The Paris Deadline (33 page)

     "You have a vivid imagination, Mr. Keats. You're a writer. I want you to picture this scene. Picture Jacques de Vaucanson, dressed in his quaint eighteenth-century garb, wearing his powdered wig, his ever-present gentleman's sword. His servants grip their torches— real torches, not these metal 'EverReadys'—and one by one, in procession they slip and stumble and feel their way in. They go about two hundred meters, because that's all we've come, believe it or not, about two hundred meters from the entrance. There was no waterfall then as far as I can tell, or underground stream like the one over there. The cave was perfectly dry. Otherwise—"

     He thumped his hand against hollow wood, a bulky shape, taller than I was. I had all along sensed its presence, I realized, but not seen it.

     "Otherwise," he said, "this cabinet and what is in it would not have been preserved."

     "He couldn't have worked in here." Armus had found his voice again. "Not with metal and automates."

     In the darkness Saulnay moved again. "No, not with the automates. His workshop was in Bertin's house back along the road to Craponne, long ago destroyed. But every time Vaucanson left the cliffs to go back to Paris, he deposited the Bleeding Man here in its special waterproof, airtight cabinet, out of sight. He deposited the Bleeding Man and the money."

     "Money?" My tongue was thick and stupid.

     "The gold and jewels, poor Mr. Keats, that the king paid Vaucanson year after year, out of his secret funds. Likewise waterproof, rust-proof, perfectly safe down here from all prying eyes."

     The gold and jewels ... I turned slowly toward Armus, and even in the suffocating darkness of the cave I felt something like a light dawning.

     
What does he want?
Of course Armus had tried to come here first. What he wanted, what the bankrupt Armus wanted, was the money. Not any gyroscope or automate. The duck would tell him the way to the money.

     There was a loud crash somewhere in front of us, in the darkness, and I could feel the limestone shiver dangerously against my back. As far as I could tell, somewhere behind the cabinet, the cave wall had split open at the base and left a gap, a cleft. That was where the stream surged out of its interior channel deep in the limestone and came into the open. I could see the running water now, a yard wide at least, spreading across the chamber floor. As it curved around the wall, it made long phosphorescent ripples and kicked and chewed at the stone before it hit another cleft under
the owl painting and drained out of sight again. Saulnay splashed sideways across the floor. He said something in German, got a muttered reply. The snout of his automatic moved back into the light. "Johannes is worried. He thinks the cave is not safe."

     There is no darkness like the darkness of a tunnel, no emptiness. The cave was not safe, Johannes was right, the rain outside was swelling the stream inside to the breaking point, the cave was filling up with phantoms, faces slowly spinning, wet petals on a stem.

     I had been wrong again, I thought, wrong about everything, wrong from the start. Because what was true for the bankrupt Armus was also true for the bankrupt, embittered Saulnay.

     "The money," I said hoarsely. "It was always about the money, wasn't it?" I took a step forward. "As soon as you saw the duck in Bassot's window, you thought of the money—Vaucanson's fortune, the king's gold that Vaucanson took and kept because he was a miser. It was never anything to do with a gyroscope, was it?"

     "It may be yet. You give me ideas, Mr. Keats. Move back, please. Move away from the girl. We're in a hurry now."

     I took one more step toward him. "I know caves and mines. I've spent my life in them. That wall isn't going to collapse. You have plenty of time."

     The pistol pushed out of the darkness into the light like a hand coming out of stone.

     "Show us," I said, almost in a whisper, "the Bleeding Man."

     There was only the sound of sloshing water, the moan and scrape of the limestone, gathering its weight above us. Despite the chill, sweat was dripping from my eyes, my nose. The Toymaker, I thought, would not pull the trigger yet. The Toymaker wanted to make his effect, frighten the children. He wanted to wind up his dolls and turn them loose and see them run off the side of the table. Let him.

     I took one step sideways.

     Saulnay lowered his gun. He was a twisting shadow, gray
smoke. When he spoke again he was farther away, just inside the lantern's glow. To his left stood the tall piece of furniture, which gradually, knob by knob, panel by panel, came into focus.

