The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  A car rattled by on the street above. Johannes yanked the knots once more and stood up. It was well past midnight, I thought, maybe even later. Madame Serboff would be fast asleep on the other side of the building, five or six doors and a corridor away. The other nine tenants were even farther away, upstairs, useless.

  Meanwhile the duck was rapidly going backwards in time, so to speak, falling apart in pieces. The torso was wingless now. Methodically, a jeweler's loupe in one eye, using his good hand only, Saulnay opened the greenish-brass belly plate with a pair of pliers, detached one of the webbed feet, and laid it aside. He unscrewed the neck halfway. Under the single electric bulb his white face had tiny black veins and scratches like marble. I had once spent a rainy afternoon in the Louvre looking at the old Roman busts of senators and consuls, and Saulnay had that kind of face, I thought—stern, fleshy, confident, interested only in the things in front of him, not in the spiritual world his small, hard eyes couldn't see. The German toymaker had a Roman face. He picked up one of the wings and spun a cam.

  "I know more than you think," I said, and he raised his head. "About Vaucanson, his daughter, the code or the message in the duck that you want."

  Saulnay held the wing steady. The little cam spun and spun and then wobbled to a stop.

  "Except you don't care about the duck," I said, "you care about the Bleeding Man."

  "So you said before."

  "You care about the gyroscope. You want to sell the gyroscope to the army, the German army I assume. Maybe even give it to them."

  He studied me for a long time. Johannes moved closer to Elsie. Saulnay's hand was on the table, inches from the beige envelope. I willed his eyes to stay on me.

  "An interesting theory," he finally said. Then he walked around the corner of the worktable toward me and Johannes raised his Webley pistol level with my chest. "He's just talking to distract us. This has something to do with the wings and the cams," Saulnay said to Johannes. "I don't like Americans, but I don't underestimate them."

  "He won't shoot," I said. "The noise would wake up half the building. There's a gendarmerie on Saint-Germain. You'd never get out."

  Saulnay smiled and twisted his upper body so that his right hand moved in little circles over the table. "Such a clutter," he said. "Things out of place, paper, food." His hand hovered over the detached foot, the wings, the beige envelope, then dropped like a hawk into his overcoat pocket and came up with another pistol, a small square automatic. "If we had enough time," he said in the same conversational tone, "I would take you out to the Métro entrance or a sewer and see what exactly makes you fall apart in the dark, underground."

  "Let Elsie go."

  He came around to the corner of the table. "There was something about the cams," he said. "I could tell from your eyes."

  "What's a cam?"

  "You must have seen men get shot in the war, Sergeant Keats. It's an astonishingly painful wound. It can take a man many hours to die from a single small bullet through the navel. I want to know about the cams."

  "I don't know anything about cams."

  "I can count in French or English or German," Saulnay said. "One of them will be the last language you ever hear. Un, deux—"

  "Stop!" Elsie said. "I'll tell you!"

  And I lunged at the table, driving up with my feet, twisting forward with the chair on my back. My ankles came free but not my hands. Somebody's gun fired once, twice, and I fell under the table on my back like a turtle, kicking. For a moment all I could see was the underside of the table. Then the lightbulb clicked off, on. Saulnay's white face sailed by and the door slammed.

  When I finally righted myself and worked my hands loose, it could have been thirty seconds or two minutes later—I had no idea. Distant voices were echoing, receding. The table was on its side. The floor was covered with tools and paper and bits of metal. The lightbulb was drifting gently back and forth on its cord like a pendulum, illuminating the storage room section by section as it passed.

  In the cold, swaying light there was a strange absence of sound and life—there was no duck, no envelope, no Elsie.

  PART FIVE

  The Bleeding Man

  Thirty-Seven

  AT ELEVEN O'CLOCK THE NEXT NIGHT, not quite twenty-four hours after Elsie Short had disappeared, I found myself sitting in a stalled railway car somewhere east of the French mountain town of Besan¸on, halfway to Switzerland.

