The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  "I like the American slang. And you see, I have a small collection of automates myself, French and Swiss. They were made by my grandfather, whom you somehow very oddly neglected to mention."

  Despite my bad ear and the noise of sixty chattering Frenchmen, I still imagined I could pick out Elsie's rising voice. I twisted my head and saw her and Vincent and Libby Armus, walking toward the piano.

  The grip on my arm tightened. "His name was Hervé Foucault," Annick Perret said, and the Muse of Coincidence laughed out loud, "and he lived in Neuchâtel. He was, how would you put it in slang? He was the 'fancy man' of that terrible little pute, Jacques Vaucanson's daughter."

  The piano burst into a Charleston. I took one astonished look at Libby Armus bent over the keyboard, fingers flying, and then lifted a startled Annick Perret out of her chair and guided her around a corner, into a book-lined study with paintings I ignored and a beautifully upholstered lady's chaise longue.

  "If you shut the door, too," said Annick with another broad grin, "it will do wonders for my reputation, even at seventy-nine. Especially at seventy-nine."

  "I know about Jacques Vaucanson," I said, pulling out the chaise for her. "But not much about his daughter."

  "You were in the war, were you not, poor boy? The eyes always give it away." She rubbed the nubby fabric of the chair with her palm. "So much in a hurry, so single-minded, all of you after the war. You think the world could end at any moment. Sit right there. Do you see this ring?"

  She held up a crooked finger that was bent by arthritis and age, and also by the weight of a thick, beautifully worked band of silver with a teardrop ruby set in the center. "This ring belonged to Jacques Vaucanson's daughter," Annick said. She turned it under a lamp and it caught the reflections of old leather books, gold-stamped bindings, three hundred-year-old light. "Angélique was her name, Angélique-Victoire de Vaucanson. She married the son of the Comte de Salvert, but he was a fool and she was a flirt and my grandfather Hervé, of course"—a proud and rather salacious chuckle—"was adorably handsome. And a genius with his hands, which a woman always likes."

  I was trying to do the math in my head. "You couldn't have known her?"

  A snort this time, not a chuckle. "I'm not as old as all that, young man. I was born in 1848, if you want to know, in the Dordogne, in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. Angélique was dead before that. But I come from a long-lived family, and my grandfather was younger than she was. He lived to be ninety-three. I remember him well."

  "And the ring?"

  She rotated it slowly, hypnotically, in the light. The distant piano stopped and applause rippled into the room.

  "Well, it first belonged to the king," she said, with a little nod of satisfaction and pleasure. "Then it belonged to her, that was the story. Louis XV of disgraceful memory must have given it to Jacques in the middle of the eighteenth century. When Angélique ran away with my grandfather, her husband the comte cut off all her money. How she lived after that nobody knew, because my grandfather never made very much from his automates. But everybody thought Jacques had secretly left her all the jewels and gold that he earned from the king, for the silk machines in Lyon. He must have hidden it somewhere before he died, from the tax collectors. But he told Angélique where, and whenever she needed money evidently she just dipped her hands into a treasure chest, like a pirate queen."

  "In Neuchâtel?"

  Annick Perret's plaster-white face turned slowly toward me. Up close I could see what a work of art her maquillage was— eyebrows completely shaved and replaced by two thin curling lines; eyelashes tipped with purple mascara; her mouth a deep, sly scarlet bow of strident geranium red.

  "That was the very odd thing," she said, almost in a whisper. "She always disappeared from Neuchâtel for six or seven days, and when she came back, my grandfather said her carriage smelled of limestone—he was from near the Dordogne, and he would know. The Dordogne is limestone country. To tell the truth, I always thought he was in on the secret."

  I leaned back and took a deep breath and wondered if a cigarette would offend her. Out in the big room a new and very different kind of piano music had started, angry and percussive, nothing like a Charleston.

  "George Anthiel," Annick said with disdain. "He once wrote a ballet for six player pianos and two airplane propellers."

  "Did your grandfather," I said, choosing my words as carefully as I could, so that nothing could possibly go wrong, "ever talk about something called 'Solresol'?"

  She frowned at me, at the open door and the music, and shook her head.

