The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  They liked to do that, I said. The Germans liked to delay their second charge till a rescue party was down. Actually, so did we. Or maybe I didn't say anything at all to Cross. I wasn't sure. I couldn't hear myself over the tintement of my ears. I watched the smoke creep across the ceiling and vanish into the shadowy molding. When I was a boy my grandfather the lawyer had rather cruelly made me learn to swim in the ice-cold waters of a place north of Boston called, deceptively, "Singing Beach." I was not a good swimmer, but he made me learn, so I wouldn't drown. Because, he said—and I remember his words exactly—because "the Ocean Doesn't Care."

  "According to the reports," Cross said, "when your team couldn't function anymore because of gas poisoning, you still went back one more time, to rescue your last three men, and the Germans blew a final charge while you were down, and you and the three men and a German soldier in a Draeger suit were all trapped in some kind of narrow hollowed-out space about eight feet wide and three feet high."

  When I didn't say anything to that either, he turned to the end of his papers. "'Sergeant Keats,'" he read, and deliberately or not his voice took on a faintly British accent, "'had been seriously wounded in hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels. He was bleeding profusely from his scalp and his shoulder where he had been shot twice. When rescuers finally reached him, at thirty meters depth from the surface, he was unconscious and covered with dried blood and rats. At our best estimate he was trapped in the darkness with four corpses, pinned under a fallen timber, for upwards of forty-eight hours.'"

  I stood up and worked my shoulder back and forth and started for the door. The ocean doesn't care. The tunnels didn't care.

  "Apparently," Cross said, "the German in the Draeger suit didn't die in the explosions."

  I shrugged on my coat and reached for my hat.

  "Apparently," Cross said, "at some point during those forty-eight hours the German revived. He sat up in that strange mechanical suit and started crawling toward you with his gun. And you shot him."

  I couldn't hear a thing over the drumbeat of blood in my ears. I watched my hand reach mechanically, like a machine, for the lever on the door.

  MAJOR CROSS: It must have been absolutely terrifying, to turn on your flashlight down in that black coffin of a space and see his goggles start to move, his chest begin to breathe, the blood from his wound start to flow again—

  SERGEANT KEATS: [no reply]

  MAJOR CROSS: As if he had somehow come back to life.

  Thirty-Four

  "NO," ROOT SAID. "WHAT THE HELL IS SOLRESOL?"

  It was about six-thirty in the evening then, one day after my brandy and chat with Major Cross. It was dark and bitterly cold. I was sitting on a three-legged stool next to Root, who was himself reclining more than sitting on an elaborate chromium-plated, leather-padded barber's chair, with a black and white striped sheet tucked around his collar. For the moment all you could see of him was his red face and the tips of his shoes. These he now wriggled with childish satisfaction, pretending, he said, they were mice.

  I leaned back so the barber could step around me to the gas burner on the counter where he kept his cups and razors. The only other people in the room were two old men in wool vests and black berets who had arranged themselves like bookends on either side of the window. They were watching shopgirls come and go on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

  "Solresol," I told him, "was a musical language. A kind of code, I guess. It was invented in the nineteenth century by a Frenchman. You could write it down in notes, like music—do, re, mi—and speak it or sing it, whichever you liked. Evidently as you shifted the stress you changed a note from a noun to a verb or an adjective."

  "Ask Shirer about it. He probably speaks it."

  "They used to teach Solresol all over Europe and America, up until about 1880. Victor Hugo could speak it, James Audubon, Napoleon III. They taught a course in Solresol at Oxford."

  Behind him the barber had gotten his burner lit and was heating a tiny cup of water over it, paying us no attention at all.

  "One of its charms, apparently, was that you could also hum it or whistle it or play it on a French horn."

  "Ask the man Shirer."

  By now the cup was frothy with a stiff yellowish-white meringue, which the barber stirred with a brush. Then he turned and lathered Root's face till he looked like a cake. Then he dove forward and began to shave with quick, short, artistic strokes.

