The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Because I was now working full-time again, with assignments and deadlines every day, I hadn't actually seen or spoken to Elsie— with the exception of one brief telephone call—since our aborted dinner at Paulette's, four long days ago. She bounded around the table and liberated the package from my arm. "Nigel—would you mind getting us another chair? And some coffee?"

  Nigel looked hard at me and made a silent exit. Meanwhile Elsie was clearing a space among the tools and then carefully, sheet by sheet, pulling the oil-paper apart.

  When everything was spread out and neatly arranged under the overhead light, she leaned back and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. "Ruined," she said flatly. "Wrecked, a mess. I can't stand it."

  I resisted the urge to tell Nigel that she was talking about the automate, not me. He set out two cups and a pot with quick, flickering gestures, noiseless as the fish in the tank, and left us again.

  "Ruined," she repeated. "Look at that—a dozen pieces at least, both feet detached, the head and the neck over here. This is the right wing, I have no idea what this is."

  Elsie was far better with her hands than I was. My maternal grandmother had been like that. She had repaired everything in her house herself—my grandfather was a lawyer and limited his manual labor to trimming the nibs of his writing pens—and in my memory she is always bending over the workbench in the little screened alcove next to her kitchen, usually with a broken pot or pan on it and a fistful of wrenches and pliers. Briefly, memorably, Elsie looked like that. With grandfatherly dignity I sat back and poured us both coffee.

  "Armus told me he repairs his own automates," I said. "That's an impressive set of tools."

  "He's very clever. He fixes all of them."

  "The duck still belongs to me," I said. "Legally speaking. Or semi-legally. I signed for it at the Préfecture."

  "Vincent knows lots of lawyers." Her left hand picked up a tiny blade. The other hand fit a wing in a slot. "If you're going to be tedious, Toby Keats, he could have them draw up a partnership for us. We could have joint custody until Mr. Edison sends his lawyers. Just like a divorced couple."

  I spooned sugar into my cup and watched her work. Four nights ago at Paulette's I had gotten as far as saying the word "gyroscope" to her, but it had been completely drowned out by Shirer's party coming in. Elsie hadn't even heard it. To this moment, "gyroscope" remained my own flea in my ear.

  "The other evening," I said, clearing my throat, "just before all Bedlam and Parnassus was let out, I was about—"

  Abruptly, I stopped and looked around the room.

  Vincent Armus didn't know about Vaucanson's real Duck and the Bleeding Man—so Elsie had insisted. Nobody did, she said, except the two of us and probably Henri Saulnay. Even Root didn't know about the Bleeding Man. Whatever she and I might be thinking, the rest of the world believed the duck was a Robert Houdin replica that Elsie was trying to deliver in one piece to the Edison Doll Company.

  But Vincent Armus was different. He was a knowledgeable collector of automates, and a greedy, troubling man, and this was his house, his remarkably expensive apartment. The perfectly balanced organism, the one who would survive the war, Norton-Griffiths used to say, was silent. I started my sentence over.

  "I'm still not sure I have the sequence right."

  "What sequence?" Elsie scarcely looked up.

  "You really do work for Thomas Edison?"

  "I really do work for Thomas Edison. And I really am writing a book about automates, though I haven't got very far with it. It's based on my dissertation. As you know."

  "So when exactly did you meet Saulnay?"

  She fit the second wing into the torso and gently turned the duck's right foot in the proper direction. Then she lifted the tail and fanned it partly open. It didn't look like a wreck at all to me.

  "I actually came over here to Europe," Elsie said slowly, feeling for a tool without looking. "I came over to Europe in November, if you must know, when it was clear I wouldn't get a teaching job in New York. So I took Mr. Edison's offer and I went to Germany first, because the Germans make the best dolls, even better dolls than the French. I don't hate the Germans. I wasn't in the war, Toby."

  "And that was where you saw him."

