The Paris Deadline

THE PARIS DEADLINE

"Wow! This is storytelling at its very best. Max Byrd uses the whole deck of cards—character, place, history, humor, and intrigue—to weave his magical story. You want a good ride?
The Paris Deadline
is your ticket!"

—Michael Connelly, author of
The Brass Verdict
and
The Scarecrow

"Max Byrd's
The Paris Deadline
is the best 'code and cipher' novel I've ever read, a wonderful historical thriller, combining terrific characters with wit, erudition, more cool facts than your average encyclopedia, and a blistering narrative drive that makes the pages fly. Do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading this book!"

—John Lescroart, author of
The Thirteenth Juror
and
Betrayal

"Some of the things I love most about the book—the wit and erudition, the scholarship, the interesting things about the underground war and automates—are not the things other people will like. They'll be caught up in the mystery of the duck and the love story between the appealing Toby and Elsie, and the fact that it's set in Paris. Of course, I love that too!"

—Diane Johnson, author of
Le Divorce
and
The Shadow Knows

California Thriller

Finders, Weepers

Fly Away, Jill

Fuse Time

Target of Opportunity

Turner Publishing Company
200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950 Nashville, Tennessee 37219
445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor New York, NY 10022

www.turnerpublishing.com

The Paris Deadline

Copyright © 2012 Max Byrd. All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Gina Binkley
Book design: Glen Edelstein

Cover image: Paris, France: Gargoyles of the Notre-Dame cathedral. 1960s. Photograph by Janine Niepce (1921-2007). © Janine Niepce / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Byrd, Max.

The Paris deadline / by Max Byrd.

     p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-61858-277-5

1. Vaucanson, Jacques de, 1709-1782--Fiction. 2. Robotics--Military applications--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.Y675P37 2012

813'.54--dc23

                                                     2012014190

Printed in the United States of America

12 13 14 15 16 17 18—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my granddaughters,
Haley, Abigail, and Noelle

The Gyroscope, familiar to millions as a children's toy, was invented, it is thought, in Paris in 1852 by a French physicist named J.B.L. Foucault, though this is disputed by some authorities. As a device, it possesses the remarkable ability to define a direction in space with a great degree of accuracy, so much so that in 1910 the first workable gyrocompass was installed on the German warship "Duisberg," for the purpose of keeping it precisely on course.

—
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition

"I suppose I would have to agree," said Dr. Robert Goddard, the mild-mannered inventor of the liquid-fuelled ballistic missile, "that this has made the world a more dangerous place."

—
New York Times, March 17, 1926

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—
Arthur C. Clark

                 Vaucanson's Duck

T
HE EIGHTH WINTER AFTER THE
W
AR
, I was living in a one-room garret, a fourth-floor walk-up not much wider than a coat hanger, on the disreputable rue du Dragon.

     And no, to get the question out of the way at once, I didn't know Hemingway, though it was Paris and the year was 1926 and every other expatriate American in the city seemed to trip over his feet or lend him money as a daily occurrence. (Years later I did stand behind him in the mail line at American Express and listen to him denounce Woodrow Wilson in very loud and Hemingwayesque French, which had the slow, clear, menacing cadence of a bull's hoof pawing the ground.)

     The only literary person I actually did know, besides Gertrude Stein's landlord, was the journalist who sat on the other side of the desk we shared at the
Chicago Tribune
offices on the rue Lamartine.

     He was a slender, amiable young man named Waverley Root. He was twenty-six that year, the same as the century, five years
younger than I was, not quite old enough to have been in the army. Root was a remarkable person who wrote English like a puckish angel and spoke French as if he had a mouthful of cheese, and a decade or so later he was to find his true calling as a celebrated food critic for the
New York Herald.
The last time I saw him he wore nothing but yellow shirts and had gotten so fat he appeared to have inflated himself in one push of a button, like a rubber raft on a ship.

     But in those days celebrity was far over the horizon, and Waverley Root was simply another vagabond reporter who had washed up on the cobblestoned shores of the Right Bank in search of a job. He had gone to Tufts. I had gone to Harvard. He had worked for the
New York World.
I had worked for the
Boston Globe.
He drank anisette and I drank Scotch, and this small divergence in personal character accounted for the fact that on the chilly, rainy Monday morning of December 7, he was leaning against my chair, nursing a French hangover (as he nicely put it), rigid, classical, and comprehensive.

