ARGIS BOLTON was a big fellow, in every physical respect. That was the preeminent impression of anyone unlucky enough to be in his glowering presence for more than a minute. His knees, hoisted up on preternaturally long legs, pressed up against the underside of his desk and his back bent almost double to bring his elbows to rest on the top. His torso lurched forward and the length of it nearly spanned the desk’s broad top. Atop the torso swiveled a long sinewy neck, and the neck culminated in a large head with piercing eyes.

The unfortunate subject the eyes were presently focused upon was Hargis Bolton’s polar opposite in nearly every way: a short and portly man whose pallor seemed to be a side effect of his portliness, as if his skin were stretched tight to accommodate the fat that lay underneath. Plump cheeks in an honest, open face framed a neat black mustache underneath quick, intelligent eyes. If Bolton’s eyes pierced and probed, Alistair McEnroe’s eyes scanned and smiled, the crinkles under them a fatal tell on any poker face he might try to muster.

He sat now in the chair on the other side of the desk, studying the top and surreptitiously scratching an epithet into the underside. Bolton was angry, as usual, and McEnroe waited patiently for a lull in the tirade.

“...not only your patriotic duty, but a damned poor reflection on your association with this university as well!” Bolton seemed to have finished.

“Yes, sir. Of course. Unforgivable dereliction…most humbly apologize...shan’t be repeated.”

McEnroe mumbled off the litany of penances with his head bowed but one eye raised to look Bolton dead on. That eye said everything: I might be as forgetful as a goldfish, but I’m the best damned professor this institution has had in 50 years!

Bolton knew it too, and now he sighed and pushed himself back from his desk.

“Honestly, Mac...I wonder how you survive sometimes. You’ve got to figure out where you left those papers. Take the rest of the day off, alright? I’ll find a sub.” His tone had softened, and McEnroe knew his job was safe, for now.

“Aye. Hargis…” he hesitated. “Hargis, I know. I’m sorry.” Alistair McEnroe stood from the desk and replaced his bowler on his head. “I’ll find them, I will.”

St. Ethel’s University buzzed around him as he clacked his way through the immaculate marble halls. It was the start of the fall term, and petrified first-years scurried about trying to navigate their way to their classrooms while dodging the roving bands of laughing, joking seniors, who knew and loved Ethel’s the way Mac did. He would usually have exchanged barbs and retorts with them, for he was a fixture by then at Ethel’s, switching between lectures in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering. At least before the war started.

The trouble in Germany had cast a pall over the faculty. There was talk of shutting down the campus for a semester, sending the students to their homes for safety. There was talk of implementing bomb drills, gas drills, even building a bomb shelter in the old gymnasium. No one said anything to the students, but the teachers' lounge was always good for a horrible rumor or two.

Mac’s ears still rang with Bolton’s harangue, and he kept his head low and his eyes forward as his mind buzzed with his thoughts. He grew more and more irate.

The cheek of questioning his patriotism! It wasn’t as if he didn’t take the project seriously. He’d signed onto Project Auflösung with perfect alacrity. He had made strides, incredible advances in the technologies of modern warfare, maybe even created something truly and wholly new—and that at great personal cost. He might get a job with the government after the war. That was how major the work was. He had mislaid a few bloody papers.

Mac’s thoughts were roughly interrupted by a rough blow at his shoulder.

“I beg your pardon,” stammered Mac, rubbing what he felt sure would shortly become a bruise.

“No, the fault is mine,” said his accidental assailant. “I really do…”

He broke off as he looked at Mac’s face and ducked his head so that he seemed nearly swallowed up in his long overcoat. Without another word, his sudden acquaintance hitched up his shoulders and strode quickly away.

***

AC MADE his way to his office in the library, still locked, the last place he had seen that all-important sheaf of papers. His desk was empty, though not totally without evidence of his previous occupancy: he traced the lead scribbles on the worn face, palimpsests of many years of academic work, writing lectures, proofreading papers, figuring grade averages; rubbed at the burn marks from the surreptitious cigarette cupped low so the librarian didn’t catch him. No sign of the papers, on the desk or in the twin cubbies above or anywhere on the floor below, five feet in every direction.

“Celia, my dear...a moment, if you please,” Mac quavered to the stern matron behind the reference desk.

His dread was not misplaced. Ms. Celia McCafferty was the one who had castigated him for the cigarette burns in the carrel; she was the one who levied the profligate late fees he incurred quarterly; she had administered absolution, after imposing penance, when he absently left his borrowed books in the rain or spilled ink on them or peppered them with unwelcome annotations in the margins. She was also an infallible source of information, a master reference librarian, and despite her crotchetiness, one of Mac’s most valuable allies in his work.

