by Max Byrd
I leaned forward until my knees touched Johannes's.
"What's your last name?" I asked in French. "Is it Saulnay, like your uncle?" And then, even though I had told Bill Shirer I didn't speak it, I repeated the question in German.
His skin was less swarthy than I remembered it, washed out in the dim interior light of the bus to a milky blue, but up close, under the dirty wet jacket, the shoulders looked as broad and hard as a railroad tie. I saw the glint of something metallic in his belt. He smiled just enough to show two gold teeth.
"Johannes Saulnay."
"You can't have the duck, Johannes," I said in German again, then forgot the words for 'Get off the bus and go to hell,' though it didn't really matter, because at the sound of German being spoken half a dozen of our fellow passengers craned around and scowled, and the young woman next to Johannes actually drew her skirt up as if it were about to drag in the mud. The French had lost a thousand soldiers a day in the war. Nobody forgets a number like that.
Johannes wasn't interested in an international popularity contest. He said something rapid and guttural, the only words of which I understood were "for a higher good"—Das alte Gute— and spat on the floor, which was, I remembered, a very German thing to do.
Then he stood up and grabbed the lapels of my coat.
The bus was just then slowing for a turn. I shoved him back with the flat of my hand and in the same continuous motion stood up myself and walked into the first-class section.
Behind me the benches had erupted in a collective howl of disgust. In front of me the ticket taker shouted till he saw the coins in my hand. Then he waved me toward the last empty seat and positioned himself in the center of the aisle, between the two wooden panels.
There is something about a uniform to a German. Johannes was on his feet again by now, swaying with the bus, but the ticket taker, all gold braid and shiny leather cap, stretched a "Complet" sign across the doorway, folded his arms, and told him to sit down at once.
I had no illusions about the deterrent effect of a cardboard sign on a piece of rope. Ahead of the driver I could see the towers of the Hôtel de Ville. Alongside the bus, under my window, a long panoply of umbrellas, wet, multi-jointed like the carapace of a Chinese dragon, was unwinding along the sidewalk. You don't have to be Jacques de Vaucanson, I thought, to understand how a lever works. As the bus slowed again I shifted the duck in my hands, reached over the driver's shoulder, and pulled the front door open.
Out on the rue de Rivoli there was the usual bedlam of Paris traffic going in a thousand directions at the same time. For an instant I could see Johannes bulling forward, a blur of quilted jacket and shoulder, and the ticket taker tumbling backward. The driver was furiously wrenching the door closed again. Then the bus lurched forward and I was on my home ground, the center of Paris, the labyrinth I knew, and I gripped the terrified automate close with both hands and started to run.
Halfway to the place Vendôme I stopped in front of a closed hairdresser's window and stood for a long cautious minute. The window had a Josephine Baker doll for sale and a display of "Bakerfix" pomade for sale, but no Johannes Saulnay in the reflection.
I looked up and down the street. A passing car's yellow eyes crawled up the window and disappeared. The sky was a narrow gray stripe of cottony cloud. As long as you can see the sky, Norton-Griffiths used to say, you're not really in trouble. But I was.
It was nine-fifty-two on the dot when I spotted the stone-cold figure of Napoleon on the top of the column in the center of the place Vendôme, and two minutes after that when I walked under the big red awning and entered the lobby of the Ritz.
Around ten o'clock the lobby of the Ritz is almost always jammed— the late boat train from Le Havre gets in at nine, the "Mistral" and two or three others from the south of France rattle into the Gare de Lyon about the same time. Consequently steamer trunks and valises are piled everywhere, from the two revolving doors all the way to the last potted palm before the bar—suitcases, hat boxes, Moroccan portmanteaus, not to mention their train-weary owners, porters, valets, bellhops, and the higher class of pickpockets (the Ritz charged nine dollars a day minimum for a single room—I had no idea what they charged for a suite).
I wrapped my coat tighter around my own bedraggled baggage and navigated through a crowd of ermine collars and waterproof coats, wincing at the high-pitched skreaks and honks of English travelers braying at each other. If I—or the duck—had worn a monocle and top hat and spats, we might possibly have slipped through without anyone taking notice. As it was, however, heads turned disdainfully in my direction. My muddy shoes left a wet black trail across the blue Persian carpet, and over on the left, behind his golden cage one of the clerks looked up, recognized me, and frowned.
