The Paris Deadline (26 page)

     It was seven o'clock by then, and there was a light drizzle and the wind was harder and colder than ever. I left Root at the corner of his building and made my way over to the nearly deserted place Saint-Michel, ordinarily the busiest spot on the Left Bank. From there I walked along the river to the pont des Arts. Then I pulled my collar up and my hat down and pushed my way out to the humpbacked center of the bridge, where I leaned against a railing and listened to the passing barges slapping against the current— do, re, mi—sol, re, mi.

     Parisians call them the Right Bank and the Left Bank because the earliest maps all showed Paris as you looked downriver from east to west. And the right bank, of course, was the Right Bank. I loved the neat and orderly French mind, deluded by logic.

     The place to really see Paris, all the guidebooks agree, is from a bridge, any bridge, preferably at sunset or dawn, but probably not on a dark February night when the wind is blowing little silver bullets of ice. I held onto my hat and watched the traffic.

     A clock on the quai Voltaire struck the quarter hour. Something was coming with the wind, I thought, something was coming to a head. I felt my nostrils flare against the stinging cold, the way they used to do in the war, before the artillery fire began. My left hand fumbled in my pocket and traced the edges of Natalie Barney's invitation and I lowered my head and started to walk. Proto Man goes to a Party.

     At the rue Mazarine I cut through a maze of narrow streets and cobblestoned passageways that, apart from a scattering of electric lights here and there, must have looked pretty much the same when Thomas Jefferson and his private secretary William Short walked up and down them at the end of the eighteenth century. Then I emerged onto the better-lit rue Saint-Benoit and tapped on the window of the Café Camargue and William Short's bright, blonde, twentieth-century descendant turned and gave me a dazzling smile.

     "You drink too much," Elsie said as I slipped into the chair beside her. "So I ordered coffee."

     "I like to drink."

     She reached over and patted my hand and the cat Byron leapt up on the table next to me and purred a warning. "My chaperon tonight," she said, "needs to be sober and alert. I've been reading about Natalie Barney. I really shouldn't go at all."

     "You'll be the belle of the ball."

     "That's what I'm afraid of."

     There was no good answer to that, so I took off my overcoat and kissed her quite long and hard on the rouge à baiser and then took off my hat.

     Elsie blinked and gave a slow, very different kind of smile. "Some chaperon."

     "Madame Serboff says you didn't come by this afternoon."

     "Ah. Well." Elsie sat back so that the Greek owner could deposit two strong black coffees on the table, served as it often was in those days in sherbet glasses. She ladled sugar into hers and frowned so hard that the cat backed away. "Well," she said, "about that. I've been giving it a lot of thought, all yesterday and today, and I just don't see how your theory's going to work, Toby Keats. That's why I didn't come by. I've tried everything I can with the cams. I simply don't understand how the duck could make a sound on its own, not even a quack, that would turn into a musical code."

     The disadvantage of the sherbet glasses, of course, was that they didn't have handles, so that you had to sit and stare at your coffee until it cooled down. "What about the tines in the throat?"

     "Probably there just to break up the food when the silly thing swallowed."

     "Like hens' teeth."

     She didn't laugh. "Hens don't have teeth. Two of your cams are probably extras. Or maybe duplicates. I didn't look. I just put them back in your envelope."

     "They look like they have different bevels."

     "Well, I'm sorry, I just don't think it makes any sense, not the gyroscope theory, or the idea that Saulnay wants to give it to the German army. When you come right down to it, he just wanted the duck for himself. He's a toymaker."

     She took a sip of her coffee, made a face, and spooned another mound of sugar into it. "You're a very persuasive person, you know, despite all your bad jokes and the way you live like a crab in that terrible room. When you get an idea, you're like my father, you'd have to be hit on the head to make you change direction."

     "That could be arranged," I said. "I'd prefer a cam."

     She laughed. "Anyway, in the clear light of day"—she looked at the window and the dark street outside and gave a wry shrug. "In the clear light of dark, I guess, even the Bleeding Man seems like a Jules Verne story. I'm not as stubborn as you are. I guess
deep down I don't really believe Vaucanson ever did more than talk about it. I certainly don't believe I'm going to find it now and make my fortune."

