Drink for the Thirst to Come (37 page)

I slipped between Cordwell and a hutch of street-bunnies who seemed unable to stop touching Ferdinand with their noses.

Colin, Cordwell’s son, was behind the bar. The world’s best bartender, Colin juggled jokes, patter, orders to the waitress, balanced laughter and business as only a great publican, to the matter-born, can do. He was—is—brilliant at the art.

I ordered another pint. Got it. Placed the wooden box on the bar. At first lull, I
ah-hemmed
John.

“Ah,” he said, turning. “What’d you think?”

I thought.

I believe—believed—that it is never good simply to love something. Such love always must be tempered with analysis and
kvetch
. “Sagged at the top,” I said. “A great storm. Then that first island scene, well…” I hated having loved this production.

“Well, yes!” Cordwell said. “It’s all that stuff. Then it gets into it and, by God!”

“Yes. It sang,” I said. I hated myself.

“Ha!” he said. “Yes. It sang. Good.”

I handed him the box. “From a friend of yours,” I said, “at the show. Said he had to leave and could I give it to you. He left. I’ve given it to you.”

Cordwell turned the box over. His vast nose wrinkled. His eyes crinkled. The box looked small.

When I made to leave, Cordwell stopped me.

“Have you
any
idea what’s in here?” he asked. He waved the unopened box under my nose. “Any idea at
all
?” The box seemed to offend him, as though he knew that I knew
just
what was in there and, by God, sir, he wouldn’t have it. No, sir, not a bit of it!

“Damned Bavarian bureaucrat.” He tipped his head back and looked along the hump of his nose at it.

I remembered my line. “He said to tell you, ‘This thing no longer stands between you.’ With an accent, but that’s more or less it.”

“Yes, yes, yes…” Cordwell was slipping into fustian mode, as he must have with the RAF officers’ board, more British than God, donchaknow?

“Let me show you, young fella.”

So saying, he opened the box. I almost heard a boom of kettledrums, a growl of bowed basses. Inside, a metal something gleamed in barlight. The place faded. The background of actors, fans, and dreams withdrew.

Not really but this was a cinematic not Shakespearean moment. Inside the box, nested on a piece of charred khaki cloth, was a bullet. It looked newly cast and polished, yet I knew it was from the war, the Second War, as John called it, World War II.

“Huh,” I said or something like.

Cordwell picked up the thing, held it from point to cap, between thumb and middle finger. He handled it as though it were of vast import and impossibly fragile. He turned to me. The brass casing caught a spark of warm light from the lamp on the end of the bar. The glint flashed in John’s eye.

“The nerve of the fellow,” he breathed. His dudgeon had softened. “He wasn’t even supposed to be there, you know? You know that?” Cordwell turned the thing, hefted it, gauged its weight, looked at it point-on, then from its rear. “He was a substitute. Making-do because it was wartime. Damn the fellow anyway. His fault.”

He laid the bullet on the bar.

“You know, don’t you, what this damned thing is, eh?” He was speaking because I was there, not because I was important to him or that I hear the tale he was about to spin.

Because I was there I answered. “A bullet,” I ventured.

“Right…” There was more expected.

“I’d say… .30 caliber?” A guess.

“Thirty.”

“Maybe?”

Cordwell hefted it again. “Caliber thirty. Yes.” He knew he wasn’t going to get a savvy answer from me. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said and put the shell, slug-up, on the bar. “Colin!” Cordwell ordered a quarter-gill of Irish whiskey and sat it next to his pint of Watney’s. He flicked both ends of his mustache with the knuckle of his index-finger then bolted the whiskey. “There,” he said, “now…”

He was wound for a good one.

“That bullet,” he said, pointing with his chin, “is my bullet. Meant for me, here.” He touched himself over his heart. “See?” He pointed to the markings along the shell casing. “That, sir, is me, my number. Go on. Have a look.”

I shoved my eyeglasses an inch or so from the round. There was a number. Fine lines engraved on the brass. I read it aloud, and as I did Cordwell spoke it with me.

“A thing one doesn’t forget: one’s
number
! The one that, when it’s up, it’s bloody well
up
. Don’t care how old you are, what war you were in, you carry it forever.” He tapped his chest again. “Turn out Beowulf’s crew from the ashes, ask them their rowing numbers, and by the Lord Harry, they’d know ’em to the man. To the man.” He picked up the round and turned it again. Again the light caught his eye. “One’s number.” He repeated the number. I’ll not repeat it here.

