The Paris Deadline (3 page)

     Here on the rue Bonaparte specialization was also alive and well. The tiny shop in front of me had evidently decided to confine itself to nothing but antique armchairs. The shop window next to it had a jumbled display of what seemed to be old ceramic bowls, but which turned out to be, on closer inspection, eighteenth-century chamber pots. One of them was ornamented on the bottom with a faintly discolored portrait of Benjamin Franklin in his famous round fur hat.

     I paused, shifted my package to my other arm, and tried to imagine what offense had brought the great Pennsylvanian so low. Tant pis, I decided, and walked half a block down the street to number 24.

     Here, by contrast, the single display window was absolutely empty—no chamber pots, no goldfish. The sign on the lintel said "Objets Divers de la Magie et des Automates," followed by the name of the proprietor, "Patrice Bassot, Ancien Professeur d'Histoire à la Sorbonne." The big pasteboard card hanging from the door handle said emphatically, in both French and English, "Closed."

     Rain from the awning was dripping in cold little worms down my collar. My head ached. I had worked on a newspaper long enough not to believe anything I saw in print. I turned the handle and stepped inside.

"A
ND
?"
SAID
W
AVERLEY
R
OOT
, leaning back in his chair and locking his hands behind his head. "And?"

     "And nothing. Nobody home," I said. "It was empty. Just a few wooden birds on a shelf and a cabinet full of painted eggs."

     "Hmmph." Root swiveled to look at the window. "'Some days in Paris,'" he muttered, "'it failed to rain.'" Which, I assumed, was the first sentence of yet another of his unwritten, unpublished short stories.

     "Actually, there was a boy in the back," I said, "about sixteen or seventeen, packing up boxes. He told me the store had been sold to a taxidermist."

     Root swiveled back around and frowned at our duck—my duck, I supposed—now reposing in a sort of moldy contentment in the middle of our shared desk. "And the automatic parrots?"

     "No idea. The boy never heard of them. I left a note in the door and a message at the Ritz."

     "She won't be happy."

     "She's going to the Riviera in a week."

     Root grunted and counted out six aspirins from a tin box. He gave me two and swallowed the rest himself.

     "I hope that damn thing can type," said B. J. Kospoth, stopping beside my desk. He handed me a stack of manila folders.

     "Just hunt and peck," I said.

     Kospoth doesn't approve of me. He says I lack ambition and live in a shell like a hermit and I ought to get over the goddam war. Now he gave a mirthless laugh, favored Root with his usual dyspeptic nod, and went on down the room, toward the outside corridor, where an apparatus the French mistook for an elevator separated us from the offices of "Atlantic and Pacific Photos."

     It was half past two, and the day staff of the
Trib
was about as hard at work as it was likely to get. Kospoth, whose initials are unexplained to this day, was our Day Editor, Art Critic, and Photography Chairman, a taciturn mustachioed fifty-year-old veteran of two or three now defunct Midwestern papers. Since we had no staff photographers of any kind—Root occasionally took photographs with his own equipment—Kospoth's Photography Chairmanship consisted chiefly of crossing the hall once a day and selecting a few stock pictures from Atlantic and Pacific, who were also owned by Colonel McCormick and so had to give them to us for free.

     On the other side of the city room two men about my own age were going over the "local" copy—as a newspaper for Americans abroad, much of our space was devoted to steamship arrivals, departures, and noteworthy scandals of visiting compatriots (B. J. liked to average at least one divorce or jewel theft a week). The day reporters trekked every morning to the dozen or so major hôtels and took down names and hometowns of American guests, as supplied by hôtel clerks or inscribed in the Visitors Book the
Trib
kept in a little Information Office over on the rue Scribe. When I had first started at the
Trib
we also sent a man to the steamship companies for their passenger lists, but now the
companies just mailed us the names of notable personages we might want to interview.

     "I never heard of Vaucanson," Root said from the other side of the desk.

     I let that pass. Bill Shirer, our resident human encyclopedia, hadn't heard of him either, though Shirer, a bright kid one year out of college, with a taste for slang, had promised he would dig it up for me, "absitoively, posilutely."

