The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  I don't like impatience, especially in strangers. "In a minute, I think."

  "Oh?" The toymaker cocked his head the other way. I glanced around the room.

  Most of Saulnay's work space was filled with the same jumble of tools and toys as the outer room. On a shelf behind him sat a Punchinello marionette and two tiny brass birdcages like the ones at Vincent Armus's house. Propped against some ledgers was a framed photograph of a younger Saulnay in the uniform of a German corporal. But my eye was drawn irresistibly to something else.

  I stood up and walked over to a side table and bent forward to look at the single item on it, a beautiful porcelain doll about ten inches high, wearing a golden-colored silk gown. She had bright blue eyes and a little puff of blonde hair and she was seated at a tiny dulcimer piano. All the strings inside it were visible. The doll's hands held two little felt-covered hammers.

  "If you touch the lever on the bench," Saulnay said, "the lady will play for you." I stretched one finger toward the lever. There was the usual delay and metallic whirring I had come to expect, then the lady on the bench began to move the hammers rapidly over the strings and a silvery bright whirl of musical notes filled the room. As she played, the lady turned her smiling face from side to side and her eyes moved back and forth from Saulnay to me.

  "That was built by a watchmaker named Kintzing, a German," Saulnay said. "About 1780. It may have belonged once to Marie-Antoinette. There's an even better one in Neuchâtel, a girl who plays original melodies on the organ. Her chest moves up and down while she plays, and the very first spectators thought she was breathing, like a living person. Most of them ran away in terror."

  I watched the hammers fly across the strings. The lady's eyes lingered on mine as she smiled.

  "In Paris, you know," Saulnay said, "some of the first spectators at the cinema fled screaming from the theater—it was a kind of a riot—such is the fear we have of artificial life. The musician in Neuchâtel was created, incidentally, by Henri Jacquet-Droz. I wonder if you've heard of him?"

  Reluctantly I stepped back from the lady with the dulcimer. She turned her head away. "You mentioned him in your talk. He built a boy who could write with a pen and ink. You said the boy could write, 'Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am.'"

  "Very good, Mister Keats."

  "And Jacquet-Droz was a protegé of Jacques de Vaucanson."

  "Very good again. He studied with Vaucanson and then returned to Switzerland and started his own workshop. The Writing Boy is one of my favorites. I wish he could talk as well as write, of course. Then he would be perfect. Many of those old craftsmen were interested in sound, you know, sound and music. Which is something they have in common with your Mister Edison, I suppose, being deaf as he reportedly is. I understand that, with a nice sense of irony, he's working on a motion picture that can talk—imagine the riots then!"

  The doll's delicate hands slackened their speed, stopped, the music leaked slowly out of the room.

  I found that I was breathing hard myself. I wiped my hands on my coat and sat down again at the worktable. "I thought you might be able to tell me something about this," I said, and pushed the carton across the table.

  He pulled it close to his belly and picked up a small bone-handled knife.

  "Your pneumatique to me at the newspaper said you know a good deal about Jacques de Vaucanson."

  The toymaker was extraordinarily deft with his hands. I watched him quickly slit a strip of tape on the box with the knife. Then just as quickly, as if he were pulling a bandage from a wound, he yanked the tape away and dropped it into a trash basket beside his stool.

  "Not a good deal," he corrected me, and wiped the knife blade on his sleeve. "I know a little something. I grew up in the Alsace, you see, and spent my boyhood summers at a family farm not thirty kilometers from our Jacques's old family home. Our friend Miss Short visited me there not long ago. My grandfather knew people who had actually been acquainted with Vaucanson. And there were still some around when I was young who remembered the family—his daughter moved there to enjoy her widowhood. There was one of Vaucanson's Paris protegés named Hervé Foucault, who evidently contributed much to her enjoyment."

  He slit a second strip of tape and opened the two cardboard wings of the carton. Then he leaned back on his stool. "You have an interesting face. Elsie Short said as much at the Conservatory. She saw you in the audience. An interesting face."

