The Paris Deadline (5 page)

     She replaced the photograph in the purse. "As you may imagine," she said, "Mr. Edison is not a man who gives up easily. He's seventy-eight years old and he's still full of projects. About a year ago he decided to start a new doll factory, with an improved phonograph. But he also wanted a much prettier doll, and the truth is, the American doll industry doesn't amount to much.
Most dolls sold at home are actually made here in France or in Germany. My job is to find five or six perfect models to hold the new and improved phonograph, and buy the rights to them."

     She shook her blonde helmet of hair and selected a small, bright, vulnerable smile from her repertoire. "I've only been in Europe two weeks, and when I saw the duck in that store window I thought he would be a terrific novelty item—he could quack and waddle and recite a nursery rhyme through his beak."

     "Who was Jacques de Vaucanson?"

     The smile wobbled a little, but held firm. "Jacques de Vaucanson," she said, "was an eighteenth-century inventor of automates. And so yes, you've found out my secret. Vaucanson built a famous duck that could flap its wings and walk. Mr. Edison is a great admirer of his."

     "This isn't Vaucanson's Duck?"

     She laughed out loud. "Not a chance, I'm afraid. He looks like Vaucanson's Duck. A little bit. Or so I think. There are only one or two old engravings to go by. But the real duck was destroyed in a fire at the end of the eighteenth century, all of Vaucanson's automatons were. Several people, however, made imitations from the original model. What I bought, I'm sure, is an imitation made about 1880 by Robert Houdin, the famous Paris magician. He loved old automates and used to build copies as a hobby. I recognized it right away—Mr. Edison would, too—but Bassot had no idea, even though he said he's a specialist in automatons. And then when the duck didn't arrive at my hôtel and it turned out you had it and you wouldn't answer your telephone—"

     Here she broke off because the Greek owner of the restaurant had come over to refill my glass. Meanwhile the cat, Byron, in a friendly gesture, had jumped on the empty chair beside Elsie. She was not a cat person. She scooped it up like a halfback and handed it to the Greek.

     I leaned back in my chair and watched while she readjusted the waterproof coat and brushed away invisible cat hair from
her collar. By my unpracticed estimation, she was twenty-five or twenty-six years old, very young to be a personal agent of Thomas Alva Edison. Already, in the space of not quite twenty minutes, she had wept, smiled, lied (at least once), frowned (or glowered), and delivered a brief, informative lecture on mechanical dolls. French philosophy has not yet gotten around to the Problem of Woman, probably because it knows an insoluble thing when it sees it.

     "I thought you were much older, at first," she said, "when I saw your hair. Were you in the war? Is that why it's so gray?"

     I usually avoid the subject of the war with a joke. "It probably turned gray," I said, "this very afternoon, when somebody knocked me on my head in the rain. For a moment I even thought they were trying to steal our mutual duck."

     On the other side of the table Elsie Short's healthy young face turned to chalk. She bolted straight up from her chair.

     "I need some air," she said.

I
N THOSE YEARS
P
ARISIAN GENDARMES
still wore black silk-lined capes in the winter. The slang term for policemen then was hirondelles—swallows—because as they went down the dark streets on their bicycles, the capes rose and flapped behind them like tails and they looked like swooping birds. To me they looked like bats.

     Two of them were standing by a lamppost when we came out of the café. They turned with a swish of their capes and watched us curiously.

     Elsie ignored them. She began to walk so fast that I had to stretch my legs to keep up with her. At the boulevard Saint-Germain she looked left and right, then spotted a taxi rank half a block past the church and started toward it.

     "Well, I talk too much," she said as we weaved through the terrace tables of the Flore. She thrust her hands in her raincoat pockets and slowed her pace, but not much. "I never listen, it's my biggest fault. I should go back to my hôtel. Who tried to hit
you on the head? Did they steal the duck? No, you said it's at your office."

     This was, I could imagine Root telling me, a suspiciously large amount of nervous energy to spend on a wind-up toy. By this time we had reached the terrace of the Deux Magots and the big hedges in boxes that the café used in the winter as a windscreen. One of the waiters lifted his tray like a drawbridge to let us pass, and we came to a temporary halt at the corner in front of the Saint-Germain church.

