The Paris Deadline (7 page)

     If there hadn't been a concert at Notre Dame that afternoon, and several thousand exiting concertgoers blocking my way on the
sidewalk, I might have reached the Préfecture of Police before Serge Soupel left for the rest of the week, out on a case in Versailles. But I didn't, and Soupel's sniffy, punctilious clerk announced that he was certainly not about to release official evidence to a civilian on the basis of a handwritten letter, not until the Inspector came back. I sighed and looked at my watch again.

     In an open room behind the clerk's desk, swinging gently in a cage on a shelf, Mrs. McCormick's two automate porcelain parrots communed with their thoughts. Next to them, scruffier than ever, head bowed and drooping in the avian equivalent of a hangdog look, was Elsie Short's copy of Vaucanson's Duck.

     I took a step in their direction. The clerk had the double beard then in fashion with the police, splitting at the chin and curling up like ram's horns. He stroked both ends and watched me suspiciously. I held up my watch again. Four forty-five. The clerk stood and closed the door.

     It is not a good idea, Root had said, to upset somebody whose family owns your place of employment, not to mention twenty million dollars and sixty-six acres of the North Shore of Chicago. In my mind's eye I could see Mrs. McCormick standing in her drawing room at the Ritz, lorgnette unholstered, face of stone. I could also see a trim blonde person, not reclusive, who filled the air with flying shoes and loopy smiles. I looked at my watch, looked at the door, gave the clerk a two-finger tunneler salute, and left.

The "Conservatory of the Arts and Professions" is located on the Right Bank about a block south of one of Paris's tawdrier theater districts. It consists of one part Institute of Technology and one part Museum of Inventions. Some of the inventions were housed in an adjoining Catholic church that the city of Paris had appropriated during the Revolution and rededicated, with a fine French sense of irony, to the Rule of Science.

     I stopped my taxi at the corner of rue Vaucanson, mentally
kicking myself for not remembering the name of the street, and hurried past the church and into the Museum.

     In Paris in 1926 fewer than half of the buildings had electric lights, but the Conservatory, under the Rule of Science, was practically ablaze with them. Edison would be pleased, I thought. I passed a Bleriot airplane under a spotlight, then a row of illuminated glass cases displaying phonographs, Bakelite radios, and one of Bell's early telephones. I went around a model of Pascal's mystical computing machine and reached the bottom of a staircase where a large permanent sign said, Théâtre des Automates. Next to it somebody had printed in very nice fourteen-point Garamond type: "American Women's Club of Paris. Mlle. Short of New Jersey. 5–6
P.M.
"

     A bored-looking guard waved me on, and I took the stairs two at a time, turned left at what appeared to be an enormous brass weaving loom, and entered a dark, narrow auditorium full of howling children.

"I
GIVE YOU
M
ISS
E
LSIEDALE
M. S
HORT
!"

At the bottom of a descending rank of benches, behind a long library table and more illuminated glass cases, Elsie short was looking up at the audience and smiling broadly.

     A fat middle-aged man in a red velvet coat and gray trousers stood next to her. He had small pig-like features crowded into the center of a big pink face, he was bald except for a silver bristle around his ears, and he was gesturing toward Elsie with one upturned palm, like a genial Master of Ceremonies.

     In front of them both, spilling onto the floor around the table, sat at least a hundred applauding people, American Club women and dozens and dozens of children in costume—elves, fairies, polar bears, one adolescent Old Saint Nicholas.

     "Miss Elsiedale Short," the fat man boomed, "of the Thomas Edison Doll Company!"

     There was another round of applause, and while it was dying down I edged my way behind the last row of benches and joined a
line of what I took to be fathers with their backs against the wall.

     At the speaker's table Elsie was stepping forward, smoothing the front of her dress. "A real doll," muttered the man on my left. Elsie looked across the audience from left to right and smiled again. She wasn't wearing her waterproof coat and blue trilby hat tonight. She was wearing a pink and white sheath, tight at the hips, tighter at the bust—no woman in Paris in 1926 wore a bra— and a fleur-de-lys spray on her left shoulder that must have cost Mr. Edison a pretty penny.

