To Kingdom Come

“I’m glad of that,” I said, my heart still racing.

“Come. Look here. Each of these materials can be turned into an infernal device. Here is ammonia, isopropyl alcohol, glycerin soap, common manure. A trained bomb maker would find an average home a treasure trove of materials. A few ingredients from a local chemist are also helpful. In these bottles are sulfur, magnesium, and sulfuric acid. Of course, we need not start from scratch every time. Here are primers, timers, fuses, blasting caps, a plunger. This cylinder is an artillery shell.”

“I must say, it seems strange to see a notorious bomber with his own explosives hut, in the middle of an army base,” I said.

“Ja, well, there was a time when I would have blown myself to bits before working for a government agency, but since then, I have learned to listen to the demands of the stomach. That, perhaps, and the fact that I have been deported from most of the countries in Europe. I have no desire to leave this one. Luckily for me, Britannia is a sentimental old girl, and she has hugged many a socialist, nihilist, and anarchist to her bosom while her sisters have shown us the door.”

“Yes,” I countered, “but they seem to have you under lock and key here.”

“She is sentimental but not stupid. Have no worries for me, young man. I’ve blown my way out of worse situations than this, when it suited me. I am comfortable here. For one thing, I am not being pestered by factions such as the amateurs who tried to blow up Scotland Yard.”

“What do they have you working on, may I ask?”

“A new and improved form of dynamite at their request, a malleable form that can be pressed under a bridge or against a building. To tell you the truth, I am tinkering with it but not very hard. I have reached the twilight of my life, and this is the best an old bomb maker like me can expect. Believe me when I say I have no intention of giving anyone yet another and more dangerous type of bomb with which to inflict more carnage on the world.”

“How did you meet Mr. Barker?” I asked.

“He scooped me up in the street. I had only been in London a few days, and he hailed me from a passing cab. He said he recognized me from a photograph in an obscure Yiddish newspaper, the only one I have allowed to be taken of me. He took me to the most unusual restaurant.”

“Chinese?” I asked.

“Ja! They served rice and watery tea and animal parts that even a witch would refuse. Your master is a very unusual fellow, but-what is the Scottish word? Very canny.”

“I’m sure he’d say the same about you,” I commented.

“I? I am merely an old tinkerer. One day some Serbian anarchists came into my laboratory in Bonn to ask if a bomb could be fitted into a coronation crown. The would-be king was deposed, it turned out, before he could be crowned, but I’d made the device and my career was born. My most difficult assignment was to build a bomb into the revolver belonging to a Russian general. I hollowed out the cylinder and handle, and filed the barrel down to the final inch. When it blew up, it took him and several of his closest subordinates with him.”

“Amazing,” I said, trying not to picture the carnage. “And what, if I may ask, are your politics?”

“I thought that would be obvious, young man. Like all makers of wholesale destruction, I am a pacifist. The bad thing about war is that it makes more evil people than it can take away, as Kant said. But come. We have work to do.”

I spent the morning assembling a picric bomb, the small metal sphere one sees in political cartoons, then we took it out and exploded it in a small bunker that had been dug for the purpose. Van Rhyn pointed out the pieces of shrapnel on all sides of the dirt walls and described in too-vivid terms the results if my sphere had been thrown under the carriage of the Czar or Emperor Franz Josef. At least he stopped at mentioning the Queen.

We ate in a small mess, a term which in every way describes the lunch I had there, then returned to the eccentric bomb maker’s little potting shed laboratory. Van Rhyn seemed no more particular about food than Barker, and he came away wearing much of it on his beard and shirtfront. He had another similarity to my employer, I thought, which was a detached air, as if while speaking to you, he was also thinking other, deeper thoughts. With van Rhyn it was abstruse chemical formulas and shrapnel trajectory, while with Barker … well, one never knew with Barker. He was either contemplating the universe or figuring out the most expedient way to get someone in a headlock.

In the afternoon, we made our own version of Mr. Nobel’s dynamite. We started out with a bowlful of crystalline silica, which van Rhyn insisted was known as kieselguhr, and a test tube that contained a yellowish liquid that he informed me was nitroglycerin.

“This is very unstable. The least thing could cause it to blow up-sudden jarring, a change in temperature. I would swear that sometimes it explodes out of sheer bad temper. I am very vain, Mr. Llewelyn, about the fact that I have all ten of my fingers, and each one is intact. You don’t know how many of my associates are missing digits. It is the badge of our profession. We are not a long-lived group, you see, and so far, there has been no need for pensions.”

One would think pouring some crystals into a cardboard tube, saturating them with liquid, and attaching a fuse and primer would be a matter of a few minutes, but producing dynamite is a slow and dangerous process. The kieselguhr is supposed to stabilize the nitroglycerin, so it can be transported and handled safely, but the old bomb maker handled the harmless-looking length of tubing far more gingerly than the lethal-looking sphere of the picric bomb. He also made sure the length of the fuse was long enough for us to get far away. Van Rhyn lit a little German cheroot that looked like a sausage, and used it to light the dynamite. He tossed it into the bunker and we didn’t need an invitation to run as fast as our legs would carry us. The second explosion was much louder than the first. I momentarily lost my hearing, and there was a high-pitched ringing in my ears when we came back to explore the bunker. Actually, “hole” would be a better word now. The shape had been altered from a rough rectangle to a circle, and there was a concentric ring of dirt clods around it. Van Rhyn was going on about the purity and simplicity of explosives, but I was catching only every fifth or sixth word.

That was my introduction to the world of bomb making. Johannes van Rhyn promised that the next day we would explore low-impact bomb making, followed by high-impact explosions on the next; and near the end, the course would conclude with me actually making my own nitroglycerin from scratch in van Rhyn’s little lab. I wasn’t looking forward to that. For one thing, I’m awfully fond of my fingers, every last one of them.

“Allow me, sir,” the German said, taking a heavily carved walking stick from a corner, and locking the windows and doors, “to walk you partway to the station.”

“That is almost two miles,” I said. “There is really no need.”

“I am a great walker, young man,” van Rhyn told me. “It shall give us a chance to talk further. How long have you been working for Mr. Barker?”

“About two months, sir.”

“This is quite a plan Barker has concocted,” he said. “Your employer will have to keep his wits about him, but he is essentially correct. The Irish have laid hands upon a supply of old industrial-use dynamite from America, but it had degraded. Some of it will no longer explode, and some will at the slightest provocation. They need an explosives expert, and I am the only recognized authority. I have been wooed by the Irish before. Some of them tried to recruit me half a year ago.”

“Really?” I asked. I was curious about the old German. “Why didn’t you join their organization, if I may ask?”

“I thought it unlikely that they would win, and I had just arrived in England and did not relish the idea of being thrown out.”

Van Rhyn and I walked along the side of the wide road talking, while uniformed soldiers marched and drilled at our elbows.

“So how did you get tossed out of your own country?” I asked.

“There was a little misunderstanding. Filling a statue of Bismarck with explosives did not necessarily mean that I wished it to be delivered to the Iron Chancellor himself.”

“Of course not,” I said, wondering what the English authorities would think of a hollow statue of Her Majesty, filled with explosives. “But, tell me, what do you get out of this?”

“Well, Mr. Llewelyn, I have been promised a small remuneration from your boss, but, principally, I am paying off a debt. It was he who helped to secure me this work. He spoke to the army, and told them who I was. They are not pushing me here, and, for once, I have room and board and a place to work in peace. They let me alone most of