The Paris Deadline (6 page)

     It was one of those bright, sunny, almost-warm winter afternoons that made you forget that Paris enjoyed approximately the same climate as London and Munich. The sky was scrubbed blue. There was no sign whatsoever of the snow that had powdered the old city like an eighteenth-century wig on Monday. Down the street, on the opposite side of the rue Lamartine, came a troop of French schoolchildren dressed in their uniforms of black aprons and white collars. They all wore wooden-soled shoes, as high-topped as boots, and made an ear-splitting clatter as they ran along the sidewalk.

     "You're a hard man to get hold of, Mr. Keats," said Major Cross. "I'm told the War Department sent somebody last year and you wouldn't see him. In July they sent two men."

     "I believe I was traveling in July."

     He flipped a page in the folder as he walked. "Actually," he said, "you were right here in Paris and you called our people 'mongrel beef-witted lords' and said if they came back again you would make them the 'loathsomest scabs in all Greece.' Shakespeare, I think,
Troilus and Cressida.
"

     He closed the folder and gave me a small, tight smile. I shrugged.

     "Your editor said you keep pretty much to yourself. He called you a hermit when you're not at work."

     I shrugged again. By this time we had reached the rue de Trévise and were stopped on the curb, waiting for some empty trucks to rattle past on their way back from les Halles.

     "Even so, Colonel McCormick was very anxious we should have your interview," he said. "The Army wants to publish an official history of the war and they plan to bring out Volume One by next summer—June 24, in fact. That's the ten-year anniversary of Pershing's first landing in France."

     I pushed off the curb and we crossed together. The Major fell automatically into step with me.

     "And the Colonel's role in this?"

     "He's underwriting the publication costs," Cross said, "of Volume One, anyway—for patriotic reasons, he says, but of course he gets his name on the title page and he gets to say a good deal about the contents. He seems to feel a chapter on your people is absolutely indispensable."

     "My people," I said.

     "The Tunnelers Corps, the underground bombers. The Moles." One more snap of the bands on his folder. "He said to tell you, and I quote, 'We have a deadline and you're a goddam reporter.'"

     The rue de Trévise was the kind of commercial and nondescript Parisian street that no tourist would linger over, but to me its anonymous, ordinary foreignness was part of its charm. The buildings were gray and beige five-story boxes with mansard roofs and red tile roofs, late nineteenth-century speculators' handiwork, thrown up more or less hastily when Baron von Haussmann's great boulevards just to the south sent this whole part of the city into a construction boom. I looked up at the sky, already beginning to fade from blue to slate. At this latitude, in another half hour or so, the sun would vanish, and without Edisonian electric lights it would give way completely to darkness and the city in front of me would swim and flicker and be gone. I remembered an old astronomy class from college—if there were no sun, there would be no weather. Weather is solar energy received at the earth's uneven surface and redistributed.

     No sun underground, no weather.

     At the corner of rue Richer some builder with an artistic touch had put in a glass-roofed arcade, and there was now a little protected café and bar just inside it, with tables under the glass.

     "Actually," Cross said, "Deadline or no deadline, I'm as interested as the Colonel, personally. To a desk soldier like me, you know, what you did is fascinating."

     Fascinating. I took a deep, cold breath.

     "Since the Colonel insists," I said, and we went inside and sat down under the glass roof. I ordered Sancerre, which was a
perverse choice because Sancerre is a white wine served chilled and not a winter kind of drink. The Major, to my surprise, in very good French ordered a snifter of brandy.

     But if I expected him to begin a systematic biographical question-and-answer, Army-style, he surprised me again by pulling two or three photographs out of his manila folder.

     "These are from our British friends," he said. "They're having trouble identifying some of the faces. We thought you might help."

     I picked up the first of the photographs. It was an ordinary five-by-eight glossy, black and white, of course, because color wasn't widely available in those days, and wouldn't be for another decade or so.

     But then, for this subject you only needed black and white.

     The photograph showed perhaps twenty-five men, sitting and standing in three rows and facing the camera. The shadow of whoever had taken the picture fell across the right-hand side and reached almost to the shattered tree trunk behind them. There was the back of an army lorry just in the corner. A wall of sandbags shoulder-high. A dark, gaping space beneath the sandbags on the right, where some learned joker had placed a handwritten sign in Latin, "Facilis descensus Averno." Easy the descent to Hell.

     "This chap, for instance," said Cross and put his finger on a face.

     When I didn't say anything, after a moment he took a sip of his brandy and remarked in a conversational tone, "Some of you people had remarkably long hair, for the military."

     "That was Norton-Griffiths' idea. He thought people talked too much when they went to the barber."

     "Ah." Cross made a microscopic adjustment to the photograph, squaring it with the edge of the table, and to his credit offered no comment about my gray hair. "So you knew the famous Norton-Griffiths, a legendary person."

     It was an excellent interviewing technique, deliberate or not, almost guaranteed to loosen the tongue. Major John
Norton-Griffiths, known throughout the British Army as "Empire Jack," was one of those colorful, eccentric, and hugely outsized personalities that spring up so easily in the damp, unweeded garden of the English upper class.

     Before the war he had owned a civil engineering company that specialized in building tunnels for the London Underground and sewers for the city of Manchester. When the war began he had taken one look at the Royal Geological Survey of Flanders and the Low Countries, imagined somehow what was to come, and soon afterwards formed with his own money a private company of miners, tunnelers, and geologists, all of whom he insisted on calling, to the disgust of the Regular Army, "Moles." I had become a Mole in the fall of 1916, about five months after I had dropped out of my class at Harvard.