  The man Shirer, of course, had told me about it in the first place, and from our little excursion to the Faubourg Saint Antoine I had gone straight to the Reference Room of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  It was amazing, as my father used to say, how much had gone on in the world before a person was born. There were still Solresol textbooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale, dozens of them, school grammars, three different editions of an official dictionary. Like Esperanto, Solresol had been a commonplace fact of life through much of the nineteenth century, and now it was as obscure and forgotten as Ozymandias.

  I had copied the basic rules from one of the grammars, and Elsie Short had spent the better part of the last two days in Madame Serboff's storage room on the rue du Dragon, twisting the tines in our duck's throat, tapping, stretching, adjusting the eight extra cams to make it quack or honk like Victor Hugo. Result: an ungodly series of pinging metallic noises, but nothing remotely resembling a code or a message. The problem, Elsie said, was either in the cams or in the whole loony idea.

  In a neighborhood Parisian barbershop it was the customer's job to remove the sheet, wash the lather off in a sink, and then dry his face with a communal towel. I watched while Root went through the ritual, muttering something in his crumbly French that made the barber laugh. At the door he patted his cheeks happily and took his hat from the rack.

  "Remind me what a cam is."

  "I showed you one, in the Ritz. They're disks, about the size of a dime. Or in this case even smaller. They turn gears."

  "Does a typewriter have them?"

  I thought for a moment. "No."

  Root opened the door and scowled at the blast of cold February air. "Then I don't give a damn," he said.

  The rue Monsieur-le-Prince runs northwest from the Luxembourg Gardens toward the Seine. Since it was the night of Natalie Barney's Open House, that happened to be precisely the direction I was going.

  It was seven o'clock by then, and there was a light drizzle and the wind was harder and colder than ever. I left Root at the corner of his building and made my way over to the nearly deserted place Saint-Michel, ordinarily the busiest spot on the Left Bank. From there I walked along the river to the pont des Arts. Then I pulled my collar up and my hat down and pushed my way out to the humpbacked center of the bridge, where I leaned against a railing and listened to the passing barges slapping against the current— do, re, mi—sol, re, mi.

  Parisians call them the Right Bank and the Left Bank because the earliest maps all showed Paris as you looked downriver from east to west. And the right bank, of course, was the Right Bank. I loved the neat and orderly French mind, deluded by logic.

  The place to really see Paris, all the guidebooks agree, is from a bridge, any bridge, preferably at sunset or dawn, but probably not on a dark February night when the wind is blowing little silver bullets of ice. I held onto my hat and watched the traffic.

  A clock on the quai Voltaire struck the quarter hour. Something was coming with the wind, I thought, something was coming to a head. I felt my nostrils flare against the stinging cold, the way they used to do in the war, before the artillery fire began. My left hand fumbled in my pocket and traced the edges of Natalie Barney's invitation and I lowered my head and started to walk. Proto Man goes to a Party.

  At the rue Mazarine I cut through a maze of narrow streets and cobblestoned passageways that, apart from a scattering of electric lights here and there, must have looked pretty much the same when Thomas Jefferson and his private secretary William Short walked up and down them at the end of the eighteenth ce
ntury. Then I emerged onto the better-lit rue Saint-Benoit and tapped on the window of the Café Camargue and William Short's bright, blonde, twentieth-century descendant turned and gave me a dazzling smile.

  "You drink too much," Elsie said as I slipped into the chair beside her. "So I ordered coffee."

  "I like to drink."

  She reached over and patted my hand and the cat Byron leapt up on the table next to me and purred a warning. "My chaperon tonight," she said, "needs to be sober and alert. I've been reading about Natalie Barney. I really shouldn't go at all."

  "You'll be the belle of the ball."

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  There was no good answer to that, so I took off my overcoat and kissed her quite long and hard on the rouge à baiser and then took off my hat.

  Elsie blinked and gave a slow, very different kind of smile. "Some chaperon."

  "Madame Serboff says you didn't come by this afternoon."

