The Paris Deadline (14 page)

We followed Mrs. Armus down a hallway and into a living room three times the size of my flat. It had a thick brown carpet, a fireplace whose gray stonework ran up to the ceiling, and it was sparely but handsomely furnished with a dozen or so glittering rhomboids and triangles in the most up-to-date Art Déco manner. Directly in front of us the Eiffel Tower was framed in a balcony
window. Off to the right, we could see the tops of the plane trees in the park below and the silent traffic circling the École Militaire. At the far end of the room, behind a pair of chromium parallelograms posing as sofas, two maids were setting out chafing dishes on a long buffet table.

     "If you'll wait right here," said Mrs. Armus, "I'll go find the Lord of the Manor."

     Root leaned his camera and tripod against a chair and started toward the buffet table. I walked over to the big balcony window and craned my head to see the place du Trocadéro behind the Eiffel Tower. The rich are very different from you and me, Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to have observed one day with his usual breathless amazement at the obvious. To which his friend Ernest had apparently muttered, Yes, indeed, they have more money.

     "An absurd mistake," said Vincent Armus from the doorway. "I don't know who sent you that notice. We normally deal with the
New York Herald
only."

     He paused for a moment, glanced at Root by the buffet table, and then advanced three steps toward me. He was wearing a creased black lounge suit with a gray vest and a narrow silver-colored tie that emphasized the hawk-like intensity of his features, and in the sharp reflected light of all the chromium and steel he looked every bit as angular and rigid as his furniture.

     With an expression of disloyal amusement Mrs. Armus handed Root a plate.

     "But Miss Short tells me it might possibly help in her job," Armus added flatly. "I know that the Edison Company positively courts publicity."

     Behind him Elsiedale Short, Ph.D., stepped into the same doorway, looking surprised and curious. Her blonde hair was freshly clipped and shaped and she had on the same tight-fitting sheath she had worn on Wednesday, and as she walked around one of the sofas, to my eye she was the only curved thing in the room.

     "Elsie's staying with us now," said Mrs. Armus from the buffet
table. "She moved in last Tuesday. She's a dear girl. We used to know her father in New York."

     "Tuesday?"

     "We didn't like a hôtel," Mrs. Armus said, "for a girl alone, after what happened."

     I brought my gaze back to Armus and his perpetual frown. "No, of course. Well, about our being here. I have a friend at the
Herald
who told me about the party. I'd already talked to my editor about a Sunday feature—'Automates in France'—something about the history of them, automates and toys and the Christmas season. He wants to start with a local connection. It's a nice hook—nineteenth-century French machines, a twentieth-century American collector."

     "You don't have the Duck yet, do you?" Armus said.

     "Mrs. McCormick is still at sea."

     "Who is that person by the table?"

     "Waverley Root is his name, Vincent." Elsie was wary, but helpful. "He works at the
Tribune
, too, with Toby Keats."

     "He brought a camera," I said, "if it's all right with you. He's a very good photographer."

     Root waved a knife and a piece of bread. "It is a far, far butter thing I do," he said.

     "If it weren't to help Miss Short and her job," Armus muttered. When nobody said anything to that, he made a show of pulling back his cuff and looking at his watch. "If you really must see the automates, they're in the next room," he said. "We have just enough time before people arrive."

T
HE NEXT ROOM WAS, IN FACT
, three doors down the hall and faced into a courtyard, not the Champ-de-Mars. Elsie Short pushed open the door and stood back and I stopped dead on the threshold.

     On the left-hand side of Vincent Armus's Collection Room, reaching about to shoulder height, were two big aquarium tanks, filled with what seemed like blackish-green water and speckled like a pointilliste canvas with bright, silent patches of color, rising, falling, gliding away out of sight.

     I stared at the fish for a moment, then turned to the right-hand side of the room where a bookshelf covered the wall. In front of the books, on three rows of rectangular black pedestals, stood the main items in Vincent Armus's collection. There were perhaps two dozen automatons altogether. Some of them looked like the toys Elsie and Henri Saulnay had displayed at the Conservatoire—colorfully dressed clowns with big round white faces like the Man-in-the-Moon, a monkey with a violin, a monkey with a cigar, a minstrel
with a banjo. But most of the automatons were representations of birds, and most of the birds were in small brass cages.

