The Paris Deadline Page 8

  But in late May of 1918, the German and American armies clashed in a furious artillery battle at the nearby village of Cantigny—Colonel McCormick's Medal of Honor battle. Beireis's grandson fled in terror, and the castle was overrun and pillaged by deserting soldiers. If it was indeed "le vrai original," Vaucanson's Duck finally disappeared for good that month from the historical record, another unsung casualty of the Great War.

  "It's more than two pages long." Elsie Short handed my notebook back to me and picked up her wine glass.

  I remembered that all any writer really wants, even a Ph.D., is loud, constant, and unconditional praise. "I thought it was too good to cut short," I said. "No pun intended."

  She wrinkled her rouge Baudecroux in a fleeting smile. "And I notice you didn't even get to the part about the Bleeding Man."

  I flipped my notebook open and showed her. "It took up a fourth page."

  "Do you think I could have another of these?" She held up her glass, and I signaled the waiter, who was listening to a radio turned down low so it wouldn't bother the customers.

  Then I leaned forward and said out loud what both of us had been dancing around. "So you think the duck you found could actually be the one from Metz?" I liked one of Shirer's newer bits of slang. "The Real McCoy?"

  "I think," she said carefully, "Mr. Bassot bought it or found it in a shipment of old toys, but he didn't know what it was, so he foolishly sold it to me. And it's legally mine now, I don't care what your boss's mother says."

  "No Robert Houdin? No replica? Vanished like your nephew Conrad?"

  "Oh, yes. Robert Houdin made a replica. He even tried to pass it off as the real one for a few years. Back then people were always doing things like that. Magicians used to bill themselves all the time as 'Vaucanson the Second.' I'm going to put all of that in my book. The book I'm writing about automatons. That article's just a chapter."

  She leaned back while the waiter filled our wine glasses again. The music now coming from the radio was Don Giovanni, and pleasantly enough the scene when the old General's marble statue, like Vaucanson's Flute Player, comes to life.

  "When I first visited Paris," I told Elsie Short, "before the war, people used to listen to the opera on their telephones—you had to pay a special subscription. It was called 'Theaterphone,' and it was the only time in history that their telephones worked."

  Elsie was not interested in my reminiscences. "I want my duck, Mr. Toby Keats."

  Who. What. Where. When, they taught you. I slipped the notebook in my pocket and asked the journalist's fifth question: "Why? So why did Vaucanson buy back his duck and keep it a secret all those years?"

  She drummed her fingers on the table. "I don't know why. He was a strange and disagreeable man. Maybe he wanted to give it to his daughter—he adored his daughter. Or maybe he thought it would bring him luck after the silk workers' riots in Lyon. He was evidently very superstitious. Or maybe he was just one of those people who has to have a secret—I've known collectors like that. Why are you smiling?"

  "My father used to say he belonged to the school of 'No Single Explanation.'"

  "I want my duck."

  "Is Mr. Edison really going to pay you five thousand dollars for that little hunk of rusty metal?"

  "He might. If I could get it authenticated. A museum might buy it. Private collectors might buy it. Mr. Armus is a collector. He might."

  It was my turn to drum my fingers on the table. "Mr. Armus is a collector?"

  "He has a very good amateur collection, yes. And he knows a lot about the history of automates. He went to Yale."

  "Some people do. Does he know what you think?"

  "About the duck?" Elsie found something interesting in the bottom of her wine glass. "I suppose he thinks it's just a Houdin replica. That's what I told him." She raised her head and looked me in the eyes. "I don't like being deceitful. But to answer your question, nobody else knows that I think it may be the real Vaucanson's Duck, only the two of us. And you only know because of a crazy mixed-up delivery and a couple of ceramic parrots."

  "If the duck is worth all that money," I said slowly, "maybe somebody else does know."

  Her face went blank.

  "Maybe somebody else saw it in the shop window, too," I said, "and thought the late Patrice Bassot still had it. Another collector, for example."

  She drained her wine in one gulp and stood up. "That," she said as she shook on her coat, "is most unlikely. The police were very clear. He was an old man alone in his shop. There was a robbery. Pure coincidence."