  "When he worked for Vaucanson, did he ever make musical automates? Music boxes?"

  "Like the Flute Player, you mean?" She shook her head again. "Those were very early in Vaucanson's life. My grandfather came to him almost as a boy, at the rue Charonne, and he worked on the weaving machines. In Neuchâtel he worked for the Jacquet-Droz family, and none of them was particularly interested in music. They rarely made music boxes."

  "They made," said small, blonde, absolutely gorgeous Elsie Short from the doorway, "automatic Writing Machines. You should remember that, Toby. They made the first automates who could hold a pen and write out actual letters and words, and they could write all sorts of things, in French or English."

  "There's still one of them that works perfectly well," said Annick Perret, smiling at Elsie and beckoning her forward. "'The Writing Boy'—it's in the museum in Neuchâtel."

  "What they wrote," Elsie said, staying right where she was, looking straight at me, "depended on the cams."

  Thirty-Six

  IT WAS ALMOST ELEVEN O'CLOCK before we could make an exit from Natalie Barney's party. Twice we eased our way, like fugitives on the lam, through the big drawing room toward the hallway, and twice we were stopped, once by Libby Armus, who had someone Elsie positively needed to meet, once by Natalie Barney, who took us both over to shake the limp paw of the composer and pianist George Antheil.

  Even then, we had scarcely reached the sidewalk of the rue Jacob when Vincent and Libby Armus came out of a clowd of furs and top hats and caught us at the curb. Libby led us all toward a waiting taxi (no Mercedes this time, I noticed with interest).

  "I would very much," said Vincent Armus, bending close to me, murmuring, "very much like to conclude my business deal regarding the automate, Mr. Keats. Elsie is hesitating. I understand you are somehow a partner in it, or at least she wants your consent. Actually, I don't understand that at all. It's her property."

  I pulled up my collar. The rain had died away, but the air was misty, and a fidgety, uneasy wind was still brushing off the wet rooftops, sending some gray clouds scudding east toward Switzerland. Through a gap overhead there was a pale white new moon with beveled edges like a cam.

  I absolutely hated the high, tense whine in my ears that Johannes's fist and pistol had given me, an unearthly sensation like a piano wire stretched through my head. "I'm not sure," I heard myself say, "that it's a very good business deal for her."

  "Mr. Keats—"

  Libby Armus peered around his shoulder. Her beaked nose was red with cold, but her expression was cheerful, friendly.

  "Mr. Keats, do you need a ride in our taxi? Did you like the music?"

  "I liked your Charleston fine. Not so much the other guy."

  "Is it more money?" Armus said. "I would be willing to pay—" He paused and squinted at the moon. "I would be willing to pay six hundred dollars down in cash, right now, three thousand in total."

  "Sweetheart, cash? You know we shouldn't be buying more—" Libby turned toward Elsie. Elsie put her hand on Armus's sleeve.

  "Toby and I still need to talk some things over first," she told him with an apologetic grimace. "It's my property, but we have a kind of arrangement. And besides, I don't want to sell you something if it's broken or, worse yet, not genuine."

  "I'll take my chances on all of that," Armus said in the same impatient voice. "My offer is very generous. You won't do better. I would really like to settle the thing rig
ht now. As for being broken, I can repair the duck myself. Whether it's by Vaucanson or Houdin, I want it."

  Libby Armus, cheerfulness replaced by a small, tight expression of worry, had moved over to the open taxi door. "Are you getting in back with me, Elsie dear?"

  "I'm going to walk," Elsie said, taking my arm, "with Toby."

  We were halfway down the block when a side gate opened in a wall alongside number 20 and Annick Perret hobbled out, talking over her shoulder to someone inside. As she saw us she waved and said in English, "Such a handsome couple!"

  Both of us nodded and waved back, and then we turned the corner onto the dark and leafy rue de Furstemberg and Elsie dropped my arm like a sack. "I'm still mad at you," she said.

  "It wasn't Solresol at all," I said, and took her arm back.

  "Correcting my grammar." She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, grinning, put a hand on each of my coat lapels, and studied my face. "Whether or not, Toby Keats. The Writing Boy!" she said, and kissed me so hard that, as Root would say, my socks rolled up and down.

