The Paris Deadline (15 page)

     She smiled at her own wavering reflection in the aquarium tank. "And on the other side of the room the dreadful automates —not alive, mechanical, but somehow capable of singing. Toys to keep
a drowsy philosophe awake." She leaned forward confidentially. "That's much too imaginative a contrast for our host. The fish tanks came with the house, I think."

     "I think I'd better go help him with the Bird Bush." Elsie finally pulled her hand free.

     "I didn't know you were friends with the Armuses," I said to Natalie, who had turned to watch Elsie cross the room.

     "I adore them both, especially the wife, Libby." She stroked her bare throat with one hand. "I always say that the burdens of marriage are too great to be borne by two people alone."

     "Ah."

     "That rather unnerving creation must have cost Armus quite a pretty penny."

     "He told me two thousand dollars."

     "Then he must have stolen it," said Natalie Barney, "because I know for a fact that he hasn't a sou. Come and see me sometime, Mr. Keats." She patted my shoulder and looked at Elsie again. "But not by yourself."

At a quarter to ten Elsie Short led us out to the front hallway and held open the door. The sounds of the party were growing louder in the other rooms, and I had pretty much run out of journalistic excuses for staying.

     "Your friend Miss Barney," Elsie murmured, "just invited me to the rue Jacob for chocolate."

     "Natalie Barney," Root told her, grinning, "is a fine and friendly person, and her chocolate is good."

     "Are you really going to write a story about the Bontems?"

     "I still have," I said carefully, "a lot of questions about automates."

     Root made little rude snorting sounds as he folded his tripod and hoisted it over his shoulder. We were all in the foyer outside the apartment now. "I'm going to say good night, young people,"
he told us, going down the hall toward the elevator. "Veni, vidi, video—I came, I saw, I photographed."

     We watched him clamber into the elevator, which was a polished iron cage designed for someone half his size, and wave cheerfully as it started to clatter and wobble and sink out of sight.

     "That is very bad Latin," Elsie said, "video," and we both looked at the door to the Armus's apartment. I put my hand on the knob and closed it. I have no idea why you and Root are such good friends, Bill Shirer had said, you're more like a monk than anything else. You don't even chase girls. But I hadn't always been a monk. I looked at Elsie's bright, upturned face, the glossy rouge Baudecroux on her lips, the curve of the pink sheath where it cradled her breasts, and like an idiot I asked her about Vaucanson's Duck.

     "Those songs that Bontems made for his birds—they're created by cams, you said?"

     "Very small, very precise."

     "So you could change the cam and change the song whenever you liked. You could make a nightingale caw like a crow if you wanted to."

     "Well, they're interchangeable, yes." Elsie's smile was faint and cautious. "But I don't think anybody has ever tried to make a nightingale caw."

     "And Vaucanson's Duck could do something like that?"

     "We'll have to see," she said. Her smile was completely gone. "When you give it back to me."

     I walked two paces down the hall to a window that looked down on the trees and the lighted footpaths of the Champ-de-Mars. The test of a first-class intellect, Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said, is the ability to hold two different ideas in your mind at the same time. I couldn't do it.

     "Why do you really want the duck, Elsie?"

     "I beg your pardon?"

     She had reopened the door to Armus's apartment and Nigel the butler was peering curiously out at us.

     "Look," I said, "I admit the duck is interesting, fascinating—the whole world of dolls and automates and strange mechanical gadgets that walk and talk and defecate, though God knows only a Frenchman would have thought that last one up. I didn't know anything about them before you came." I looked hard at Nigel and he moved back inside. Elsie took a step inside the door. I thought of Eric the Minor's wrecked lungs. I thought of the artificial legs and arms I had seen on soldiers in England after the War, the big iron contraption I had seen in the Brompton Road Chest Hôpital that closed around a man's torso like a cage and squeezed his chest in and out, hissing and sighing, to make him breathe, or sing.

     "The duck knows the way to something else," I said.

     "No."

     I began to walk toward her. My head pounded and hurt like a real and living knot of flesh and bone. "Does this have something to do with the Bleeding Man?"

