The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  "'Without Vaucanson's shitting duck, there would be nothing left to remind us of the glory of France.'—Voltaire, 1757."

  I laughed out loud and the clerk glared. I turned the page.

  Jacques de Vaucanson merited exactly seven sentences in the encyclopedia, not counting Voltaire's sardonic tribute. He had been born in Grenoble in 1709 and died in Paris in 1782 and in between apparently enjoyed two remarkable careers.

  First, as an eighteenth-century P. T. Barnum he had created a number of life-sized automatons that were exhibited all over Europe and made him a famous man. And second, in 1741, having somehow become the personal friend of Louis XV, he was appointed Royal Inspector to the Silk Manufactures of Lyon, where he invented silk weaving machines of such efficiency and genius that they displaced thousands of workers from their jobs. These same workers thereupon rioted and chased him back to Paris, where he lived till his death. His best-known automatons were a flute player that actually played the flute, a tambourine player who actually played the tambourine, and a mechanical duck that ate food with its beak, digested it, and actually . . . excreted it. (Am I making this up? No. There was Voltaire's epigram; there, on page 678, was reproduced an eighteenth-century drawing of the celebrated duck on exhibit in Germany.)

  Stranger still, Vaucanson's Duck, once the toast of Europe, after a wildly successful tour of France, Germany, and Italy, had mysteriously disappeared, perhaps stolen by rival inventors. Imitations, non-excreting, had often been made. But no trace of the original duck had been seen since the early nineteenth century.

  Finally, with the introduction of rubber to Europe in 1745, the seventh and last magisterial sentence of the encyclopedia explained, Vaucanson had reportedly embarked on a secret and blasphemous and no doubt entirely fictitious project for the king, nothing less than to create . . .

  "Monsieur."

  The clerk switched the display window lights off and made a show of loudly opening and closing the cash register.

  The Larousse Encyclopedia was probably the most expensive book in the store. It cost two hundred and twenty francs and even at twenty-five francs to the dollar it was out of my budget (the Colonel paid us twice a month, by cash, not check). I took one more look at the little eighteenth-century drawing and reluctantly replaced the book. On my way out the clerk nodded with the chilly condescension of one scholar to another. I emerged on the sidewalk, turned up my collar and pulled down my hat, and started to walk.

  I don't take the Métro because you have to go down long flights of stairs into a tunnel and the electric lights in the trains often flicker off for a second or two between stations. Besides, if there was ever a good city for walking . . .

  I let the sentence drift away unfinished and watched the cars race at each other like jousting bulls, horns blaring, headlights flashing. My father, who distrusted all mechanical transportation, had once told me that around the turn of the century, when there were only two automobiles in the entire state of New Mexico, naturally they had run into each other.

  At the Louvre I took the long way around, despite the wind and cold, and went over the river at the Carrousel Bridge. On the Left Bank side, as usual, a very old, very frail man sat doing a jigsaw puzzle on a square of cardboard. Too proud to beg. Doing what he could. I knew how he felt. I dropped a coin in his hat and went to a little café on a side street for a steak and frites.

  And with the coffee and brandy I tried to remember what else I might know about Jacques de Vaucanson. Nothing. The silk workers riots were news to me. Louis XV, I dimly recalled, had suffered from a royal assortment of ailments, diseases, phobias and had no doubt consulted—I was not proud of this pun—every quack in the kingdom. It was quite possible, I thought with a grin, that Mrs. McCormick had bought herself an imitation shitting duck.

  I tried to imagine telling her that, but despite Root's aspirin and the medicinal wine, the dull pain in my head from the morning fall had started to come back stronger than ever. I stared out the café window and watched my thoughts scatter like marbles.

  "Well, of course, you had a visitor," said the concierge at my building, Madame Serboff. She poked her head over the Dutch-door counter that separated her from the rest of the world, looked left and right at the empty street, and wrinkled her nose like Mrs. Tiggle Winkle. "You finally had a visitor, and of course you were out."

  "From the newspaper?"

  "It was a woman," she said with inexpressible disapproval and regret. "Young. She went away."

  "Is she coming back?"

  The French think pessimism is a sign of intelligence. Madame Serboff shook her head conclusively and handed me my key. "She won't be back."

