The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Seven

1950

At the corner of rue du Faubourg and boulevard Poissonnière, there is raucous music. Accordian and piano and a violin play a Jewish air into the city. The Rex rises into dark clouds, its sign peppered with bullets and still glowing.

“Who was he?” says Thibaut.

“The man in Les Deux Magots?” Sam says. “A crook. A thief. Just a murderer. It doesn’t even matter any more. I thought, we thought, if I could… That the box might be a way to open the city. Open gates and send messages. Out and…” She glances down. “But no. The S-Blast came out of that box and it’s here now.”

“Alesch was there,” Thibaut says. Sam says nothing. “And someone else.”

She says nothing.

“What’s going on?” Thibaut says.

“I don’t know. Truly,” she says. She holds up burnt documents and the canister of film. “Fall Rot,” she says. “They mention it in here, but it’s oblique. It’s all code words and hints, but I think they’re talking about the devils. And I don’t know why. That was Kundt. His commission used to hunt the artists, and I think after the blast, they started hunting the art. Turned into manif specialists.” She looks at him. “I told you the Nazis are getting better at manifs. And now the K Commission are working with demonologists. Alesch’s church.”

She opens a charred file. Her lips move as she reads the half-sentences that are all that remain. “They’re saying the devils should be aspects of something. And there’s something they want to manifest but they can’t, it needs more than they have…” She hesitates. “They’re trying to do something, Thibaut. They want something.”

The exquisite corpse’s beard-train whistles. This cinema is a stronghold of the Free French and their allies, no friends of Main à plume, and Thibaut focuses his mind, pleading with the manif silently for silence. Every time he communicates with the exquisite corpse—because that is what this is, communication—he hears nothing back but a tone like tinnitus.

“Stay,” Thibaut says. He pulls the cord. The exquisite corpse sinks to the pavement on the corner, becomes as architecture.

The Rex’s guards search them and incompetently question them and let them in to noise and warmth and the smell of drink, dirt, and sweat. Rows of seat-stubs slope down the tumbling hall. People are dancing. Women and men watch the huge screen from a raised half-floor above. What is showing is snips of images, monochrome light. Someone in the projection booth is stringing bits together, grabbing ripped-up centimeters of whatever film is by their fingers and running it for seconds, then replacing it. Melodramas, old silent movies, entertainments, news, documentary footage.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

He takes off his cap and tidies his ruined pajamas. No one looks at them: his true affiliation is dangerous here, but even the most austere Free French would not forbear deploying so powerful an artifact, Surrealist or not. Splendid figures sit in dark corners in pre-war clothes. A black woman plays chess urgently against herself. The dancers’ steps raise dust.

Tattered Free French uniforms, the grimy workers’ clothes of other partisans, with clues so Thibaut can judge that this person is Francs-Tireurs et Partisans or Groupe Manouchian, this one Confrérie Notre-Dame, this Armée Juive, that Ceux de la Libération. This thin intellectual from the Groupe du musée de l’Homme, perhaps; or a scout come in from the Société de Gévaudan, the legendary resistance center in a Lozère sanatorium. There might even be foolhardy rightists here, Vichy-loyal anti-Nazis. Vichysto-resistant, he thought them. An epithet from the future. But no Main à plume.

These streets will be bombed. Maybe trodden on by another angry sculpture, he supposes, or pulled toward Hell by fretful demons. Until then, at the end of the world, there’s drinking and dancing, moonshine and crude cocktails made from remnant liquor. Behind the bar are pinned scores of IOUs: no one is sure how money works any more. On the walls are posters, memories of resistance victories. The remnants of a swastika have been allowed to stand, so that they can be repeatedly defaced.

“Watch the screen,” says Sam.

“We should not be here,” Thibaut says.

“So we’ll be quick. We have to know. You got another projector we can use?”

She runs for the stairs. Thibaut watches the film over the heads of the dancers. After a minute it jerks and brightens. He imagines Sam shoving aside whoever is upstairs. Pistol to the head. Taking over from whoever feeds it bits and pieces of old film.

The screen goes dark then light.

