The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Deep, deep down, where obsessions start, what does he really want?

  I watched Armus's head jerk with the rhythm of the tracks, and I had no idea what he wanted, I had no idea at all. Then I rubbed my own unshaven chin with the side of my hand and turned back to the window to study the rain. I wanted Elsie.

  They wouldn't have harmed her. That was my constant inner refrain. They wouldn't hurt her. But they wouldn't let her go either, because they would need Elsie's good hands one more time, for one more task. So they would hire a car somewhere and take to the roads. That's all they could do. Saulnay would assume that the trains and the buses were watched. But whether he hired a car or stole a car, he still wouldn't get to the Dordogne Valley before the train.

  The window was streaked with wriggling white worms of water. The road alongside the track looked icy slick. Out in the passing forest the trees and bushes were bent low, bowing to the cold, hard, driving rain that had begun to fall just west of Lyon.

  Root couldn't sit still. He got up and opened the compartment door to the train corridor, stuck his head out, closed the door again.

  "Saint-Bonnet," he said, repeating the plan we had already worked out on the train down from Neuchâtel. "Saint-Bonnet is six miles north of the cave where they're going, more or less. What we do, in Saint-Bonnet, we find the gendarmerie, Toby makes them call Soupel in Paris, they send out the troops. We don't have to go anywhere near Font-de-Pré."

  "Bravo, Root," Armus said sarcastically, without opening his eyes. "I will make you my general."

  I wiped condensation from the window with a handkerchief and jammed my hand back in my pocket.

  Above the evergreen forest rose a line of bare, gray cliffs, wet and jagged boundaries as tall as a five-story building, like walls. They paralleled the track on either side of the river for as far as I could see. But not regular, geometric Roman walls, made of uniform blocks and arches. These were limestone cliffs. They weren't as big or famous as the cliffs much farther west, in the Dordogne Valley, where the Cro-Magnon Man had been found. But by some geological twist, these cliffs had been dug out over the eons by the cold, fast rivers that crisscrossed the Massif Central. They were limestone, they were highly porous to water, soft to the touch of the wind. From the train, they looked wrinkled like an elephant's hide, grayish-white, and wildly irregular.

  Along with the Dordogne Valley, these were some of the oldest settled parts of Europe. Men and women had been hunting along the streams here and living in the cliffs since before the Egyptians erected their first pyramid, or the Mesopotamians settled into villages along the Tigris. Living in the cliffs, in the caves in the limestone cliffs.

  Mary Shelley, I thought, had picked the wrong landscape for horror. Snow-capped mountains weren't terrifying. High, bright summits, close to the sun and sky, weren't frightening. Caves were what you wanted for sheer terror, sheer claustrophobic terror. Caves deep in the earth. Tunnels with no light at all. You climb up for light. You dig down for darkness.

  "Ten minutes," Root said. "Ten minutes to go."

  On the opposite bench Armus, fully awake, stared at me without speaking. Root poured me a paper cup full of wine and tore me off a part of a stale baguette and I sat and gnawed and stared right back at him.

  By now, I thought, there was really nothing left to say. We had talked ourselves out, from Neuchâtel to Dijon to Lyon— whatever Armus the collector and student of automatons hadn't already known, I had finally told him: the Bleeding Man and Elsie's theories, Angélique-Victoire, Saulnay and his nephew and the gyroscopes and the war. At that point in the story Armus had sneered. Saulnay might believe that he could sell the automaton to the German army. Saulnay might believe that because he was an uneducated thug. But not even Jacques de Vaucanson, in Armus's learned opinion, could have built a gyroscope small enough to fit in a mannequin's head.

  Yet the Bleeding Man, even without a gyroscope . . . Jacques de Vaucanson's lost masterpiece of Art and Science was incredibly valuable.

  A certain kind of person, Armus had said, might kill to find the Bleeding Man.

  Once, and once only, had Armus flared into anger: if the cave had a name, people must have explored it—what could possibly be left for anybody to see?

  But Root had written a story once, for the Trib's Sunday Travel Section, about the tourist attractions of the Massif Central. And Root never forgot a word he had typed.

