“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.”