Now it shows scattering airplanes, a long shot of dancing. A dim shape, in a vast chamber. Sunlight comes through a big window. There is a jump and Thibaut sees another corridor. He can barely make out the images through the distortion of burn. The inside of an empty room. Then with no transition the room contains a figure. A man in a coat watches eyelessly from a chessboard head.

In the Rex, the urgent jazz continues.

The figure on the screen might have been a man holding a board in front of his face, even has a hand to the board’s base, but there is something in his stillness. Thibaut knows he is looking at a manif.

There is no sound to the footage. A volley of bullets rips into the chessboard-man. Thibaut cries out.

The figure does not stagger but the front of his coat and jacket flower in blood. It drips from the board.

The music is breaking down now. People are staring at the screen. They see a soldier in Wehrmacht uniform, turned slowly away from the camera, in another sunbeam-crisscrossed chamber full of floating dust.

A figure in a white coat enters the shot and prods the soldier. Machinery moves. A crucifix is on the wall. The soldier keeps turning, and just as his features should become visible to the camera, with a smooth transition he is back to facing away again, and still turning, his face still hidden.

“That’s the Soldier with No Name!” a woman shouts in the quieting room. “I saw him once.” A faceless German officer in a dirty uniform, it walks the city flicking away coins on which are written slogans that turn the heads of German fighters. Currency stamped with sedition. The manif foments renegacy. Now, on the screen, it stands on a platform. It still faces away. You will never see its face. There is a noose around its neck.

A trapdoor opens and the soldier falls and snaps hideously to. The crowd cries out.

It sways. Even in death the manif’s face never turns toward the camera.

People are standing. On the screen now there is a priest, not Alesch. A glimmer of a darker chamber, for one instant a huge shape.

“That’s Drancy,” someone says.

A massive intricate thing is strapped down by many parts. At one end of a dissecting table, a sewing machine, at the other an umbrella. Between them, flickering in black and white, is an exquisite corpse. The third that Thibaut has ever seen. Its head is a great spider, twitching limbs above the body of a well-dressed man. Its legs are amphorae. The manif is snared with wires.

Two men appear, in aprons and surgical masks. They heft a grinder and a chain saw.

“No,” Thibaut says, but he cannot issue orders backward through the screen.

The men silently fire up their tools. The exquisite corpse watches with its clutch of eyes. Its spider face tries to scuttle. Whatever holds it holds it well. The men bring their blades down.

The audience in the Rex is shouting. The machines touch where the components meet. Up sprays something too pale, too thick to be blood, as they take the manif apart.

The vivisectionists shove through the impossible body. The exquisite corpse reknits and billows out sawdust or shreds of cotton and the men cut faster, against the recalcitrance of Surrealist matter. Down go the saws.

And the corpse is nothing. Three everyday nothings. Remnants. Inanimate.

To dark. Light. More priests, scientists, someone carrying the parts of another manif. A man nods at the camera—he has no mustache, but Thibaut recognizes the dark-haired man who got away with Alesch.

The film blebs and the man is gone. For seconds there is only light. Then for an instant the screen is full of a new figure, a huge and lurching shadow with a terrible face, coming for the camera.

The Rex is tumult. The image is frozen. There are only those eyes like bowls of shadows, mouth like a tusked hole. It looms.

“That’s not a manif,” says Sam quietly, startling Thibaut amid the chaos. He did not hear her descend from the booth. “That’s a devil. But something’s wrong with it.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” She hands him a few ends of film, and he holds them up and sees tiny exquisite corpses ripped into their components by machines, bleeding from tentacular toes, back-bent legs or mountain legs or twisted scarf legs, concentric-ring torsos with butter-knife arms, their lolling heads hammer and a sickle or knight’s helmet or a pair of bloodied kissing lovers. Exquisite executions.

“We know they’re learning to control manifs,” he says. They look at each other while the customers of the Rex holler. “The whip for the wolf-tables. The woman on the Vélo. She wasn’t on their side but they must know each other’s techniques. And now they’re using some manifs for sacrifices.”

“And there are devils,” Sam says. “They’re building up to something. You saw that man? Just before the last thing? The man from the jeep?”