  My flat was four floors up a rickety spiral staircase. At every landing there was a water spigot and basin and a recessed closet with a pissoir and a slops jar, just like at my grandfather's old farm in Massachusetts. Bathtubs were all the way downstairs again in the basement, next to a row of tiny locked rooms Madame Serboff rented out for storage. From the window on my landing, next to my door, I had a panorama of moonlit tile rooftops, church towers, red chimneys, and off in the distance, also to remind us of the glory of France, there was the great golden dome of Napoleon's tomb.

  I would take another fistful of aspirin for my aching head tonight, I thought, and go over in the morning to the American Library to look up more about Vaucanson.

  I put my key in the lock and opened the door and the girl in the trilby hat sprang out of my one and only chair and threw a shoe right past my ear.

  "Dammit, Mr. Toby Keats! Why don't you answer your horrible phone?" she said, and promptly burst into tears.

  Six

  "I NEVER CRY," SHE SAID, and blew her nose and burst into tears again.

  I bent and picked up the shoe.

  "Never," she said, wiping her nose with her handkerchief. "I telephoned you five times at your office and when I finally got you, all you could say was 'Allo?' over and over like a stupid Frenchman."

  "The Problem of Communication," I said.

  "And then you hung up."

  I put the shoe on the corner of my desk. Back in the chair by the window the girl had removed her trilby hat and used it to cover the purse in her lap. She had quite pale blonde hair, I could see now, bobbed close like a Viking's helmet. Her face was bright and round, and despite the red eyes and tears, she had a general air of being ready to jump up and start catapulting shoes all over again. If you were my grandfather, you might have said that there was a good deal of the West Highland terrier about her. She was still wearing her waterproof coat, but the wet Paris snow had soaked her head and shoulders so thoroughly her collar had turned dark and her mascara was beginning to run. Before she could shake herself dry on the carpet I went over to the bed and sat down.

  She looked at me warily and slid the chair a few inches to the left.

  "My name is Elsie Short."

  I nodded noncommittally. Her accent was unmistakably American, though I couldn't place it.

  "I came up the back stairs when your landlady wasn't looking."

  "Burglars usually just toss a bone to distract her."

  "I'm not a burglar!"

  Elsie Short sat up straight and lifted her chin defiantly. Then she evidently thought about the burglar idea, sniffed again, and let her gaze travel about the little room until it stopped at the desk and the ancient clothes wardrobe next to it. The doors of the wardrobe were still wide open. The papers and notebooks on the desk had been raked to one side and quite obviously tossed like a salad.

  "Well." She stuffed her handkerchief into her purse and snapped it shut. "Anyway, I apologize for throwing your shoe at you."

  "That's okay. I wasn't wearing it."

  "But I want my duck back."

  "Ah."

  She moved her eyes around the tiny room again, from the desk to the Juan Miro lithograph on the wall, to the two bookcases overflowing with second-hand books from the stalls along the Seine. There were even more books on the floor and on the
windowsill, looking out at Napoleon's tomb. Root had visited once and said my room had books the way other places had ants.

  "It's a Christmas gift for my nephew," Elsie Short said, bringing her eyes back to me. "He lives in Rye, New York. He's an invalid. He spends all day in bed. It's of no interest to anybody else, I should think. A trinket. Worthless, really. But he likes ducks."

  I didn't say anything.

  "I know you have it," she said, sniffing. "A maid at the Ritz Hôtel told me you took it away in a taxi."

  "And you're sure this duck is yours?"

  "Of course I am! This is Monday. On Saturday I went to that little man's shop on the rue Bonaparte and bought it for a hundred and fifty francs, except I didn't have that much cash on me and Monsieur Bassot, who is by the way a very lecherous person, wouldn't let me take it without full payment, or . . . never mind. I said he was lecherous. I gave him fifty francs and came back that night with the rest, but he was closed and wouldn't answer the door. And then this morning he told me his boy had sent it to an American woman at the Ritz by mistake." She dug into her purse and came up with a yellow sheet of paper, which she spread out on the corner of my desk. "That's my receipt."

  I picked up the paper and tried to decipher somebody's water-soaked French scrawl.

  "It isn't here," Elsie Short went on, "the duck isn't. I know because I admit I looked."

  "It's safe in the inky bosom of the Trib."

  "You mean your office?"

  I nodded and handed her back the paper.

  "You talk funny," she said. "And I don't think you believe a solitary word I've said."

  There were not many female reporters in Paris—two or three chain-smoking ice-cube chewing basilisks over at the New York Herald, a nice woman named Flanner who wrote witty articles for the New Yorker magazine, an elderly matron who served as the Tribune's fashion editor, but wisely stayed as far away as possible from the male clubhouse atmosphere of the city room. I had forgotten how direct, straightforward, and untrustworthy the American Girl could be.

