After Hours: Tales From Ur-Bar

by Joshua Palmatier; Patricia Bray

  Sappers learned the ins and outs of each model by trial and error. Hence the shortened life expectancy. Sometimes a bomb didn’t go off because it was a rum fish—a dud. But sometimes a bomb didn’t go off because it was booby-trapped: based on a familiar model, but designed to blow when some poor bastard tried to disarm it. This was a good method for killing sappers. Also, sprinkling unexploded bombs around the city disrupted civilian life long after the all-clear sounded. The UXB was a tool for spreading terror. Bloody Jerries.

  Quivering hands caused Reg’s spanner to jitter around the bolt, rapping and tapping against the bomb like bursts of Morse, telegraphing his fear to the outside world. He took a slow deep breath to settle his nerves. And realized the smell was off. Mud, yes. Shattered brick and plaster dust, yes. The sharp odor of sweat trickling from his armpits, yes. But there was something else.

  Reg took another whiff. It left his head spinning and his vision blurred. But there, beneath the stink of his own terror: the cloying scent of diethyl ether.

  In an instant, he realized what had happened. The Dietrich had smashed through a surgical theater on its way down, shattering the cabinet where the nurses stored vials of anesthetic. Invisible ether fumes, heavier than air, were cascading into the crater. He lay in a cloud of it.

  Marlene, you backstabbing bitch.

  He had to work quickly, before the fumes overwhelmed him. Reg pressed the funnel to his mouth and sucked down a lungful of relatively clean air from up above. It tasted of tobacco; Holly always smoked when he had a man down-hole. The hose stuck to Reg’s fingers. Ether had a nasty tendency to break down rubber and plastic. Those same corrosive tendrils would soon work their way inside the bomb casing and play merry hob with the wiring.

  He relayed the problem up top. In moments he heard the crackle of glass beneath work boots as a few mates quickly located and cleared away the chemicals. Nothing they could do about the fumes in the crater, though.

  Bolts one, two, three, and four came out easy. Five and six were a bit stubborn. Seven fought back. And number eight wouldn’t budge.

  And wasn’t that just like a bint. Sometimes a girl started out easy at first, but refused to let go. Why couldn’t Sybil take a hint and shove off? If he kept having it off with girls on the side, that only served her right.

  She said they needed to have a talk, but he knew what that was about. He wouldn’t let himself get cornered. His mum had done that to his dad, and look how that turned out.

  Reg sucked on the hose again, held his breath, gave the bolt another tug. Nothing. A dent in the access plate had pulled the bolt out of true.

  He fought off a dizzy spell, and struggled to clear his mind. Reg pressed his forehead against the bomb. He imagined his awareness expanding through the casing, and tried to picture the state of affairs. The Dietrich’s dark innards took shape in his mind’s eye, like the pieces of an elaborate puzzle. If he loosened the last bolt, the release of tension in the dented plate would tip it inward about half an inch. Just far enough to brush the altimeter cable. The ether fumes had been working on that same cable for several minutes now; the insulation would be wearing thin. Reg looked deeper.... No, the battery hadn’t been dislodged by the hard landing.... The cable was live. Contact with the plate would cause a short. And that would trigger the detonators.

  Severing that cable would render the bomb inert. Only problem, the Dietrich was a mess of wires. Hit the wrong one and . . . closed casket. Reg fished out his pocketknife. The exertion left him light-headed. The patch of blue sky above swirled and sparkled like a kaleidoscope.

  “Plate’s stuck,” he wheezed, tasting rubber and cigarettes. His lips tingled. “Gotta cut. The altimeter.”

  Urgent murmuring on the other end. Then Peter’s voice echoed down the hose: “Reg! Stop! You’re not thinking clearly. That’s not how you do a Dietrich!”

  Reg pushed his knife blade into the gap. Gently. Met resistance. Pictured it: no, not there. Slid it backward. Deeper now. Nice and easy, just like Sybil’s first time. There, something caught. That had to be it. In his mind’s eye, the blade rested square on the offending cable.

  He thought a quick prayer. Lord, I’ll never cheat on Sybil again. But he knew he couldn’t keep that promise. I’ll give Sybil what she wants. I’ll buy her a ring. I’ll take care of her. Don’t let me die here.

