Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  On the train to Montreuil, he saw a woman with his picture folded under her arm. He stood up to go into another car, but the train was crowded, and he couldn’t find another seat.

  The act of taking his picture without his consent had betrayed hostility, but he’d thought the nature and intent of the hostility could have been random craziness until he saw what had been done with his photograph and where it had been printed. They weren’t after him in particular, they were after the Lazares. Until the paper was slid under his door the photograph was a vague, unexplained prank, as inexplicable as the boy in the rain who had called him a lunatic; and anyone who would wear a loud-checkered vest like that might well have a few screws loose himself. Those who read La Libre Parole had little interest in the North African wars, the Panama scandal, or General Boulanger, nor were they obsessed with an accounting of who in the city bought what where, but they had ideas about race and infection, and somehow in their desire to rout out those they perceived as foreigners, Fabien knew he’d been caught up in a campaign of eradication that he felt certain had nothing to do with him.

  As the train continued east he drew sketches on the margins of his newspaper of the prison yard that needed to be built at Star Films. No object in the studio had a fixed identity. The ties that held object to name, use, and meaning were loose and flapped in the breeze. His picture was being circulated all over Paris. By the time the train reached Montreuil his drawing of the prison set ran into columns of type. He looked at the woman who had folded up her copy of La Libre Parole as he walked past her seat in order to exit the train.

  He’s a member of the Syndicate. It was in the paper.

  Fabien was sure he heard her whisper, but when he turned his head she was looking out the window.

  Syndicate. S - S - S Syllabant with the steam escaping from the train.

  From the station platform he watched until the train was out of sight, then he walked toward the glass building at 74, boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville, at the intersection of rue François Debergue. The two-tiered network of spars and panes dazzled in the sun. Under its steeply pitched roof he felt safe.

  When he unlocked the door to his rooms the studio was already noisy with hammering and crowded with actors silently and independently acting out their parts in a pavane of unrelated gestures. He wondered if any of them had seen his picture, even by accident, and what it meant to them. While waiting for Méliès he stared at the flea circus absently, finally taking the thing down and unscrewing one of the turrets in distraction, just to see how it was put together. Dry husks, specks of dead fleas tilted toward his hand and a cuff link fell out. It was in the shape of the letter M and studded with fake diamonds. Fabien left it on the floor. The identity of the person who slid the paper under his door was another question. He didn’t understand how he could have been identified by that person. Someone at La Libre Parole knew his name. His concierge, quick to exchange favors for payment, was the first suspect, but her name had been Madmoiselle Lazard before she married. The abortionist, though he watched her, didn’t seem to watch him in return. Even the frog killers who had seen him on the train, even they, were suspect. The former Zouave who missed the desert knew his name and address. The truculent boy who watched him in the rain and told him he was a lunatic seemed the only one free of suspicion. By yelling at Fabien, by accusing him of madness as he watched his reflection in a secondhand ashtray, he had called attention to himself as well. The paper might have been delivered by a friend who knew he would never see it otherwise, anonymously offering a gesture of explanation if not caution. Someone who didn’t want to get involved himself, and so didn’t knock, didn’t wait around to answer any questions. There had been a headline in Le Siecle once, not long ago: Les Mensonges de la Photographie. In altered photographs deadly enemies appeared to be enjoying one another’s company. He remembered thinking these images must have caused everyone who saw them to doubt the veracity of photographic evidence, how could it be otherwise? To see Zola and General du Paty de Clam, the man who first accused Dreyfus of being a spy, to see them as comrades made the films that emerged weekly from Montreuil look like reinforcements of common sense rather than contradictions of gravity, simple logic, and most appearances.

  A woman leaned in his doorway. It was Bluette dressed as a figure from a painting that came to life in the last scene of a film Fabien had forgotten about. She played Manet’s Olympia, but in this scene only her head was needed. Since the Dreyfus project was still only in a rudimentary stage, other films were being wound up.

  “Your entertainments are shown in amusement parks. Hard cases and poor sops on their days off laugh themselves sick, I think. What a place for Manet,” she said. A picture frame was fastened around her head. Why did she say your entertainments? Angry at Méliès for not casting her in The Dreyfus Affair, she didn’t include herself.

  “Maybe you’re right.” The film about a painting come to life might be a flop of no interest to anyone. “That hasn’t stopped you from working on them, has it?” He didn’t know why she was suddenly talking to him, and because he was distracted, he answered her sharply.

  “Do you wear a lot of secondhand clothing?” she asked. Fabien had thought his clothes looked new apart from a few ink or paint stains around the cuffs.

  “My work takes me to such places . . .”

  “I know, I know,” she didn’t let him finish. “Say, you might need one of these yourself.” She unfastened the frame and put on one of the false beards hanging from pegs near Fabien’s desk.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A disguise, dummy. I saw someone reading that paper on the train. I saw your picture. Are you going to ask them to print an apology?” She laughed. “Their address is right on the front page. It isn’t a secret.” She snapped a false beard hanging from a peg. “Listen, my friend, you may not know it, but they mean business. If you cause trouble for them, they’ll cause trouble for you.”

