The Paris Deadline Read online

  A maid was quickly summoned to take the duck away and rewrap it, and the hôtel emissaries disappeared to fire an indignant letter across the bow of the rue Bonaparte, while Mrs. McCormick retired to bathe her temples in eau de cologne.

  When the maid reappeared with my package I tucked it under my arm, gave her an unauthorized five francs from Mrs. McCormick's taxi money, and oiled my way, as Bertie Wooster said of his manservant Jeeves, across the bespangled lobby of the Ritz and out into the place Vendôme.

  It was raining harder by then, backing up the gutters, giving the cobblestones a wicked, slippery sheen. I waited five or six minutes for an unoccupied cab to spit itself out from the scrum of cars and taxis slowly revolving past the hôtel awning; mentally calculated how long I could live in the South of France on what Mrs. McCormick spent on ceramic parrots (the Colonel paid his Paris reporters a starting salary of fifteen dollars a week). There was a bus stop on the other side of the hôtel, I thought impatiently, on the rue Saint-Honoré. And though I normally wouldn't go down a narrow Parisian alley—or any kind of alley, for that matter—I needed to get back to the paper for the afternoon rush. There was a shortcut I knew around the corner from the hôtel entrance. I waited another two minutes, pulled up my collar, and stepped out into the rain.

  I had just reached the narrowest, darkest part of the alley when a sudden cloudburst swept out of the sky from the east, and the walls on either side appeared to collapse inward around me, like the walls of a cave, and then exploded into thousands of dancing gray diamonds of rain.

  I pressed my back against a door, under an eave. As a new peal of thunder began, I closed my eyes and hunched my shoulders, and something much heavier than raindrops hit me with a colossal bang and I staggered sideways. Another blow caught me in the neck. Hands dug at my coat. Thunder clapped again, a huge, rolling artillery boom that carried me eight years backward in time and, gasping from shock and pain, I went down to one knee and slowly tumbled over, just as I had before, into a roaring, buffeting, many-fisted darkness.

  When I came to, I was sitting up against the alley wall and three or four pale white faces were floating in front of me, blinking on and off like fireflies.

  Somebody started to pull on my shoulders. I shook him off. Amazingly, I still had Mrs. McCormick's package under my left arm, in an iron grip like a football. Somebody else said in French that I must have slipped and fallen in the cloudburst and knocked my head on the cobblestones. Then Waverley Root's kindly, hung-over features wobbled into focus. He changed his mind, I thought stupidly. And as he knelt on the pavement beside me I heard his familiar ironic voice begin to scold, "Well, Toby, nice weather for—"

  "Vaucanson's Duck!" I said, remembering.

  Three

  BUT ALAS, THAT WAS JUST ABOUT ALL I REMEMBERED. The name Vaucanson—was it Blaise or Fran¸ois, or maybe Pierre? With my throbbing head and ringing ears I couldn't concentrate enough to be sure. An old toymaker, I thought. A faintly scandalous person. A joke by Voltaire . . .

  By the time I had eased myself into the cab that Root and the Ritz doorman had whistled over, even that much was slipping away, and the wet brown package under my arm had resumed its role as simply one more item in Mrs. McCormick's gallery of imperial eccentricities, to be delivered, as she said, posthaste.

  "If somebody actually hit you," Root said doubtfully, leaning his big round face into the taxi window like an arriving planet, "I guess you should report it."

  I shook my head, regretted it. The prospect of a damp afternoon filling out quintuplicate forms in a French gendarmerie was worse than any headache. My coat was torn, my cheek was bruised, but I was otherwise unbloodied.

  "I probably imagined it," I told him. "It was raining pretty hard. There was thunder."

  "Ah. Thunder. An alley." He studied me for a moment longer, then repeated the address to the driver and thumped the roof of the cab with his hand. When I looked back he was heading into a bar.

  Then and now, the rue Bonaparte lies all the way over on the other side of the Seine, on the Left Bank. Its southern and more fashionable part serves as the western border of the place Saint-Suplice, where the big church sports its ancient twin towers like a pair of gigantic municipal inkwells and the wealthy, retired Left Bankers sit in their shadow in the Café de la Mairie and feed the pigeons.