“Beginning of the war: everything was shambles, I can tell you. Not enough of anything: men, weapons, ammunition; everyone a bit of shy about who does what to whom. Well, the very same was true of the
Small World
.”

That’s how he put it, as though anyone would know instantly what he meant, “the Small World.” I crunched my nose a bit and must have looked confused.

“Let me put it to you this way,” he said. “The wee-folk, as the Irish have it, ‘the kingdom,’ Faerie, the glamour world, don’t you know? See, they’re no more ready for war than is the smelly mob. Us. At the beginning it’s all chop-chop and never a by-your-leave. Things have to be done and they are done. Not well sometimes, sometimes bloody badly, but they get acted upon.”

I took a long sip and found the glass empty. A full one sat next to it.

“Take for instance the Hampden bomber. Damn fine ship. What I flew, Hampdens. Four-man crew, tight little piece. Kept losing them. Long narrow tail had a way of falling off when hit with too much at one time. Well, that’s war. Mind you, the Hampden was a bit elderly. Came along in the ’30s. A grandfather of a plane, you might say.” He smiled and licked his lips. “And now this is a
thing
. They looked just like one of Jerry’s kites. Yes. The damned Dornier, the Do. 17. Our own chaps kept shooting us down. Bloody embarrassing. ‘Anything to report, flying officer?’ ‘Oh, I say, sir, either I topped one of Adolph’s 17s or, by God, punched Old Reggie’s mess ticket.’ ‘Ah, bad show…’”

Cordwell did that, burst into playlettes. Good at it too.

“So there we were. We flew at night, you know? Yes. And this was early in the war. I was observer. November. November 7, ’41. We were over Belgium. Yes, we were going to bomb, but first we had to fly this long-wide triangle between the
Paix de Calais
and two other checkpoints. We’re there principally to draw Jerry fighters and ack-ack—that’s anti-aircraft to you Yanks—from our Wellingtons flying the main show into Berlin that night.”

He squinted as though I’d sneered at something. “Now let me tell you, sir: Observer! Observer was a term left from the First War. Not to brag, but the observer is the busiest man in the aircrew.” He ticked off the observer’s jobs. “He’s co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, nose gunner, and if there was time he brewed the tea and did what-have-you.”

“Sort of a stage manager?” I ventured.

Cordwell beamed. “Exactly!” He tapped my pint with the rim of his. “All right. During approach, my station was in the nose. Picture this: I am squatting in a Perspex bubble. I see myself reflected on this curved surface all around…” He reached out his hand ahead, as though touching his reflection a half-century gone. “Below is the ground, ahead, the night. You’re surrounded by whatever’s trying to kill you: fighters, flak, birds!” He laughed, then became serious. “No joke,” he said. He paused long enough to let me know there was another tale
there
.

“Tony Gordon. Old Tony was the pilot. His canopy was above and behind me. There was a top gunner-slash-radio operator and behind it all, the tail gunner. “Now, we were on the landward line of our triangle, over Belgium, still carrying a full bomb-load. A flight of Wellingtons goes over on its way to the show. ‘Ta, loves. Good luck. Give ’em a bit for us,’ and then…”

Cordwell’s mouth and eyes froze, wide open.

“Then one of our fighter lads drops down—support for the Wellys, you know—and has a go at us. Well, suddenly it’s not so funny, eh? Shot by one of your own.

“We did a few light-and-fancies, he flipped a few up our tail, then was gone. I reckoned he’d sussed that we were the home team and fled to avoid embarrassment and vile language.

“That, or as I found out later, he’d run out of ammo.” He waved the cartridge in the air. “After that we caught a cross-fire from two ack-ack batteries. Barrage lights had us fixed so Tony dropped to the deck—ack-acks are useless at low-level—and there we were.” He looked at me. “Been to Belgium?”

I shook my head.

“Bloody country’s like Kentucky. Flat as prairie, then you’re in the mountains. Point is, we ran out of prairie and a mountain tore our tail off.

“Okay. We crashed. Fiery mess. The tail broke off and the plane tore itself to pieces for a half-mile down a valley before going nose-first into a hill. We survived. Tony dragged himself out, then helped the other two. The tailgunner was injured so badly, the Germans repatriated him. Imagine that. Well, it was early in the war.

“There’s no good reason why I survived. I’m jammed in the front, the plane’s on fire, everything’s a twisted mess and unexploded bombs. I had no idea where I was, how to get out. And Tony, bless him, Tony climbs back on the flaming wing and, I swear it, he talks me out. By the time I’d gotten myself to where he could grab hold of me, the plane was about to blow. Still had our bombs, did I mention? Then we’re out and running and then we fall and it blows.