I gave a little salute and hurried on toward the elevators, which, then and now, were three in number and stood just opposite the dark noisy cave of mirrors that was the Ritz bar.
In fact, in those days the Ritz had two bars. The one on the left was small and undistinguished and reserved exclusively for gentlemen. The one on the right, where Root was a fixture, was brighter, often crowded with women, and served little plates of olives with their cocktails.
I took one step inside the one on the right and caught the eye of the bartender Frank, who shook his head. No Root tonight.
I turned and looked at the elevators. My pulse was finally slowing. My heart was no longer pounding my ribs like a hammer. But my duck was dripping rainwater and making a puddle. An exotic traveler in a green turban and turned-up slippers stared at me curiously. Root, I thought, would have laughed and showed him the duck and announced he had just arrived on the Canard Line. I wasn't Root.
An elevator door slid silently open and the operator's face peered out. I shook my head and started up the stairs on the right.
In the corridor on the first floor I paused at a window with a view of the place Vendôme down below. Its Christmas lights and banners swung and glittered in the rain, people standing by the Napoleon column in the center had champagne bottles and umbrellas. They may have been singing, but I couldn't be sure, because the Ritz insulates its corridors and rooms very well. I pulled the automate free of my coat and wiped its long springy neck with my sleeve and realized that I had no name for it, only Vaucanson's Duck, which seemed a feeble and inadequate thing to call something that had already caused—
My pulse might have been slowing, but my mind was still bumping wildly up and down, caroming like a pinball. I needed Root, I thought as I reached suite Eleven, I needed to get to a telephone, to a typewriter—I would call the police. If I could figure it out I would write one hell of a story for the Trib. I reached for the door handle and turned it. I would call the duck—
"Keats," said Mrs. Katharine McCormick as she swung the door majestically open.
Twenty-Seven
"YOU MAY COME IN, MR. KEATS. In-Tray," she added in her personal version of French, and swept the folds of her dress to one side and stepped back.
She was wearing a black hat with a wide brim and a wet feather, a jacket and long green traveling dress made of some stiff, heavy material I didn't recognize, steel wool probably, and, behind her jeweled lorgnette she was wearing an expression of severe and icy displeasure. On the coffee table sat a small Tartan carpetbag with a railroad tag tied to its clasp.
"He looks surprised," said Mrs. Gwenyth Crawford Gleeson from the couch.
"He looks guilty," said Elsie Short.
"That damned duck has nine lives," said Root. He was seated on a window divan behind the couch, overlooking the place Vendôme, and he raised an imaginary glass to me in a sardonic gesture of fellow feeling.
"Language, Mr. Root," said Mrs. McCormick and closed the door. "I would like to know, Mr. Keats, what precisely has been going on in my suite? What has been transpiring? This young woman"—her lorgnette dipped like a scepter toward Elsie—"has been telling me a most extraordinary tale."
"I thought," I said, gripping the duck in t
he crook of my arm, "that you were still in Nice, Mrs. McCormick, until Thursday."
"I telephoned the Tribune and told Editor Kospoth that I was returning early. He was to telephone you, both of you, to let you know."
"The Problem of Communication," said Elsie maliciously.
"She says," Mrs. McCormick placed her hat on the table and moved across the carpet toward the fireplace, where, as always when she was in residence, a little cairn of sea-coal was burning merrily on the grate. "She says that one or both of you told her that I had taken this wretched automat to Nice with me and that I was going to keep it for myself."
"Yes," I said. Elsie was standing at the far end of the couch, next to the seated Mrs. Gleeson. She was wearing a simple cotton dress of the kind you would buy off the rack at the Samaratine. It was navy blue, with a white belt and the big shoulder pads then in fashion, and a kind of chevron of pleats down one sleeve. Her blonde helmet of hair was sparkling, not with barnacles and jewels like Mrs. Gleeson's, but with a little lacework of crystal-like raindrops that must have been shaken out when she took off her hat. Her cheeks were flushed a bright healthy pink, no makeup, not even lipstick tonight. Her nose was small and pert and ordinary and next to her, I thought, all the other women in Paris were as plain as cabbages. "Yes, that's pretty much correct."
