The Paris Deadline

by Max Byrd

  Closer to me, not twenty feet away, a maze of tall crevices and cracks led inward and down, under the wet, slippery rocks, toward a thin black fissure.

  I crouched and started to move forward again on bent knees, then stopped completely. Duckwalking, I thought, and told myself that if I bit my tongue I wouldn't laugh and I wouldn't cry and I wouldn't have to go down in the dark.

  There were old boards by my feet, another chain, another warning plaque upside down in the mud—"Danger de Mort. Pierres Tombantes." My pulse was beating like a tom-tom. My hands were gritty and wet. I took a deep breath and braced myself on a ledge.

  A light came on in the rocks.

  For a long moment I stayed precisely where I was, motionless, not even breathing. Voices drifted out of the cave, over the roar of the water.

  I could go in as long as there was light, I thought. I could go into a cave or a tunnel as long as I could stand up and see. Anybody could do that much.

  I reached the edge of the last boulder and started to squeeze myself into the crevice. It was not much wider than a man's shoulders, not much wider than a coat hanger. The waterfall was just above my head to the left, whipping the air back and forth with spray. The rock surface here was rubbed slick by time and water, smooth to the touch like skin. I could still hear the voices moving away in the cave. The light inside made a wavering white crescent across the stone. I turned to one side and forced myself five steps deeper. It was like crawling into a bone.

  I took three more steps and the light went out.

  Forty-One

  ELSIE'S VOICE CAME LOUD AND CLEAR, not a hundred feet away.

  She was around a corner, well inside the cave, and she was telling somebody not to be a fool, but I couldn't hear more than that. I couldn't think about that. Even in the darkness, my eyes were closed as hard I could close them. I was as rigid as a stone. I was an automaton, immobile, without a key to turn and make me move. My face was drenched with sweat and with spray from the waterfall. My wrists were crossed against my face, a sign of weeping.

  There were stages in panic, I knew. Paralysis, stupor, then the letting go. I had scratched my cheek against something sharp in the crevice and a trickle of blood was running down my jaw. Slowly, slowly, I wiped it away and lowered my wrists. A thousand French soldiers a day had died in the war, a thousand a day for four years, many of them buried or drowned in the mud when their shelters and dugouts collapsed on their heads. I thought about my name, Keats, which had always haunted me, the English poet in love with easeful death. When he was dying in Rome, I had read, he spat arterial blood into his hands, wet rags of tissue like Eric the Minor's lungs. A Bleeding Man. I bleed, therefore I am.

  "You are," said Henri Saulnay, next to my ear, "just in time, Mr. Keats." And I sighed like a dead man and opened my eyes.

  He had a gun, of course, probably the same little automatic he had threatened me with on the rue du Dragon. I felt it prodding my ribs, but my eyes were fixed on the flashlight he carried in his other hand, the bandaged one. It made a brilliant cone of light at my feet, yellow at the edges. The light twitched softly from side to side like a cat's tail.

  "That way," he said in French. "You first."

  The cave sloped downward at almost thirty degrees. As best I could tell in the darkness we were in an antechamber directly below the waterfall. As I shuffled forward I could hear the rocks grinding and scraping just above us, but the roof in the antechamber was high, ten feet high at least, and I didn't have to stoop. Step by step I started to breathe again. My shoes kicked bits of junk and detritus on the floor, loose pebbles.

  Elsie must have been much farther away than I had imagined, because we kept on descending, turning through narrow passages whose ceilings dropped lower and lower. The passages were incredibly confusing. Once a strong downward draft of cold air passed across my face, and I tried to steady my head and remember elementary science—cold air sank, cold air sank as the night came on. Cold air sinks, warm air rises. To pull the air down into the cave with that much force, I thought, there had to be another opening somewhere, a back entrance, or a hollow under the waterfall.

  "Stop right there," Saulnay said.

