The Paris Deadline (2 page)

     In his case, the burden was the Queen Mother, Mrs. Katherine Van Etta Medill McCormick, a grande dame about a hundred and
fifty years old, daughter of the famous Civil War reporter Joseph Medill, eccentric even for a newspaper family, and much too fond (in the opinion of the
Tribune
staff) of visiting Paris. She called the Colonel "Bertie," which he hated, and had previously called him, against all evidence, "Katrina," until at the age of nine he rebelled.

     Mrs. McCormick liked Root, as everybody did, and the Colonel liked me, because he thought I was a project in need of completing. When Mrs. McCormick had errands to be done in Paris, she summoned us both and reported the results, good or bad, directly back to Bertie.

     I stopped at the corner of the rue de Provence and watched a girl herding five or six goats down the street, still not an unusual sight in Paris in the twenties. An old man leaned out of a third-floor window and shouted to her, and while I crossed to the rue Rossini I could hear the goats' hoofs clattering as they went up the stairs to be milked.

     I was a long way from Boston, I thought, or even Cantigny, and turned my gaze to the smallish blonde woman on the opposite sidewalk.

     She was studying a tray of croissants in a bakery window, she had no herd of goats, and she was well worth looking at. She wore a nicely tailored green waterproof coat, which was beaded with rain and showed off her waist and her calves and her sensible brown brogues. Her hat was a blue trilby of a style I had never seen before and which, if I were not five thousand miles from home, I would have called foreign. And she had a brilliant red feather in the hatband, like a Christmas tree bulb.

     In the buttery reflection of the shop window it was hard to see her face. She seemed to be counting coins in her palm. And despite the relative emptiness of the street, she also seemed completely unaware that she was being followed.

     The follower in question was half a block down the sidewalk, a squat, broad-shouldered, gypsy-featured man about my age. He wore a dirty gray quilted jacket and a scowl, and carried a leather-covered
billy in one hand, like a swagger stick, and moment by moment he was inching closer to her.

     Up to no good. Obviously a pickpocket, I thought, and I took a step off the curb with the idea of making some sort of warning gesture to my fellow foreigner. The swarthy man transferred his scowl to me and then, to my utter astonishment, bared his teeth in a wolfish snarl.

     At which precise moment the skies over Paris broke apart in a stupendous clap of thunder and a squall of freezing hard rain swept across the cobblestones with the rattling sound of coal going down a slide.

     I don't mind rain. I grew up in New Mexico, where rain is so important that the Navajos have dozens of different names for it, the way Eskimos have for snow. But thunder and lightning are another story, another story for a soldier—ask Colonel McCormick about it. As the first boom rolled overhead I closed my eyes and clenched my fists as I always do, and counted silently till the last vibration had died away.

     When I opened my eyes again both Red Feather and Dirty Jacket had vanished like a dream.

"A
ND
I
INSIST THAT YOU GET THEM BACK
," Mrs. McCormick said, staring at me imperiously but myopically through her jeweled lorgnette. "At once. Toot sweet!" she added for the benefit of the two frock-coated Ritz Hôtel dignitaries who stood in the center of the carpet, joined at the elbow.

     They bowed in synchronized acknowledgement and resumed their impression of stuffed frogs. Mrs. McCormick sniffed; twirled her lorgnette once by the stem like a drum majorette; turned majestically toward the Louis XV gold-filigreed table by the window.

     "And I want you to dispose of that."

     Many Parisians regard the first floor (second floor American) as the floor of most prestige in a residence, because it's away from the servants and the street. For reasons of entitlement and vanity, therefore, Mrs. McCormick always asked for and got the same four-room suite on the first floor of the Ritz, looking out on the
traffic in the place Vendôme and well above the busy sidewalk just below. It had the added advantage of facing east, so that even on this damp and gloomy morning, enough sunlight crept into the room to illuminate the memorably unimpressive object now sitting on the Louis XV table.

     "That thing, Mr. Keats." She swept her hand back and forth like a little broom, as if to whisk it away.

     The thing in question was, of all things in the world, a life-sized metal duck. It had a faded brown body and a faintly green head, like a mallard, and it was nesting, so to speak, in a white pasteboard box stuffed with cut paper. The morning light around it looked like a puddle of foil.