  Its northern part is livelier, a dilapidated little medieval corridor that runs from the Saint-Germain church up to the river and the quai Malaquais. Sometimes very late in the evening its fusty smells and overhanging timbered gables make me think of Villon's Paris, where wolves would slink into the city under the public gallows at Montfaucon and wander down to drink from the cool, clear waters of the Seine. But in fact, by day at least, it is largely a street of more or less respectable antiquarian shops, picture framers, and bookbinders, with a few students from the nearby Beaux Arts School drifting up its tributaries and lending it a slightly bohemian air.

  At quarter to twelve, just as the rain was tapering off to a drizzle, my cab pulled up in front of the church, where more pits and excavations in the nearby pavement brought traffic to a standstill. The driver shrugged. I shrugged. I paid him the rest of Mrs. McCormick's money and stepped out. I peered longingly for a moment at the Café Les Deux-Magots, where dry, clear-headed patrons were bent over an early lunch. Then I waited for an elephant-hipped omnibus to lumber by, and I splashed off down the rue Bonaparte, over a necklace of puddles, to the nearest awning.

  The degree of specialization in Parisian shops, I had learned a long time ago, is something no American, brought up on the easy-going concept of a "general" store or a five-and-dime, can readily understand. On my block of the rue du Dragon there was a shop about twelve feet wide, counting the door, which sold nothing but pet goldfish. Next to it an Alsatian butcher sold no beef, only horse meat. (Am I making this up? No. The goldfish shop was called "La Vie Silencieuse.")

  Here on the rue Bonaparte specialization was also alive and well. The tiny shop in front of me had evidently decided to confine itself to nothing but antique armchairs. The shop window next to it had a jumbled display of what seemed to be old ceramic bowls, but which turned out to be, on closer inspection, eighteenth-century chamber pots. One of them was ornamented on the bottom with a faintly discolored portrait of Benjamin Franklin in his famous round fur hat.

  I paused, shifted my package to my other arm, and tried to imagine what offense had brought the great Pennsylvanian so low. Tant pis, I decided, and walked half a block down the street to number 24.

  Here, by contrast, the single display window was absolutely empty—no chamber pots, no goldfish. The sign on the lintel said "Objets Divers de la Magie et des Automates," followed by the name of the proprietor, "Patrice Bassot, Ancien Professeur d'Histoire à la Sorbonne." The big pasteboard card hanging from the door handle said emphatically, in both French and English, "Closed."

  Rain from the awning was dripping in cold little worms down my collar. My head ached. I had worked on a newspaper long enough not to believe anything I saw in print. I turned the handle and stepped inside.

  Four

  "AND?" SAID WAVERLEY ROOT, leaning back in his chair and locking his hands behind his head. "And?"

  "And nothing. Nobody home," I said. "It was empty. Just a few wooden birds on a shelf and a cabinet full of painted eggs."

  "Hmmph." Root swiveled to look at the window. "'Some days in Paris,'" he muttered, "'it failed to rain.'" Which, I assumed, was the first sentence of yet another of his unwritten, unpublished short stories.

  "Actually, there was a boy in the back," I said, "about sixteen or seventeen, packing up boxes. He told me the store had been sold to a taxidermist."

  Root swiveled back around and frowned at our duck—my duck, I supposed—now reposing in a sort of moldy contentment in the middle of our shared desk. "And the automatic parrots?"

  "No idea. The boy never heard of them. I left a note in the door and a message at the Ritz."

  "She won't be
happy."

  "She's going to the Riviera in a week."

  Root grunted and counted out six aspirins from a tin box. He gave me two and swallowed the rest himself.

  "I hope that damn thing can type," said B. J. Kospoth, stopping beside my desk. He handed me a stack of manila folders.

  "Just hunt and peck," I said.

  Kospoth doesn't approve of me. He says I lack ambition and live in a shell like a hermit and I ought to get over the goddam war. Now he gave a mirthless laugh, favored Root with his usual dyspeptic nod, and went on down the room, toward the outside corridor, where an apparatus the French mistook for an elevator separated us from the offices of "Atlantic and Pacific Photos."

