The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  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.

  Fifteen

  WHEN 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:

  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.")

  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.

  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.

  Sixteen

  "WELL, OF COURSE, I LIED," SAID ELSIE SHORT.

  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."

  "If it's not a replica."

  "Yes, of course, if it's not a replica. Only the original would be worth that much money." She transferred her glower over to Root, who was standing with conspicuous politeness about eight feet away, by our building door, obviously listening to every word. "As you seem to know."

  "As I seem to know," I said. I slipped the American Journal of Anthropology back in my pocket. That particular issue contained a thoroughly impenetrable article on the private lives of primates, an article on Navajos and rain, which I thought was pretty good, and one quite fascinating article by Elsiedale Short, Ph.D., entitled "Vaucanson's Duck and the 'Bleeding Man.'"

  The question was, I thought, who else knew?

  Root held up his wristwatch and tapped the crystal with one finger. "One-twenty-five," he said, "if Keats doesn't get upstairs in the next three minutes, my little friends, our managing editor is going to hang him from the yardarm with a typewriter ribbon and I'll have to find a new desk mate, who probably won't lend me money or lose at cards the way Keats does." He walked over to Elsie and raised his hat. "Waverley Root, Esquire," he said. "Enchanté."

  "Miss Elsie Short," I said.

  She looked at me with a hard, flat, very red face. "I want my duck."

  "I don't have it," I said. Truthfully.

  "If it's that mangy toy duck with the hangover," Root told her, "it's on its way to sunny Nice, no doubt for the cure. Our boss's mother Mrs. McCormick bought it and wanted to return it, and now she says she's changed her mind and she's going to keep it." He gave her his big moon-faced grin. "Women."

  Elsie gave him a frozen stare.

  "Anyway," Root said, "I got the duck from the police this morning while Toby was out of the office, and I packed it myself: two parrots, one mechanical duck. I took the whole menagerie à trois to the Gare de Lyon"—he tapped his watch again—"about four hours, forty-two minutes ago."

  "I don't believe you."

  Root shrugged. "Hôtel des Anglais, sunny Nice, undoubtedly a first-floor suite."

  Elsie glowered at him, at me, then turned on her heel and marched off down the sidewalk.

  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," Root said, tilting his head and studying her walk. "Nice girl, and much prettier than you said."

  It was, from the point of view of the newspaper business, an extremely busy afternoon.

  The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald—no, I never met him either—was in town that week and Root was assigned the job of editing his interview down to a mere 1,200 words, after which Kospoth decided in a fit of unreason to run it on the Society Page instead of the Book Review page, so the whole thing had to be re-edited and reset. At home two western Senators had boldly come out for a repeal of the Volstead Act, and Senator William E. Borah of Idaho had gone them one better by calling for a repeal of the income tax ("Borah Nix Tx" in Trib cabalese—our term for cable shorthand).

  On the Sports Page the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen denied engagement rumors. On the Front Page somebody named Paul Joseph Goebbels had been named Nazi Party leader in Berlin, and a French countess had danced at the Hôtel Meurice with a Negro.

  I finished off Senator Borah at five o'clock, Lenglen at six, and at seven I left Root menacing F. Scott Fitzgerald (his photograph) with a pair of scissors and a glue pot. On the stairs down to the rue Lamartine I met Shirer, whom I hadn't seen since nine o'clock that morning, and we exchanged a few words about the Germans and Dr. Goddard's wayward rockets. Then he proceeded on up the stairs without enlightening me at all about any job offers from the Herald, and I turned around and literally stumbled into Elsie Short.

  "I want to apologize," she said.

  I looked past her to the street. It was dark and undoubtedly bone-pinching cold outside. Somebody's quilted jacket shoulder slid by on the far sidewalk, and I stiffened and felt a sensation of ice in my throat. Then the jacket was gone.

  Elsie Short folded her arms across her chest and repeated whatever she had been telling me.