     She closed the door and was gone.

MAJOR CROSS:
People are always telling me about the mud. I suppose you have some vivid memories of it too. I've read a few of your articles in the
Tribune
—you have a way of sketching scenes.

SERGEANT KEATS:
Well, a lot of the English regular soldiers still wore old-fashioned spats over their boots, at least in the early years. The mud just latched onto those and pulled them apart. Sometimes it was so thick and gloppy that when they ran across a field the mud even sucked their boots and socks off and they had to keep charging the Germans barefoot.

MAJOR CROSS:
But not you tunnelers?

SERGEANT KEATS:
In the tunnels you usually wore just socks anyway, for the silence, or you went barefoot by choice. The Germans wore boots. We could hear them. We were used to mud underground—but upside, I remember seeing two Corpsmen bending down and trying to lift a stretcher that was on the ground
with a wounded soldier on it. All that happened was the stretcher stayed where it was and the two Corpsmen started to sink down into the mud, first their shoes, then their knees, all the way to their waists.

MAJOR CROSS:
And the horses in the mud?

SERGEANT KEATS:
The horses would sink to their bellies and whimper and cry like a dog. For days at a time in the winter you couldn't haul a wagon, anything. Except Norton-Griffiths had a Rolls Royce that he had somehow got over to Belgium and he went everywhere in it, with a chauffeur. It was nearly hit once by a German shell. The concussion blew off all of its fenders and doors, but the motor kept running and he kept going. Mud was different in different places, you know, according to the geology. In Flanders we dug our tunnels through blue clay mostly, which was like a slimy soap. After a shift of working underground you were covered with it, your hair and clothes and face. But it didn't stay blue. It had an odd property of turning white as it dried, so that by the time we crawled back to the surface we looked like a parade of ghosts climbing up out of a hole in the ground.

MAJOR CROSS:
And in the Somme?

SERGEANT KEATS:
In the Somme you had either red clay or chalk. The chalk was so bright sometimes that the men wore dark goggles underground. You could get a tunneler's version of snow-blindness.

MAJOR CROSS:
[consulting notes]
Tell me about the listening stations.

SERGEANT KEATS:
[no reply]

MAJOR CROSS:
You had to be so quiet in the tunnels, I understand, because the Germans were also digging tunnels from their trenches toward yours, to plant their bombs and mines under our people, and any sound would give away your positions. They
would detonate a bomb and bury you. Or vice versa. But you had advanced technical devices to hear them coming.

SERGEANT KEATS:
[slowly]
In the beginning we used the advanced technical device of a bucket filled with freezing cold water and set on the floor. You put one ear into it and listened as hard as you could, on the theory that the water magnified sound vibrations. Or sometimes we used the old Roman way of holding a stick between your teeth and pressing it into the wall, same reason. Later we had doctors' stethoscopes. Early in 1917 somebody devised a "geo-listening" device with earphones that wasn't bad. But a good listener still depended on his own ears mostly. You reached the point where you could distinguish footsteps from spades, feet from knees. The best listeners were the Welsh—

MAJOR CROSS:
[chuckles]
The Welsh always claim special powers.

SERGEANT KEATS:
Sometimes to fool the Germans we would dig a side tunnel, away from the main one, and set up a mechanical device that bumped against the clay a couple of times a minute like a shovel.

MAJOR CROSS:
How deep underground were you?

SERGEANT KEATS:
[speaking rapidly]
You have no idea—nobody could have any idea—what it was like to crouch by yourself, alone, in a completely dark tunnel about a shoulder's width across, crouch there in the mud and the dripping water and do nothing but listen. We had three-hour shifts. The Germans could be inches away, on the other side of your wall. The end of a tunnel was often stuffed with ammonal and gunpowder cotton that would detonate at a pistol shot or a blow with a hammer if we needed an explosion. We mainly used hand signals. If you had a cough or a cold you couldn't go underground. After an hour of utter silence you could hear your heart beating, every single motion, function, breath you took was magnified so much—like the man in the Edgar Allan
Poe story—men frequently went insane, they hallucinated and started to crack up and that was the end of them as tunnelers.