     She raised the sherbet glass of coffee with both hands until all I could see was her Delft-blue eyes. "But here's the good news, Toby Keats," she said. "Vincent wants to buy my duck."

N
ATALIE
B
ARNEY LIVED IN A THREE HUNDRED
-year-old house that she had bought in 1909.

     Three hundred years is old, even in Paris, even to somebody from Boston. Her house was located ten minutes from the Café Camargue, a couple of blocks down the rue Jacob from the even older building where Benjamin Franklin and John Jay had signed the treaty with the British in 1783 that ended the American Revolution. A few years ago the Paris branch of the American Chamber of Commerce had put up a small plaque on the Franklin house, and on warm days you could often see an American or two standing on the sidewalk reading it. In 1916 some of the wild-boy aviators from the volunteer Lafayette Squadron had thrown a stupendously drunken party in what they thought was the very room where the treaty was signed. Then they had gone out to the Battle of Verdun and shot down German pilots till the sky ran red.

     Elsie and I left the Camargue at exactly half past eight and
walked five minutes north, heads bowed against the wind, arguing all the way.

     What Vincent Armus proposed, she said for the third time, was to give her two thousand dollars for the partially reassembled automate. That was a very good price, she thought, for an antique toy in such terrible condition. Even before it was broken, establishing that it was truly Vaucanson's Duck was going to be hard. She could write to Mr. Edison, but he wasn't going to be interested in something that badly damaged. Besides, he wanted a doll who could talk, not a duck who couldn't even quack. In any case, legally the duck belonged to her. And two thousand dollars was a very good price, a terrific price, whether or not I agreed.

     "Just 'whether,'" I said, stupidly pedantic. "Not 'whether or not.'"

     "Whether or not," she said grimly, "it's the original Vaucanson's Duck, he wants to buy it. It would suit his collection of birds, he says."

     "For cash?"

     "For three hundred dollars now, the rest in six months."

     "I say No."

     "And I say Yes," she said, looking at me with Delft-blue daggers. "And you don't really have anything to do with it."

     At which point we rounded a corner and found ourselves on the rue Jacob. Ahead of us, amid shrieks of laughter and gusts of wind, a line of grumbling black taxis was discharging fellow guests at the curbside of number 20. We joined them, slipped through a brightly painted blue wicket and crossed a cobblestoned courtyard to the front door. There one maid took our hats and coats and another led us down a hallway and pulled open a pair of French doors.

     "I don't think he has two thousand dollars to pay you," I said. "I think he's going broke."

     "Oh," said Elsie, and took one step forward. "Oh, my."

     Root has a theory that because the great seventeenth-century architects were first trained as artists and spent years drawing the
human body, when they began to design buildings and rooms, they instinctively found the right proportions to put around the human frame. But whatever Natalie Barney's living room had looked like in the seventeenth century, in 1926 it had clearly undergone a modern metamorphosis.

     The room in front of us now had been carved out of three separate smaller rooms— you could see the old ceiling beams and supporting timbers—so that it was twice the size of the drawing room in Vincent Armus's apartment. But tonight there were at least sixty people, male and female, laughing and smoking, crowded into the single space, along with a grand piano and a buffet table in one corner, and all sense of proportion had clearly been blown to pieces. At the far end of the room, a row of tall windows exposed the famous garden. Beyond them I could make out two or three columns of the Sapphic Greek Temple.

     "It was supposed to be a small, intimate literary gathering, you know, champagne and chocolate." To our right, from another hallway, our hostess herself materialized, splendid in a shimmering white cocktail dress and three great loops of colored beads that reached all the way to her hips. I thought they looked like bicycle chains.

     She smiled at me, took Elsie's arm. "But as you see, it's gotten rather out of hand. You can find yourself a drink, Mr. Keats, I'm sure, while I show our friend around."

     "Duck soup," I said, and gave a little bow.

     "Sober and alert," Elsie muttered, and then I watched as Natalie led her away, toward a group of handsome young women dressed in tailored men's suits and bow ties, à la gar¸onne.

