The Paris Deadline (21 page)

     "Not soberly," I said.

     "Do you know Mr. Hemingway?" Elsie asked him, in apparent innocence.

     "Hemingway is a writer," Root said, and held out his glass for more champagne, "with an inexhaustible ability to repeat himself."

     "Root sometimes writes fiction," I contributed.

     "I used to write poetry," he said sadly, "till I showed some of it to my father and he handed it back the next day and said, 'You don't do much of this, I hope?'"

     There was more in this vein, two glasses more at least, and then Shirer stood up at the other end of the row of tables, and proposed a toast to his alma mater, Coe College in Iowa, and afterwards the room fell into one of those abrupt, profound silences that happen in even the noisiest of parties.

     That was the point at which one of the day shift men leaned out across his table and called down to me. "So tell us why you're scared of the Métro, Keats."

     The room, if anything, grew quieter still. I could hear the faint clink and rattle of pans in the kitchen, Shirer wheezing, the blood slowly draining out of my skin. Up and down the tables faces turned to me, or in the case of Kospoth turned away. Elsie stared at me.

     "Why the hell," said the day shift man, "won't you ride the damn thing? Most convenient transportation in the world, the Métro is. I hear you won't even buy a ticket."

     "The Paris Métro," Root said, "was begun in 1898, which was later than London and New York, which both had subways from the 1870s on—"

     "Kospoth told me," the day shift man interrupted. He was more than a little drunk and glowering and smirking at the same time. "Kospoth told me you were afraid of the dark. When the electricity's off you won't even go down to the basement, a grown man."

     "No, he won't," said one of the French girls from the photo office. "I've seen him start down there and then turn around."

     Root was tall and slender, but he possessed unusual strength in his arms and shoulders, and he suddenly stood up and slammed his right hand down on the table so hard that the silverware jumped and Elsie gasped. "In the bloody fucking war," he said, "this guy spent two days buried underground in a collapsed tunnel with four corpses, one of them German, only they weren't corpses the first day and he won't ever say what happened or what it was like. He spent two days buried alive with dead men. In a two-foot-high tunnel, a hundred feet underground. He volunteered to go down to rescue them. He volunteered to rescue them." Root looked at Kospoth. "The British gave him the Victoria Cross for crawling down into that goddam tunnel, so if he doesn't want to go underground anymore and ride the goddam Métro, you can let it pass, all of you, you can just give it a fucking miss."

     He looked up and down the silent row of tables, then carefully lowered himself into his chair. He wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief and reached for a bottle. "I like red Burgundy with fish," he said, "if nobody objects."

V
AUCANSON'S
D
UCK
—
OR THE SEVERAL PIECES
of it that were left after my tug-of-war with Johannes—was all this time back in the possession of the Paris Police. Evidence, once again, of a crime.

     On his visit to the hôpital in Neuilly, I had asked Inspector Soupel to return it to me. But Soupel had only pinched his eyebrows together and explained that, since the death of Patrice Bassot was now under reinvestigation, the police had no intention of releasing evidence.

     Evidence of what? I had asked, sounding exactly like Elsie Short. But he had only tamped his pipe and given an imperturbable Gallic shrug.

     It took, in the end, one of the French lawyers that the
Trib
kept on retainer to loosen their grip, and even then, Soupel told me sternly, the said duck was still technically in the custody of the city of Paris. But Colonel McCormick's name carried a great deal of weight in France. (The Colonel himself knew absolutely
nothing about the duck or my misadventure at the Métro; and Mrs. McCormick, after sending me a get-well potted aster, had hurried off to London with Gwyneth Crawford Gleeson to rest her nerves).

     Which was how it happened that on the 23rd of January, around five in the afternoon, I signed six different kinds of receipt-and-disclaimer, and Soupel handed me a box wrapped in shiny brown oil-paper, pretty much the size and shape of the package I had taken out of the Ritz seven weeks ago. It was raining steadily, just as before, and outside his office Parisian traffic was in its usual state of mechanized lunacy. But this time, I took a number 92 bus, slipped across the Seine without being cudgeled or followed, and carried my duck safely home to the rue du Dragon.

