The Paris Deadline (23 page)

     Yesterday I had written eighteen hundred words on the engrossing subject of Charlie Chaplin's impending divorce from his wife Oona. Kospoth had grunted and said that the second installment on French automates ought to be the same length. Which left me, I calculated, picking up my notes, about two paragraphs to go.

     I didn't have a typewriter in my room. Much too expensive for what the Colonel paid us. At home I wrote the old-fashioned way, in longhand with a pen and ink on yellow sheets of paper that I brought from the
Trib.

     I sighed, exhaled a white comma of condensation into the cold air of the room, and quickly scribbled three absolutely ordinary sentences about French ingenuity and modern technology. Then I stopped and reread them, wincing faintly, like a tolerant but disappointed parent. Poor things, I thought, but mine own. Some people call writing "self-expression," I suppose, because the ink seems to flow straight out of your fingertips, as if it were squeezed out of your innermost self and onto the paper, as if it were part of you, as if it were in some real sense your life's blood. To write, I thought pompously, reaching for my breakfast wine, was the least mechanical act in the world. No automaton could really do it.

     Down below on the rue du Dragon some early riser was out on the sidewalk, sweeping the curb and singing a slow, scratchy song about love and war. There was a whistled refrain at the end of each verse.

     I stopped in mid-stretch and stared at the wall. Then slowly and indistinctly, like the tip of a sail on the horizon, an idea began to appear.

M
Y UNOFFICIAL WORKING PARTNERSHIP WITH
E
LSIE
S
HORT
resumed, unofficially, a little past two o'clock that afternoon.

     It was, of course, the one time of day that the city room was in full journalistic throttle, as far as the Paris edition of the
Trib
ever was. There were five reporters crowded around the big shabby oval table, three of them typing madly. Herol Egan, feet on his desk, jacket around his shoulders, was shouting into a telephone (the Problem of Communication) while he wrote down racing odds with his free hand (Self-Expression). The copy boy was staggering past him under a tottering white stack of newsprint, and Root and I were grimly facing each other at our rewrite desk. He had just handed me a marked-up page two galley when Egan let out a long shrill whistle that should have broken the windows and pointed his telephone toward the door.

     "Bombs away," murmured Root, and took back the galley.

     I swiveled around. Ms. Short was standing in the doorway,
blushing furiously. She had on her usual green waterproof coat, but today she was hatless and the coat was unbuttoned and she had clearly spent a good part of the morning in the hands of a first-class coiffeuse. Her blonde hair had been shampooed and expertly clipped to hug the soft curves and strong bones of her face. Somebody had touched her eyelashes with the faintest brush strokes of mascara, making the innocent Delft blue even bluer and much less innocent. Her blouse was white, the skirt beneath the coat was a straight fine red wool, tight as a bell, and stopped very far north of her knees. By the time she reached my desk every male head in the room was turned in her direction.

     "Who's that girl?" Kospoth appeared beside Root's chair with a handful of papers and Bill Shirer two steps behind him. He glowered at Elsie and then at me.

     "This is Toby's nurse from the hôpital," Root said, standing up and shaking Elsie's hand. "She's come to check his pulse."

     "You met Miss Short at Paulette's," I reminded him, "the other night." I had no idea whether to shake her hand or kiss her again like a plouc. In any case, it was unclear that Kospoth, who favored grappa and grenadine when he drank, would actually remember anything that had happened at Paulette's restaurant. He snorted politely and handed me a folder.

     "Nice little story," he said, "automates. But those damn things still give me the creeps. You owe me eight hundred words on this for tomorrow, Keats."

     Root lifted the folder out my fingers and plopped it on his side of the desk. "He's got to go out and talk with the lady, I think."

     Kospoth had an enormous old pocket watch that we called the Turnip. He drew it out of a vest pocket and wiped his moustache with the back of his wrist. "Twenty minutes."

     "Absitoively," I said, and picked up my coat.