     Meanwhile, Root and I were quietly working our way through Kospoth's manila folders, which contained, as usual, batches of editorials clipped from the mother paper back in Chicago. From the very start, evidently, the Colonel had distrusted the effect of Parisian immorality on the political views of his staff. Even during the war, when the paper was published exclusively for the army in Europe, he had insisted that all editorials had to come from Chicago. Now every two weeks he still personally mailed us a selection. Those he marked "A" in bright red pencil had to be run as soon as possible, before the Democrats took the Republic down the road to ruin. Those he marked "B" were potentially heretical, but might be run if we were short of space. Those that had somehow slipped into the paper without his approval were marked "NO-NO-NO."

     "I think it's hollow." Root picked up the duck. "Or at least its gizzards are loose."

     I had noticed the same thing. The duck's belly had a sliding panel that opened to reveal a pattern of holes about the diameter of a pipe cleaner. If you turned it slowly from one side to the other you could hear tiny metallic pins clinking about.

     "Give it an aspirin," I said as a joke.

     Root cocked his head at me. Then he slowly produced his tin box again. He held out his palm and pushed the duck's head forward with one finger, and we both watched in astonishment as the neck and skull bent and curved down in a perfectly life-like motion and the two halves of the beak fell open just above the aspirin.

     "If it starts to quack and crap, you're out of here," said Kospoth, passing by our desk in the other direction with a packet of photos under his arm. More a prophet than he would ever know.

     Over his shoulder he added, "And you had two messages, Keats, by the way, while you were out. Man from the Army Archives again. And somebody who wouldn't leave her name."

     "What did you tell the Army?"

     "I said you were a gently oozing spring of information about toy ducks, but you wouldn't tell him a damn thing about the war. Now please, little boys, put that in a sock and get to work."

     Kospoth was far from being a tyrannical boss, but there was a certain note of reasonable exasperation in his voice. Across the room two day reporters sniggered. The French copy boy lit a fresh blue Gitane and leered, and Herol Egan, our Sports Editor, who had just walked in from a three-hour lunch, grinned and tossed a paper wad in our direction. Root lowered his head to the editorials. I slipped the duck into the hollow space below my typewriter and we did, conspicuously, get to work.

     We were, as I told you, rewrite men. Sometimes, when things were busy, Root and I served as actual reporters, going out on actual news stories, though this was not at any time a strength of the
Tribune.
Most days we pasted in the editorials and put together the news stories for the first four pages—in those days the Paris edition was normally eight to ten pages long, much of it sports scores and stock market numbers. For home news, to save money the Colonel limited our incoming cables to fifty words a night. The result was that often we were presented with a stingy four-word summary from Chicago ("Pres speaks Protestant Conv") and expected to spin out a full six-inch story from that. Root was a gifted and uninhibited spinner, especially good at political vacuousness, and his more exuberant inventions were occasionally picked up and reprinted by the wire services, to the mild confusion of those who had actually witnessed an event. ("President Coolidge told a rapt audience of two thousand clerics
at the National Protestant convention yesterday that 'a man who does not pray is not a praying man.'") When things were slow he chafed and muttered and played with his scissors.

     By five o'clock I had selected a harmless pair of editorials for the next day, put the Gumps where they belonged, and made two supplementary trips across the hall to Atlantic and Pacific, where the eye-squeezing burnt almond fumes of the photographers' chemicals bothered me almost as much as thunder.

     As I came back from my second trip I noticed that the city room had settled into full deadline speed. Egan was typing furiously, one cigarette in his mouth, one in his ashtray. Two men were piecing together the disastrous stock market quotes, like the ruins of Carthage. Others were sitting down at the big table to type or scuttling in and out of Kospoth's office, shouting.

     I handed my photos to the copy boy and went to the window beside our desk. It had long ago gotten dark—Paris in December, not for sun worshippers—and an oddly sad person with silver-white hair gazed incuriously back at me from the glass, like a laminated ghost of myself. I pressed my forehead to the cold window and looked at the street. The rain had given way to blowing sheets of snow down on the rue Lamartine. In the penumbra of the nearest streetlamp tumbling snowflakes caught the light and seemed to burst into flame.

