The Paris Deadline (17 page)

     The door behind me swung open and Root handed me a medium-sized cardboard carton, fastened across the top and sides with electrician's black tape. "You're going to be late," he said to me, "if you don't hurry. Number sixteen rue des Minimes. Which," he added to Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson, "is in the Marais, you know, a district of Paris I dislike very much."

     "It is," she said, staring at the carton, "rather dangerous there."

     "But what can you do?" he said. "Mrs. McCormick ordered cuff links for the Colonel, a little Christmas gift, and they sent her a bunch of painted snuff box lids by mistake. If you want to come in and wait, Keats is just leaving."

M
ORE DANGEROUS THAN
M
RS
. G
LEESON KNEW.

     At a quarter past eight I stepped off the bus in front of the church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Antoine, the triple play of sanctification as Root called it, and promptly took two wrong turns in the winding medieval streets of the Marais and ended up at the northwest corner of the place des Vosges.

     Here I stumbled and nearly fell over a metal bar in the sidewalk that people once used to scrape mud from their shoes—"Marais" sounds very fine, but it really just means "swamp" in French, which is what this part of Paris was in the fifteenth century, a narrow marshy bog stretching roughly from the present-day Bastille to the Hôtel de Ville. At one point in the sixteenth century it was highly fashionable to live here. But swamp has a way of trumping fashion, and gradually, as the houses sank and the water rose, the private hôtels and luxurious apartments had been abandoned. For the last two hundred years or so, the Marais had been nothing but
a damp, crooked, and labyrinthine refuge for the social outcasts of Paris—Jews, bandits, prostitutes. Toymakers.

     At the dark and muddy rue de Béarn a city crew on overtime was digging utility ditches in the street. I turned left by a corner café, gave fifty centimes to a pair of beggars who staggered up out of the shadows, and one minute later entered the west end of the rue des Minimes.

     Henri Saulnay, born "Heinrich Zell," was fifty-seven years old, German by citizenship, but a native of the French-German region of Alsace—I knew this because, having metamorphosed now into amateur historical researcher, I had just spent two profitable hours that afternoon in the
Trib
's modest little business library.

     Saulnay was also, according to the
Almanach de Commerce
, one of a vanishing breed of little-known European craftsmen: a toymaker who designed and built by hand, in his own shop, each and every toy he sold.

     There were, our business editor had told me, perhaps a dozen of his kind left now remaining in all of France, aged Davids struggling against the American Goliaths that mass-produced toys by the tens of thousands from pre-cut and pre-stamped metal sheets and Bakelite plastic. The best American manufacturer was called the "Humpty Dumpty Circus Company of Philadelphia," and some of their toys were designed by a young artist named Alexander Calder, who had spent some time in Paris studying design. Calder liked to make toys that have moving or articulated parts like automates—he preferred the word "mobile"—and in an interview published several years before in the
Trib
he had said he thought Henri Saulnay was a true artist in his field. Too bad, Calder had said, about Saulnay's German politics.

     "If you'll wait right there," said the bored young man who opened the door, "I'll tell him you're here."

     I don't wait very well anymore. I shifted my package under my arm and followed him down a hallway and into an open courtyard. He glowered at me over his shoulder, but said nothing. Together
we squeezed along a narrow passageway on the left and stopped in front of an ancient wooden door with a sixteenth-century spy grille at the top and a Yale lock on the side.

     Any old structure in the Marais has certainly been flooded many times by the Seine, in the slushy brown days before modern dams tamed the river. In winter every crooked alley and house in the district gives off a notorious clammy odor, a cold, green, reptilian sweat that comes through the walls like a fungus. I tipped up my collar and held my breath while the bored young man fumbled through a set of keys.

     But if I expected to step through the door into something like the leaking hold of a ship, I was pleasantly surprised. The room directly in front of me was about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, brightly lit and almost dry, almost modern. There was a big, hardworking Franklin stove at the far end, and a cluttered table in the center, where my guide abruptly sat down.