  "I said, Mr. Armus called the hôtel long distance for me and what you said, or what Mr. Root, Esquire said, turned out to be true. Mrs. McCormick did go to Nice."

  I rubbed the back of my hand against my eyes. "Did you speak to her?"

  "No. The hôtel said she was out. In fact, they said she was registered, but was about to go on a yachting trip with the Prince de Condé and wouldn't be back for at least a week. Mr. Armus is going to try again tomorrow anyway."

  "You know, Miss Short—Elsie—Elsie Short—" I stopped rubbing my hands across my eyes and stared at her.

  About three months ago a Parisian chemist named Paul Baudecroux had introduced the latest fashion sensation, rouge à levres baiser, which translated roughly as "lipstick that would not leave a mark when kissing." Our fashion editor had written three consecutive stories about it. Minor riots had broken out at the cosmetics counters of La Samaritaine. Elsie Short was wearing her green waterproof coat, of course, and the blue trilby hat with the feather. But she was also wearing, unmistakably, rouge Baudecroux. I peered at the folded slip of official Army notepaper in my hand, which was a reminder from Major Cross of his deadline and a request for another of "our talks."

  "You look tired," she said.

  Major Cross had said seven-thirty. Root had said nine. Oh what a tangled web we weave, I thought, when first we practice to deceive . . . which either Cross or Root or both of them would have recognized as being a quotation from Sir Walter Scott's Marmion, a tale of beef-witted men and faithless women.

  "What are you thinking?"

  I took Elsie Short's arm and led her toward the door. "Just getting my ducks in a row," I said.

  Seventeen

  Two-page Summary of the Article "Vaucanson's Duck and 'The Bleeding Man,'" by Elsiedale Short, Ph.D.

  Jacques de Vaucanson was a very sick man.

  Or thought he was.

  All his life Vaucanson suffered from periodic bouts of illness, real or imaginary, associated with his bowels and his digestion. It was this morbid preoccupation with the fragility of his own body that would lead ultimately to his remarkable friendship with the king of France.

  He was, of course, a mechanical genius—as a toddler he studied a priest's clock while his mother was at confession, and at the end of a month he had memorized its design and built a perfect copy of it. As a student in the monastery of the Minime monks he invented a mechanical boat that could cross a pond on its own and also two "androids" that served dinner and then cleared the tables. The monks were scandalized—to make a mechanical boat was one thing; to make a mechanical man was blasphemous—Vaucanson was toying with the Lord's prerogative to create, he was coming very close to the creation of—it didn't seem an oxymoron to anybody in the eighteenth century—artifi
cial life.

  From the monastery Vaucanson went to Paris and then Rouen, where he studied anatomy with the oddly named Claude-Nicholas Le Cat, a surgeon notorious across Europe for his self-proclaimed project of building, in his own words, "an automated man in which all the primary functions of an animal economy will be duplicated, including respiration and the circulation of the blood."

  With Le Cat, Vaucanson actually built a very crude android, but it proved not to do any of the functions very well. The rather haughty young student abandoned his teacher and returned to Paris. There, despite more bouts of illness, he exhibited on February 11, 1738 his own very well-functioning automatons: the famous Flute Player, which looked like a marble statue come to life, and one year later his Tambourine Player and his Duck.

  Historians have long believed that he sold all three automates to traveling exhibitors when he went to work for the king in 1741, as Inspector of the Royal Silk Manufactures. All of them disappeared; none of them survived their creator.

  But this may not be true.

  The two musical figures were evidently destroyed by a fire in Naples in 1780. How they got to Naples nobody knew.

  But it is very possible that Vaucanson secretly bought back his old Duck in 1763, from a Lyonnaise glove maker named Dumoulin, though if he did, he never showed it in public again. Nonetheless, a "canard mécanique" was in the inventory of his daughter's possessions at her death in 1834, with the mysterious descriptive tag, "le vrai original." Which mechanical canard was then sold by the daughter's estate to an Alsatian physician named Gottfried Beireis, who kept it in his private collection in the city of Metz.