The Paris Deadline (28 page)

     He cleared a little more space around the duck and leaned back so that his face hung by itself in the light. Johannes prodded me onto a wooden kitchen chair and lashed my hands behind me with a rope. Then he drew the rope under the chair bottom and tied my ankles to the lower rung and stepped back. Around the sides of the storage room there was nothing to see but a bicycle wheel suspended from a wall. To the left of the duck's feet, in the clutter of parts and tools, lay a small beige paper square, as inconspicuous to me as the Eiffel Tower. I took the cams off, she had said, and put them back in your envelope.

     "Well, I have to give you credit, my dear Elsie Short." Saulnay beamed at her as if they were back on the lecture platform at
the Thêatre des Automates. "From what I had understood, our mechanical friend here was hopelessly broken when Mr. Keats had his moment—what was it, Keats, at the Métro? Panic? Terror? Johannes described it quite vividly. Something to do with the trenches, perhaps? Never mind. The duck looks good."

     The duck, I thought, looked very good. It looked as if it had come back to life, if you could say that about an inanimate object. I kept my eyes fixed on its back and tail, where Elsie had somehow found and inserted a few green and black authentic duck feathers. I kept my eyes far away from the beige envelope.

     "When I saw the duck before," Saulnay said, "in my toy shop, I only had a moment, not nearly long enough to really inspect it. Even then I thought there was something wrong with the wings."

     "The joints are rusted, that's all." Elsie rubbed her face where he had slapped her.

     "Show me."

     "Look for yourself."

     He held up the splinted fingers. "A little domestic accident," he said, "when I was chasing our friend Mr. Keats in the Marais. It's not serious but awkward for working with tools. Show me."

     Elsie looked at the bandage without expression for a moment. Then she leaned forward and twisted a rod I couldn't see and the right wing came off in her hand. At the same time, almost exactly as it said in Vaucanson's book, the flexible tube of the neck rose and straightened as if the duck were about to swallow.

     Saulnay leaned forward as well, into the light. I strained against the rope on my wrists and let my eyes go to Johannes, but he was a good two feet away, staring back at me, and the pistol in his fist was almost touching Elsie's back.

     "Again," Saulnay said. He concentrated intensely on something in the duck's motion. Then Elsie did the same thing with the left wing and placed the two wings side by side on the table, next to the envelope. I pressed my feet against the floor and made the chair legs scrape.

     "Let Elsie go," I said.

     "Nonsense." Saulnay picked up a tiny screwdriver with his good hand and began to probe the joint where the right wing joined the body and the rods from the now nonexistent pedestal would have turned the cams. He glanced up at Johannes. "Check your knots."

     Johannes was broad-shouldered and angular, not heavy and flabby like his uncle. He had changed his quilted Alsatian jacket for a heavy wool blouson and a black roll-necked sweater and I could smell the sweat and oil on it as he came close. He knelt and stretched out his left hand to test the knots, but he kept the pistol in his right hand carefully back. After a second I recognized it as the same Webley revolver he had used before, at the Métro, a deadly efficient weapon, elegant and brutal in the best English tradition.

     A car rattled by on the street above. Johannes yanked the knots once more and stood up. It was well past midnight, I thought, maybe even later. Madame Serboff would be fast asleep on the other side of the building, five or six doors and a corridor away. The other nine tenants were even farther away, upstairs, useless.

     Meanwhile the duck was rapidly going backwards in time, so to speak, falling apart in pieces. The torso was wingless now. Methodically, a jeweler's loupe in one eye, using his good hand only, Saulnay opened the greenish-brass belly plate with a pair of pliers, detached one of the webbed feet, and laid it aside. He unscrewed the neck halfway. Under the single electric bulb his white face had tiny black veins and scratches like marble. I had once spent a rainy afternoon in the Louvre looking at the old Roman busts of senators and consuls, and Saulnay had that kind of face, I thought—stern, fleshy, confident, interested only in the things in front of him, not in the spiritual world his small, hard eyes couldn't see. The German toymaker had a Roman face. He picked up one of the wings and spun a cam.