  Behind me the flashlight beam played on my shoes and the chalky white floor. Saulnay adjusted an unseen piece of equipment.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what Root had written in the Trib about the geology of the caves. The cliffs were limestone, of course, grayish-white and black, an extremely porous sedimentary rock. On top of the cliffs, two or three hundred feet above us, would be a layer of soil, but under that soil it would be limestone, limestone all the way down. The groundwater on top would leach down through the soil over the ages, and its acid would eat away the calcite in limestone, dissolving it and washing it away in waterfalls and boring out innumerable caves and tunnels. The result was a great plateau of rock riddled with holes.

  In cold, wet weather, Root had written, it is as unstable as a house of cards.

  Saulnay prodded me with the pistol again and we turned left at a corner that was marked by a grid of pink stalagmites rising out of the floor.

  "That was the third left, Mr. Keats, if you were counting. Gauche, gauche, droit, gauche, as our little wooden friend in Neuchâtel wrote. There were two passages off to the right that I don't think you even saw. I notice your hands are shaking. It's a pity about your tremor. You're going to turn right precisely where my light is pointing and then stand as still as you can."

  He touched my sleeve and I turned where he said and Elsie Short sprang up in the light like a jack-in-the-box and started toward me.

  "Toby!"

  I didn't stand still. I jumped forward and somebody knocked me sideways into the hard wall of the cave, and I went down on my knees and rolled through water. When I straightened again, I could see Johannes's big shoulders behind a flashlight beam and Elsie's green waterproof coat, and next to her, as the cone of light rose, Vincent Armus's white face.

  "Keats," he said softly and extended his hands slightly like a martyr to show that they were bound at the wrists by a cord.

  We were in a chamber next to a rushing underground stream. I felt the cold air moving across my face again, even colder now because I was soaking wet. I could hear the stream hissing, banging rhythmically against a loose rock. The floor was damp. The chamber itself I thought was concave, like the bottom of an upside-down bowl, but that was hard to know for sure, since the only light came from the flashlights Saulnay and Johannes carried, and from a single kerosene lantern resting ten feet away on the ground.

  "Keats," Armus said again.

  When the flashlight moved away, the lantern on the ground gave him the effect of nightmarish deformity. Its light reached just to his chin, so that his eyes and the top of his head disappeared as he shifted his weight. He looked bizarrely incomplete.

  "I didn't go to Craponne," he murmured, "I wanted to get to the cave first. I didn't think you would come. I hid my car off in the bushes, by the road. What I wanted—"

  And he said something else that I couldn't hear, but I had already lost interest in Vincent Armus, and so, apparently, had Saulnay. He pushed Armus roughly to one side and played his flashlight up and down the cave wall on my right.

  "Get over there, Mr. Keats, next to the girl, but keep an arm's length distance from her."

  "My friend is going to be here with the police," I said, "any minute."

  He didn't bother to reply. I didn't blame him. It had sounded feeble enough, even to me. I heard scraping noises in the shadows, the clink of metal on metal, and one by one I began to sort out other images. Water running down the cave wall. Elsie's blonde hair, her feet in the same brown shoes she had been wearing the first day in Paris. Armus's hands, bound very tight with thin rope. And on the opposite wall, as if it were flying straight out of the black rock and into my face, the fierce white wings and big eyes of a cartoonish-like owl.

  I jerked my head back. Saulnay must have been watching. I heard him chu
ckle and saw him move to the other side of the lantern.

  "Very good, Mr. Keats, you recover a little underground, in your natural habitat. Mole meets Owl. That's one of the drawings they find in these caves sometimes. There's another over here—"

  He waved his beam up and down. "This." A man's handprint materialized on the wall as if it had just soaked through the stone. Its fingers were spread wide and outlined in red and white. They seemed to be gripping a stone protuberance on the wall, the way you would grip a ball.

  "That would be the artist's own hand, no doubt," Saulnay said. "He was signing his painting." Saulnay moved somewhere else in the chamber, and I half turned to follow him. As my eyes adjusted more and more to the darkness, the old skills crept back. I caught flashes of color, spots of movement here and there. I could have been a fish in one of Armus's tanks, floating in the dark like a dot.

  "Or perhaps," Saulnay said, "this is the hand of our own Jacques de Vaucanson, because we know for a fact that he was here, in this very cave, this very space. Perhaps he left his signature for us, the way ordinary tourists write their names on the walls at Peche Merle."