Ms. McCafferty peered at him from behind a thick volume and even thicker spectacles. When it became clear that she would continue glaring at him without bestowing the boon of a greeting, Mac continued.

“Have you seen my papers, love? In a small black brief? They were right there in my carrel. Yesterday, I think.”

“There are no misplaced papers, nor any other object, here. Everything has a place, you know. There is no place for that which has no place.”

Ms. McCafferty was fond of these turns of phrase, and Mac wondered if her constant devotion to her books gave rise to her slightly stilted manner of speaking: self-composed maxims, pithy proverbs that espoused her own personal opinions as if they were gospel.

“Yes, ma’am, I know. But it’s terribly important, and I thought you might remember…”

“I don’t ‘remember’...I know. I never saw the papers but I did see a man in a long grey greatcoat stop by your carrel for a moment, while you were meeting with Bolton. He stopped by the desk to very conspicuously feign interest in published works by the faculty...and then quickly refused my invitation to the public lectures. He said he was a great admirer of yours and mentioned he’d been following you since your lab work at Greenley.”

“Anything else about him? Please...what did he look like?”

“Oh, tall, brownish hair, rather handsome, but his nose had been broken and badly set, sort of pointed but crooked. He wore shaded spectacles, oddly large, as if to cover his eyes, but he took them off to talk to me. He was quite enthusiastic about you and harped on a bit about what you meant to him. He let slip that he had done some military-scientific work, but he certainly wasn’t one of ours...I mean, he had an accent.”

Mrs. McCafferty curled her lip and seemed ready to launch off into a tirade, so Mac interjected with an “I see. What else?”

“Nothing of note. I told him you’d be back in but he seemed to change his tone a bit. Seemed awfully hurried to leave.”

Mac sighed. The ancient librarian fixed him with a stare and exaggerated looking at her wrist, and Mac made his way to the exit and headed home.

***

HE SLUSH of a late spring squelched underfoot, encroaching into Mac’s worn leather wingtips and soaking his socks, but his head was down and his mind elsewhere. Anger at himself and his absentmindedness lowered on his thoughts like a dark cloud; his fists clenched violently in his pockets. Arriving at his flat—Number 24 Northumbria, leased for cheap, even by teachers’ standards—he stepped on the envelope tucked halfway under the doormat. Uttering an oath under his breath, Mac bent to pick it up, shook off the muck, and was surprised to see Hargis Bolton’s spidery script and old-fashioned wax seal.

“What now?” thought Mac irritably.

Shucking off his greatcoat, adding to the already considerable mess on the floor, Mac broke the seal and unfolded the letter with one hand while rummaging in the fridge for a pint and half a leftover pork pie with the other. A dinner invitation. Dated that morning. Why hadn’t Bolton just asked him during their meeting? Mac’s brow furrowed. Wait—a freshly inked note at the bottom: 

Mac, there’s something I want your opinion on...the University’s not the place for private talk these days. I’ve got a bottle of very old Dalmore, so come on down. —Hargis.

Hargis Bolton did not live in a teacher’s flat. He had a sprawling, quaint manor out in the countryside made of a dark grey stone, rising whimsically above an overly long cobblestone driveway. The building was, like Bolton himself, a throwback—Mac had often thought relic in the course of some of their more passionate disagreements—to the days, not long past, of ranks and royalty, arms and honors.

But Hargis Bolton was no fusty old coot. Having served a long and glorious career in the navy, he then had a professorship at the naval academy before retiring to teach at Ethel’s and “rise in the ranks," as he liked to say, to the position of headmaster. Despite their differences—Mac thought now of Bolton’s straight-laced adherence to the rules, his old-fashioned gallantry—Mac and Bolton were true colleagues, deadly earnest in their devotion to their country and their college.

Bolton could never be anything but earnest. He had long past risen through the ranks of academia at Ethel’s, by dint of his longevity, stubbornness and a true spark of genius. His grandcester had been the inaugural provost of St. Ethel’s, and a certain talent for education ran in the blood. Which, Mac thought ruefully, explained Bolton’s vehemence in chastising him earlier. Ethel’s proper functioning and academic excellence were Hargis’ domain and he took pride in his duty with a ferocious seriousness. He was no stick in the mud though. Perhaps the legends grew in the absence of fact, for Bolton never spoke of his records, but he had more than “done his bit” in the service and Ethel’s was a well-known destination for any young man considering a military career.

***

AC MULLED all this as he stood at the imposing green front door, his thoughts interrupted by a somber-looking butler who wrestled him out of his coat and snatched his bowler away while herding him into the study where Hargis Bolton stood poking the fire.