     Three hours later, at exactly ten minutes past eight, I climbed the stairs to the penthouse floor of number 8 rue Jean Carriès. For a long moment I simply stood in the hallway, thinking. Shifted my package from arm to arm. Walked to the window and studied the trees below on the Champ-de-Mars, smoking in the rain like true Parisians. At fourteen minutes past eight I raised my hand and knocked at the door.

     Even if Vincent Armus and his wife were far away, Nigel the butler and chaperon was very much in. He opened the door almost at once, murmured sardonically "Mr. Hearst," and without another word escorted me down the hall, past the Yale medallion on the wall and the empty living room with the rhomboidal Art Déco furniture.

     In the Collection Room the fish tanks were still in place, their golden denizens flickering back and forth in, as Natalie Barney had said, strangely noiseless life. On the right, the painted metallic birds and banjo players and clowns sat on their rows of black pedestals, unmoving. Off to one side of the clowns, Elsie Short, very much alive, sat behind a folding worktable covered with two rows of what looked like surgical instruments.

     "You brought it!"

     "I brought what's left of it."

     Because I was now working full-time again, with assignments and deadlines every day, I hadn't actually seen or spoken to Elsie— with the exception of one brief telephone call—since our aborted dinner at Paulette's, four long days ago. She bounded around the table and liberated the package from my arm. "Nigel—would you mind getting us another chair? And some coffee?"

     Nigel looked hard at me and made a silent exit. Meanwhile Elsie was clearing a space among the tools and then carefully, sheet by sheet, pulling the oil-paper apart.

     When everything was spread out and neatly arranged under the overhead light, she leaned back and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. "Ruined," she said flatly. "Wrecked, a mess. I can't stand it."

     I resisted the urge to tell Nigel that she was talking about the automate, not me. He set out two cups and a pot with quick, flickering gestures, noiseless as the fish in the tank, and left us again.

     "Ruined," she repeated. "Look at that—a dozen pieces at least, both feet detached, the head and the neck over here. This is the right wing, I have no idea what this is."

     Elsie was far better with her hands than I was. My maternal grandmother had been like that. She had repaired everything in her house herself—my grandfather was a lawyer and limited his manual labor to trimming the nibs of his writing pens—and in my memory she is always bending over the workbench in the little screened alcove next to her kitchen, usually with a broken pot or pan on it and a fistful of wrenches and pliers. Briefly, memorably, Elsie looked like that. With grandfatherly dignity I sat back and poured us both coffee.

     "Armus told me he repairs his own automates," I said. "That's an impressive set of tools."

     "He's very clever. He fixes all of them."

     "The duck still belongs to me," I said. "Legally speaking. Or semi-legally. I signed for it at the Préfecture."

     "Vincent knows lots of lawyers." Her left hand picked up a tiny blade. The other hand fit a wing in a slot. "If you're going to be tedious, Toby Keats, he could have them draw up a partnership for us. We could have joint custody until Mr. Edison sends his lawyers. Just like a divorced couple."

     I spooned sugar into my cup and watched her work. Four nights ago at Paulette's I had gotten as far as saying the word "gyroscope" to her, but it had been completely drowned out by Shirer's party coming in. Elsie hadn't even heard it. To this moment, "gyroscope" remained my own flea in my ear.

     "The other evening," I said, clearing my throat, "just before all Bedlam and Parnassus was let out, I was about—"

     Abruptly, I stopped and looked around the room.

     Vincent Armus didn't know about Vaucanson's real Duck and the Bleeding Man—so Elsie had insisted. Nobody did, she said, except the two of us and probably Henri Saulnay. Even Root didn't know about the Bleeding Man. Whatever she and I might be thinking, the rest of the world believed the duck was a Robert Houdin replica that Elsie was trying to deliver in one piece to the Edison Doll Company.