  His hand had gone numb. Reg had to reach around and hold the knife with two hands. They were both numb.

  He counted. One. Two—

  The severed cable twanged apart.

  Like a dented access plate, the tension came out of Reg in one go. A moist chill dampened his shirt throughand-through. He took up the hose again, fumbled it with sweat-slick fingers. The tingle spread from his lips to his face, neck, chest, arms. The crater started to spin. He could barely hold the hose.

  “‘Sclear,” he mumbled.

  The last thing he did before passing out was try to check his boilersuit for a damp stain. No self-respecting shop girl would bed a fellow who pissed himself. But the anesthetic overwhelmed him before he could find out.

  He awoke in a part of Guy’s that hadn’t taken a Luftwaffe calling card through the ceiling. Pain had brought him round; his shoulders felt as though they’d been pulled within a wire’s width of dislocation. A cool draft tickled him, and he realized his shirt was torn under the arms. Felt like he had some rope burn there, too. The other men of the 246 must have hauled him out on a harness.

  “Terrific work, Reg.” Holly’s voice.

  Reg tried to sit up. Wobbled. Heaved. His breakfast—reconstituted egg and the last pieces of his week’s bacon ration—became a puddle between his feet.

  “That’s the ether wearing off,” said Holly. “Quacks should be around in a few.”

  The room teetered to a halt, more or less. Reg chanced a gentle shake of his head. “They get it? The Dietrich?”

  As if to demonstrate the foolishness of his question, a hoist creaked and a chain rattled somewhere down the corridor. Peter yelled, “Ho! Easy, lads!”

  Reg hopped to his feet. Holly caught him when he stumbled. They went outside to where the other engineers of 246 Company had just finished transferring the Dietrich from a gurney to a flatbed lorry. They’d done the final bolt and pulled out the access panel. A mess of wires and cables spilled out like a drawn man’s entrails. The thickest one, deep in the rats’ nest, was cut clean in two. It was exactly what Reg had pictured.

  Doyle stood to the side, staring at the defanged bomb. He’d been transferred from another field company where he’d spent the first part of the war on a comfortable stint building citadels and bunkers for Whitehall and the Admiralty. Poor sod. He was too new to be useful, so the others had brushed him aside while they loaded the bomb. He was also too new to hide the way he kept well away from the Dietrich, and to hide the expression on his face when he saw its tangled innards.

  He walked over to Reg, lifted his helmet, ran a hand through the black bristles on his scalp. His breath steamed in the cold sunlight.

  Doyle swallowed. He tried to sound nonchalant, but his voice broke when he asked, “How’d you know it was a ringer?”

  “I got lucky.” A lie, but Reg was feeling smug. What a way to go out. His final job was already the stuff of sapper lore. Not bad for a kid who left home at fourteen.

  “Reg has the Sight,” said Peter. He lashed a tarpaulin, the same one Reg had lain upon, over the bomb. He jumped down and pounded his fist on a side panel. The lorry lurched into gear, leaving them coughing in a cloud of diesel exhaust. It pulled past the other sappers already at work dismantling the barricades. The crowd of onlookers gave a small cheer before beginning to disperse.

  “The Sight?” Doyle asked. “What’s that?”

  “It’s why you should stick close to Reg,” said Peter. “Do that and you’ll be right as rain.”

  Reg said to him, “Why don’t you shut it?”

  Peter wasn’t far off. Reg didn’t think of it in such mystical terms, but t
he fact of the matter was he did have a knack for seeing how things worked. If he could see something, or lay his hands on something, sooner or later he’d get a picture of how it went together. How it worked.

  Until the war, Reg had only used it to talk women horizontal. After all, that was just another puzzle wanting a solution. You just had to see how all the pieces fit together: your words and her desires, her body language and your interests. The proper sequence of events led to an inevitable result, like chemical reactions within a fuse.

  Sometimes he was too good at it. But maybe Sybil would give up if she caught him in the act with another girl. Marry her? He’d rather die.

  The first time he’d gone down hole, during a cold September rain to grapple with a Lynn that had cratered West Ferry Road near the docks, Reg realized the same knack he had for knowing how to undress a bird could also save his life. Thing of it was, he never knew until it was all said and done. The Sight had a limited scope. A few feet, a few minutes.