“Hullo, Mac. Gracious of you to come; I sent that note on this morning.”

“Of course, Hargis. I’m glad to be here.”

Mac anticipated a reopening of that morning’s conflict and kicked uncomfortably at the ancient Japanese rug underfoot, but Hargis played the host to the hilt, setting Mac down in front of hot consommé, cold cuts and a truly impressive roasted pheasant. 

Mac guessed, correctly, that Hargis would take his time getting to the matter, and resigned himself, not entirely reluctantly, to a long evening.

At last Hargis pushed himself back from his plate. His eyes, never merry and gay at the best of times, now narrowed with a deadly intensity. 

“Mac, I’m sorry I came down on you that hard this morning. No sign of them yet, is there?”

When Mac shook his head and dropped his eyes, Hargis continued. 

“I couldn’t tell you at the university, but I wanted to pick your brain. What do you know about the situation in Germany?” 

“A bunch of thugs. Jackbooted bullies looking for trouble.”

Hargis frowned. “A bit more than that, I’m afraid. Chancellor Hitler is talking of war. And Germany is desperate enough to do it. This new Enabling Act is dangerous—the most anti-democratic thing I’ve seen in my lifetime. Everything’s gone to the chancellorship; the Reichstag has been completely cut out, as has the President. This is a power grab. It smacks of something dangerous, and I don’t think Herr Hitler is done. Not by a long shot.”

Mac knew his old friend was probably right, but he felt a pang of misery stab through his chest. 

“But what has all this to do with me? I’m not going to fight...why, we’re not even at war!”

“Your work, Mac. It isn’t going to be long before someone, either Hitler, his fanatics, or some damned opportunist, takes the theory and puts it into practical use, and that could very well be disastrous. We cannot—cannot—let those papers fall into the wrong hands.”

“Oh god—I’m sorry. I had only known the half of it.” Mac’s face fell and hot shame flushed across his neck. “I wish I had just handed the project over to someone else and been rid of it—why didn’t someone take over from me, Hargis?”

Hargis looked a little more kindly at his colleague, a half-smile. 

“Secrecy, my boy. The fewer eyes on that information the better.” 

He let the sentence hang before throwing in a compliment with mock reluctance. 

“And we can’t afford to let any brain-power go to waste. The best saboteurs are the ones who actually designed what they’re sabotaging. Besides, none of us are immune from involvement now. Mac, they’ve called us all up, in a way. I’m ‘consulting’, now. It’s actually all rather exciting!” Hargis rubbed his hands together and his bony shoulders quivered with delight. “Doing our bit, eh? That’s the ticket—old colleagues turned brothers in arms. Speaking of arms, I have something for you.”

The evening went on late, far past Mac’s usual bedtime, and though Hargis was a gracious host, Mac’s duty hung over him like a dangling noose. He was both relieved and disheartened when Bolton called it a night, insisting on a parting gift of a heavy wooden lockbox holding two pistols, along with the rest of the Dalmore. 

There was much to think about and not much time to do it. In the back of the cab home, Mac fingered the ivory-handled derringers Hargis had foisted on him. Beautiful things, they were, old Bolton family pieces, an identical pair obviously made for some rich Duke or Sir or Lord’s personal vendettas in the long-ago days when honour had nothing to do with how one acted and everything to do with who one’s grandfather and great-great grandfather were. 

Mac had protested at first when Bolton took them down from their dusty lockbox, but relented when he saw the pride in Bolton’s eyes. Bolton didn’t care a hang for modern conventions of nicety and good manners, but tradition and symbolism—these were blood and air and life to him. And that was why Mac had accepted the pistols. For Bolton’s sake.

***

AC SIGHED. Poor old Bolton. The way his eyes had shone when talking about his duty. This was a grand adventure to him, a chance to vicariously fight the war through other people, when it wasn’t him who did the bleeding and dying in some soggy trench over in France. Pity turned to ire. They hadn’t any right to...to conscript him like this. The more Mac thought, the more irritated he grew. 

Angrily, Mac pulled the cabbie over at his favorite pub, ten minutes’ walk from his flat. The consommé and pheasant hadn’t much staying power, and a sup and a nightcap of the Dalmore would be very welcome.

The Ragged Queen was neither the oldest nor the most popular public house in town, but the beefsteak pie and bitter were first-rate and its lack of popularity meant it was the rare quiet spot in that bustling college town. 

Mac commandeered his usual spot and fell to.