     "The ones I ordered were much larger and very well made," said Mrs. McCormick, "and there were two of them."

     Lightning flashed across the window, raindrops spattered on the glass, and as I closed my eyes again and counted till the thunder came, I almost imagined she was speaking of the odd pair I had seen on the rue Rossini ten minutes earlier.

     But of course she was not. She was speaking of the curious antiques she had purchased ("for a goodly price, Mr. Keats") on Saturday afternoon all the way across the Seine on the rue Bonaparte.

     "Two absolutely marvelous 'automats,'" she assured us, pronouncing the last word with so flat a midwestern accent that for a moment I imagined that she had strolled out into Paris and bought a pair of coin-operated cafeterias like Horn & Hardart's in New York. "They were South American parrots with green ceramic legs and hooked beaks, and they flapped their wings and spread their tails when you wound them up with a key."

     "Ah," said one of the Ritz brothers, "automates."

     "What I said." Mrs. McCormick wheeled the lorgnette in my direction like a double-barreled cannon. "I hate this damn country, you know. I fell out of bed here once."

     The Ritz men were conferring in sibilant French whispers.
I advanced boldly on the duck which, under the faded paint, appeared to be made out of some kind of plated copper. It had a sad little fantail of five or six dried out feathers. The copper was tarnished, its webbed feet were covered with wrinkled orange leather, and the whole thing looked, as far as you could say it about an object made of metal, moth-eaten.

     "Easy there, boy," I said, bending forward.

     An automate or "automaton" was a mechanical creature that simulated the motions of a living being. Fifty years ago, in the 1870s, they were supposed to be wildly popular in France, and you could still run across them from time to time in arcades and carnivals. In a street fair over by the Bourse I had once seen a windup automate magician on display, about ten inches high, who bowed left and right when you fed him a coin, then swiveled to a little felt-covered table, tipped his hat, and made a thumb-sized cotton rabbit appear. But science had marched on, and automates were hard to find now in the age of Maxim machine guns, wireless radios, and motion pictures.

     I poked at the duck's beak. Its long, solemn face stirred something odd and offbeat in my memory.

     A name, a place in Switzerland—somebody's duck? Who?

     There was no obvious key or lever to make it move or quack or do anything at all except sit in the wet gray light of the place Vendôme and stare at the street. A melancholy duck. I rather liked it.

     Behind me Mrs. McCormick was explaining that the wretched shop on the rue Bonaparte had sent over this morning, not her two splendid South American automatic parrots, for which she had given seventy-five dollars in cash, but this miserable, inactive, mechanical canard.

     That seemed a little harsh, I thought, and stroked the poor fellow's moldy back.

     "You will want to return it," Mrs. McCormick announced, "posthaste, in a taxi."

     A maid was quickly summoned to take the duck away and rewrap it, and the hôtel emissaries disappeared to fire an indignant letter across the bow of the rue Bonaparte, while Mrs. McCormick retired to bathe her temples in eau de cologne.

     When the maid reappeared with my package I tucked it under my arm, gave her an unauthorized five francs from Mrs. McCormick's taxi money, and oiled my way, as Bertie Wooster said of his manservant Jeeves, across the bespangled lobby of the Ritz and out into the place Vendôme.

     It was raining harder by then, backing up the gutters, giving the cobblestones a wicked, slippery sheen. I waited five or six minutes for an unoccupied cab to spit itself out from the scrum of cars and taxis slowly revolving past the hôtel awning; mentally calculated how long I could live in the South of France on what Mrs. McCormick spent on ceramic parrots (the Colonel paid his Paris reporters a starting salary of fifteen dollars a week). There was a bus stop on the other side of the hôtel, I thought impatiently, on the rue Saint-Honoré. And though I normally wouldn't go down a narrow Parisian alley—or any kind of alley, for that matter—I needed to get back to the paper for the afternoon rush. There was a shortcut I knew around the corner from the hôtel entrance. I waited another two minutes, pulled up my collar, and stepped out into the rain.

     I had just reached the narrowest, darkest part of the alley when a sudden cloudburst swept out of the sky from the east, and the walls on either side appeared to collapse inward around me, like the walls of a cave, and then exploded into thousands of dancing gray diamonds of rain.

