The Paris Deadline (27 page)

     I was trying to do the math in my head. "You couldn't have known her?"

     A snort this time, not a chuckle. "I'm not as old as all that, young man. I was born in 1848, if you want to know, in the Dordogne, in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. Angélique was dead before that. But I come from a long-lived family, and my grandfather was younger than she was. He lived to be ninety-three. I remember him well."

     "And the ring?"

     She rotated it slowly, hypnotically, in the light. The distant piano stopped and applause rippled into the room.

     "Well, it first belonged to the king," she said, with a little nod of satisfaction and pleasure. "Then it belonged to her, that was the story. Louis XV of disgraceful memory must have given it to Jacques in the middle of the eighteenth century. When Angélique ran away with my grandfather, her husband the comte cut off all her money. How she lived after that nobody knew, because my grandfather never made very much from his automates. But everybody thought Jacques had secretly left her all the jewels and gold that he earned from the king, for the silk machines in Lyon. He must have hidden it somewhere before he died, from the tax collectors. But he told Angélique where, and whenever she needed money evidently she just dipped her hands into a treasure chest, like a pirate queen."

     "In Neuchâtel?"

     Annick Perret's plaster-white face turned slowly toward me. Up close I could see what a work of art her maquillage was— eyebrows completely shaved and replaced by two thin curling lines; eyelashes tipped with purple mascara; her mouth a deep, sly scarlet bow of strident geranium red.

     "That was the very odd thing," she said, almost in a whisper. "She always disappeared from Neuchâtel for six or seven days, and when she came back, my grandfather said her carriage smelled of limestone—he was from near the Dordogne, and he would know. The Dordogne is limestone country. To tell the truth, I always thought he was in on the secret."

     I leaned back and took a deep breath and wondered if a cigarette would offend her. Out in the big room a new and very different kind of piano music had started, angry and percussive, nothing like a Charleston.

     "George Anthiel," Annick said with disdain. "He once wrote a ballet for six player pianos and two airplane propellers."

     "Did your grandfather," I said, choosing my words as carefully as I could, so that nothing could possibly go wrong, "ever talk about something called 'Solresol'?"

     She frowned at me, at the open door and the music, and shook her head.

     "When he worked for Vaucanson, did he ever make musical automates? Music boxes?"

     "Like the Flute Player, you mean?" She shook her head again. "Those were very early in Vaucanson's life. My grandfather came to him almost as a boy, at the rue Charonne, and he worked on the weaving machines. In Neuchâtel he worked for the Jacquet-Droz family, and none of them was particularly interested in music. They rarely made music boxes."

     "They made," said small, blonde, absolutely gorgeous Elsie Short from the doorway, "automatic Writing Machines. You should remember that, Toby. They made the first automates who
could hold a pen and write out actual letters and words, and they could write all sorts of things, in French or English."

     "There's still one of them that works perfectly well," said Annick Perret, smiling at Elsie and beckoning her forward. "'The Writing Boy'—it's in the museum in Neuchâtel."

     "What they wrote," Elsie said, staying right where she was, looking straight at me, "depended on the cams."

I
T WAS ALMOST ELEVEN O'CLOCK
before we could make an exit from Natalie Barney's party. Twice we eased our way, like fugitives on the lam, through the big drawing room toward the hallway, and twice we were stopped, once by Libby Armus, who had someone Elsie positively needed to meet, once by Natalie Barney, who took us both over to shake the limp paw of the composer and pianist George Antheil.

     Even then, we had scarcely reached the sidewalk of the rue Jacob when Vincent and Libby Armus came out of a clowd of furs and top hats and caught us at the curb. Libby led us all toward a waiting taxi (no Mercedes this time, I noticed with interest).

     "I would very much," said Vincent Armus, bending close to me, murmuring, "very much like to conclude my business deal regarding the automate, Mr. Keats. Elsie is hesitating. I understand you are somehow a partner in it, or at least she wants your consent. Actually, I don't understand that at all. It's her property."

     I pulled up my collar. The rain had died away, but the air was misty, and a fidgety, uneasy wind was still brushing off the wet rooftops, sending some gray clouds scudding east toward Switzerland. Through a gap overhead there was a pale white new moon with beveled edges like a cam.

     I absolutely hated the high, tense whine in my ears that Johannes's fist and pistol had given me, an unearthly sensation like a piano wire stretched through my head. "I'm not sure," I heard myself say, "that it's a very good business deal for her."

     "Mr. Keats—"

     Libby Armus peered around his shoulder. Her beaked nose was red with cold, but her expression was cheerful, friendly.

     "Mr. Keats, do you need a ride in our taxi? Did you like the music?"

     "I liked your Charleston fine. Not so much the other guy."

     "Is it more money?" Armus said. "I would be willing to pay—" He paused and squinted at the moon. "I would be willing to pay six hundred dollars down in cash, right now, three thousand in total."

     "Sweetheart, cash? You know we shouldn't be buying more—" Libby turned toward Elsie. Elsie put her hand on Armus's sleeve.

     "Toby and I still need to talk some things over first," she told him with an apologetic grimace. "It's my property, but we have a kind of arrangement. And besides, I don't want to sell you something if it's broken or, worse yet, not genuine."

     "I'll take my chances on all of that," Armus said in the same impatient voice. "My offer is very generous. You won't do better. I would really like to settle the thing right now. As for being broken, I can repair the duck myself. Whether it's by Vaucanson or Houdin, I want it."

     Libby Armus, cheerfulness replaced by a small, tight expression of worry, had moved over to the open taxi door. "Are you getting in back with me, Elsie dear?"

     "I'm going to walk," Elsie said, taking my arm, "with Toby."

