The Paris Deadline (25 page)

"N
O," SAID
M
AJOR
C
ROSS
. "W
HAT IN THE WORLD IS
S
OLRESOL?"

     I hung my hat and coat on a rack and squinted at the window of his office. It was twenty minutes till six, dark, and a strong east wind was fluttering and flapping its black wings against the glass as if it wanted to come in. This was a different room in the same suite of offices on the rue Taitbout, and it had fewer books and more cabinets and furniture than the other one. A little metal heater glowed by one wall, an old-fashioned coal-burning stove that the French for some reason called a "salamander." There was a metal desk in the center, piled high with papers, two spindly wooden chairs and a coffee table, and oddly enough, dangling from another rack by the far wall, a standard-issue British army gas mask, no cylinder.

     "Solresol," I said as we each sat down on opposite sides of the coffee table, "was an artificial language based on music."

     "Never heard of it." Cross placed a brown cardboard folder on the table and began to shuffle through it.

     "Early nineteenth-century. Invented around 1825 by a Frenchman named Fran¸ois Soudre."

     "No, sorry."

     "Soudre thought you could make a universal language using only the seven basic notes of the musical scale." When Cross looked up at me curiously from his folder, I shrugged. "Somebody told me about it last night. There wasn't much in the big Larousse, but I thought maybe, as a learned archivist—"

     "I've been reading about canaries, if that helps. Songbirds." From a shelf under the table he produced a decanter of honey-colored brandy and two thumb-sized snifters. "You kept them down in the tunnels, evidently. Somehow I never pictured that."

     "It's a coal miner's trick, to warn about gas, or lack of oxygen—if your canary stops breathing and falls off his perch you're in trouble."

     "And when you're in trouble you run for your kit," Cross said, and we both turned to look at the gas mask hanging in the corner. "Somebody's souvenir," he said by way of explanation. "This isn't my regular office. But you had other animals too, down below, not just canaries, yes?"

     I had come to Major Cross's office because Colonel McCormick's note had ordered me, more or less, to cooperate. Kospoth knew that and had given me three hours off. This was to be the second and last interview, I had told myself. My firm intention was to keep my answers terse, brisk, unhelpful, and be out of there and on my way in twenty minutes.

     But the mention of the canaries set off a funny train of associations. In Flanders there had been an enormous hairy kilt-wearing Scotsman named Auchinleck who spent his spare time trimming the delicate little claws of our canaries—not an easy sight to forget. Which made me remember the red London double-decker bus that arrived one rainy afternoon, loaded to the roof with wicker cages of sparrows and canaries donated by a girls' school in Kent.

     "Mice, for example," said Major Cross.

     "Mice," I agreed. "We used mice too." There had never been any shortage of mice in the tunnels, or rats or fleas.

     "According to another interview," Cross said, tapping his folder, "Norton-Griffiths had an aviary constructed at Calais, where he actually bred canaries by the thousands."

     "My friend Root at the paper has a file he calls 'Facts Too Good to Check.'"

     "This person seemed to be sure."

     "Nothing Norton-Griffiths did would surprise me. I don't know about the aviary. I do know we weren't the only ones who used canaries. The infantry used them in the dugouts, too, under the trenches—because every explosion produces gas, and the gas could linger in the trenches and kill you. What you probably won't find in your file is the fact that some of the tunnelers kept bigger animals than canaries, for mascots. I was once down at the end of a tunnel by myself and when I turned around to go back I bumped into a spotless white rabbit cleaning its paws. If he'd had a vest and a gold watch, I could have been in
Alice in Wonderland.
"

     Cross stared at me for a count of two, like an older, grayer version of Bill Shirer, then shook his head and started to laugh, a big, surprisingly deep laugh that came from his belly and shook his thin flat face like a leaf.

     "I like your literary allusions," he said, still laughing, rubbing his nose with the back of his wrist, "very eclectic and refreshing." He leaned forward and refilled my snifter. "So what happened," he said as he leaned back and kept on smiling, "the last time you went down?"