  I felt Elsie's fingers touch my right hand, and I shifted an infinitesimal distance closer to her.

  Even as I moved, I heard the waterfall shift a little too, above the sound of the stream, and I felt its vibrations grow stronger through the porous limestone. Out of nowhere Saulnay's hard Roman profile appeared on my left.

  "You have a vivid imagination, Mr. Keats. You're a writer. I want you to picture this scene. Picture Jacques de Vaucanson, dressed in his quaint eighteenth-century garb, wearing his powdered wig, his ever-present gentleman's sword. His servants grip their torches— real torches, not these metal 'EverReadys'—and one by one, in procession they slip and stumble and feel their way in. They go about two hundred meters, because that's all we've come, believe it or not, about two hundred meters from the entrance. There was no waterfall then as far as I can tell, or underground stream like the one over there. The cave was perfectly dry. Otherwise—"

  He thumped his hand against hollow wood, a bulky shape, taller than I was. I had all along sensed its presence, I realized, but not seen it.

  "Otherwise," he said, "this cabinet and what is in it would not have been preserved."

  "He couldn't have worked in here." Armus had found his voice again. "Not with metal and automates."

  In the darkness Saulnay moved again. "No, not with the automates. His workshop was in Bertin's house back along the road to Craponne, long ago destroyed. But every time Vaucanson left the cliffs to go back to Paris, he deposited the Bleeding Man here in its special waterproof, airtight cabinet, out of sight. He deposited the Bleeding Man and the money."

  "Money?" My tongue was thick and stupid.

  "The gold and jewels, poor Mr. Keats, that the king paid Vaucanson year after year, out of his secret funds. Likewise waterproof, rust-proof, perfectly safe down here from all prying eyes."

  The gold and jewels ... I turned slowly toward Armus, and even in the suffocating darkness of the cave I felt something like a light dawning.

  What does he want? Of course Armus had tried to come here first. What he wanted, what the bankrupt Armus wanted, was the money. Not any gyroscope or automate. The duck would tell him the way to the money.

  There was a loud crash somewhere in front of us, in the darkness, and I could feel the limestone shiver dangerously against my back. As far as I could tell, somewhere behind the cabinet, the cave wall had split open at the base and left a gap, a cleft. That was where the stream surged out of its interior channel deep in the limestone and came into the open. I could see the running water now, a yard wide at least, spreading across the chamber floor. As it curved around the wall, it made long phosphorescent ripples and kicked and chewed at the stone before it hit another cleft under the owl painting and drained out of sight again. Saulnay splashed sideways across the floor. He said something in German, got a muttered reply. The snout of his automatic moved back into the light. "Johannes is worried. He thinks the cave is not safe."

  There is no darkness like the darkness of a tunnel, no emptiness. The cave was not safe, Johannes was right, the rain outside was swelling the stream inside to the breaking point, the cave was filling up with phantoms, faces slowly spinning, wet petals on a stem.

  I had been wrong again, I thought, wrong about everything, wrong from the start. Because what was true for the bankrupt Armus was also true for the bankrupt, embittered Saulnay.

  "The money," I said hoarsely. "It was always about the money, wasn't it?" I took a step forward. "As soon as you saw the duck in Bassot's window, you thought of the money—Vaucanson's fortune, the king's gold that Vaucanson took and kept because he was a miser. It was never anything to do with a gyroscope, was it?"

  "It may be yet. You give me ideas, Mr. Keats. Move back, please. Move away from the girl. We're in a hurry now."

  I took one more step toward him. "I know caves and mines. I've spent my life in them. That wall isn't going to collapse. You have plenty of time."

  The pistol pushed out of the darkness into the light like a hand coming out of stone.

  "Show us," I said, almost in a whisper, "the Bleeding Man."

  There was only the sound of sloshing water, the moan and scrape of the limestone, gathering its weight above us. Despite the chill, sweat was dripping from my eyes, my nose. The Toymaker, I thought, would not pull the trigger yet. The Toymaker wanted to make his effect, frighten the children. He wanted to wind up his dolls and turn them loose and see them run off the side of the table. Let him.