"Actually," Root said from the window, "I was the one who told her that. I remember it well. It was last week outside the Trib just after lunch—"
"Be quiet, Mr. Root." Mrs. McCormick inspected him through the lorgnette. "You would say that, of course, to help Mr. Keats. The two of you are inseparable, Heaven knows why, but you are only the follower and Keats is the moral and intellectual leader."
Root and I both stared at her in amazement.
She gave a brisk, imperial nod in the direction of Mrs. Gleeson. "That is what Bertie always says. 'Damaged goods,' he calls Keats, because of the War, he says. But not hopeless."
"Well, the automate is mine, thanks to nobody." Elsie stepped around the coffee table and held out her hand. "I've shown Mrs. McCormick the receipt," she said. I took a step backwards. "She knows all about the mix-up at the store and the murder and robbery and Mr. Edison's plans for the doll factory."
"Mr. Edison is a friend of Bertie's, you know."
"She doesn't want the duck," Elsie said. "But I do." I took another step backwards, and her face tilted and softened just as it had in the café when she told me I talked funny. "Toby?"
There was a rapid series of thumps behind me. Mrs. McCormick raised her palm for silence and turned with the slow majesty of a gunboat turret toward Root. Grumbling under his breath, he stood up and walked past Elsie, shrugged at me, and opened the door.
"A thousand times apologies for the delay," said somebody in professionally mangled English, and two young men in the gray Cossack uniforms of the Hôtel Ritz porters staggered in, lugging a small mountain of suitcases, clothes bags, and Christmas packages. Behind them, in correct evening dress and carrying nothing, came a Ritz functionary of the management caste.
"In there," said Mrs. McCormick, pointing to the bedroom door, and indicated to the rest of us with a nod and a pursing of her lips that we should all remain in mute and frozen tableau while the servants were present.
"When were you in Alsace?" I said to Elsie Short.
"What?"
"Mr. Keats," intoned Mrs. McCormick, my boss's mother and owner of one quarter of the Chicago Tribune, Paris edition.
"When were you in Alsace?" I said. "You told me you'd just arrived in Europe, but Henri Saulnay said you had come to his farm, you talked to him about Jacques Vaucanson—"
"Saulnay," she said, and grabbed for the duck.
Behind her now the two porters were craning their necks in curiosity, management was frowning. Mrs. Gleeson bolted up like a catapult.
"Keats!" cried Mrs. McCormick. "Give her that ridiculous toy!"
"No."
"Give it to her!"
"No." The person who had Vaucanson's Duck was directly in the path of Henri Saulnay and his thuggish nephew, and I had fought many more Germans than Elsie Short. The person who had Vaucanson's Duck—
"Toby!"
Root held Elsie's arms while Mrs. McCormick advanced toward me, flames shooting out of her eyes.
"Give her the goddam duck!" Root cried. At which point Elsie broke free, the porter behind her toppled sideways in an avalanche of luggage, and I pulled open the door and took French leave.
At the bottom of the stairs I threw one glance toward the crowded lobby and then ran straight ahead, into the gentlemen's bar.
A waiter leapt out of my way, the bartender shouted. I dashed out the side exit and into the cold, dark street.
It was the rue Cambron, some idiotic part of my mind remembered, and it ran three short blocks north and south, toward nowhere in particular. Both sides of it were lined with parked cars and delivery vans. I turned automatically right, heading in the general direction of the rue Lamartine and the Trib, where I might or might not still have a job, and started to trot along the sidewalk, weaving in and out of the parked cars. The rain had stopped completely, but the wind was still shrieking up and down the street. Far overhead it had punched and torn the night sky into a ragbag of frayed clouds and frozen stars.
I heard the bar door slamming open and voices calling my name. I swerved right at the first corner I came to, looked back for a heartbeat over my shoulder—and ran headlong into Johannes.