     "When I first started, Mr. Keats," said Vincent Armus, clearing his throat behind me (in his little kingdom he was, if not warm and friendly, at least markedly more civil). "When I first started out, I was living in Berlin and I collected any sort of antique automate I could find, though I particularly liked the clowns. Clowns are not, of course, the sort of thing the Germans do well. When we came to Paris, I discovered the French subspecialty of birds and I decided to concentrate on them."

     I opened my notebook and he began to walk down the first row of pedestals, reciting names, dates, and brief, crisp technical descriptions. I was suitably impressed. Armus didn't know what Elsie knew about Vaucanson's Duck, but otherwise he did Yale proud.

     Probably the first automates in history, he informed me, were singing birds. The Egyptians made them. Then the Greeks did. The painted wooden cuckoo clock in the farmhouse kitchen, so ordinary and familiar, was a lineal descendant, by way of the eighteenth-century and Switzerland, of the ancient automate-maker's art. There was an old castle at Hesdin where all the birds and little animals in the garden were still automates, set in motion by hydraulic power from a fountain.

     But no one, in Armus's opinion, had ever made mechanical singing birds to rival those of Gustave Bontems of Paris, who started his business as a teenager in 1831 and created his last great masterpiece in 1890, when he was crippled with arthritis and nearly blind.

     "And this is it," Armus said. He led us around the bookcases and into a scallop-shaped alcove that contained exactly one black pedestal. On top of the pedestal was a brightly colored, three-foot-high enamel thorn bush, populated by what looked like a dozen tiny birds peering out from its paper leaves like Christmas lights on a tree.

     We stood in front of it, studying the trunk and the birds and the sharp, realistic thorns. He had had to repair some key parts of the apparatus himself, Armus said, which were broken when he bought it. He was, he allowed, not a bad amateur technician. Then he reached around the base and turned a key. There was a pause of a few seconds. Something metallic and unseen clicked twice. Slowly, in random sequence, the birds began to move their beaks and chirp, and a moment later their wings began to open and close, and their tail feathers lifted and fell in an irregular, jerky rhythm.

     What I disliked most about it—what made me back up and rub my sweating palms against my jacket—was the fact that one by one the birds started to hop from twig to twig as they sang, their bead-like little eyes bright with what might have been life, but was only reflected light from the lightbulbs on Vincent Armus's ceiling. I felt spooked and nervous, I felt exactly the way I had felt when Elsie's clown at the Conservatoire had started to walk.

     "It's called 'Bird Bush and Clock.'" Armus tapped the small clock dial in the center of the base. "People often say 'Bird Tree' instead of 'Bird Bush.' I hope your newspaper gets it right, Mr. Keats."

     I was still rubbing my hands against my jacket. "Hope," I said for absolutely no reason I could think of, "is the thing with feathers," and Armus turned and studied me coldly for a moment, then raised one eyebrow and smiled. I realized then that I had no grip whatsoever on his character.

Root was slow in getting his camera and tripod around and into place in the little alcove. Arriving guests could be heard in the big living room down the hall, and one or two wandered into the Collection Room, plates and glasses in hand.

     "He began as a taxidermist, you know," Elsie Short said, coming up beside me as I stood in front of the fish tanks. I looked over at
Armus. "Gustave Bontems did," she said dryly. "As a boy Gustave Bontems was apprenticed to a taxidermist, and according to the story, one day a customer said how life-like his stuffed nightingale looked and he burst into tears and said, 'Yes, but it doesn't sing!'" She frowned at me. "Shouldn't you be taking notes on all this?"

     I pulled out my notebook and obediently opened it to a blank page. "Thank you for interceding with the host," I said. "I wasn't sure he was going to let us stay."

     Elsie kept her attention fixed on the Bird Bush, where several older men, American by their voices, had now gathered around Armus. Next to him a tall, mannish-looking woman in her early forties had just arrived by herself.

     "As you might have guessed," Elsie said, "Bontems was fascinated by sound. He used to get up before dawn and go out in the fields and listen to the birds coming awake. Then he would file the teeth on his music box over and over until he got them exactly right and duplicate them with cams."