  I took one step sideways.

  Saulnay lowered his gun. He was a twisting shadow, gray smoke. When he spoke again he was farther away, just inside the lantern's glow. To his left stood the tall piece of furniture, which gradually, knob by knob, panel by panel, came into focus.

  It was a mahogany armoire, an antique eighteenth-century clothes cabinet. They would have gone wild about it in the shops on the rue Bonaparte. It was at least seven feet tall, four feet wide, and Saulnay must have been right about the dryness of the cave when Vaucanson stored it there, because, though the feet and legs looked battered and warped by the water of the stream, the upper sections were straight and clean and one or two of the brass hinges still winked and glistened like fireflies in the light.

  "If either of you moves, I will shoot."

  It was Saulnay who spoke, but Johannes who came into view. He shifted the lantern onto a ledge just a few inches over the muddy floor. I could only see him from the waist down, half a man, two legs walking like scissors. His left hand gripped the Webley revolver. His right hand held a crowbar.

  I willed my feet a few inches forward.

  "There's a lock on it." Johannes worked the crowbar between slits in the cabinet door. "The cabinet's incredibly heavy."

  "He would have lined it with lead," Elsie said from somewhere behind me, "to keep out rats."

  Johannes half knelt with his crowbar, one pants leg in the oily black water, and his broad shoulders went down and suddenly up like a pump, and over the constant drum of the stream and the waterfall there was a long, nerve-shredding sound of splintering wood and groaning metal.

  It was like opening a tomb, I thought.

  Even the cave seemed to hold its breath. The door of the cabinet swung slowly outward, from right to left, and for the first time in two hundred years, light spilled over the glassy form, the naked head and shoulders, the eyes, the perfectly formed hands, the transparent crystal torso of the Bleeding Man. Vaucanson's Adam. Proto Man.

  He was standing upright, the crown of his bare head just touching the top of the cabinet. As the light and shadows from the lantern wavered back and forth across his chest, there was the briefest illusion of movement, of breath, and I thought of the doll at the piano, the clown that came to life and terrified the children.

  Then the cold air, running in from the depths of the cave, made something in his mechanism contract and start,
and for one unbearable second the Bleeding Man seemed to shudder and exhale and take a step forward—

  "Johannes!"

  Johannes straightened and caught it in his arms. Saulnay limped into the light. He played his flashlight up and down the length of the automate's cloudy glass legs. I heard Elsie beside me gasp—in the flashlight's beam you could see the inner gears and metal cams and clockwork wheels that would have made the creature rise, walk, turn and turn again. And coiling around them, like the lace of a spider's web, thin blue-black veins were pressed between layers of glass, an eighteenth-century filigree of cracked rubber and dried-out blood, artificial life.

  "Put it back—look at the bottom of the cabinet."

  Johannes shoved the Bleeding Man back into his upright position. Under his feet, the width of the cabinet, were two drawers with silver knobs in the center. Johannes pulled at the drawer on the left. In a silent gliding motion it came forward to reveal, not scattered and loose, but neatly arranged in columns, by the careful, calculating hand of Jacques de Vaucanson himself, row after row of small engraved coins that had the true, authentic dull yellow glow of gold.

  Saulnay dropped to his knees in the water and Johannes stood up. He kept his pistol aimed at the three of us. Saulnay turned and grinned over his shoulder at Elsie. "Louis d'or," he said. "Coin of the realm." His flashlight ran up and down the columns. "How much would you say, Miss Short, the king ultimately paid our friend for his blasphemous project?"

  Elsie took a deep breath. "Twenty thousand louis, about."

  "And the profligate daughter spent at least half, but that still leaves—" Saulnay braced himself on the cabinet and pushed to his feet. The Bleeding Man's left arm seemed to jerk, like a reflex.

  "That still leaves enough money." Saulnay's bandaged hand raised the flashlight to Armus's pale face. "About a million and a quarter of your dollars, I would think," he said and swung the light directly into my eyes. "Reparation," he said in German.