     It was a mahogany armoire, an antique eighteenth-century clothes cabinet. They would have gone wild about it in the shops on the rue Bonaparte. It was at least seven feet tall, four feet wide, and Saulnay must have been right about the dryness of the cave when Vaucanson stored it there, because, though the feet and legs looked battered and warped by the water of the stream, the upper sections were straight and clean and one or two of the brass hinges still winked and glistened like fireflies in the light.

     "If either of you moves, I will shoot."

     It was Saulnay who spoke, but Johannes who came into view. He shifted the lantern onto a ledge just a few inches over the muddy floor. I could only see him from the waist down, half a man, two legs walking like scissors. His left hand gripped the Webley revolver. His right hand held a crowbar.

     I willed my feet a few inches forward.

     "There's a lock on it." Johannes worked the crowbar between slits in the cabinet door. "The cabinet's incredibly heavy."

     "He would have lined it with lead," Elsie said from somewhere behind me, "to keep out rats."

     Johannes half knelt with his crowbar, one pants leg in the oily black water, and his broad shoulders went down and suddenly up like a pump, and over the constant drum of the stream and the waterfall there was a long, nerve-shredding sound of splintering wood and groaning metal.

     It was like opening a tomb, I thought.

     Even the cave seemed to hold its breath. The door of the cabinet swung slowly outward, from right to left, and for the first time in two hundred years, light spilled over the glassy form, the naked head and shoulders, the eyes, the perfectly formed hands, the transparent crystal torso of the Bleeding Man. Vaucanson's Adam. Proto Man.

     He was standing upright, the crown of his bare head just touching the top of the cabinet. As the light and shadows from the lantern wavered back and forth across his chest, there was the briefest illusion of movement, of breath, and I thought of the doll at the piano, the clown that came to life and terrified the children.

     Then the cold air, running in from the depths of the cave, made something in his mechanism contract and start, and for one unbearable second the Bleeding Man seemed to shudder and exhale and take a step forward—

     "Johannes!"

     Johannes straightened and caught it in his arms. Saulnay limped into the light. He played his flashlight up and down the length of the automate's cloudy glass legs. I heard Elsie beside me gasp—in the flashlight's beam you could see the inner gears and metal cams and clockwork wheels that would have made the creature rise, walk, turn and turn again. And coiling around them, like the lace of a spider's web, thin blue-black veins were pressed between layers of glass, an eighteenth-century filigree of cracked rubber and dried-out blood, artificial life.

     "Put it back—look at the bottom of the cabinet."

     Johannes shoved the Bleeding Man back into his upright position. Under his feet, the width of the cabinet, were two drawers with silver knobs in the center. Johannes pulled at the drawer on the left. In a silent gliding motion it came forward to reveal, not scattered and loose, but neatly arranged in columns, by the careful, calculating hand of Jacques de Vaucanson himself, row after row of small engraved coins that had the true, authentic dull yellow glow of gold.

     Saulnay dropped to his knees in the water and Johannes stood up. He kept his pistol aimed at the three of us. Saulnay turned and grinned over his shoulder at Elsie. "Louis d'or," he said. "Coin of the realm." His flashlight ran up and down the columns. "How much would you say, Miss Short, the king ultimately paid our friend for his blasphemous project?"

     Elsie took a deep breath. "Twenty thousand louis, about."

     "And the profligate daughter spent at least half, but that still leaves—" Saulnay braced himself on the cabinet and pushed to his feet. The Bleeding Man's left arm seemed to jerk, like a reflex.

     "That still leaves enough money." Saulnay's bandaged hand raised the flashlight to Armus's pale face. "About a million and a quarter of your dollars, I would think," he said and swung the light directly into my eyes. "Reparation," he said in German.

     For the next five minutes, as the cave grew colder and colder and the water in the stream rose by another inch, Johannes went through the tedious process of carrying pocket loads of coins from the drawers out to the chamber entrance by the stalagmites. In his haste Saulnay had brought no bags or boxes. The drawers of the cabinet were far too heavy for one man to carry by himself, even if they could be lifted from the frame. Johannes would have to work in stages while his fat, lame uncle watched. There was no other way except to unload the drawers piecemeal, stack the coins on higher ground closer to the cave entrance, then come back and start over again.