     But Vincent Armus was different. He was a knowledgeable collector of automates, and a greedy, troubling man, and this was his house, his remarkably expensive apartment. The perfectly balanced organism, the one who would survive the war, Norton-Griffiths used to say, was silent. I started my sentence over.

     "I'm still not sure I have the sequence right."

     "What sequence?" Elsie scarcely looked up.

     "You really do work for Thomas Edison?"

     "I really do work for Thomas Edison. And I really am writing a book about automates, though I haven't got very far with it. It's based on my dissertation. As you know."

     "So when exactly did you meet Saulnay?"

     She fit the second wing into the torso and gently turned the duck's right foot in the proper direction. Then she lifted the tail
and fanned it partly open. It didn't look like a wreck at all to me.

     "I actually came over here to Europe," Elsie said slowly, feeling for a tool without looking. "I came over to Europe in November, if you must know, when it was clear I wouldn't get a teaching job in New York. So I took Mr. Edison's offer and I went to Germany first, because the Germans make the best dolls, even better dolls than the French. I don't hate the Germans. I wasn't in the war, Toby."

     "And that was where you saw him."

     "Before the war Henri Saulnay was a well-known toy manufacturer. I never imagined anything else about him. I thought he might still have a few old doll models that he'd never put into production, so I went to his family's farm, it's near Metz, because he was back there on some kind of business. I spent a day and he drove me over and showed me what was left of his factory, which was bombarded and destroyed in a battle—he was incredibly bitter— and we talked about dolls and Mr. Edison and automates. When he told he would be back in Paris in December, I thought he would be a good person to help with my talk. End of sequence."

     "Is it Vaucanson's Duck?"

     "What's left of it," she said. "Maybe. Probably. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put this together again." She turned the duck's torso upside down and a piece of greenish metal tubing fell out of the open space where, back in the Ritz, I had loosened the plate.

     Elsie Short's best feature, Root had told me, was her eyes. Not too big, not too small. They were Delft china blue, sincere and transparent as the day was long. You could see her thoughts like the clouds in the sky.

     "If it's the duck," I reminded her, "something about it is connected to the Bleeding Man. Why would Vaucanson buy back the duck in his old age and leave it to his daughter?"

     She made a face at the metal tubing. "I have no idea. You know, somebody searched my hôtel room when I was in Metz. I thought it was the maid. But it happened again in Paris, the same
day I found Bassot's shop, and I got truly scared. I was afraid some other collector might have seen it first. It never occurred to me that it could have been Henri Saulnay."

     "And he came back later to the store with his nephew, to steal it."

     "So it was just good luck, as it worked out, that I didn't have enough cash to pay for it then."

     "Not for Patrice Bassot."

     "Well, no." She lowered her head solemnly and tried reattaching the neck to the torso. With one wing already firmly in place and both feet on the table, it was looking more and more like the ghostly duck in Eric the Minor's photographs. Automatically I felt in my jacket pocket for them, but it was the wrong jacket. I had sent my brown tweed coat to the cleaners the morning I came back from Neuilly.

     "And I was truly scared, too," she said, "that other time, right out there at the front door to this apartment, after the party, when you said the Duck knows the way to the Bleeding Man. I was amazed you said that. Because that's what I wonder too. I wonder if that very strange and secretive person Jacques de Vaucanson did finally build the Bleeding Man. And if he did, would he have hidden it somewhere also very strange and put the key to the hiding place in this ... this—" She looked at the duck and made an exasperated hissing sound, like a wet thumb on a stove.

     The duck balanced precariously on its warped feet and did its best to look nonchalantly back at her, but it was headless, of course. Its crown and neck lay directly between its feet on the table, surrounded by more tiny copper tubes, some redundant cogs, broken springs.

     "I cannot believe he hid it in this horrible duck," she said, and off to my right, in the clear, glassy silence of the room, there was a metallic whir and a click and I stood suddenly bolt upright, and the Man-in-the-Moon clown slowly raised his walking stick and began to chuckle.

     "It's only a toy," she said, and put her hand on my arm.