The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Madame Charlotte, Parisian to the core, blushed like a schoolgirl as she took the chrysanthemum and held it up to the street lamp, and Root added something I didn't quite catch, in his own curious brand of French—he himself described it as more fluent than accurate—and she grinned broadly, as people did when they talked with Root.

  There was a pile of newspapers on an upended crate beside her. She picked up the top sheet and rolled it deftly into a cone. Then she shook out some potato slices that were cooking in a can of oil and flipped them into the cone. A dash of salt, a splash of vinegar, and she handed it over to Root, who gave her one franc, which was too much, and murmured (I think), "Ma déesse culinaire,"—My culinary goddess.

  He was just finishing the last of the potato slices when we entered the lobby of the Hôtel Ritz. He wiped his fingers on the newspaper cone and dropped it in an ashtray. I took a heavy brass key from the man at the desk and with what I liked to imagine were condescending nods to the porter, we mounted the stairs to Mrs. McCormick's suite.

  "Did you notice, by the way?" Root asked as we entered the living room. "In his apartment Armus had a Yale medal on the wall where nobody could miss it."

  "I saw it. Class of '96." I walked over to the closet by the bedroom door and reached high up on the shelf.

  "There is," he said, clearing a space for me on the coffee table, "a brothel on the rue Chabanais that has a blue and white banner right over the piano: 'For God, Country, and Yale.' They claim it brings in business."

  Then he stood back and I placed the duck carefully on the coffee table. I had gotten the idea early on Saturday morning, looking out my window at the snowfall and thinking of Mrs. McCormick in the south of France, because she, in the careless, imperial way of the very rich, had of course kept her suite at the Hôtel Ritz while she was away. Both Root and I were known at the desk. We could come and go whenever we wanted, I had thought, on the pretense of doing Mrs. McCormick's errands. And for the safekeeping of stolen mechanical ducks, as all the authorities agree, a suite at the Ritz is better than a bank vault.

  "What time is your appointment?" Root asked.

  "No appointment. I said I would be there sometime after eight."

  "It ain't gonna fly," he said, and shook his head sadly at the duck, which I now had on my lap. I pressed one finger down on its skull and its neck stretched slowly out full-length and its black dopey eyes stared sadly up at me, as if I were measuring it for the gallows.

  I was not bad with my hands, for a Harvard man. In my father's silver mine you worked with machines, and machines broke, and in the outer reaches of southern New Mexico, seventy feet underground, you learned how to fix them yourself.

  I picked up a tiny flat-headed screwdriver that a jeweler around the corner from the Trib had sold me. If you raised the wings of the duck one at a time, I had already discovered, the head would bob and some kind of inner spring would turn in the neck and make a swallowing sound like a metallic gulp.

  It was amazingly realistic. The wings, Vaucanson had claimed to the king, duplicated the bone structure of a real duck's wing. They moved up and down with perfect smoothness, and as they moved they worked a kind of suction cup or inverted bellows in the throat, exactly like sinews and bones.

  "Is this the book?" Root held up a tiny duodecimo volume that I had checked out of the American Library on Saturday, the only book Jacques de Vaucanson had ever written. It was published in London in 1742 as Le Méchanisme du Fluteur Automate and had an English translation in the back, "The Mechanism of the Flute-Player Automate, with a Note on Vaucanson's Duck."

  Root balanced himself on the arm of one of the Ritz's handsome horsehair sofas and flipped to the next to last page. "'I believe,' he read, 'that Persons of Skill and Attention will see how difficult it has been to make so many different moving Parts in this small Automaton of a Duck; as for Example, to make it rise upon its Legs and throw its Neck to the Left and Right.'" He paused and looked at the duck. "Can it do that now?"

  "No."

  "'They will also see that what is sometimes a Center of Motion for a movable Part, at another Time becomes movable on that Part, which Part then becomes fix'd. In a Word, they will be sensible of a prodigious Number of Mechanical Combinations.'"

  "There was a pedestal in the picture," I said. In the second of the photographs that Eric the Minor had given me, the duck stood on top of a waist-high pedestal, with a drum-shaped wind-up engine beneath it and rods attached to its feet. "The engine made the rods go up and down like pistons in the body, but you couldn't see them because the pedestal was covered with a sheet of plaster."

