by Max Byrd
For the next five minutes, as the cave grew colder and colder and the water in the stream rose by another inch, Johannes went through the tedious process of carrying pocket loads of coins from the drawers out to the chamber entrance by the stalagmites. In his haste Saulnay had brought no bags or boxes. The drawers of the cabinet were far too heavy for one man to carry by himself, even if they could be lifted from the frame. Johannes would have to work in stages while his fat, lame uncle watched. There was no other way except to unload the drawers piecemeal, stack the coins on higher ground closer to the cave entrance, then come back and start over again.
Saulnay positioned himself on the opposite wall, beside the drawing of the owl, and kept the barrel of his automatic aimed at the three of us.
"Johannes," he said, "has more rope in the car. When he's finished transferring the coins he will tie each of you very securely to one of these stone bars that come out of the ground—stalagmite, stalactite, I don't know the right English word. And then we will have to leave."
"Without the gyroscope?" I said.
He let the question hang unanswered in the air. The water from the stream was pulsing in through crevices in the floor now, deeper than ever. Another rock shifted over our heads, making a grumbling sound like thunder. Water was running in sheets now down the walls of the chamber. I felt it over my shoe tops, I could feel it turning the floor of the cave into mud.
"Perhaps not," Saulnay finally said. "Perhaps I ought to look more closely at the mechanism." I touched two fingers to Elsie's cold, trembling hand, like Mr. Morse to his wife.
Saulnay walked or waded across the narrow chamber, kicking up more phosphorescent ripples from the water. The gun stayed steady, in his good left hand. When he reached the cabinet and the automate, he stopped.
"You need somebody's help," I said, "if you want to get the gyroscope out of it."
No response.
"Somebody who understands the machine."
I took one tentative step forward and heard the water slosh. Johannes came splashing back into the chamber, somewhere to my left.
"You could sell the gyroscope to the highest bidder," I said, "for a lot more money. But you need somebody else to help get it out."
"Not you." The gun rose in the darkness like a conjuror's trick and seemed to come to rest on top of the flashlight beam. I saw Saulnay by the open cabinet, in front of the rigid and lifeless body of the Bleeding Man.
"Elsie could take it out. She knows about these machines. Let her help, let her go."
"No."
The beam and the gun shifted two feet and stopped at Vincent Armus's thin, haggard profile. "You."
I took three running steps through the water and crashed like a bullet into him.
Johannes shouted, the cabinet rocked and started to topple forward. A gun went off above my head—one, two spurts of orange flame swallowed by the darkness and the mad crashing echoes of sound and water, and then rock splitting, water exploding into the cave.
On hands and knees I somehow found Elsie and dragged her sideways, toward the stalagmites on the higher ground. We clawed through the mud and noise, up the walls of the chamber, over its lip. Then, stumbling, hauling ourselves frantically out of the water, we turned to see.
Below us the flashlight beams flew back and forth in the black air like ghosts. We saw Johannes rise to his knees, shouting. As the waterfall broke in through the limestone walls, one by one, the hollowed out chamber began to crumple and collapse. In the beam of the kerosene lantern I saw the painted owl dissolving in streaks. Saulnay staggered to his feet. He aimed the pistol straight at Elsie. Armus came into view. Saulnay grabbed at his coat. Then Vincent Armus surprised me a third and last time. He pushed Saulnay around and reached up high with his two bound hands and pulled, and the huge wooden cabinet tilted and turned and fell sideways onto them, pinning them down like Welsh miners in a tunnel. Then the Bleeding Man spun out of the open door.
His head shattered, his legs buckled, but he somehow flung his glassy arms wide, making a sound like a man in pain, and sprawled across them both, dead weight.
As Elsie and I scrambled higher, I could just make out three faces, then two. Then the mud and water burst over their heads and they gulped it once and were gone.
When we crawled out some half an hour later, onto the level space by the waterfall, the force of the collapse had jammed some of the falling rocks off to one side of the cave entrance, leaving a narrow shelf just wide enough for the two of us. Elsie held my arm with both hands. I gripped the edge of the crevice and slowly, carefully, with the cave to my back, stood up straight. To Root, standing down below in the rain and watching us, it must have looked like magic.
Epilogue:
PARIS
IT WAS ALMOST THREE MONTHS LATER to the day, ten o'clock at night, May 21st, 1927, that Charles A. Lindbergh leaned out of the left side window of "The Spirit of Saint Louis" and guided the little single-engine airplane to a perfect landing on the grassy meadows of Le Bourget military airfield just north of Paris.