  "Somebody did hit me on the head," I reminded her, "that same day."

  "I'm surprised it doesn't happen every day. You're a very exasperating man."

  "They hit me while I had the duck."

  "Which you had in a wrapped package that nobody could see inside. And you were coming out of the incredibly expensive Ritz, not your awful room on the rue de Beast."

  "Rue du Dragon. An English synonym for bad-tempered person."

  I handed her the blue trilby hat and she began buttoning her coat perversely, from the male point of view, from bottom to top. My mother had done it all the time.

  "Tell me about Henri Saulnay," I said.

  Her fingers stopped moving. "There's nothing to tell. I only met him two days ago, because he's a toymaker and they use him sometimes to repair the automates at the Conservatory. I needed somebody to help with the talk. I didn't really like him very much."

  "You know, the first time I saw you," I said, "it was on the rue Lamartine and a man—"

  She finished buttoning the coat with an impatient twirl of her fingers and jammed the hat on her head like a sock. "Like many men I've known, Mr. Keats, you seem to confuse conversation with autobiography. Fascinating as your Parisian memoirs must be, I'm really not in the mood. Right now I'm thinking maybe I should just go see Mrs. McCormick in person, myself. I could probably take a train to Nice first thing in the morning and be waiting on the dock when she comes back from her cruise."

  I stood up and pulled back her chair. "Well, she's not that easy to talk to," I said. "I'd let Root handle it. She likes him. He can make a long-distance call on a Trib telephone and if we're lucky she won't put up a fuss and he can have it shipped back to Paris, as she likes to say, toot sweet."

  Elsie put her hands in her pockets and cocked her head. "Why do I think, Mr. Keats," she said, "that there's something you've forgotten to tell me?"

  I put my hands in my pockets and cocked my head the other way. "Nothing at all. Absitoively, posilutely."

  The same ghost of a smile crossed her lips, and for just an instant her face relaxed and softened. Through the window behind her I could see the short, straight figure of Major Cross coming down the sidewalk.

  "You talk funny," she said, and turned and left.

  Major Cross was a career librarian who had metamorphosed into a military man. Or vice versa. He, at least, didn't confuse autobiography with conversation. From West Point in 1918, he told me, he had gone straight to General Pershing's staff for the battle of Saint Mihiel, as record keeper and logistics officer, and from there to President Wilson's staff of archivists and historians at the Paris Peace Conference. But that was really all he wanted to say about himself.

  We sat down at my table and ordered, at the Army's expense, a plate of cheese and a bottle of 1923 Santenay and he explained that since it was a Friday night and I undoubtedly had social engagements to pursue, he only wanted to give me copies of a few sample interviews he had already conducted with other Moles. After I'd read them, he thought, we could schedule a formal meeting at his office with a stenographer. Then he would edit, send it to Washington, and I would be officially quits with the Army, if not with Colonel McCormick.

  "Next week?" he said, pulling open his manila folder and holding his pen poised above a little calendar grid. "Say, Monday afternoon?"

  I swirled the wine in my glass and watched the snowflakes beginning to fill the air outside, earlier than predicted
in the Trib, little silent distant artillery puffs of white.

  "So what do you know about Dr. Robert Goddard and his liquid-fuelled rockets?" I asked.

  "Not familiar."

  "He's invented rockets that can go twenty miles or fifty miles or a hundred miles, longer than any artillery shell anyway, and carry a warhead. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and if he can figure out how to steer the things accurately to a target, somebody can sit in Paris, say, and lob them right onto Trafalgar Square in London. Or the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. It's funny. Here you are, worried about the history of the last war, which was fought, as far as my experience goes, about ten feet underground, but the next one is going be fought in the sky."

  Cross shook his head.

  "'Without Contraries is no Progression,'" I said.

  He did his paper-cutter smile and put down his pen. "William Blake. 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.'"

  I filled my wine glass again, thinking you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough, also William Blake. "At Saint Mihiel, you saw a good deal of the machine gun in action."

