The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  We stopped a few yards short. "Wait here," Armus said and strode briskly ahead.

  Root and I looked at each other. A few months ago Root had written a piece on the novelist Tolstoy for the Book Page of the Sunday Trib, and he had devoted a whole column to what the great Russian writer called "shading"—his theory that human personalities were little more than perpetual bundles of contradiction. If you waited long enough, the passionate man turned cold, the coward turned brave, the hero could smile and smile and become a villain.

  Twenty feet ahead of us Armus stopped and gestured abruptly to the gendarmes, and then before our eyes the pompous literary historian of the train last night metamorphosed into a kind of Prussian Commandant, staring down his nose at a pair of worms. He stood stiff as a flagpole in his fur-collared overcoat and spoke quickly, in icy-cold French. After a moment he reached in the coat and presented them a business card, and without bothering to look at us snapped his fingers in our direction.

  "We're from the Chase Bank," he muttered as one of the gendarmes pulled open the front door, "and unlikely as it may seem, you're both my assistants."

  Inside the front door there was a corridor lined with exhibition cases and then a set of ticket booths and turnstiles. At the turnstiles a middle-aged woman, still in her hooded parka and heavy boots, held up her hand and stopped us again.

  She was warier than the gendarmes, but Armus was irresistibly patrician and condescending. He repeated his cool, bald-faced lie that he had come on behalf of the Chase Guaranty Bank of New York, Geneva branch, which underwrote most of the city's theft insurance. It was necessary at once, he insisted loudly, that he inspect for damage to the museum's collections, in case there was a monetary claim. The Swiss attitude to money has no shading about it. They don't like to annoy banks. The ticket taker held Armus's business card up to the light as if it were a counterfeit bill, then told us to wait while she went for her supervisor.

  The instant she stepped out of sight I shoved a turnstile open and started trotting rapidly down the hall.

  Nobody saw me.

  I ignored the signs for all the other galleries and followed the red arrows for the exhibit of "Les Androids des Jacquet-Droz." Behind me I could hear somebody protesting, then Root's calming voice. As I turned right at the extreme rear of the ground floor, I saw an ornately framed portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bertin and his dog by a river. It took two more steps for my memory to jog and remind me that Bertin had been the Comptroller General of France under Louis XV. He had also been an enthusiast of automates and he was the secret funneler of money and instructions from the king to Vaucanson. It was Bertin's encoded memoranda to the Treasury, Elsie had told me, that first showed that the king's gold was being used for something wilder and more dangerous than silk weaving looms.

  Elsie. Why would Saulnay take Miss Elsie Short with him? The skeptical Inspector Soupel had wanted to know that— there had been no ransom note, no message. He only had my word for the alleged abduction. What use could she possibly be to the toymaker?

  Four men in business suits were standing by a broken display cabinet. Shards of wood and glass had already been swept in a pile, in the neat Swiss manner. They had the look of real insurance men. They turned toward me with puzzled expressions. Then I heard Root behind me telling them good morning in loud English, and I pushed by them and around one more corner and entered the Salle des Jacquet-Droz, where the three last surviving automates of Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz and their French assistant Hervé Foucault were housed.

  In a sense, from Elsie's descriptions, I already knew what to expect, what the Jacquet-Droz automatons would look like. Even so, I wasn't prepared for the luxurious charm, the obsessive Swiss perfectionism of the setting that had been built for them—the space in front of me was a three-sided recreation of an eighteenth-century drawing room, with false windows and brilliant red velvet wall coverings, more antique paintings, mirrored gold girandoles, and silver sconces. Along the left and right walls were two handsome Louis XVI sofas. Four or five chairs stood around a chess table. A painting of an Alpine landscape had been propped on a tripod in a corner. Everything was here, everything was in its neat and ordered place.

  Except that there were only two, not three clockwork figures.

  The one on the left, I knew, was the Draughtsman—a pint-sized boy in a green velvet jacket sitting at a little mahogany desk. He held a piece of paper with his left hand, a pencil with his right. When he was set in motion, Elsie said, he could trace a butterfly, a dog, or the king's profile. The one on the right was larger and dressed as if she were going to a ball. This was the Musician that Saulnay had described in his workshop in Paris, a girl in a bright yellow gown who sat with her fingers poised over the keyboard of a small polished wooden organ, ready at the touch of a switch to begin to breathe and play.

