The Paris Deadline (29 page)

     "Eleven forty-five." He held out his watch for me to see.

     "Two more hours." I started to get up again, and he gripped my arm.

     "You understand that I don't know anybody in Neuchâtel," he told me for maybe the twentieth time. "I did business there
before the War, but the men I dealt with are all gone by now." He wiped cheese from his mouth with a handkerchief and looked at Root, then shifted on the hard bench to face me directly. "You're responsible for this, Keats. She should have come back to the apartment with us. She should have sold me the duck. You're a stupid, stupid man."

     There wasn't a lot to say to that. It seemed to be the Parisian consensus. I braced my hands on the seat back in front of me to get up, and he put his hand on my arm.

     "The Swiss police," he said, "will never agree to what you want. I said that before. If it weren't for Elsie I wouldn't even be here. But if we're going to do this thing, you cannot tell the Swiss police."

     "No Swiss police," I said. Outside, far below us, a single light in a window hung for a moment in the black landscape, then flew away like a bird.

     "No Swiss police," he repeated. "If they've gone to the Jacquet-Droz exhibit, that will be clear. We can find that out. If not, we turn right around and go back to Paris and leave it to the French police." He shivered and pulled up the collar of his coat and both of us winced as the train wheels squealed on a trestle and began to slow down again. I looked at my watch and then, for the second time in our acquaintance, Armus surprised me with a complete reversal of tone.

     "Let me tell you something ironic, Keats," he said. "Not many people know this. In August of 1817 two very strange people arrived at Neuchâtel from Paris. They weren't in a train, of course, in 1817. They came in one of those big lumbering Alpine stagecoaches that nineteenth-century travelers took to cross over Switzerland and down into Italy. Astonishing what they endured in those days, just to travel. The two people I mean were Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary. She'd married him just a year or so earlier, though not in a church."

     "We arrive in an hour, the British Army up there says." Root slipped into a seat in front of us.

     Armus sniffed. "Percy Bysshe Shelley," he said, "was a poet and a morbid hypochondriac. No one could mention a disease without his taking it on."

     "Like Vaucanson," Root said.

     "Like Vaucanson, like Louis XV, like the surgeon Le Cat, like any number of monomaniacs back then, materialists who imagined that an artificial body would be better, stronger, healthier than their God-given flesh and blood bodies. Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley came to Neuchâtel specifically to look at the automates that the Jaquet-Droz family had on display. He was a poet, but he had a sense of humor. He wanted to see the Writing Boy, he told Mary, so that he could study a perfect android version of himself."

     "A Mechanical Mirror," Root said.

     "But evidently he was disappointed. Certainly he wasn't inspired to poetry by the Writing Boy. And after two days he hurried his party off to Geneva. But Mary Shelley was far more imaginative than her husband. She had already lost one baby. According to her diary, while they were still in Neuchâtel she went six more times to see the automates by herself and afterwards the image, particularly of the heaving chest and moving eyes of one of them, in some real sense haunted her. A year later she started a book."

     
"Frankenstein
," Root said, spoiling his story.

     And the train shivered and shuddered and came to a halt again.

I
T WAS ALMOST SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE MORNING
by the time we finally rolled, creaking and groaning, into Neuchâtel, pushed from behind by another locomotive that had to be sent out from Dijon when our own used up the last of its nine lives.

     The sleepy customs agent stamped our passports without looking at them, and we walked out through the deserted little station and onto the windswept, charmless town square that fronted it. Empty. No taxi, not even a dogsled.

     While Root and Armus rescued our grips from the baggage compartment, I found a public telephone. I wanted to call Soupel or Mrs. Armus, but the telephone only took Swiss jetons, not French coins. I hung up and shaded my eyes against the rising sun, as if Elsie or Saulnay or Dr. Frankenstein's artificial man himself might come staggering out of the light.

     It was still bitter cold but clear. We were at an altitude of about two thousand feet, yet Neuchâtel, what I could see of it
in the breaking dawn, had the feel and look of an Alpine village much higher up. Above the rooftops and shuttered facades, pink-topped mountains rose in the east, jagged and forlorn.

