The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Nothing concentrates the mind, Dr. Johnson said, like the prospect of being hanged. Or, he might have added, suffocated.

  Root told me his French came to him one night in the Métro, when he suddenly realized, like switching on a light, that he understood every word the pretty girl beside him was saying. But I don't take the Métro.

  It was five minutes to seven when I turned off halfway down the boulevard des Invalides and walked up a quiet tree-lined street toward the severe eighteenth-century facade of the École Militaire.

  This part of the 7th Arrondissement was one of Paris's wealthy quartiers. The long rectangular Champ-de-Mars was its green park, with the Eiffel Tower and the Seine squaring it off at the north end, the École Militaire at the south. On either side of the Champ-de-Mars, in an elegant grid of side streets, ran two or three rows of handsome, very expensive modern apartment buildings, uniformly six stories high, topped with penthouse gardens. In the dark, except for the mansard roofs and the cat's-eye yellow headlights on the passing cars, you might have thought you were on the Upper East Side in New York.

  That, of course, and the faint Parisian smell of urine on the street from the vespasienne at the corner.

  I sat down on a bench and watched the spotlights revolve on the Eiffel Tower, a sight I very much enjoyed. Hard to believe now, but the Eiffel Tower had originally been painted red. Then the second year of its existence it had been repainted a bright, eye-curling yellow. Three hundred artists and writers had signed a petition to tear the tower down, on the grounds that it was the single ugliest structure in Europe. But then the war came and the Army had galloped in to the rescue, and now it served as the world's largest military radio antenna and the artists and writers were off in the outer darkness, gnashing their teeth as usual.

  Even harder to believe now, of course, is that in 1925 the Citroën car company had placed the name "André Citroën" in great luminous letters on all four sides of the tower. The letters were in six colors and twenty meters high. People said they could be seen forty miles away.

  I looked at my watch and noted with obscure satisfaction that the first two letters of the "André" facing me had burned out. Originally, the École Militaire had used the park for troop maneuvers and drills—hence the "Mars" in Champ-de-Mars—but all that was gone with the days of the musket and the saber. My grandfather had come to Paris for the Universal Exhibition of 1878 and told me that he had been on the Champ-de-Mars when a well-known Irish courtesan named Lee d'Asco went up in a balloon, wearing men's clothes and carrying a revolver. She came back down perfectly naked, except for the revolver, having thrown out her clothes piece by piece to lighten the basket. It was my grandfather who taught me my first words of French.

  Somewhere nearby a municipal clock struck a sluggish seven bells. Around me shoppers were still going past with their Christmas packages. A few soldiers from the École drifted by in kepis and mufflers. There were no armed ducks, no academic bounty hunters, no thuggish persons with billy clubs and quilted jackets. No ghosts, no Moles.

  I watched a dog running back and forth on the snowy grass, and slowly, slowly the same nagging question began to circle around in my head again, like a scrap of paper in the wind.

  I was a rewrite man. I edited stories and tried to figure out what people really meant to say, consciously or not, and I was usually not too bad at it. And right from the start Elsie Short's clearly written but oddly illogical essay had set off a blinking light—she hadn't written about the Flute Player, or the Tambourine Player, or Vaucanson's remarkable silk weaving looms, which in the great historical scheme of things could be said to have started the Industrial Revolution in France. Those were clearly far more important than a few mechanical toys.

  She had written about two things only, not logically linked. "Vaucanson's Duck and the Bleeding Man."

  And what in the world did the one have to do with the other?

  I pulled my right hand out of my overcoat pocket and saw that I had made it into a fist.

  At seven-twenty-two Root came bounding up from the Métro like a six-foot rabbit popping out of its hole, and we set out across the park for Vincent Armus's party.

  Twenty

  THE RUE JEAN CARRIÈS RUNS AT RIGHT angles to the Champ-de-Mars, on the southwest side, about a third of the way down toward the river. In the lobby directory of number 8, I was not surprised to find that Armus lived on the penthouse floor.