     We were halfway down the block when a side gate opened in a wall alongside number 20 and Annick Perret hobbled out, talking over her shoulder to someone inside. As she saw us she waved and said in English, "Such a handsome couple!"

     Both of us nodded and waved back, and then we turned the corner onto the dark and leafy rue de Furstemberg and Elsie dropped my arm like a sack. "I'm still mad at you," she said.

     "It wasn't Solresol at all," I said, and took her arm back.

     "Correcting my grammar." She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, grinning, put a hand on each of my coat lapels, and studied my face. "Whether or not, Toby Keats. The Writing Boy!" she said, and kissed me so hard that, as Root would say, my socks rolled up and down.

     She was wearing the same green raincoat she had worn the first time I saw her, and a darker green cloche that reached down to her forehead in the flapper fashion. The night mist sparkled on her face like jewels. I kissed her back, slowly, for perhaps a month and a half, and when we had both come up for air we started to walk again.

     "There was probably never a code," I heard myself saying as we turned another corner. "Either Vaucanson or Foucault—or both of them—just set up a machine to write out in plain French where the money was—"

     "And wherever the money was," Elsie said excitedly, "that would be where the Bleeding Man was, too. Because he kept it all hidden, everything was hidden from the tax collectors and the Church."

     "Where it was, where it is now."

     "Don't you dare correct my grammar."

     We debouched on the rue de Buci, which had an open-air vegetable market three days a week.

     "And the secret location," I said as we picked our way between the empty stalls, "was kept in the Duck."

     "Which Angélique-Victoire inherited—"

     Elsie stopped and frowned at the boulevard Saint-Germain just ahead. "This isn't the way to the Armus's apartment."

     "No."

     "It's the way to the rue du Dragon."

     "Yes."

     "Are you leading me astray, Toby Keats?"

     "I certainly hope so," I said, taking her arm again.

     We turned and walked west, leaning into the wind. We passed a Métro sign and the wolf-gray stone haunch of the Saint-Germain Church. The Flore was almost empty, the Deux Magots was closed, and most of the side streets looked deserted. We crossed over and turned south on the rue du Dragon.

     "I don't even know," Elsie said, shivering as the wind began to nibble and bite, "where Neuchâtel is."

     "It's in Switzerland, on the Lake of Neuchâtel. Population about four thousand. It's five hours away by train."

     "It might not be," she used her warning voice again, "the right automate, you know. The cams might not fit, or they may be too old and damaged. And there still might be no Bleeding Man after all."

     For an instant, for the single pulse of a thought, I wanted to say there was always a Bleeding Man. Poor maudlin Toby.

     "Did you really tell that old lady," Elsie said, "that I was your petite amie?"

     "I did. I told her you were one half of a handsome couple."

     "Root says there were camp followers in the war, all of you soldiers had mistresses."

     "Not me," I said, turning and holding her at arm's length so that I could see the red spots of cold the wind had rubbed on her cheeks. I was about to make a joke to avoid the subject of the war, as usual—camp followers were off-limits, Hors de Combat.
But I was fumbling at the same time in my pocket for a key and distracted, because something was not quite right. Ordinarily Madame Serboff locked the door to the building at eleven and went to bed. After that, to get in you had to ring her bell and wait on the sidewalk, stamping your feet and blowing on your fingers in the dark, until she had lit a cigarette and put on her pink flannel robe and floppy slippers and come shuffling and muttering out to the front. But given the strange hours of the newspaper business I had my own key.

     "Toby?"

     "Take your hand out of your pocket, Mr. Keats."

     I turned around slowly, fingers curled and tingling, and saw the small piggish black eyes and white jowls of Henri Saulnay, long expected, long forgotten. I felt something round and hard jam into my back.

     "My nephew Johannes is behind you," Saulnay said. "He's armed and unpredictable. Come this way, both of you."

     Elsie started to pull me away. Saulnay reached over and slapped her once and then stepped back, and Johannes showed her the gun.

     "I'll yell," she said, staring at the gun.

     "And he'll shoot," Saulnay told her, "your friend."

     I saw her face, white and frightened under the cloche, then Johannes pushed me hard toward the door.

     There was a main entrance to the building, and a lower entrance under the steps, where the dustbins were kept. We went down the steps and into a narrow passageway, past the coal chute and the gently hissing boiler that in theory supplied the rooms with heat. It was only two feet below street level, with narrow windows at sidewalk level, and both Saulnay in the front and Johannes behind us had flashlights, so that we weren't really underground or in the dark, but even with all that I stumbled and my hands began to shake.

     "Where's Madame Serboff?" I said.

     Saulnay ignored me. We went down four wooden steps. I heard Saulnay turn a lock. Elsie said something, breathing hard. Johannes jabbed me in the ribs and I walked through the door. On the worktable in front of me I saw Elsie's toolbox, a tiny oil can, scattered wrenches. At one end were bits of springs and levers, some crumpled sheets of brown paper, and sitting in the middle of the paper, as if in a nest, its melancholy eyes fixed on me and its metal beak gaping in surprise, Vaucanson's goddam Duck.

     It was Madame Serboff's storage room, of course, where Elsie had been coming each morning. Johannes shoved me to one side and closed the door. On the other side of the table Saulnay switched on the overhead bulb.

     "Turn the lock," he said. Johannes stretched his arm over to his left and slid a bolt. Saulnay pulled Elsie's work stool out from the shadows and lowered his bulk onto it.

     "This belongs to Johannes." Next to the brown paper, he picked up a banana peel, rather fastidiously, with his right hand. His left hand had slender wooden splints on the two middle fingers, held in place by a cloth bandage. "We were here for much of the night and of course became rather hungry. But that's no excuse. Germans are not usually so messy. Bonsoir encore, Mr. Keats. Tie him up in that chair, please, Johannes."