  "The conductor doesn't know why it's stopped," Root said, lowering his long frame onto the seat in front of me. "And he doesn't know how long it's going to be stopped. And he doesn't really seem to give a damn."

  "Probably," said an Englishman working his way down the aisle, "you've had a flood or a mudslide around Champagnole or Belfort. Some of the bridges up there aren't so stable, you know. Good deal of fighting over them toward the end, Mulhouse, Thann, Besan¸on. Bloody geography lesson, that's all the War was." He was about the right age and had a stiff left leg that he dragged along like a log and he looked at my gray hair and paused with his hand on the seat back, waiting to see if I wanted to reminisce.

  I didn't. I looked across to the other row of seats, where Vincent Armus was sitting by a window, staring at the motionless black landscape.

  The three of us and the Englishman were on Wagon 118 of SNCF train 3246, which left Dijon five days a week at 3:25 P.M., after you connected from the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. Train 3246 had six commuter-style cars with American-style aisles instead of compartments, and it was pulled by one underpowered diesel locomotive. From Dijon, when it wasn't stalled on a siding, it rolled through thirty miles of stumpy gray winter vineyards in northern Burgundy, turned east, and ambled over to Besan¸on and then to Belfort, and finally took a deep breath and climbed up the rugged foothills of the Val de Travers, leaving France at last for the little watchmaking border town of Neuchâtel.

  Neuchâtel was the only place in the world I could think of where Saulnay would have taken Elsie.

  If, Inspector Soupel had said, Saulnay had really taken her.

  Maybe, he had said, maybe she went on her own accord. Maybe she changed sides, maybe, Monsieur Keats, you're imagining things.

  Armus made a kind of sneering noise through his nose and stood up. Root and I watched him go down the aisle and around the bulkhead where the toilets were.

  Why bring him along? Root had said. Why bring Armus along at all? Armus was a snob and a prick, and he was fifty years old if he was a day—why did we need him?

  There was one good reason.

  Nobody else in Paris—nobody else I knew—understood how to fix an eighteenth-century automate or make one start if the mechanism didn't have an On-Off switch.

  I worked my dry tongue across my teeth and then stood up.

  "Now what?" Root said. "Getting out to push?"

  I ignored him and walked to the end of the car, opened the door, and jumped down to the track. It was cold outside but not raining. Some days in Switzerland it failed to rain. The glow of the train lights obscured the sky, though I thought I could make out the dimmest possible halo of white far ahead, higher in the foothills, possibly the city of Neuchâtel, unless, of course, it was La Chaux-de-Fonds or Fleurier or Thann or God-Damn-Your-Eyes or any of the other dozen or so milk run stops the train was scheduled to make before it quit for the night. There were all kinds of geography lessons.

  Up ahead the locomotive was throbbing quietly like a cat on a rug. Steam was leaking out of the hotboxes on the wheels, and I could see the tip of somebody's cigarette near the folding steps of the carriage in front.

  Trains, I thought with disgust. My Boston grandfather had been a train buff. His father had helped design one of the earliest steam locomotives on the East Coast, around 1840, for the Baltimore and Ohio. In those quaint days, my grandfather said, some of the locomotives were so crude that they didn't even have brakes. When they rolled into a station a gang of roustabouts rushed out to the track and pulled them to a stop with ropes hooked on to the locomotive.


  Trains. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, because of a number of costly miscalculations concerning rolling stock and empty troop cars, the Germans had started teaching their staff officers how to draw up railroad timetables. Ultimately the Germans learned to do it with such precision that they could shuffle men and equipment around a battlefield ten times faster than ever before in military history. Train scheduling became a required subject at the Berlin War Academy. Then the French and the English military academies had followed suit, so that you could argue, as Norton-Griffiths liked to do, that the whole astonishing continent-wide scale of destruction and horror in the 1914 War was the direct, logical consequence of Europe's super-modern railway network.

  With the exception, evidently, of the Dijon-Neuchâtel Line.

  But I didn't care about the history of trains. Or Vaucanson's Duck. Or even the goddam Bleeding Man. I had brought Armus along because there was nothing in the world I wanted to do except find Elsie.