He had flown solo and nonstop across the Atlantic from New York City, in thirty-three and a half grueling hours, so heavily loaded with extra fuel that he barely cleared the telephone wires at Roosevelt Field when he took off. He was the first person in history ever to fly that far nonstop, and in doing so he not only won a $25,000 prize offered by the millionaire aviation enthusiast Raymond Orteig, he also transformed—on a gigantic Edisonian scale—the way people would live and travel for centuries. But that, like my reading of Freud, and Root's transformation into a food critic, was still to come.
On a smaller scale, the arrival of "Lucky Lindy" in Paris was, of course, the biggest news story of the year—maybe even the single biggest news event of the whole frenetic, celebrity-mad decade of the 1920s, "Les Années Folles."
And as the plump, jolly, red-nosed Muse of Journalism must have intended for a reason, I missed it all.
I missed it because Herol Egan was sick that day and Root was filling in for him on the Sports Desk and because, despite our knowledge that Lindbergh had taken off the night before, nobody in Europe thought he would make it. The biggest news story of the day, everybody in Paris was convinced, would be the outcome of the men's doubles match in the French International Tennis Championships, to which, in an expansive mood and with two of Herol's free extra tickets, Root had invited Elsie and me.
I remember well that it was a warm, sunny Saturday, perfect weather after a week of fog and drizzle. The chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysées were in full bloom, and the great avenue was green and leafy and dazzled with sunlight, like an Impressionist painting.
We took a cab from the Trib and drove out to the old stadium in Saint Cloud, not the one you know now in the Bois de Boulogne, where they play what has become the Roland Garros tournament. The press box then was at the south end of the stadium, elevated over the crowd by about fifty feet. From it we could look straight down on the famous red clay of the tennis court. If you turned your head slightly to the right, you could look out across the rolling brown Seine and the Isle of Swans toward the heart of Paris.
It was a wonderful Parisian crowd that day—the men were dressed in crisp white flannels and Panama straw hats, and the women, in their bright floppy bonnets and many-colored sun dresses, bobbed and swayed like so many blossoms in a garden, the acme of fashion in what would turn out to be the last great year of the Flapper Era. Duke Ellington would open soon at the Cotton Club in New York. Al Jolson would make the first "talkie" motion picture, "The Jazz Singer." Babe Ruth would hit sixty home runs before the season was over, an untouchable record. Even in tennis it seemed like an annis mirabile. The day before, in the men's singles championship, the American Bill Tilden had definitively beaten little René Lacoste (the "Crocodile") in straight sets.
That day, of course, the French were out for revenge. And indeed, Tilden and his partner Frank Hunter looked tired, while according to the sports reporters around us, the two French pla
yers, Borotra and Brugnon, were at the peak of their game.
We sat in the box and admired the day and drank chilled Sancerre on the Colonel's expense account. Between sets Root asked about Elsie's progress on her book. She was halfway through the final revision, she reported, and Mr. Scribner in New York said he wanted to have a look. (She should call it, Root thought, The Duck Also Rises.) Scribner was also interested in expanding my articles on automates from the Trib, maybe for a companion book. From time to time we glanced over at the Diplomatic Box, where the American Ambassador Herrick Smith had gathered a large party to cheer Tilden and Hunter on. But then, a little after four o'clock, there was a stirring in the Ambassador's box, and shortly after that the Ambassador and two or three aides slipped quietly away.
When the match was over—Tilden and Hunter lost in three sets—Root stayed in the Press Box to type his story. Elsie and I skipped the Métro (some things don't change) and walked on ahead in the gathering twilight, toward the city. Afterwards, I would learn that Ambassador Smith had left the stadium because he was told that Lindbergh, contrary to all expectations, had just been spotted over Ireland. Assuming his fuel held out, he would arrive in Paris that night, in the dark.
If I had been paying closer attention, I might have noticed, as we made our way into the place de l'Alma, that there were almost no cars or buses on the streets, and the cafés and sidewalks were strangely empty for a Saturday night.
In fact, as the Trib would later report, as soon as the news about Lindbergh began to spread, something close to ten thousand cars, taxis, trucks, and bicycles—nearly all the available vehicles in Paris, it seemed—had rushed wildly toward Le Bourget, so many of them that the four-mile road between the Porte Villette and the airfield was brought to a hopeless standstill. It was probably the first great traffic jam in European history. The police would estimate that over half a million people that night had somehow crowded onto the grass field (there were no concrete runways on it in 1927). Many of the cars and trucks were hastily lined up with their headlights on to guide the airplane in.