  "Before the war Henri Saulnay was a well-known toy manufacturer. I never imagined anything else about him. I thought he might still have a few old doll models that he'd never put into production, so I went to his family's farm, it's near Metz, because he was back there on some kind of business. I spent a day and he drove me over and showed me what was left of his factory, which was bombarded and destroyed in a battle—he was incredibly bitter— and we talked about dolls and Mr. Edison and automates. When he told he would be back in Paris in December, I thought he would be a good person to help with my talk. End of sequence."

  "Is it Vaucanson's Duck?"

  "What's left of it," she said. "Maybe. Probably. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put this together again." She turned the duck's torso upside down and a piece of greenish metal tubing fell out of the open space where, back in the Ritz, I had loosened the plate.

  Elsie Short's best feature, Root had told me, was her eyes. Not too big, not too small. They were Delft china blue, sincere and transparent as the day was long. You could see her thoughts like the clouds in the sky.

  "If it's the duck," I reminded her, "something about it is connected to the Bleeding Man. Why would Vaucanson buy back the duck in his old age and leave it to his daughter?"

  She made a face at the metal tubing. "I have no idea. You know, somebody searched my hôtel room when I was in Metz. I thought it was the maid. But it happened again in Paris, the same day I found Bassot's shop, and I got truly scared. I was afraid some other collector might have seen it first. It never occurred to me that it could have been Henri Saulnay."

  "And he came back later to the store with his nephew, to steal it."

  "So it was just good luck, as it worked out, that I didn't have enough cash to pay for it then."

  "Not for Patrice Bassot."

  "Well, no." She lowered her head solemnly and tried reattaching the neck to the torso. With one wing already firmly in place and both feet on the table, it was looking more and more like the ghostly duck in Eric the Minor's photographs. Automatically I felt in my jacket pocket for them, but it was the wrong jacket. I had sent my brown tweed coat to the cleaners the morning I came back from Neuilly.

  "And I was truly scared, too," she said, "that other time, right out there at the front door to this apartment, after the party, when you said the Duck knows the way to the Bleeding Man. I was amazed you said that. Because that's what I wonder too. I wonder if that very strange and secretive person Jacques de Vaucanson did finally build the Bleeding Man. And if he did, would he have hidden it somewhere also very strange and put the key to the hiding place in this ... this—" She looked at the duck and made an exasperated hissing sound, like a wet thumb on a stove.

  The duck balanced precariously on its warped feet and did its best to look nonchalantly back at her, but it was headless, of course. Its crown and neck lay directly between its feet on the table, surrounded by more tiny copper tubes, some redundant cogs, broken springs.

  "I cannot believe he hid it in this horrible duck," she said, and off to my right, in the clear, glassy silence of the room, there was a metallic whir and a click and I stood suddenly bolt upright, and the Man-in-the-Moon clown slowly raised his walking stick and began to chuckle.

  "It's only a toy," she said, and put her hand on my arm.

  By eleven-thirty the duck was still less than half assembled—or reassembled. Even Elsie was starting to yawn, and I was rubbing the back of my neck and thinking of how soon I needed to be back at the Trib for the morning shift.

  Conspicuously, without comment, I retrieved the duck's packing box from the floor and put it on the table.

  Elsie stopped in mid-yawn and frowned at the box. "I'm not finished," she said. "We're not finished.
We're not even close to being finished. Putting this back together could take days, if we can do it at all."

  "Well, we can't leave it here out on a table, for people to see."

  "You mean for Vincent to see."

  "According to Inspector Soupel"—I picked up the still detached head and neck while she drummed her fingers on the table—"Saulnay or Johannes could still be in Paris. The police aren't looking very hard. And Henri still wants the duck. And right now except for a sixty-year-old butler you're here all alone."

  "But the duck will be much, much safer," she said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "in a one-room flat on the rue de Beast in the custody of a man with no lock on the door and a hole in his head who's already managed to lose the little dear twice."

  I turned the duck's head around in my palm till one small black eye was staring up at me. Maybe it would wink. "Madame Serboff has a locked room in the basement that she keeps for storage. It's not the Métro. It has a light. I go down there without any problems. I have a key. You could come and visit the duck whenever you wanted."