  I walked around the last carriage and peered down into a ravine of restless shadows. We should have hired an automobile in Paris, I thought, the way Armus had wanted.

  No, Inspector Soupel had instructed. Don't hire a car. Don't leave Paris on your own. Don't go anywhere. Bulletins and descriptions of the alleged kidnappers would be sent to gendarmeries all over eastern France. Soon enough, he assured us, the great apparatus of the French national police system would be in motion. To do anything ourselves would be both stupid and illegal. And if, for good measure, we tried to drive in those mountains in the winter, he said, the Swiss police would soon be pulling our frozen corpses out of a lake or a river bottom. Trust the authorities. Sit still and wait.

  Say no to bullshit was what Norton-Griffiths used to tell us.

  I suddenly hammered the flat of my hand against an iron panel and comically, improbably, as if I had jammed a spur in its flank, the little train shuddered and bucked and sixty yards up the track the locomotive snorted.

  Thirty seconds later we were moving.

  Inside our car Armus was eating a cold cheese sandwich that he had bought in Dijon. Root hung onto a strap, talking to the Englishman. As the train started to pick up speed, I lost my balance and sat down heavily beside Armus.

  "Eleven forty-five." He held out his watch for me to see.

  "Two more hours." I started to get up again, and he gripped my arm.

  "You understand that I don't know anybody in Neuchâtel," he told me for maybe the twentieth time. "I did business there before the War, but the men I dealt with are all gone by now." He wiped cheese from his mouth with a handkerchief and looked at Root, then shifted on the hard bench to face me directly. "You're responsible for this, Keats. She should have come back to the apartment with us. She should have sold me the duck. You're a stupid, stupid man."

  There wasn't a lot to say to that. It seemed to be the Parisian consensus. I braced my hands on the seat back in front of me to get up, and he put his hand on my arm.

  "The Swiss police," he said, "will never agree to what you want. I said that before. If it weren't for Elsie I wouldn't even be here. But if we're going to do this thing, you cannot tell the Swiss police."

  "No Swiss police," I said. Outside, far below us, a single light in a window hung for a moment in the black landscape, then flew away like a bird.

  "No Swiss police," he repeated. "If they've gone to the Jacquet-Droz exhibit, that will be clear. We can find that out. If not, we turn right around and go back to Paris and leave it to the French police." He shivered and pulled up the collar of his coat and both of us winced as the train wheels squealed on a trestle and began to slow down again. I looked at my watch and then, for the second time in our acquaintance, Armus surprised me with a complete reversal of tone.

  "Let me tell you something ironic, Keats," he said. "Not many people know this. In August of 1817 two very strange people arrived at Neuchâtel from Paris. They weren't in a train, of course, in 1817. They came in one of those big lumbering Alpine stagecoaches that nineteenth-century travelers took to cross over Switzerland and down into Italy. Astonishing what they endured in those days, just to travel. The two people I mean were Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary. She'd married him just a year or so earlier, though not in a church."

  "We arrive in an hour, the British Army up there says." Root slipped into a seat in front of us.

  Armus sniffed. "Percy Bysshe Shelley," he said, "was a poet and a morbid hypochondriac. No one could mention a disease without his taking it on."

  "Like Vaucanson," Root said.

  "Like Vaucanson, like Louis XV, like the surgeon Le Cat, like any number of monomaniacs back then, materialists who imagined that an artificial body would be better, stronger, healthier than their God-given flesh and blood bodies. Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley came to Neuchâtel specifically to look at the automates that the Jaquet-Droz family had on display. He was a poet, but he had a sense of humor. He wanted to see the Writing Boy, he told Mary, so that he could study a perfect android version of himself."

  "A Mechanical Mirror," Root said.

  "But evidently he was disappointed. Certainly he wasn't inspired to poetry by the Writing Boy. And after two days he hurried his party off to Geneva. But Mary Shelley was far more imaginative than her husband. She had already lost one baby. According to her diary, while they were still in Neuchâtel she went six more times to see the automates by herself and afterwards the image, particularly of the heaving chest and moving eyes of one of them, in some real sense haunted her. A year later she started a book."

