The Paris Deadline (18 page)

     There was a flush on his cheeks and a new energy in his movements. He set the duck in the center of the table and reached for his tools. In a matter of moments he had the stomach plate off and he was greedily lifting the two side plates of the torso, swinging them up where they hinged at the spine to reveal its drooping tangle of curved greenish-crusted metal tubes. Most of the tubes were no bigger than a pencil. Some teeth-like struts must have been ribs when the duck ... when the duck was alive, I thought like an idiot, and bent to peer over his shoulder.

     "That," Saulnay said. "Please. Now." He pointed down the table without looking up and I handed him a jeweler's loupe, which he fixed in his left eye. In his right hand appeared the tiniest pliers I had ever seen.

     "Elsie Short says this was a replica of Vaucanson's Duck."

     "Yes, yes, I know her ideas. She claims there were dozens of nineteenth-century replicas made. Robert Houdin made at least one, an Englishman named Babbage made another— not a very good one. Hervé Foucault probably did, others, the Jacquet-Droz brothers. The test is always the wings, you see, the most complex part." He rocked back on his stool. "Mister Keats, forgive me—I don't work well with somebody staring at me. In the other room, there is wine, bread—if you'd give me ten minutes alone, twenty?"

     I straightened slowly and my eyes must have traveled across the little workroom, checking for doors and windows, because
Henri Saulnay's small pig-like features tightened and he placed his hands on the table.

     "I won't," he said, and his smile reached no further than his lips, "steal your duck."

I
N THE NEXT ROOM THERE WAS, IN FACT
, a bottle of red wine on one of the back shelves and a set of six unmatched glasses. Nobody else was in sight. Thunder boomed overhead, and a lamp flickered off and on in the corner. The front door looked locked and bolted. I could hear the angry hiss of rain sweeping across the ceiling, and feel the cold night air rubbing around and around the corners of the ancient building like a cat. Some days in Paris it failed to rain. The door to the third room was closed.

     I don't like thunder, I don't like locked doors. I don't like it when the power goes off and the lights start to flicker.

     Miss Short had visited our family farm, he said, in Alsace.

     But Elsie Short said she had just met Saulnay a week ago. She had only just come over from New York.

     I turned around. "No," I said.

     The door to Saulnay's workroom had not quite closed. At
the table I could see the pale bristly dome of his head bent over the duck, whose worried black eyes seemed to be fixed on mine, pleading.

     "No," I said and stepped back into the workroom. Before Saulnay could move I pushed the empty carton to one side and picked up the duck. "No," I said, as if third time were a charm, "I've changed my mind, I think. I'm taking it back."

     Slowly, slowly Saulnay rose from his stool, spilling shadows. His head bumped the swinging lamp. His big shoulders spread out like a cape.

     "You are," he said, "a quite stupid American."

I backed into the main workroom and felt my hip touch something. More thunder rumbled above us, and the electric lights blinked on and off. When I turned again the other workroom door was open and a burly man in a dirty gray quilted jacket was coming through it. I looked at him, looked at the Yale lock on the front door. Saulnay limped closer.

     "You want the duck," I said, "because you think it's the real one, too." And then I added the thought that had been skating about somewhere in my mind since the moment I met Elsie Short. "And more than the duck, you want the Bleeding Man."

     His face hung in the dim room, bald as the moon, and a second, fainter look of surprise came and went with the wavering lights. "There is no Bleeding Man, Mister Keats. There never was a Bleeding Man. Pure legend. Pure stupidity." He leaned against the table and held out his hand. "But I do want this automate, never mind why."

     He lifted his chin toward the man in the quilted jacket. "This is my nephew Johannes, my sister's son. He knows very little about toys. He knows a good deal about rougher things."

     The French version of the Yale lock works from the outside by a key. From the inside your thumb alone can turn a latch to
move the tumbler. The nephew in the quilted jacket started toward me. I took a step back and as I fumbled with the door, Saulnay shoved the big table forward into my belly and the floor seemed to rock like a boat.

     "Get him!"

