The Paris Deadline (30 page)

     "Somebody broke in last night, n'est-ce pas? They tampered with the Writing Boy, yes?" I said.

     Because that was what they had to do. Because a night and a half ago, in the police car between the rue du Dragon and Inspector Soupel's damp basement office, I had suddenly understood exactly why Saulnay had taken Elsie with him, and it was for the same reason I had brought Vincent Armus with us—to operate the automate. With his hand in bandages, Saulnay couldn't do it himself. Johannes was a thug, Johannes couldn't do it for him. But with a gun at her head Elsie Short could.

     The two Swiss technicians transferred their frowns to Root and Armus behind me. I stepped between them and pushed them aside, and found myself face to face with Mary Shelley's mechanical inspiration, Hervé Foucault's secret pal, the ultimate Jacquet-Droz automate, which I would live long enough to hear called the world's first programmed computer.

The Writing Boy had been built in 1772, four years before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was twenty-eight inches tall, made of carved and painted wood. He had blonde hair, fair skin, pink cheeks. He was barefoot. He was dressed in a kind of flowing eighteenth-century blue silk shirt and cloak and he was seated, like the Draughtsman in the other room, behind a mahogany table or desk to which he was attached at the base. He had a quill pen in his right hand, a real inkwell beside it.

     "I don't know who you are, sir." The man in the white coat was swiveling from Armus to Root to me.

     "It's all right," Root said, grinning, shaking their hands with both of his. "He's from Paris, we're all from Paris. Mr. Armus is an expert on automates. The police called us in."

     The Writing Boy, desk and all, was resting on a worktable surrounded by stacks of paper and miniature tools like the ones Elsie used. He had been partly turned around to his right and the cloak and shirt pinned up to reveal the lower part of his torso. And from that bare space somebody had removed
a wooden plate about the size of my outspread hand, so that, thanks to the pale Swiss morning light streaming in through the window behind us, I could see his thick metal spine and golden clockwork.

     All of them—Vaucanson, Jacquet-Droz, Foucault—all of them had concealed the mechanism of their automates inside the carefully sculpted bodies of human beings or animals. Elsie had told me that with some wonder. They did it because they wanted to show, not a mechanism, not a gadget or a truc, but something that looked like life itself. The Prometheus Complex, she called it. When my hand gripped the Writing Boy's shoulder, his head turned an inch or two and his eyes rolled toward me, questioning. But by that time I was peering into the occult mechanism of the cylindrical spine and the rings of levered disks and impossibly tiny cams going up and down it.

     Forty cams, each one controlling a single character or letter, more than enough for what the Writing Boy always composed for public exhibition: Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.

     Most of the cams were made of a grayish-black metal—old, worn, lusterless. But toward the top of the spine, on each side, somebody had removed the old ones and in their places inserted, bright as lighthouses if you were looking for them, four slightly thicker, copper-colored, cams.

     If you change the right cams, Elsie had said, you change what he writes.

     "Don't touch those!" The man in the white coat grabbed my arm. I shoved him away. The other man started for the door, but Root blocked his way.

     "You have to leave right now—I insist." White Coat was back, clawing at my arm again, trying to pull the Writing Boy and the little desk out of my reach. Papers and tools went flying, the automate tilted. I pushed him aside and righted the Boy.

     "You—!" he said, and I hit him hard twice in the neck, just
below the ear, where Norton-Griffiths had trained us to hit in the tunnels, where the nerves and the cams all bunch together under the bone, and he dropped to the floor like a hammer.

     By the door Root and the other Swiss technician went stiff and silent. Armus took a deep breath and said nothing.

     I swung back to the worktable and began to paw through the tools and papers and boxes scattered across it.

     "They put those cams in," Armus said, "last night. The shiny ones." He bent beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and squinted into the gears.

     "Elsie put them in. That's why they brought her. With Saulnay's hand in splints they had to have somebody who could make it work. Johnannes wouldn't know." There was absolutely nothing I wanted on the table, no scrap of paper, no message, no trail of bread crumbs, nothing.

     "Toby," Root said from the door. "The floor."

     "Make it write," I said to Armus, because that was why I had brought him, the only reason in the world. "The new cams changed his text. I don't know how to make him work, but you do. Wind him up, plug him in, do what it takes."

     On the floor the man in the white coat was stirring, coming groggily to his knees. Hardheaded Swiss. Armus didn't bother to raise his head. He was still dressed in his fur-collared topcoat and pearl-gray wool suit, and he looked as if he should be strolling down the avenue Montaigne with an ivory cane and a poodle. But he had been collecting automatons since before the War, he had a house full of tools, and he had made his Bird Bush spring into action with a flick of his thumb.

     "Hit him again." Armus glanced at the man on the floor.

     "There's ink, the pen is ready." I turned the Writing Boy slightly on the tabletop and Armus moved around to the side. By the door Root was making a pair of gags with handkerchiefs. I tossed him a roll of cord from the table.

     "I don't know," Armus said. "They always hid the starting
mechanism. You have to wind them up, sometimes with a key, sometimes a handle. This one maybe. Or—no. Here. This."

     He stretched one arm around the little desk and slowly rotated something I couldn't see.

     It was half-past eight according to the undoubtedly accurate Swiss clock on the wall. Outside, the Lac de Neuchâtel was stirring in its bed, the pale winter sun was riding a strong east wind higher in the sky, aiming its beams at our windows. As always with artificial life, nothing happened for a space of five, six seconds. Fiat lux. The Writing Boy's doll-like face gazed straight ahead at a spot on the wall. His bare feet stayed where they were, crossed at the ankles. Then the familiar whirring, clicking sound of creation began and a moment later his right arm, slowly, smoothly rose in the air.