     "That's Henri Saulnay with her," said my talkative neighbor. "He's a German."

     "Boys and girls," said Elsie in a strong, carrying voice. "As Monsieur Saulnay told you, I work for Mr. Thomas Edison in New Jersey, and my job is to go all over Europe looking for rare and special dolls. I'd like to tell you a story about one very old doll that was quite famous. It was an automate. They don't have it here in the Museum. Monsieur Saulnay is a toymaker, and he doesn't have it in his toymaker's shop either. But I can tell you what it was like."

     As she talked the fat man opened the illuminated cases and began pulling out brightly colored boxes to stack on the table.

     "Miss Short," he said over his shoulder in what I could now place as a faintly guttural German accent, "is writing a book about automates."

     Elsie nodded. "This is a story about the great French philosopher Descartes, boys and girls. He lived almost three hundred years ago. One day in the year 1644, Descartes was summoned all the way to Stockholm by the Queen of Sweden, because she wanted to meet him. So he arranged to travel from Paris, right where we are, to Antwerp, Belgium on land, and then from Antwerp to Sweden by sea. He was accompanied, he told the captain of his ship, by his young daughter, Francine. But after two days under sail, neither the captain nor the crew had seen the little girl. She was in her cabin, seasick, Descartes said. Then on the third day a terrible storm arose, just north of the English Channel."

     The toymaker opened one of the boxes on the table and pulled out a clay mask, painted brown and white, which looked like the snout of a grinning dog.

     "The sailors," Elsie said, "were worried about the little girl. So while Descartes was on deck clinging to a mast in the wind, some of them ran down below, into his cabin, where they found, not a little girl, but a box about the size—"

     "Of this box here." The German had a pronounced limp. He put down the dog mask and moved awkwardly a few feet to his right. Then he stooped and heaved a green and red wooden box upright onto the table. It was about twenty inches tall and was decorated with crescents and sparkling silver stars. There were two brass hinges and a golden knob.

     Elsie turned the box so that its door faced the children.

     "And in that box," she told them, "the sailors found a doll, a life-sized painted doll made out of wax and a wig and pieces of wood and metal. And as one of the sailors leaned forward to touch it, the doll jumped out of the box and began to walk, moving her arms and legs—just like a real person!"

     Her hand pulled a lever, the door of the box sprang open, and slowly, mysteriously, into the light lurched a dazzlingly white little girl with golden hair and a red velvet dress moving her right arm stiffly, turning her painted face back and forth. Her eyes rolled. Her mouth dropped open as if to speak.

     Some of the children began to scream in terror. One of the mothers cried, "Ohhhh!" and snatched her child back. A patter of applause instantly died away.

     "But of course it wasn't a real little girl," Elsie said hurriedly, and stopped the doll in mid-step. She lifted its skirt to show a pair of wooden dowels and two roller balls where the feet should have been.

     "It was an automate doll, a toy, a machine that acts like a person. You see, Descartes once did have a daughter, and her name was Francine, but she died when she was five years old, of
scarlet fever, and Descartes missed her so much that he made a mechanical replica of her and carried it with him everywhere."

     Elsie spread the doll's skirt and flounced sleeves. "She might have looked like this. But our doll was made in 1774 by one of the members of the famous Jacquet-Droz family in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. They also made a pair of life-sized little boys. One of them can draw pictures. The other can actually write 'I think, therefore I am' in French with a real pen and ink. Those are still in existence, in a museum."

     "The writing doll is remarkable," said Henri Saulnay, " and very complicated. But this one is simpler." He worked a lever to make the grinning dog's jaw open and its eyes blink comically. "This is an imitation I made myself of an ancient Egyptian toy."

     He peered over the toy at a sobbing child in the first row. "I didn't do a very good job, I guess."

     "What happened to the Francine doll?" asked one of the mothers.

     "Ah." The toymaker limped down the length of the table and put his mask away. Meanwhile Elsie opened another box and extracted, in rapid succession, a blue- and white-striped top, a little metal cowboy on a pony, a red and black bird on a music box, and a top-hatted Pierrot clown with the oversized round face of a full moon. One by one Saulnay began to wind them up.