  But Peter needed to keep his mouth shut. However the Sight worked, it was Reg’s gift. His alone.

  The captain didn’t miss a trick. He heard the edge in Reg’s voice. “I’d buy you a pint,” he said, clapping Reg on the shoulder. “But the quacks said you should go easy.”

  “I can handle a pint if it’s free,” said Reg.

  He was finished risking his life. He’d put in his time, and now he was done with the dangerous work. Time to move up the ladder a bit. He reckoned that’s why Captain Hollister wanted to have a chat.

  “You lot,” Holly called, “finish that Dietrich. Meet us at the Bull when it’s locked down.”

  Reg rode with the captain. Holly used his own car on the job because many sapper units still didn’t have their own vehicles. At least now they had a lorry; most sappers had to catch rides with civilians. Reg didn’t mind. Month back or so, on his way to a job, he’d met a nice bird whose husband worked on a merchant ship in the North Atlantic. Poor sod was gone for weeks at a time.

  246 Company worked out of Bermondsey, which, thanks to the docks and warehouses, had suffered worse than many neighborhoods under the Luftwaffe’s affections. The city had become a patchwork of order and chaos. Some streets looked perfectly normal, as though there wasn’t a war on. Other places were nothing but piles of rubble. Spots where the shattered brick and timbers had been cleared away left gaps in the city as conspicuous as a broken incisor on a pageant queen’s smile. Here and there, a lone chimney or part of a wall towered over the wreckage, etched with curlicues of dust and soot.

  “Doyle’s looking a bit green,” said Holly.

  “Can’t say I noticed,” Reg lied.

  “He isn’t ready.”

  “Either he’ll get ready, or the Jerries will take him off your hands quick enough.”

  Holly parked in front of a chemist’s shop, just up the street from 246 Company HQ. He said, “And how many others along with him?”

  “That’s why we evacuate.”

  Holly pounded his fist on the fascia. “Enough, Reg. I’m not sending him in yet. That means we’re short and I’m begging you to stay on.”

  “Like hell I will. Sapper teams are always down a man or two.”

  Holly stepped from the car. Reg followed. Long streamers of spongy cloth had been strewn across the road. Reg recognized the tattered shreds of a barrage balloon.

  Nobody Reg knew could remember seeing or hearing of the Sword and Bull prior to a few months ago. Yet the pub was clearly old, as evidenced by the weathered oak sign swinging above the door. The carving depicted a bull cracking the earth beneath its hooves, a sword thrust between its shoulders. The paint had long ago flaked away except where it covered the horns and hooves of the rampant bull. They glittered like gold in the late autumn sunlight.

  The two men studied the pub with the same quiet deliberation they gave a fresh bomb crater. Somebody had chalked a note on the front door: Plenty of beer, bottle and draught.

  Holly nodded at the pub. “Let’s give it a try.”

  “I still want that pint,” said Reg.

  When Holly opened the door, Reg might have sworn he caught a whiff of something humid, like a river. But they were a solid mile from the Thames, and it never smelled that clean. He shook his head, tried to clear the last remnants of ether playing with his senses. The pub itself was dark compared to the unusually bright winter day outside. It took a moment for Reg’s eyes to adjust.

  He took an immediate dislike to the place: it had no snug. Reg preferred a bit of privacy once he got serious about chatting up a bird. And the hearth had no fire, only cold ashes. As public houses went, it wasn’t impressive.

  The barkeep was a bloody giant. Easily twenty stone if he weighed a pound, yet tall enough to wear it well. He wore his long, coal-black beard in braids, and his skin was dusky bronze. His eyes, lighter than the surrounding shadows, glimmered in the half light like twinned opals.

  Holly said, “Two pints of your best bitters!”

  The mountain behind the bar said, “The best is also my only bitters.”

  His voice rumbled like a dormant volcano tossing in its sleep. And it carried an odd lilt, like the faint suggestion of foreign lands. Reg couldn’t place it.

  “That’ll do.”

  When the barkeep turned his back to fetch a pair of glasses, Holly gestured at his bare chin. “Reckon he’s a Celt?” he asked, sotto voce.

  Reg shrugged. “I reckon he’s a tough bastard.”

  The captain introduced himself and Reg.

