The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  "But they promised! You promised!"

  "My name is Vincent Armus," said a man in a Homburg hat. "I'm with Miss Short."

  I had seen Vincent Armus inside, off in a corner, and I had disliked his hat. Now I disliked the rest of him. I nodded brusquely and moved forward to help Elsie to her feet, but Armus stepped masterfully in front of me. He took her elbow and steered her toward the stairs. Like an automaton, I followed.

  Vincent Armus, Elsie explained over her shoulder, was a family friend. He lived in Paris. She was staying at his house. And he was very upset that the police had taken her duck—Mr. Edison's legal property—for no good reason at all.

  "And I am too," she added. "You told me you would get the duck today. And you spoke such good French to the police, I thought it was just a formality."

  "What in the world were you doing interfering, Mr.—"

  "Keats," Elsie said. "Toby Keats. I told you that." We were out of the museum by now, passing through the courtyard by the church, into the bright lights of the rue Vaucanson. "Like the poet, 'Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit.'"

  "That's Shelley," Armus said, giving me either an amused or a disdainful look. "Keats wrote, 'For many a year I have been half in love with easeful death.'"

  There were really only two kinds of Americans in Paris in 1926, apart from the drunken vacationers reeling around Montmartre on what the French called "Whoopee Tours." There were the vaguely literary, vaguely bohemian expatriates like myself and Root, mostly poor and hung over, who had left home for all kinds of personal reasons, including a deeply felt discontent with life in Mr. Coolidge's America. And then there were the older, richer, decidedly un-bohemian residents, mostly in business, who never thought of themselves as expatriates, who lived in private hôtels and grand apartments along the boulevard Haussmann or the Champ-de-Mars and who could summon with a flick of the finger, as Armus did now, limousines out of the dark.

  "There's no need for you to be involved further, Keats," he said. A long, thunderous Mercedes, big enough to have a steam engine under the hood, rolled elegantly up to the curb.

  "I know some very competent lawyers," he added. "Miss Short is an American citizen, a completely respectable person. I've advised her to turn this matter over to them. You should never have let them take her property away, certainly not as 'evidence' in a so-called crime."

  "I think so too," Elsie said.

  "It was obviously the work of some kind of juvenile gang or common thug."

  Out in the cold night, under a street lamp, I could see Vincent Armus more clearly than I had upstairs in the museum. He was thin, angular, slightly hawkish-looking, in his late forties or early fifties. Under his topcoat I could make out a stiff white shirt collar whose creases bit into his neck, and a red silk tie and diamond stick pin that would have cost two years of a Trib reporter's salary. I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, I thought, the reason why I cannot tell.

  Elsie was already in the backseat of the big car, under a lap robe that the chauffeur had given her. She was saying something else to me, but her voice was frozen out in the cool precision of Vincent Armus's. "What did you say was the name of the French police inspector, Keats? I'll call him tomorrow."

  "Kospoth. Blaise Javier Kospoth."

  He gave me a dismissive nod and turned to step into the car.

  "I don't really need a ride," I said to his back. "I'll be fine walking."

  As the Mercedes slid away effortlessly into the traffic his long pale face flashed at me through the window like a ceremonial knife.

  I stood for a moment in the cold night air, contemplating the brightly lit arch of a Métro entrance half a block away. Then I jammed my hands in my pockets and started to walk toward the theatre district, where I knew there would be a cab. And for no reason at all, except that I saw the signpost again, I said aloud, "Funny coincidence that the old man on the rue Bonaparte was born in Grenoble, isn't it, Toby? Where Vaucanson was born?"

  At the sound of my voice a dark shape on the sidewalk turned and I recognized the imposing figure of Elsie Short's comrade on the stage, the German toymaker Henri Saulnay.

  "I enjoyed your presentation tonight, Monsieur," I said in French. "Most informative and entertaining."

  He inclined his big head slightly.

  "You would know a good deal about Jacques de Vaucanson." I pointed at the street sign. "Given your profession, I suppose."

  There was a big red metal disk hanging from the next street lamp a few yards further on, the Parisian sign in those days for a bus stop. He craned his head to look at an approaching Number 92 bus, which of course didn't go anywhere near the rue du Dragon.

  "I know very little about him," he said, "no."

  "Vaucanson's famous duck," I said. "According to our mutual friend Miss Short, it was destroyed in a fire back in the eighteenth century. But Robert Houdin made a replica around 1880. She wants to copy it as a toy for the Edison Company."