  "'This Machine,'" Root turned the page, "'when once wound up, performs all the different Operations of a living Animal without being touch'd any more.'"

  He kept on reading. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it must have been like in the eighteenth century, back when Vaucanson himself was a "living Animal." The past, I had been taught by my best professor at Harvard, is a foreign country, under permanent quarantine. We can't really go there, even in imagination, and if we could go there, we wouldn't like it. We wouldn't like the smells and the dirt, the diseases, the sewage, the violence, the extraordinarily rough and clawed-up texture of everyday life.

  But then again, I thought, I had been a long time in a foreign country.

  Jacques de Vaucanson was thirty years old in 1739, the year he first exhibited the Flute Player and the Duck. All the books agreed that he was a tall, underfed hypochondriac from the provinces, uncomfortable in Paris. He was invariably overdressed in a powdered wig and a gentleman's fine laced surtout that he couldn't afford. One year earlier he had borrowed a huge sum of money to rent a workshop and an exhibition space in the Hôtel de Longueville, the "Salle des Quatre Saisons," a famously beautiful room covered with mirrored panels and gilded ornaments and newly painted frescoes over the doorways and windows. And even though he was struck down in the autumn by yet another of his mysterious illnesses and had to direct his workmen while he lay feverish on a couch. By the time spring rolled around he had seventy-five visitors a day lined up outside the Hôtel de Longueville to see his automates perform. Each visitor paid three livres admission, a week's wages for an ordinary laborer, and Jacques de Vaucanson was on his way to wealth and fame and the Bleeding Man.

  None of which explained why twenty years later he had secretly repurchased (possibly) the Duck and (possibly) given it to his daughter.

  "'The End,'" Root read, and then closed the book. "'Finis.'"

  I picked up a wrench from the table and then, trying to ignore the feeling that the duck was giving me a look of pained indignation, I undid the rust-coated plate that served as its belly, which was as far as I had yet dared to go in tinkering with it.

  "You know what Natalie Barney said to me?" Root watched as I pulled the belly plate away. "She said she thought Armus's automates were boring, and I said why? And she showed me those enormous crocodile teeth and said, 'Because I don't enjoy innocent pleasures.'"

  I grunted and pried the plate down and a bit of screw and rusted flange dropped out. The screw was a dry ancient greenish-brown in color and clearly not machine-tooled as it would have been in the late nineteenth century or the twentieth century. Hand-turned on a metal lathe in 1738, if Elsie Short was right, by M. Jacques de Vaucanson himself.

  "She also said—this was while you were chatterboxing with your young lady—she said, 'You men are interested in women only from the waist down, while my interest in men is only from the neck up.' She hates Gertrude Stein, did you know that?"

  I did know that. Americans all over Paris knew that. I also knew that, notwithstanding their mutual dislike, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein often sat side by side for hot chocolate at Rumplemeyer's. I also knew that Gertrude Stein's favorite piece of music was "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine," which she played over and over on a phonograph during her salons for Hemingway and the boys. But at this moment I wasn't thinking about what Root called the scribbling tribe. I was
peering inside the bowels of Vaucanson's glorious duck and seeing nothing but a corroded metal cobweb of miniature struts and springs, some of them loose, some of them barely attached to the walls of the body.

  "Give up?" Root had gotten on his knees beside the coffee table and was squinting into the duck. I rocked back on my heels and rubbed my eyes.

  Outside the windows of Mrs. McCormick's suite, down on the place Vendôme, the sounds of automobile traffic had faded. There was a tourist's horse and carriage just below us, and briefly, just as if we were truly transported back to the eighteenth century, all I could hear was the slow clop-clop of its hoofs on the cobblestone, faint clicking noises that made the suite sound like a roomful of clocks.

  "I see eight extra cams I can't figure out, really small, four hooked into each wing," I said. "Right at the shoulder joint. There must be twenty more cams on each side to move the wings."

  "What's a cam?"

