“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.
12
Sometimes they would roll into a town or village so hard on the heels of the armor and infantry that they encountered people uninstructed on the difference between liberation and surrender. An old man in a clock tower with a deer rifle, say, or five murderous Boy Scouts sharing a burp gun, or the last joker in town with a death’s-head on his hatband, insisting with tedious punctilio on standing them to a round of pointless slaughter. Lives and time would be lost trying to clarify the matter.
“This is bullshit,” said Diddens.
He was talking about the arrow in his left foot. It was a fine piece of pine and goose feathers. A second arrow had lodged with a thunk in a window box several feet wide of my grandfather, just before he dragged Diddens to cover behind a pile of rubble in the main thoroughfare of Vellinghausen. It had taken Diddens a minute to get past incredulity.
“I mean, what kind of thing is that?” Diddens was squatting on his right haunch with his left leg stuck out in front of him. He was an Alabaman, a chemist who had worked in Dow’s pesticides division before the war. He was not prone to hysteria, but the arrow had him a little keyed up. “A fucking arrow?”
“At least it makes a change from bullets,” my grandfather said.
“Fuck you, it’s not sticking out of your foot!”
“You have a point.”
“This is bullshit!” Diddens said again. This time he yelled it, but his cry had nothing to resound against and it failed to carry. Vellinghausen had undergone a week of shelling by both sides, followed by a pitched two-day tank battle before the Germans conceded the town for good to elements of the 8th Armored Division. Almost all the buildings were badly damaged. Most of the main street of Vellinghausen was gray sky.
“Calm yourself,” my grandfather said. He understood that from Diddens’s point of view, it seemed absurd to have come across France and four hundred miles into Germany without being touched by artillery or small-arms fire only to be shot with an arrow. On the other hand, there was a venerable school of thought that taught when a conquering army showed up in your hometown at the head of a trail of death and destruction, you were supposed to do what you could to make conquest expensive, using whatever came to hand. That type of behavior was the stuff of poems and heroes. In the past three months my grandfather had seen poetry and heroism of this nature cost the lives of several Germans, three first-rate jeep drivers, two radiomen, and Lieutenant Alvin P. Aughenbaugh, Ph.D. This Diddens was Aughenbaugh’s replacement, and he was all right, but I don’t think my grandfather ever recovered from the loss of Aughenbaugh. He would not tell me the circumstances of his friend’s death other than to say that it came in the back of a jeep while my grandfather was trying to keep him upright and talking until they could find an aid station.
“Did it hit bone?” my grandfather asked Diddens.
“I— ” The question seemed to give Diddens something to focus on. He gritted his teeth and studied his heavy boot. He was moving his foot around inside it. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Can you put weight on it?”
Diddens put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder and raised himself off the ground. He drew in his left leg and lowered himself onto the left foot. He gasped. “Uh. No.” He stuck his foot back out. This time he just sat down flat on the cobblestones, as if now were any kind of time to take a rest. “Ah, jeez. It really hurts. I think the point must be coming out of the bottom. Is it coming out of the bottom? Can you see?”
My grandfather frowned. They were already behind schedule. Vellinghausen was not even supposed to be a stop on their route. They were supposed to be following the 3rd Armored Division, but a map failure, a moonless night, and unexpected panzer movement south of Lippstadt had entangled them with the 8th. Forward regiments of the 3rd were already a day or more ahead of them, headed for Paderborn. A day or more closer to Nordhausen.
My grandfather reached for the gun at his hip. At the same time he bent over and grabbed hold of the shaft in Diddens’s foot. He jerked the arrow backward. It slid loose with a moist pop. The head emerged streaked with purple from the hole it had made going into the boot, just to the left of the laces.
Diddens let out a yawp of outrage and shock. “What?” he said.
My grandfather stood up and came out from behind the heap of plaster chunks, roof tiles, and plaster dust that had been hiding them. He raised the gun and swept the street with his eyes, thinking about angles and sight-lines. He noted without lingering on them a black and orange cat, a bicycle that concussion had twisted around a hitching post to symbolize infinity. Behind the rubble pile Diddens clutched his foot and diverted his thoughts from the pain by describing in Alabaman detail the unnatural use that my grandfather had made of my great-grandmother. Up the street on the right, a bakery occupied the ground floor of a stucco townhouse painted the color of lemon custard. The houses this side of it had paid off the tank gunners’ luck with jackpots of rubble like the one they had taken cover behind. My grandfather traveled his gaze up the pale stucco to the third story. Its paired windows seemed to be at about the limit of the effective range of an archer.
“What are you doing?” Diddens said. “Get down, are you fucking nuts?”
My grandfather knew he was taking chances. In general it was best, for example, not to try to remove a sharp object from a puncture wound because it might be acting to plug the hole it had made in some major vein or artery. But there were no major veins or arteries, as far as my grandfather knew, in the human foot. As for stepping into the middle of the street when you knew somebody out there was trying to kill you with a bow and arrow, he had decided to test a personal theory that since the arrow had gone into Diddens’s foot and not his head or his throat, the archer must not be much of a marksman.
“No,” my grandfather said. “Just in a hurry.”
In the ruins of Köln he and Aughenbaugh had interviewed a captured Wehrmacht truck driver—irrespective of what it said on their bills of lading, all truck drivers carried information—who reported having hauled a shipment of machine parts in mid-March to a group of “professors” at Nordhausen. One of the professors he claimed to have seen there was a thickset young blond whom the driver described as clearly the man in charge.
As it happened, my grandfather, along with all the other hunters in the unit, was recently issued a detailed inventory of thousands of leading Nazi “professors.” It was code-named the Black List and was said to have been compiled from a German original found by a Polish janitor at Bonn University, half-flushed down a toilet in the mayhem of the German retreat from that city. My grandfather’s orders were to track down the scientists, technicians, and engineers whose names appeared on the Black List and capture them before the Russians could. At the top of the Black List was the name of a physicist said to be the inventive mind behind the V-2 rocket, one of which had come close to killing my grandfather and Aughenbaugh that night in London. According to the limited intelligence the Allies had on him, this rocket man was a beefy blond fellow.
My grandfather had
never wanted anything more than he wanted to be the man who brought in this Wernher von Braun. Or maybe at that point—he told me—what he wanted more than anything was to see one of von Braun’s rockets. That desire was, at the moment, the only certainty he possessed, apart from a strong intuition that one of the Russian hunters traveling west from Poland behind the fast-moving Red Army would never sit around crying because he had an arrow in his foot.
Something whispered in my grandfather’s left ear, and just behind him a mallet struck a block of wood. The flower box, planted only with mud and ash, had taken another hit. The time had come to test his hypothesis about the archer’s marksmanship. So far the man was shooting one for three.
The fourth arrow hummed in low and whistling and clattered against the cobblestone street about fifteen feet in front of my grandfather. It skittered along, struck some jut in the cobbles, and bounced. Its vector was deformed by the impact, and it shot up at an eighty-degree angle to the street. It tumbled interestingly through the air toward my grandfather, end over end and moving slightly to the left of him. He reached out as it came cartwheeling and managed to snatch it as it went by.
* * *
It was not that my grandfather felt no fear.
“I was afraid the whole time,” he told me. “From the minute I got there. Even when no one was shooting at me or trying to drop a bomb on my head. But whenever they did shoot at me, what happened was, it made me angry, too.”
“And the anger trumped.”
“It was, you know, it flooded over me.”
“Yeah.”
“It just washed everything else away. That was the time . . . In my whole life, that was the time I got some use out of it. When somebody was shooting at me.” He twisted his mouth. “But I didn’t know until that day it worked with arrows, too.”