MAJOR CROSS:
Everybody in the Army had hallucinations, from what I hear. One of my interviewees talked about seeing an angel on a white horse, waving a sword. Another one told me his captain ordered them to march up to a castle across a stream, but there was no stream, no castle, there was nothing at all, just endless flat Belgian countryside. And it was like that underground too?

SERGEANT KEATS:
The problem with hallucinations, Major Cross, is that they can be real. Not far from Metz, forty feet underground, I saw disembodied hands sticking out of the mud and clay. For a minute I thought they were like the dragon's teeth in the story, that turned into men. Then I saw that the Germans had fired a camouflet next to one of our tunnels and collapsed it. Those were our people buried in the mud. I counted three hands and then turned out my light.

Cross scribbled a note in his ever-present manila folder. "And faces?" he said. "One of the reports talks about your seeing faces?"

     I poured another glass of his good brandy and said nothing. I stared at the wall behind his head and said nothing. A fat black winter fly such as you get in a city, never in the country, was buzzing around his window curtain, beyond which, I assumed, was still the rue Taitbout and the bright shops and gay clothes and inexpressibly pretty French women. I swallowed more brandy and didn't say anything about faces. Instead, I told him that sometimes when tunnelers were killed underground their bodies were pulverized by the explosions, and then the chalky water that oozed through the tunnels, all the way back to the entrance, was reddish-white with blood.

     "And in April, 1917?"

     "In April 1917 we had a counter-blast from the Germans that killed dozens of men and nearly sealed off our tunnel. We started
digging through the wet chalk and clearing timbers and after about thirty feet we heard voices and tapping on the other side of a collapsed wall. They were our people and they were still alive, but of course, without fresh air they wouldn't last long."

     "Because of the poisonous gases in the tunnel, yes? From the explosion?"

     "The captain in charge ordered us to push a pilot hole toward them, extremely low and narrow, no beams to support the walls, and we took turns digging forward as fast as we could. You were wriggling on your belly like a worm, clawing at the wet chalk with your hands, and passing it back along your body to the man behind you, and the top of the tunnel was scraping your head and pressing down on your shoulders. We had gone about twenty feet when I turned on my flashlight and saw two men straight ahead of me. I knew them both. Welsh miners from Cardiff. They were about another ten feet ahead of me and they were lying face down on the floor, pinned by the broken timber beams."

     "Alive?" Cross closed his folder.

     "The broken timber," I said, "was what had saved them. It was keeping the weight of the collapsed chalk off their heads and chests, but the rest of their bodies were buried in chalk. And right behind them, dammed up by the mud and wood, was a rising pool of water. I could feel the tunnel tightening around my own body, it was like being squeezed to death in a great white fist. I had a moment, one moment—how long is a moment by Army standards, I wonder? Ten seconds? Fifteen? After that it was clear the water would rush over the mud dam and flood us all. I didn't move. I stared at Harry Lewis's face and he stared back at me and then somebody behind me began to pull my legs because I couldn't move or wouldn't move and my flashlight beam was still on his face and they dragged me back out of the pilot hole just as the water burst over the timbers and the last thing I saw was their two faces
staring at me, and then the chalky water came over and they gulped it and were gone."

     Cross wrote something else. Then he said softly, "That still wasn't the worst thing, was it?"

     The fly landed on the left arm of my chair and sat perfectly still. I raised my right hand, held my breath, and then snatched it from the air as it rose. I could feel it beating frantically against my palm, trapped. Then I opened my fingers and set it free.

     "No," I said, and stood up to leave.

                 The Toymaker

E
LSIE
L
IKED
V
INCENT
A
RMUS, SHE SAID.
He had been a friend of her father, and if he hadn't exactly dandled her on his knees as a baby, she had seen him now and again with his family in New York, from her school years on. People misunderstood Armus, she thought, because of his money and his rather grand, impatient manner, which concealed a sensitive and scholarly nature. He was a born worrier. To her the curious thing was that, with his brains and sensitivity, he hadn't become a professor like her father.