The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Ordinarily, of course, with Root and Elsie on the scene and my Tribune press card in my pocket, the police would have carted me off to the American Hôpital about a mile down the road from the Franco-Britannique, where there was undoubtedly a bulk-rate contract for concussed reporters. But the American Hôpital had been closed since October for renovations.

  Actually, I didn't mind the Franco-Britannique at all. It was small and had an interior garden laid out in the bristly concentric geometric patterns the French find so soothing. It also had a library and a "Letter Room" looking out on the garden that reminded me of the "Talbot Service House" we used to go to in Ypres, a sprawling Belgian mansion that the Reverend Tubby Clayton of Oxford had bought with his own money and fitted out for soldiers on leave from the trenches. The Service House was open to both officers and enlisted men—the Reverend Tubby had placed a sign over the door: "Abandon All Rank, All Ye Who Enter Here"—and had a piano, a laundry, and a room where you could use an actual toilet, and I had spent three days there (not in the toilet) in the spring of 1916, not long after we blew up Messines Ridge.

  "'Some days in Paris it failed to snow,'" muttered Root, which I took to be a revision of his unpublished story. He eased himself into a roomy leather chair and handed me a folded copy of the Trib. "I see they finally trusted you with a razor."

  It was late morning, January 5, 1927—I had more or less slept through Christmas and New Year's, like Rip van Winkle—and out in the garden it was indeed snowing lightly. I was abruptly put in mind of the day in April 1918 when a freak blizzard had swept over the forward lines, and while I was down on my hands and knees repairing a pump, a troop of Brits came marching by in the snow and singing the Eton Song, "Jolly Boating Weather."

  Enough with the war, I thought. Kospoth is right, the goddam war is over. "Stitches coming out tomorrow," I told him, and tapped the fat white bandage under my left eye. It's surprising how much damage the barrel of a pistol can do when somebody swings it full force into the side of your head. The first time Johannes had hit me, in the alley outside the Ritz where he tried to steal the duck, he had just given me a headache. This time he had left me with a mildly fractured skull, a shattered cheekbone below my eye socket that had taken the surgeons an hour and a half to repair, and a harsh off-and-on buzzing sound in one ear for which the euphonious French word was tintement.

  "And by the way, you owe me dinner, Biff." Root took the paper out of my hand and pointed to an article halfway down page 3, "Annual Quat'z Arts Bal in Montmartre." This had taken place on New Year's Eve, when an expatriate American playboy named Harry Crosby had rented a dance hall near the Closerie des Lilas and one of the bare-breasted art students had been seen wearing a live snake around her arm and a necklace of dead pigeons. Herol Egan had written the story, and I had bet Root fifty francs that Kospoth wouldn't print the word "nipple." In fact, as I saw now, he had only cut "dead pigeons."

  I grunted and turned to the front page, where I learned, first, that nobody knew yet whether Calvin Coolidge the Silent was going to run for a third presidential term next year—he refused to say—and second, that the young American aviator Charles Lindbergh had put off his transatlantic flight attempt till May.

  I leaned back and read while Root got up and wandered around the Letter Room in his usual restless, bear-in-a-cabin manner, picking up books and putting them back, turning an empty ashtray upside down to read the label on the bottom. At the door he made a kind of semaphore signal with his hands that he was going to find coffee for us, and I turned back to the window. In the center of the garden were two stone cupids squirting water into a basin, and a great stone turtle between them. All of them wore the green patina of a Paris winter, and they were gradually disappearing behind a veil of blowing snow.

  Johannes and Henri Saulnay had also disappeared behind a veil of something, though that wasn't news I would find in the paper. That, in fact, I had learned from Criminal Inspector Serge Soupel, he of the bushy eyebrows and the affair of the late Patrice Bassot. He had come out to the Franco-Britannique the day after New Year's, looking grim and red-nosed, and had spent two and a half hours, until the nurses sent him away. Most of the time he had rubbed his temples and smoked Gauloises and poked a stubby, impatient finger at implausibilities in my official statement. Who, he wondered scornfully, would go to the trouble to purloin a beat-up, non-functioning, antique children's toy—a shitting duck, of all things? Much less, kill a harmless old man for it, not to mention assault a foreign journalist, in public view, on the steps of the Métro?

