The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  "Don't go now," I said. "Let's head for the rue du Dragon. The hell with Kospoth."

  "I can't go with you. I have to meet Vincent at the train station."

  Inevitably, for a girl with toasted blonde hair and a form-fitting skirt, two different taxis swung toward the curb.

  "Then come over for dinner and I'll show you my etchings of the duck."

  "I can't have dinner with you tonight," she said as I pulled open the door of the nearer taxi. "Libby is already back and they're having a dinner for me."

  She slipped inside, but I kept the door wide open. "Now that you're rich," I said, "are you moving out of the rue Jean Carriès? Or does Vincent want you handy?"

  "Monsieur," the driver said, "vous allez entrer ou non?"

  The taxi behind us blew its horn, the three short notes, and Elsie looked at it and then at me. "I have to go, Toby."

  I squinted through the window toward the other side of the street, where some loitering men were watching us. The taxi driver behind us sat on his horn.

  "Better let me keep the cams," I said, but she couldn't hear me over the horn. Her driver stretched one arm impatiently over the seat back and pushed my hand off, and a moment later the taxi pulled away.

  On Friday three things happened in quick succession. Major Cross telephoned again and this time I was in. The union printing press operators down in the basement walked out on one of their periodical labor actions—which meant they didn't labor. And on top of the stack of mail the copy boy handed me at noon was a handwritten invitation from Miss Natalie Barney: "At Home" on Tuesday night, she informed me, at 20 rue Jacob, from eight o'clock. The postscript was less than subtle: "Please bring your friend. I don't want to write her at the Armus's apartment because I don't like Vincent Armus."

  "Good news," said Bill Shirer in his intense, diffident way. He handed me a thick envelope. "I sold a piece to the Mercury—just got the galleys."

  We were both on our way down the stairs since, because of the labor action, there was going to be no paper today. I slipped the envelope into a folder.

  "I will," I promised, "read it first thing tonight."

  "Ah." His face fell a little. Shirer was a born newspaperman. He couldn't imagine somebody not gobbling down every printed word he saw, as soon as he saw it. "Well, sure," he said. "Tonight is fine."

  We reached the rue Lamartine and stopped awkwardly in the middle of the sidewalk. I looked at Shirer's young, lanky features, his ever-present pipe and trench coat. He was twenty-one or twenty-two, I guessed, a decade younger than me, roughly the same height and coloring, but with a kind of freshness and enthusiasm I hadn't felt for years. You can see ghosts of people you've known. You can see ghosts of people you might have been.

  "Come on with me," I said, buttoning the flap on his trench coat for him, "let's play hooky."

  There is a fatalistic Gilbert and Sullivan song that cheerfully declares, with a jig and a nod, that there's nothing we can do to change our stories, "We're all born either Little Whigs or Little Tories!" If they had been singing about Parisians, they would have said we were all born either Little Left-Bankists or Right-Bankists.

  Bill Shirer was from Iowa, by way of Chicago, and he had only been in Paris for seven months, but he was a Left-Bankist to his core. He lived in the Hôtel Lisbonne on the rue Vaugirard, halfway between the boulevard Saint-Michel and the green arm of the Luxembourg Gardens that curls around just opposite the Odéon Théâtre. He sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne to improve his French. He haunted the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore on the rue Odéon, in the hopes of catching a glimpse of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. After dinner, he headed for the bohemian cafés along the boulevard Montparnasse—the Select or the Dome or the Closerie des Lilas—where all the expatriate writers and artists sat around till dawn, drinking absinthe and cognac and being geniuses together. (Needless to say, he already knew Hemingway.)

  But he didn't know the Right Bank. He didn't know the working-class quarters of Belleville or Père-Lachaise or the bucolic Canal Saint-Martin, and he certainly had never made an excursion east of the Bastille and down into the swarming lanes and gritty backstreets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where much of the immigrant population of Paris had collected like silt in a drain.

  We stepped off a bus on the northwest end of the boulevard Voltaire and walked through a North African street market and into an alley lined with carpenters' workshops and ragpickers' stands. It looked as though a strip of Marrakesh had dropped out of the sky into gray, damp Paris.