  "Nope. Not a solitary word."

  Elsie Short's face was not difficult to read. A flush began at her collarbone and moved slowly up her neck. She opened her mouth, closed it again, and glowered.

  "Let us," I said foolishly, "go and have a cup of coffee and I'll tell you why."

  Seven

  IN RETROSPECT, I SHOULD HAVE STOPPED right there. Politely shaken her hand and said goodbye. Then gone back into my cozy room a free man, murmuring the words of that lifelong bachelor Thomas Gray, "Where ignorance is bliss . . ." Or possibly Goldsmith, "When lovely woman stoops to folly . . ."

  Should have done. Of course, in retrospect, I should have also gone to Yale instead of Harvard, learned Spanish instead of French, and volunteered for the New Mexican Navy or the Dirigible and Hot Air Balloon Corps instead of the Third Army Engineers.

  There were at least five cafés at the bottom of the rue du Dragon, including the noisy and expensive Café de Flore, where hardy Parisians sat outside on the terrace all winter long, warmed by charcoal braziers placed on tripods among the tables.

  But my taste doesn't run to the expatriate crowd at the Flore, and we went into a snug, lace-curtained café next door, "Le Camargue," empty except for us, the Greek owner by the zinc bar, and a lanky brown and white cat named Byron. Elsie Short gave the cat a suspicious look right out of the terrier universe and ordered a hot chocolate. I ordered a plate of cheese and a half bottle of Fleurie and from long habit pulled the curtain to one side so I could see outside. It was snowing lightly again. The pavement glinted under a white skin of ice that would still be there in the morning.

  "Well," said Elsie Short stiffly when the wine and chocolate had come. "Why don't you believe a solitary word I say, Mr. Toby Keats?"

  I poured myself a glass of the Fleurie. "In the first place," I said, "the duck in question is much too old and beaten up to be a Christmas gift, even for an invalid nephew. In the second place, given the French telephone system, nobody would go to the trouble of calling me five times and breaking into my room, not for a toy like that, when you could buy a brand-new toy for next to nothing at the Samaratine. Is the nephew real, by the way?"

  "He's fictional," she said glumly. She shoveled, God bless her, two heaping spoonsful of sugar into the already sweetened chocolate. "I was going to call him Conrad if you asked."

  "Conrad Short?"

  "Short is my real name. I work for the Thomas Edison Company, if you must know. I'm here in Paris on business."

  "You're an inventor?" I had a hard time keeping the surprise out of my voice. Even in the third decade of the twentieth century, when progress had broken all the moulds, I had never heard of a female inventor, certainly not one who looked like young Elsie Short.

  She wrinkled her nose, and I thought she might growl. Instead, she stuck out her lower lip and appeared to come to a decision.

  "I work for the Talking Doll Division of Mr. Edison's company," she said rather formally, and produced from the purse a square white business card with her name on it, followed by "Thomas A. Edison Company, West Orange, New Jersey," and a little drawing of a lightbulb.

  "All right."

  "I'm what you might call a kind of scout, or roving agent."

  "All right again."

  "You've probably never heard of Mr. Edison's Doll Company," Elsie Short said, cocking her head as if to gauge the full extent of my ignorance.

  "I'm an only child," I said, "no sisters, no nieces, no dolls."

  "Well, not many people remember it now. But almost as soon as he invented the phonograph—you have heard of the phonograph?—Mr. Edison began to try to make it smaller, miniature, in fact. He likes to make his inventions on the smallest scale he can. In 1878 he actually exhibited a doll right here in Paris that had a little phonograph built right into its body."

  She dove into the purse again and came out with a glossy 2x3 photograph of a repellently ugly pigtailed doll. It had pursed lips and enormous fat cheeks and was wearing a billowing white garment that somebody in West Orange, New Jersey might think was an Alpine milkmaid's dress. Out of the top of her head, like a smokestack, rose a freakish horn-shaped funnel.

  Elsie Short made a sympathetic face.

  "I know. That's the speaker for the phonograph. The doll was almost two feet tall. You put in a wax recording cylinder and wound her up in the back and out of the funnel she recited 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Jack and Jill.' Mr. Edison eventually made the phonograph a little smaller, but the speaker still came out of the top of her head. He set up a factory and manufactured several thousand of them, but they never sold well, and the factory went out of business in 1890."

  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."