     I looked at the window behind his right shoulder and said nothing, nothing at all.

     Cross waited. He felt in his coat and produced a dimpled brass cigarette case. Then he stretched one arm over to the desk and found an ashtray for the coffee table. "They say you were a 'Proto' Man, but I couldn't find that term in the manuals—what was a Proto Man, Toby?"

     The human instinct to answer a direct question, put to you by name, is strong. I took a cigarette from the case he had left open on the table. "A Proto Man was somebody in special breathing gear, a 'Proto Suit.' You used it on rescue missions or when you were very deep in a tunnel where there was probably gas."

     "Something you wore, then?"

     I lit the cigarette with a match he handed me, drank about a thumb's worth of brandy, and watched the gray smoke begin to rise and coil on a draft of air from the window, like a snake charmer's trick.

     "There were special oversized goggles for your eyes," I said. "You had a hood, a big double-folded white canvas bellows on your chest, two or three gauges, a nose clamp, a couple of oxygen cylinders strapped to your back. There were two very fat rubber hoses that came up from the bellows and into a mouthpiece. The idea was you breathed oxygen from the cylinders while the carbon dioxide you exhaled got scrubbed clean through a second pouch that was filled with caustic soda granules."

     "Something like that?" Cross pointed his cigarette toward the gas mask.

     "Not really. The Proto was much bigger, clumsier. It weighed a ton. You looked like a machine. You looked like a deep-sea diver who's popped up in a coal mine."

     "And everybody had a Proto suit?"

     "No. Only a couple of men in each unit. There was a smaller version called a 'Salvus,' but it just worked for about twenty minutes."

     "And the Germans had these suits too."

     "The Germans had something called the Draeger Suit. Instead of gauges it had a transparent window in the pouch, so you could see the granules. You could watch them moving up and down with every breath and changing color. Otherwise it was the same."

     Cross pulled a stapled sheaf of papers out of his folder and flipped to a page in the center. "June 11, 1918," he said, not quite
reading. "A little bit after the Battle of Cantigny. You were in the lines east of Reims, near the Marne, and the Germans blew a camouflet deep in your tunnels. This was a British tunnels unit attached to General Pershing."

     I studied our cigarette smoke, which was flattening out against the ceiling now like the top of a bluish-gray mushroom.

     "It says they sent you down in your Proto Man suit, with three other enlisted men, to rescue your people, and you had got five of them out when the Germans blew another charge."

     They liked to do that, I said. The Germans liked to delay their second charge till a rescue party was down. Actually, so did we. Or maybe I didn't say anything at all to Cross. I wasn't sure. I couldn't hear myself over the tintement of my ears. I watched the smoke creep across the ceiling and vanish into the shadowy molding. When I was a boy my grandfather the lawyer had rather cruelly made me learn to swim in the ice-cold waters of a place north of Boston called, deceptively, "Singing Beach." I was not a good swimmer, but he made me learn, so I wouldn't drown. Because, he said—and I remember his words exactly—because "the Ocean Doesn't Care."

     "According to the reports," Cross said, "when your team couldn't function anymore because of gas poisoning, you still went back one more time, to rescue your last three men, and the Germans blew a final charge while you were down, and you and the three men and a German soldier in a Draeger suit were all trapped in some kind of narrow hollowed-out space about eight feet wide and three feet high."

     When I didn't say anything to that either, he turned to the end of his papers. "'Sergeant Keats,'" he read, and deliberately or not his voice took on a faintly British accent, "'had been seriously wounded in hand-to-hand combat in the tunnels. He was bleeding profusely from his scalp and his shoulder where he had been shot twice. When rescuers finally reached him, at thirty meters depth from the surface, he was unconscious and covered with dried blood
and rats. At our best estimate he was trapped in the darkness with four corpses, pinned under a fallen timber, for upwards of forty-eight hours.'"

     I stood up and worked my shoulder back and forth and started for the door. The ocean doesn't care. The tunnels didn't care.

     "Apparently," Cross said, "the German in the Draeger suit didn't die in the explosions."