  “You’re either sure Dreyfus was a spy or certain he was framed.” An actor dressed as a sleepwalker joined them and added, “If you challenge them, take an arsenal.” The cardboard sword and prop guns would do him no good.

  Fabien ran his fingers through his hair. In The Eclipse sexless planets became male or female and fell in love, skipping cheeses became agents of revenge, a painting could come to life and walk away from a wall, the sun could swallow a train, and cardboard guns could do injury.

  Poor sun, Georges had said, I must make him swallow a nausea pill. Where is my nausea pill today?

  If his morning train had been eaten by the sun, he’d be traveling in some giant solar stomach instead of designing a prison cell, and it seemed to him that an imaginary trip might present a reasonable alternative to the glare of light through glass and Méliès’s testy continuation of the debate as to whether or not there should have been a crucifix on the cell wall. Fabien watched the sleepwalker put his arm around Bluette, who still wore his fake beard, and she swung the picture frame, her arm like a pendulum, and the frame a weight. As they walked down the hall she nearly hit a man in a cheese costume when he passed her.

  “Careful with that thing,” the cheese complained.

  The sleepwalker only held his nose.

  Fabien put one of the wooden guns in his pocket and walked out of Star Films as silently as he had arrived that morning. On the road to the train he skirted the cheese walking in the same direction, and he realized that the panes and spars of Méliès’s studio no longer made him feel removed from the city and safe from its inhabitants.

  Fabien became obsessed with the idea of finding the photographer who had taken his picture. If he could speak to her, if he could ask her what demons set in motion the act of stalking, the endless hours of waiting in front of certain shops in order to photograph strangers; if he could dissolve the opaque mass of these questions into something transparent and clear, he could regain enough sure footing to throw stones at the offices of La Libre Parole itself, to take a crack at their
door with a sledgehammer. He already knew part of the answer: by intimidating potential customers the paper forced a boycott that would in turn cause those businesses to fold and their owners to flee. He knew that, but he wanted to ask her what drove her into the street with a camera, that was all. Finding her presented certain problems. The offices of La Libre Parole were out of bounds. Even messenger boys would recognize him, but he learned the paper had its printing operations in a basement near place Maubert, and the printers, perhaps just doing a job without particular allegiances to one side or another, might have some information about those who took the pictures. Photographic plates were delivered directly to them. On an afternoon shortly after the incident he looked for their address, walking in circles as if he didn’t actually intend ever to come face to face with his destination but finally arriving at the east end of place Maubert, a street he knew well. He asked directions of a boy whose back was to him as he glued bicycle advertisements to a brick wall.

  “Look,” the boy pointed sarcastically at the row of posters with the end of his glue brush. Men raced around a velodrome. “If you were to follow the direction in which the bicycles point, you would come to it.”

  The ruelle off place Maubert was more like a narrow lane than a street, and as he turned down it, he heard what sounded like shrieking in a foreign language. A woman knocked on a smeared glass window, gesturing for him to come in, pointing to the door, but he ignored both her and the shrieks. The number he sought was a few doors down. Barely visible it was painted in white on the glass transom of a small apartment building that contained a butcher shop on the ground floor. It was obvious no printers had their works in this building. Looking for an explanation he entered the butcher’s. There were no customers, and the place smelled of rancid meat hanging on hooks. Its walls were smeared with dirt and blood, peeling paint fell near a few cuts lying on a table. A young man, probably the butcher’s assistant, laconically arranged a roll of sausages into a starlike shape.

  “I’m looking for some printers who have a shop at this address.” He shaded his eyes from a nonexistent light. They surely knew what went on in the building. An older man, the owner of the shop, came out from behind a striped curtain.

  The boy pointed to stairs outside the shop, dropping a leg of red meat as he did so. He quickly picked the leg up, wiping the sawdust that clung to it off on his apron before replacing the joint on the counter. Fabien thanked him and left. As he unlatched the gate before the steps leading down to the basement he noticed the butcher had come out from behind his sausage counter and was staring at him as he descended. Fabien stared back. The man’s apron was covered with fresh red marks and old stains. He held a cleaver in one hand and clutched a leg of some kind of meat under his arm, and he stood frozen like a statue.

  An unmarked door abutted the last step. Fabien flattened his hair with spit then dusted it with white powder and put on a pair of dark glasses. Among the tricks he’d learned working at Star Films was how one could disguise oneself with very little effort. He pushed the door open and found himself in a large cellar, much broader than the building above; it was at least several cellars combined.

  “Hertobise, down boy, goddamn you to hell,” someone called out to a dog that barked in the distance.