     Kospoth's voice had the carrying power of a battleship cannon. Elsie and I were halfway to the door when we heard him say, "See, Root, that's a nice girl, you ought to find somebody like that."
Root murmured something and then, as I pushed open the door for Elsie, we heard Kospoth again. "Oh hell, Root, the girls you know are as hard to get as a haircut."

     Elsie smothered a laugh, the door swung shut, then immediately opened again and Bill Shirer stuck out his head. "Telephone for Toby!"

     "Posilutely," I said, and took Elsie by the arm.

We went east to a café near the square Montholon. It was still cold and gray, and the tables were crowded with city workmen who had been out digging holes and repairing pavement. We threaded our way through their piled up shovels and brooms to the far corner of the bar.

     "They call the counter the comptoir or the zinc," Professor Keats said as the bartender shoved two cups toward us. "Not elegant, but coffee costs half as much here as it does at a table."

     Elsie gave me a dazzling smile. "I have two things to tell you, Toby Keats," she said. "First, it could cost twice as much as at the table. Mr. Edison cabled me this morning—or his office did—and they liked the Normandy doll sample I sent so much that they want to sign a contract with the manufacturer. I have to go to Caen tonight and start the paperwork and then I get the job of staying in Paris and supervising everything. So I'm rich! I have a hundred and eighty dollars a month for six months and all the dolls I can play with."

     I grinned and pushed the ticket for the coffee toward her cup. "Congratulations. You can pay."

     She pushed it back. "I'm rich, but I'm old-fashioned."

     "And the other thing?"

     Her smile faded abruptly. She reached into one of the pockets in her waterproof coat and pulled out a folded brown envelope and put it on the bar.

     "Last night," she said. "Right after I let you kiss me, I stood
there and I thought, what in the world am I doing here with a white-haired old Civil War veteran like you, except that it's true you make me laugh sometimes? Then I thought I really hadn't told you everything, and I should. I hadn't shown you these. Vincent bought them for me when I first came to Paris. They're from a book by Robert Houdin. They're really rare."

     I slid two yellowing brittle sheets of paper from the envelope onto the counter. A French coffee drinker to my right pointed a cigarette at two beautifully made drawings of Vaucanson's Duck and its inner workings. "Fucking ugly chicken," the Frenchman muttered.

     "These are really detailed, like a machinist's blueprints," Elsie said, ignoring him. She leaned closer so that her shoulder touched mine. "They're either drawings of Vaucanson's Duck itself—our duck—or else drawings of the replica Houdin made for his magic act. It doesn't really matter because you can see the mechanism exposed right here, and Houdin claimed he had copied the original. I got these out after you left last night. If I follow them I can see how to attach both wings to the body just the way it shows—that was always a problem. They might even flap up and down. I know I should have told you."

     "What about the drum?" I pointed to the barrel-like contraption in the second drawing, a formidably tall cylinder of wires and springs and levers under the duck's feet.

     Elsie's face fell a little. "Harder," she said, and moved away from my shoulder. "Nobody knows if you started the drum by winding a key or using a series of falling weights to turn the wires. Houdin kept that part secret. Sometimes the trickiest thing about eighteenth-century automates is the way they start. It's not always obvious."

     Through the café window, on the other side of the street I saw a man about my age step through a doorway and disappear into a hidden court. To an American, someone disappearing through a half-open door into a hidden courtyard is the quintessential European sight.

     "What we think," I said slowly, "is that Vaucanson hid a clue in the duck about where to find the Bleeding Man. That's why he bought the duck back in 1763, that's why he left it to his daughter, that's why Saulnay wants it. But now we think we probably have to make the duck quack or waddle or wiggle its ears—it probably has to go into action and do something in order to show us."

     Elsie started to drum her fingers on the counter. "That's what we think, Toby Keats."

     The door across the street was as blank and solid as if it had never opened. "What do we know," I asked even more slowly, "about codes and ciphers in the eighteenth century?"

     Her fingers stopped and a moment later started again, as rapid as gunfire.

It was quieter and much less smoky outside in the square Montholon. I bought two more cups of coffee from a stall on the corner and brought them back to Elsie, who had found a bench opposite a children's carousel. But she was far too restless now to sit still. She took two quick sips, frowned at the silent carousel, and sprang up again, circling the bench and gesturing dangerously with her little waxed paper cup.