  "How very kind."

  I stood by the table holding the box and said nothing. She paced to the fish tanks and back. "I have to do work on my Normandy doll for Mr. Edison tomorrow morning."

  "I can leave the key with Madame Serboff."

  She made her face flat and hard. "If you lose it again—"

  "I'm a dead duck," I said, and she kept her face rigid for another five seconds before she started to laugh.

  At the front door of the apartment Nigel squeezed between us and walked a few steps down the hallway to push the button for the elevator.

  "When do the Armuses come back?" I asked Elsie.

  "In two days."

  "Mr. Armus returns Thursday afternoon." Nigel squeezed past us in the other direction and held the door open for Elsie. "At four o'clock from London." When neither of us moved, he coughed and disappeared discreetly back into the apartment. At the other end of the landing the pulleys and cables at the top of the elevator shaft began to spin back and forth like demented gyroscopes.

  "The duck may or may not know the way to the Bleeding Man," I said slowly. "The way it's broken now, we may never find out. But I'm a reporter. I like to go back to why. Why does Saulnay want the Bleeding Man? And why does he want it so much that he would actually kill somebody for it? Two somebodies if you count me."

  "Because of the money, of course." Elsie shook her head. "He's after the money, not the academic glory, like me. Not that I would turn the money down."

  "The money," I said stupidly, forcing my mind back.

  "If collectors would pay five thousand dollars for the real Vaucanson's Duck," Elsie said, "imagine what they'd pay for the long-lost Bleeding Man. You said it yourself in that little café. And remember Saulnay was ruined in the war, he lost his factory and all his money, and his business has never recovered." She cocked her head. "Or do you still belong to the School of No Single Explanation?"

  Root claims to be working on a book he's going to call An American Guide to European Kissing. The rules, he says, are complex, and if you don't understand them you can wind up looking like a plouc, which is French for "redneck." Italians, for example, kiss each other three times whenever they meet, men and women, once at least in the air with a maximum of noise. German men usually don't kiss a woman's face, but bend over her hand and kiss their own thumb. The French kiss an older woman twice on the cheeks, a younger woman up to four times, depending on the degree of familiarity and the proximity of a husband. The English shake hands.

  "You don't really trust me," said Elsie Short in a quiet, rueful voice, "do you, Toby Keats?"

  Rules, I thought, are made to be broken, and I touched her lips with one finger as lightly as I could and leaned forward. When she finally drew back, her face was flushed.

  "You kiss funny," she said, and she stepped behind the door and pulled it shut with a click.

  The elevator had already come and gone again by then. I wasn't going to take it anyway, but I stared at the closed door for a moment, then walked over and stabbed the electric button twice, just as Nigel had done, and watched the wheels begin to turn and the cables move. The little elevator car slid noiselessly up the shaft. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose with two fingers and then turned and walked the eight steps back to Vincent Armus's door. Elsie opened it at my first knock.

  "And if he's not after the money?" I said.

  Thirty

  THE GYROSCOPE WAS INVENTED IN PARIS in 1852 by a French scientist named Jean Bernard Léon Foucault.

  In Foucault's version the gyroscope was really little more than an amusing novelty, a clever variation on a child's spinning top. I had played with one myself as a boy and remembered the bright chromium frame and the almost hypnotic whir of the spin. Nobody knew how Foucault had come up with the idea, although the Grand Larousse suggested that it was probably devised as a supplement to his famous "Foucault's Pendulum" experiment that demonstrated (to the few skeptics who remained) the rotation of the earth on its axis.

  In its original form, and for fifty years afterwards, the gyroscope consisted simply of a frame around a metal wheel, which wheel moved in turn around a vertical spin axis. If you set the wheel spinning, no matter how you tilted or turned its frame, angular momentum would keep the wheel pointing in the direction you had first chosen.