  Font-de-Pré was only the name of a nearby farm, he said. The cave had been officially discovered four years ago, in 1922, the same year as the better known cave in the Dordogne called Pêch-Merle, where tourists and archaeologists came in droves to look at the prehistoric paintings, and nobody had paid much attention to the smaller, much less accessible cave.

  But Font-de-Pré was certainly known to somebody long before 1922. The two small boys (and their dog) who discovered it had turned up, just inside its mouth, old eighteenth-century bottles and plates and half a wooden wheel that belonged to an eighteenth-century carriage. Cro-Magnon bones and wall paintings were undoubtedly somewhere deeper inside. But nobody knew for sure, because two days after the boys discovered the cave, the Massif Central suffered one of its occasional deep earth tremors and several tons of splintering limestone had fallen across the entrance.

  "My legs hurt," Armus said.

  "Five minutes," Root said.

  At Saint-Anthème we entered a tunnel and I closed my eyes. At Saint-Bonnet the train rattled and swayed to a halt. Root tapped my arm and opened the compartment door, and we stepped out into the rain.

  Forty

  NO PLAN, THEY USED TO SAY IN THE ARMY, survives first contact with the enemy.

  Saint-Bonnet was tiny, barely big enough to call a hamlet. It seemed to consist of no more than the squat, square, one-story wooden train station, which was empty except for us; a bakery, closed at this time of day; a dozen houses strung along each side of a narrow, muddy road. There was a garage opposite the station, with a Michelin Tire sign over the door illuminated by the single Edisonian electric light I could see in the whole village, probably run off a generator. Everything else was kerosene lamps or cold, wet, gathering darkness, folding down from the limestone cliffs like a great black prehistoric wing.

  Inside the garage there were five more lightbulbs strung over two repair bays. One bay was filled with wooden crates. On the other sat a battered green two-seater Citroën A 8CV. A pair of boots and trousers stuck comically out from under a running board. And behind the office counter, next to a charcoal heater, a cheerful teenage girl was eating a sandwich made out of a sliced baguette and a chocolate bar.

  "No gendarmerie in Saint-Bonnet," she said. She looked placidly from one face to another and settled on Root, the youngest. "We're much too small. You have to go all the way to Le Puy."

  "Can we telephone from here?"

  The girl shrugged and inclined her head toward the front window, where the rain was flying past, almost horizontal to the muddy street. There was a telephone in the Post Office at Craponne, she told us, but it closed at two in the afternoon in winter. In emergencies, the train station could probably telegraph.

  "There was," Armus said with barely concealed fury, "nobody in the damned train station."

  The girl was unperturbed. She took a bite of her chocolate sandwich and turned around to peer through an open door at the Citroën. "You can drive that car to Craponne," she said, "for four hundred francs."

  "Ridiculous." Armus pulled up his fur collar, already soaking wet from the short run over from the station. "That's much too much."

  He doesn't have it, I suddenly thought. I remembered his overdraft, his overdue loan, Libby Armus's pinched face when he offered Elsie cash. The unemployed banker from the rue Jean Carriès doesn't have four hundred francs. Fifteen dollars.

  Rain blew against the front window, scratching frantically at the glass. The wind shook the Michelin sign like a flag. I pulled out my wallet.

  "You are," Root told the girl, "the cutest little hig
hway robber I've ever seen." He counted out two hundred and fifty francs from his own wallet, slid a hundred of mine down the counter, and then from somewhere in his heavy coat produced two flat squares of chocolate wrapped in brown paper and tissue. "Mad money," he said to me in English. "Ça suffit?" to the girl.

  She took the money and the chocolate and left us at the counter while she crossed over and down to the garage proper and said something we couldn't hear to the legs under the running board. When she came back she said, "You can have it in thirty minutes, maybe less," and brought out the inevitable French quadruplicate forms and quintuplicate forms. Cro-Magnon Man probably had to fill them out with a chisel.

  "I'll drive the car," Armus said. "I'll drive to Craponne and call Soupel. You two wait here in case Elsie shows up."