     Jacques de Vaucanson, she told me, had indeed been one of those Enlightenment savants who dabbled in codes and ciphers and mechanical languages. There were lots of them. There was a seventeenth-century Englishman named Wilkins who had built an elaborate "grammar engine" out of pasteboard flaps and levers. You could supposedly use it to understand any language. The mathematician Leibnitz dreamed up a kind of encyclopedia based on binary signs, every idea assigned a number, some combination of plusses and minuses that a calculating machine could decipher. Later, another Englishman named Babbage actually built two automatons like the Swiss Writing Boy, little English boys who played Crosses and Noughts and had a code embedded in the
game. Spectators in the know could read a secret political message when the boys played. It was all a game to puzzle-solvers like that, she said. Vaucanson and his friend Le Cat were playing hide and seek with the Church. But mostly people who liked such devices were just secretive by their very nature. Love of secrecy was what made them think the world had been created in the form of a puzzle, by somebody like them. It was only a clock, a machine that a smart person could figure out and copy.

     "I thought," she said, "I really, really thought that somewhere inside the duck he would have scratched numbers or letters or if you pulled the right wires, something would have opened or fallen out, a compartment ... that's what Mr. Edison would have done."

     She handed me her cup. Then she shivered and pulled up her collar and we started to walk around the little park again. At the metal gate that led out of the square a gaggle of French schoolchildren bounced in, jumping, squealing, on their way to the carousel.

     "About as far from automates," I said, "as they could possibly be."

     Elsie gave a wry little smile and took my arm, and I felt the warm pressure of her weight and inhaled the scent of her blonde hair, stylish and Parisian and bright as toasted gold in the darkening afternoon.

     "Some people thought Mr. Edison's first Talking Doll was artificial life, too," she said. "They called him a Mad Scientist. He got all sorts of letters of protest. Did you know that there's even a novel about him—
The Eve of the Future
? He supposedly creates the perfect woman, an automaton, and a young man falls in love with it, like Pygmalion."

     We were back on the rue Lamartine by now, passing in front of a pharmacy that had an elaborate display of artificial legs and eyes in the window, a very common display for postwar Paris. I looked at my watch. Norton-Griffiths once told me that we won the war because the Allied troops were equipped with small reliable wristwatches, and the Germans still used
big, clumsy pocket watches like Kospoth's Turnip. Over in the square Montholon two grandfatherly old men had started the carousel for the children.

     "The Perfect Woman," Elsie muttered, "and the Bleeding Man—what a combination!"

     If I had been Root, I thought, I would have made a joke and kissed her again and forgotten the duck. I would have sent B. J. Kospoth a jolly pneumatique and spirited her off to the nearest bistro. But I wasn't Root and I was bothered by the looks of the quilted jacketed workmen coming out of our café. If I weren't truly single-minded and obsessive I wouldn't have lasted two minutes in Norton-Griffiths' goddam tunnels. And besides, just as Root said, I wanted to show off.

     "Elsie," I said, and looked at my watch again.

     "You have to get back, I know. So do I."

     "Listen, this morning I had an idea, first about codes, and then about music."

     Most of the smaller parks and squares in Paris have children's carousels. Most of the carousels have a little barrel organ built into the central wheel. Elsie looked at me, then at the carousel, which was revolving faster and faster now. Over the shouts of the children, it was thumping out the opening bars of "Sur le Pont d'Avignon."

     "Last spring," I said, "I interviewed a visiting American musician named Gershwin. He was fascinated by the way Paris taxicab horns all sound the same three notes, like a signal. He said he was writing music based on it. You told me Bontem was interested in bird calls. Edison is interested in sound. Vaucanson was interested in sound and music, too. He even tried to build a Talking Head, right? And if Vaucanson didn't put a code in the duck, Hervé Foucault and Vaucanson's daughter could have done it, after he died. What if it's not any action the duck does, but how it sounds?"

     "The duck," she said carefully, "doesn't make any noise."