The Paris Deadline (12 page)

     Louis died suddenly in 1774 and Vaucanson, bedridden and immobilized himself, died a few years later.

     As far as History knows, the Bleeding Man was never built.

     Or if built, never found.

I put down the notebook and poured myself a medicinal glass of brandy from the bottle in the letter box on my desk. Or if built, never found.

     Except in the minds of two slightly hysterical eighteenth-century hypochondriacs, I wondered, did the Bleeding Man ever really exist?

     And if it existed once, was it still around somewhere, tucked away and forgotten in a dark corner of the great scattered and jumbled family attic that was post-war Europe?

     And what possible value would it have now?

     It was a funny thing, but for the first few years after the war ended there had been a surge of sightings of mythical beasts. This had interested Colonel McCormick, so the
Tribune
often ran stories about the harebrained expeditions sent out to spot such creatures as the Australian bunyip or the African rackabore, or, my personal favorite, the cross-feathered snee. Why not one more?

     I shifted my chair around to look at the bookcase. Amid the magazines and trashy French novels on the highest shelf there was a three-volume set of
Oliver Twist
, recently purchased for two francs, fifty centimes on the quai Voltaire. Next to it was a paperbound almanac for the year 1925. Next to it an edition of
Macbeth
in French. And sitting in a shoe box on top of the
Macbeth
, looking down with envy at my brandy, was a small, bedraggled, copperish creature that once upon a time had eaten, digested, excreted (maybe), and otherwise enjoyed all the functions of an animal economy.

     Fair is fair, and fowl is fowl, I thought, raising my glass to
Macbeth
, which is a play about witchcraft and magic and murder, and men not of woman born.

     I swallowed and sighed. Then, because a vague and alcohol-addled notion was slowly taking shape in my mind, I raised my glass again to Vaucanson's Duck and showed him the notebook pages about the Bleeding Man and murmured very softly in French, so as not to wake the dead, "And what else do you know about this, my fugitive friend?"

W
ELL, OF COURSE
, I
HAD LIED
.

     In the first place, I told myself, I was a newspaperman and therefore skeptical by nature and training. And therefore still far from convinced that the sad-faced little metal contraption on my bookshelf was in fact Jacques de Vaucanson's own long-lost glorious creation.

     By general consensus, after all, the "Shitting Duck" had been Missing in Action since either 1770 or 1912 or 1918, depending on whose scholarly article you believed—Elsie Short herself had told me that the skies of the nineteenth century had been thick with Vaucansonian replicas and faux canards. Who was to say that Elsie, a roving "doll hunter," of all implausible things, wasn't simply another in a long line of tricksters and fortune seekers, aiming to put one over on a gullible public? or a wealthy and gullible collector? or a gullible and senile Thomas Edison?

     This seemed like so muddled a piece of reasoning that I stopped in the middle of the Pont Royal and took off my hat and shook my head to clear it.

     Because who would go to so much trouble for a bizarre little excreting automaton? Five thousand dollars was a lot of money, but not a duck's ransom.

     Too much brandy, I thought. Too little logic.

     It was quarter to eight in the morning, Saturday morning, and the snowstorm, our fourth of the month, was just twirling its great white billowing skirts in farewell and rising slowly to dance away to the east. We get snow in Paris about every third year, for a few weeks at a time, rarely sticking to the ground, nothing at all compared to the iron-cold winters I still remembered from the eighth and ninth circles of Hell that were Boston and Cambridge for a New Mexico boy.

     Even so, during the night a good half an inch had managed to accumulate on the rooftops and the streets. The familiar hulking black shoulders of the Louvre were still covered with a soft, unlikely crest of white, like epaulets. The trees in the Tuileries Gardens looked like ranks of white-haired soldiers in a row. Over to the east, the dawn sky was low and gray and sunless, and stippled everywhere with silvery bits of down, still falling gently.

     I watched a few early buses churn by in the snow. Somewhere off to the left children shouted. I heard dogs bark from one of the pet stores down by the quai du Louvre. Otherwise, Paris was so still and silent you might have thought its heart had stopped.