  "This thing. Elsie explained them to me." I showed him a tiny copper disk about half the size of an American dime. "It changes the direction of a gear. And on the throat there's a metal bar with teeth like a comb that clicks onto a gear. But these cams aren't attached to a gear or anything else. I don't get it."

  Root brushed his knees and stood up with a little wheeze. "Toby Keats," he said. "You ever hear of Captain Ahab?"

  I had, but I didn't like the question. "No."

  "It's late, it's dinnertime in Paris, you have made the acquaintance of a charming blonde person, and instead of being outside enjoying it all, you're down on the floor on your hands and knees, sweating and red-faced, like a man who's been chasing a white whale all day. Or a metal duck." He bent forward so that I had to look at his face. "What the hell do you want, Toby?"

  "I don't know what I want."

  "You still think there's something hidden in the duck, don't you? Something Elsie Short won't tell you about—diamonds, rubies, a Golden Turd."

  "I think," I said, holding up a cam from the wing and turning it slowly in the light, "I think that Jacques de Vaucanson was a very strange man. And I think," I said, "that there's something here that I can't quite see. I'd like to find it."

  Root snorted and grinned. "You just want to impress Elsie Short."

  I squinted at the cam.

  "Love," he said, "is blonde." And somebody knocked on the door.

  We looked at each other and Root's grin faded to a frown. He bent down and scooped up the duck and walked into the bedroom.

  I counted the dislodged cams, eight of them, and slipped them into my jacket pocket. Then I went to the door.

  There is a certain kind of elderly woman in Paris who grows shorter and denser with age. Their perfectly silvered white hair looks like coiffed marble, and they sprout small hard bits of jewelry everywhere on their bodies, like barnacles.

  "You're not Mrs. McCormick," said the specimen in front of me. She spoke English with a British accent and she leaned forward and adjusted her eyeglasses for maximum penetration. Behind her one of the Ritz bellmen peered over her shoulder at the room.

  "Mrs. McCormick is away on a trip. She won't be back till Thursday. I work for her son."

  "The Colonel McCormick," said the bellman. "This is Monsieur Keats."

  It was remotely possible, I thought, that Root would have a sneezing fit, or the duck would come to life and start quacking and splashing in the bidet. I stepped outside into the corridor.

  "I am Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson," she informed me, pausing ominously between each name. "One of her oldest friends. From London. I had a message from Mrs. McCormick. I most certainly thought she was here. She should be here."

  The door behind me swung open and Root handed me a medium-sized cardboard carton, fastened across the top and sides with electrician's black tape. "You're going to be late," he said to me, "if you don't hurry. Number sixteen rue des Minimes. Which," he added to Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson, "is in the Marais, you know, a district of Paris I dislike very much."

  "It is," she said, staring at the carton, "rather dangerous there."

  "But what can you do?" he said. "Mrs. McCormick ordered cuff links for the Colonel, a little Christmas gift, and they sent her a bunch of painted snuff box lids by mistake. If you want to come in and wait, Keats is just leaving."

  Twenty-Four

  MORE DANGEROUS THAN MRS. GLEESON KNEW.

  At a quarter past eight I stepped off the bus in front of the church of Saint-Paul and Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Antoine, the triple play of sanctification as Root called it, and promptly took two wrong turns in the winding medieval streets of the Marais and ended up at the northwest corner of the place des Vosges.

  Here I stumbled and nearly fell over a metal bar in the sidewalk that people once used to scrape mud from their shoes—"Marais" sounds very fine, but it really just means "swamp" in French, which is what this part of Paris was in the fifteenth century, a narrow marshy bog stretching roughly from the present-day Bastille to the Hôtel de Ville. At one point in the sixteenth century it was highly fashionable to live here. But swamp has a way of trumping fashion, and gradually, as the houses sank and the water rose, the private hôtels and luxurious apartments had been abandoned. For the last two hundred years or so, the Marais had been nothing but a damp, crooked, and labyrinthine refuge for the social outcasts of Paris—Jews, bandits, prostitutes. Toymakers.

  At the dark and muddy rue de Béarn a city crew on overtime was digging utility ditches in the street. I turned left by a corner café, gave fifty centimes to a pair of beggars who staggered up out of the shadows, and one minute later entered the west end of the rue des Minimes.

