The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  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.

  Eight

  IN THOSE YEARS PARISIAN 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.

  PART TWO

  Birds of a Feather

  Nine

  IT WAS THURSDAY, DECEMBER 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.

  It was one of those bright, sunny, almost-warm winter afternoons that made you forget that Paris enjoyed approximately the same climate as London and Munich. The sky was scrubbed blue. There was no sign whatsoever of the snow that had powdered the old city like an eighteenth-century wig on Monday. Down the street, on the opposite side of the rue Lamartine, came a troop of French schoolchildren dressed in their uniforms of black aprons and white collars. They all wore wooden-soled shoes, as high-topped as boots, and made an ear-splitting clatter as they ran along the sidewalk.

  "You're a hard man to get hold of, Mr. Keats," said Major Cross. "I'm told the War Department sent somebody last year and you wouldn't see him. In July they sent two men."

  "I believe I was traveling in July."

  He flipped a page in the folder as he walked. "Actually," he said, "you were right here in Paris and you called our people 'mongrel beef-witted lords' and said if they came back again you would make them the 'loathsomest scabs in all Greece.' Shakespeare, I think, Troilus and Cressida."

  He closed the folder and gave me a small, tight smile. I shrugged.

  "Your editor said you keep pretty much to yourself. He called you a hermit when you're not at work."

  I shrugged again. By this time we had reached the rue de Trévise and were stopped on the curb, waiting for some empty trucks to rattle past on their way back from les Halles.

  "Even so, Colonel McCormick was very anxious we should have your interview," he said. "The Army wants to publish an official history of the war and they plan to bring out Volume One by next summer—June 24, in fact. That's the ten-year anniversary of Pershing's first landing in France."

  I pushed off the curb and we crossed together. The Major fell automatically into step with me.

  "And the Colonel's role in this?"

  "He's underwriting the publication costs," Cross said, "of Volume One, anyway—for patriotic reasons, he says, but of course he gets his name on the title page and he gets to say a good deal about the contents. He seems to feel a chapter on your people is absolutely indispensable."

  "My people," I said.

  "The Tunnelers Corps, the underground bombers. The Moles." One more snap of the bands on his folder. "He said to tell you, and I quote, 'We have a deadline and you're a goddam reporter.'"

  The rue de Trévise was the kind of commercial and nondescript Parisian street that no tourist would linger over, but to me its anonymous, ordinary foreignness was part of its charm. The buildings were gray and beige five-story boxes with mansard roofs and red tile roofs, late nineteenth-century speculators' handiwork, thrown up more or less hastily when Baron von Haussmann's great boulevards just to the south sent this whole part of the city into a construction boom. I looked up at the sky, already beginning to fade from blue to slate. At this latitude, in another half hour or so, the sun would vanish, and without Edisonian electric lights it would give way completely to darkness and the city in front of me would swim and flicker and be gone. I remembered an old astronomy class from college—if there were no sun, there would be no weather. Weather is solar energy received at the earth's uneven surface and redistributed.

  No sun underground, no weather.

  At the corner of rue Richer some builder with an artistic touch had put in a glass-roofed arcade, and there was now a little protected café and bar just inside it, with tables under the glass.

  "Actually," Cross said, "Deadline or no deadline, I'm as interested as the Colonel, personally. To a desk soldier like me, you know, what you did is fascinating."

  Fascinating. I took a deep, cold breath.

  "Since the Colonel insists," I said, and we went inside and sat down under the glass roof. I ordered Sancerre, which was a perverse choice because Sancerre is a white wine served chilled and not a winter kind of drink. The Major, to my surprise, in very good French ordered a snifter of brandy.

  But if I expected him to begin a systematic biographical question-and-answer, Army-style, he surprised me again by pulling two or three photographs out of his manila folder.

  "These are from our British friends," he said. "They're having trouble identifying some of the faces. We thought you might help."

  I picked up the first of the photographs. It was an ordinary five-by-eight glossy, black and white, of course, because color wasn't widely available in those days, and wouldn't be for another decade or so.

  But then, for this subject you only needed black and white.

  The photograph showed perhaps twenty-five men, sitting and standing in three rows and facing the camera. The shadow of whoever had taken the picture fell across the right-hand side and reached almost to the shattered tree trunk behind them. There was the back of an army lorry just in the corner. A wall of sandbags shoulder-high. A dark, gaping space beneath the sandbags on the right, where some learned joker had placed a handwritten sign in Latin, "Facilis descensus Averno." Easy the descent to Hell.

  "This chap, for instance," said Cross and put his finger on a face.

  When I didn't say anything, after a moment he took a sip of his brandy and remarked in a conversational tone, "Some of you people had remarkably long hair, for the military."

  "That was Norton-Griffiths' idea. He thought people talked too much when they went to the barber."

  "Ah." Cross made a microscopic adjustment to the photograph, squaring it with the edge of the table, and to his credit offered no comment about my gray hair. "So you knew the famous Norton-G
riffiths, a legendary person."

  It was an excellent interviewing technique, deliberate or not, almost guaranteed to loosen the tongue. Major John Norton-Griffiths, known throughout the British Army as "Empire Jack," was one of those colorful, eccentric, and hugely outsized personalities that spring up so easily in the damp, unweeded garden of the English upper class.

  Before the war he had owned a civil engineering company that specialized in building tunnels for the London Underground and sewers for the city of Manchester. When the war began he had taken one look at the Royal Geological Survey of Flanders and the Low Countries, imagined somehow what was to come, and soon afterwards formed with his own money a private company of miners, tunnelers, and geologists, all of whom he insisted on calling, to the disgust of the Regular Army, "Moles." I had become a Mole in the fall of 1916, about five months after I had dropped out of my class at Harvard.

  "Your job, as I understand it," Major Cross said, "was to dig deep tunnels from our side of the trenches over to the German side, under No Man's Land, and plant bombs literally under their feet."

  "'Overcharged' bombs, that's what we called them, even though they were underground. We put them under the German lines, yes, about ten feet below the surface. 'Undercharged' bombs were called camouflets, and those we used to make 'controlled' explosions inside the tunnels, to blow up the German moles, who were digging as fast as they could toward us to blow up our people. The Army has a funny idea of 'controlled.'"

  "Quite a sight, I imagine," Major Cross said. "Eight or nine hundred pounds of TNT going off right under a mess hall or a barracks or people just marching calmly across what they thought was terra firma, no warning at all. Nerve-wracking."

  When I said nothing to that, Major Cross reopened his manila folder. "You also went to General Leonard Wood's volunteer regiment in Plattsburg, New York, I see, another larger-than-life character, like Norton-Griffiths."