  The space in the center was empty.

  "You are—?"

  The one other human being in the room was a man with straw-yellow hair and an air of mild surprise. He was holding a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. He had on ski boots and gray trousers and a blue blazer with a red and yellow medallion and the words "Départment de Conservation" stitched above it. I muttered "Police, wrong room," turned on my heel, and went out again just as Root and Armus entered the corridor.

  "Toby—?"

  There had been a plan of the building on the wall by the turnstiles. I headed left out of the automates' room, toward an outside door. On the right, exactly as on the plan, was an open door also marked "Départment de Conservation" and I went through it quickly, smiling, like a man who knew what he was doing.

  "The Writing Boy is safe, yes?" I said in my best Parisian French. "Unharmed or damaged?"

  Two technicians, with notebooks this time, one of them in a white laboratory coat, looked up frowning.

  "Somebody broke in last night, n'est-ce pas? They tampered with the Writing Boy, yes?" I said.

  Because that was what they had to do. Because a night and a half ago, in the police car between the rue du Dragon and Inspector Soupel's damp basement office, I had suddenly understood exactly why Saulnay had taken Elsie with him, and it was for the same reason I had brought Vincent Armus with us—to operate the automate. With his hand in bandages, Saulnay couldn't do it himself. Johannes was a thug, Johannes couldn't do it for him. But with a gun at her head Elsie Short could.

  The two Swiss technicians transferred their frowns to Root and Armus behind me. I stepped between them and pushed them aside, and found myself face to face with Mary Shelley's mechanical inspiration, Hervé Foucault's secret pal, the ultimate Jacquet-Droz automate, which I would live long enough to hear called the world's first programmed computer.

  The Writing Boy had been built in 1772, four years before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was twenty-eight inches tall, made of carved and painted wood. He had blonde hair, fair skin, pink cheeks. He was barefoot. He was dressed in a kind of flowing eighteenth-century blue silk shirt and cloak and he was seated, like the Draughtsman in the other room, behind a mahogany table or desk to which he was attached at the base. He had a quill pen in his right hand, a real inkwell beside it.

  "I don't know who you are, sir." The man in the white coat was swiveling from Armus to Root to me.

  "It's all right," Root said, grinning, shaking their hands with both of his. "He's from Paris, we're all from Paris. Mr. Armus is an expert on automates. The police called us in."

  The Writing Boy, desk and all, was resting on a worktable surrounded by stacks of paper and miniature tools like the ones Elsie used. He had been partly turned around to his right and the cloak and shirt pinned up to reveal the lower part of his torso. And from that bare space somebody had removed a wooden plate about the size of my outspread hand, so that, thanks to the pale Swiss morning light streaming in through the window behind us, I could see his thick metal spine and golden clockwork.

  All of them—Vaucanson, Jacquet-Droz, Foucault—all of the
m had concealed the mechanism of their automates inside the carefully sculpted bodies of human beings or animals. Elsie had told me that with some wonder. They did it because they wanted to show, not a mechanism, not a gadget or a truc, but something that looked like life itself. The Prometheus Complex, she called it. When my hand gripped the Writing Boy's shoulder, his head turned an inch or two and his eyes rolled toward me, questioning. But by that time I was peering into the occult mechanism of the cylindrical spine and the rings of levered disks and impossibly tiny cams going up and down it.

  Forty cams, each one controlling a single character or letter, more than enough for what the Writing Boy always composed for public exhibition: Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.

  Most of the cams were made of a grayish-black metal—old, worn, lusterless. But toward the top of the spine, on each side, somebody had removed the old ones and in their places inserted, bright as lighthouses if you were looking for them, four slightly thicker, copper-colored, cams.

  If you change the right cams, Elsie had said, you change what he writes.

  "Don't touch those!" The man in the white coat grabbed my arm. I shoved him away. The other man started for the door, but Root blocked his way.