  "Well, what the hell," Shirer said, lighting his pipe and looking curiously around. Farther down the street a few poules struck a pose while their mecs guys stood nearby, waiting to sell whatever drugs were going that week.

  "Not that way," I said. We squeezed eastward through the stalls and the litter and passed along a little black creek with Dutch footbridges over it. Sheets of dirty ice lay crumpled up along the water's edge. On the other side of the bridge were bare plane trees and vacant lots where, before the French Revolution, practically in the shadow of the Bastille, eighteenth-century Parisians had planted their crops and raised their sheep. We took a shortcut I knew down another alley and passed kebab carts manned by Algerian Mahgrebs, and two minutes later we emerged onto the cold and weathered cobblestones of the ancient rue de Charonne.

  I had already looked up the house and the street in the Paris Annuaire, but there was really no substitute, as stubborn old Doctor Johnson said, for treading historic ground yourself.

  "That's number 51," Shirer said, and we stopped and peered up, but not at the graceful eighteenth-century hôtel particulier that had once housed Jacques de Vaucanson and his legion of assistants and inventors. That was gone fifty years ago, replaced by a block of cheap apartments.

  "I thought there might still be something to see," I muttered. "Some kind of building, some idea, some trace." I took a step or two down an alley and halted when a pair of black dogs came growling out of a door. "I thought there might be something at least to write about for Kospoth in the paper, one of my stories about odd Paris."

  Shirer had out his map. "About half a mile from here," he said, "would be where the German line was laid out during the siege of Paris, up beyond those hills. You could write about that."

  I was moving along the street and scarcely heard him. Vaucanson, if I remembered correctly, had bought the hôtel in 1746 and lived there till he died forty years later. His daughter, the flighty heiress of ducks, had been born here. According to the books the workshop had been in a big shed-like building behind the house, and it was there that he built the prototypes for the silk-weaving engines in the Conservatory Museum.

  I tried to imagine the rumble and fanfare of the king riding up in his squadrons of carriages and marching in procession, all silks and ermine, through the hôtel residence and into the shed behind it, where he and the disagreeable Vaucanson could sit apart and cackle together and compare their illnesses, real and imagined. And when no one else was present, bend forward in conspiratorial whispers about certain thrilling but blasphemous projects. But there was not a sign of any of that now, not even a frisson, not even a tingle in the hairs on your neck. Normally in France the past is never really gone, never far away—

  "I meant the siege of 1870," Shirer of the encyclopedic memory said, catching up to me. "The Franco-Prussian War, not your war."

  "Well, I'm old, Father William," I said, "but not that old. Actually, the German line in my war was two or three miles farther east. But they were using Herr Krupp's new cannons then, and a great many shells ended up right here in the east of Paris."

  Shirer sucked on his pipe and looked around suspiciously at the grimy face of the apartment building, as if the past were a giant cannonball that might come smashing back through the walls, into the fretful present.

  Back at our bus stop I bought him a glass of wine in a bar opposite a cemetery gate. The bar was called "Mieux Ici Q'en Face," which means "Better Here Than Across the Stre
et." It had a good view of one of the odder traffic lights in Paris, a strange contraption that had only one color—red—and rose up out of the pavement when a policeman blew a horn. Nearby sat a man whose sign said he would watch your dog for a franc while you went inside the cemetery.

  I can never get enough of things like that, but for a reporter Shirer was sometimes not very curious. He reached in his trench coat and produced another copy of his article for the American Mercury.

  "Just read one thing." He pointed the stem of his pipe at a paragraph about halfway down the first column. "Just read one thing. This is about Winston Churchill and his scientific advisor, a guy named Lindemann. You know about Winston Churchill?"

  "I saw him once in the trenches, Bill. He was strolling along on the top of the sandbags smoking a cigar and pointing a swagger stick at the Germans, and they were firing like madmen, but nobody could hit him. He didn't even duck."

  "You really saw him?"