  Damp, badly lit rooms were partially separated into smaller cubicles by a series of partitions. The presses were quiet; he saw no printers, only neglected typecases and composing sticks. A dead rat lay on its back in a puddle of dirty ink near one of the press legs. They would never get rid of the rats with the meat just upstairs. Two men sat in the back hunched over a table, and they seemed to be the only ones present in the rooms smelling of ink and petrol. The cellar was dark, only their faces were lit. His hair began to rise, and he ran his hand over his head, hoping to flatten it, brushing the powder from his shoulders, hoping his attempts at changing his appearance would be successful. He was skillful at his profession but feared this was not a film set, and what read as on-the-job full makeup in one place might appear cartoonish in another. Their voices were barely audible, and at first they didn’t see him; they appeared to be penciling out lines of type on the pages strewn over their desk. One sported only a beard, no moustache, and as he approached him, Fabien was tempted to pull on that clump of hair, so wiry looking against the deadly white pallor, that he half suspected it would snap back, a fake. A long, scratched counter separated Fabien from the two men. Initials had been carved into it, indicating the plank might have been purchased secondhand and had once served as a bar or part of a table. The bearded man rolled up ink-stained sleeves. He took off his glasses, rubbed the lenses on his sleeve and pushed them back on his head. In the distance his colleague scribbled on a pad and poured himself a drink. Between the bad lighting, removed glasses, and preoccupation, he didn’t appear to recognize Fabien, although a copy of the paper with his picture in it lay open on the counter.

  “My name is Jean Belmonde,” Fabien said. The man squinted. “I’m interested in your front page.”

  “What can you do for us?”

  “I’m a photographer. I offer my services and my experience.”

  “What kind of pictures do you take?”

  “Portraits.”

  “You need to go to the main offices.”

  “They sent me to you. I’m meant to accompany one of your photographers just for a day or two, to learn the ropes, so to speak. I was told you would give me the address of the woman photographer because she most needs help.”

  The printers were silent. Fabien kept talking.

  “When you publish someone’s picture a signal is sent, notice is given. I’ve been swindled by cheapskates and foreigners.” Fabien thought about Bernard Lazare and how he sometimes paid him more but also sometimes less than an object’s worth. He hoped the man would put the two halves of the sentence together without Fabien having to spell out what it was he was trying to say. He had learned his lines from the man who had transformed a table into a map of North Africa. Unlike Méliès, Fabien didn’t care about the Dreyfus trial and felt no strong convictions about his guilt or innocence, but the photograph had attacked him when he didn’t want to get involved. His image became the agency of their campaign. What did he want from these people? He wanted them to contribute to their own exposure, but it was exposure launched from spongy ground. There were moments when he wasn’t sure the raving prose spewed out every week by the men who scuttled in the dark cellar before him actually hurt anyone. He felt himself sucked into a morass. He barged on.

  “We’re overrun by clappers and syphilitics who prey on Christian charity and goodwill. They live in charnel houses with unwashed children, training them to be just as rapacious as their fathers,” he picked up steam, “pimping, preying, contaminating, especially in Alsace.” Alsace, he believed, was a code for the Dreyfus situation. The man nodded. Fabien felt encouraged. “Landlords, factory owners, harassers of all kinds, polluters.”

  The printer put his elbow on the counter and leaned in closer to Fabien. He sensed he was gaining credibility.

  “Barracks should be built to isolate them, and then they must be sent back to Asia where they came from. Or they could be put on boats to be set adrift in the Atlantic or blown up, even better. Only when they’re separated from the rest of us can we really breathe freely.”

  The printer nodded. Not enthusiastically, but it was clear he was listening closely. Fabien returned to his original reason for visiting the printers.

  “To shame people by publishing their photographs and put others out of business is a strategy that requires patience, but I’m also fast and hide easily.” Fabien ducked under the counter as if to demonstrate, realizing as he did so that it might have been a mistake to infer that their operation was in any way clandestine or sly because these men were, in some ways, quite open about what they saw as their work.

  “You can take pictures fast?” the man bent down to ask him.

  Fabien nodded. Standing quickly and still feeling fru
strated at his ineptitude, he concentrated on the printer’s beard and equally fake-looking eyebrows, dark and wiry against white skin, the kind of deliberately aggressive hair that might provoke an agitated child to tweak it. The man slowly looked down at the paper lying open on the counter, then looked up at Fabien.

  The man turned his back on Fabien as his colleague approached, and they whispered to one another. Fabien heard the words risk and intimidation so he affected a nodding response that could be interpreted as agreement, despite the fact he had no idea what they were actually talking about.

  The other man, compact as a jockey with a pencil moustache, folded papers with a sharp crease and handed his colleague a printed page, which he held at a distance without reading. This second man was almost doll-like. If he had been taller he might have seemed less tightly wound and his attractiveness might have been unnerving; instead he was the kind of person who could be compared to a whippet. Weak light filtered through the sheet he held up, and Fabien was able to see the lines but couldn’t interpret the reversed words. The beard returned it to his associate, a man who even when he spoke in whispers, clearly believed in his own importance.