     And in the second place, I thought, starting on again toward the Right Bank, somebody had very definitely taken a fist to the side of my head, in the alley by the Ritz, while I was burdened with duck, and not much later the unfortunate Patrice Bassot had turned up dead in his shop. And though Root had snorted dismissively and quoted Thoreau to the effect that the world was simply a Tissue of Coincidences, there was no point at all in exposing anybody else to possible danger, Elsie Short included.

     This was marginally more plausible, and I congratulated myself and crossed over into the Tuileries, whose name didn't come, as most Americans imagined, from the tulips planted in its
flower beds every spring, but from the sprawling factory that used to dig up its red clay and make roof tiles (tuiles) back in the days, I thought, of Jacques de Vaucanson.

     This morning it was still too early for anybody but a crew shoveling the paths, and a pair of ragged clochards on a bench, sharing a bottle. I exited the gardens by the rue de Rivoli gate and turned left through its long, chilly gallery of arcades.

     And finally, I told myself, shifting the weight in my overcoat pocket as I approached the much brighter and breezier place Vendôme and the Hôtel Ritz—finally, in the third and last place, there was some little part of me that thought once I handed over the duck, that might well be the last I would ever see of small, blonde, rather splendid Elsiedale Short.

Unlike the
New York Herald
, the
Trib
put out a Sunday edition. But it was a laughably thin affair and consisted mostly of advertisements and an occasional travel supplement, along with various "soft news" features that we either copied shamelessly from the home Chicago edition or wrote ourselves for an extra stipend from the Colonel.

     It was almost nine o'clock by the time I reached the rue Lamartine, and the city room was still empty except for B. J. Kospoth and the French copy boy, who were sitting at opposite ends of the long table drinking coffee from paper cups and staring at each other.

     A skeleton crew would drift in later to lay out pages and check the cables, in case the weekend in America produced something important enough to stop the presses. Meanwhile I sat down at my desk by the window and thumbed through my files. The French copy boy came by, smirking around a foul bituminous Gitane, and told me that the snowstorm had knocked out the electricity from Montmartre to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and likewise all the telephone lines in Paris. But the pneumatique, he said with an
admiring shake of his head for the genius of France, was immune to all possible weather and functioning just as well as ever.

     With which he lifted up a wire basket of fat little copper cylinders and dumped them on my blotter.

     The pneumatique seems incredibly quaint now, but in those days it was the last word in urban communication, and in many respects the very practical Parisian response to their moody and unreliable telephones.

     An X-ray photo of Paris in 1926 would have revealed the system to an onlooker: an amazingly complex web of two-inch pneumatic tubes and pipes under the city's skin, strung all over the central arrondissements, beneath the sidewalks, over buildings, through the Métro, like two thousand miles of veins and arteries in a gigantic Bleeding Man. You could find the pneumatique in businesses, hôtels, embassies, even in some private residences. The copper cylinders that I was unpacking on my desk were about six inches long, the shape of a stubby candle, and they twisted open at either end to allow a rolled-up paper message to be inserted. Air pressure propelled the cylinders at remarkably high speed, like underground rockets. If your correspondent didn't have the pneumatique, you could pay an extra thirty centimes and fire your letter off to the nearest post office, which promised to deliver it within two hours, and often did.

     I knew so much about the system because I had written a feature three months ago for a particularly slow Sunday edition. Kospoth had run it uncut and asked for more, and the following week I had written a piece about the first private bus line in Paris (it was started, since you ask, in 1684, when an entrepreneur named Villiers bought twenty big horse-drawn freight wagons called carrosses, installed backless benches in them, and hired the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal to work out the most efficient and profitable routes).

     As if on cue, Kospoth finished his coffee and worried his way down to my desk.

     "This is okay," he said, handing me a dummy of tomorrow's page three. "I'm actually bumping the Paul column to Tuesday, so you get an extra inch."

     "Give a man an inch," I said, "and he thinks he's a ruler."

