The Paris Deadline (9 page)

     "Upstairs is better," I told him, and pulled open the door.

L
IKE THE
T
RIB
, THE
P
ARIS
H
ERALD
had arranged its premises vertically—printing presses down in the basement, a spacious, well-lit composing room on the first floor, and next to it a number of smaller storage and mailing rooms. The editorial offices were just above the composing room, on a mezzanine with a wall of towering two-story windows in the grand French manner, looking directly down on the rainy parallelpipeds of les Halles.

     When we reached the top of the stairs I watched Shirer's startled reaction to the massive polished mahogany table that dominated the city room. This had apparently been built according to the exact specifications of the paper's legendary founder, Commodore James Gordon Bennet (title courtesy of the New York Yacht Club), a man of such spectacular eccentricity that he had been exiled from New York society for urinating on his fiancée's grand piano. The table had space for more than a dozen deskmen, each sitting beneath a dangling electric lightbulb. There was a U-shaped slot in the center of the table, reached by
lifting a flap, and the Managing Editor presided at the open end, facing the windows and the market.

     Or in the case of this morning, facing the top of the stairs and tamping tobacco into his pipe with his thumb.

     "The pipe is a good sign," I said, and presented Bill Shirer to Eric Hawkins with the odd feeling that they both might promptly vanish in a burst of smoke.

     Hawkins greeted us warily, probably because he disapproved of what he had once called my "habitual lack of seriousness." In any case Hawkins was an old hand at sizing up and putting off ambitious young newspapermen who wanted a job. Hawkins himself had come over from Manchester, England, in 1915, and stayed with the
Herald
through the whole four years of the War, during which time the
Herald
was reduced, like the
Trib
, to a single sheet of daily newsprint. He now ran a full-time staff of twenty-five or thirty journalists. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the business and no sense of humor whatsoever, being famously baffled by the American slang his reporters liked to slip into their stories (once changing, people claimed, "So's your old man!" to "Your father is also!").

     "If you came to see your friend Billings, he should be back in his lair," Hawkins told me, giving the last word a pleasant little North England burr. "Or he will be soon. Did you see this?"

     For the second time that day somebody showed me a paper. This one was that morning's
Herald
, folded over to a two-paragraph page four story about one Professor Robert L. Goddard of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who had fired the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket back on March 16 and was now firing another one, bigger, better, farther. I looked down at the gray rain whipping endlessly back and forth across the striped awnings of les Halles and thought of a leaden sky filled with exploding rockets.

     "And nobody pays any attention," snorted Hawkins, who was something of a student of popular science. "Not even us—page four, no less. Of course he can't steer the damn things yet, he just
points them and fires, but they can already go for miles and miles."

     "The Germans pay attention," said Shirer, earning himself a quick, thoughtful Hawkins nod. "They have a full-scale rocket program. And the Russians too. Last month the Russians invited Goddard to speak at the Tsilovasky Institute."

     "Ah," said Hawkins wisely, "the Russians."

     "What he really needs to invent," Shirer said, "is a way to steer them."

     I left them puffing smoke at each other like a pair of locomotives and worked my way along the back of the mezzanine, past an open door where four tickers on private leased wires spun out the
Herald
's cables from New York and London. Any one of them would have put our old Rube Goldberg contraptions at the
Trib
to shame. At the end of the mezzanine a corridor led down a row of offices to the photo archives.

     My friend Eric Billings—known at the
Herald
, because of Hawkins, as Eric the Minor—was about my age, a Cornell graduate, and another veteran of 1914–1918. He had been badly gassed by the Germans toward the end, somewhere on the Somme, but no worse, he liked to say, than when he covered Congress for the Associated Press. We had met two or three years ago at one of the bookstores on the rue Saint-Jacques, both of us reaching at the same time for the same copy of Baudelaire. Once in a while we had lunch at the Camargue and talked about books, never about the War.

     He wasn't in the archives, of course, because on cold, stormy days his lungs worked about as well as two wet paper bags and he stayed home and drank brandy. But he had left a brown envelope with his secretary, labeled as always, according to his instructions, "To the Poet Keats."

     I took the envelope and my canvas bag and a cup of coffee back into his private office, sat down in his chair and pulled out two photographs of Vaucanson's duck.

     Maybe.

     These were copies, it goes without saying. The originals were lost. But Bill Shirer had seen a mention of them yesterday in his research. And I had written Eric Billings, who had run his fingers through the superbly well-stocked archives of the
Herald.

     I shook out a cigarette from a pack of Gauloise Jaunes, which would have been my second cigarette of the day, my fourth of the week, thought of Eric the Minor's lungs, and put it back. The two photographs staring up at me from his desk blotter had a brownish, washed-out antique quality that suggested they had been made in the previous century, perhaps by daguerreotype.

     I shifted in the chair and corrected myself. Daguerreotypes had come in around 1840 and were one of a kind, they couldn't be reproduced in multiple copies. That was why they never appeared in old newspapers and books. These looked like modern photographs, taken, in the usual way, from negatives.

     The first one showed what seemed to be the skeleton of a featherless bird constructed out of bent wires and coiled springs. It was perched on a tree stump. You could see right through the spaces in its springs and wires to a painted background of sky and cloud. Its neck was long and arched, like my duck's, its beak partly open, its wings flung back at an exhausted angle, as if it had just flown two hundred years and passed through a furnace.

     The second photograph showed the same duck skeleton from the front, but resting this time on a big wooden frame. A metal drum suspended inside the frame bristled with levers and wires that went up through the duck's legs.

     There was a typed note in French stapled to the bottom. It said, "Images of Vaucanson's Duck, received anonymously from Dresden." Then a little string of question marks and somebody's faded handwriting: "Dated 1911. Found in a desk drawer, Musée du Louvre, April 13, 1922."