     "Toby," he said, "I will never drink alcohol again."

     "I know it."

     "An owl slept in my mouth last night. My teeth turned green. My poor eyes look like two bags of blood."

     "They look like two bags of ink." I typed "30"—newspaperese for "The End"—on a sheet of yellow paper and swiveled to hand it through a hole in the wall—literally.

     The Paris edition of the
Tribune
occupied the top three floors of a rambling nineteenth-century structure that had not been designed with modern journalism in mind. Apart from the Managing Editor's sanctum behind a frosted glass door, our editorial offices consisted of one long city room, which held a collection of sprung leather chairs, a long oval table covered with typewriters and ashtrays, and a string of smaller rewrite desks like ours, crammed off to the sides and in the corners. All practically deserted, of course, at this time of the morning. Bedlam arrived
later, with the regular reporters, at the civilized hour of noon.

     The composing rooms were downstairs (we lowered copy by force of gravity, through a chute in the middle of the floor) and the printing presses were in the basement. Our copyeditors had been banished to an interior room mysteriously inaccessible to us except by going down two flights of stairs and up again three, hence the hole in the wall. More than one visitor, seeing a disembodied hand waving vaguely through a slot in the plaster, had been put in mind of the House of Usher.

     "And there is no health in me," Root said and sat down heavily on his side of the desk.

     "It's nine thirty-one," I said. "She told us to be there at ten."

     Our urchinish French copy boy plopped a thick stack of rubber composing mats on my blotter, murmured "Mon cher Papa," as he did every morning, and sidled away, smoking a torpedo-sized Gitane, to the dark little basement cubby he inhabited down among the rolls of newsprint. He called me "Old Dad," because even at thirty-one, my hair was mostly silver-gray, almost white, like a policeman's helmet. Many people, especially women, assumed sympathetically that something had turned it that way in the war, and if they were young and attractive, I had been known not to correct them. In fact, it had simply happened overnight when I was nineteen, and for some obscure reason, possibly modesty, probably vanity, I had never tried to dye it.

     "Goddam 'The Gumps,'" Root said and picked up one of the composing mats.

     I sighed and took it back. "The Gumps" had nothing to do with his hangover. They were the Paris edition's most popular comic strip (followed closely by "The Katzenjammer Kids" and "Gasoline Alley"). On Colonel McCormick's personal instructions, the comic strip mats were mailed to us from Chicago twice a month, filed in a cupboard behind the City Editor's desk, and delivered to me every Monday to be arranged in chronological order and chuted down to the printing room.

     "She asked for both of us," I reminded him. "Tous les deux. Root and Keats, Keats and Root."

     Root closed his eyes in anisette-induced meditation.

     I sighed again like the Lady of Shalot and got to my feet. "Suite twenty-five, Hôtel Ritz, if you change your mind."

     "Suites to the suite," Root said, with eyes still closed. And as I reached the door he added, sotto voce, "Lambs to the slaughter."

     Outside on the rue Lamartine it was raining softly in the slow, sad Parisian winter way and the street was almost deserted: a few soggy shoppers, a gendarme in his cape, a pair of disheartened workmen on ladders stringing waterlogged loops of Christmas tinsel between the lampposts. Another crew was silently studying an enormous and inexplicable pit in the pavement, part of the endless cycle of street repair and excavations in post-war Paris.

     I took thirty seconds to gulp a thimbleful of black coffee from the stall in front of our door, and another thirty seconds to frown at the cold gray sky and disapprove of our climate. Then I made my way around the pit and started out, an obedient lamb, for the Ritz.

     The
Chicago Tribune
and its Paris subsidiary were owned at that time by Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, who had won the Medal of Honor at Cantigny (a battle I'd also attended, in a minor role), and who ran his newspaper along much the same military principles of fear and feudalism that he had evidently employed in the Army.

     Fortunately for us, he managed the paper at a distance, coming to Paris only once or twice a year for what he jocularly called "little friendly look-sees," but which had the grim, white-gloved, pursed lips air of a regimental inspection. Like other monarchs he was invariably referred to by his title—in three years at the
Tribune
I had never heard him called anything except "the Colonel"—and like other monarchs as well, he was seriously burdened by family.