The Paris Deadline (10 page)

     "If it's not a replica."

     "Yes, of course, if it's not a replica. Only the original would be worth that much money." She transferred her glower over to Root, who was standing with conspicuous politeness about eight feet away, by our building door, obviously listening to every word. "As you seem to know."

     "As I seem to know," I said. I slipped the
American Journal of Anthropology
back in my pocket. That particular issue contained
a thoroughly impenetrable article on the private lives of primates, an article on Navajos and rain, which I thought was pretty good, and one quite fascinating article by Elsiedale Short, Ph.D., entitled "Vaucanson's Duck and the 'Bleeding Man.'"

     The question was, I thought, who else knew?

     Root held up his wristwatch and tapped the crystal with one finger. "One-twenty-five," he said, "if Keats doesn't get upstairs in the next three minutes, my little friends, our managing editor is going to hang him from the yardarm with a typewriter ribbon and I'll have to find a new desk mate, who probably won't lend me money or lose at cards the way Keats does." He walked over to Elsie and raised his hat. "Waverley Root, Esquire," he said. "Enchanté."

     "Miss Elsie Short," I said.

     She looked at me with a hard, flat, very red face. "I want my duck."

     "I don't have it," I said. Truthfully.

     "If it's that mangy toy duck with the hangover," Root told her, "it's on its way to sunny Nice, no doubt for the cure. Our boss's mother Mrs. McCormick bought it and wanted to return it, and now she says she's changed her mind and she's going to keep it." He gave her his big moon-faced grin. "Women."

     Elsie gave him a frozen stare.

     "Anyway," Root said, "I got the duck from the police this morning while Toby was out of the office, and I packed it myself: two parrots, one mechanical duck. I took the whole menagerie à trois to the Gare de Lyon"—he tapped his watch again—"about four hours, forty-two minutes ago."

     "I don't believe you."

     Root shrugged. "Hôtel des Anglais, sunny Nice, undoubtedly a first-floor suite."

     Elsie glowered at him, at me, then turned on her heel and marched off down the sidewalk.

     "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," Root said, tilting his head and studying her walk. "Nice girl, and much prettier than you said."

It was, from the point of view of the newspaper business, an extremely busy afternoon.

     The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald—no, I never met him either—was in town that week and Root was assigned the job of editing his interview down to a mere 1,200 words, after which Kospoth decided in a fit of unreason to run it on the Society Page instead of the Book Review page, so the whole thing had to be re-edited and reset. At home two western Senators had boldly come out for a repeal of the Volstead Act, and Senator William E. Borah of Idaho had gone them one better by calling for a repeal of the income tax ("Borah Nix Tx" in
Trib
cabalese—our term for cable shorthand).

     On the Sports Page the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen denied engagement rumors. On the Front Page somebody named Paul Joseph Goebbels had been named Nazi Party leader in Berlin, and a French countess had danced at the Hôtel Meurice with a Negro.

     I finished off Senator Borah at five o'clock, Lenglen at six, and at seven I left Root menacing F. Scott Fitzgerald (his photograph) with a pair of scissors and a glue pot. On the stairs down to the rue Lamartine I met Shirer, whom I hadn't seen since nine o'clock that morning, and we exchanged a few words about the Germans and Dr. Goddard's wayward rockets. Then he proceeded on up the stairs without enlightening me at all about any job offers from the
Herald
, and I turned around and literally stumbled into Elsie Short.

     "I want to apologize," she said.

     I looked past her to the street. It was dark and undoubtedly bone-pinching cold outside. Somebody's quilted jacket shoulder slid by on the far sidewalk, and I stiffened and felt a sensation of ice in my throat. Then the jacket was gone.

     Elsie Short folded her arms across her chest and repeated whatever she had been telling me.

     "I said, Mr. Armus called the hôtel long distance for me and
what you said, or what Mr. Root, Esquire said, turned out to be true. Mrs. McCormick did go to Nice."

     I rubbed the back of my hand against my eyes. "Did you speak to her?"

     "No. The hôtel said she was out. In fact, they said she was registered, but was about to go on a yachting trip with the Prince de Condé and wouldn't be back for at least a week. Mr. Armus is going to try again tomorrow anyway."

     "You know, Miss Short—Elsie—Elsie Short—" I stopped rubbing my hands across my eyes and stared at her.

     About three months ago a Parisian chemist named Paul Baudecroux had introduced the latest fashion sensation, rouge à levres baiser, which translated roughly as "lipstick that would not leave a mark when kissing." Our fashion editor had written three consecutive stories about it. Minor riots had broken out at the cosmetics counters of La Samaritaine. Elsie Short was wearing her green waterproof coat, of course, and the blue trilby hat with the feather. But she was also wearing, unmistakably, rouge Baudecroux. I peered at the folded slip of official Army notepaper in my hand, which was a reminder from Major Cross of his deadline and a request for another of "our talks."

     "You look tired," she said.

     Major Cross had said seven-thirty. Root had said nine. Oh what a tangled web we weave, I thought, when first we practice to deceive . . . which either Cross or Root or both of them would have recognized as being a quotation from Sir Walter Scott's
Marmion
, a tale of beef-witted men and faithless women.

     "What are you thinking?"

     I took Elsie Short's arm and led her toward the door. "Just getting my ducks in a row," I said.

Two-page Summary of the Article "Vaucanson's Duck and 'The Bleeding Man,'" by Elsiedale Short, Ph.D.

Jacques de Vaucanson was a very sick man.

     Or thought he was.

     All his life Vaucanson suffered from periodic bouts of illness, real or imaginary, associated with his bowels and his digestion. It was this morbid preoccupation with the fragility of his own body that would lead ultimately to his remarkable friendship with the king of France.