  "I saw Madame Curie, too, with her portable X-ray machine. You should have been there."

  He gave me a look and waited his customary two-beat pause to see if that was a joke, then decided it wasn't. "In 1924 Lindemann told Churchill about new kinds of explosives, very compact, very powerful, but still only possible in theory. Now this year Churchill is wondering if these explosives could be carried in rockets. Look at this quote: 'Could not explosives of this new type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?' Remember what I was telling Eric Hawkins?"

  I leaned against the bar and watched a bus go around the corner of the cemetery, leaning hard on its right wheels but keeping its balance.

  "Or this one," Shirer read. "'It is very hard to transport oneself into the past,' Churchill says, 'when the jaws of the future are upon us.' Isn't that good?"

  My mind swung back like the needle of a compass. "What do you know, Bill, about codes and ciphers and such in the eighteenth century?"

  Anybody else would have put down his glass and stared at me as if I were crazy, but Shirer simply frowned and relit his pipe. "Not the Morse Code?"

  "The Morse Code came later."

  "I know. Morse thought it up so he could communicate with his deaf wife. He used to tap out signals on her hand with his finger."

  I finished my wine and waited. There was no point whatsoever in telling him that in the tunnels we had done the same thing, tapped each other's hands in the dark in a rudimentary code, flesh to flesh, except when we put on our special breathing gear.

  Shirer shook his head and stood up straight. "Well, nothing then, I guess. Sorry, Toby."

  I patted his shoulder and, like a good gray-haired uncle, paid for his drink. I was already out on the sidewalk, pulling my collar up against the wind, when I heard his voice behind me, small and tentative. "Unless maybe," he said, "you were thinking of Solresol?"

  Thirty-Three

  "NO," SAID MAJOR CROSS. "WHAT IN THE WORLD IS SOLRESOL?"

  I hung my hat and coat on a rack and squinted at the window of his office. It was twenty minutes till six, dark, and a strong east wind was fluttering and flapping its black wings against the glass as if it wanted to come in. This was a different room in the same suite of offices on the rue Taitbout, and it had fewer books and more cabinets and furniture than the other one. A little metal heater glowed by one wall, an old-fashioned coal-burning stove that the French for some reason called a "salamander." There was a metal desk in the center, piled high with papers, two spindly wooden chairs and a coffee table, and oddly enough, dangling from another rack by the far wall, a standard-issue British army gas mask, no cylinder.

  "Solresol," I said as we each sat down on opposite sides of the coffee table, "was an artificial language based on music."

  "Never heard of it." Cross placed a brown cardboard folder on the table and began to shuffle through it.

  "Early nineteenth-century. Invented around 1825 by a Frenchman named Fran¸ois Soudre."

  "No, sorry."

  "Soudre thought you could make a universal language using only the seven basic notes of the musical scale." When Cross looked up at me curiously from his folder, I shrugged. "Somebody told me about it last night. There wasn't much in the big Larousse, but I thought maybe, as a learned archivist—"

  "I've been reading about canaries, if that helps. Songbirds." From a shelf under the table he produced a decanter of honey-colored brandy and two thumb-sized snifters. "You kept them down in the tunnels, evidently. Somehow I never pictured that."

  "It's a coal miner's trick, to warn about gas, or lack of oxygen—if your canary stops breathing and falls off his perch you're in trouble."

  "And when you're in trouble you run for your kit," Cross said, and we both turned to look at the gas mask hanging in the corner. "Somebody's souvenir," he said by way of explanation. "This isn't my regular office. But you had other animals too, down below, not just canaries, yes?"

  I had come to Major Cross's office because Colonel McCormick's note had ordered me, more or less, to cooperate. Kospoth knew that and had given me three hours off. This was to be the second and last interview, I had told myself. My firm intention was to keep my answers terse, brisk, unhelpful, and be out of there and on my way in twenty minutes.

