The Paris Deadline (16 page)

     To a reporter, however, the curious thing about Vincent Armus was that nobody knew where he got his money.

     Or more precisely, when his money would run out.

     As far as the public records went, Vincent Armus had worked for the Chase Guaranty in Paris as a gentleman banker until they closed their branch two years ago. Since then he had evidently lived on his savings, which were not inconsiderable, given that in 1919 he had inherited well over $150,000 from his father, who had owned three hardware stores in Connecticut.

     One hundred and fifty-thousand dollars was a princely sum for a
Trib
employee. But not all that much when you had no regular job but kept an apartment on the rue Jean Carriès and drove a Mercedes car. He had a personal checking account at J.P. Morgan Bank, which was eight hundred dollars overdrawn that month— this was highly illegal to know, but came courtesy of Bill Shirer's friend the German-speaking bank clerk. Armus also had a second mortgage from J.P. Morgan, which would come due next June, and it wasn't obvious from the books how he could pay it. Or in other words, as usual, Natalie Barney's information was correct and he didn't have a sou.

     But lack of income so far hadn't changed Armus's highliving style. In addition to automates, Elsie's new landlord, I learned, also collected expensive silver cow creamers, first editions of the writings of Samuel Johnson, and, according to the amazing Shirer's notes, something called "pornographic snuff box lids" painted by an eighteenth-century Englishman named Richard Cosway.

     "Of whom," said Root, "regrettably I have never heard."

     We had just then reached the corner of the rue des Capucines, where a short snaggle-toothed old Frenchwoman known universally as Madame Charlotte kept a cart of fried potatoes for sale. It was six-fifteen on a cold Monday night, three days before Mrs. McCormick was due to return from Nice, and Root was carrying a single blue chrysanthemum, which he had liberated from a florist's trash can near the
Trib
and which he now presented, with a little bow, to Madame Charlotte.

     Madame Charlotte, Parisian to the core, blushed like a schoolgirl as she took the chrysanthemum and held it up to the street lamp, and Root added something I didn't quite catch, in his own curious brand of French—he himself described it as more fluent than accurate—and she grinned broadly, as people did when they talked with Root.

     There was a pile of newspapers on an upended crate beside her.
She picked up the top sheet and rolled it deftly into a cone. Then she shook out some potato slices that were cooking in a can of oil and flipped them into the cone. A dash of salt, a splash of vinegar, and she handed it over to Root, who gave her one franc, which was too much, and murmured (I think), "Ma déesse culinaire,"—My culinary goddess.

     He was just finishing the last of the potato slices when we entered the lobby of the Hôtel Ritz. He wiped his fingers on the newspaper cone and dropped it in an ashtray. I took a heavy brass key from the man at the desk and with what I liked to imagine were condescending nods to the porter, we mounted the stairs to Mrs. McCormick's suite.

     "Did you notice, by the way?" Root asked as we entered the living room. "In his apartment Armus had a Yale medal on the wall where nobody could miss it."

     "I saw it. Class of '96." I walked over to the closet by the bedroom door and reached high up on the shelf.

     "There is," he said, clearing a space for me on the coffee table, "a brothel on the rue Chabanais that has a blue and white banner right over the piano: 'For God, Country, and Yale.' They claim it brings in business."

     Then he stood back and I placed the duck carefully on the coffee table. I had gotten the idea early on Saturday morning, looking out my window at the snowfall and thinking of Mrs. McCormick in the south of France, because she, in the careless, imperial way of the very rich, had of course kept her suite at the Hôtel Ritz while she was away. Both Root and I were known at the desk. We could come and go whenever we wanted, I had thought, on the pretense of doing Mrs. McCormick's errands. And for the safekeeping of stolen mechanical ducks, as all the authorities agree, a suite at the Ritz is better than a bank vault.

     "What time is your appointment?" Root asked.

     "No appointment. I said I would be there sometime after eight."

     "It ain't gonna fly," he said, and shook his head sadly at the
duck, which I now had on my lap. I pressed one finger down on its skull and its neck stretched slowly out full-length and its black dopey eyes stared sadly up at me, as if I were measuring it for the gallows.