  But you can't stop progress. Bigger gyroscopes with electric motors and gimbals were quickly put to work in the war. The gimbals were metal rings that circled the gyroscope and kept it horizontal. At first the Germans used these giant devices to keep their warships on course in rough weather. And then toward the end of the war they used them to stabilize their biggest artillery, especially the Big Bertha cannons, only by now everybody was calling the device a gyrocompass. In 1917 the British and Americans started to use them to aim the gun batteries on their battleships, because those guns could fire a shell the size of a suitcase that would fly almost fourteen miles. And while the ship's deck was rocking and swaying in the water you wanted to keep your barrels always pointed precisely in the same direction, for maximum accuracy and destruction.

  These were no children's toys. On a battleship you had a master gyrocompass, about the size of a very large desk, run by a nearby motor and linked to a series of ordinary compasses that sent signals back to it from the deck, the rudder, the engine room, all the arms and legs, so to speak, of the ship.

  The problem, as everybody acknowledged, was how to make the gyroscope smaller. Before the war an American engineer named Elmer Sperry, who would later found a company called Sperry Rand, had built a gyroscope that could fit into a wheelbarrow—he tried to sell it to the Barnum and Bailey Circus for a high-wire tightrope act. But that was as small as anybody had gotten.

  Why did you want a smaller gyrocompass anyway?

  The obvious reason was so you could install one in an airplane. Mr. Charles Lindbergh, for example, was planning, as everybody knew, to fly from New York to Paris without stopping. He would dearly love to have a gyroscope that would stabilize his airplane in the wind and turbulence over the Atlantic and guide it safely to its faraway destination.

  Another reason to have a smaller gyroscope, a reason that was slowly dawning on a few progressive military thinkers, was so that it could guide one of Professor Goddard's liquid-fuelled exploding rockets to a target.

  "Now the interesting fact about J.B.L. Foucault," I said, and lifted my glass to salute the silent but attentive books on the top of my case. "The interesting fact about J.B.L. Foucault is that he was the grandson of Hervé Foucault. And Hervé Foucault was Jacques de Vaucanson's most loyal and trusted assistant. Are you following this?"

  The books maintained their pose of polite attention.

  "He was also," I said, "as I have pointed out to Miss Elsiedale Short, the lover of Vaucanson's flighty daughter, so smitten that he followed her to Alsace when she left her husband, and there they lived together in unwedded bliss for tw
enty years until death did them part."

  The books frowned in concentration.

  "The same daughter," I said, "to whom Vaucanson bequeathed, oddly and mysteriously, his celebrated duck."

  It was five-thirty in the morning now, not quite five hours since I had left Elsie Short at Vincent Armus's apartment. I looked at the brown box on my desk, and poured myself another glass of what Root liked to call one's "breakfast wine," a lesser Chablis in this case. The room was freezing cold, as was the wine, and would be until Madame Serboff turned on the heat about nine o'clock. But I had gotten up out of a warm bed early, partly because my head hurt and my ears were ringing, mostly because, full-time working journalist that I was again, I still owed B. J. Kospoth the second installment of my article on French automates and children's toys. The first part had appeared a few days earlier, to the journalistic equivalent of a massive yawn— two columns of dutiful prose about Gustave Bontems and Vincent Armus, Greek and Egyptian dolls, the cuckoo clock.

  "Put some goddam zing in it," Kospoth had muttered, and so I had now written six more pages covering Vaucanson's Excreting Duck, his Flute Player, and the "Theater of Automates" at the Conservatory where Elsie had talked. Not a syllable, of course, about the Bleeding Man. Nobody in the Trib's readership would be interested in scholarly speculation about two eighteenth-century hypochondriacs—I could hear the Colonel's sardonic, dismissive voice all the way from Chicago. Nobody would care that the Bleeding Man, if indeed he ever existed, could stand up and walk and turn about, going precisely where he was aimed.

  Or that he could only do that if he had a tiny gyrocompass in his head and others in his legs.

  I stood up myself and hopped three icy steps to the window and pulled the curtain back. Out to the east there were streaks of shivering white light where the frozen sun was trying to hoist itself up over the rooftops. I watched a few gray clouds drift westward toward the tomb of Napoleon and imagined a Parisian sky full of falling rockets.