  I looked at the girl's office clock, which said it was only four-fifteen, though the sky and the rain outside made it seem like midnight. Police would still be hours away. Who really knew where Elsie was? It was no bad idea to get Armus out of our hair. If I found her first, we wouldn't need him at all.

  "Our lucky day," the girl said to Root as she gave him the first set of papers and a pen and ink. "We go weeks without anybody hiring a car, and now, there you are, two in one day."

  Root looked up from his forms. I put my hands on the counter.

  "Today just after lunch," she said cheerfully. "Before the rain started, three more customers came in to rent. They took our big four-door Monasix Renault." She spread some more forms on the counter. "For two men and a girl."

  Memory is the iceberg, thought is the iceberg's tip.

  The electric flashlight, Norton-Griffiths had told me once, was a French invention, but the zinc-encased chemical batteries were perfected by an American firm called "EverReady" and that was the only kind of battery-powered flashlight he allowed us to have in the tunnels.

  "Mademoiselle." As calmly as I could, I pointed to a set of banged-up metal flashlights beside the cash register and asked if they were for sale, with fresh "EverReady" batteries. The girl behind the counter wiped chocolate from her fingertips. That would be twenty-five francs more, she said, and held out her hand.

  The other people were strangers, too, she thought, maybe Parisians because they had funny accents, like us. The older man had a limp. She slid two flashlights over the counter and looked at us curiously, then she went down to the car again.

  It was ten minutes to five by the clock on the garage wall when Armus finally squeezed himself behind the wheel of the Citroën and banged the door closed.

  "You should wait over there in the station," he told us in his peremptory manner. "In case somebody comes by train." Then he pulled his head back and pressed the starter button, and the unseen motor jumped to life, like an automaton. The girl raised the garage door with a chain crank, Armus eased the car's snout out onto the muddy main street. He gunned the engine, the two red reflectors on the rear fenders bounced, flickered, and disappeared around a curve.

  The garage had no maps, but the girl drew us a rough outline on the back of our bill. Craponne was no more than twenty kilometers to the southwest, on what passed for the main road. But, she warned, it would be slow traveling today on that road. When it rained like this the streams flooded the pavement in all the low spots, everything flooded around Saint-Bonnet because the limestone was so porous. The cliffs turned into waterfalls, the roads turned into lakes. Font-de-Pré, she added, was barely two kilometers in the opposite direction from Craponne, but the entrance to the old cave was blocked off and dangerous because of falling rocks and water. Nobody from Saint-Bonnet ever went there.

  Root and I stood in the open door and looked down the road where she had pointed. The rain was stronger than ever, lashing the sky. Armus would have been better off, I thought, renting a boat. Root was wearing a beat-up fedora and a heavy black canvas coat that he had grabbed on the way out the door in Paris, and it seemed to drink the water instead of shed it. Shivering and muttering, he buttoned his collar and started to trudge toward the train station across the street.

  I stayed where I was, in front of the garage, under the light.

  "Root."

  He peered back over his shoulder like an owl.

  "You wait there," I said, nodding at the station and trying hard not to sound like Armus. "I can't."

  He stood in the rain and nodded, then he turned and kept on going toward the station.

  I was sixty yards past the last house in Saint-Bonnet when he caught up to me. Neither of us spoke. We hunched our necks against the wind, buried our chins, marched.

  On the wet road, against the flying rain, it took us fifteen minutes to walk a kilometer. I found a road marker along the shoulder, shaped as they always are in France like a New England gravestone, and I used my flashlight to study the garage girl's map and then look at my watch. Root stamped his feet and blew his nose and we started off again.

  To walk is to think. To think, remember. Most men, Elsie Short had said sardonically in the café, confuse autobiography with conversation. I swung my legs rhythmically, steadily along the side of the road, into the falling rain. The road was unpaved, like so many rural roads in France in 1927. The rain had turned the surface to mud, a dense, gritty mud that sucked at our shoes and froze our feet. I really was in a Time Machine now, I thought, I was marching in the mud in France again, I was going backwards with every step.