     "I can answer that question," he said. "Poor Francine doll—the sailors were terrified and ran to tell the captain. When the captain saw her, he too was shocked—he thought this was the work of the Devil and must be the reason for the terrible, terrible storm."

     Elsie released the cowboy and his pony began to buck. The bird opened and closed its beak and chirped. And the clown began to swing his arms and march in a straight line toward the edge of the table. The children screamed and pointed.

     The toymaker ignored the clown.

     "It is true, by the way," he said, "that automates can't turn
around or change direction. They can only walk forwards or backwards. To change direction and not fall down would require a gyroscope inside, something like this spinning top. But gyroscopes are very large—they use them to steer ships. Nobody has ever made a gyroscope small enough to steer a doll."

     He finally looked over at the moon-faced clown as it rocked like a metronome back and forth, closer and closer to the side of the table. Over the shouts of the children he said, "You asked what happened to the Francine doll, Madame? It was a case of Science versus Superstition, you know, and Superstition is always stronger. The sailors took Francine and threw her overboard and drowned her."

     He straightened, grinned, brushed the sides of his jacket again, and at the last possible moment his hand swooped out and caught the clown's leg. The children erupted in an earsplitting geyser of cheers.

     "Too damn loud for me," said the man on my left, starting for the door.

     But I stayed exactly where I was, fists clenched, brow drenched in sweat, mesmerized.

I
F SOMEONE BELIEVES THAT A DOLL LOOKS
"sad" or "angry," that is what the Viennese Doctor Sigmund Freud calls "The Uncanny"—the terrifying feeling we have when we can't be certain that what we are seeing is alive or dead. The Uncanny can be triggered, Freud says, by waxwork figures like those at Madame Tussaud's—and also by ingeniously constructed dolls and automates. A child's innocent desire for her doll to come to life is one thing. But a walking or gesturing automaton may suddenly provoke, in children and adults alike, a deep and unreasoning fear.

     Or obsession.

     The "Théâtre des Automates" was hardly more than an auditorium tucked into one wing of the Conservatory museum, so I had to wait for Elsie outside in the corridor, in a milling crowd of mothers and costumed children, next to the big brass industrial weaving loom I had passed going in. This time, reading the placard at its base, I was not entirely surprised to see that the loom had been fabricated in the "Workshop of Jacques
de Vaucanson" in 1762. I was just leaning forward and squinting into its Lilliputian gears and pistons when the door swung open and Henri Saulnay emerged.

     The war had ended eight years ago. But to the French—and the Germans too, for that matter—it was still as fresh and bitter as ever, the bloodiest chapter yet in their centuries-long mutual insanity. Whether it was his intimidating bulk or his German accent, nobody made a move toward him.

     "Boche," said somebody in the crowd. Somebody else said, "Hush." The children stared but made no move toward him. Saulnay nodded calmly and limped on by.

     Then the auditorium door swung open again and Elsie Short stepped out.

     This time most of the children rushed forward to greet her, so that she stopped, knelt, shook hands with two or three dolls held up for her inspection. From her knees she threw me a look of surprise.

     "You came! Do you have my duck?"

     "No soap, no duck," I said. "Soupel wasn't there."

     "But they promised! You promised!"

     "My name is Vincent Armus," said a man in a Homburg hat. "I'm with Miss Short."

     I had seen Vincent Armus inside, off in a corner, and I had disliked his hat. Now I disliked the rest of him. I nodded brusquely and moved forward to help Elsie to her feet, but Armus stepped masterfully in front of me. He took her elbow and steered her toward the stairs. Like an automaton, I followed.

     Vincent Armus, Elsie explained over her shoulder, was a family friend. He lived in Paris. She was staying at his house. And he was very upset that the police had taken her duck—Mr. Edison's legal property—for no good reason at all.

     "And I am too," she added. "You told me you would get the duck today. And you spoke such good French to the police, I thought it was just a formality."

     "What in the world were you doing interfering, Mr.—"

     "Keats," Elsie said. "Toby Keats. I told you that." We were out of the museum by now, passing through the courtyard by the church, into the bright lights of the rue Vaucanson. "Like the poet, 'Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit.'"