  She was wearing the same green raincoat she had worn the first time I saw her, and a darker green cloche that reached down to her forehead in the flapper fashion. The night mist sparkled on her face like jewels. I kissed her back, slowly, for perhaps a month and a half, and when we had both come up for air we started to walk again.

  "There was probably never a code," I heard myself saying as we turned another corner. "Either Vaucanson or Foucault—or both of them—just set up a machine to write out in plain French where the money was—"

  "And wherever the money was," Elsie said excitedly, "that would be where the Bleeding Man was, too. Because he kept it all hidden, everything was hidden from the tax collectors and the Church."

  "Where it was, where it is now."

  "Don't you dare correct my grammar."

  We debouched on the rue de Buci, which had an open-air vegetable market three days a week.

  "And the secret location," I said as we picked our way between the empty stalls, "was kept in the Duck."

  "Which Angélique-Victoire inherited—"

  Elsie stopped and frowned at the boulevard Saint-Germain just ahead. "This isn't the way to the Armus's apartment."

  "No."

  "It's the way to the rue du Dragon."

  "Yes."

  "Are you leading me astray, Toby Keats?"

  "I certainly hope so," I said, taking her arm again.

  We turned and walked west, leaning into the wind. We passed a Métro sign and the wolf-gray stone haunch of the Saint-Germain Church. The Flore was almost empty, the Deux Magots was closed, and most of the side streets looked deserted. We crossed over and turned south on the rue du Dragon.

  "I don't even know," Elsie said, shivering as the wind began to nibble and bite, "where Neuchâtel is."

  "It's in Switzerland, on the Lake of Neuchâtel. Population about four thousand. It's five hours away by train."

  "It might not be," she used her warning voice again, "the right automate, you know. The cams might not fit, or they may be too old and damaged. And there still might be no Bleeding Man after all."

  For an instant, for the single pulse of a thought, I wanted to say there was always a Bleeding Man. Poor maudlin Toby.

  "Did you really tell that old lady," Elsie said, "that I was your petite amie?"

  "I did. I told her you were one half of a handsome couple."

  "Root says there were camp followers in the war, all of you soldiers had mistresses."

  "Not me," I said, turning and holding her at arm's length so that I could see the red spots of cold the wind had rubbed on her cheeks. I was about to make a joke to avoid the subject of the war, as usual—camp followers were off-limits, Hors de Combat. But I was fumbling at the same time in my pocket for a key and distracted, because something was not quite right. Ordinarily Madame Serboff locked the door to the building at eleven and went to bed. After that, to get in you had to ring her bell and wait on the sidewalk, stamping your feet and blowing on your fingers in the dark, until she had lit a cigarette and put on her pink flannel robe and floppy slippers and come shuffling and muttering out to the front. But given the strange hours of the newspaper business I had my own key.

  "Toby?"

  "Take your hand out of your pocket, Mr. Keats."

  I turned around slowly, fingers curled and tingling, and saw the small piggish black eyes and white jowls of Henri Saulnay, long expected, long forgotten. I felt something round and hard jam into my back.

  "My nephew Johannes is behind you," Saulnay said. "He's armed and unpredictable. Come this way, both of you."

  Elsie started to pull me away. Saulnay reached over and slapped her once and then stepped back, and Johannes showed her the gun.

  "I'll yell," she said, staring at the gun.

  "And he'll shoot," Saulnay told her, "your friend."

  I saw her face, white and frightened under the cloche, then Johannes pushed me hard toward the door.

  There was a main entrance to the building, and a lower entrance under the steps, where the dustbins were kept. We went down the steps and into a narrow passageway, past the coal chute and the gently hissing boiler that in theory supplied the rooms with heat. It was only two feet below street level, with narrow windows at sidewalk level, and both Saulnay in the front and Johannes behind us had flashlights, so that we weren't really underground or in the dark, but even with all that I stumbled and my hands began to shake.

  "Where's Madame Serboff?" I said.