  Henri Saulnay, born "Heinrich Zell," was fifty-seven years old, German by citizenship, but a native of the French-German region of Alsace—I knew this because, having metamorphosed now into amateur historical researcher, I had just spent two profitable hours that afternoon in the Trib's modest little business library.

  Saulnay was also, according to the Almanach de Commerce, one of a vanishing breed of little-known European craftsmen: a toymaker who designed and built by hand, in his own shop, each and every toy he sold.

  There were, our business editor had told me, perhaps a dozen of his kind left now remaining in all of France, aged Davids struggling against the American Goliaths that mass-produced toys by the tens of thousands from pre-cut and pre-stamped metal sheets and Bakelite plastic. The best American manufacturer was called the "Humpty Dumpty Circus Company of Philadelphia," and some of their toys were designed by a young artist named Alexander Calder, who had spent some time in Paris studying design. Calder liked to make toys that have moving or articulated parts like automates—he preferred the word "mobile"—and in an interview published several years before in the Trib he had said he thought Henri Saulnay was a true artist in his field. Too bad, Calder had said, about Saulnay's German politics.

  "If you'll wait right there," said the bored young man who opened the door, "I'll tell him you're here."

  I don't wait very well anymore. I shifted my package under my arm and followed him down a hallway and into an open courtyard. He glowered at me over his shoulder, but said nothing. Together we squeezed along a narrow passageway on the left and stopped in front of an ancient wooden door with a sixteenth-century spy grille at the top and a Yale lock on the side.

  Any old structure in the Marais has certainly been flooded many times by the Seine, in the slushy brown days before modern dams tamed the river. In winter every crooked alley and house in the district gives off a notorious clammy odor, a cold, green, reptilian sweat that comes through the walls like a fungus. I tipped up my collar and held my breath while the bored young man fumbled through a set of keys.

  But if I expected to step through the door into something like the leaking hold of a ship, I was pleasantly surprised. The room directly in front of me was about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, brightly lit and almost dry, almost modern. There was a big, hardworking Franklin stove at the far end, and a cluttered table in the cent
er, where my guide abruptly sat down.

  "In here, Mr. Keats, if you please." Henri Saulnay himself appeared, in his fat man's red velvet jacket, at a door just beyond the stove. He limped out two steps and waved me forward.

  The clutter on the table, I saw as I passed, was largely made up of exquisitely tiny wooden body parts—dozens of dolls' heads and legs and arms scattered about at random. More body parts were stacked in a kind of Lilliputian boneyard in the center, under a lamp. There were paintbrushes, paint pots, Christmas ribbons and wrapping paper, a flat tray of screws and screwdrivers and tiny hammers the size of my thumb. Through an open door I could see one more room. A slope-browed man in a leather apron stared at me from beneath a swinging lightbulb. Then he turned out the light.

  "A disconcerting sight, I suppose," said Saulnay in his guttural French, shrugging in the direction of the table. He ushered me into his workroom. "All those poor maimed creatures. But this is our busy season, you know, as much as a three-room workshop with almost no customers can have a busy season. The French don't like to buy German toys, so I have to sell bits and pieces to French shops, where they put on their own name. I'm told that this time of year the Edison Doll Factory in New Jersey looks like a butcher's shambles on the grand scale—barrels and barrels of arms and legs, buckets full of glass eyes and painted lips. But that's the American way, is it not? Everything on the grand scale, even slaughter. Shall we speak English?"

  Saulnay closed the door, turned the lock, and cocked his oversized head at me.

  I looked at the locked door for a moment. Then I set my carton on the workbench that filled the center of the room and pulled up a stool. "English is fine."

  "Good. Good. Zehr gute." He removed his red jacket and hung it from two hooks on the wall, where it billowed like a sailor's hammock. Then he drew up a stool for himself at the table. "You must forgive my forced humor, Mr. Keats. I was in our Great and Mutual War, in a modest way of course, because of my age, and it was an American artillery shell that gave me my limp"—he paused long enough to adjust the swinging lamp over the table. "And my notoriously Teutonic point of view, of course. I am, you may say, unrepentantly German. Is that package for me? Let me have a look."