     "Your job, as I understand it," Major Cross said, "was to dig deep tunnels from our side of the trenches over to the German side, under No Man's Land, and plant bombs literally under their feet."

     "'Overcharged' bombs, that's what we called them, even though they were underground. We put them under the German lines, yes, about ten feet below the surface. 'Undercharged' bombs were called camouflets, and those we used to make 'controlled' explosions inside the tunnels, to blow up the German moles, who were digging as fast as they could toward us to blow up our people. The Army has a funny idea of 'controlled.'"

     "Quite a sight, I imagine," Major Cross said. "Eight or nine hundred pounds of TNT going off right under a mess hall or a barracks or people just marching calmly across what they thought was terra firma, no warning at all. Nerve-wracking."

     When I said nothing to that, Major Cross reopened his manila folder. "You also went to General Leonard Wood's volunteer regiment in Plattsburg, New York, I see, another larger-than-life character, like Norton-Griffiths."

     I nodded and watched a girl who looked not in the least
like Elsie Short strolling down the rue Tricher. Just beyond the entrance to the arcade she stopped and hiked her skirt and peered backwards over her shoulder, as only a French girl can, at her very well-turned calf.

     Major Cross paid no attention. "And you were born in Massachusetts," he read from a form, "but grew up in Gila, New Mexico. Then Harvard College. An unusual combination."

     The girl lowered her skirt, winked at me, and moved on down the street. I picked up my glass and held it to the winter sunlight, and as the poet said, Lethewards sank.

     "Well, Major Henry Cross, my father used to claim that New England was a slaughterhouse of ideas, and he couldn't get away from it fast enough. I think he was quoting Mencken. On his twenty-fifth birthday he sold a coffee pot by Paul Revere that he had inherited and bought a silver mine which he named 'the Minute Man,' and from the time I was twelve years old I spent summers working in it, about seventy feet underground, which was why I came to the attention of Empire Jack. And so now you have the story of my war. All my regards to Colonel McCormick."

     I stood up and placed two francs on the table, service compris.

     Major Cross was cool and unperturbed. He smiled gently. "Oh, I think we've just begun, Mr. Keats."

     "Got to see a man about a duck," I said, and left.

A
BOUT TWO PARROTS AND A DUCK
, to be precise—Prisoners of the State.

     Because seventy-two hours earlier the Paris Police, investigating the death of Patrice Bassot from unnatural causes, had officially confiscated both my mechanical duck and Mrs. McCormick's two ceramic parrots.

     Confiscated as state's evidence, police inspector second-class Serge Soupel, had solemnly explained.

     Evidence of what? The frustrated Elsie Short had demanded. Police obtuseness? Criminal stupidity?

     The French police do not take kindly to American sarcasm even today; they didn't in 1926 or in any other year, for that matter, either. Soupel had raised one bushy Gallic eyebrow in annoyance and, for chastisement, set her to filling out the endless forms and depositions that all French bureaucracies consume by the bushel. Meanwhile he personally escorted me across town to the
Trib
's building, where I dutifully opened my desk and handed over my
miniature aviary. When we got back to the Préfecture, Elsie had signed all her statements, called a cab, and vanished without a word—a habit of hers, as I was to learn.

     But Elsie Short was not a girl for the vie silencieuse. On Tuesday she telephoned me three times to see if I had liberated the duck. On Wednesday she called twice and slammed down the phone both times when I said they were still behind bars. Mrs. McCormick had also left an ominous message with Kospoth on Tuesday—She required her parrots no later than Thursday evening at six. If Keats couldn't do this simple errand for her, Bertie would not be pleased.

     I had tried my best, of course. I had written and called Soupel. I had reached an assistant consul at the American embassy, who laughed and hung up the telephone. And on Wednesday there had also been a nicely written (if I say so myself) item in the
Tribune
:

M. Patrice Bassot, 72 years old, a native of Grenoble and dealer in automates and curiosities, was found dead in his shop on the rue Bonaparte late Monday night. Police questioned two American witnesses who discovered the body and have concluded that it was a case of robbery gone bad. Inspector Serge Soupel of the Préfecture tells the
Tribune
that M. Bassot had recently sold his shop and was planning to return to Grenoble. Thieves apparently tried to take advantage of the victim's age and frailty. When Bassot resisted, Inspector Soupel surmises, he was struck a fatal blow. The Préfecture of Police, he added, has committed its full resources to the investigation. Given M. Soupel's formidable reputation as one of Paris's outstanding crime fighters, the
Tribune
feels confident of his success.

On the theory of catching more flies with honey, I had sent Soupel three copies of the paper with his name underlined. In return, at Thursday noon he had sent me a handwritten note granting
amnesty to the duck. Not counting the Colonel's rocket from Chicago, this was one of two notes I had received that day.

At the corner of rue Saulnier I looked back at Major Cross, who was still at our table under the arcade, writing in his notebook.

     I felt in my pocket and pulled out another slip of paper. This was on plain white paper, not buff vellum, and the handwriting was as round and curved and feminine as a goblet: "Dear Mr. Toby Keats," Elsie Short had written. "If you have finally rescued my duck, which you should not have had in the first place, from the obtuse police, you may bring it to this address today. After seeing your apartment, I will add that admission to the talk is free, since you probably couldn't afford to buy a ticket."

     Enclosed was a card with an engraved invitation:

THE AMERICAN WOMEN'S CLUB OF PARIS
announces
a special Christmas presentation

by Miss Elsie Short, Ph.D.:

Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers,
December 10, 1926, 5–6
P.M.

I looked at my watch. Four-fifteen. Plenty of time to pick up my three birds of Christmas and deliver the duck to Elsie, I thought, and I set out walking quickly toward Soupel's office on the quai des Orfèvres.