  Saulnay ignored me. We went down four wooden steps. I heard Saulnay turn a lock. Elsie said something, breathing hard. Johannes jabbed me in the ribs and I walked through the door. On the worktable in front of me I saw Elsie's toolbox, a tiny oil can, scattered wrenches. At one end were bits of springs and levers, some crumpled sheets of brown paper, and sitting in the middle of the paper, as if in a nest, its melancholy eyes fixed on me and its metal beak gaping in surprise, Vaucanson's goddam Duck.

  It was Madame Serboff's storage room, of course, where Elsie had been coming each morning. Johannes shoved me to one side and closed the door. On the other side of the table Saulnay switched on the overhead bulb.

  "Turn the lock," he said. Johannes stretched his arm over to his left and slid a bolt. Saulnay pulled Elsie's work stool out from the shadows and lowered his bulk onto it.

  "This belongs to Johannes." Next to the brown paper, he picked up a banana peel, rather fastidiously, with his right hand. His left hand had slender wooden splints on the two middle fingers, held in place by a cloth bandage. "We were here for much of the night and of course became rather hungry. But that's no excuse. Germans are not usually so messy. Bonsoir encore, Mr. Keats. Tie him up in that chair, please, Johannes."

  He cleared a little more space around the duck and leaned back so that his face hung by itself in the light. Johannes prodded me onto a wooden kitchen chair and lashed my hands behind me with a rope. Then he drew the rope under the chair bottom and tied my ankles to the lower rung and stepped back. Around the sides of the storage room there was nothing to see but a bicycle wheel suspended from a wall. To the left of the duck's feet, in the clutter of parts and tools, lay a small beige paper square, as inconspicuous to me as the Eiffel Tower. I took the cams off, she had said, and put them back in your envelope.

  "Well, I have to give you credit, my dear Elsie Short." Saulnay beamed at her as if they were back on the lecture platform at the Thêatre des Automates. "From what I had understood, our mechanical friend here was hopelessly broken when Mr. Keats had his moment—what was it, Keats, at the Métro? Panic? Terror? Johannes described it quite vividly. Something to do with the trenches, perhaps? Never mind. The duck looks good."

  The duck, I thought, looked very good. It looked as if it had come back to life, if you could say that about an inanimate object. I kept my eyes fixed on its back and tail, where Elsie had somehow found and inserted a few green and black authentic duck feathers. I kept my eyes far away fr
om the beige envelope.

  "When I saw the duck before," Saulnay said, "in my toy shop, I only had a moment, not nearly long enough to really inspect it. Even then I thought there was something wrong with the wings."

  "The joints are rusted, that's all." Elsie rubbed her face where he had slapped her.

  "Show me."

  "Look for yourself."

  He held up the splinted fingers. "A little domestic accident," he said, "when I was chasing our friend Mr. Keats in the Marais. It's not serious but awkward for working with tools. Show me."

  Elsie looked at the bandage without expression for a moment. Then she leaned forward and twisted a rod I couldn't see and the right wing came off in her hand. At the same time, almost exactly as it said in Vaucanson's book, the flexible tube of the neck rose and straightened as if the duck were about to swallow.

  Saulnay leaned forward as well, into the light. I strained against the rope on my wrists and let my eyes go to Johannes, but he was a good two feet away, staring back at me, and the pistol in his fist was almost touching Elsie's back.

  "Again," Saulnay said. He concentrated intensely on something in the duck's motion. Then Elsie did the same thing with the left wing and placed the two wings side by side on the table, next to the envelope. I pressed my feet against the floor and made the chair legs scrape.

  "Let Elsie go," I said.

  "Nonsense." Saulnay picked up a tiny screwdriver with his good hand and began to probe the joint where the right wing joined the body and the rods from the now nonexistent pedestal would have turned the cams. He glanced up at Johannes. "Check your knots."

  Johannes was broad-shouldered and angular, not heavy and flabby like his uncle. He had changed his quilted Alsatian jacket for a heavy wool blouson and a black roll-necked sweater and I could smell the sweat and oil on it as he came close. He knelt and stretched out his left hand to test the knots, but he kept the pistol in his right hand carefully back. After a second I recognized it as the same Webley revolver he had used before, at the Métro, a deadly efficient weapon, elegant and brutal in the best English tradition.