     Kospoth rubbed the back of his head and grimaced, because putting out a newspaper was the single most serious and important thing in the world and not ever to be joked about. I turned the dummy page around to look.

     This week I had written about a uniquely Parisian enterprise I had stumbled on one evening when I was wandering near the Bastille. It was called the "Blanchisserie des Imprévoyants," which translated more or less as "The Laundry for Those Who Don't Plan Ahead," and it consisted of two bare, steamy rooms on a backstreet just beyond the ancient pile of brick and rubble where the French Revolution had begun. In the front room about a dozen men were sitting in chairs around the walls, naked from the waist up. Some of them were reading, some were playing cards. Most were just smoking and staring out the window. In the back room a stooped and wrinkled Corsican, old enough to have been there when the Marquis de Sade lodged in the prison, was slowly and methodically washing and ironing their shirts while they waited. The only shirts, in fact, that most of them owned. He charged thirty centimes an item, same as a pneumatique. Collars cost extra. I thought the name of the place was a bit unfair.

     "The Colonel likes this stuff," Kospoth informed me with a sniff. Kospoth had been a brand-new reporter on the
Des Moines Register
when a hurricane and fire in 1894 killed five hundred people in Hinckley, Minnesota, and thus he tended to equate news with disaster.

     "I was thinking," I said, "of a story next week about French automates."

     "What? Like Horn and Hardarts?"

     "Little machines, automatons, toys that look like people and wave their arms and roll their eyes just like you."

     "Those things give me the creeps," Kospoth said, and picked up the dummy page and took three steps back toward his sanctum. Then he turned around and came back to my desk.

     "The Colonel says you got no ambition," he said. "You know that?"

     I nodded and opened the last of my cylinders.

     "You could get out of this if you wanted to—" Kospoth's arm took in the big, shabby city room, our run-down building, presumably the streets, and the gray and alien city outside. "You're so good," he said, "you write so clean and fast, you could be in New York, Chicago—"

     "Paris," I said.

     His face went hot and red, as if it had burst inside. "You make a joke out of everything, Keats. But you don't fool me. You're hiding out from the war, off in your miserable little Left Bank apartment and you don't talk to anybody but that nut Root. You want to know who's a goddam automaton?" he said. "You are!"

     Somewhere a telephone rang, and we both looked around, startled. Then Kospoth leaned over and rapped the side of my desk with the edge of the dummy. "Bulletin just in," he said, "the fucking war is over!"

     I watched the door of the sanctum slam shut, then swiveled my chair around. People were starting to wander in now. One of the financial reporters was at the oval table, typing. Herol Egan was standing in a corner, reading Le Monde. I swiveled back and sat quietly, looking at nothing. Slowly my hands stopped trembling. I lifted them carefully from my lap and placed them flat on my desk. I heard myself inhale and exhale gently, the way Buddhists do when they learn to meditate.

     There were seven pneumatiques on the blotter, five of them press releases from the various fashion houses along the avenue Montaigne, which, since snow was still falling all over Paris, were naturally getting ready to announce their spring lineups.

     The sixth copper cylinder, however, had clearly materialized
straight from the great universal Tissue of Coincidences. In it was an envelope addressed to Mrs. Millicent Cubbins, Society Editor, not of the lowly
Chicago Tribune
but the exclusive and fashionable
New York Herald.
Her name, however, had been partially crossed out and over it a familiar hand had printed in loud caps, "TO THE POET KEATS."

     I opened the envelope and took out an expensive-looking creamy bond note card that fell just short of being a press release. It was a personal invitation to Mrs. Cubbins and it read: "Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Armus will be receiving guests Sunday, December 14 at their spacious home on the rue Jean Carriès, from 8
P.M.
to midnight. Light refreshments will be served. And as a special treat of the season, Mr. Armus will be displaying the latest addition to his colorful collection of French automates—the celebrated nineteenth-century creation 'Bird Bush and Clock,' by Bontems."

     Across the bottom of which Eric the Minor Billings had scrawled in rude blue pencil, "Curiosity killed the Cat—E."