  "You have to leave right now—I insist." White Coat was back, clawing at my arm again, trying to pull the Writing Boy and the little desk out of my reach. Papers and tools went flying, the automate tilted. I pushed him aside and righted the Boy.

  "You—!" he said, and I hit him hard twice in the neck, just below the ear, where Norton-Griffiths had trained us to hit in the tunnels, where the nerves and the cams all bunch together under the bone, and he dropped to the floor like a hammer.

  By the door Root and the other Swiss technician went stiff and silent. Armus took a deep breath and said nothing.

  I swung back to the worktable and began to paw through the tools and papers and boxes scattered across it.

  "They put those cams in," Armus said, "last night. The shiny ones." He bent beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and squinted into the gears.

  "Elsie put them in. That's why they brought her. With Saulnay's hand in splints they had to have somebody who could make it work. Johnannes wouldn't know." There was absolutely nothing I wanted on the table, no scrap of paper, no message, no trail of bread crumbs, nothing.

  "Toby," Root said from the door. "The floor."

  "Make it write," I said to Armus, because that was why I had brought him, the only reason in the world. "The new cams changed his text. I don't know how to make him work, but you do. Wind him up, plug him in, do what it takes."

  On the floor the man in the white coat was stirring, coming groggily to his knees. Hardheaded Swiss. Armus didn't bother to raise his head. He was still dressed in his fur-collared topcoat and pearl-gray wool suit, and he looked as if he should be strolling down the avenue Montaigne with an ivory cane and a poodle. But he had been collecting automatons since before the War, he had a house full of tools, and he had made his Bird Bush spring into action with a flick of his thumb.

  "Hit him again." Armus glanced at the man on the floor.

  "There's ink, the pen is ready." I turned the Writing Boy slightly on the tabletop and Armus moved around to the side. By the door Root was making a pair of gags with handkerchiefs. I tossed him a roll of cord from the table.

  "I don't know," Armus said. "They always hid the starting mechanism. You have to wind them up, sometimes with a key, sometimes a handle. This one maybe. Or—no. Here. This."

  He stretched one arm around the little desk and slowly rotated something I couldn't see.

  It was half-past eight according to the undoubtedly accurate Swiss clock on the wall. Outside, the Lac de Neuchâtel was stirring in its bed, the pale winter sun was riding a strong east wind higher in the sky, aiming its beams at our windows. As always with artificial life, nothing happened for a space of five, six seconds. Fiat lux. The Writing Boy's doll-like face gazed straight ahead at a spot on the wall. His bare feet stayed where they were, crossed at the ankles. Then the familiar whirring, clicking sound of creation began and a moment later his right arm, slowly, smoothly rose in the air.

  He turned his face to the right and dipped his quill pen into the inkwell on the desk. He shook the pen twice. I write, therefore I am. His face lowered toward the square of paper in front of him, and with an almost imperceptible nod, methodically, confidently, as his eyes moved back and forth following his pen, the Writing Boy's hand began to trace whatever message it was that Jacques de Vaucanson's daughter and her lover had secretly taught him to write, the place, if Elsie and Saulnay and I were right, where the Bleeding Man was hidden.

  What did it take? Thirty seconds? Fifty? Nobody in the room was counting. By the door Root and the other technician had stopped their scuffling. The man on the floor was blinking madly.

  Armus and I hovered by the square of paper, watching each careful, deliberate scratch of the quill. When it stopped, Armus snatched the paper free and spread it on the table.

  "What?" Root said from the door.

  Armus shook his head in disgust. "Gibberish."

  "Code," I said, thinking of Vaucanson and the universal grammar machine and Solresol. My ears were buzzing in pain. "A goddam eighteenth-century code."

  "We need to leave," Armus said. "I hear people coming."

  "He's supposed to write 'Je pense, donc je suis,'" I said and banged the table with my fist.

  "Now," Armus said. "We need to leave now."

  "Let me see it." Root bent over the table where the paper lay. On the paper the automate had traced in inch-high blue-black letters this message:

  "I'm opening the door," Armus said. "We're going."

  "That's not gibberish." Root looked up at me. "Toby."