“The Queen,” or “The Tattered Lassie," her regulars called it, was the obvious spot for a college student to sweat out his term papers or a professor to hobnob with his peers. The sign above the door had been vandalized dozens of times—that is to say, some ribald prankster had augmented the Ragged Queen’s assets with a marker dozens of times over the years, so that she now appeared rather disreputable and very ragged indeed. The veranda was littered with the grease-soaked newspapers that one’s chips came in, cigarette ends flicked carelessly on towards the small courtyard and slicks of Britain’s finest ales deposited there by overly-choosy or overly-indulgent patrons.

The chips were hot and greasy, the ale cool and tasty, and Mac started feeling quite a bit better about the whole affair. He sauntered up to the bar man, who pulled his second pint and uncorked the whisky from Mac’s satchel with an admiring glance at the label.

“Maybe it’s none of my business, sir, but the man in the corner has done nothing but watch you since you came in. Something about him raises the hackles.”

***

OMETHING TOLD Mac not to turn around, but he hazarded a subtle glance at the mirror behind the bar. Among the tall green bottles and squat brown ones hovered a face. A face, Mac realized, he had seen before. The man he had bumped into had either followed him here or had a perfect doppelgänger. The man turned away and strode to the bar, loudly and Teutonically ordering a deutsch lager. The barkeep took exception to his choice of beverage and curtly recommended a good shandy, along with his opinion of German beer, German government and the German people in general.

“Oh, no, friend,” protested the customer. “A shandy will be very good.”

The publican begrudgingly pulled the draft and scraped the foam’s overflow off with a barspoon, taking no great care for the portion he slopped onto the floor. The exchange between the two had attracted the attention of a few patrons who looked testily towards the bar, and a general babel of discontent could be heard over the tinkle of glasses and the crackling phonograph playing in the background.

Mac’s heart turned over in his chest as one burly patron drained his bottle and grabbed it by the neck. The stranger saw it too, for he threw a generous gratuity on the bar and blurted “Come, my friends! Casebeer buys a beer case! A round on me and a song for the Queen!”

Hoisting his bottle aloft, the snub-nosed man broke into a hearty rendition of “There’ll Always Be an England.” With more fervor than finesse, the guests joined in one by one until the pub rang out with the song.

Mac seized his chance and sidled up to the man, whispering fiercely in his ear. “I don’t know what game you’re playing at, but I’ll have none of it. What were you doing following me this morning?”

“I, following? No sir, this is chance, mere coincidence.”

“Was it you who was asking for me at the library?”

They jostled their way onto the veranda.

“Yes, sir, it was me. My name is Nigel Casebeer, a mechanical engineer. I am a great admirer of yours and your work”. 

“For god’s sake, man! Did you take my papers?” 

“I don’t know your papers, Herr Alistair, but such work...ah, such work could put an end to this disturbance for all times! It could be the weapon of the future—and Germany is the leader of the future! If only you knew, Doctor! We could work together—the Fuhrer is the greatest friend the sciences have ever known! Under Germany the modern world  would soar to new heights of progress and freedom never seen before!”

Casebeer’s eyes glowed with an insane passion and his shoulders shook.

This was too much. This phony patriotism, this dissembling show of national goodwill, sanctimoniously co-opting the worst that modern science had to offer.

“And the people who die? The ones that survive, masses of them, twisted, shells of men, bastardized children, barren women. Families, ripped apart and ruined, for the sake of the delusional pipe dreams of a pack of—” Mac’s voice grew louder as his temper got the best of him and he stopped short at the suspicious glances he was attracting. To sit in the lab at St. Ethel’s and dabble in the theory of lethal doses and morbidity percentages of test populations was one thing. To sit across from a sleek and civil facade that would grin and make excuses for a weapon like this, all in the name of a boorish and overweening patriotism—it was too much.

Casebeer smiled at the anger and confusion stealing across Mac’s face. “Oh,” he simpered in mock sympathy, “The Doctor’s conscience prickles him! What shall he do, the noble Doctor?”

“You infernal cad,” Mac gritted out. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Hargis knows people...he’ll turn you in and you’ll rot in a jail cell.” 

In his wrath, Mac had forgotten that Casebeer would have no idea who Hargis was. Hargis! Surely he would know what to do. 

“Excuse me," Mac spat. He stood from the table and stalked off to find a phone.

The call to Hargis didn’t take long. Hargis listened to Mac with excited alacrity, and promised to call the authorities. Mac spun on his heels and returned to an empty table. Of course Casebeer had flown. Mac slapped Casebeer’s empty glass to the floor, apologetically handed the tender a fiver to cover it, and stormed from the tavern.