“Now I am on my knees watching it all. ‘Am I dead...?’ I ask. ‘You’re not if I’m not,’ Tony said.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Indeed,” he said. “Now here’s the thing, you see. I wasn’t supposed to have been there.”

I blinked.

“You don’t understand at the time, but later you find out. Damned Bavarian Bureaucrat. I was to have bought it. Killed. Earlier. Our fighter lad was to have put
this
in me.” He held up the .30-caliber round.

“Colin,” I said, loudly.

“On me…” Cordwell said and went behind the bar, tapped each of us a draught of bitter. “Tony, I reckon, was supposed to have gotten out, away. Gone back to England, escaped, maybe been killed. But I was alive in there and he came back for me.

“We were captured, taken to a Luftwaffe night fighter HQ. Big stone chalet. I walked into this large room. Pleasant place, I thought, warm, other pilots—German, of course, but what of it? They were sipping beer and eating apples, and there across the room—I looked—stood this shredded fellow, strips of skin, burned flesh, shredded flight suit, still smoking. ‘Poor bugger,’ I thought, then, ‘By God,’ I said. ‘By God, that’s me.’ And it was. A mirror.

“Quick as you please, those Jerrys, those pilots, came over and they carried me to their table. Gave me beer and harvest apples. November, you know.”

He leaned on the bar and turned the bullet in his hand. “Cradled me in their eight arms and carried me to the fire. They gave me beer and apples and talked to me kindly. And I realized, ‘I like these fellows…’” He didn’t finish.

“It was still during the war, the first I heard from,” he jerked his head toward the upstairs, “from our friend. He wrote to me, if you can imagine. Through the Red Cross, if you believe it. A long letter in which he apologized, said he’d been on temporary assignment, transferred from the east—I never asked from where—in charge of a draft of his Folk whose job it was to ‘write the history’ of the war. ‘Write the history!’ By which he meant it was their job to inscribe numbers on the munitions that,” he made a vague, un-Cordwell gesture, “the shells that had chaps’ numbers on them. Our little friend was a manager,
Gruppenfuhrer
they called ’em—you wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy of Faerie, by the way—anyroad, he was in charge of a whole passel of the Wee People from all parts of everywhere at the beginning of the war, drafted to keep up with demand, donchaknow? Takes skill, I have heard—from him of course, to tinker together that sort of an operation. Supply blokes, craftsmen, dogsbodies, shipping clerks. A huge operation and put together overnight. Even
they
don’t work that quickly.”

He looked me in the eye. I think he was daring me to snicker.

I nodded.

“His letter said an error needed to be rectified. My number had been on a cartridge. Said cartridge intended for Hurricane such-and-such from Fighter Command Squadron so-and-so; the details went on and on. Point being, that Hurricane was to have peppered us and, me personally, through the chest—he cited just where on my person it was to have entered, what damage it was to have been done, where it was to have exited…” He touched himself again. “I was, you see, officially dead. As official as those buggers can be. History, you see.

“He bungled it. The shipment never went out, ended in a warehouse somewhere, whatever. The point being, this slug and my chest never met, and that luckless fighter bastard who’d had at us over Belgium… Well, he ran out of ammo. Like that. Without this.” He placed it on the bar.

We stared at it.

“His bookkeeping was off. Drove him mad. He followed me all through the war, through everything. I was a pretty active prisoner, I guess you’ve heard, something of an escape artist. He kept missing me, camp to camp.” He stared at my eyes again. “Dresden. You know? Missed me by thirteen hours. I’d been and gone.”

“You mean Dresden was bombed just to get…?” I started to say. Then decided not to.

“Dresden. Yes, one of the reasons I went back to architecture after the war. Wasn’t going to, but it seemed as though I owed it, somehow. Drink?” he said. “This one on you?”

I nodded, paid. He poured. We drank.

“He’s been following. Through the ’50s, ’60s. I was a character in that POW escape film. You knew that one? Yes? Yes. My character’s killed in the film. Shot in the chest. Ha! His doing, I trust.

“He keeps writing. Suggesting things would be better for all concerned if I were to let that bullet find its place. Something about history, time or the way things are supposed to be. Rot, I say, petty bureaucratic rot. Just to have paperwork balance. You know, I could tell a tale… But I won’t.”