“Two minutes.”
“It’s crazy. Why you don’t just go in from the Fontana Village side?”
“Fence.”
“Have to have a hole in it somewheres. All them pets get inside no problem.”
“What do I look like? A shih tzu or an old man?”
“A old man.”
“Here’s where there’s a paved road. You told me yourself they like to lie on hot pavement.”
“So you going to just walk in there in broad daylight.”
“I’m going to need to come back. Probably a number of times.” He hefted the brown paper bag with the lock inside it. “I want to make that easier to do.”
“You going to get us arrested,” Devaughn said. “I can’t have that. I’m an old man, too, and I need this job. I didn’t plan for no financial future like y’all.”
“Two minutes. If I get caught, I’ll say I walked here. I won’t say a word about you.”
“They might put you in jail.”
“I’ve been in jail,” my grandfather said. “I got a lot of reading done.”
Devaughn looked surprised. His gaze drifted down to my grandfather’s feet in the rubber waders and back up to his blue-and-white canvas bucket hat, souvenir of a visit to an Israeli kibbutz that he and my grandmother had made not long after the Six-Day War.
“I might like to re-estimate my opinion of you,” Devaughn said. He leaned across to roll up the passenger window, then backed the car down the driveway.
My grandfather watched Devaughn pull away. He raised the head of the walking stick and brought it down on the padlock. The impact rang up his arm to the elbow. The lock held firm. It took seven more smacks with the hammer to crack it. He yanked it open. He tried to swing aside the chain-link gate, but the kudzu vines held it fast. He pried it open an inch or two with the shaft of the walking stick but not enough to squeeze through. He unsheathed the machete and brought it down. The tendrils snapped like guitar strings. Pain twanged in my grandfather’s shoulder. The gate swung open without a sound.
My grandfather found his fingers trembling as he tore open the packaging of the new lock. After he put the new lock into place, he stooped to pick up some bits of the shattered one. He fitted them into the blister of the packaging with the rest of the old lock and put it in the paper bag. Then he stepped into the snake’s domain. He looked around, listening for a dragging sound, a pop of twigs. He was under the impression that snakes gave off a musk, and he sniffed the air. Twice dapples of sun on shade stopped the blood in his veins. He lowered himself to stoop for the snake hammer, then walked over to the rhododendron and crouched down beside it. He used the tip of the walking stick to slide the scat into the Ziploc bag.
When he tried to stand again, his knees had locked. He planted the stick in the gravel and, grateful not to find himself mocked by the smug expression of a sterling-silver duck, pulled himself up along its length. On his feet once more, he made for the gate and locked it. He slipped the key into an outer pocket of the knapsack, alongside the baggie. Then he walked down the street to the lawn and garden store to settle his account with Devaughn, and to inquire about the going day rate for a machete.
* * *
“What was it for?” I said. “What did you do with the snake poop?”
“There was a professor at Miami. In the biology department. A herpetologist. He agreed to take a look at it.”
“And?”
“He felt confident it was not the fecal matter of a boa constrictor.”
“So it was an alligator.”
“It was a python.”
“A python? Don’t pythons get really big?”
My grandfather shrugged. The shrug said, Define big. It said, Compared to an ankylosaurus? Not so big.
“Can they get big enough to eat a cat?”
He stuck out his tongue once, twice. I handed him a mug of apple juice and he took a measured sip.
“A python can swallow a deer,” he said.
“Jesus.”
“A cat? To a python? Like a handful of nuts.”
I resisted the urge to point out that snakes did not have hands.
“So, last year,” I said, “like, right after I visited you? And we watched that PBS thing about exotic pets taking over the Everglades? You basically went out into the jungle. And started hunting a python.”
Another shrug: It passed the time.
“So did you use one of those, like, noose-on-a-stick things they had?” I mimed the thrust-and-tug action of the snare tool a park ranger on the program had employed to bag a boa constrictor.
“I had no interest in capturing him,” my grandfather said. “I wanted to kill him.”
“With a gun?”
My grandfather screwed the left side of his face into the comedic half-mask he adopted when he was trying to conceal his disappointment in you.
“Maybe you should be taking notes,” he said. He handed back the mug of apple juice. “I had a snake hammer. Why would I need a gun?”
11
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:
A crystalline compound, dubbed “whizzite,” that, when mixed with an operative’s own urine and added to the fuel tank of an airplane, truck, or panzer, caused delayed but complete and irreparable damage.
A small irregular pyramid of steel that, when wedged against a rail along a stretch of track from which the opposite rail had been loosened—not even removed—was guaranteed to derail any locomotive moving less than thirty miles per hour.
A flexible, expandable garrote made of piano wire sheathed in an ordinary shoestring. “Fairly reliable,” my grandfather remembered.
A pair of “convertible bifocals,” the lower half-moons of whose lenses were ground in such a way that, with a few twists of the frames, they could be arranged to form a serviceable spyglass.
A “magnetic paint” that would, for example, permit a limpet mine to be affixed to wood or glass. “That one never quite came together,” my grandfather said. “Could’ve made a fortune if it had.”
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.