***

AC SAT in the back of the cab with his head in his hands. Despair choked him, and he felt hot tears prickle at the back of his eyes. This was all wrong. What was he doing here? Glumly he stared out the window. London at night. Beautiful, even in its dinginess. Mac thought now of how he truly loved the city. He had never known any place else. These streets were his home, they were his life. The streetlamps cast their pale yellow glow on the grey streets whipping by. Only by the frequency of their passing could Mac tell how fast they were going. He barely even cared where they were going. He had told the cab driver to look for a man matching the description of Casebeer he gave, but it was a lost cause. And so Mac sat, wondering what to do, how he would ever go home again. 

Home!

The fall term was starting, and papers would be due and tests were around the corner, a duty Mac dreaded but now found himself missing. He thought back to his school days when he lived and died with every schoolyard fight and grade-school crush; the close-knit community that sometimes seemed suffocating but now felt so solid and secure: the Reverend Grigsby who did double-duty as school proctor and made his childish cheating on tests a matter of honor and salvation; of Celia McCafferty, honour-bound to even the smallest duty, brilliant in her own way, though nobody outside of St. Ethel’s would ever know it. Of Hargis, dear old Hargis Bolton, brilliant, duty-bound. Poor Hargis. So eager to help, so committed to his country and his cause—and this was his one chance to do his bit. He would be out here, skulking in bars and chasing spies if he could. But he couldn’t, and so he sat in his office, knowing, hoping and praying that Mac would “do his bit”.

Dash it all. There was no use now. Onward and be damned. He would see it through. But not tonight. The last ship had left—of course Casebeer had seen to it to catch the last one—and the docks were shutting down for the night. In his hotel, Mac snarled at the concierge and turned in for a restless night. The bed was cold and his thoughts tormented him. It wasn’t up to him to save the bloody world! He had never asked for this terrible affair to be dropped in his lap. But all the same, it had been. Wasn’t that what heroes did? Pulled through in spite of it all, in spite of themselves? The Project left him no choice. With a shiver, he recalled the horrible particulars. No, the choice had been made for him. The world would not be subjected to those horrors, not on his account. Just as he had ripped off the covers and swung his feet to the floor, the phone at his bedside rang.

***

HE YARD had caught him. An apologetic inspector begged his pardon and humbly requested his presence at the docks. Mac needed no pressing. Fumbling for his bowler, his hand bumped the lockbox on the table. Hardly knowing why, Mac took the pistols out and put them in the pocket of his greatcoat. 

The cab pulled up at a warehouse on the docks, and Mac knew the building by the sound of loud arguing raging inside. Pulling aside the sheet metal door he was surprised to find Hargis standing over Nigel, who sat hunched over with his arms folded. 

Nigel—stupid, stupid man, not Nigel at all, but some pathetic Nazi lackey—looked up at Mac and smiled.

Everything Mac had felt till then—his qualms, his diffidence—vanished at that smile. He strode over to the impostor and pulled the pistol from his coat. He looked Nigel in the eye and flipped the gun, catching it by the barrel. One blow to the head was all he could manage before Hargis pulled him off, but it was enough. Nigel looked up at Mac through the blood streaming into his eyes, eyes that were no longer full of derision, but fear. And Mac knew he would never be just a professor again. 

Hargis knew it too. The Aüflosung Affair was over, but Mac was different. He was somber, almost sullen. And they couldn’t waste a good man. Mac could use some training, but he was bulldog-tenacious. They had narrowly skirted disaster, but both Mac and Hargis knew the Germans were only getting started. But then, maybe, so was Mac.

Back at Ethel’s, Hargis leaned back in his chair over a long lunch break in the mess hall. 

“So what d’you think, Mac? If I can do it, anyone can. No, I don’t mean go government—you’re too old and wouldn’t pass the physical. But from time to time, Her Majesty has been known to enlist private citizens with particular skill sets. Who knows—you might get to bash a few more Nazis about!”

Hargis laughed wheezily, nearly spilling the tea he was stirring.

“Oh, honestly, Hargis. It’s not funny. I just wanted to go back to teaching.” 

“I know, my friend. But the time for teaching is drawing to a close. Too many of the young lads are being called up. The university is going to a state of semi-closure. Even I’m going back into the Service—no, not fieldwork. I’m too old for that. But the ‘consulting’ is going full-time. For me. Not for you, I want you to stay on at the university. But think of it—what better cover could you want? You’ll get to keep up with your research, maintain access to the library and the laboratory, but you won’t have to lecture anymore. It’s the perfect cover. No one is going to suspect a portly college professor until it’s too late.” 

Hargis didn’t break into outright laughter this time, but he pursed his lips and his belly quivered. 

“What a card! You ought to have seen yourself wielding that pistol like a regular gangster! The picture it made: the patriot and the impostor!”

And almost in spite of himself, Mac smiled.