     The drinks were dispensed by a stout Negro woman in a musketeer's cape and a cocked hat with a feather. I took a glass of vintage Veuve Cliquot that, Prohibition or not, you probably couldn't have bought in New York, and dog-paddled my way across to the other side of the room.

     More than sixty people, I decided. Far too many people for
the modest old seventeenth-century spaces. They were more or less equally divided between men and women, and most of the men were in drab business suits or evening clothes. But the women—the women were wonderful, the women were like flocks of birds in a Parisian park, bright, glittering, in constant fluttering motion, breaking the gray smoky air of the room into noisy scoops of color. Some wore cocktail dresses like Natalie Barney's. Others were crowned with red or green turbans or fashionable "princess" tiaras. The red of the turbans, I knew from the
Trib
's social page, was called, quite poetically, 'strident geranium red.'

     Elsie had slipped out of the clutches of the gar¸onnes and was standing with Natalie Barney by the buffet. She motioned me toward her and I turned to put down my glass.

     "The architects," said a husky French voice to my left, "have warned poor Natalie that the floors will collapse if she lets people dance."

     "But I see a piano."

     The voice belonged to a very tall, very elderly woman, who patted my shoulder kindly. "That's because she is going to subject us quite soon to the music of George Anthiel. From the back your gray hair made me think you were going to be much older," she said in English. "I'm Annick Perret. Is that your petite amie?"

     I looked back at Elsie.

     "She's perfectly safe, you know," Annick Perret said. "Natalie never tries to seduce someone at her Tuesday events. These are for 'culture' only. But if your friend comes back for the Saturday salon—" She wagged her fingers in an inimitably French manner and grinned through a dense layer of powder and rouge. "Oh, la la!" she said, and quickly added, "Don't look at my face. I've had it redone so many times I look like one of those ceilings by Michelangelo. Come sit down over here and tell me your name and get me another drink."

     I did all three in backwards order and as I sat down the Muse of Coincidence must have turned her ironic gaze on me, because
Annick Perret leaned very far forward, gripped my arm with a bejeweled claw, and said, "I heard Natalie say your name. I think you must be the Mr. Keats who wrote those very amusing articles about automates?"

     "You read the
Tribune
?"

     "I like the American slang. And you see, I have a small collection of automates myself, French and Swiss. They were made by my grandfather, whom you somehow very oddly neglected to mention."

     Despite my bad ear and the noise of sixty chattering Frenchmen, I still imagined I could pick out Elsie's rising voice. I twisted my head and saw her and Vincent and Libby Armus, walking toward the piano.

     The grip on my arm tightened. "His name was Hervé Foucault," Annick Perret said, and the Muse of Coincidence laughed out loud, "and he lived in Neuchâtel. He was, how would you put it in slang? He was the 'fancy man' of that terrible little pute, Jacques Vaucanson's daughter."

     The piano burst into a Charleston. I took one astonished look at Libby Armus bent over the keyboard, fingers flying, and then lifted a startled Annick Perret out of her chair and guided her around a corner, into a book-lined study with paintings I ignored and a beautifully upholstered lady's chaise longue.

     "If you shut the door, too," said Annick with another broad grin, "it will do wonders for my reputation, even at seventy-nine. Especially at seventy-nine."

     "I know about Jacques Vaucanson," I said, pulling out the chaise for her. "But not much about his daughter."

     "You were in the war, were you not, poor boy? The eyes always give it away." She rubbed the nubby fabric of the chair with her palm. "So much in a hurry, so single-minded, all of you after the war. You think the world could end at any moment. Sit right there. Do you see this ring?"

     She held up a crooked finger that was bent by arthritis
and age, and also by the weight of a thick, beautifully worked band of silver with a teardrop ruby set in the center. "This ring belonged to Jacques Vaucanson's daughter," Annick said. She turned it under a lamp and it caught the reflections of old leather books, gold-stamped bindings, three hundred-year-old light. "Angélique was her name, Angélique-Victoire de Vaucanson. She married the son of the Comte de Salvert, but he was a fool and she was a flirt and my grandfather Hervé, of course"—a proud and rather salacious chuckle—"was adorably handsome. And a genius with his hands, which a woman always likes."