     I was not bad with my hands, for a Harvard man. In my father's silver mine you worked with machines, and machines broke, and in the outer reaches of southern New Mexico, seventy feet underground, you learned how to fix them yourself.

     I picked up a tiny flat-headed screwdriver that a jeweler around the corner from the
Trib
had sold me. If you raised the wings of the duck one at a time, I had already discovered, the head would bob and some kind of inner spring would turn in the neck and make a swallowing sound like a metallic gulp.

     It was amazingly realistic. The wings, Vaucanson had claimed to the king, duplicated the bone structure of a real duck's wing. They moved up and down with perfect smoothness, and as they moved they worked a kind of suction cup or inverted bellows in the throat, exactly like sinews and bones.

     "Is this the book?" Root held up a tiny duodecimo volume that I had checked out of the American Library on Saturday, the only book Jacques de Vaucanson had ever written. It was published in London in 1742 as
Le Méchanisme du Fluteur Automate
and had an English translation in the back, "The Mechanism of the Flute-Player Automate, with a Note on Vaucanson's Duck."

     Root balanced himself on the arm of one of the Ritz's handsome horsehair sofas and flipped to the next to last page. "'I believe,' he read, 'that Persons of Skill and Attention will see how difficult it has been to make so many different moving Parts in this small Automaton of a Duck; as for Example, to make it rise upon its Legs and throw its Neck to the Left and Right.'" He paused and looked at the duck. "Can it do that now?"

     "No."

     "'They will also see that what is sometimes a Center of Motion for a movable Part, at another Time becomes movable on
that Part, which Part then becomes fix'd. In a Word, they will be sensible of a prodigious Number of Mechanical Combinations.'"

     "There was a pedestal in the picture," I said. In the second of the photographs that Eric the Minor had given me, the duck stood on top of a waist-high pedestal, with a drum-shaped wind-up engine beneath it and rods attached to its feet. "The engine made the rods go up and down like pistons in the body, but you couldn't see them because the pedestal was covered with a sheet of plaster."

     "'This Machine,'" Root turned the page, "'when once wound up, performs all the different Operations of a living Animal without being touch'd any more.'"

     He kept on reading. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it must have been like in the eighteenth century, back when Vaucanson himself was a "living Animal." The past, I had been taught by my best professor at Harvard, is a foreign country, under permanent quarantine. We can't really go there, even in imagination, and if we could go there, we wouldn't like it. We wouldn't like the smells and the dirt, the diseases, the sewage, the violence, the extraordinarily rough and clawed-up texture of everyday life.

     But then again, I thought, I had been a long time in a foreign country.

     Jacques de Vaucanson was thirty years old in 1739, the year he first exhibited the Flute Player and the Duck. All the books agreed that he was a tall, underfed hypochondriac from the provinces, uncomfortable in Paris. He was invariably overdressed in a powdered wig and a gentleman's fine laced surtout that he couldn't afford. One year earlier he had borrowed a huge sum of money to rent a workshop and an exhibition space in the Hôtel de Longueville, the "Salle des Quatre Saisons," a famously beautiful room covered with mirrored panels and gilded ornaments and newly painted frescoes over the doorways and windows. And even though he was struck down in the autumn by yet another
of his mysterious illnesses and had to direct his workmen while he lay feverish on a couch. By the time spring rolled around he had seventy-five visitors a day lined up outside the Hôtel de Longueville to see his automates perform. Each visitor paid three livres admission, a week's wages for an ordinary laborer, and Jacques de Vaucanson was on his way to wealth and fame and the Bleeding Man.

     None of which explained why twenty years later he had secretly repurchased (possibly) the Duck and (possibly) given it to his daughter.

     "'The End,'" Root read, and then closed the book. "'Finis.'"

     I picked up a wrench from the table and then, trying to ignore the feeling that the duck was giving me a look of pained indignation, I undid the rust-coated plate that served as its belly, which was as far as I had yet dared to go in tinkering with it.

     "You know what Natalie Barney said to me?" Root watched as I pulled the belly plate away. "She said she thought Armus's automates were boring, and I said why? And she showed me those enormous crocodile teeth and said, 'Because I don't enjoy innocent pleasures.'"