  But then, he had sighed, it was true enough that Johannes and Henri Saulnay had completely disappeared. The toymaker's workshop on the rue des Minimes in the Marais had been closed down, abandoned in a hurry, evidently. A pair of French girls who came in to do the sewing for the toys' dresses had been left to their own devices, without a sou. Nobody had given a forwarding address, nobody knew where Saulnay might have gone, though the German police were supposed to be looking into it at their end.

  "Not that they'll expend much energy on the murder of a French citizen." Soupel had ground out his last cigarette on a coffee saucer and started to gather his papers. "And anyway, Henri Saulnay is a decorated veteran of the army, and you know how the Germans are about the army. I doubt they even started a file, if you want my opinion."

  I stood up, listened to the faint little sounds of gunfire and tracer bullets tintementing in my ear, and braced myself on the chair.

  "He's probably crazy from the war," Soupel added. When I didn't say anything, he snapped his briefcase closed and told me that his grandfather used to say the best cure for depression was to look at large animals, like elephants or hippopotami.

  "I'll head for the zoo," I promised, "just as soon as they let me out of here. Meanwhile, I guess Saulnay could be anywhere? He and Johannes?"

  Inspector Soupel wrapped his scarf twice around his collar. "They could be anywhere at all," he agreed. He picked up his case and turned toward the door. "They could still be right here in Paris."

  When Root came back with the coffee and a cribbage board, it was past eleven, the snow had stopped, and I was lightly dozing, dreaming of large depression-busting animals, a chorus line of hippopotami grinning cheek to cheek. I have some memory of his wheeling me in a chair back to my room, easing me into bed. One of the nurses came in with my morning dose of eye of newt and toe of frog and I asked, apparently, about the forthcoming wedding of Bill Shirer and Elsie Short. I fell asleep, Root told me later, muttering about their children, who would all be automatons or duck-stepping Germans.

  On the seventh of January, Kospoth himself came out to the hôpital with a bottle of cognac and a cowboy novel he had picked up in one of the bookstalls along the Seine, which he thought would remind me of happy trails in New Mexico.

  Elsie Short had evidently come by the hôpital three different times while I was still too sedated to know her, then she was whisked away by Vincent and Mrs. Armus on a Christmas trip to Normandy. From there she had sent a nine-page letter which alternated between blaming me for deceiving her about Mrs. McCormick and the duck and hoping sincerely that I wouldn't need any more operations, though she was surprised, she couldn't help adding, that anybody as thick-headed as I was could have a fractured skull.

  By the eleventh of January I was back in my flat on the rue du Dragon. By the thirteenth, which was Friday, I was back at my desk on the Trib, catching up on the Gumps. And by the evening of the sixteenth I was sitting in a tiny restaurant called Chez Paulette at the end of the rue Vavin, over by the Luxembourg Gardens, watching Elsiedale Short, Ph.D., trying to decipher the backward-slanting, nearly illegible green and purple hieroglyphics of Paulette's handwriting on the mimeographed menu.

  "I give up," she said, and passed it over to me. "You order. Libby always lets Mr. Armus order for her. She says it's important to keep the male ego occupied."

  The restaurant had only eight or nine tables, all of them empty but ours, so Paulette herself was
hovering beside us, setting out a bottle of Beaujolais and a pair of almost clean glasses. I pointed to the sweetbreads and farmer's salad, and she nodded twice and hurried away.

  "I think it was Thomas Edison himself, your boss, who actually invented the mimeograph machine."

  "He did. I found a nice doll for him in Normandy, by the way, and I think he's going to pay a commission on it. But I'm still going to let you pay for dinner tonight."

  "Very correct of you."

  "Because I'm still poor, and I'm also still mad at you for hiding my duck and lying about it and getting yourself broken to pieces and scaring us all like that."

  "Are you still staying with Vincent Armus?"

  "And worse yet, you got my duck broken to pieces too. Don't change the subject, Toby Keats. I'm staying at their apartment, yes, but she's gone back to New York for a visit and he's in London."