     I shrugged on my coat and reached for my hat.

     "Apparently," Cross said, "at some point during those forty-eight hours the German revived. He sat up in that strange mechanical suit and started crawling toward you with his gun. And you shot him."

     I couldn't hear a thing over the drumbeat of blood in my ears. I watched my hand reach mechanically, like a machine, for the lever on the door.

MAJOR CROSS:
It must have been absolutely terrifying, to turn on your flashlight down in that black coffin of a space and see his goggles start to move, his chest begin to breathe, the blood from his wound start to flow again—

SERGEANT KEATS:
[no reply]

MAJOR CROSS:
As if he had somehow come back to life.

"N
O
," R
OOT SAID
. "
WHAT THE HELL IS
S
OLRESOL
?"

     It was about six-thirty in the evening then, one day after my brandy and chat with Major Cross. It was dark and bitterly cold. I was sitting on a three-legged stool next to Root, who was himself reclining more than sitting on an elaborate chromium-plated, leather-padded barber's chair, with a black and white striped sheet tucked around his collar. For the moment all you could see of him was his red face and the tips of his shoes. These he now wriggled with childish satisfaction, pretending, he said, they were mice.

     I leaned back so the barber could step around me to the gas burner on the counter where he kept his cups and razors. The only other people in the room were two old men in wool vests and black berets who had arranged themselves like bookends on either side of the window. They were watching shopgirls come and go on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

     "Solresol," I told him, "was a musical language. A kind of code,
I guess. It was invented in the nineteenth century by a Frenchman. You could write it down in notes, like music—do, re, mi—and speak it or sing it, whichever you liked. Evidently as you shifted the stress you changed a note from a noun to a verb or an adjective."

     "Ask Shirer about it. He probably speaks it."

     "They used to teach Solresol all over Europe and America, up until about 1880. Victor Hugo could speak it, James Audubon, Napoleon III. They taught a course in Solresol at Oxford."

     Behind him the barber had gotten his burner lit and was heating a tiny cup of water over it, paying us no attention at all.

     "One of its charms, apparently, was that you could also hum it or whistle it or play it on a French horn."

     "Ask the man Shirer."

     By now the cup was frothy with a stiff yellowish-white meringue, which the barber stirred with a brush. Then he turned and lathered Root's face till he looked like a cake. Then he dove forward and began to shave with quick, short, artistic strokes.

     The man Shirer, of course, had told me about it in the first place, and from our little excursion to the Faubourg Saint Antoine I had gone straight to the Reference Room of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

     It was amazing, as my father used to say, how much had gone on in the world before a person was born. There were still Solresol textbooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale, dozens of them, school grammars, three different editions of an official dictionary. Like Esperanto, Solresol had been a commonplace fact of life through much of the nineteenth century, and now it was as obscure and forgotten as Ozymandias.

     I had copied the basic rules from one of the grammars, and Elsie Short had spent the better part of the last two days in Madame Serboff's storage room on the rue du Dragon, twisting the tines in our duck's throat, tapping, stretching, adjusting the eight extra cams to make it quack or honk like Victor Hugo. Result: an ungodly series of pinging metallic noises, but nothing
remotely resembling a code or a message. The problem, Elsie said, was either in the cams or in the whole loony idea.

     In a neighborhood Parisian barbershop it was the customer's job to remove the sheet, wash the lather off in a sink, and then dry his face with a communal towel. I watched while Root went through the ritual, muttering something in his crumbly French that made the barber laugh. At the door he patted his cheeks happily and took his hat from the rack.

     "Remind me what a cam is."

     "I showed you one, in the Ritz. They're disks, about the size of a dime. Or in this case even smaller. They turn gears."

     "Does a typewriter have them?"

     I thought for a moment. "No."

     Root opened the door and scowled at the blast of cold February air. "Then I don't give a damn," he said.

The rue Monsieur-le-Prince runs northwest from the Luxembourg Gardens toward the Seine. Since it was the night of Natalie Barney's Open House, that happened to be precisely the direction I was going.