The Paris Deadline (22 page)

By eleven-thirty the duck was still less than half assembled—or reassembled. Even Elsie was starting to yawn, and I was rubbing the back of my neck and thinking of how soon I needed to be back at the
Trib
for the morning shift.

     Conspicuously, without comment, I retrieved the duck's packing box from the floor and put it on the table.

     Elsie stopped in mid-yawn and frowned at the box. "I'm not finished," she said. "We're not finished. We're not even close to being finished. Putting this back together could take days, if we can do it at all."

     "Well, we can't leave it here out on a table, for people to see."

     "You mean for Vincent to see."

     "According to Inspector Soupel"—I picked up the still detached head and neck while she drummed her fingers on the table—"Saulnay or Johannes could still be in Paris. The police aren't looking very hard. And Henri still wants the duck. And right now except for a sixty-year-old butler you're here all alone."

     "But the duck will be much, much safer," she said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, "in a one-room flat on the rue de Beast in the custody of a man with no lock on the door and a hole in his head who's already managed to lose the little dear twice."

     I turned the duck's head around in my palm till one small black eye was staring up at me. Maybe it would wink. "Madame Serboff has a locked room in the basement that she keeps for storage. It's not the Métro. It has a light. I go down there without any problems. I have a key. You could come and visit the duck whenever you wanted."

     "How very kind."

     I stood by the table holding the box and said nothing. She paced to the fish tanks and back. "I have to do work on my Normandy doll for Mr. Edison tomorrow morning."

     "I can leave the key with Madame Serboff."

     She made her face flat and hard. "If you lose it again—"

     "I'm a dead duck," I said, and she kept her face rigid for another five seconds before she started to laugh.

     At the front door of the apartment Nigel squeezed between us and walked a few steps down the hallway to push the button for the elevator.

     "When do the Armuses come back?" I asked Elsie.

     "In two days."

     "Mr. Armus returns Thursday afternoon." Nigel squeezed past us in the other direction and held the door open for Elsie. "At four o'clock from London." When neither of us moved, he coughed and disappeared discreetly back into the apartment. At the other end of the landing the pulleys and cables at the top of the elevator shaft began to spin back and forth like demented gyroscopes.

     "The duck may or may not know the way to the Bleeding Man," I said slowly. "The way it's broken now, we may never find out. But I'm a reporter. I like to go back to why. Why does Saulnay want the Bleeding Man? And why does he want it so much that he would actually kill somebody for it? Two somebodies if you count me."

     "Because of the money, of course." Elsie shook her head. "He's after the money, not the academic glory, like me. Not that I would turn the money down."

     "The money," I said stupidly, forcing my mind back.

     "If collectors would pay five thousand dollars for the real Vaucanson's Duck," Elsie said, "imagine what they'd pay for the long-lost Bleeding Man. You said it yourself in that little café. And remember Saulnay was ruined in the war, he lost his factory and all his money, and his business has never recovered." She cocked her head. "Or do you still belong to the School of No Single Explanation?"

     Root claims to be working on a book he's going to call
An American Guide to European Kissing.
The rules, he says, are complex, and if you don't understand them you can wind up looking like a
plouc, which is French for "redneck." Italians, for example, kiss each other three times whenever they meet, men and women, once at least in the air with a maximum of noise. German men usually don't kiss a woman's face, but bend over her hand and kiss their own thumb. The French kiss an older woman twice on the cheeks, a younger woman up to four times, depending on the degree of familiarity and the proximity of a husband. The English shake hands.

     "You don't really trust me," said Elsie Short in a quiet, rueful voice, "do you, Toby Keats?"

     Rules, I thought, are made to be broken, and I touched her lips with one finger as lightly as I could and leaned forward. When she finally drew back, her face was flushed.

     "You kiss funny," she said, and she stepped behind the door and pulled it shut with a click.

     The elevator had already come and gone again by then. I wasn't going to take it anyway, but I stared at the closed door for a moment, then walked over and stabbed the electric button twice, just as Nigel had done, and watched the wheels begin to turn and the cables move. The little elevator car slid noiselessly up the shaft. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose with two fingers and then turned and walked the eight steps back to Vincent Armus's door. Elsie opened it at my first knock.

     "And if he's not after the money?" I said.

T
HE GYROSCOPE WAS INVENTED IN
P
ARIS
in 1852 by a French scientist named Jean Bernard Léon Foucault.

     In Foucault's version the gyroscope was really little more than an amusing novelty, a clever variation on a child's spinning top. I had played with one myself as a boy and remembered the bright chromium frame and the almost hypnotic whir of the spin. Nobody knew how Foucault had come up with the idea, although the Grand Larousse suggested that it was probably devised as a supplement to his famous "Foucault's Pendulum" experiment that demonstrated (to the few skeptics who remained) the rotation of the earth on its axis.

     In its original form, and for fifty years afterwards, the gyroscope consisted simply of a frame around a metal wheel, which wheel moved in turn around a vertical spin axis. If you set the wheel spinning, no matter how you tilted or turned its frame, angular momentum would keep the wheel pointing in the direction you had first chosen.

     But you can't stop progress. Bigger gyroscopes with electric motors and gimbals were quickly put to work in the war. The gimbals were metal rings that circled the gyroscope and kept it horizontal. At first the Germans used these giant devices to keep their warships on course in rough weather. And then toward the end of the war they used them to stabilize their biggest artillery, especially the Big Bertha cannons, only by now everybody was calling the device a gyrocompass. In 1917 the British and Americans started to use them to aim the gun batteries on their battleships, because those guns could fire a shell the size of a suitcase that would fly almost fourteen miles. And while the ship's deck was rocking and swaying in the water you wanted to keep your barrels always pointed precisely in the same direction, for maximum accuracy and destruction.