  I leaned back and let Paulette arrange the two heaping plates of farmer's salad and then take the wine bottle out of my hands and fuss with it. Elsie sat straight in her chair with her head tilted slightly to one side in the way she had, watching Paulette intensely, also in the way she had. She was wearing a pale orange sweater with no collar and a pleated brown tweed skirt with a shiny leather belt—you don't live in Paris without noticing women's clothes— and her short blonde helmet of hair was neatly trimmed, with only a few stray rebellious tendrils around her cheeks. The sweater was tight, in the reckless fashion of the 1920s, and clung to her curves like the skin of a peach, and I found it hard to think of her as a terrier anymore.

  "We need to talk," I said as she bent over her salad.

  "We are talking."

  "About Henri Saulnay and the Bleeding Man." I pushed my plate to one side and thought of Root and Captain Ahab and why "single-minded" was a better word than "obsessive." "And the gyroscope."

  At which exact moment, with a deafening blast of noise and cold air, Waverley Root sat down beside me.

  Then Bill Shirer, young and drunk, on my left, and Herol Egan with two cigarettes in his mouth next to Elsie, then Kospoth, two more reporters from the day shift, a couple of French girls from Atlantic & Pacific Photos, and three or four more people I would never actually be introduced to.

  It was, Root explained with a kind of asthmatic whoop, a party in honor of Shirer, who was going to pay for the wine for the entire evening—he picked up my glass, took a sip, made a face, and held up his hand for Paulette, while Herol Egan pulled both of his cigarettes out of his mouth and offered Elsie her choice. Before we knew it, I had been bustled two chairs down to my right, squeezed between the day reporters and one of the strangers, Kospoth was showing Elsie a photograph of his son, and Paulette and a red-faced waiter were distributing bottles of champagne.

  Gradually, as the little restaurant filled with Tribune staffers, and people moved, shouting, from table to table, I learned via Root that Bill Shirer had in fact, while I was lounging in Neuilly, been offered a job at the rival Herald, but only that afternoon the Colonel, back in Chicago, had cabled a counter-offer with a raise of ten dollars a month and a guaranteed transfer in a year to the Berlin Bureau.

  Somewhere during the soup course (our salads and sweetbreads having long ago disappeared), Shirer himself repeated the story and showed me the cable. Then Kospoth stood on a chair and made a toast, more champagne arrived, and the talk, as it always did at a Trib party, turned to shop.

  I made my way back down the row of tables and reclaimed my chair across from Elsie, just in time to hear Root begin to explain his theories of literature.

  "I have begun," he told her solemnly, wagging his glass in front of his nose, "a three-part demolition, starting in Friday's paper, of Dr. William Lyon Phelps, who has made an idiotic list of the hundred best novels in the world."

  "He teaches at Yale." Elsie matched him in solemnity. "English literature."

  "I wrote—if I may quote myself in advance—" Root said, "'It is a sad commentary on the state of criticism in America that a gentleman respected for his learning should be able to sit down at his desk and soberly, seriously list Lorna Doone as one of the world's best novels.'"

  "Not soberly," I said.

  "Do you know Mr. Hemingway?" Elsie asked him, in apparent innocence.

  "Hemingway is a writer," Root said, and held out his glass for more champagne, "with an inexhaustible ability to repeat himself."

  "Root sometimes writes fiction," I contributed.

  "I used to write poetry," he said sadly, "till I showed some of it to my father and he handed it back the next day and said, 'You don't do much of this, I hope?'"

  There was more in this vein, two glasses more at least, and then Shirer stood up at the other end of the row of tables, and proposed a toast to his alma mater, Coe College in Iowa, and afterwards the room fell into one of those abrupt, profound silences that happen in even the noisiest of parties.

  That was the point at which one of the day shift men leaned out across his table and called down to me. "So tell us why you're scared of the Métro, Keats."

  The room, if anything, grew quieter still. I could hear the faint clink and rattle of pans in the kitchen, Shirer wheezing, the blood slowly draining out of my skin. Up and down the tables faces turned to me, or in the case of Kospoth turned away. Elsie stared at me.

