“Never read him, he any good?”
“Tune in tonight,” my grandfather said. “Judge for yourself.”
He pointed to the big twenty-one-inch RCA television mounted in a heavy oak cabinet behind Pat’s desk. Permanently tuned to channel 13, presently showing a movie my grandfather didn’t recognize. John Wayne was underwater, bare-chested, fighting a giant octopus with a knife.
“Oh, I don’t watch your missus anymore,” Pat said. “I have to turn down the sound when she comes on. Nice lady. Pretty lady. But she gives me a fantod. Meaning no offense.”
“Pat. Please. I need to find her.”
“Well, all right, then, you have a seat,” Pat said. “I’ll go find Mr. Kahn.”
Pat went through the door that led to the main corridor running between the two halves of the TV station. My grandfather lingered at the counter, running his fingers across the tuck-and-roll surface of the pumpkin. He wondered why one hemisphere of a pumpkin always seemed to be as smooth as polished stone while the other was always streaked and warted with some mysterious cement.
After a minute Pat had not returned. My grandfather went to the banquette with its legs of bent rebar, and though sitting was the last thing he wanted to do, he forced himself to sit. He shuffled through the magazines: Broadcast News, Sponsor, Advertising Age, a Ring, a couple of old New Yorkers. One New Yorker somebody had left open to an advertisement with a cartoon drawing of a dismayed fisherman reeling in a boot. My grandfather sympathized. Then, in the column of text that ran down the page alongside the advertisement, his gaze caught on the hook of a capital V, separated by a hyphen from the numeral 2.
The article was entitled “A Romantic Urge.” Its author’s name was Daniel Lang. Over the course of several pages in the middle of the issue for the week of April 21, 1951—over a year and a half ago—Lang revealed to the literate, Dunhills-smoking, Triple Sec–drinking American public that the man behind Germany’s fearsome V-2 rocket was now living happily in Huntsville, Alabama, and working as a top scientist along with many other former Nazi “men of science” in the U.S. Army’s guided missile program. My grandfather had heard reports of something like this, with no mention of Wernher von Braun, and they had been vague enough for him to dismiss from his mind. It appeared, however, that not only von Braun but the better part of the German rocket program—more than a hundred men captured by the U.S. military’s wartime Operation Paperclip—had been transplanted to El Paso and then to Huntsville, where they were now being paid excellent salaries, learning to eat tamales and grits, driving around in their Chevys wearing cowboy hats and providing the United States with a missile capable of putting a nuclear warhead in the middle of downtown Moscow. Lang characterized Operation Paperclip as having been a treasure hunt and its operatives as “talent scouts.”
Lang was charmed by von Braun, with his blond hair and his buoyant manner and his protestations of innocent indifference to the strange ways of generals and führers. Von Braun was quoted to the effect that it made as much sense to blame a rocket scientist, who had wanted only to “blaze a trail to other planets,” for the deaths and destruction caused by the V-2 as it did to blame Einstein for the A-bomb. Lang characterized the man my grandfather knew to have held the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major) as a civilian, a man of peace, a reluctant warrior with his head in the clouds; he referred to the mechanized slave pit Nordhausen where the V-2 rockets had been assembled as a “production plant” staffed by Russian POWs.
“This is not good,” Barry Kahn said. My grandfather looked up. The director was a good-looking kid, one of those new postwar intellectual young Jews who dressed like a hoodlum in motorcycle jackets, rolled dungarees, never a tie. Behind him Pat stood shaking his head, looking at once reproachful and satisfied, as if he had predicted that nothing good would come of him going off to look for Mr. Kahn, or of my grandfather marrying a woman like my grandmother. “Where the hell is she, man? What am I supposed to put on the air in twenty-five minutes?”
The telephone behind the reception counter rang and rang again. Pat went around behind the counter and answered on the fourth ring, “WAAM.” He listened. His yellowed eyes, forked with pink, rolled toward my grandfather. “He’s right here.” Pat handed my grandfather the receiver. “It’s your brother.”
Less than a minute later, having spoken fewer than five words to the individual on the other end of the call, the husband of Nevermore, the Night Witch, hung up the phone. He turned to Barry Kahn. The tough-looking young Jew took a step backward, stumbling a little in his haste. His gaze was fixed on the point of the letter opener my grandfather held in his right hand. The blade of the letter opener was smeared, as with gore, with a film of orange pulp. “Easy, now,” said Barry Kahn.
In 2014, when I interviewed Kahn at his daughter’s home in Owings Mills, Maryland, the phrase he used to describe my grandfather at this moment was almost identical to the one employed by the anonymous witness who would be quoted on May 25, 1957, in the New York Daily News: I’ve never seen anyone so angry in my life.
My grandfather took a folded handkerchief from his hip pocket and used it to wipe the pulp from the blade of the letter opener, then dropped it back in the leather pen cup. He turned to Barry Kahn and handed him the pumpkin. “Here you go,” he said. While he’d been on the phone hearing the news that Uncle Ray tracked him down to pass along, my grandfather had used the letter opener to carve—punch out, really—a ragged parody of a human face. It had holes for eyes, a slit for a nose, a bent, moronic leer.
“What’s this?” Kahn didn’t want to take the pumpkin. He took it nevertheless.
“Her understudy,” my grandfather said.
He went to the coffee table and picked up the April 21, 1951, issue of The New Yorker. He held it up and took Aughenbaugh’s lighter from his pocket and set fire to a corner of the magazine. When the magazine had caught, he dropped it in a metal wastebasket by the station’s front door. “Happy Halloween,” he said.
A fire blazed up in the wastebasket. The metal rumbled with heat and then fell silent as the flame died away.
*
The Carmel, corner of Caroline and Biddle. An eminence of brick behind an iron gate in a high brick wall. Windows like slits behind heavy jalousies, steep roof castellated with dormers. A house of refuge or penitence but either way a house built to estrange its occupants from the world. On the roof the tall white cross, that high diver with arms outspread.
My grandfather had been instructed to use the back door. He parked the car on Caroline and found the alleyway promised by the prioress of the Carmel. It was an old East Baltimore alleyway paved unevenly in stones that made him wobbly at the ankles. The prioress had said to look for a steel door with a granite step. Beside the door he would see a little crank for the doorbell; on no account was he to crank it. At this hour of the night, she had told him, the Carmel was ruled by silence, or under a rule of silence, or words to that effect. They would hear him coming before he even had time to knock.
The prioress had struck him over the phone as a woman accustomed to taking matters in hand. “It was hard to know how best to serve your wife when she got here,” she had told him when he’d called the number she’d left with Uncle Ray. “I settled on a cup of tea and a pillow.”