     Elsie Short peered up at the stiff white Romanesque tower, with its tall black steeple glistening in the night sky, lit by an Edisonian spotlight. One of the two or three most beautiful structures in Paris, I always thought, but Elsie merely furrowed her brow and tapped her sensible brown shoe on the sidewalk.

     "This is the rue Bonaparte," she said with surprise when we crossed over.

     "The lower part of it," I agreed, and thought of telling her that until a hundred years ago it was called the rue des Petits Augustins, and before that it wasn't a street but a canal to the Seine, part of an enormous garden that belonged to Queen Margot of Navarre.

     But my Paris history lectures don't appeal to everybody, and Elsie had already wheeled left and started down the street. Snow was drifting between buildings in gauzy patches now. Here and there it caught a burst of wind and swirled off the pavement in a white spinning cone that looked like a mummy coming unwound. Two steps ahead of me Elsie pointed at a street sign that said rue Jacob.

     "Bassot's store was three or four blocks past this," she muttered, "I had no idea it was so close. If he's there I can prove I bought the duck."

     I glanced at my watch. The French are economical with lights. The boulevard Saint-Germain was busy and fairly bright, but the rue Bonaparte was dark and shadowy, and as far as I could tell there were just two feeble street lamps between us and the distant
Seine. I don't like the dark. My head hurt and I wanted to go home and resume being a recluse. Like a chump, I trailed after the comet Elsie.

     We reached the antique shops that sold nothing but armchairs and chamber pots. Next door, Bassot's window was black and empty except for the hand-lettered sign that said, "CLOSED." In the back a thin bar of light was just visible on the floor. Elsie knocked and rattled the door.

     Down the block, perhaps thirty yards away, two more gendarmes appeared in silhouette and a man staggered drunkenly out of a doorway. While we watched, the taller of the two policemen turned a half-step sideways and spread his black cape. The drunk stepped behind it and bent his head, and after a moment what Root would term an unmistakable hydraulic process began.

     "Well, I never," said Elsie Short.

     It was called the privilège de la cape, a Paris custom, the partial, momentary concealment behind a gendarme's outspread cloak of a gentleman on the street with a pressing need. Parisian homosexuals made something of a game of it, I was told, approaching the best-looking young gendarme they could find. I couldn't think of a good way to explain it. The drunk finished his business, Elsie shook her head, and the drunk and gendarme trio walked away toward the river. Another gust of wind filled the narrow corridor of the rue Bonaparte with a full sail of snow. When it subsided we had the street to ourselves.

     "Let's go in," said Elsie Short.

     "It's closed," I reminded her.

     Elsie knocked twice more. "He's there, I'm sure of it," Elsie said. "I didn't like Bassot at all, you know. He wears a filthy red beret and stands too close. You can explain about my duck in French. He has very bad English." She knocked again and the light in the back went out.

     Elsie looked at me triumphantly. Then she rattled the door handle one more time and pushed. The door swung slowly open.

     She stepped inside, lost at once in the shadows. I stayed where I was on the sidewalk.

     "You're not afraid of the dark, are you?" She poked her head out again.

     I looked down the street toward the invisible river, up the street toward the glow of the boulevard Saint-Germain. I jammed my hands in my coat pockets and, after five or six heartbeats, followed her in.

     The front room of the shop was as empty as the window. We passed through it in slow motion, holding our arms in front of us like two people pantomiming a swim. I was sweating now, despite the cold stream of air from the open door behind me. Elsie's blue trilby hat picked up a beam of light from the street and bobbed in the darkness like a buoy.

     A rustling noise somewhere to the right made her stop and quickly back up two steps, and I smelled her wet hair and hat and felt her shoulders turn and brush against mine.

     "A rat," she whispered. I made no answer. I don't talk in the dark. I make no noise in the dark. "Mr. Bassot?" she called in a normal voice. "Monsieur?"

     Straight ahead of us an electric light blazed on and off and we heard a back door slam.

     There was a time when I could see everything there was to be seen in the darkness, in a single quick pulse of light like that. In an instant I was around Elsie Short, pulling on a lamp cord inside a door.