  "Ah. Well." Elsie sat back so that the Greek owner could deposit two strong black coffees on the table, served as it often was in those days in sherbet glasses. She ladled sugar into hers and frowned so hard that the cat backed away. "Well," she said, "about that. I've been giving it a lot of thought, all yesterday and today, and I just don't see how your theory's going to work, Toby Keats. That's why I didn't come by. I've tried everything I can with the cams. I simply don't understand how the duck could make a sound on its own, not even a quack, that would turn into a musical code."

  The disadvantage of the sherbet glasses, of course, was that they didn't have handles, so that you had to sit and stare at your coffee until it cooled down. "What about the tines in the throat?"

  "Probably there just to break up the food when the silly thing swallowed."

  "Like hens' teeth."

  She didn't laugh. "Hens don't have teeth. Two of your cams are probably extras. Or maybe duplicates. I didn't look. I just put them back in your envelope."

  "They look like they have different bevels."

  "Well, I'm sorry, I just don't think it makes any sense, not the gyroscope theory, or the idea that Saulnay wants to give it to the German army. When you come right down to it, he just wanted the duck for himself. He's a toymaker."

  She took a sip of her coffee, made a face, and spooned another mound of sugar into it. "You're a very persuasive person, you know, despite all your bad jokes and the way you live like a crab in that terrible room. When you get an idea, you're like my father, you'd have to be hit on the head to make you change direction."

  "That could be arranged," I said. "I'd prefer a cam."

  She laughed. "Anyway, in the clear light of day"—she looked at the window and the dark street outside and gave a wry shrug. "In the clear light of dark, I guess, even the Bleeding Man seems like a Jules Verne story. I'm not as stubborn as you are. I guess deep down I don't really believe Vaucanson ever did more than talk about it. I certainly don't believe I'm going to find it now and make my fortune."

  She raised the sherbet glass of coffee with both hands until all I could see was her Delft-blue eyes. "But here's the good news, Toby Keats," she said. "Vincent wants to buy my duck."

  Thirty-Five

  NATALIE BARNEY LIVED IN A THREE HUNDRED-year-old house that she had bought in 1909.

  Three hundred years is old, even in Paris, even to somebody from Boston. Her house was located ten minutes from the Café Camargue, a couple of blocks down the rue Jacob from the even older building where Benjamin Franklin and John Jay had signed the treaty with the British in 1783 that ended the American Revolution. A few years ago the Paris branch of the American Chamber of Commerce had put up a small plaque on the Franklin house, and on warm days you could often see an American or two standing on the sidewalk reading it. In 1916 some of the wild-boy aviators from the volunteer Lafayette Squadron had thrown a stupendously drunken party in what they thought was the very room where the treaty was signed. Then they had gone out to the Battle of Verdun and shot down German pilots till the sky ran red.

  Elsie and I left the Camargue at exactly half past eight and walked five minutes north, heads bowed against the wind, arguing all the way.

  What Vincent Armus proposed, she said for the third time, was to give her two thousand dollars for the partially reassembled automate. That was a very good price, she thought, for an antique toy in such terrible condition. Even before it was broken, establishing that it was truly Vaucanson's Duck was going to be hard. She could write to Mr. Edison, but he wasn't going to be interested in something that badly damaged. Besides, he wanted a doll who could talk, not a duck who couldn't even quack. In any case, legally the duck belonged to her. And two thousand dollars was a very good price, a terrific price, whether or not I agreed.

  "Just 'whether,'" I said, stupidly pedantic. "Not 'whether or not.'"

  "Whether or not," she said grimly, "it's the original Vaucanson's Duck, he wants to buy it. It would suit his collection of birds, he says."

  "For cash?"

  "For three hundred dollars now, the rest in six months."

  "I say No."

  "And I say Yes," she said, looking at me with Delft-blue daggers. "And you don't really have anything to do with it."