     I grunted and pried the plate down and a bit of screw and rusted flange dropped out. The screw was a dry ancient greenish-brown in color and clearly not machine-tooled as it would have been in the late nineteenth century or the twentieth century. Hand-turned on a metal lathe in 1738, if Elsie Short was right, by M. Jacques de Vaucanson himself.

     "She also said—this was while you were chatterboxing with your young lady—she said, 'You men are interested in women only from the waist down, while my interest in men is only from the neck up.' She hates Gertrude Stein, did you know that?"

     I did know that. Americans all over Paris knew that. I also knew that, notwithstanding their mutual dislike, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein often sat side by side for hot chocolate at Rumplemeyer's. I also knew that Gertrude Stein's favorite piece
of music was "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine," which she played over and over on a phonograph during her salons for Hemingway and the boys. But at this moment I wasn't thinking about what Root called the scribbling tribe. I was peering inside the bowels of Vaucanson's glorious duck and seeing nothing but a corroded metal cobweb of miniature struts and springs, some of them loose, some of them barely attached to the walls of the body.

     "Give up?" Root had gotten on his knees beside the coffee table and was squinting into the duck. I rocked back on my heels and rubbed my eyes.

     Outside the windows of Mrs. McCormick's suite, down on the place Vendôme, the sounds of automobile traffic had faded. There was a tourist's horse and carriage just below us, and briefly, just as if we were truly transported back to the eighteenth century, all I could hear was the slow clop-clop of its hoofs on the cobblestone, faint clicking noises that made the suite sound like a roomful of clocks.

     "I see eight extra cams I can't figure out, really small, four hooked into each wing," I said. "Right at the shoulder joint. There must be twenty more cams on each side to move the wings."

     "What's a cam?"

     "This thing. Elsie explained them to me." I showed him a tiny copper disk about half the size of an American dime. "It changes the direction of a gear. And on the throat there's a metal bar with teeth like a comb that clicks onto a gear. But these cams aren't attached to a gear or anything else. I don't get it."

     Root brushed his knees and stood up with a little wheeze. "Toby Keats," he said. "You ever hear of Captain Ahab?"

     I had, but I didn't like the question. "No."

     "It's late, it's dinnertime in Paris, you have made the acquaintance of a charming blonde person, and instead of being outside enjoying it all, you're down on the floor on your hands and knees, sweating and red-faced, like a man who's been chasing a white whale all day. Or a metal duck." He bent forward so that I had to look at his face. "What the hell do you want, Toby?"

     "I don't know what I want."

     "You still think there's something hidden in the duck, don't you? Something Elsie Short won't tell you about—diamonds, rubies, a Golden Turd."

     "I think," I said, holding up a cam from the wing and turning it slowly in the light, "I think that Jacques de Vaucanson was a very strange man. And I think," I said, "that there's something here that I can't quite see. I'd like to find it."

     Root snorted and grinned. "You just want to impress Elsie Short."

     I squinted at the cam.

     "Love," he said, "is blonde." And somebody knocked on the door.

     We looked at each other and Root's grin faded to a frown. He bent down and scooped up the duck and walked into the bedroom.

     I counted the dislodged cams, eight of them, and slipped them into my jacket pocket. Then I went to the door.

     There is a certain kind of elderly woman in Paris who grows shorter and denser with age. Their perfectly silvered white hair looks like coiffed marble, and they sprout small hard bits of jewelry everywhere on their bodies, like barnacles.

     "You're not Mrs. McCormick," said the specimen in front of me. She spoke English with a British accent and she leaned forward and adjusted her eyeglasses for maximum penetration. Behind her one of the Ritz bellmen peered over her shoulder at the room.

     "Mrs. McCormick is away on a trip. She won't be back till Thursday. I work for her son."

     "The Colonel McCormick," said the bellman. "This is Monsieur Keats."

     It was remotely possible, I thought, that Root would have a sneezing fit, or the duck would come to life and start quacking and splashing in the bidet. I stepped outside into the corridor.

     "I am Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson," she informed me, pausing ominously between each name. "One of her oldest friends. From London. I had a message from Mrs. McCormick. I most certainly thought she was here. She should be here."