     "In here, Mr. Keats, if you please." Henri Saulnay himself appeared, in his fat man's red velvet jacket, at a door just beyond the stove. He limped out two steps and waved me forward.

     The clutter on the table, I saw as I passed, was largely made up of exquisitely tiny wooden body parts—dozens of dolls' heads and legs and arms scattered about at random. More body parts were stacked in a kind of Lilliputian boneyard in the center, under a lamp. There were paintbrushes, paint pots, Christmas ribbons and wrapping paper, a flat tray of screws and screwdrivers and tiny hammers the size of my thumb. Through an open door I could see one more room. A slope-browed man in a leather apron stared at me from beneath a swinging lightbulb. Then he turned out the light.

     "A disconcerting sight, I suppose," said Saulnay in his guttural French, shrugging in the direction of the table. He ushered me into his workroom. "All those poor maimed creatures. But this is our busy season, you know, as much as a three-room workshop with almost no customers can have a busy season. The French
don't like to buy German toys, so I have to sell bits and pieces to French shops, where they put on their own name. I'm told that this time of year the Edison Doll Factory in New Jersey looks like a butcher's shambles on the grand scale—barrels and barrels of arms and legs, buckets full of glass eyes and painted lips. But that's the American way, is it not? Everything on the grand scale, even slaughter. Shall we speak English?"

     Saulnay closed the door, turned the lock, and cocked his oversized head at me.

     I looked at the locked door for a moment. Then I set my carton on the workbench that filled the center of the room and pulled up a stool. "English is fine."

     "Good. Good. Zehr gute." He removed his red jacket and hung it from two hooks on the wall, where it billowed like a sailor's hammock. Then he drew up a stool for himself at the table. "You must forgive my forced humor, Mr. Keats. I was in our Great and Mutual War, in a modest way of course, because of my age, and it was an American artillery shell that gave me my limp"—he paused long enough to adjust the swinging lamp over the table. "And my notoriously Teutonic point of view, of course. I am, you may say, unrepentantly German. Is that package for me? Let me have a look."

     I don't like impatience, especially in strangers. "In a minute, I think."

     "Oh?" The toymaker cocked his head the other way. I glanced around the room.

     Most of Saulnay's work space was filled with the same jumble of tools and toys as the outer room. On a shelf behind him sat a Punchinello marionette and two tiny brass birdcages like the ones at Vincent Armus's house. Propped against some ledgers was a framed photograph of a younger Saulnay in the uniform of a German corporal. But my eye was drawn irresistibly to something else.

     I stood up and walked over to a side table and bent forward to look at the single item on it, a beautiful porcelain doll about ten
inches high, wearing a golden-colored silk gown. She had bright blue eyes and a little puff of blonde hair and she was seated at a tiny dulcimer piano. All the strings inside it were visible. The doll's hands held two little felt-covered hammers.

     "If you touch the lever on the bench," Saulnay said, "the lady will play for you." I stretched one finger toward the lever. There was the usual delay and metallic whirring I had come to expect, then the lady on the bench began to move the hammers rapidly over the strings and a silvery bright whirl of musical notes filled the room. As she played, the lady turned her smiling face from side to side and her eyes moved back and forth from Saulnay to me.

     "That was built by a watchmaker named Kintzing, a German," Saulnay said. "About 1780. It may have belonged once to Marie-Antoinette. There's an even better one in Neuchâtel, a girl who plays original melodies on the organ. Her chest moves up and down while she plays, and the very first spectators thought she was breathing, like a living person. Most of them ran away in terror."

     I watched the hammers fly across the strings. The lady's eyes lingered on mine as she smiled.

     "In Paris, you know," Saulnay said, "some of the first spectators at the cinema fled screaming from the theater—it was a kind of a riot—such is the fear we have of artificial life. The musician in Neuchâtel was created, incidentally, by Henri Jacquet-Droz. I wonder if you've heard of him?"

     Reluctantly I stepped back from the lady with the dulcimer. She turned her head away. "You mentioned him in your talk. He built a boy who could write with a pen and ink. You said the boy could write, 'Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.'"

     "Very good, Mister Keats."