  There was an elevator, but in deference to me, Root and I walked up the stairs. Root found the hall light and knocked, and a butler in correct evening dress opened the door.

  "You are . . .?"

  "Gentlemen of the Press," said Root. He gave a confidential pat on the head to the boxy black camera he had lugged all the way from the rue Lamartine. "Here early, to take some pictures for the Society Page."

  The butler looked from Root to the camera to me. "I'm Mr. Pulitzer," Root said. "This is Mr. Hearst."

  "Who is it, Nigel?" said a female voice in the hallway. Nigel took a step backwards, swept a white-gloved hand in our direction, and murmured, "Mr. Pulitzer and Mr. Hearst, madame."

  The voice gave a throaty chuckle, said, "Then I must be Jenny Lind," and materialized in the form of a tiny, sharp-nosed, dark-haired middle-aged woman. She was dressed in an ink-black silk Chinese jacket and trousers, and she looked, as Root would say later, like one half of a pair of crows. But she gave us each a quick smile and said, "Well, this must be one of those sex-change operations you read about, or did dear old gray-haired Millie Cubbins just split in half like an amoeba?"

  "We're from the Tribune," I said. "Not the New York Herald, I'm afraid."

  "And you're selling subscriptions door to door, like a troop of Boy Scouts?"

  Root has a way with older women, which he modestly attributes to a certain mischievous handsomeness (his phrase). He lifted the camera and tripod up to his shoulder like a soldier with a rifle and switched on a dazzling, if slightly piratical grin. "This is Toby Keats," he said. "Lost soul, solemn recluse, harmless drudge. Possibly the second-best writer in Paris. He wants to do a long, brilliant story about Mr. Armus and his automates, and I'm Waverley Root and I like to eat and I just wanted to crash the party."

  Mrs. Armus kept her expression blank for a long moment while somewhere behind her Nigel coughed like a sheep into his glove. Then her face opened into an equally roguish smile, and she stepped aside with a little mock bow. "Well, then come right in," she said, "and feed."

  We followed Mrs. Armus down a hallway and into a living room three times the size of my flat. It had a thick brown carpet, a fireplace whose gray stonework ran up to the ceiling, and it was sparely but handsomely furnished with a dozen or so glittering rhomboids and triangles in the most up-to-date Art Déco manner. Directly in front of us the Eiffel Tower was framed in a balcony window. Off to the right, we could see the tops of the plane trees in the park below and the silent traffic circling the École Militaire. At the far end of the room, behind a pair of chromium parallelograms posing as sofas, two maids were setting out chafing dishes on a long buffet table.

  "If you'll wait right here," said Mrs. Armus, "I'll go find the Lord of the Manor."

  Root leaned his camera and tripod against a chair and started toward the buffet table. I walked over to the big balcony window and craned my head to see the place du Trocadéro behind the Eiffel Tower. The rich are very different from you and me, Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to have observed one day with his usual breathless amazement at the obvious. To which his friend Ernest had apparently muttered, Yes, indeed, they have more money.

  "An absurd mistake," said Vincent Armus from the doorway. "I don't know who sent you that notice. We normally deal with the New York Herald only."

  He paused for a moment, glanced at Root by the buffet table, and then advanced three steps toward me. He was wearing a creased black lounge suit with a gray vest and a narrow silver-colored tie that emphasized the hawk-like intensity of his features, and in the sharp reflected li
ght of all the chromium and steel he looked every bit as angular and rigid as his furniture.

  With an expression of disloyal amusement Mrs. Armus handed Root a plate.

  "But Miss Short tells me it might possibly help in her job," Armus added flatly. "I know that the Edison Company positively courts publicity."

  Behind him Elsiedale Short, Ph.D., stepped into the same doorway, looking surprised and curious. Her blonde hair was freshly clipped and shaped and she had on the same tight-fitting sheath she had worn on Wednesday, and as she walked around one of the sofas, to my eye she was the only curved thing in the room.