     He was, of course, a mechanical genius—as a toddler he studied a priest's clock while his mother was at confession, and at the end of a month he had memorized its design and built a perfect copy of it. As a student in the monastery of the Minime monks he invented a mechanical boat that could cross a pond on its own and also two "androids" that served dinner and then cleared the tables. The monks were
scandalized—to make a mechanical boat was one thing; to make a mechanical man was blasphemous—Vaucanson was toying with the Lord's prerogative to create, he was coming very close to the creation of—it didn't seem an oxymoron to anybody in the eighteenth century—artificial life.

     From the monastery Vaucanson went to Paris and then Rouen, where he studied anatomy with the oddly named Claude-Nicholas Le Cat, a surgeon notorious across Europe for his self-proclaimed project of building, in his own words, "an automated man in which all the primary functions of an animal economy will be duplicated, including respiration and the circulation of the blood."

     With Le Cat, Vaucanson actually built a very crude android, but it proved not to do any of the functions very well. The rather haughty young student abandoned his teacher and returned to Paris. There, despite more bouts of illness, he exhibited on February 11, 1738 his own very well-functioning automatons: the famous Flute Player, which looked like a marble statue come to life, and one year later his Tambourine Player and his Duck.

     Historians have long believed that he sold all three automates to traveling exhibitors when he went to work for the king in 1741, as Inspector of the Royal Silk Manufactures. All of them disappeared; none of them survived their creator.

     But this may not be true.

     The two musical figures were evidently destroyed by a fire in Naples in 1780. How they got to Naples nobody knew.

     But it is very possible that Vaucanson secretly bought back his old Duck in 1763, from a Lyonnaise glove maker named Dumoulin, though if he did, he never showed it in public again. Nonetheless, a "canard mécanique" was in
the inventory of his daughter's possessions at her death in 1834, with the mysterious descriptive tag, "le vrai original." Which mechanical canard was then sold by the daughter's estate to an Alsatian physician named Gottfried Beireis, who kept it in his private collection in the city of Metz.

     But in late May of 1918, the German and American armies clashed in a furious artillery battle at the nearby village of Cantigny—Colonel McCormick's Medal of Honor battle. Beireis's grandson fled in terror, and the castle was overrun and pillaged by deserting soldiers. If it was indeed "le vrai original," Vaucanson's Duck finally disappeared for good that month from the historical record, another unsung casualty of the Great War.

"It's more than two pages long." Elsie Short handed my notebook back to me and picked up her wine glass.

     I remembered that all any writer really wants, even a Ph.D., is loud, constant, and unconditional praise. "I thought it was too good to cut short," I said. "No pun intended."

     She wrinkled her rouge Baudecroux in a fleeting smile. "And I notice you didn't even get to the part about the Bleeding Man."

     I flipped my notebook open and showed her. "It took up a fourth page."

     "Do you think I could have another of these?" She held up her glass, and I signaled the waiter, who was listening to a radio turned down low so it wouldn't bother the customers.

     Then I leaned forward and said out loud what both of us had been dancing around. "So you think the duck you found could actually be the one from Metz?" I liked one of Shirer's newer bits of slang. "The Real McCoy?"

     "I think," she said carefully, "Mr. Bassot bought it or found it in a shipment of old toys, but he didn't know what it was, so he foolishly sold it to me. And it's legally mine now, I don't care what your boss's mother says."

     "No Robert Houdin? No replica? Vanished like your nephew Conrad?"

     "Oh, yes. Robert Houdin made a replica. He even tried to pass it off as the real one for a few years. Back then people were always doing things like that. Magicians used to bill themselves all the time as 'Vaucanson the Second.' I'm going to put all of that in my book. The book I'm writing about automatons. That article's just a chapter."

     She leaned back while the waiter filled our wine glasses again. The music now coming from the radio was Don Giovanni, and pleasantly enough the scene when the old General's marble statue, like Vaucanson's Flute Player, comes to life.

     "When I first visited Paris," I told Elsie Short, "before the war, people used to listen to the opera on their telephones—you had to pay a special subscription. It was called 'Theaterphone,' and it was the only time in history that their telephones worked."

     Elsie was not interested in my reminiscences. "I want my duck, Mr. Toby Keats."

     Who. What. Where. When, they taught you. I slipped the notebook in my pocket and asked the journalist's fifth question: "Why? So why did Vaucanson buy back his duck and keep it a secret all those years?"

     She drummed her fingers on the table. "I don't know why. He was a strange and disagreeable man. Maybe he wanted to give it to his daughter—he adored his daughter. Or maybe he thought it would bring him luck after the silk workers' riots in Lyon. He was evidently very superstitious. Or maybe he was just one of those people who has to have a secret—I've known collectors like that. Why are you smiling?"

     "My father used to say he belonged to the school of 'No Single Explanation.'"

     "I want my duck."

     "Is Mr. Edison really going to pay you five thousand dollars for that little hunk of rusty metal?"

     "He might. If I could get it authenticated. A museum might
buy it. Private collectors might buy it. Mr. Armus is a collector. He might."

     It was my turn to drum my fingers on the table. "Mr. Armus is a collector?"

     "He has a very good amateur collection, yes. And he knows a lot about the history of automates. He went to Yale."

     "Some people do. Does he know what you think?"

     "About the duck?" Elsie found something interesting in the bottom of her wine glass. "I suppose he thinks it's just a Houdin replica. That's what I told him." She raised her head and looked me in the eyes. "I don't like being deceitful. But to answer your question, nobody else knows that I think it may be the real Vaucanson's Duck, only the two of us. And you only know because of a crazy mixed-up delivery and a couple of ceramic parrots."