“Maybe that’s Wolfgang Gerhard,” he says. “Of the Fall Rot project.”

“He might be calling himself that,” she says. “But that’s not his name. I recognize him and I know his name. His name is Josef Mengele.”

“How do you know all this?” Thibaut says at last. He is angry with himself for asking. “What does all this mean?”

Sam speaks quickly as the noise in the cinema increases, the Free French and others shouting about what they’ve seen. “What it means is some kind of plan. Mengele’s a specialist. He experiments. On human life, it was. And now he’s come in. In to Paris, to work with Alesch. Mengele’s not religious! He must need a specialist in devils. They’re collaborating. And with the K Commission, too. Manifs and devils and the changing of life.”

Thibaut says, “Fall Rot.”

“We have to get out of here,” Sam says. “Any second now they’ll close the door to this place and plan an idiotic, bound-to-fail all-out assault.”

“So,” Thibaut makes himself say. “Bring help.”

He meets Sam’s calm gaze. He can see her considering how to respond. No one can hear them in the uproar. “Come on,” he says, “stop playing. Just get help.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“You think I can’t see you?” he says. “That camera is not a camera. How do you know so much about all this? About the devils. Because you liked witches when you were a kid? Come on. You’re OSS.”

She looks very calm. If she is an agent of the American state, then she’s the ally of these Free French, and his enemy. Yet here he still is. She needs him for something still, he knows, and perhaps he needs her.

“Special Operations, yes,” she says, after a long moment. “That camera is a camera. But it has other uses, too.”

“You lied to me.”

“Of course.”

He blinks. “The woman on the Vélo was British, SOE. She was trying to find out about the Fall Rot program, too?”

“There’s a lot of us here,” she says. “She’d done well. We need to know what this program is. We can’t let them proceed.”

Thibaut turns from her in disgust and she hisses, literally hisses like an animal.

“Don’t you dare,” she says. “You wanted to come with me.”

“What about the book?” he says. He can barely believe his own words. He waits for her to laugh.

But she says, “What about it? The pictures are real. The book’ll be real. We’re putting together something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Perhaps,” she says with cold politeness, “you might join?”

“You’re my fucking enemy…”

“Yes.” A spy. He knows she understands him. She knows exactly how he opposes her.

Around them all the factions are gathering. “You heard me,” she says urgently. “In a moment they’re going to make some stupid plan and probably attack a petty local Gruppenführer, which I suppose is at least a distraction, and they’re going to confront you and me and find out you’re Main à plume. Which will not go well. And believe me, you’re worth far, far more to me than any of them are. So, hate me as much as you want, and you and Trotsky and your fucking lost Pope Breton and whoever else can bring your worst to bear to bring the whole of capitalist imperialism or whatever crashing down when this is over. But if Fall Rot happens, it’ll be over for both of us.”

“So call for help, spy.” He should kill her right now. He is sure if he tried she’d kill him first. He looks again at the face still on the screen.

“There’s a dampener over this city, even beyond the twenty,” she says. “I can’t call out. Most of the time no one can. Something’s happening, and I need to know what, now. Christ, you have instincts. Are you telling me you can’t feel it? And even if I could call out, you think it would help? If someone’s carrying a bomb you don’t disarm it by blowing them up. You know why Drancy’s buildings are in a horseshoe shape? They’re a focus. There’ve been many, many sacrifices there.

“Alesch and Mengele are calling something up,” she says, “and we need a scalpel, not a shotgun.”

“I’m no scalpel,” he says.

The raucousness and fury in the room are increasing. Thibaut considers terrible plans coming to pass just beyond the arrondissements, in the occupied zone.

“No indeed,” Sam says. “But I think I could use that.” She jerks her head toward the door, toward the exquisite corpse outside. “And it does not like me. And you want to go. You want to get out, but not to betray your city. Well, this is your chance to serve Paris by leaving it, Thibaut. So shall we not waste any more time?

“I can’t call for backup. For the cavalry.” She thumps her own chest and stands taller. Thibaut steps back at the sight of her expression. “That,” she says, “is what I am. I am what’s been sent for.”