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Carlo Pondravi has been supplying the Allied Forces with cutting-edge weaponry and defense systems since the war began. He’s not sure how long ago that was, exactly, but—for some time, now.
They give him impossible demands and deadlines and say things like, “We need an animatronic German shepherd with a knockout gas diffusion system” and “But Hitler has golden guns with perfect aim!” and expect him to take them seriously. He gives them what they ask for, more or less, and since people keep dying on the other side as well as on theirs, he assumes it’s all working out as well as can be expected.
When he is asked to take over as liaison to the Danger 5 team, though—that’s when he loses all faith that this war will ever end.
He is ushered to a super-secret cliffside dwelling by an eagle-headed man, and no indication is given by anyone else at the base they leave from that theriocephalousness is at all uncommon. Carlo’s life has not been particularly sheltered, but he is still, it seems, capable of being surprised.
“Is the colonel,” he asks a private as he walks by, “really half-bird?”
The soldier looks at him strangely. “Of course not, he’s a colonel, full bird.”
As they enter the den of the headquarters, the colonel tells him, “Remember, the women will try to talk to you. Just tell them to stop.”
When he meets the team he’ll be working with, they look at him, bored, and only one even says hello. She says, in fact, “How do you do,” and in a delightfully British accent, and he thinks, perusing her, that this might not be such a bad assignment at all, until she catches the direction of his gaze and idly throws a letter opener at him. It pins his sleeve to a nearby countertop that is sticky with something he’d rather not think too closely on.
“Grenadine,” whispers the Frenchman, conspiratorially, with a wink.
“So, you’re our own personal engineer, huh?” another man, American, asks him.
“Well,” he replies, “not exactly. I’m your military liaison, primarily in the area of weapons development.”
“Mmmm,” purrs the dark-haired girl, the one whose uniform is modified beyond all military standards. “I like a man who can handle his weapons.”
The American’s skeptical expression turns into a baleful glare that Carlo is not sure he deserves.
Carlo realizes only later that the girl has been speaking in Russian throughout their entire acquaintance, and that, though he knows no Russian whatsoever, he has understood every word. When he asks the American, Jackson, about this, the man only says: “Well, some things are universal,” and then, “Hey, why are you paying so much attention to Ilsa?”
Carlo is grateful to be able to go home at the end of the day, not to be a live-in resident of the Danger 5 headquarters, wherein people are rarely fully-dressed, almost never completely sober, and even less often inclined to respect personal space.
As he waits, one morning, for Ilsa and Jackson to finish their morning eyesex-over-breakfast-cereal so that he can accompany them to the shooting range, he peruses the bookshelf. It is a sad, small thing that appears to exist mostly so that there is another flat surface upon which people can rest their drinks.
There are piles of magazines (most of which have some variety of the word “man” in the title, and some degree of female nudity in the contents), a small but surprisingly well-curated selection of public policy texts, and a paperback copy of Histoire de Babar, le petit elephant, in which a female elephant has been repeatedly defaced.
“What do you do when you’re not trying to kill Hitler?” he asks idly.
“Drink!” says Pierre. “Want one?”
Carlo declines.
Tucker grunts, sulking in the corner, but Carlo is unsure whether the response is to the conversation or to the latest issue of Practical Chortle, whose cover bears only the overly-stylized photo of a bereft orangutan, one hand half-closed around a pear.
At the range, he asks their strengths, their weaknesses, their preferred calibers and capacities, and what they’d like to see improved.
“As long as mine is bigger than Claire’s,” Ilsa says.
“But leave the biggest guns to me,” says Jackson, “Don’t want to strain the ladies.”
Ilsa shoots him in the foot as she walks away.
“On this gun,” she says in passing, “the safety does not work properly.”
Jackson throws him a very unsubtle wink. “She likes me,” he says, and although Carlo does not know Ilsa particularly well (“I don’t need new friends,” she said abruptly, when he once asked if she could give him the time), he thinks that violence is probably not, for her, necessarily a sign of dislike.
He winks back weakly, but mostly it’s to close his eyes at the sight of the blood.
He waits, daily, for someone to tell him he’s been recalled; that he can return to his comfortable lab. It doesn’t happen.
What does happen is that, one day, while they’re out testing the newest prototype, a highly advanced geolocation device, capable of seeking out unique genetic sequences, the locator, instead of finding Pierre (a piece of whose silky hair it had been given), retrieves a neighborhood Labrador.
“Well, this is a bit of a Jam Roly-Poly,” says Tucker, absently patting the dog on its head. “We told Pierre to stay hidden until we found him. What do we do now?”
“We find him the old-fashioned way,” says Claire brusquely, and she nods meaningfully to Ilsa. “You’ve got it with you, haven’t you?”
Ilsa hands Carlo a viewfinder.
“A toy?” he asks blankly.
“A field camera,” she corrects scornfully.