     I pressed my back against a door, under an eave. As a new peal of thunder began, I closed my eyes and hunched my shoulders, and something much heavier than raindrops hit me with a colossal bang and I staggered sideways. Another blow caught me in the neck. Hands dug at my coat. Thunder clapped again, a huge, rolling artillery boom that carried me eight years backward in time and,
gasping from shock and pain, I went down to one knee and slowly tumbled over, just as I had before, into a roaring, buffeting, many-fisted darkness.

     When I came to, I was sitting up against the alley wall and three or four pale white faces were floating in front of me, blinking on and off like fireflies.

     Somebody started to pull on my shoulders. I shook him off. Amazingly, I still had Mrs. McCormick's package under my left arm, in an iron grip like a football. Somebody else said in French that I must have slipped and fallen in the cloudburst and knocked my head on the cobblestones. Then Waverley Root's kindly, hung-over features wobbled into focus. He changed his mind, I thought stupidly. And as he knelt on the pavement beside me I heard his familiar ironic voice begin to scold, "Well, Toby, nice weather for—"

     "Vaucanson's Duck!" I said, remembering.

B
UT ALAS, THAT WAS JUST ABOUT ALL
I
REMEMBERED
. The name Vaucanson—was it Blaise or Fran¸ois, or maybe Pierre? With my throbbing head and ringing ears I couldn't concentrate enough to be sure. An old toymaker, I thought. A faintly scandalous person. A joke by Voltaire . . .

     By the time I had eased myself into the cab that Root and the Ritz doorman had whistled over, even that much was slipping away, and the wet brown package under my arm had resumed its role as simply one more item in Mrs. McCormick's gallery of imperial eccentricities, to be delivered, as she said, posthaste.

     "If somebody actually hit you," Root said doubtfully, leaning his big round face into the taxi window like an arriving planet, "I guess you should report it."

     I shook my head, regretted it. The prospect of a damp afternoon filling out quintuplicate forms in a French gendarmerie was worse than any headache. My coat was torn, my cheek was bruised, but I was otherwise unbloodied.

     "I probably imagined it," I told him. "It was raining pretty hard. There was thunder."

     "Ah. Thunder. An alley." He studied me for a moment longer, then repeated the address to the driver and thumped the roof of the cab with his hand. When I looked back he was heading into a bar.

     Then and now, the rue Bonaparte lies all the way over on the other side of the Seine, on the Left Bank. Its southern and more fashionable part serves as the western border of the place Saint-Suplice, where the big church sports its ancient twin towers like a pair of gigantic municipal inkwells and the wealthy, retired Left Bankers sit in their shadow in the Café de la Mairie and feed the pigeons.

     Its northern part is livelier, a dilapidated little medieval corridor that runs from the Saint-Germain church up to the river and the quai Malaquais. Sometimes very late in the evening its fusty smells and overhanging timbered gables make me think of Villon's Paris, where wolves would slink into the city under the public gallows at Montfaucon and wander down to drink from the cool, clear waters of the Seine. But in fact, by day at least, it is largely a street of more or less respectable antiquarian shops, picture framers, and bookbinders, with a few students from the nearby Beaux Arts School drifting up its tributaries and lending it a slightly bohemian air.

     At quarter to twelve, just as the rain was tapering off to a drizzle, my cab pulled up in front of the church, where more pits and excavations in the nearby pavement brought traffic to a standstill. The driver shrugged. I shrugged. I paid him the rest of Mrs. McCormick's money and stepped out. I peered longingly for a moment at the Café Les Deux-Magots, where dry, clear-headed patrons were bent over an early lunch. Then I waited for an elephant-hipped omnibus to lumber by, and I splashed off down the rue Bonaparte, over a necklace of puddles, to the nearest awning.

     The degree of specialization in Parisian shops, I had learned a long time ago, is something no American, brought up on the easy-going concept of a "general" store or a five-and-dime, can readily understand. On my block of the rue du Dragon there was a shop about twelve feet wide, counting the door, which sold nothing but pet goldfish. Next to it an Alsatian butcher sold no beef, only horse meat. (Am I making this up? No. The goldfish shop was called "La Vie Silencieuse.")