     It was a storeroom of some kind, no bigger than my garret, filled ceiling to floor with a jumble of packing crates and chairs and pasteboard boxes.

     Elsie said something I didn't hear. Two of the boxes were open. I saw a tiny leg and foot in a clown's costume hooked over one of the edges. A wooden tiger. A Chinese doll. On its side, a brass birdcage with two large porcelain parrots on a perch. 'Automat' parrots, I thought, exhaling loudly, thinking of Mrs. McCormick.

     I straightened and started to turn back to Elsie when my eye fell on a shape behind the packing crates, against a whitewashed wall. The dim yellowish French lightbulb that served the storeroom as illumination was still swinging gently back and forth on its cord, like a pendulum. At each pass it shone, just for a moment, on a red beret, a patch of dirty brown hair, a neck bent at an unnatural angle.

     Behind me I heard Elsie gasp and felt her hand clasp my arm.

     I backed up slowly, keeping a watchful eye on the unmoving head and shoulders of what I presumed was Patrice Bassot, Very Late Professor at the Sorbonne.

     In the war most people got used to corpses. You slept beside them, ate beside them, carried them through the trenches on your shoulders like sacks of sand. Not me. I never did.

     I backed up another step, and my heels bumped against something, and I spun and faced the front of the shop. Elsie's hand fumbled for mine. She was trembling like a child. A car passed down the dark street, feeling its way like a beetle toward the Seine. A pale sigh of exhaust fumes floated in through the open door.

     In the cold, swaying darkness of the rue Bonaparte there was a strange absence of sound and breath that I can only call a European silence.

                 Birds of a Feather

I
T WAS
T
HURSDAY
, D
ECEMBER
10, three full days after Elsie Short had first appeared in my garret on the rue du Dragon, when B. J. Kospoth walked over to my desk, leaned forward, and balanced himself carefully, simian-like, on his eight bare knuckles.

     "Claims he has a letter for you," he said, and jerked his head in the direction of a short, fair-haired man about my own age, standing just to his left and clutching a leather briefcase to his chest. The stranger had the flattest face I had ever seen. When he turned to cough, diffidently into his fist, it was like squinting sideways at a sheet of paper.

     "Not my idea to bother you, Mr. Keats," he apologized, handing me the letter, "though I did call several times. Mr. Kospoth may not have given you the message. I'm Henry Cross."

     The letter was in a small, crisp, expensive vellum envelope, buff-colored, with my name in bold pen strokes on the front. For a moment I thought it might be from Elsie Short, but when I turned it over the return address, printed in grim, muscular Roman type,
was "1519 Astor Street, Chicago." There was no stamp or postmark.

     "He had it sent over in the embassy courier bag," Cross said, "that's why there's no stamp."

     I opened the envelope and pulled out a single stiff note card, which read, in its entirety, "TALK TO THIS MAN, DAMMIT—MCCORMICK."

     I looked up at Henry Cross. "I'm from the Army Archives," he said. "I'm actually Major Cross, but I didn't want to upset Mister Kospoth by throwing rank around." He threw, if not his rank, at least a glance around the noisy city room, where half the places at the big oval table were now taken.

     It was well past three o'clock in the afternoon. The financial writers were hunched over a galley, arguing about J.P. Morgan. The travel editor, whose name I could never remember, had joined Kospoth by the windows for a heated conference that apparently required reading aloud from their notebooks simultaneously. Herol Egan was at his typewriter, fingers curled like Paderewski above the keys, his eyes fixed on a pencil stuck in the ceiling.

     "Perhaps there's a quieter place?" Cross suggested in his mild way.

     I looked at the note card again. Over the course of four years I had received maybe six or seven handwritten letters from the Colonel. They were unmistakable in their brevity, their very bad penmanship, which made the letters look like little spiders mashed violently into the paper, and their unanswerability. I would talk to the man.

     "I have to go out," I told him, "on an errand. If you don't mind walking with me."

     He gave another glance around the room and allowed that walking would be fine.

Outside on the rue Lamartine Major Cross produced first his diffident cough, then from the leather briefcase a military-style manila folder tipped at the corners with red elastic bands.