  The big green bus came hissing and bumping to a halt twenty feet away, headlights blazing. Henri Saulnay smiled very faintly and started toward it. "If that's what she told you," he said.

  Thirteen

  IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOW, I SUPPOSE, to say what Paris really looked like in 1926 or 1927.

  The old newsreels wash it all out into a grainy, flickering black-and-white metropolis that appears faintly comic, decidedly quaint—the narrow streets around the Place de la Concorde, built for horse-drawn carriages, crowded with old-fashioned black cars and omnibuses; women in cloche hats and bobs, wearing long beaded necklaces and flapper dresses so short they had to powder their knees; grinning men in funny straw hats and moustaches, all of them going across the screen with the odd, jerky motions that Mr. Edison's cameras always gave them, somehow making a whole city walk like Charlie Chaplin.

  It was probably an advertising man who first called the twenties the "Jazz Age," a term without much meaning for the seven or eight million young French widows and orphans the Great War had left behind in its wake, or the dozens of legless, armless, or sightless young veterans I passed every day on my way to work, sprawled on the sidewalk, wearing the "Mutilé de Guerre" placards that a compassionate government had issued as their license to beg. The French themselves afterwards called it "Les Années Folles," the Crazy Years, which might have been better. Nobody ever called it the Age of Reason.

  "Do you speak German?"

  Bill Shirer leaned across the table and studied me with his usual faintly humorless intensity.

  "Not a word." I was having coffee and a cigarette, the soldier's breakfast, according to Remarque, and he was still mopping up the remains of a very handsome omelette aux fines herbes, which had cost, my treat, the rough equivalent of a nickel.

  "I thought maybe, since you were in the war, and saw a lot of the Germans, and Root said . . ."

  "I was trying to kill them, Bill, not open a salon."

  "I know, I just thought—I'm studying German now, that's why I asked."

  He pushed his plate away and signaled our waiter for another coffee. Then he pulled out a pipe, a leather tobacco pouch, and various shiny metal tools for loading, tamping, ballasting, and igniting it. Pipe smokers ordinarily carry more equipment than a coal miner. Young Bill Shirer had only taken up his pipe a few weeks ago and still hadn't mastered all of its subtleties. He had started it, he told me, to look older and impress French girls, but in fact Bill Shirer's main ambition in life, as everybody knew at the Trib, was to be posted away to eastern Europe, where he was convinced the next great war would start, and he was certain that a pipe and a trench coat would do the trick.

  I signaled for another cup of coffee myself and squinted through the window at the rain.

  "I'm taking it from a guy in my hôtel," Bill said, between noisy puffs, "Jewish guy. He works as a clerk at J.P. Morgan, but he speaks German, and I give him English lessons back. Did you see this?"

  He handed me a copy of that morning's Tribune and pointed to a story about a Montmartre artist's model who
had been arrested as a spy for a "Foreign Power." She was caught taking photographs at a French military airfield. The government wouldn't identify the foreign power, but the story (byline "Wm. S. Shirer") strongly hinted that it must be Germany.

  "Well, I wouldn't believe everything you read in the paper, Bill."

  There was always a kind of two-beat pause with Shirer, while he decided whether you had made a joke. He puffed, then smiled.

  "What I don't understand," he said, "is how you and Root are such good friends." He pushed the paper aside and handed me a little stack of note cards and two fat brown envelopes. "You're not really alike at all. You're like a monk, compared to him. This is what I could find so far."

  I looked at the note cards first, but they were in Shirer's tiny crabbed handwriting and would need to be deciphered later, when I was alone. The two fat envelopes each contained a copy of a different scholarly journal, both of them stamped "Property of the American Library of Paris." The first was the "Bulletin of Modern European History," published by Columbia University Press, and the second was something called "Publications of the American Anthropological Association."

  I turned the pages of the first one, while Shirer talked with his pleasant midwestern earnestness about the German menace to world peace, which he and many other students of world affairs—but not the French—devoutly believed in. The French were still too busy rebuilding after the war to do much more than sneer at the defeated and sulking Germans, which they did constantly and nastily. To call somebody like Henri Saulnay "Boche" was actually pretty mild. Two years ago, in 1924, they had self-righteously banned German athletes from coming to the Olympics in Paris.

