the swell of her breasts under the shirt, her gabardine trousers into the tops of her wellingtons. She told him and Aughenbaugh that the spirit of volunteerism was commendable, but it would be best for them just to get out of the way and let her mates and her do the job that the ARP and the Jerries had trained them to do. It was a harrowing job. If blood and pieces of what had until recently been citizens of London were something you wanted to see, you could see them.
“Penguins with Eskimos,” Aughenbaugh said contemptuously. Remembering this line, years later, my grandfather burst out laughing, even though it literally hurt to laugh. “What the hell are we fighting for, Rico?”
They went back inside and up to their room. Aughenbaugh poured more whiskey into the beakers and passed one to my grandfather. It was graduated in milliliters. The whiskey went to ninety-two. My grandfather raised it and proposed a toast. “Cats in a bag,” he said. He drank it all in one swallow and held it out for Aughenbaugh to fill again. “Probabilities and contingencies.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Aughenbaugh said. “The bag is Newtonian physics.”
“I missed that,” my grandfather said.