The Paris Deadline

  Praise for

  THE PARIS DEADLINE

  "Wow! This is storytelling at its very best. Max Byrd uses the whole deck of cards—character, place, history, humor, and intrigue—to weave his magical story. You want a good ride? The Paris Deadline is your ticket!"

  —Michael Connelly, author of The Brass Verdict and The Scarecrow

  "Max Byrd's The Paris Deadline is the best 'code and cipher' novel I've ever read, a wonderful historical thriller, combining terrific characters with wit, erudition, more cool facts than your average encyclopedia, and a blistering narrative drive that makes the pages fly. Do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading this book!"

  —John Lescroart, author of The Thirteenth Juror and Betrayal

  "Some of the things I love most about the book—the wit and erudition, the scholarship, the interesting things about the underground war and automates—are not the things other people will like. They'll be caught up in the mystery of the duck and the love story between the appealing Toby and Elsie, and the fact that it's set in Paris. Of course, I love that too!"

  —Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and The Shadow Knows

  Also by Max Byrd

  California Thriller

  Finders, Weepers

  Fly Away, Jill

  Fuse Time

  Target of Opportunity

  Turner Publishing Company

  200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950 Nashville, Tennessee 37219

  445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor New York, NY 10022

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  The Paris Deadline

  Copyright © 2012 Max Byrd. All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover design: Gina Binkley

  Book design: Glen Edelstein

  Cover image: Paris, France: Gargoyles of the Notre-Dame cathedral. 1960s. Photograph by Janine Niepce (1921-2007). © Janine Niepce / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Byrd, Max.

  The Paris deadline / by Max Byrd.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-61858-277-5

  1. Vaucanson, Jacques de, 1709-1782--Fiction. 2. Robotics--Military applications--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.Y675P37 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2012014190

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 17 18—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my granddaughters,

  Haley, Abigail, and Noelle

  The Gyroscope, familiar to millions as a children's toy, was invented, it is thought, in Paris in 1852 by a French physicist named J.B.L. Foucault, though this is disputed by some authorities. As a device, it possesses the remarkable ability to define a direction in space with a great degree of accuracy, so much so that in 1910 the first workable gyrocompass was installed on the German warship "Duisberg," for the purpose of keeping it precisely on course.

  —Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition

  "I suppose I would have to agree," said Dr. Robert Goddard, the mild-mannered inventor of the liquid-fuelled ballistic missile, "that this has made the world a more dangerous place."

  —New York Times, March 17, 1926

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —Arthur C. Clark

  PART ONE

  Vaucanson's Duck

  One

  THE EIGHTH WINTER AFTER THE WAR, I was living in a one-room garret, a fourth-floor walk-up not much wider than a coat hanger, on the disreputable rue du Dragon.

  And no, to get the question out of the way at once, I didn't know Hemingway, though it was Paris and the year was 1926 and every other expatriate American in the city seemed to trip over his feet or lend him money as a daily occurrence. (Years later I did stand behind him in the mail line at American Express and listen to him denounce Woodrow Wilson in very loud and Hemingwayesque French, which had the slow, clear, menacing cadence of a bull's hoof pawing the ground.)

  The only literary person I actually did know, besides Gertrude Stein's landlord, was the journalist who sat on the other side of the desk we shared at the Chicago Tribune offices on the rue Lamartine.

  He was a slender, amiable young man named Waverley Root. He was twenty-six that year, the same as the century, five years younger than I was, not quite old enough to have been in the army. Root was a remarkable person who wrote English like a puckish angel and spoke French as if he had a mouthful of cheese, and a decade or so later he was to find his true calling as a celebrated food critic for the New York Herald. The last time I saw him he wore nothing but yellow shirts and had gotten so fat he appeared to have inflated himself in one push of a button, like a rubber raft on a ship.

  But in those days celebrity was far over the horizon, and Waverley Root was simply another vagabond reporter who had washed up on the cobblestoned shores of the Right Bank in search of a job. He had gone to Tufts. I had gone to Harvard. He had worked for the New York World. I had worked for the Boston Globe. He drank anisette and I drank Scotch, and this small divergence in personal character accounted for the fact that on the chilly, rainy Monday morning of December 7, he was leaning against my chair, nursing a French hangover (as he nicely put it), rigid, classical, and comprehensive.

  "Toby," he said, "I will never drink alcohol again."

  "I know it."

  "An owl slept in my mouth last night. My teeth turned green. My poor eyes look like two bags of blood."

  "They look like two bags of ink." I typed "30"—newspaperese for "The End"—on a sheet of yellow paper and swiveled to hand it through a hole in the wall—literally.

  The Paris edition of the Tribune occupied the top three floors of a rambling nineteenth-century structure that had not been designed with modern journalism in mind. Apart from the Managing Editor's sanctum behind a frosted glass door, our editorial offices consisted of one long city room, which held a collection of sprung leather chairs, a long oval table covered with typewriters and ashtrays, and a string of smaller rewrite desks like ours, crammed off to the sides and in the corners. All practically deserted, of course, at this time of the morning. Bedlam arrived later, with the regular reporters, at the civilized hour of noon.