  "She said that?"

  He nodded. "She also said you write for a newspaper, which is how I found you."

  "All the moues that's fit to print."

  Saulnay wrinkled his piggy nose. "I disapprove of puns," he said dryly, "if I don't think of them myself. Before the war, let me say, Mr. Keats, I owned a small but thriving business in Dieuz, which is in Germany despite its French name. I had twenty-six employees and an annual profit of around seven or eight thousand of your dollars. The American Army burned it to the ground in 1918, and all but one of my employees was killed. So I picked up what little I had left and changed my name and came to Paris, where the craft is still thriving—not the easiest thing in the world, to move to your enemy's capital. But I thought art—and craft—are above politics and I could reestablish myself here, where the business is."

  There was a distant rumble of thunder, which I felt even through the thick walls of the workshop. "And so you have."

  "Hardly. I'm poor and not truly thriving, as you can see. But in the years right after the Peace it was worse. I was a very bitter and unhappy toymaker, I assure you, and I made certain angry speeches, led certain angry manifestations in the street that I now regret. Things are bad in Germany, Mr. Keats. It was a very bad peace you Americans imposed on us. I have considerable sympathy for Herr Hitler and his followers. But an old man's speeches and posters don't change anybody's politics. The world falls apart no matter what we think. I say all this because, along with your interesting face and handsome gray hair, I sense a certain wariness in your posture toward me. I imagine that as an American you may have formed resentments against Germans. German soldiers."

  "No."

  "No? Ancient enemies like ourselves? Very saintly of you. Well, I ramble on." He suddenly turned the carton sideways and switched from English to a clumsy Alsatian French. "'Certains ne trouvent leur vie intéressante,' as Jules Renard says, 'que lorsqu'ils la racontent.' Some people find their lives interesting only when they talk about them. This looks like Vaucanson's Duck."

  I stood up abruptly. "The real one?"

  Saulnay had the duck completely out of the carton and was revolving it in his big, careful hands. His face had a look of genuine surprise.

  "I thought, I was told—I understood from all the books. I thought you were bringing me a toy. No, it wouldn't be the real duck, of course. The real one disappeared a long time ago. But this is certainly very old."

  There was a flush on his cheeks and a new energy in his movements. He set the duck in the center of the table and reached for his tools. In a matter of moments he had the stomach plate off and he was greedily lifting the two side plates of the torso, swinging them up where they hinged at the spine to reveal its drooping tangle of curved greenish-crusted metal tubes. Most of the tubes were no bigger than a pencil. Some teeth-like struts must have been ribs when the duck ... when the duck was alive, I thought like an idiot, and bent to peer over his shoulder.

  "That," Saulnay said. "Please. Now." He pointed down the table without looking up and I handed him a jeweler's loupe, which he fixed in his left eye. In his right hand appeared the tiniest pliers I had ever seen.

  "Elsie Short says this was a replica of Vaucanson's Duck."

  "Yes, yes, I know her ideas. She claims there were dozens of nineteenth-century replicas made. Robert Houdin made at least one, an Englishman named Babbage made another— not a very good one. Hervé Foucault probably did, others, the Jacquet-Droz brothers. The test is always the wings, you see, the most complex part." He rocked back on his stool. "Mister Keats, f
orgive me—I don't work well with somebody staring at me. In the other room, there is wine, bread—if you'd give me ten minutes alone, twenty?"

  I straightened slowly and my eyes must have traveled across the little workroom, checking for doors and windows, because Henri Saulnay's small pig-like features tightened and he placed his hands on the table.

  "I won't," he said, and his smile reached no further than his lips, "steal your duck."

  Twenty-Five

  IN THE NEXT ROOM THERE WAS, IN FACT, a bottle of red wine on one of the back shelves and a set of six unmatched glasses. Nobody else was in sight. Thunder boomed overhead, and a lamp flickered off and on in the corner. The front door looked locked and bolted. I could hear the angry hiss of rain sweeping across the ceiling, and feel the cold night air rubbing around and around the corners of the ancient building like a cat. Some days in Paris it failed to rain. The door to the third room was closed.