  "Elsie's staying with us now," said Mrs. Armus from the buffet table. "She moved in last Tuesday. She's a dear girl. We used to know her father in New York."

  "Tuesday?"

  "We didn't like a hôtel," Mrs. Armus said, "for a girl alone, after what happened."

  I brought my gaze back to Armus and his perpetual frown. "No, of course. Well, about our being here. I have a friend at the Herald who told me about the party. I'd already talked to my editor about a Sunday feature—'Automates in France'—something about the history of them, automates and toys and the Christmas season. He wants to start with a local connection. It's a nice hook—nineteenth-century French machines, a twentieth-century American collector."

  "You don't have the Duck yet, do you?" Armus said.

  "Mrs. McCormick is still at sea."

  "Who is that person by the table?"

  "Waverley Root is his name, Vincent." Elsie was wary, but helpful. "He works at the Tribune, too, with Toby Keats."

  "He brought a camera," I said, "if it's all right with you. He's a very good photographer."

  Root waved a knife and a piece of bread. "It is a far, far butter thing I do," he said.

  "If it weren't to help Miss Short and her job," Armus muttered. When nobody said anything to that, he made a show of pulling back his cuff and looking at his watch. "If you really must see the automates, they're in the next room," he said. "We have just enough time before people arrive."

  Twenty-One

  THE NEXT ROOM WAS, IN FACT, three doors down the hall and faced into a courtyard, not the Champ-de-Mars. Elsie Short pushed open the door and stood back and I stopped dead on the threshold.

  On the left-hand side of Vincent Armus's Collection Room, reaching about to shoulder height, were two big aquarium tanks, filled with what seemed like blackish-green water and speckled like a pointilliste canvas with bright, silent patches of color, rising, falling, gliding away out of sight.

  I stared at the fish for a moment, then turned to the right-hand side of the room where a bookshelf covered the wall. In front of the books, on three rows of rectangular black pedestals, stood the main items in Vincent Armus's collection. There were perhaps two dozen automatons altogether. Some of them looked like the toys Elsie and Henri Saulnay had displayed at the Conservatoire—colorfully dressed clowns with big round white faces like the Man-in-the-Moon, a monkey with a violin, a monkey with a cigar, a minstrel with a banjo. But most of the automatons were representations of birds, and most of the birds were in small brass cages.

  "When I first started, Mr. Keats," said Vincent Armus, clearing his throat behind me (in his little kingdom he was, if not warm and friendly, at least markedly more civil). "When I first started out, I was living in Berlin and I collected any sort of antique automate I could find, though I particularly liked the clowns. Clowns are not, of course, the sort of thing the Germans do well. When we came to Paris, I discovered the French subspecialty of birds and I decided to concentrate on them."

  I opened my notebook and he began to walk down the first row of pedestals, reciting names, dates, and brief, crisp technical descriptions. I was suitably impressed. Armus didn't know what Elsie knew about Vaucanson's Duck, but otherwise he did Yale proud.

  Probably the first automates in history, he informed me, were singing birds. The Egyptians made them. Then the Greeks did. The painted wooden cuckoo clock in the farmhouse kitchen, so ordinary and familiar, was a lineal descendant, by way of the eighteenth-century and Switzerland, of the ancient automate-maker's art. There was an old castle at Hesdin where all the birds and little animals in the garden were still automates, set in motion by hydraulic power from a fountain.

  But no one, in Armus's opinion, had ever made mechanical singing birds to rival those of Gustave Bontems of Paris, who started his business as a teenager in 1831 and created his last great masterpiece in 1890, when he was crippled with arthritis and nearly blind.

  "And this is it," Armus said. He led us around the bookcases and into a scallop-shaped alcove that contained exactly one black pedestal. On top of the pedestal was a brightly colored, three-foot-high enamel thorn bush, populated by what looked like a dozen tiny birds peering out from its paper leaves like Christmas lights on a tree.

