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?”