     I shifted a step to the right and peered at the people hurrying home. I have a bad habit of staring at faces in the street. Sometimes that's all I can see: pale, gaunt, mesmerizing faces everywhere, ghost-like—people I used to know, leave it at that.
What the hell is he looking at?
I had once heard Shirer ask Root, and Root had taken him aside and whispered. But the kid was too young, Root himself was too young. This time, however, down at the corner where the rue Lamartine met the rue de Maubeuge, the face I saw was not one of my eccentric visitations. The workmen of that morning had strung their Christmas tinsel quite low, and as it spun and flashed in the wind I had a very clear view of the dark-haired gypsy-featured man in the quilted jacket.

     I leaned forward, one hand on the window handle.

     Then I looked over at my desk and the little coppery reflection in the space below the typewriter.

     Jacques de Vaucanson, I thought.

T
ELEPHONES IN THE TWENTIES
had no dials, nor had it occurred to shirt manufacturers then to make their shirts with different sleeve lengths, so men with short arms used cloth-covered elastic bands of varying degrees of nattiness to hold their cuffs back. I turned around to see Kospoth fumbling with his left armband and the long coiled wires of a telephone snagged on it, making him look for a moment like the Laocoon of the city room. He handed me the earpiece, growled something about calls at work, and disappeared into his office.

     I put the piece to my ear, jiggled the bar, and listened to a woman's faraway voice pronounce my name impatiently. Then the line went dead.

     Modern French philosophy is preoccupied with the Problem of Communication, a direct consequence, I think, of their telephone system. I jiggled a few more times and gave up. Root handed me my coat.

     "We're going to Balzar's for dinner," he said. "The kid too." He nodded toward Shirer, who was standing by the long table trying to light a pipe. "Choucroute alsacienne, with herring to start."

     "We don't have to take the Métro," Shirer said earnestly. "I know you don't take the Métro."

     It was a subject of some conversation around the paper that I didn't take the Métro and usually ate dinner alone or just with Root. Damn snobby Harvard recluse, was Kospoth's much-repeated verdict.

     "Not tonight, sorry," I said. "Still have an editorial to finish." Root grunted suspiciously, and I watched them clump out into the corridor and start down the stairs with Herol Egan, chattering and laughing.

     For the next five minutes I prowled aimlessly around the city room, straightening files that didn't need to be straightened. Then I took a deep breath and went out to the rue Lamartine. My gypsy-featured ghost was gone. The snow had stopped. The night had settled into a Parisian deep freeze.

     Ten blocks away, directly opposite the Comédie Fran¸aise, I pushed open the door of a bookshop called the "Librarie La Pautre" and strolled in a lordly manner, like a paying customer, down the center aisle. At the reference section I lifted the big one-volume Larousse Encyclopedia from the shelf and balanced it on the corner of a table. If that thing starts to quack and crap, Kospoth had said . . . Out of the mouths of babes. I flipped the pages until I found the Vs. I was the only customer in the store, and the clerk over by the cash register leaned forward on his elbows and frowned hard at me. I ran my finger down one column and read.

     "'Without Vaucanson's shitting duck, there would be nothing left to remind us of the glory of France.'—Voltaire, 1757."

     I laughed out loud and the clerk glared. I turned the page.

     Jacques de Vaucanson merited exactly seven sentences in the encyclopedia, not counting Voltaire's sardonic tribute. He had been born in Grenoble in 1709 and died in Paris in 1782 and in between apparently enjoyed two remarkable careers.

     First, as an eighteenth-century P. T. Barnum he had created a number of life-sized automatons that were exhibited all over Europe and made him a famous man. And second, in 1741, having somehow become the personal friend of Louis XV, he was appointed Royal Inspector to the Silk Manufactures of Lyon, where he invented silk weaving machines of such efficiency and genius that they displaced thousands of workers from their jobs. These same workers thereupon rioted and chased him back to Paris, where he lived till his death. His best-known automatons were a flute player that actually played the flute, a tambourine player who actually played the tambourine, and a mechanical duck that ate food with its beak, digested it, and actually . . . excreted it. (Am I making this up? No. There was Voltaire's epigram; there, on page 678, was reproduced an eighteenth-century drawing of the celebrated duck on exhibit in Germany.)