  The composing rooms were downstairs (we lowered copy by force of gravity, through a chute in the middle of the floor) and the printing presses were in the basement. Our copyeditors had been banished to an interior room mysteriously inaccessible to us except by going down two flights of stairs and up again three, hence the hole in the wall. More than one visitor, seeing a disembodied hand waving vaguely through a slot in the plaster, had been put in mind of the House of Usher.

  "And there is no health in me," Root said and sat down heavily on his side of the desk.

  "It's nine thirty-one," I said. "She told us to be there at ten."

  Our urchinish French copy boy plopped a thick stack of rubber composing mats on my blotter, murmured "Mon cher Papa," as he did every morning, and sidled away, smoking a torpedo-sized Gitane, to the dark little basement cubby he inhabited down among the rolls of newsprint. He called me "Old Dad," because even at thirty-one, my hair was mostly silver-gray, almost white, like a policeman's helmet. Many people, especially women, assumed sympathetically that something had turned it that way in the war, and if they were young and attractive, I had been known not to correct them. In fact, it had simply happened overnight when I was nineteen, and for some obscure reason, possibly modesty, probably vanity, I had never tried to dye it.

  "Goddam 'The Gumps,'" Root said
and picked up one of the composing mats.

  I sighed and took it back. "The Gumps" had nothing to do with his hangover. They were the Paris edition's most popular comic strip (followed closely by "The Katzenjammer Kids" and "Gasoline Alley"). On Colonel McCormick's personal instructions, the comic strip mats were mailed to us from Chicago twice a month, filed in a cupboard behind the City Editor's desk, and delivered to me every Monday to be arranged in chronological order and chuted down to the printing room.

  "She asked for both of us," I reminded him. "Tous les deux. Root and Keats, Keats and Root."

  Root closed his eyes in anisette-induced meditation.

  I sighed again like the Lady of Shalot and got to my feet. "Suite twenty-five, Hôtel Ritz, if you change your mind."

  "Suites to the suite," Root said, with eyes still closed. And as I reached the door he added, sotto voce, "Lambs to the slaughter."

  Outside on the rue Lamartine it was raining softly in the slow, sad Parisian winter way and the street was almost deserted: a few soggy shoppers, a gendarme in his cape, a pair of disheartened workmen on ladders stringing waterlogged loops of Christmas tinsel between the lampposts. Another crew was silently studying an enormous and inexplicable pit in the pavement, part of the endless cycle of street repair and excavations in post-war Paris.

  I took thirty seconds to gulp a thimbleful of black coffee from the stall in front of our door, and another thirty seconds to frown at the cold gray sky and disapprove of our climate. Then I made my way around the pit and started out, an obedient lamb, for the Ritz.

  The Chicago Tribune and its Paris subsidiary were owned at that time by Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, who had won the Medal of Honor at Cantigny (a battle I'd also attended, in a minor role), and who ran his newspaper along much the same military principles of fear and feudalism that he had evidently employed in the Army.

  Fortunately for us, he managed the paper at a distance, coming to Paris only once or twice a year for what he jocularly called "little friendly look-sees," but which had the grim, white-gloved, pursed lips air of a regimental inspection. Like other monarchs he was invariably referred to by his title—in three years at the Tribune I had never heard him called anything except "the Colonel"—and like other monarchs as well, he was seriously burdened by family.

  In his case, the burden was the Queen Mother, Mrs. Katherine Van Etta Medill McCormick, a grande dame about a hundred and fifty years old, daughter of the famous Civil War reporter Joseph Medill, eccentric even for a newspaper family, and much too fond (in the opinion of the Tribune staff) of visiting Paris. She called the Colonel "Bertie," which he hated, and had previously called him, against all evidence, "Katrina," until at the age of nine he rebelled.

  Mrs. McCormick liked Root, as everybody did, and the Colonel liked me, because he thought I was a project in need of completing. When Mrs. McCormick had errands to be done in Paris, she summoned us both and reported the results, good or bad, directly back to Bertie.

  I stopped at the corner of the rue de Provence and watched a girl herding five or six goats down the street, still not an unusual sight in Paris in the twenties. An old man leaned out of a third-floor window and shouted to her, and while I crossed to the rue Rossini I could hear the goats' hoofs clattering as they went up the stairs to be milked.

  I was a long way from Boston, I thought, or even Cantigny, and turned my gaze to the smallish blonde woman on the opposite sidewalk.

  She was studying a tray of croissants in a bakery window, she had no herd of goats, and she was well worth looking at. She wore a nicely tailored green waterproof coat, which was beaded with rain and showed off her waist and her calves and her sensible brown brogues. Her hat was a blue trilby of a style I had never seen before and which, if I were not five thousand miles from home, I would have called foreign. And she had a brilliant red feather in the hatband, like a Christmas tree bulb.

  In the buttery reflection of the shop window it was hard to see her face. She seemed to be counting coins in her palm. And despite the relative emptiness of the street, she also seemed completely unaware that she was being followed.