  "The Maxim machine gun, yes."

  "Which was aimed by adjusting the angle of the barrel relative to the fixed firing platform and tightening or loosening the transversing screw."

  "Yes."

  "And the gunner made it sweep back and forth by what the Brits called a 'two-inch tap,' which laid down a stream of bullets so dense you could literally see them shining in the air, like a metal curtain. Six hundred rounds a minute. Nobody in the world could walk upright in front of a machine gun."

  I finished my wine and reached for the bottle again. I had visited the American cemetery at Saint Mihiel. There were more than four thousand graves. Major Cross's face was very flat and quiet. "The machine gun," I said, "emphasis on machine, more or less made the business of killing automatic. It's a kind of an automaton, in fact, wouldn't you say? Except that it still requires a human being to aim it and feed it and whisper sweet nothings in its ear. A Goddard rocket doesn't even need that."

  "An automaton," said Major Cross, pushing the sample reports across the table to me, "by definition looks like a person or an animal. This is my card with the address. We have an office up on the rue Taitbout. Say, four o'clock Monday?"

  I slipped the card in my shirt pocket. "I'm just one of many soldiers, Major—why are you and the Colonel so damned eager to have my interview?"

  He was already getting up and preparing to go, and Root had just that moment appeared in front of the café window, peering in like a rakish moon.

  Cross shrugged himself into a warm-looking camel's-hair topcoat and began to button it, from the top down, of course. "I can't speak for the Colonel, but as far as the Army goes, you're an anomaly, you know, Mr. Keats. There were thousands of Americans who fought with the British and Canadians, probably as many as nine or ten thousand. But in the whole war only twenty-seven Americans were actually assigned to the British tunneler crews, and despite your Professor Goddard and his rockets the Army is very interested in the underground war."

  "Always looking backwards, the Army," I agreed. "Twenty-seven of us with our heads in the ground."

  "You're the only survivor," Major Cross said, and turned and left.

  Root and I had dinner in another café over by les Halles, a somewhat pricier establishment with cloth on the tables and curtains in the window, and we ate escargots in their shells and then lamb for the main course.

  Root looked at the next table, where a couple had also ordered lamb. "Sheeps that pass in the night," he said.

  As we ate he told me about the food shortages during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1871. At one point, people grew so hungry that there was actually a shortage of rats to eat. Toward the end, the government slaughtered animals in the zoo for the starving populace, and, according to Root, the famous chef César Ritz promptly invented a new recipe—elephant trunk, with sauce chasseur.

  When we scattered our coins on the table for the bill, he sighed and allowed as how Herol Egan had just made twenty-five dollars writing an English-language brochure for a brothel on the rue de Louvois. He could dig up similar work for us, Root said, if we wanted. I shook my head. He patted my shoulder and left for a party at the Hôtel Lisbonne.

  It was past ten o'clock when I reached the rue du Dragon. In my room, despite the cold, I opened my window and watched the long Paris night settle in. The sky was filled with snow, not falling exactly, but gently riding up and down on the back of the wind. The golden dome of the Invalides was barely visible. A few blocks away I could hear the trucks starting up the grade on the boulevard Raspail, making the same low growl as the tigers in the zoo. Here and there in windows behind the drifting snow I could see a few flickering pinpoints of Edisonian lights.

  I closed the window and sat down in the chair that Elsie Short had used and made my mind work back and forth, like a man excavating a tree stump. Then I pulled out my little spiral notebook.

  Two-Page Summary of "Vaucanson's Duck and the 'Bleeding Man.'" Page Four.

  After the Shitting Duck came the infamous Bleeding Man Project.

  Louis XV had assumed the throne in 1710 when he was five years old. He was an orphan, lonely, as kings usually are, and plagued, like Vaucanson, by inexplicable and untreatable illnesses. As he grew older he studied anatomy with a royal tutor and performed all kinds of surgical experiments on dogs and cats. When he was twenty-nine he was taken to see an exhibit of Vaucanson's automates—taken at the instigation of his Controller-General, a man named Jean Baptiste Bertin. The king was instantly fascinated and demanded to meet the inventor. A year later, following a royal order, Bertin, as front man, hired Vaucanson to reform the national silk industry in Lyon.