     These were no children's toys. On a battleship you had a master gyrocompass, about the size of a very large desk, run by a nearby motor and linked to a series of ordinary compasses that sent signals back to it from the deck, the rudder, the engine room, all the arms and legs, so to speak, of the ship.

     The problem, as everybody acknowledged, was how to make the gyroscope smaller. Before the war an American engineer named Elmer Sperry, who would later found a company called Sperry Rand, had built a gyroscope that could fit into a wheelbarrow—he tried to sell it to the Barnum and Bailey Circus for a high-wire tightrope act. But that was as small as anybody had gotten.

     Why did you want a smaller gyrocompass anyway?

     The obvious reason was so you could install one in an airplane. Mr. Charles Lindbergh, for example, was planning, as everybody knew, to fly from New York to Paris without stopping. He would dearly love to have a gyroscope that would stabilize his airplane in the wind and turbulence over the Atlantic and guide it safely to its faraway destination.

     Another reason to have a smaller gyroscope, a reason that was slowly dawning on a few progressive military thinkers, was so that
it could guide one of Professor Goddard's liquid-fuelled exploding rockets to a target.

"Now the interesting fact about J.B.L. Foucault," I said, and lifted my glass to salute the silent but attentive books on the top of my case. "The interesting fact about J.B.L. Foucault is that he was the grandson of Hervé Foucault. And Hervé Foucault was Jacques de Vaucanson's most loyal and trusted assistant. Are you following this?"

     The books maintained their pose of polite attention.

     "He was also," I said, "as I have pointed out to Miss Elsiedale Short, the lover of Vaucanson's flighty daughter, so smitten that he followed her to Alsace when she left her husband, and there they lived together in unwedded bliss for twenty years until death did them part."

     The books frowned in concentration.

     "The same daughter," I said, "to whom Vaucanson bequeathed, oddly and mysteriously, his celebrated duck."

     It was five-thirty in the morning now, not quite five hours since I had left Elsie Short at Vincent Armus's apartment. I looked at the brown box on my desk, and poured myself another glass of what Root liked to call one's "breakfast wine," a lesser Chablis in this case. The room was freezing cold, as was the wine, and would be until Madame Serboff turned on the heat about nine o'clock. But I had gotten up out of a warm bed early, partly because my head hurt and my ears were ringing, mostly because, full-time working journalist that I was again, I still owed B. J. Kospoth the second installment of my article on French automates and children's toys. The first part had appeared a few days earlier, to the journalistic equivalent of a massive yawn— two columns of dutiful prose about Gustave Bontems and Vincent Armus, Greek and Egyptian dolls, the cuckoo clock.

     "Put some goddam zing in it," Kospoth had muttered, and so
I had now written six more pages covering Vaucanson's Excreting Duck, his Flute Player, and the "Theater of Automates" at the Conservatory where Elsie had talked. Not a syllable, of course, about the Bleeding Man. Nobody in the
Trib
's readership would be interested in scholarly speculation about two eighteenth-century hypochondriacs—I could hear the Colonel's sardonic, dismissive voice all the way from Chicago. Nobody would care that the Bleeding Man, if indeed he ever existed, could stand up and walk and turn about, going precisely where he was aimed.

     Or that he could only do that if he had a tiny gyrocompass in his head and others in his legs.

     I stood up myself and hopped three icy steps to the window and pulled the curtain back. Out to the east there were streaks of shivering white light where the frozen sun was trying to hoist itself up over the rooftops. I watched a few gray clouds drift westward toward the tomb of Napoleon and imagined a Parisian sky full of falling rockets.

     What was it Mark Twain said?—"History rhymes."

It was possible, Elsie had said when we had gone back inside Armus's apartment. She had sat down behind the table in the Collection Room again, skeptical, doubtful. Barely possible. Jacques de Vaucanson was a mechanical genius, certainly—he could have invented anything, just like Mr. Edison. And Hervé Foucault could have learned enough from Vaucanson's daughter, or guessed, or followed a hint. But still ... a tiny working gyroscope, a hundred and twenty years old. What were the odds?

     On the other hand, she said, warming to the subject, it was foolish to think that those old Enlightenment scientists were so far behind us. We were still using and refining what they had started to uncover in an astonishing burst of creativity at the end of the eighteenth century—the steam engine, she had said, beginning to tick items off with her fingers, 1775. The electrical semaphore, 1792.
The telegraph, 1794. The circular saw, the electrical capacitator, the telegraph, Volta's battery, the fountain pen.

     "The guillotine," I had said. "The cuckoo clock. Henry Shrapnel's artillery shell, 1803."

     She frowned and patted my hand.

     In any case, Henri Saulnay was an embittered and hard-up chauvinist, I reminded her. Suppose he wanted to find the gyroscope and give it to the embittered and hard-up German army? To guide the rockets we knew they were testing—Bill Shirer had already written three stories about them.

     She put her chin in her hands. Either motive was possible, she finally allowed. But the fact was, if Vaucanson had ever built the Bleeding Man, and if it did contain miniature gyroscopes to help it stand up and walk, he had hidden it somewhere very secret indeed. Unless the horrible shitting duck could tell us where the automaton was concealed, the motive didn't matter. It didn't matter why you wanted the Bleeding Man, she had said, if you couldn't find him.

     I ground out a cigarette and stared out my window at the dawn. In the cool light of day, without Johannes pounding down the sidewalk after me, it didn't even seem barely possible. It seemed like the gyroscopic hallucinations of a washed-up reporter with a hole in his gray-haired head. I shivered and hopped back to my desk to earn a living.