  The follower in question was half a block down the sidewalk, a squat, broad-shouldered, gypsy-featured man about my age. He wore a dirty gray quilted jacket and a scowl, and carried a leather-covered billy in one hand, like a swagger stick, and moment by moment he was inching closer to her.

  Up to no good. Obviously a pickpocket, I thought, and I took a step off the curb with the idea of making some sort of warning gesture to my fellow foreigner. The swarthy man transferred his scowl to me and then, to my utter astonishment, bared his teeth in a wolfish snarl.

  At which precise moment the skies over Paris broke apart in a stupendous clap of thunder and a squall of freezing hard rain swept across the cobblestones with the rattling sound of coal going down a slide.

  I don't mind rain. I grew up in New Mexico, where rain is so important that the Navajos have dozens of different names for it, the way Eskimos have for snow. But thunder and lightning are another story, another story for a soldier—ask Colonel McCormick about it. As the first boom rolled overhead I closed my eyes and clenched my fists as I always do, and counted silently till the last vibration had died away.

  When I opened my eyes again both Red Feather and Dirty Jacket had vanished like a dream.

  Two

  "AND I INSIST THAT YOU GET THEM BACK," Mrs. McCormick said, staring at me imperiously but myopically through her jeweled lorgnette. "At once. Toot sweet!" she added for the benefit of the two frock-coated Ritz Hôtel dignitaries who stood in the center of the carpet, joined at the elbow.

  They bowed in synchronized acknowledgement and resumed their impression of stuffed frogs. Mrs. McCormick sniffed; twirled her lorgnette once by the stem like a drum majorette; turned majestically toward the Louis XV gold-filigreed table by the window.

  "And I want you to dispose of that."

  Many Parisians regard the first floor (second floor American) as the floor of most prestige in a residence, because it's away from the servants and the street. For reasons of entitlement and vanity, therefore, Mrs. McCormick always asked for and got the same four-room suite on the first floor of the Ritz, looking out on the traffic in the place Vendôme and well above the busy sidewalk just below. It had the added advantage of facing east, so that even on this damp and gloomy morning, enough sunlight crept into the room to illuminate the memorably unimpressive object now sitting on the Louis XV table.

  "That thing, Mr. Keats." She swept her hand back and forth like a little broom, as if to whisk it away.

  The thing in question was, of all things in the world, a life-sized metal duck. It had a faded brown body and a faintly green head, like a mallard, and it was nesting, so to speak, in a white pasteboard box stuffed with cut paper. The morning light around it looked like a puddle of foil.

  "The ones I ordered were much larger and very well made," said Mrs. McCormick, "and there were two of them."

  Lightning flashed across the window, raindrops spattered on the glass, and as I closed my eyes again and counted till the thunder came, I almost imagined she was speaking of the odd pair I had seen on the rue Rossini ten minutes earlier.

  But of course she was not. She was speaking of the curious antiques she had purchased ("for a goodly price, Mr. Keats") on Saturday afternoon all the way across the Seine on the rue Bonaparte.

  "Two absolutely marvelous 'automats,'" she assured us, pronouncing the last word with so flat a midwestern accent that for a moment I imagined that she had strolled out into Paris and bought a pair of coin-operated cafeterias like Horn & Hardart's in New York. "They were South American parrots with green ceramic legs and hooked beaks, and they flapped their wings and spread their tails when you wound them up with a key."

  "Ah," said one of the Ritz brothers, "automates."

  "What I said." Mrs. McCormick wheeled the lorgnette in my direction like a double-barreled cannon. "I hate this damn country, you know. I fell ou
t of bed here once."

  The Ritz men were conferring in sibilant French whispers. I advanced boldly on the duck which, under the faded paint, appeared to be made out of some kind of plated copper. It had a sad little fantail of five or six dried out feathers. The copper was tarnished, its webbed feet were covered with wrinkled orange leather, and the whole thing looked, as far as you could say it about an object made of metal, moth-eaten.

  "Easy there, boy," I said, bending forward.

  An automate or "automaton" was a mechanical creature that simulated the motions of a living being. Fifty years ago, in the 1870s, they were supposed to be wildly popular in France, and you could still run across them from time to time in arcades and carnivals. In a street fair over by the Bourse I had once seen a windup automate magician on display, about ten inches high, who bowed left and right when you fed him a coin, then swiveled to a little felt-covered table, tipped his hat, and made a thumb-sized cotton rabbit appear. But science had marched on, and automates were hard to find now in the age of Maxim machine guns, wireless radios, and motion pictures.

  I poked at the duck's beak. Its long, solemn face stirred something odd and offbeat in my memory.

  A name, a place in Switzerland—somebody's duck? Who?

  There was no obvious key or lever to make it move or quack or do anything at all except sit in the wet gray light of the place Vendôme and stare at the street. A melancholy duck. I rather liked it.

  Behind me Mrs. McCormick was explaining that the wretched shop on the rue Bonaparte had sent over this morning, not her two splendid South American automatic parrots, for which she had given seventy-five dollars in cash, but this miserable, inactive, mechanical canard.

  That seemed a little harsh, I thought, and stroked the poor fellow's moldy back.

  "You will want to return it," Mrs. McCormick announced, "posthaste, in a taxi."