  But like most of us they had no idea of what victory had actually cost. Over his desk at the Trib, Shirer had tacked a translation from a speech by the National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler: "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain. No, we do not ask for pardon. We demand—Vengeance!"

  One of these days, Shirer liked to say, Hitler and his so-called 'Nazis' would be all over Germany like snakes coming out of a drain.

  But on December 11, 1926, in a little café I liked on the rue Montmartre, what I was thinking about was not the accelerating future, but the distant and placid past.

  The article Shirer had marked in the "Bulletin of Modern European History" was titled "The Automatons of Jacques de Vaucanson," the production of someone named Parvis Mansur, who was an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr. I had read only the first two or three paragraphs before Shirer finished his coffee with a loud gulp and tapped his watch.

  "You said we ought to get there before nine," he reminded me, "while Mr. Hawkins is free."

  Reluctantly I tucked my journals and note cards away. Then I led Bill Shirer out into the rain.

  We were going four or five blocks south on the rue du Louvre, which was at that hour a busy, fractious, wildly overcrowded commercial street, one of the main arteries into the great fruit and vegetable market at les Halles. It was also the street that housed the offices of our main rival newspaper, the New York Herald. Eric Hawkins was the Herald's Managing Editor and Bill Shirer wanted to meet him as a favor in return for the journals he had brought, probably with the idea of angling for a better job.

  But Eric Hawkins and every other newspaperman in Paris would have been amused by the thought that the Herald and the Tribune were rivals. In 1926 there were three English-language papers in Paris—us, the tiny Paris Times, which was a four-page spin-off of its granddaddy in London; and, leading the pack with a daily circulation of almost 20,000 copies, as Gertrude Stein was supposed to call it, "the dear dear dear old Herald." It was rightly said that the Trib was so far behind the Herald that we had to give away free copies in hôtel lobbies, but that was actually a trick the Colonel had borrowed from his circulation wars in Chicago. As far as I knew the Colonel stuck with nothing that wasn't showing a profit.

  "I come to the markets here with Root sometimes," Shirer told me. "He knows a restaurant here."

  Which was what they would put on Root's tombstone, I thought, pulling my collar up against the rain. "He Knew a Restaurant."

  A policeman on a huge chestnut-colored horse was directing traffic at the chaotic western gate to les Halles, and we stopped in the middle of the slippery cobblestones. I looked at the horse's great wet haunches rippling with tension, like muscles under a silken tent, and thought of all the horses I had seen in the rainy fields of the Marne, hauling or feeding or lying blown apart in the mud.

  I like open-air markets, I always have. I like the sprawl, the noise, the general air of unorganized energy that does not march, or counter-march, or bivouac. I understand the impulse that makes tourists finish up their revels with a pre-dawn visit here to quaff raw, dauntingly alcoholic farmers' red table wine and slurp thick onion soup with a spoon the size of a ladle, while they watch the market stalls open.

  We paused for a line of stooped, burly-shouldered men to pass in front of us. These were called les forts des Halles—the strong men of the markets. Back then they didn't use motorized dollies or scooters to move the merchandise around. The forts just piled their loads onto wooden frames that looked like shelves, and strapped the frames to their backs with canvas belts.

  They didn't use crates either—this was long before people hid their vegetables and fruits behind wooden slats. At les Halles they carried them off the trucks or horse-drawn carts and stacked them loose on the ground in the long barn-like pavilions. Outside on the pavement, Shirer and I had to navigate our way through what looked like an exploded cornucopia. Even in cold, drizzly December there was French abundance—white beans from Normandy, carrots and cauliflowers from the rich black fields to the east, oranges and lemons from Provence.

  Root had written a quite beautiful article on les Halles, the kind of thing that was so good and unexpected in a newspaper that it made you think the Colonel actually had his eye on something besides the profit line. I still remembered one sentence by heart: "Unpackaged vegetables and fruit covered the sidewalks, arranged by skillful and loving hands into colorful masterpieces of edible architecture—red pyramids of radishes, green cubes of cabbage, purple parallelpipeds of eggplants."

  "It's not as grand as I thought," muttered Shirer when we stopped at a shabby three-story building marked number 38, rue du Louvre. He peered at a modest polished brass sign, "NEW YORK HERALD PARIS EDITION."

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

  Fourteen

  LIKE THE TRIB, THE PARIS HERALD 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 an
d 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.