     "A cam is a little curved wheel, right? Like a pulley?" I asked.

     "More or less. In automates they have teeth to engage the gears and make the tines in the birds' throats bend and vibrate like the ones in a music box. They also turn the heads and open the beaks. There are fourteen birds on that Bush, seven different species, and believe it or not, each one is singing a precise, scientifically accurate call." She tilted her head in my direction and added in the same dry voice, "As for interceding, I just thought I should keep an eye on you, Mr. Toby Keats, seeing that you still have my property, so to speak."

     "Birds of a feather," I said proudly and wrote it in my notebook. "How do they jump from branch to branch?"

     "You have wires that run to the cams and wheels in the base," she said, "behind the clock. I built something like it once when I was a girl, my father and I did, down in our basement, but on a much bigger scale, of course. I was something of a tomboy."

     "William Peyton Short," I said. "Descendant of the diplomat
William Short who was Thomas Jefferson's private secretary right here in Paris when the French Revolution began. I knew there was something about your name, and I had a human encyclopedia in our office named Shirer look it up. Your father was an engineering professor at Columbia, and he had two or three patents in mining technology, one of them with our friend Mr. Edison."

     Her face turned unexpectedly pensive. "My father was quite a wonderful man," she said. "My mother died when I was four and he brought me up by himself. He wanted me to be a professor too, like him."

     "Except—?"

     "Except—have you tried to find a university teaching job in New York, Mr. Keats? As a woman? My father died two years ago. The last thing he did was introduce me to Mr. Edison, who gave me a job out of charity. But I'm not going to be a doll hunter all my life. Not if I publish my book."

     I put away my notebook. "My editor says, 'Don't get it right, get it written.'"

     Her laugh was spontaneous and irresistible. But then she put her hand on my sleeve and asked, "Who is that woman?"

     I had already recognized the new arrival. She was wearing a hipless gray "flapper" dress that might have come off the cover of that month's
Vogue
, along with a silver tiara and a white fur fox piece draped around her shoulders, and while she smiled she kept one large bejeweled hand resting in a proprietary fashion on Armus's left shoulder. "Her name is Natalie Barney. She's a scandalous American expatriate."

     "She certainly seems to be charming Vincent and those other men. Libby won't like that."

     "Actually," I said, "she won't have the slightest interest in Vincent."

     Elsie looked at me, then at Natalie Barney, who had just then turned her gaze in our direction. "Oh," she said. A faint pink blush colored her cheeks. "Oh."

     "Mr. Keats the reporter." Natalie Barney crossed the room in three brisk steps, shook my hand with a firm, masculine grip, and showed her large, predatory teeth, not to me, but to Elsie. "I'm Natalie Barney, Mr. Keats. We've met at various oh-so-dull American Colonist functions, and I read you every day in the dreadful old
Tribune.
Now I understand you're going to write about poor Vincent's toys."

     She extended her hand to Elsie and repeated her name, and Elsie, descendant of a diplomat, smiled and shook hands and appeared not to notice that Natalie had maneuvered us both around to one side of the aquarium tanks and still had Elsie's one hand in both of hers.

     Natalie Barney was one of the wealthiest, most intelligent, most uninhibited of all the American expatriates in Paris, and incidentally its most prominent lesbian, though she was reputed to have once seduced Bernard Berenson, out of curiosity. Her house on the rue Jacob was notorious for its all-female soirées, which usually culminated in what admiring Parisians called the "rites of Sappho." There was a small Greek temple at the bottom of her garden, Root had told me, which the ladies reached on a path strewn with flower petals by a small boy hidden out of sight.

     "I adore Mr. Keats's hair," she told Elsie. "Don't you? If I ever go gray"—she patted her own raven-black cloche—"I mean to dye it the same color exactly."

     "It makes him look young," said Elsie the Ironist.

     Natalie chuckled. "You must be a writer too. What I like about the writer's art," she added, looking at me, "even in newspapers, is the way good literature so naturally divides everything into two opposite parts, like the body and soul. Or male and female. Here, for instance, Mr. Keats, you have on one side of the room the organic, living world of the fishes, silent but alive."