  But the mention of the canaries set off a funny train of associations. In Flanders there had been an enormous hairy kilt-wearing Scotsman named Auchinleck who spent his spare time trimming the delicate little claws of our canaries—not an easy sight to forget. Which made me remember the red London double-decker bus that arrived one rainy afternoon, loaded to the roof with wicker cages of sparrows and canaries donated by a girls' school in Kent.

  "Mice, for example," said Major Cross.

  "Mice," I agreed. "We used mice too." There had never been any shortage of mice in the tunnels, or rats or fleas.

  "According to another interview," Cross said, tapping his folder, "Norton-Griffiths had an aviary constructed at Calais, where he actually bred canaries by the thousands."

  "My friend Root at the paper has a file he calls 'Facts Too Good to Check.'"

  "This person seemed to be sure."

  "Nothing Norton-Griffiths did would surprise me. I don't know about the aviary. I do know we weren't the only ones who used canaries. The infantry used them in the dugouts, too, under the trenches—because every explosion produces gas, and the gas could linger in the trenches and kill you. What you probably won't find in your file is the fact that some of the tunnelers kept bigger animals than canaries, for mascots. I was once down at the end of a tunnel by myself and when I turned around to go back I bumped into a spotless white rabbit cleaning its paws. If he'd had a vest and a gold watch, I could have been in Alice in Wonderland."

  Cross stared at me for a count of two, like an older, grayer version of Bill Shirer, then shook his head and started to laugh, a big, surprisingly deep laugh that came from his belly and shook his thin flat face like a leaf.

  "I like your literary allusions," he said, still laughing, rubbing his nose with the back of his wrist, "very eclectic and refreshing." He leaned forward and refilled my snifter. "So what happened," he said as he leaned back and kept on smiling, "the last time you went down?"

  I looked at the window behind his right shoulder and said nothing, nothing at all.

  Cross waited. He felt in his coat and produced a dimpled brass cigarette case. Then he stretched one arm over to the desk and found an ashtray for the coffee table. "They say you were a 'Proto' Man, but I couldn't find that term in the manuals—what was a Proto Man, Toby?"

  The human instinct to answer a direct question, put to you by name, is strong. I took a cigarette from the case he had left open on the table. "A Proto Man was somebody in special breathing gear, a 'Proto Suit.' You used it on rescue missions or when you were very deep in a tunnel where there was probably gas."

  "Something you wore, then?"

  I lit the cigarette with
a match he handed me, drank about a thumb's worth of brandy, and watched the gray smoke begin to rise and coil on a draft of air from the window, like a snake charmer's trick.

  "There were special oversized goggles for your eyes," I said. "You had a hood, a big double-folded white canvas bellows on your chest, two or three gauges, a nose clamp, a couple of oxygen cylinders strapped to your back. There were two very fat rubber hoses that came up from the bellows and into a mouthpiece. The idea was you breathed oxygen from the cylinders while the carbon dioxide you exhaled got scrubbed clean through a second pouch that was filled with caustic soda granules."

  "Something like that?" Cross pointed his cigarette toward the gas mask.

  "Not really. The Proto was much bigger, clumsier. It weighed a ton. You looked like a machine. You looked like a deep-sea diver who's popped up in a coal mine."

  "And everybody had a Proto suit?"

  "No. Only a couple of men in each unit. There was a smaller version called a 'Salvus,' but it just worked for about twenty minutes."

  "And the Germans had these suits too."

  "The Germans had something called the Draeger Suit. Instead of gauges it had a transparent window in the pouch, so you could see the granules. You could watch them moving up and down with every breath and changing color. Otherwise it was the same."

  Cross pulled a stapled sheaf of papers out of his folder and flipped to a page in the center. "June 11, 1918," he said, not quite reading. "A little bit after the Battle of Cantigny. You were in the lines east of Reims, near the Marne, and the Germans blew a camouflet deep in your tunnels. This was a British tunnels unit attached to General Pershing."

  I studied our cigarette smoke, which was flattening out against the ceiling now like the top of a bluish-gray mushroom.

  "It says they sent you down in your Proto Man suit, with three other enlisted men, to rescue your people, and you had got five of them out when the Germans blew another charge."