  But there were other, secret royal instructions as well.

  Vaucanson was given a large amount of money to build—in seclusion, in confidence, in total secrecy, especially from the Church—a complete and functioning human being, which the king could use for medical study and experiment.

  This "Bleeding Man" was long thought to be mere blasphemous rumor, the work of Vaucanson's many enemies. In fact, exactly one year ago Elsie Short, Ph.D., had come across evidence that this royal secret really existed. She had found in the special collections of Columbia University a previously unknown entry in the proceedings of the Lyon Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was the record of a conversation during which Vaucanson, evidently drunk, described to the Director of the Academy his project for an Homme Saignant—a "Bleeding Man." This was to be an automate, Vaucanson said, like his celebrated Flute Player. But this time he planned to build a full-sized model of the human body—no flute. It was to be shaped in semi-transparent wax, with visible intestines, a heart, a stomach, and rubber veins and arteries through which real human blood could flow. A man, anatomically correct and complete to the last detail. Or as close to completeness as eighteenth-century science could manage. When finished, the Bleeding Man would be able to catch a fever, eat, excrete, move his arms—in short, "enjoy all the functions of an animal economy," just as in Le Cat's and Vaucanson's early dream.

  But toward the end of his life Louis XV began to suffer from prolonged and terrifying bouts of dizziness. For weeks at a time he could scarcely stand or walk.

  And after a disabling fall, Vaucanson himself started to experience the same symptoms. (They probably both suffered from Menière's Disease, an affliction of the inner ear that destroys the sense of balance.) As a result, the king changed his goal. He instructed Vaucanson to build a man who would not only bleed, but also do what the king could scarcely do now by himself—rise up from a sitting position, walk forward, turn, turn again, walk sideways, never once blundering into the walls or furniture or losing its balance or growing dizzy. For this new wizardry he was apparently prepared to pay—in secret, through Bertin again—a huge fortune in gold and jewels. No other documents, or gold or jewels, have ever turned up.

  Louis died suddenl
y in 1774 and Vaucanson, bedridden and immobilized himself, died a few years later.

  As far as History knows, the Bleeding Man was never built.

  Or if built, never found.

  I put down the notebook and poured myself a medicinal glass of brandy from the bottle in the letter box on my desk. Or if built, never found.

  Except in the minds of two slightly hysterical eighteenth-century hypochondriacs, I wondered, did the Bleeding Man ever really exist?

  And if it existed once, was it still around somewhere, tucked away and forgotten in a dark corner of the great scattered and jumbled family attic that was post-war Europe?

  And what possible value would it have now?

  It was a funny thing, but for the first few years after the war ended there had been a surge of sightings of mythical beasts. This had interested Colonel McCormick, so the Tribune often ran stories about the harebrained expeditions sent out to spot such creatures as the Australian bunyip or the African rackabore, or, my personal favorite, the cross-feathered snee. Why not one more?

  I shifted my chair around to look at the bookcase. Amid the magazines and trashy French novels on the highest shelf there was a three-volume set of Oliver Twist, recently purchased for two francs, fifty centimes on the quai Voltaire. Next to it was a paperbound almanac for the year 1925. Next to it an edition of Macbeth in French. And sitting in a shoe box on top of the Macbeth, looking down with envy at my brandy, was a small, bedraggled, copperish creature that once upon a time had eaten, digested, excreted (maybe), and otherwise enjoyed all the functions of an animal economy.

  Fair is fair, and fowl is fowl, I thought, raising my glass to Macbeth, which is a play about witchcraft and magic and murder, and men not of woman born.

  I swallowed and sighed. Then, because a vague and alcohol-addled notion was slowly taking shape in my mind, I raised my glass again to Vaucanson's Duck and showed him the notebook pages about the Bleeding Man and murmured very softly in French, so as not to wake the dead, "And what else do you know about this, my fugitive friend?"