     These were the Jura Mountains, I knew, the source of the archaeologists' word "Jurassic." They had probably looked pretty much the same when prehistoric Jurassic hunters loped across them in animal skins and bare feet, or when eighteenth-century Angélique-Victoire Vaucanson had hurried past them on her way to the mysterious spot where her father had hidden away his gold and his gyroscope and his own version of an artificial, walking, talking, breathing Frankenstein Man.

     "The lake is over there." Armus pointed one gloved hand toward the east. "The main church up there."

     "Where's the museum?"

     "This way."

     Neuchâtel was not a market town. It was a watchmaking town and Swiss cuckoo-clock-making town. It had an old church and a turreted château and a squared-off medieval prison tower and one hundred and forty-three public fountains, if you believed a sign by City Hall. But without a farmers' market, none of its cafés opened at five in the morning the way they did around les Halles in Paris. We followed the street Armus had pointed out and went down a steep embankment toward the lake. From the top of our hill it looked long and flat, like a giant silver thumb pressed into a valley.

     At what passed for a lakeside marina, shabby by Swiss standards, one café owner was just pulling his shutters back. We tramped inside, puffing steam like three little trains, and saw two fishermen at the zinc bar being served coffee and cognac by a teenaged girl with Mary Pickford bangs. Root ordered the same for us, and six croissants, while Armus and I took a table by the window.

     "That's it. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire." Armus inclined his profile toward a tree-lined esplanade two or three hundred yards away, overlooking the lake. At the far end was a brown and white
gabled building, big enough and plain enough to be anything from a hôpital to the local lycée. Three black sedans were parked at its front door, but there was nobody in them.

     "Today is officially Friday, eight hours old," Root deposited a tray on the table and the girl from the bar began passing out cups. "Thursday, yesterday, according to our lovely Lady of the Coffee Bean here, the museum over there was closed all day, and it doesn't open again till noon."

     "Somebody's there now," I said, and looked at the cars.

     The bar girl murmured something in Root's ear and he turned his head slowly toward the museum and the cars and then back to me. "Those are the police, she says. People broke in last night and beat up the guard."

It took us almost ten minutes to walk the three hundred yards to the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire because we had first to cut back into the town, then climb a deceptively steep set of stairs to the esplanade. By the time we reached the front entrance the three black sedans had been joined by a blue and white squad car. A line of flimsy yellow sawhorses blocked the door.

     In Paris, if a major museum had been broken into, the police would be swarming over the grounds like wasps and no mere civilian, certainly not a bedraggled trio of foreigners, could expect to wander casually into the crime scene. In the village of Neuchâtel the only police in sight were two yawning, uniformed gendarmes leaning against the sawhorses.

     We stopped a few yards short. "Wait here," Armus said and strode briskly ahead.

     Root and I looked at each other. A few months ago Root had written a piece on the novelist Tolstoy for the Book Page of the Sunday
Trib
, and he had devoted a whole column to what the great Russian writer called "shading"—his theory that human personalities were little more than perpetual bundles of
contradiction. If you waited long enough, the passionate man turned cold, the coward turned brave, the hero could smile and smile and become a villain.

     Twenty feet ahead of us Armus stopped and gestured abruptly to the gendarmes, and then before our eyes the pompous literary historian of the train last night metamorphosed into a kind of Prussian Commandant, staring down his nose at a pair of worms. He stood stiff as a flagpole in his fur-collared overcoat and spoke quickly, in icy-cold French. After a moment he reached in the coat and presented them a business card, and without bothering to look at us snapped his fingers in our direction.

     "We're from the Chase Bank," he muttered as one of the gendarmes pulled open the front door, "and unlikely as it may seem, you're both my assistants."

     Inside the front door there was a corridor lined with exhibition cases and then a set of ticket booths and turnstiles. At the turnstiles a middle-aged woman, still in her hooded parka and heavy boots, held up her hand and stopped us again.