  I don't like thunder, I don't like locked doors. I don't like it when the power goes off and the lights start to flicker.

  Miss Short had visited our family farm, he said, in Alsace.

  But Elsie Short said she had just met Saulnay a week ago. She had only just come over from New York.

  I turned around. "No," I said.

  The door to Saulnay's workroom had not quite closed. At the table I could see the pale bristly dome of his head bent over the duck, whose worried black eyes seemed to be fixed on mine, pleading.

  "No," I said and stepped back into the workroom. Before Saulnay could move I pushed the empty carton to one side and picked up the duck. "No," I said, as if third time were a charm, "I've changed my mind, I think. I'm taking it back."

  Slowly, slowly Saulnay rose from his stool, spilling shadows. His head bumped the swinging lamp. His big shoulders spread out like a cape.

  "You are," he said, "a quite stupid American."

  I backed into the main workroom and felt my hip touch something. More thunder rumbled above us, and the electric lights blinked on and off. When I turned again the other workroom door was open and a burly man in a dirty gray quilted jacket was coming through it. I looked at him, looked at the Yale lock on the front door. Saulnay limped closer.

  "You want the duck," I said, "because you think it's the real one, too." And then I added the thought that had been skating about somewhere in my mind since the moment I met Elsie Short. "And more than the duck, you want the Bleeding Man."

  His face hung in the dim room, bald as the moon, and a second, fainter look of surprise came and went with the wavering lights. "There is no Bleeding Man, Mister Keats. There never was a Bleeding Man. Pure legend. Pure stupidity." He leaned against the table and held out his hand. "But I do want this automate, never mind why."

  He lifted his chin toward the man in the quilted jacket. "This is my nephew Johannes, my sister's son. He knows very little about toys. He knows a good deal about rougher things."

  The French version of the Yale lock works from the outside by a key. From the inside your thumb alone can turn a latch to move the tumbler. The nephew in the quilted jacket started toward me. I took a step back and as I fumbled with the door, Saulnay shoved the big table forward into my belly and the floor seemed to rock like a boat.

  "Get him!"

  I staggered sideways. My right arm swept a little army of dolls and doll parts from the table, and the nephew's shoes went out from under him. He landed in front of me on one knee, so close I could smell the garlic and grease on his jacket. He fumbled on the table for a hammer.

  I held up the duck.

  "Stop!" Saulnay's big palm shot forward. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. Johannes came forward in quick stroboscopic jerks, like film running backward, his hammer raised.

  "If he comes any closer," I told Saulnay, "I'll smash this thing like an eggshell."

  Saulnay lowered his hand. He limped a step toward me. "You are in," he said, "very far over your thick American head."

  I flipped the lock and opened the door.

  The cold, wet Paris night oozed into the room like a waterlogged ghost. There was a metal working chisel on the floor beside my shoe. My eyes fixed on Johannes, I stooped and picked it up with my left hand. Then I straightened, turned, took two steps through the door, and slammed it shut.

  Outside, I shifted the duck's weight and jammed the chisel into the door frame above the lock.

  The courtyard I had come through was dark and slick with rain, and completely empty. By the time I reached the street I could hear the door splintering behind me. The street lamps were out, of course, on the rue des Minimes and the wind was whipping the black sky up and down like the flap of a tent.

  There were some parts of Paris I knew by feel and touch like a blind man, but the dank, labyrinthine Marais wasn't one of them. I slipped and staggered, squeezed the duck's bony wings into my chest, and broke into a run—and found myself directly in front of yet another new utility ditch. This one was a monster: deep, crazy deep. As far as I could tell in the dark, it extended the whole width of the street. The pit in the center was a jumble of sawhorses and sewer pipes. Right over the center was a sloping sheet of plywood that stretched across the ditch and blocked out the sky like a roof.