  “Gil,” said the barkeep. He put two pint glasses on the bar. As he filled the second, he said, “Little early in the day for men in uniform.”

  “Oh, we’ve already been hard at work,” said Reg. By now the life-and-death rush of adrenaline had evaporated, leaving him hollow and windblown. He’d come damn close to snuffing it, and the realization had transmuted his terror to giddiness. He downed a hefty portion of his pint.

  Gil took a towel from the brass rail behind the bar, flipped it over his shoulder, and set to work rinsing glasses under a water tap. “What work is that?”

  Reg wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Me? I work miracles, mate.”

  “I’ve seen miracles.”

  Holly clasped Reg by the shoulder. To Gil, he said, “Reg here is a bloody magician, he is.”

  “I’ve seen that, too,” said Gil. He almost sounded serious. A very strange fellow.

  “Best goddamned sapper there ever was,” said Holly.

  Gil cocked an eyebrow. “Sapper?” He said it without letting his attention stray from the glass in his hands, as though merely making conversation in the centuries-old tradition of barkeeps everywhere.

  Holly said, “Yeah, sappers. Royal Engineers, mate.” Gil let the silence speak for him. Didn’t even shake his head. “Unexploded ordnance?” More silence. “The Blitz?”

  “Ah. That.” Gil gave the glass one final pass with the towel before stowing it under the bar. He pulled out another, inspected it in the half light. “Seen wars, too.”

  Giddiness and ale together became a witch’s potion that left Reg feeling indignant. Sapper crews would be talking for years to come about what he’d accomplished today. He wouldn’t tolerate some outsider shrugging it off.

  “Hey!” He leaned across the bar to grab Gil by the arm. “We’re fighting a war! Pikers like you need to pay attention to what’s happening out there.”

  Gil looked at the hand on his forearm, and then slowly looked up to stare at Reg. Again, he didn’t say anything. But his eyes, those gray-green opals, bored into him. It didn’t take the Sight to see there was no winning a fight with Gil. Reg yanked his hand away.

  “I meant it about you being the best,” said Holly. “Which is why I’m begging you to stay on. Just a bit longer before I put you in for promotion. Please.”

  “I’ve already stayed on for you. I’ve done my bit, and now you owe me.”

  “Does Britain owe you, too? The king?”

  Re
g could tell from the way Gil assiduously avoided them that he was taking in every word. He might have looked bored by it all, but the tosser was listening. Reg hated arguing in front of the barman. But argue they did, through their first pints, and their second.

  Holly wouldn’t ease up. He kept dogging Reg until finally Reg said, “Sod off! I’ve done my bit, and that’s final. Promotion or none, I’m not going down hole again.”

  He left Holly at the bar, and took up a game of darts. Thock. Who the hell did Holly think he was, anyway? Who did he think Reg was? Thock. Selfish git, treating Reg like that. Clack. The next dart missed its mark, bounced off the wall, and skittered across the floorboards.

  The afternoon wore on. More folks wandered into the pub on their way home from work. The after-work crowd kept Gil busy; he ran the place by himself. The men from 246 Company arrived about an hour before sundown, their catch from the hospital safely disassembled. Doyle tried again to ask Reg how he’d known what to do, but Reg was too busy describing his exploits to a pair of tittering shop girls.

  Holly kept to the bar, looking hurt. Peter joined him. They seemed to get on well enough with Gil. Reg caught bits and pieces of their conversation, and at one point thought he heard Peter carrying on about the Sight again, but by that point Reg had the shop girls in his thrall and thus was more concerned with choosing between them for a cozy overnight than with Peter’s rumormongering.

  At sundown, Peter helped Gil pull curtains over the windows. The barkeep might not have paid the war much heed, but at least he obeyed the blackout regulations.

  The evening crowd brought the pub to life. Doyle and Holly played darts. Their hoots and calls melded with the din of laughter and conversation, and the occasional rattle of the flue as a gust of wind eddied down the chimney. Knowing their services would likely be needed in the morning, the sappers cleared out early. They waved goodbye to Reg. All but Holly.

  Reg was returning to the bar to fetch two more pints, and had just decided that he’d take the ginger-haired girl home rather than the brunette, when Gil cleared his throat and nodded at the door. Reg turned.