  Going backwards in more ways than one. Craponne, I had somehow remembered half a kilometer back, was the town where Jean-Baptiste Bertin had established his country home, where scholars, Elsie said, had found his account book with the records of secret payments to Vaucanson, his fellow enthusiast of artificial life. If you wanted a place to hide your work, your money from Parisian eyes, Bertin's obscure country house beneath the limestone cliffs was hard to beat.

  Root stopped ahead of me. His black coat, I thought, fit him like a shadow. He pointed his flashlight beam at a wooden post and called my name, and I had a sudden vision of Jacques de Vaucanson deep in the bowels of the earth, in a limestone cave, his torches dancing in the darkness like Root's flashlight, but giving off a sulfurous, blasphemous smell. The king approached him, weaving and stumbling. They stood together grinning like a pair of alligators. I saw a gigantic figure of glass and metal—

  "Toby."

  I wrenched my mind back from the eighteenth century.

  "This is it," Root said. "Font-de-Pré."

  I bent down to touch a whitewashed wooden post. There had been a chain looped around it, going to another post a few yards off, but this post was leaning badly and the chain was in the mud as if wheels had gone over it. I could barely read the official metal plaque attached to it with a piece of wire: "Fermé." Buried in mud was another plaque: "Chasse Interdite. Pierres Tombantes." No hunting allowed. Falling rocks.

  "Tire ruts," Root said, and played his flashlight beam up and down a churned-up gully just beyond the posts. "Two or three sets of them. One goes over in that direction." He pointed the flashlight beam toward a black mass of vegetation where two swampy, half-frozen ruts disappeared into the darkness. His beam snagged for an instant on something that might have been metallic, then the wind bunched the branches and leaves into a shaggy wet ball and whatever it was disappeared.

  "The main ones follow some kind of old trail up to the cliffs." Root brought the flashlight back around to the right.

  "If you stay close here by the road," I said, "you can signal Armus when he comes."

  "While you do what?"

  I didn't answer because I didn't know. I clicked my flashlight off and started to move up the gully, into the knee-high bushes and muddy weeds that once upon a time would have been part of a pré, a meadow. Close by on my left, I could hear, over the snap and flutter of the wind, the hiss of a stream curling off through the weeds like a snake. And beyond that, I could hear the deeper, angrier rush of a waterfall cascading down the cliffs.

  Floods everywhere, she had said.

  Where was t
he car that had made the ruts?

  No big, heavy steel-bodied Renault, I thought, could drive very far through the mud and tangle of the field, let alone get through the dense line of forest that began just yards ahead.

  I felt my way between the tire ruts. Each time I stopped I could see the cliffs hovering over the trees, an unbreaking wave of high, gray stone, Frozen Time, Calcified Time.

  I had been wrong in Paris about Solresol, I thought, and wrong about how long it would take somebody to drive from Neuchâtel to Saint-Bonnet, and now I was probably wrong about the car too. I had almost reached the trees at the bottom of the waterfall before my flashlight picked it up, a brief glimmering of blue paint on a fender, almost as dark as Root's coat.

  There was nobody in it, nothing. The back tires had sunk six inches down into the mud. I risked one quick burst of light on the empty front seat and crept around the front of the car toward the sound of falling water.

  Saulnay's limp, I guessed. They would have driven as close as they could to the entrance of the cave because of Saulnay's limp. Could Elsie have jumped free in the darkness and run for help? I remembered Johannes's Webley pistol and jammed the flashlight in my coat pocket and followed a muddy track uphill.

  Sixty feet from the car, the ground began trembling under my feet from the waterfall, and I could see why nobody came to Font-de-Pré.

  In front of me was a jagged pile of boulders and splintered rocks at least twice my height. This had to be where the deep earth tremor had shaken the cliffs. The rocks were long, flat, stacked, and angled in all directions. The waterfall burst like a rocket out of a break in them far up the side of the cliff. The rocks and boulders beneath it groaned and creaked in the violent rush of the water, as if they were about to tumble and fall again, and against the silver gray clouds of the western sky they made a black silhouette like the knuckles of a fist.