     I staggered sideways. My right arm swept a little army of dolls and doll parts from the table, and the nephew's shoes went out from under him. He landed in front of me on one knee, so close I could smell the garlic and grease on his jacket. He fumbled on the table for a hammer.

     I held up the duck.

     "Stop!" Saulnay's big palm shot forward. The lights in the room flickered on and off again. Johannes came forward in quick stroboscopic jerks, like film running backward, his hammer raised.

     "If he comes any closer," I told Saulnay, "I'll smash this thing like an eggshell."

     Saulnay lowered his hand. He limped a step toward me. "You are in," he said, "very far over your thick American head."

     I flipped the lock and opened the door.

     The cold, wet Paris night oozed into the room like a waterlogged ghost. There was a metal working chisel on the floor beside my shoe. My eyes fixed on Johannes, I stooped and picked it up with my left hand. Then I straightened, turned, took two steps through the door, and slammed it shut.

Outside, I shifted the duck's weight and jammed the chisel into the door frame above the lock.

     The courtyard I had come through was dark and slick with rain, and completely empty. By the time I reached the street I could hear the door splintering behind me. The street lamps were out, of course, on the rue des Minimes and the wind was whipping the black sky up and down like the flap of a tent.

     There were some parts of Paris I knew by feel and touch like a
blind man, but the dank, labyrinthine Marais wasn't one of them. I slipped and staggered, squeezed the duck's bony wings into my chest, and broke into a run—and found myself directly in front of yet another new utility ditch. This one was a monster: deep, crazy deep. As far as I could tell in the dark, it extended the whole width of the street. The pit in the center was a jumble of sawhorses and sewer pipes. Right over the center was a sloping sheet of plywood that stretched across the ditch and blocked out the sky like a roof.

     Like a tunnel.

     I stood on the edge of the ditch, swaying. A peal of thunder turned over and over on its side, like a body rolling down a hill.

     If I hadn't been able to see a thin gleam of light beyond the plywood roof I would never have moved, I would still have been wobbling back and forth in the rain when Johannes skidded into sight at the end of the street.

     But I did see it, and so after hesitating one more beat of my pulse, I plunged down the slippery mud and under the plywood roof, shaking, stumbling, eyes fixed on nothing but a watery glow thirty yards away. The thunder pealed again and I counted backwards from ten the way they had taught me, hunching my shoulders against the unimaginable weight of earth and stone that was about to come down across my back.

     Then my shoes hit pavement, cold rain pelted my hair, and I burst white and flailing out of the ditch like a swimmer exploding out of the surf.

     There was electricity here. The place des Vosges was straight in front of me, ringed by street lamps, its long arched arcade bright and shimmering in the rain. Two cars were coming from opposite directions, and I skittered somehow between them, over to the dark fenced garden that filled the center of the square. Behind me Johannes scrambled up into the light.

     If you put up a table and a chair, the French will eat outside in a snowstorm. At the farthest diagonal corner of the place des Vosges, a small indomitable café had four or five tables set out
under the stone arcade, and at one of the tables a waiter and two customers were staring in my direction.

     I glanced at Johannes, on the opposite curb. Then I ran along the fence.

     By the time I reached the arcade, he had vanished. The waiter, incongruous in a tuxedo jacket and white apron, was marching toward me, frowning.

     "Monsieur! Attention!" He stopped under a fluttering electric light and folded his arms over his chest. Behind me Johannes's face reappeared between two arches as if we were playing Hide and Seek. Cat and Mouse. Duck-Duck-Goose.

     "Téléphone, s'ils vous plaït?" I said.

     The waiter studied my wet hair, my soaked overcoat, the strange metallic duck tucked under my arm, bobbing its head.

     "Pas de téléphone ici, Monsieur."

     "Dommage," I said, and shifted the duck so that I could reach in my pockets. The first bill I came to was a crumpled ten-franc note, pink and soggy from the rain and, like all French paper money, about the size of a beach towel. If I sat down right there, I thought, and ordered a twenty-course meal, Johannes and Saulnay would still be waiting in the square when I finished, two against one.

     "Dommage," I said again, shoved the ten-franc note in his apron, and from the couple's table picked up a wine bottle by the neck and smashed it against the wall.