     She was warier than the gendarmes, but Armus was irresistibly patrician and condescending. He repeated his cool, bald-faced lie that he had come on behalf of the Chase Guaranty Bank of New York, Geneva branch, which underwrote most of the city's theft insurance. It was necessary at once, he insisted loudly, that he inspect for damage to the museum's collections, in case there was a monetary claim. The Swiss attitude to money has no shading about it. They don't like to annoy banks. The ticket taker held Armus's business card up to the light as if it were a counterfeit bill, then told us to wait while she went for her supervisor.

     The instant she stepped out of sight I shoved a turnstile open and started trotting rapidly down the hall.

     Nobody saw me.

     I ignored the signs for all the other galleries and followed the red arrows for the exhibit of "Les Androids des Jacquet-Droz." Behind me I could hear somebody protesting, then Root's calming
voice. As I turned right at the extreme rear of the ground floor, I saw an ornately framed portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bertin and his dog by a river. It took two more steps for my memory to jog and remind me that Bertin had been the Comptroller General of France under Louis XV. He had also been an enthusiast of automates and he was the secret funneler of money and instructions from the king to Vaucanson. It was Bertin's encoded memoranda to the Treasury, Elsie had told me, that first showed that the king's gold was being used for something wilder and more dangerous than silk weaving looms.

     Elsie. Why would Saulnay take Miss Elsie Short with him? The skeptical Inspector Soupel had wanted to know that— there had been no ransom note, no message. He only had my word for the alleged abduction. What use could she possibly be to the toymaker?

     Four men in business suits were standing by a broken display cabinet. Shards of wood and glass had already been swept in a pile, in the neat Swiss manner. They had the look of real insurance men. They turned toward me with puzzled expressions. Then I heard Root behind me telling them good morning in loud English, and I pushed by them and around one more corner and entered the Salle des Jacquet-Droz, where the three last surviving automates of Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz and their French assistant Hervé Foucault were housed.

     In a sense, from Elsie's descriptions, I already knew what to expect, what the Jacquet-Droz automatons would look like. Even so, I wasn't prepared for the luxurious charm, the obsessive Swiss perfectionism of the setting that had been built for them—the space in front of me was a three-sided recreation of an eighteenth-century drawing room, with false windows and brilliant red velvet wall coverings, more antique paintings, mirrored gold girandoles, and silver sconces. Along the left and right walls were two handsome Louis XVI sofas. Four or five chairs stood around a chess table. A painting of an Alpine landscape had been propped
on a tripod in a corner. Everything was here, everything was in its neat and ordered place.

     Except that there were only two, not three clockwork figures.

     The one on the left, I knew, was the Draughtsman—a pint-sized boy in a green velvet jacket sitting at a little mahogany desk. He held a piece of paper with his left hand, a pencil with his right. When he was set in motion, Elsie said, he could trace a butterfly, a dog, or the king's profile. The one on the right was larger and dressed as if she were going to a ball. This was the Musician that Saulnay had described in his workshop in Paris, a girl in a bright yellow gown who sat with her fingers poised over the keyboard of a small polished wooden organ, ready at the touch of a switch to begin to breathe and play.

     The space in the center was empty.

     "You are—?"

     The one other human being in the room was a man with straw-yellow hair and an air of mild surprise. He was holding a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. He had on ski boots and gray trousers and a blue blazer with a red and yellow medallion and the words "Départment de Conservation" stitched above it. I muttered "Police, wrong room," turned on my heel, and went out again just as Root and Armus entered the corridor.

     "Toby—?"

     There had been a plan of the building on the wall by the turnstiles. I headed left out of the automates' room, toward an outside door. On the right, exactly as on the plan, was an open door also marked "Départment de Conservation" and I went through it quickly, smiling, like a man who knew what he was doing.

     "The Writing Boy is safe, yes?" I said in my best Parisian French. "Unharmed or damaged?"

     Two technicians, with notebooks this time, one of them in a white laboratory coat, looked up frowning.