Bill Shirer, always working, got there in time to see Lindbergh come out of the night sky like a shooting star and circle the field twice before he landed. When the American climbed out of his cockpit, he never touched the earth, because the cheering French instantly heaved him onto their shoulders and rushed him toward the hangar. As soon as that happened, Shirer knew he had his story and he turned around and literally ran three of the four miles back to Paris, outracing the competition, which was still caught in the traffic jam. At the Champ-de-Mars he somehow found a cab to take him the rest of the way to the rue Lamartine, where he commandeered a typewriter and Kospoth's own private sanctum. Subsequently, he would attend a two A.M. news conference with Lindbergh at the Ambassador's residence (the aviator wearing a pair of Smith's elephantine pajamas), in which, among other things, Lindbergh praised the American scientist Robert Goddard and his work on guided rockets and gyrocompasses.
But all that, as I say, I missed.
Elsie and I strolled back from the tennis court arm in arm, as couples do in Paris. Near the place de la Concorde we went across the pont Alexandre III to the Left Bank and onto the dark Esplanade of the Invalides, where the great golden dome still glowed softly in the night. We talked a little of this and that, nothing at all of Saint-Bonnet or the Bleeding Man or the fortune lost and buried for good with Saulnay and Johannes and Armus deep below the rumbling limestone cliffs. At some point I think I looked up into the darkening sky, but I took no notice of the future, in the form of a guided machine with wings, droning past us overhead.
And as for what became of Vaucanson's Duck? When we finally returned to Paris, its partially disassembled self was nowhere to be found, not in Madame Serboff's storeroom, not in my garret, not on the shelves of Inspector Soupel's evidence room. True to its nature, and as it had done so many times in the past, the duck had simply vanished again, though I was certain that it would turn up somewhere else one day, revived like a clockwork phoenix.
At the corner where the rue de Bac comes down to meet the quai Voltaire, one of my favorite crossroads in Paris, Elsie stopped and sighed and looked up the river toward the gorgeous spotlit buttresses and towers of Notre Dame. They were riding the gathering darkness like a ship.
"Would you like to go back to the rue du Dragon, Miss Short," I asked, quoting my namesake poet, "with a gray-haired gent for a spot of 'pipes and timbrels and wild ecstasy'?"
Elsie smiled and took my arm again and we walked slowly east, along the river. "Writing Boy," she murmured.
Note
INCREDIBLE AS THEY SEEM, VAUCANSON, the excreting duck, the Bleeding Man, the Writing Boy, the museums of automates—all real, all as historically accurate as I could make them (it is a mystery why anybody ever called the eighteenth century the Age of Reason). For biographical information I have relied on Jacques de Vaucanson: Mécanicien de Genie by Andre Doyon and Lucien Liaigre. Also Le Monde des Automates by Alfred Chapuis, Automata by Chapuis and Edmond Droz, and the delightful Edison's Eve by Gaby Wood. Vaucanson himself wrote the book that Toby and Root read in Mrs. McCormick's hôtel suite; it was published in an English translation in 1742.
I have drawn phrases, anecdotes, and descriptions from Waverley Root's wonderful memoir, The Paris Edition, and from William S. Shirer's memoir, A Twentieth-Century Journey. There are two very good books about the Tunnelers of World War I that I have also used for material and incidents: Beneath Flanders Fields by Peter Barton, Peter Doyle, and Johan Vandewalle; and Alexander Barrie's Underground War.
Finally, for their support and encouragement, my deepest thanks to my beautiful wife Brookes and to my friends John Lescroart and Bill Wood.
About the Author
Max Byrd is the award-winning author of fourteen other books, including four bestselling historical novels and California Thriller, for which he received the Shamus Award. He was educated at Harvard and King's College Cambridge, England, and has taught at Yale, Stanford, and the University of California. Byrd is a Contributing Editor of The Wilson Quarterly and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review. He lives in California.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: Vaucanson's Duck
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART TWO: Birds of a Feather
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
PART THREE: The Toymaker
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
PART FOUR: On the Rue Jacob
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
PART FIVE: The Bleeding Man
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Epilogue: PARIS
Note
About the Author