  It was half past two, and the day staff of the Trib was about as hard at work as it was likely to get. Kospoth, whose initials are unexplained to this day, was our Day Editor, Art Critic, and Photography Chairman, a taciturn mustachioed fifty-year-old veteran of two or three now defunct Midwestern papers. Since we had no staff photographers of any kind—Root occasionally took photographs with his own equipment—Kospoth's Photography Chairmanship consisted chiefly of crossing the hall once a day and selecting a few stock pictures from Atlantic and Pacific, who were also owned by Colonel McCormick and so had to give them to us for free.

  On the other side of the city room two men about my own age were going over the "local" copy—as a newspaper for Americans abroad, much of our space was devoted to steamship arrivals, departures, and noteworthy scandals of visiting compatriots (B. J. liked to average at least one divorce or jewel theft a week). The day reporters trekked every morning to the dozen or so major hôtels and took down names and hometowns of American guests, as supplied by hôtel clerks or inscribed in the Visitors Book the Trib kept in a little Information Office over on the rue Scribe. When I had first started at the Trib we also sent a man to the steamship companies for their passenger lists, but now the companies just mailed us the names of notable personages we might want to interview.

  "I never heard of Vaucanson," Root said from the other side of the desk.

  I let that pass. Bill Shirer, our resident human encyclopedia, hadn't heard of him either, though Shirer, a bright kid one year out of college, with a taste for slang, had promised he would dig it up for me, "absitoively, posilutely."

  Meanwhile, Root and I were quietly working our way through Kospoth's manila folders, which contained, as usual, batches of editorials clipped from the mother paper back in Chicago. From the very start, evidently, the Colonel had distrusted the effect of Parisian immorality on the political views of his staff. Even during the war, when the paper was published exclusively for the army in Europe, he had insisted that all editorials had to come from Chicago. Now every two weeks he still personally mailed us a selection. Those he marked "A" in bright red pencil had to be run as soon as possible, before the Democrats took the Republic down the road to ruin. Those he marked "B" were potentially heretical, but might be run if we were short of space. Those that had somehow slipped into the paper without his approval were marked "NO-NO-NO."

  "I think it's hollow." Root picked up the duck. "Or at least its gizzards are loose."

  I had noticed the same thing. The duck's belly had a sliding panel that opened to reveal a pattern of holes about the diameter of a pipe cleaner. If you turned it slowly from one side to the other you could hear tiny metallic pins clinking about.

  "Give it an aspirin," I said as a joke.

  Root cocked his head at me. Then he slowly produced his tin box again. He held out his palm and pushed the duck's head forward with one finger, and we both watched in astonishment as the neck and skull bent and curved down in a perfectly life-like motion and the two halves of the beak fell open just above the aspirin.

  "If it starts to quack and crap, you're out of here," said Kospoth, passing by our desk in the other direction with a packet of photos under his arm. More a prophet than he would ever know.

  Over his shoulder he added, "And you had two messages, Keats, by the way, while you were out. Man from the Army Archives again. And somebody who wouldn't leave her name."

  "What did you tell the Army?"

  "I said you were a gently oozing spring of information about toy ducks, but you wouldn't tell him a damn thing about the war. Now please, little boys, put that in a sock and get to work."

  Kospoth was far from being a tyrannical boss, but there was a certain note of reasonable exasperation in his voice. Across the room two day reporters sniggered. The French copy boy lit a fresh blue Gitane and leered, and Herol Egan, our Sports Editor, who had just walked in from a three-hour lunch, grinned and tossed a paper wad in our direction. Root lowered his head to the editorials. I slipped the duck into the hollow space below my typewriter and we did, conspicuously, get to work.

  We were, as I told you, rewrite men. Sometimes, when things were busy, Root and I served as actual reporters, going out on actual news stories, though this was not at any time a strength of the Tribune. Most days we pasted in the editorials and put together the news stories for the first four pages—in those days the Paris edition was normally eight to ten pages long, much of it sports scores and stock market numbers. For home news, to save money the Colonel limited our incoming cables to fifty words a night. The result was that often we were presented with a stingy four-word summary from Chicago ("Pres speaks Protestant Conv") and expected to spin out a full six-inch story from that. Root was a gifted and uninhibited spinner, especially good at political vacuousness, and his more exuberant inventions were occasionally picked up and reprinted by the wire services, to the mild confusion of those who had actually witnessed an event. ("President Coolidge told a rapt audience of two thousand clerics at the National Protestant convention yesterday that 'a man who does not pray is not a praying man.'") When things were slow he chafed and muttered and played with his scissors.