     Shirer knocked on the door and stuck his head in. "I'm going to scram," he said. "Catch you later."

     "Did he offer you a job?"

     He looked at the neat row of metal filing cabinets behind Eric Billings' desk and studied the labels. "I'll see you back at the office," he said, and closed the door.

     There was one more item in the brown envelope. It was the torn-off masthead of the left-wing Paris newspaper
Le Canard Enchainé
and a scribbled question from Eric the Minor Billings: "Poet, what the hell are you up to?"

     I leaned back in his chair, lit my Gauloise Jaune after all, and opened the first journal.

W
HEN
I
WAS TEN YEARS OLD
I was allowed to borrow a book from my father's library for the first time.

     I remember the day very well—I remember the library itself, a spacious wood-paneled bay with three big windows that had been specially added on to our old ranch house and lined from floor to ceiling with his books. Even then I think I recognized that it was a little slice of his much-despised New England recreated in the arid, brown, faintly lunar landscape of southwestern New Mexico. The windows looked west, toward a blue-black mesa some ten miles away where his silver mine began. My father's desk was shoved right up against the center casement, so that he could frown and worry to his heart's content, with nothing but space between him and his underground gamble.

     The book I had chosen to borrow was
The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane, in a little hardback edition purchased, according to the spidery notation under the title, at Lauriston's Bookshop, 9 Tremont St., Boston, April 13, 1891. My father turned it over
for a while in his rough, no longer very Bostonian hands, then pulled out a little spiral notebook from a drawer. In the notebook I was to enter the title, author, date borrowed, date returned, and a two-page summary in my own words of the story. He made me do this with every book I borrowed, until the year I went off to college. To this forcibly acquired habit I attributed, among other things, my ability to work four years (so far) for the Colonel and my impatience with the long-winded world of academics like Parvis Mansur.

     "The Automatons of Jacques de Vaucanson" took up thirty-six double-columned pages in the
Bulletin of Modern European History
, was packed with information, and based on a dissertation for the University of Pennsylvania. His major points, in order—if you're reading over my shoulder, Dad—were these:

1. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, people had been making automatons, which were often simply dolls with movable limbs, but sometimes they reached quite astonishing levels of complexity. The Greeks had them, the Romans had them. They worked by means of springs or water pressure or forced air. Usually priests or magicians made them, and such people were often thought to have demonic powers, which led to the occasional stoning or dismemberment when somebody like the Sorcerer's Apprentice brought inanimate objects dangerously to life. Albertus Magnus (1206–1280) was said to have invented a man made of brass that could talk, but Thomas Aquinas became enraged at its blasphemies and beat it to pieces with a hammer. (In early nineteenth-century France, the professor couldn't resist adding, mechanized rubber women used in place of prostitutes were known as "consolateurs.")
   

2. In the early eighteenth century philosophers called French Materialists began to spread the idea, furiously denounced by the Church, that a human being was really no more than
   a mechanical device. In theory it ought to be possible, the Materialists said, to build an automate that could do anything a man could do—walk, talk, digest, even fall sick and die.
   

3. And finally, Jacques de Vaucanson was one of those unlucky geniuses born before his time. If he had lived in the twentieth century and worked with Bakelite plastic, chargeable electric batteries, and modern chemical techniques, he might indeed have created a sensationally life-like "robot." Some legends said that he secretly did anyway. In fact, a gifted mechanic, a brilliant student of anatomy, though ravaged himself by mysterious periodic illnesses, he had built only three automatons, now lost in the wreckage of time: the Flute Player, the Tambourine Player, and the Duck.
   

     The Duck was his most celebrated creation. By all accounts it had a beak that could masticate food and swallow, lungs to inhale, and a miniature labyrinth of interior brass pipes that worked to digest and then excrete what it had eaten.

     Though, alas, the professor confessed, even Vaucanson couldn't truly reproduce the miracle of excretion.

     According to the nineteenth-century magician Robert Houdin, who claimed to have seen the original, the Duck was a hoax. It could indeed quack, waddle, flap its wings, and eat—but not truly digest or excrete: a hidden compartment held an already prepared mixture to be discharged after the food was ingested.

     All three automates had vanished in Germany or Italy or the south of France, in a well-documented fire that nobody seemed able to document.

I ground out my foul-tasting cigarette against Eric the Minor's metal wastebasket.

     Through the window opposite his desk I could see that the rain had stopped and the stalls at les Halles had closed, as they usually did about nine o'clock, except for a few small children picking up scraps of food from the sidewalk. A woman was pushing a cart of old clothes for sale down the street, and even three stories up I could hear her raspy voice as she sang out their prices. Over by the gates a few twentieth-century consolateurs were waiting, hands cocked on hips, for stray customers from the markets. In the ordinary light of day the strange idea that had begun to tickle my brain ought to have drifted away like cigarette smoke. There were no blasphemous automates out there, no shitting ducks or robots.

     Only reclusive journalists hammered on the head and antique dealers with their necks snapped.

     I frowned at the window and the gunmetal gray foreign sky. Whether it was taken in 1911 or earlier, the photograph was still modern. I picked up another cigarette. Poet, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?

     If my father hadn't made me feel guilty for not reading all the way through whatever I borrowed, I might never have opened the second journal.

"W
ELL, OF COURSE
, I
LIED," SAID
E
LSIE
S
HORT.

     I grimaced at the fat black clouds sagging out of the sky over the rue Lamartine and made a show of turning up my overcoat collar. She glowered at me as if she might stamp her foot through the pavement.

     "Of course, I lied, dammit, excuse my French, Mr. Toby Keats. Why in the world would I tell you—a complete stranger? That duck is probably worth five thousand dollars—ten thousand dollars, even."