     He turned his face to the right and dipped his quill pen into the inkwell on the desk. He shook the pen twice. I write, therefore I am. His face lowered toward the square of paper in front of him, and with an almost imperceptible nod, methodically, confidently, as his eyes moved back and forth following his pen, the Writing Boy's hand began to trace whatever message it was that Jacques de Vaucanson's daughter and her lover had secretly taught him to write, the place, if Elsie and Saulnay and I were right, where the Bleeding Man was hidden.

     What did it take? Thirty seconds? Fifty? Nobody in the room was counting. By the door Root and the other technician had stopped their scuffling. The man on the floor was blinking madly.

     Armus and I hovered by the square of paper, watching each careful, deliberate scratch of the quill. When it stopped, Armus snatched the paper free and spread it on the table.

     "What?" Root said from the door.

     Armus shook his head in disgust. "Gibberish."

     "Code," I said, thinking of Vaucanson and the universal grammar machine and Solresol. My ears were buzzing in pain. "A goddam eighteenth-century code."

     "We need to leave," Armus said. "I hear people coming."

     "He's supposed to write 'Je pense, donc je suis,'" I said and banged the table with my fist.

     "Now," Armus said. "We need to leave now."

     "Let me see it." Root bent over the table where the paper lay. On the paper the automate had traced in inch-high blue-black letters this message:

     "I'm opening the door," Armus said. "We're going."

     "That's not gibberish." Root looked up at me. "Toby."

     "We have to go!" Armus was in the hall. There was an outside door to the right, leading straight to the esplanade. Far down the corridor voices were booming.

     "That's not gibberish," Root said. Root of the quick, capacious, analytic mind. "That's shorthand like McCormick's cabalese at the paper. Those are directions. Font de Pré—left, left, right, left.

     Gauche, gauche, droite, gauche."

     "Font de Pré?"

     "It's by Le Puy," Root said as we started to run. "Just west of Lyon. It's a cave, Toby."

L
YON IS THE SECOND LARGEST CITY IN
F
RANCE
. It was already ancient and important when Jacques de Vaucanson lived there in the middle of the eighteenth century, building his silk-weaving machines and slipping away into the Dordogne Valley on his blasphemous secret projects.

     The Romans founded Lyon as a colony in 43 bc and called it "Lugdunum," which sounds like something out of
Gulliver's Travels.
And almost the first thing the new colonists of Lugdunum did was construct an enormous amphitheatre on a hillside overlooking the convergence of the Saône and Rhone rivers, for gladiators and chariot racing. It still existed in 1927. From the train station platform I could crane my neck and see the funicular railway up to it and, under a black ceiling of clouds, the monotonous ruined arches of the amphitheatre wall. But compared to the cave dwellers of the Dordogne Valley, sixty or seventy miles to the west, the Romans had practically come yesterday.

     "Over there," Root murmured.

     Armus and I both looked up. On the opposite platform, two sets of tracks away, a pair of gendarmes, fat as teddy bears in their heavy blue overcoats, were strolling with their batons clasped behind their backs, studying the crowd of waiting passengers.

     The big station clock above the tracks read 1:38 p.m.

     "They will not," Armus said, "have the slightest interest in us."

     He was right. I knew he was right. We had left the museum by the esplanade door, at a dead run, and nobody had seen us, nobody had followed. At the little Neuchâtel station we had scrambled aboard a local Swiss train for La Chaux that was already starting to roll. From there to Besan¸on. Besan¸on to Lyon. We had taken nothing from the museum but a scrap of paper. A mild case of assault, with no property damage, was not going to provoke the Swiss police into an international manhunt.

     "Not the slightest interest," Armus repeated, and all three of us stood up as a grimy black locomotive came hissing and clanking along the platform, pulling a line of battered pre-war carriages. An engineer with a beret on his head and a pipe between his teeth watched complacently as the wheels braked and gave one last ankle-scalding burst of steam and the carriage doors popped open. It didn't look like a Time Machine, but it was about to carry us back 20,000 years.

Time, of course, was everything now. As best we could figure, Saulnay and Johannes would have reached Neuchâtel about ten hours before us, dragging Elsie with them. They would have broken into the museum after midnight. Then, if Saulnay had understood what the Writing Boy was telling them . . . No question that he had. Saulnay was used to automatons, how they worked, how they could be tinkered with.

     "Some men are born to hangovers," Root said. He sat down
and offered me a paper cup and then held up a bottle of red wine he had bought at the station in Lyon. "And some have hangovers thrust upon them. Bread and sausage in my pocket." He flapped his coat with one arm. "You need to eat, Toby. Even Armus took some sausage."

     I glanced over at Armus, who was sitting directly in front of Root in our tiny, cramped compartment, head lolling slightly from side to side in weariness. His eyes were shut, his chin was buried in his scarf. After two days of French trains his clothes were rumpled and filthy. The elegant fur collar on his overcoat was smeared with a sticky unidentifiable film.

     Shadings, I thought, Tolstoyan contradictions. He looked nothing at all like the Prussian Commandant who had frozen the brains of the two gendarmes in Neuchâtel with his glare, not a bit like the Patrician Prick of the Champ-de-Mars. He looked like a railway tramp, a down-on-his-luck vagabond.

     I had my own theory of character, which was not Tolstoyan. It was a theory that had been drummed into me long ago by an editor at the
Boston Globe
, who used to grab my lapels on my way out to a story. People are simple, he would say, stories are simple. All you ever need to know about somebody is this one simple thing: What does he want?

     Deep, deep down, where obsessions start, what does he really want?

     I watched Armus's head jerk with the rhythm of the tracks, and I had no idea what he wanted, I had no idea at all. Then I rubbed my own unshaven chin with the side of my hand and turned back to the window to study the rain. I wanted Elsie.