  "Frankenstein," Root said, spoiling his story.

  And the train shivered and shuddered and came to a halt again.

  Thirty-Eight

  IT WAS ALMOST SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING by the time we finally rolled, creaking and groaning, into Neuchâtel, pushed from behind by another locomotive that had to be sent out from Dijon when our own used up the last of its nine lives.

  The sleepy customs agent stamped our passports without looking at them, and we walked out through the deserted little station and onto the windswept, charmless town square that fronted it. Empty. No taxi, not even a dogsled.

  While Root and Armus rescued our grips from the baggage compartment, I found a public telephone. I wanted to call Soupel or Mrs. Armus, but the telephone only took Swiss jetons, not French coins. I hung up and shaded my eyes against the rising sun, as if Elsie or Saulnay or Dr. Frankenstein's artificial man himself might come staggering out of the light.

  It was still bitter cold but clear. We were at an altitude of about two thousand feet, yet Neuchâtel, what I could see of it in the breaking dawn, had the feel and look of an Alpine village much higher up. Above the rooftops and shuttered facades, pink-topped mountains rose in the east, jagged and forlorn.

  These were the Jura Mountains, I knew, the source of the archaeologists' word "Jurassic." They had probably looked pretty much the same when prehistoric Jurassic hunters loped across them in animal skins and bare feet, or when eighteenth-century Angélique-Victoire Vaucanson had hurried past them on her way to the mysterious spot where her father had hidden away his gold and his gyroscope and his own version of an artificial, walking, talking, breathing Frankenstein Man.

  "The lake is over there." Armus pointed one gloved hand toward the east. "The main church up there."

  "Where's the museum?"

  "This way."

  Neuchâtel was not a market town. It was a watchmaking town and Swiss cuckoo-clock-making town. It had an old church and a turreted château and a squared-off medieval prison tower and one hundred and forty-three public fountains, if you believed a sign by City Hall. But without a farmers' market, none of its cafés opened at five in the morning the way they did around les Halles in Paris. We followed the street Armus had pointed out and went down a steep embankment toward the lake. From the top of our hill it looked long and flat, like a giant silver thumb pressed into a valley.

  At what passed for a lakeside marina, shabby by Swiss st
andards, one café owner was just pulling his shutters back. We tramped inside, puffing steam like three little trains, and saw two fishermen at the zinc bar being served coffee and cognac by a teenaged girl with Mary Pickford bangs. Root ordered the same for us, and six croissants, while Armus and I took a table by the window.

  "That's it. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire." Armus inclined his profile toward a tree-lined esplanade two or three hundred yards away, overlooking the lake. At the far end was a brown and white gabled building, big enough and plain enough to be anything from a hôpital to the local lycée. Three black sedans were parked at its front door, but there was nobody in them.

  "Today is officially Friday, eight hours old," Root deposited a tray on the table and the girl from the bar began passing out cups. "Thursday, yesterday, according to our lovely Lady of the Coffee Bean here, the museum over there was closed all day, and it doesn't open again till noon."

  "Somebody's there now," I said, and looked at the cars.

  The bar girl murmured something in Root's ear and he turned his head slowly toward the museum and the cars and then back to me. "Those are the police, she says. People broke in last night and beat up the guard."

  It took us almost ten minutes to walk the three hundred yards to the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire because we had first to cut back into the town, then climb a deceptively steep set of stairs to the esplanade. By the time we reached the front entrance the three black sedans had been joined by a blue and white squad car. A line of flimsy yellow sawhorses blocked the door.

  In Paris, if a major museum had been broken into, the police would be swarming over the grounds like wasps and no mere civilian, certainly not a bedraggled trio of foreigners, could expect to wander casually into the crime scene. In the village of Neuchâtel the only police in sight were two yawning, uniformed gendarmes leaning against the sawhorses.