     "And Jacquet-Droz was a protegé of Jacques de Vaucanson."

     "Very good again. He studied with Vaucanson and then returned to Switzerland and started his own workshop. The Writing Boy is one of my favorites. I wish he could talk as well
as write, of course. Then he would be perfect. Many of those old craftsmen were interested in sound, you know, sound and music. Which is something they have in common with your Mister Edison, I suppose, being deaf as he reportedly is. I understand that, with a nice sense of irony, he's working on a motion picture that can talk—imagine the riots then!"

     The doll's delicate hands slackened their speed, stopped, the music leaked slowly out of the room.

     I found that I was breathing hard myself. I wiped my hands on my coat and sat down again at the worktable. "I thought you might be able to tell me something about this," I said, and pushed the carton across the table.

     He pulled it close to his belly and picked up a small bone-handled knife.

     "Your pneumatique to me at the newspaper said you know a good deal about Jacques de Vaucanson."

     The toymaker was extraordinarily deft with his hands. I watched him quickly slit a strip of tape on the box with the knife. Then just as quickly, as if he were pulling a bandage from a wound, he yanked the tape away and dropped it into a trash basket beside his stool.

     "Not a good deal," he corrected me, and wiped the knife blade on his sleeve. "I know a little something. I grew up in the Alsace, you see, and spent my boyhood summers at a family farm not thirty kilometers from our Jacques's old family home. Our friend Miss Short visited me there not long ago. My grandfather knew people who had actually been acquainted with Vaucanson. And there were still some around when I was young who remembered the family—his daughter moved there to enjoy her widowhood. There was one of Vaucanson's Paris protegés named Hervé Foucault, who evidently contributed much to her enjoyment."

     He slit a second strip of tape and opened the two cardboard wings of the carton. Then he leaned back on his stool. "You have an interesting face. Elsie Short said as much at the Conservatory. She saw you in the audience. An interesting face."

     "She said that?"

     He nodded. "She also said you write for a newspaper, which is how I found you."

     "All the moues that's fit to print."

     Saulnay wrinkled his piggy nose. "I disapprove of puns," he said dryly, "if I don't think of them myself. Before the war, let me say, Mr. Keats, I owned a small but thriving business in Dieuz, which is in Germany despite its French name. I had twenty-six employees and an annual profit of around seven or eight thousand of your dollars. The American Army burned it to the ground in 1918, and all but one of my employees was killed. So I picked up what little I had left and changed my name and came to Paris, where the craft is still thriving—not the easiest thing in the world, to move to your enemy's capital. But I thought art—and craft—are above politics and I could reestablish myself here, where the business is."

     There was a distant rumble of thunder, which I felt even through the thick walls of the workshop. "And so you have."

     "Hardly. I'm poor and not truly thriving, as you can see. But in the years right after the Peace it was worse. I was a very bitter and unhappy toymaker, I assure you, and I made certain angry speeches, led certain angry manifestations in the street that I now regret. Things are bad in Germany, Mr. Keats. It was a very bad peace you Americans imposed on us. I have considerable sympathy for Herr Hitler and his followers. But an old man's speeches and posters don't change anybody's politics. The world falls apart no matter what we think. I say all this because, along with your interesting face and handsome gray hair, I sense a certain wariness in your posture toward me. I imagine that as an American you may have formed resentments against Germans. German soldiers."

     "No."

     "No? Ancient enemies like ourselves? Very saintly of you. Well, I ramble on." He suddenly turned the carton sideways and switched from English to a clumsy Alsatian French. "'Certains ne trouvent leur vie intéressante,' as Jules Renard says, 'que lorsqu'ils
la racontent.' Some people find their lives interesting only when they talk about them. This looks like Vaucanson's Duck."

     I stood up abruptly. "The real one?"

     Saulnay had the duck completely out of the carton and was revolving it in his big, careful hands. His face had a look of genuine surprise.

     "I thought, I was told—I understood from all the books. I thought you were bringing me a toy. No, it wouldn't be the real duck, of course. The real one disappeared a long time ago. But this is certainly very old."