The gentle voice? Yes: the tone of someone who, when asked to do and die, would quite like to know the reason why. Geoffrey Household and his generation were young enough to escape the trenches of the last war, but old enough to witness the terror and carnage that comes when countries throw millions of bodies with bayonets at one another. For this new kind of warfare—and this new kind of warrior—there would be no Light Brigade charges into the jaws of death. Class X was all for service, but not for suicide. If you wanted their bodies, their brains were part of the bargain.
Gubbins knew that trying to transform these skeptical, gentle-voiced intellectuals into icy cold operators was going to be tricky, especially since he couldn’t expect much help from the military. “We’ve only fought decently in the British Army,” one disgusted general sniffed in response to Gubbins’s desire to teach “silent killing.” When the Firm sent out feelers to Edward Shackleton, an air force lieutenant (and son of Ernest, the fabled Antarctic explorer), Shackleton asked his squad commander what it was all about. “Don’t touch it,” the commander warned him. “They’re not the sort of people you want to be mixed up with.”
So Gubbins bypassed the army and instead looked for help from “the Whore of the Orient”—Shanghai, where the world’s dirtiest gutter fighters did battle in the world’s most dangerous city. Shanghai in the 1930s was ruled by jungle law, to the extent that jungle creatures specialized in gambling, sex slaves, dope dealing, and gang warfare. As Asia’s busiest port, Shanghai bustled with so many addicts, pirates, and waterfront hustlers that by 1936 it could comfortably support an estimated 100,000 criminals. Even its name meant trouble: get “shanghaied” and you’d wake up with a bad headache and a worse surprise, often a few miles out to sea as free labor on a merchant ship. One crime boss bragged that he’d fed a troublesome girlfriend to his pet tiger; another dealt with rivals by slitting their arm and leg tendons and heaving them, alive but helpless, into the middle of a busy street.
Into this madness strode Bill Sykes and William Fairbairn, the Heavenly Twins. Fairbairn was originally a Royal Marine who arrived in 1907 after answering a worldwide recruiting call by the beleaguered Shanghai police. His welcoming gift was a beating so savage he had to be hauled to the hospital in the back of a rickshaw; during foot patrol along the waterfront, a gang of hoodlums nearly pummeled and booted him to death. During his long recovery, Fairbairn ruefully reflected that none of the training he’d ever gotten—not as a boxer, not even as a frontline soldier—was of any use in the panicky, ferocious chaos of a real street brawl. So once he was back on his feet, Fairbairn began to immerse himself in the science of true gutter fighting. He began by apprenticing himself to “Professor Okada,” a jiu-jitsu expert who trained the Japanese emperor’s security force. Fairbairn gradually became such a skilled knifeman and sharpshooter that his innovations are still in use by Special Forces a half-century later.
Fairbairn’s turnaround was so dramatic that he was picked to head the Shanghai Riot Squad. During his thirty years along the water-front, Fairbairn survived more than six hundred fights, including the time a Chinese bandit’s bullet scorched by his face and singed his eyebrows. His favorite sidekick was Bill Sykes, a slight, friendly gent who looked like he’d be happiest with a quiet pipe and a couple of grandkids. Sykes was a true oddity in Shanghai, partly because his real name was Eric A. Schwabe but mostly because he was an amateur hobbyist in a city of professional badasses. Sykes insisted he was nothing more than a sales rep who liked to hang around cops, and only went by a fake name because the real one sounded too German. Maybe. But whispers of spy service are hard to deny when you go through life with an alias and a talent for stabbing men to death with a sheet of newspaper. (Just fold it diagonally until it tightens into a point, Sykes would shrug, then drive it in right under the chin. Simple, really.)
By the time World War II began, Sykes and Fairbairn were nearly sixty years old; their hair had gone white, and their sharpshooting eyes now needed spectacles. Still, Gubbins wanted his first class of dirty-trickster recruits to see the old-school stuff in action, so he invited Sykes and Fairbairn to a training camp he’d set up at a hidden estate deep in the Scottish Highlands. “We were taken into the hall of the Big House, and suddenly at the top of the stairs appeared a couple of dear old gentlemen,” recalled a recruit, R. F. “Henry” Hall. The recruits watched, aghast, as their would-be mentors stumbled and fell, “tumbling, tumbling down the stairs” … and then sprang to their feet in a battle crouch, each with a dagger in his left hand and a .45 in his right. The “dear old gentlemen” had gotten the drop on an entire roomful of aspiring secret agents. Pit-pit-pit—a few squeezes of the trigger and the room would be full of corpses.
“A shattering experience for all of us,” Hall admitted.
The Heavenly Twins, so dubbed for their saintly demeanor when not demonstrating how to claw a man’s testicles while dragging a bootheel down his shin, got right to work. They demonstrated thirty-six ways to knock someone cold with an open hand and nifty tricks for turning office supplies into weapons. “A clipboard for example,” said Henry Hall. “You can strike somebody with it across the side of the neck, on the head, on the nose, under the nose, you can hit him in the parts, you can hit him in the solar plexus….”
The Twins even introduced their own weapons: the icicle-thin Fairbairn-Sykes Commando Knife, which slides in and out of a man’s heart as neatly as a hypodermic needle, and the swordlike “smatchet,” a Bronze Age throwback that can crush through your rib cage and split you to the groin. “We were to be gangsters,” commented new dirty trickster Robert Sheppard. “But with the behavior, if possible, of gentlemen.”
CHAPTER 10
It’s craftsmanship over showmanship.
—DR. THOMAS AMBERRY, a retired and overweight seventy-one-year-old podiatrist, on why he can sink 2,750 consecutive free throws and no NBA player can
THE TWINS HAD MADE THE IR PEACE with an ugly truth: when it comes to raw weaponry, we’re the biggest wimps in the wild. Humans don’t have fangs or claws or horns or venom. We’re not strong, we’re not fast, we can’t see at night or crush with our jaws. Luckily, we’re really wobbly—and that’s what makes us deadly.
The best way to learn about wobble power—the same power that helped school principal Norina Bentzel overpower a maniac with a machete—is to strip down to your underwear in front of a bunch of strangers. At least that’s what I discovered in Tempe, Arizona, where I became a test subject for fitness experts from across the country who’d gathered to learn from Thomas Myers, a pioneering researcher in human connective tissue and author of the landmark text, Anatomy Trains.
“Just relax,” Myers tells me as I strip down to be analyzed. “And stand naturally,” which might be the most useless advice you can give someone whose pants are on the other side of the room. I push back my shoulders and stiffen my back, trying to make it look as if military attention is my everyday posture. About thirty students, including a trainer for pro baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks, gather in front of me in a semicircle and begin jotting notes on their clipboards.
“Andria,” Myers says after a few minutes. “Would you?”
An athletic young woman sets aside her clipboard. She strips down to her sports bra and panties and joins me in front of the group.
“Head: anterior shift,” one of Myers’s students calls out. She checks her clipboard. “With a posterior tilt.”