  "Why the hell," said the day shift man, "won't you ride the damn thing? Most convenient transportation in the world, the Métro is. I hear you won't even buy a ticket."

  "The Paris Métro," Root said, "was begun in 1898, which was later than London and New York, which both had subways from the 1870s on—"

  "Kospoth told me," the day shift man interrupted. He was more than a little drunk and glowering and smirking at the same time. "Kospoth told me you were afraid of the dark. When the electricity's off you won't even go down to the basement, a grown man."

  "No, he won't," said one of the French girls from the photo office. "I've seen him start down there and then turn around."

  Root was tall and slender, but he possessed unusual strength in his arms and shoulders, and he suddenly stood up and slammed his right hand down on the table so hard that the silverware jumped and Elsie gasped. "In the bloody fucking war," he said, "this guy spent two days buried underground in a collapsed tunnel with four corpses, one of them German, only they weren't corpses the first day and he won't ever say what happened or what it was like. He spent two days buried alive with dead men. In a two-foot-high tunnel, a hundred feet underground. He volunteered to go down to rescue them. He volunteered to rescue them." Root looked at Kospoth. "The British gave him the Victoria Cross for crawling down into that goddam tunnel, so if he doesn't want to go underground anymore and ride the goddam Métro, you can let it pass, all of you, you can just give it a fucking miss."

  He looked up and down the silent row of tables, then carefully lowered himself into his chair. He wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief and reached for a bottle. "I like red Burgundy with fish," he said, "if nobody objects."

  Twenty-Nine

  VAUCANSON'S DUCK—OR THE SEVERAL PIECES of it that were left after my tug-of-war with Johannes—was all this time back in the possession of the Paris Police. Evidence, once again, of a crime.

  On his visit to the hôpital in Neuilly, I had asked Inspector Soupel to return it to me. But Soupel had only pinched his eyebrows together and explained that, since the death of Patrice Bassot was now under reinvestigation, the police had no intention of releasing evidence.

  Evidence of what? I had asked, sounding exactly like Elsie Short. But he had only tamped his pipe and given an imperturbable Gallic shrug.

  It took, in the end, one of the French lawyers that the Trib kept on retainer to loosen their grip, and even then, Soupel told me sternly, the said duck was still technically in the custody of the city of Paris. But Colonel McCormick's name carried a great deal of weight in France. (The Colonel himself knew absolutely nothing about the duck or my misadventure at the Métro; and Mrs. McCormick, after sending
me a get-well potted aster, had hurried off to London with Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson to rest her nerves).

  Which was how it happened that on the 23rd of January, around five in the afternoon, I signed six different kinds of receipt-and-disclaimer, and Soupel handed me a box wrapped in shiny brown oil-paper, pretty much the size and shape of the package I had taken out of the Ritz seven weeks ago. It was raining steadily, just as before, and outside his office Parisian traffic was in its usual state of mechanized lunacy. But this time, I took a number 92 bus, slipped across the Seine without being cudgeled or followed, and carried my duck safely home to the rue du Dragon.

  Three hours later, at exactly ten minutes past eight, I climbed the stairs to the penthouse floor of number 8 rue Jean Carriès. For a long moment I simply stood in the hallway, thinking. Shifted my package from arm to arm. Walked to the window and studied the trees below on the Champ-de-Mars, smoking in the rain like true Parisians. At fourteen minutes past eight I raised my hand and knocked at the door.

  Even if Vincent Armus and his wife were far away, Nigel the butler and chaperon was very much in. He opened the door almost at once, murmured sardonically "Mr. Hearst," and without another word escorted me down the hall, past the Yale medallion on the wall and the empty living room with the rhomboidal Art Déco furniture.

  In the Collection Room the fish tanks were still in place, their golden denizens flickering back and forth in, as Natalie Barney had said, strangely noiseless life. On the right, the painted metallic birds and banjo players and clowns sat on their rows of black pedestals, unmoving. Off to one side of the clowns, Elsie Short, very much alive, sat behind a folding worktable covered with two rows of what looked like surgical instruments.

  "You brought it!"

  "I brought what's left of it."