I was about to post about those. And I remember exactly how and when I heard about them. I had managed to snag a galley print review copy of William Gibson’s newest book Pattern Recognition a couple of weeks before publication. Early in there was a passage where a woman was restlessly walking the London streets late at night:
Summary
She’s in a street of what she thinks are called mews houses, little places, scarily cute, still headed toward Portobello and the market, when she sees them: three men, variously jacketed, their collars up, staring gravely into the open trunk of a small and uncharacteristically old mirror-world car. Not so much a mirror-world car as an English car, as no equivalent exists, on Cayce’s side of the Atlantic, to mirror. Vauxhall Wyvern, she thinks, with her compulsive memory for brand names, though she doubts that this is one of those, whatever those might have been. As to why she notices them now, these three, she later will be unable to say.
No one else in the street, and there is something in the gravity they bring to their study of whatever it is they are looking down at. Careful poker masks. The largest, though not the tallest, a black man with a shaven head, is zipped like a sausage into something shiny, black, and only approximately leatherlike. Beside him is a taller, gray-faced man, hunched within the greasy folds of an ancient Barbour waterproof, its waxed cotton gone the sheen and shade of day-old horse dung. The third, younger, is close-cropped and blond, in baggy black skater shorts and a frayed jean jacket. He wears something like a mailman’s pouch, slung across his chest. Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London.
She can’t resist glancing into the trunk.
Grenades.
Black, compact, cylindrical. Six of them, laid out on an old gray sweater amid a jumble of brown cardboard cartons.
“Miss?” The one in shorts.
“Hello?” The gray-faced man, sharply, impatient.
She tells herself to run, but can’t.
“Yes?”
“The Curtas.” The blond one, stepping closer.
“It isn’t her, you idiot. She’s not bloody coming.” The gray one again, with mounting irritation.
The blond one blinks. “You haven’t come about the Curtas?”
“The what?”
“The calculators.”
She can’t resist, then, and steps closer to the car, to see. “What are they?”
“Calculators.” The tight plastic of the black man’s jacket creaking as he bends to pick up one of the grenades. Turning to hand it to her. And then she is holding it: heavy, dense, knurled for gripping. Tabs or flanges that look as though meant to move in these slots. Small round windows showing white numbers. At the top something that looks like the crank on a pepper mill, as executed by a small-arms manufacturer.
“I don’t understand,” she says, and imagines she’ll wake, just then, in Damien’s bed, because it’s all gone that dreamlike now. Automatically seeking a trademark, she turns the thing over. And sees that it is made in Liechtenstein.
Liechtenstein?
“What is it?”
“It is a precision instrument,” the black man says, “performing calculations mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic components. The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five-millimeter camera. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed.” Voice deep and mellifluous. “It is the invention of Curt Herzstark, an Austrian, who developed it while a prisoner in Buchenwald. The camp authorities actually encouraged his work, you see. ‘Intelligence slave,’ his title there. They wished his calculator to be given to the Führer, at the end of the war. But Buchenwald was liberated in 1945 by the Americans. Herzstark had survived.” He gently takes the thing from her. Enormous hands. “He had his drawings.” Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the handle at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window. “Eight hundred pounds. Excellent condition.” Dropping an eyelid partially, to wait for her response.
“It’s beautiful,” his offer finally giving her a context for this baffling exchange: These men are dealers, come here to do business in these things. “But I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”