  Like a tunnel.

  I stood on the edge of the ditch, swaying. A peal of thunder turned over and over on its side, like a body rolling down a hill.

  If I hadn't been able to see a thin gleam of light beyond the plywood roof I would never have moved, I would still have been wobbling back and forth in the rain when Johannes skidded into sight at the end of the street.

  But I did see it, and so after hesitating one more beat of my pulse, I plunged down the slippery mud and under the plywood roof, shaking, stumbling, eyes fixed on nothing but a watery glow thirty yards away. The thunder pealed again and I counted backwards from ten the way they had taught me, hunching my shoulders against the unimaginable weight of earth and stone that was about to come down across my back.

  Then my shoes hit pavement, cold rain pelted my hair, and I burst white and flailing out of the ditch like a swimmer exploding out of the surf.

  There was electricity here. The place des Vosges was straight in front of me, ringed by street lamps, its long arched arcade bright and shimmering in the rain. Two cars were coming from opposite directions, and I skittered somehow between them, over to the dark fenced garden that filled the center of the square. Behind me Johannes scrambled up into the light.

  If you put up a table and a chair, the French will eat outside in a snowstorm. At the farthest diagonal corner of the place des Vosges, a small indomitable café had four or five tables set out under the stone arcade, and at one of the tables a waiter and two customers were staring in my direction.

  I glanced at Johannes, on the opposite curb. Then I ran along the fence.

  By the time I reached the arcade, he had vanished. The waiter, incongruous in a tuxedo jacket and white apron, was marching toward me, frowning.

  "Monsieur! Attention!" He stopped under a fluttering electric light and folded his arms over his chest. Behind me Johannes's face reappeared between two arches as if we were playing Hide and Seek. Cat and Mouse. Duck-Duck-Goose.

  "Téléphone, s'ils vous plaït?" I said.

  The waiter studied my wet hair, my soaked overcoat, the strange metallic duck tucked under my arm, bobbing its head.

  "Pas de téléphone ici, Monsieur."

  "Dommage," I said, and shifted the duck so that I could reach in my pockets. The first bill I came to was a crumpled ten-franc note, pink and soggy from the rain and, like all French paper money, about the size of a beach towel. If I sat down right there, I thought, and ordered a twenty-course meal, Johannes and Saulnay would still be waiting in the square when I finished, two against one.

  "Dommage," I said again, shoved the ten-franc note in his apron, and from the couple's table picked up a wine bottle by the neck and smashed it against the wall.

  Then I held up the jagged end of the bot
tle up so that anyone at all could see it, and stepped around the corner and into the rain again.

  At the rue de Rivoli there were many more people on the street, shoppers laughing and walking in the rain, shoppers huddled under awnings, a little armada of shiny black umbrellas sailing up and down the sidewalk. I dropped the broken bottle in a trash can and heaved myself up onto the platform of a number 41 bus, going west.

  The rue de Rivoli is the second or third longest street in Paris, and the 41 bus goes all the way down it to the end of the Tuileries. I made my way inside and squeezed into a seat on a wooden bench. I closed my eyes and wrapped my coat around the duck and tried to imagine the Bleeding Man in a cold Paris rain, the Bleeding Man in pursuit of me, running fast, catching up like a rocket, swinging gracefully onto the bus, never once, not for a moment, stumbling or losing his balance.

  Because of a gyroscope, I suddenly thought, and opened my eyes to see Johannes sitting on the opposite bench.

  Twenty-Six

  PARISIAN BUSES IN 1926 WERE GREEN and yellow and divided, like all things in Gaul, into three parts. There was the open platform in the rear for standees; then a second-class section with wooden benches; then, separated by two vertical black wooden panels with leafy gold lettering, a first-class section that contained exactly 17 leather seats, a front door, and the driver's chair. By law nobody could be standing in either the first- or second-class sections when the bus started to move—you had to be in a seat—and there was always a ticket taker in a Napoleonic admiral's uniform ready to enforce it.