     Saulnay positioned himself on the opposite wall, beside the drawing of the owl, and kept the barrel of his automatic aimed at the three of us.

     "Johannes," he said, "has more rope in the car. When he's finished transferring the coins he will tie each of you very securely to one of these stone bars that come out of the ground—stalagmite, stalactite, I don't know the right English word. And then we will have to leave."

     "Without the gyroscope?" I said.

     He let the question hang unanswered in the air. The water from the stream was pulsing in through crevices in the floor now, deeper than ever. Another rock shifted over our heads, making a grumbling sound like thunder. Water was running in sheets now down the walls of the chamber. I felt it over my shoe tops, I could feel it turning the floor of the cave into mud.

     "Perhaps not," Saulnay finally said. "Perhaps I ought to look more closely at the mechanism." I touched two fingers to Elsie's cold, trembling hand, like Mr. Morse to his wife.

     Saulnay walked or waded across the narrow chamber, kicking up more phosphorescent ripples from the water. The gun stayed steady, in his good left hand. When he reached the cabinet and the automate, he stopped.

     "You need somebody's help," I said, "if you want to get the gyroscope out of it."

     No response.

     "Somebody who understands the machine."

     I took one tentative step forward and heard the water slosh. Johannes came splashing back into the chamber, somewhere to my left.

     "You could sell the gyroscope to the highest bidder," I said, "for a lot more money. But you need somebody else to help get it out."

     "Not you." The gun rose in the darkness like a conjuror's trick and seemed to come to rest on top of the flashlight beam. I saw Saulnay by the open cabinet, in front of the rigid and lifeless body of the Bleeding Man.

     "Elsie could take it out. She knows about these machines. Let her help, let her go."

     "No."

     The beam and the gun shifted two feet and stopped at Vincent Armus's thin, haggard profile. "You."

     I took three running steps through the water and crashed like a bullet into him.

Johannes shouted, the cabinet rocked and started to topple forward. A gun went off above my head—one, two spurts of orange flame swallowed by the darkness and the mad crashing echoes of sound and water, and then rock splitting, water exploding into the cave.

     On hands and knees I somehow found Elsie and dragged her sideways, toward the stalagmites on the higher ground. We clawed through the mud and noise, up the walls of the chamber, over its lip. Then, stumbling, hauling ourselves frantically out of the water, we turned to see.

     Below us the flashlight beams flew back and forth in the black air like ghosts. We saw Johannes rise to his knees, shouting. As the waterfall broke in through the limestone walls, one by one, the hollowed out chamber began to crumple and collapse. In the beam of the kerosene lantern I saw the painted owl dissolving in streaks. Saulnay staggered to his feet. He aimed the pistol straight at Elsie. Armus came into view. Saulnay grabbed at his coat. Then Vincent Armus surprised me a third and last time. He pushed Saulnay around and reached up high with his two bound hands and pulled, and the huge wooden cabinet tilted and turned and fell sideways onto them, pinning them down like Welsh miners in a tunnel. Then the Bleeding Man spun out of the open door.

     His head shattered, his legs buckled, but he somehow flung his glassy arms wide, making a sound like a man in pain, and sprawled across them both, dead weight.

     As Elsie and I scrambled higher, I could just make out three faces, then two. Then the mud and water burst over their heads and they gulped it once and were gone.

When we crawled out some half an hour later, onto the level space by the waterfall, the force of the collapse had jammed some of the falling rocks off to one side of the cave entrance, leaving a narrow shelf just wide enough for the two of us. Elsie held my arm with both hands. I gripped the edge of the crevice and slowly, carefully, with the cave to my back, stood up straight. To Root, standing down below in the rain and watching us, it must have looked like magic.

I
T WAS ALMOST THREE MONTHS LATER
to the day, ten o'clock at night, May 21st, 1927, that Charles A. Lindbergh leaned out of the left side window of "The Spirit of Saint Louis" and guided the little single-engine airplane to a perfect landing on the grassy meadows of Le Bourget military airfield just north of Paris.