  By five o'clock I had selected a harmless pair of editorials for the next day, put the Gumps where they belonged, and made two supplementary trips across the hall to Atlantic and Pacific, where the eye-squeezing burnt almond fumes of the photographers' chemicals bothered me almost as much as thunder.

  As I came back from my second trip I noticed that the city room had settled into full deadline speed. Egan was typing furiously, one cigarette in his mouth, one in his ashtray. Two men were piecing together the disastrous stock market quotes, like the ruins of Carthage. Others were sitting down at the big table to type or scuttling in and out of Kospoth's office, shouting.

  I handed my photos to the copy boy and went to the window beside our desk. It had long ago gotten dark—Paris in December, not for sun worshippers—and an oddly sad person with silver-white hair gazed incuriously back at me from the glass, like a laminated ghost of myself. I pressed my forehead to the cold window and looked at the street. The rain had given way to blowing sheets of snow down on the rue Lamartine. In the penumbra of the nearest streetlamp tumbling snowflakes caught the light and seemed to burst into flame.

  I shifted a step to the right and peered at the people hurrying home. I have a bad habit of staring at faces in the street. Sometimes that's all I can see: pale, gaunt, mesmerizing faces everywhere, ghost-like—people I used to know, leave it at that. What the hell is he looking at? I had once heard Shirer ask Root, and Root had taken him aside and whispered. But the kid was too young, Root himself was too young. This time, however, down at the corner where the rue Lamartine met the rue de Maubeuge, the face I saw was not one of my eccentric visitations. The workmen of that morning had strung their Christmas tinsel quite low, and as it spun and flashed in the wind I had a very clear view of the dark-haired gypsy-featured man in the quilted jacket.

  I leaned forward, one hand on the window handle.

  Then I looked over at my desk and the little coppery reflection in the space below the typewriter.

  Jacques de Vaucanson, I thought.

  Five

  TELEPHONES IN THE TWENTIES had no dials, nor had it occurred to shirt manufacturers th
en to make their shirts with different sleeve lengths, so men with short arms used cloth-covered elastic bands of varying degrees of nattiness to hold their cuffs back. I turned around to see Kospoth fumbling with his left armband and the long coiled wires of a telephone snagged on it, making him look for a moment like the Laocoon of the city room. He handed me the earpiece, growled something about calls at work, and disappeared into his office.

  I put the piece to my ear, jiggled the bar, and listened to a woman's faraway voice pronounce my name impatiently. Then the line went dead.

  Modern French philosophy is preoccupied with the Problem of Communication, a direct consequence, I think, of their telephone system. I jiggled a few more times and gave up. Root handed me my coat.

  "We're going to Balzar's for dinner," he said. "The kid too." He nodded toward Shirer, who was standing by the long table trying to light a pipe. "Choucroute alsacienne, with herring to start."

  "We don't have to take the Métro," Shirer said earnestly. "I know you don't take the Métro."

  It was a subject of some conversation around the paper that I didn't take the Métro and usually ate dinner alone or just with Root. Damn snobby Harvard recluse, was Kospoth's much-repeated verdict.

  "Not tonight, sorry," I said. "Still have an editorial to finish." Root grunted suspiciously, and I watched them clump out into the corridor and start down the stairs with Herol Egan, chattering and laughing.

  For the next five minutes I prowled aimlessly around the city room, straightening files that didn't need to be straightened. Then I took a deep breath and went out to the rue Lamartine. My gypsy-featured ghost was gone. The snow had stopped. The night had settled into a Parisian deep freeze.

  Ten blocks away, directly opposite the Comédie Fran¸aise, I pushed open the door of a bookshop called the "Librarie La Pautre" and strolled in a lordly manner, like a paying customer, down the center aisle. At the reference section I lifted the big one-volume Larousse Encyclopedia from the shelf and balanced it on the corner of a table. If that thing starts to quack and crap, Kospoth had said . . . Out of the mouths of babes. I flipped the pages until I found the Vs. I was the only customer in the store, and the clerk over by the cash register leaned forward on his elbows and frowned hard at me. I ran my finger down one column and read.