  We stood in front of it, studying the trunk and the birds and the sharp, realistic thorns. He had had to repair some key parts of the apparatus himself, Armus said, which were broken when he bought it. He was, he allowed, not a bad amateur technician. Then he reached around the base and turned a key. There was a pause of a few seconds. Something metallic and unseen clicked twice. Slowly, in random sequence, the birds began to move their beaks and chirp, and a moment later their wings began to open and close, and their tail feathers lifted and fell in an irregular, jerky rhythm.

  What I disliked most about it—what made me back up and rub my sweating palms against my jacket—was the fact that one by one the birds started to hop from twig to twig as they sang, their bead-like little eyes bright with what might have been life, but was only reflected light from the lightbulbs on Vincent Armus's ceiling. I felt spooked and nervous, I felt exactly the way I had felt when Elsie's clown at the Conservatoire had started to walk.

  "It's called 'Bird Bush and Clock.'" Armus tapped the small clock dial in the center of the base. "People often say 'Bird Tree' instead of 'Bird Bush.' I hope your newspaper gets it right, Mr. Keats."

  I was still rubbing my hands against my jacket. "Hope," I said for absolutely no reason I could think of, "is the thing with feathers," and Armus turned and studied me coldly for a moment, then raised one eyebrow and smiled. I realized then that I had no grip whatsoever on his character.

  Root was slow in getting his camera and tripod around and into place in the little alcove. Arriving guests could be heard in the big living room down the hall, and one or two wandered into the Collection Room, plates and glasses in hand.

  "He began as a taxidermist, you know," Elsie Short said, coming up beside me as I stood in front of the fish tanks. I looked over at Armus. "Gustave Bontems did," she said dryly. "As a boy Gustave Bontems was apprenticed to a taxidermist, and according to the story, one day a customer said how life-like his stuffed nightingale looked and he burst into tears and said, 'Yes, but it doesn't sing!'" She frowned at me. "Shouldn't you be taking notes on all this?"

  I pulled out my notebook and obediently opened it to a blank page. "Thank you for interceding with the host," I said. "I wasn't sure he was going to let us stay."

  Elsie kept her attention fixed on the Bird Bush, where several older men, American by their voices, had now gathered around Armus. Next to him a tall, mannish-looking woman in her early forties had just arrived by herself.

  "As you might have guessed," Elsie said, "Bontems was fascinated by sound. He used to get up before dawn and go out in the fields and listen to the birds coming awake. Then he would file the teeth on his music box over and over until he got them exactly right and duplicate them with cams."

  "A cam is a little curved wheel, right? Like a pulley?" I asked.

  "More or less. In automates they have teeth to engage the gears and make the tines in the birds' throats bend and vibrate like the ones in a music box. They also turn the heads and open the beaks. There are fourteen birds on that Bush, seven different species, and believe it or not, each one is singing a precise, scientifically accurate call." She tilted her head in my di
rection and added in the same dry voice, "As for interceding, I just thought I should keep an eye on you, Mr. Toby Keats, seeing that you still have my property, so to speak."

  "Birds of a feather," I said proudly and wrote it in my notebook. "How do they jump from branch to branch?"

  "You have wires that run to the cams and wheels in the base," she said, "behind the clock. I built something like it once when I was a girl, my father and I did, down in our basement, but on a much bigger scale, of course. I was something of a tomboy."

  "William Peyton Short," I said. "Descendant of the diplomat William Short who was Thomas Jefferson's private secretary right here in Paris when the French Revolution began. I knew there was something about your name, and I had a human encyclopedia in our office named Shirer look it up. Your father was an engineering professor at Columbia, and he had two or three patents in mining technology, one of them with our friend Mr. Edison."

  Her face turned unexpectedly pensive. "My father was quite a wonderful man," she said. "My mother died when I was four and he brought me up by himself. He wanted me to be a professor too, like him."

  "Except—?"

  "Except—have you tried to find a university teaching job in New York, Mr. Keats? As a woman? My father died two years ago. The last thing he did was introduce me to Mr. Edison, who gave me a job out of charity. But I'm not going to be a doll hunter all my life. Not if I publish my book."