  "We have to go!" Armus was in the hall. There was an outside door to the right, leading straight to the esplanade. Far down the corridor voices were booming.

  "That's not gibberish," Root said. Root of the quick, capacious, analytic mind. "That's shorthand like McCormick's cabalese at the paper. Those are directions. Font de Pré—left, left, right, left.

  Gauche, gauche, droite, gauche."

  "Font de Pré?"

  "It's by Le Puy," Root said as we started to run. "Just west of Lyon. It's a cave, Toby."

  Thirty-Nine

  LYON IS THE SECOND LARGEST CITY IN FRANCE. It was already ancient and important when Jacques de Vaucanson lived there in the middle of the eighteenth century, building his silk-weaving machines and slipping away into the Dordogne Valley on his blasphemous secret projects.

  The Romans founded Lyon as a colony in 43 bc and called it "Lugdunum," which sounds like something out of Gulliver's Travels. And almost the first thing the new colonists of Lugdunum did was construct an enormous amphitheatre on a hillside overlooking the convergence of the Saône and Rhone rivers, for gladiators and chariot racing. It still existed in 1927. From the train station platform I could crane my neck and see the funicular railway up to it and, under a black ceiling of clouds, the monotonous ruined arches of the amphitheatre wall. But compared to the cave dwellers of the Dordogne Valley, sixty or seventy miles to the west, the Romans had practically come yesterday.

  "Over there," Root murmured.

  Armus and I both looked up. On the opposite platform, two sets of tracks away, a pair of gendarmes, fat as teddy bears in their heavy blue overcoats, were strolling with their batons clasped behind their backs, studying the crowd of waiting passengers.

  The big station clock above the tracks read 1:38 p.m.

  "They will not," Armus said, "have the slightest interest in us."

  He was right. I knew he was right. We had left the museum by the esplanade door, at a dead run, and nobody had seen us, nobody had followed. At the little Neuchâtel station we had scrambled aboard a local Swiss train for La Chaux that was already starting to roll. From there to Besan¸on. Besan¸on to Lyon. We had taken nothing from the museum but a scrap of paper. A mild case of assault, with no p
roperty damage, was not going to provoke the Swiss police into an international manhunt.

  "Not the slightest interest," Armus repeated, and all three of us stood up as a grimy black locomotive came hissing and clanking along the platform, pulling a line of battered pre-war carriages. An engineer with a beret on his head and a pipe between his teeth watched complacently as the wheels braked and gave one last ankle-scalding burst of steam and the carriage doors popped open. It didn't look like a Time Machine, but it was about to carry us back 20,000 years.

  Time, of course, was everything now. As best we could figure, Saulnay and Johannes would have reached Neuchâtel about ten hours before us, dragging Elsie with them. They would have broken into the museum after midnight. Then, if Saulnay had understood what the Writing Boy was telling them . . . No question that he had. Saulnay was used to automatons, how they worked, how they could be tinkered with.

  "Some men are born to hangovers," Root said. He sat down and offered me a paper cup and then held up a bottle of red wine he had bought at the station in Lyon. "And some have hangovers thrust upon them. Bread and sausage in my pocket." He flapped his coat with one arm. "You need to eat, Toby. Even Armus took some sausage."

  I glanced over at Armus, who was sitting directly in front of Root in our tiny, cramped compartment, head lolling slightly from side to side in weariness. His eyes were shut, his chin was buried in his scarf. After two days of French trains his clothes were rumpled and filthy. The elegant fur collar on his overcoat was smeared with a sticky unidentifiable film.

  Shadings, I thought, Tolstoyan contradictions. He looked nothing at all like the Prussian Commandant who had frozen the brains of the two gendarmes in Neuchâtel with his glare, not a bit like the Patrician Prick of the Champ-de-Mars. He looked like a railway tramp, a down-on-his-luck vagabond.

  I had my own theory of character, which was not Tolstoyan. It was a theory that had been drummed into me long ago by an editor at the Boston Globe, who used to grab my lapels on my way out to a story. People are simple, he would say, stories are simple. All you ever need to know about somebody is this one simple thing: What does he want?