  At which point we rounded a corner and found ourselves on the rue Jacob. Ahead of us, amid shrieks of laughter and gusts of wind, a line of grumbling black taxis was discharging fellow guests at the curbside of number 20. We joined them, slipped through a brightly painted blue wicket and crossed a cobblestoned courtyard to the front door. There one maid took our hats and coats and another led us down a hallway and pulled open a pair of French doors.

  "I don't think he has two thousand dollars to pay you," I said. "I think he's going broke."

  "Oh," said Elsie, and took one step forward. "Oh, my."

  Root has a theory that because the great seventeenth-century architects were first trained as artists and spent years drawing the human body, when they began to design buildings and rooms, they instinctively found the right proportions to put around the human frame. But whatever Natalie Barney's living room had looked like in the seventeenth century, in 1926 it had clearly undergone a modern metamorphosis.

  The room in front of us now had been carved out of three separate smaller rooms— you could see the old ceiling beams and supporting timbers—so that it was twice the size of the drawing room in Vincent Armus's apartment. But tonight there were at least sixty people, male and female, laughing and smoking, crowded into the single space, along with a grand piano and a buffet table in one corner, and all sense of proportion had clearly been blown to pieces. At the far end of the room, a row of tall windows exposed the famous garden. Beyond them I could make out two or three columns of the Sapphic Greek Temple.

  "It was supposed to be a small, intimate literary gathering, you know, champagne and chocolate." To our right, from another hallway, our hostess herself materialized, splendid in a shimmering white cocktail dress and three great loops of colored beads that reached all the way to her hips. I thought they looked like bicycle chains.

  She smiled at me, took Elsie's arm. "But as you see, it's gotten rather out of hand. You can find yourself a drink, Mr. Keats, I'm sure, while I show our friend around."

  "Duck soup," I said, and gave a little bow.

  "Sober and alert," Elsie muttered, and then I watched as Natalie led her away, toward a group of handsome young women dressed in tailored men's suits and bow ties, à la gar¸onne.

  The drinks were dispensed by a stout Negro woman in a musketeer's cape and a cocked hat with a feather. I took a glass of vintage Veuve Cliquot that, Prohibition or not, you probably couldn't have bought in New York, and dog-paddled my way across to the other side of the room.

  More than sixty people, I decided. Far too many people for the modest old seventeenth-century spaces. They were more or less equally divided between men and women, and most of the men were in drab business suits or evening clothes. But the women—the women were wonderful, the women were like flocks o
f birds in a Parisian park, bright, glittering, in constant fluttering motion, breaking the gray smoky air of the room into noisy scoops of color. Some wore cocktail dresses like Natalie Barney's. Others were crowned with red or green turbans or fashionable "princess" tiaras. The red of the turbans, I knew from the Trib's social page, was called, quite poetically, 'strident geranium red.'

  Elsie had slipped out of the clutches of the gar¸onnes and was standing with Natalie Barney by the buffet. She motioned me toward her and I turned to put down my glass.

  "The architects," said a husky French voice to my left, "have warned poor Natalie that the floors will collapse if she lets people dance."

  "But I see a piano."

  The voice belonged to a very tall, very elderly woman, who patted my shoulder kindly. "That's because she is going to subject us quite soon to the music of George Anthiel. From the back your gray hair made me think you were going to be much older," she said in English. "I'm Annick Perret. Is that your petite amie?"

  I looked back at Elsie.

  "She's perfectly safe, you know," Annick Perret said. "Natalie never tries to seduce someone at her Tuesday events. These are for 'culture' only. But if your friend comes back for the Saturday salon—" She wagged her fingers in an inimitably French manner and grinned through a dense layer of powder and rouge. "Oh, la la!" she said, and quickly added, "Don't look at my face. I've had it redone so many times I look like one of those ceilings by Michelangelo. Come sit down over here and tell me your name and get me another drink."

  I did all three in backwards order and as I sat down the Muse of Coincidence must have turned her ironic gaze on me, because Annick Perret leaned very far forward, gripped my arm with a bejeweled claw, and said, "I heard Natalie say your name. I think you must be the Mr. Keats who wrote those very amusing articles about automates?"

  "You read the Tribune?"