     Then I held up the jagged end of the bottle up so that anyone at all could see it, and stepped around the corner and into the rain again.

     At the rue de Rivoli there were many more people on the street, shoppers laughing and walking in the rain, shoppers huddled under awnings, a little armada of shiny black umbrellas sailing up and down the sidewalk. I dropped the broken bottle in a trash can and heaved myself up onto the platform of a number 41 bus, going west.

     The rue de Rivoli is the second or third longest street in Paris, and the 41 bus goes all the way down it to the end of the Tuileries. I made my way inside and squeezed into a seat on a wooden bench. I closed my eyes and wrapped my coat around the duck and tried to imagine the Bleeding Man in a cold Paris rain, the Bleeding Man in pursuit of me, running fast, catching up like a rocket, swinging gracefully onto the bus, never once, not for a moment, stumbling or losing his balance.

     Because of a gyroscope, I suddenly thought, and opened my eyes to see Johannes sitting on the opposite bench.

P
ARISIAN BUSES IN
1926
WERE GREEN
and yellow and divided, like all things in Gaul, into three parts. There was the open platform in the rear for standees; then a second-class section with wooden benches; then, separated by two vertical black wooden panels with leafy gold lettering, a first-class section that contained exactly 17 leather seats, a front door, and the driver's chair. By law nobody could be standing in either the first- or second-class sections when the bus started to move—you had to be in a seat—and there was always a ticket taker in a Napoleonic admiral's uniform ready to enforce it.

     I leaned forward until my knees touched Johannes's.

     "What's your last name?" I asked in French. "Is it Saulnay, like your uncle?" And then, even though I had told Bill Shirer I didn't speak it, I repeated the question in German.

     His skin was less swarthy than I remembered it, washed out in the dim interior light of the bus to a milky blue, but up close,
under the dirty wet jacket, the shoulders looked as broad and hard as a railroad tie. I saw the glint of something metallic in his belt. He smiled just enough to show two gold teeth.

     "Johannes Saulnay."

     "You can't have the duck, Johannes," I said in German again, then forgot the words for 'Get off the bus and go to hell,' though it didn't really matter, because at the sound of German being spoken half a dozen of our fellow passengers craned around and scowled, and the young woman next to Johannes actually drew her skirt up as if it were about to drag in the mud. The French had lost a thousand soldiers a day in the war. Nobody forgets a number like that.

     Johannes wasn't interested in an international popularity contest. He said something rapid and guttural, the only words of which I understood were "for a higher good"—Das alte Gute— and spat on the floor, which was, I remembered, a very German thing to do.

     Then he stood up and grabbed the lapels of my coat.

     The bus was just then slowing for a turn. I shoved him back with the flat of my hand and in the same continuous motion stood up myself and walked into the first-class section.

     Behind me the benches had erupted in a collective howl of disgust. In front of me the ticket taker shouted till he saw the coins in my hand. Then he waved me toward the last empty seat and positioned himself in the center of the aisle, between the two wooden panels.

     There is something about a uniform to a German. Johannes was on his feet again by now, swaying with the bus, but the ticket taker, all gold braid and shiny leather cap, stretched a "Complet" sign across the doorway, folded his arms, and told him to sit down at once.

     I had no illusions about the deterrent effect of a cardboard sign on a piece of rope. Ahead of the driver I could see the towers of the Hôtel de Ville. Alongside the bus, under my window, a
long panoply of umbrellas, wet, multi-jointed like the carapace of a Chinese dragon, was unwinding along the sidewalk. You don't have to be Jacques de Vaucanson, I thought, to understand how a lever works. As the bus slowed again I shifted the duck in my hands, reached over the driver's shoulder, and pulled the front door open.

     Out on the rue de Rivoli there was the usual bedlam of Paris traffic going in a thousand directions at the same time. For an instant I could see Johannes bulling forward, a blur of quilted jacket and shoulder, and the ticket taker tumbling backward. The driver was furiously wrenching the door closed again. Then the bus lurched forward and I was on my home ground, the center of Paris, the labyrinth I knew, and I gripped the terrified automate close with both hands and started to run.