Vaucanson's Duck flew out of my hands like a ball. As I fell to the pavement, I saw it tumbling in the wind. It smacked into a puddle under a street lamp, head bobbing frantically, one brass wing flapping.
For an instant everything was what Mrs. McCormick had wanted—a mute, fixed tableau. I lay sprawled on my chest on the sidewalk, my empty right hand stretched out in front. To one side, balanced on a knee and a fist, Johannes was staring at the duck. To my left a tramp sat on a bench with a wine bottle halfway to his mouth. Two yards ahead the duck tumbled over one last time in Edisonian slow motion and landed on his feet.
And Johannes took three quick steps and scooped him up.
By the time I scrambled to my own feet Johannes was thirty yards away. I saw him dodge around a knot of people coming out of a restaurant. I felt blood on my cheek, heard blood pounding like a cannon in my ears. I was the ultimate automaton, I was the Bleeding Man. I dropped my shoulders and charged straight forward, through the same knot of shouting people, over a curb, off a lamppost—we were on the boulevard des Capucines, I realized, wide, bright, horrible, dancing with Christmas lights and banners, swarming with cars and taxis.
Ahead, rising up like a steamship from a sea of light, was an enormous green and white facade—he was running for the Opéra, he was going to lose me in the great crowd of Christmas revelers and opera goers now streaming out of its six golden doorways, flooding the sidewalks and street.
I watched Johannes disappear behind a taxi. Over the boom-boom-boom of my bleeding ear I heard a gendarme's whistle. Amazingly, even as my legs pumped up and down, I somehow swept my gaze left to right across my whole field of vision, going up and down by systematic quadrants just the way they had trained me, just the way you did when you were trapped in a tunnel and had to find your target. And at that moment Johannes bounced into sight again and dashed to his right and I saw that it wasn't the Opéra he was running for after all, but the Métro.
It was too much. After everything else—after Elsie, after Saulnay, Mrs. McCormick, the rain and the cold and the wind—it was far too much.
There was light behind me, light all around me, moving, floating, pushing away the night air. But at the bottom of the Métro entrance, twenty feet down a set of wet and slippery concrete steps, I could see green wooden doors and behind them ... and behind them, I thought. I stopped on the topmost step and gripped the handrail. Behind the green doors there would be no light, behind them there would be the long black throat of the Métro tunnel. Facilis descensus Averno. Not ever, I
thought. Not ever again.
I took one step down.
Just in front, Johannes turned and looked back at me.
I took a second step, trembling from head to toe like a man in a fever, and lurched for the duck. It was too wet and slick for either of us to hold, and it went skidding out of my fingers onto the ground, between the legs and feet of the crowd coming out of the doors. Johannes's face turned hard and flat, and he yanked the metallic glinting thing out of his belt, which some crazed part of my mind noted was a Webley .38-caliber officer's pistol, the kind the British had used in the War.
I heard people scream, and I must have seen him snarl and step toward me, but by then my thoughts had shut down, my feet had stopped.
I forced myself one more step back into the War and felt the tears running down my cheek, the Weeping Man, and then Johannes, too scornful and cruel to waste a bullet, clubbed me three times in the skull and face with the barrel of his gun, slowly, casually, as one might slap a coward, and I rolled over and over down the steps and hit the doors with a sob.
When I opened my eyes it was starting to rain again and a policeman in the only city I had ever loved was shaking my shoulder and Waverley Root was wobbling into focus just as before, holding the shattered pieces of Vaucanson's Duck in his hands.
"Damaged goods," I said, and then I was gone.
PART FOUR
On the Rue Jacob
Twenty-Eight
IN THE ARMY WE USED TO CUT OFF the suspenders of captured German soldiers, so that they had to use both hands to hold up their pants and couldn't run away.
Something like that, I assumed, must have been in the minds of the good Sisters who ran the little Hôpital Franco-Britannique out on the rue Barbès in Neuilly, where the French police had finally taken me on the night of December 22nd and where, for the first three days, they dressed me in a knee-length blue hôpital gown with no underwear and only paper slippers for my feet. Not that I was going anywhere.