     "I know more than you think," I said, and he raised his head.
"About Vaucanson, his daughter, the code or the message in the duck that you want."

     Saulnay held the wing steady. The little cam spun and spun and then wobbled to a stop.

     "Except you don't care about the duck," I said, "you care about the Bleeding Man."

     "So you said before."

     "You care about the gyroscope. You want to sell the gyroscope to the army, the German army I assume. Maybe even give it to them."

     He studied me for a long time. Johannes moved closer to Elsie. Saulnay's hand was on the table, inches from the beige envelope. I willed his eyes to stay on me.

     "An interesting theory," he finally said. Then he walked around the corner of the worktable toward me and Johannes raised his Webley pistol level with my chest. "He's just talking to distract us. This has something to do with the wings and the cams," Saulnay said to Johannes. "I don't like Americans, but I don't underestimate them."

     "He won't shoot," I said. "The noise would wake up half the building. There's a gendarmerie on Saint-Germain. You'd never get out."

     Saulnay smiled and twisted his upper body so that his right hand moved in little circles over the table. "Such a clutter," he said. "Things out of place, paper, food." His hand hovered over the detached foot, the wings, the beige envelope, then dropped like a hawk into his overcoat pocket and came up with another pistol, a small square automatic. "If we had enough time," he said in the same conversational tone, "I would take you out to the Métro entrance or a sewer and see what exactly makes you fall apart in the dark, underground."

     "Let Elsie go."

     He came around to the corner of the table. "There was something about the cams," he said. "I could tell from your eyes."

     "What's a cam?"

     "You must have seen men get shot in the war, Sergeant Keats. It's an astonishingly painful wound. It can take a man many hours to die from a single small bullet through the navel. I want to know about the cams."

     "I don't know anything about cams."

     "I can count in French or English or German," Saulnay said. "One of them will be the last language you ever hear. Un, deux—"

     "Stop!" Elsie said. "I'll tell you!"

     And I lunged at the table, driving up with my feet, twisting forward with the chair on my back. My ankles came free but not my hands. Somebody's gun fired once, twice, and I fell under the table on my back like a turtle, kicking. For a moment all I could see was the underside of the table. Then the lightbulb clicked off, on. Saulnay's white face sailed by and the door slammed.

     When I finally righted myself and worked my hands loose, it could have been thirty seconds or two minutes later—I had no idea. Distant voices were echoing, receding. The table was on its side. The floor was covered with tools and paper and bits of metal. The lightbulb was drifting gently back and forth on its cord like a pendulum, illuminating the storage room section by section as it passed.

     In the cold, swaying light there was a strange absence of sound and life—there was no duck, no envelope, no Elsie.

                 The Bleeding Man

A
T ELEVEN O'CLOCK THE NEXT NIGHT
, not quite twenty-four hours after Elsie Short had disappeared, I found myself sitting in a stalled railway car somewhere east of the French mountain town of Besan¸on, halfway to Switzerland.

     "The conductor doesn't know why it's stopped," Root said, lowering his long frame onto the seat in front of me. "And he doesn't know how long it's going to be stopped. And he doesn't really seem to give a damn."

     "Probably," said an Englishman working his way down the aisle, "you've had a flood or a mudslide around Champagnole or Belfort. Some of the bridges up there aren't so stable, you know. Good deal of fighting over them toward the end, Mulhouse, Thann, Besan¸on. Bloody geography lesson, that's all the War was." He was about the right age and had a stiff left leg that he dragged along like a log and he looked at my gray hair and paused with his hand on the seat back, waiting to see if I wanted to reminisce.

     I didn't. I looked across to the other row of seats, where Vincent Armus was sitting by a window, staring at the motionless black landscape.

     The three of us and the Englishman were on Wagon 118 of SNCF train 3246, which left Dijon five days a week at 3:25
P.M.
, after you connected from the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. Train 3246 had six commuter-style cars with American-style aisles instead of compartments, and it was pulled by one underpowered diesel locomotive. From Dijon, when it wasn't stalled on a siding, it rolled through thirty miles of stumpy gray winter vineyards in northern Burgundy, turned east, and ambled over to Besan¸on and then to Belfort, and finally took a deep breath and climbed up the rugged foothills of the Val de Travers, leaving France at last for the little watchmaking border town of Neuchâtel.