Jackson stares at him incredulously. “How have you not heard…and you’re the guy they’ve got spearheading our weapons development?”
He and Ilsa shake their heads at each other sadly, before Ilsa seems to remember that she is currently (though no one seems sure why) avoiding eye contact with Jackson.
Carlo looks through, and although he can admire Vatican City in stereoscopic view, he doesn’t think it’s likely to help them find Pierre. “Perhaps this is the wrong pair?” he suggests delicately.
Jackson grabs them from him roughly. “What do you know? These are top of the line! Look, watch—“ He stares into the glasses, brow furrowed.
After several moments, Claire clears her throat.
“I can’t see him,” Jackson grudgingly concedes. “Which means he must be underground.”
“Let’s just get a drink,” says Ilsa.
The others shrug, and even Claire concedes. “But just one,” she says, as she opens the door to a convenient bar. “And then we really ought to…”
“Ah-hah, my friends, I knew you would find me!” Pierre declares, jumping springily from the lap of a full-lipped woman.
The prototype in Carlo’s pocket chirps faintly.
Jackson declares it ready for duty.
In his obligatory report, Carlo does his best to argue otherwise, but the colonel slaps him on the back and tells him modesty is unbecoming.
“You’ve created the tool that will help us find and kill Hitler!” the colonel declares.
Carlo smiles weakly and nods, but it’s mostly to work the crick out of his neck.
Carlo has never believed himself suited to combat, and certainly not to special ops, but when Jackson throws an arm around his neck and says, “Think of it as an opportunity for research,” he finds himself hard-pressed to say no.
“The field is no place for engineers,” counters Ilsa.
“I’ll look out for him,” Jackson says, his eyes challenging her to further protest. “And besides, he’ll have the prototype.”
Carlo thinks later that he probably should have paid more heed to Ilsa’s derogatory snort, but at the time it seemed like a continuation of their larger dynamic (snipe, smirk, wink, repeat). He also thinks it should have occurred to him to mention that the prototype had no defensive capabilities whatsoever. When he thinks these things, however, it’s a little too late to do much about them.
He finds himself staring down a row of bank tellers with suspiciously uniform blond hair and blue eyes, and wonders why he couldn’t have waited in the car as back up. Just as one of the tellers begins to raise her weapons, however, he sees, on the other side of the drive-through window, Ilsa, calmly taking a shot through the pneumatic tube.
The teller falls over, cleanly shot through the head.
Carlo would stop to consider the laws of physics, but Jackson is chuckling as he disarms the others, and so he feels like he should lend a hand.
“Some deposit, huh?” Jackson says, shaking his head in admiration. “Oh, that woman.”
Carlo finds the appreciation a bit unseemly, as they’re still standing in a pool of the victim’s blood, but he’s trying not to judge people too harshly for their actions in love and war, which are, of course, the great exceptions to all.
Then Carlo gets his first glimpse of Hitler, and his only clear thought is, I wonder if the mustache is fake, before he hears Jackson yell, “I’ve got a clear shot!”
When the bullet bounces off of a strangely armored soldier more suited for space than Earth, ricochets off an overhang, collides mid-air with a ceiling fan and doubles back to lodge itself in his chest, Carlo cannot find it in himself to be surprised. This moment has been coming since he first met this team, since Tucker said, “Hey, you there, are you here for the dry-cleaning?”
Carlo hears, faintly, the sound of breaking glass.
“Out the window again!” Jackson says. “Well, we’ll get him next time.”
“A clear shot!” Ilsa curses in Russian, “You said you had a clear shot. If you didn’t have one, why would you say that? I could have—“
“Your head got in the way!” Jackson shouts back.
“So you take the shot!”
“I’m not going to—you’re more important than killing Hitler!”
Carlo regrets the fact that, despite his blurring vision, he’s being given a front-row seat to a rather risqué make-out session.
“Knock it off and show some professionalism, would you?” Tucker gripes.
“Oh, yes, that’ll be the day,” Claire says airily, stooping to remove the prototype from Carlo’s shaking hands.
“Activate sequence Find Hitler,” she states clearly, and they all watch as the device, a subtle creation in fiberglass and bark cloth, whirrs and flies out the shattered window, off into the dark.
Jackson checks a screen attached to his wrist that extends halfway up his forearm. “Heading towards El Dorado."
“There is no—“
“According to our locater, there is now!” he says, with gusto.
His next words, Carlo thinks, are probably some expansion on this idea, but his hearing is growing fuzzy, and it’s hard to tell.
As Carlo dies, he finds himself cradled in the arms of the Frenchman, and although he is uncertain why this is the case, it is a strangely comforting way to die, and he finds himself spilling a treasured secret, his last words of wisdom to impart to the world before he dies. “Two parts bourbon, one part honey syrup, and one of lemon juice,” he whispers, “shaken and strained. Garnish with a cherry. The perfect”—and here he pauses to wheeze, before squeezing out the last words—“the perfect Gold Rush.”