     Neuchâtel was the only place in the world I could think of where Saulnay would have taken Elsie.

     If, Inspector Soupel had said, Saulnay had really taken her.

     Maybe, he had said, maybe she went on her own accord. Maybe she changed sides, maybe, Monsieur Keats, you're imagining things.

     Armus made a kind of sneering noise through his nose and stood up. Root and I watched him go down the aisle and around the bulkhead where the toilets were.

     Why bring him along? Root had said. Why bring Armus along at all? Armus was a snob and a prick, and he was fifty years old if he was a day—why did we need him?

     There was one good reason.

     Nobody else in Paris—nobody else I knew—understood how to fix an eighteenth-century automate or make one start if the mechanism didn't have an On-Off switch.

     I worked my dry tongue across my teeth and then stood up.

     "Now what?" Root said. "Getting out to push?"

     I ignored him and walked to the end of the car, opened the door, and jumped down to the track. It was cold outside but not
raining. Some days in Switzerland it failed to rain. The glow of the train lights obscured the sky, though I thought I could make out the dimmest possible halo of white far ahead, higher in the foothills, possibly the city of Neuchâtel, unless, of course, it was La Chaux-de-Fonds or Fleurier or Thann or God-Damn-Your-Eyes or any of the other dozen or so milk run stops the train was scheduled to make before it quit for the night. There were all kinds of geography lessons.

     Up ahead the locomotive was throbbing quietly like a cat on a rug. Steam was leaking out of the hotboxes on the wheels, and I could see the tip of somebody's cigarette near the folding steps of the carriage in front.

     Trains, I thought with disgust. My Boston grandfather had been a train buff. His father had helped design one of the earliest steam locomotives on the East Coast, around 1840, for the Baltimore and Ohio. In those quaint days, my grandfather said, some of the locomotives were so crude that they didn't even have brakes. When they rolled into a station a gang of roustabouts rushed out to the track and pulled them to a stop with ropes hooked on to the locomotive.

     Trains. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, because of a number of costly miscalculations concerning rolling stock and empty troop cars, the Germans had started teaching their staff officers how to draw up railroad timetables. Ultimately the Germans learned to do it with such precision that they could shuffle men and equipment around a battlefield ten times faster than ever before in military history. Train scheduling became a required subject at the Berlin War Academy. Then the French and the English military academies had followed suit, so that you could argue, as Norton-Griffiths liked to do, that the whole astonishing continent-wide scale of destruction and horror in the 1914 War was the direct, logical consequence of Europe's super-modern railway network.

     With the exception, evidently, of the Dijon-Neuchâtel Line.

     But I didn't care about the history of trains. Or Vaucanson's Duck. Or even the goddam Bleeding Man. I had brought Armus along because there was nothing in the world I wanted to do except find Elsie.

     I walked around the last carriage and peered down into a ravine of restless shadows. We should have hired an automobile in Paris, I thought, the way Armus had wanted.

     No, Inspector Soupel had instructed. Don't hire a car. Don't leave Paris on your own. Don't go anywhere. Bulletins and descriptions of the alleged kidnappers would be sent to gendarmeries all over eastern France. Soon enough, he assured us, the great apparatus of the French national police system would be in motion. To do anything ourselves would be both stupid and illegal. And if, for good measure, we tried to drive in those mountains in the winter, he said, the Swiss police would soon be pulling our frozen corpses out of a lake or a river bottom. Trust the authorities. Sit still and wait.

     Say no to bullshit was what Norton-Griffiths used to tell us.

     I suddenly hammered the flat of my hand against an iron panel and comically, improbably, as if I had jammed a spur in its flank, the little train shuddered and bucked and sixty yards up the track the locomotive snorted.

     Thirty seconds later we were moving.

Inside our car Armus was eating a cold cheese sandwich that he had bought in Dijon. Root hung onto a strap, talking to the Englishman. As the train started to pick up speed, I lost my balance and sat down heavily beside Armus.