The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Nine

1950

The border of the old city remains blocked with wire and guns. “There’s no way we’re getting out aboveground,” Sam says.

But Mairie des Lilas, the last Métro station on the line, sits a few streets east of the rim of the barrier. Outside, beyond the sealed-off twenty.

Sam descends the stairs at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth into bad darkness, and Thibaut follows. They walk the tunnels you should never enter. They pass trains that stopped years ago. Through the undercity.

Thibaut breathes shallowly, carefully, his hands trembling. A barrier wells out of the gloom before them. The remains of a checkpoint abandoned back in the first days, when the Germans decided the predators below the pavement were security enough.

Sam has her camera up, and sweeps ahead of them. Behind Thibaut the exquisite corpse follows.

Thibaut watches for monsters. He watches for trains that sit up on their haunches and tell stories.

Something whisks past beyond their torchlight. Sam shouts a command in a terrible resonant voice, in no language Thibaut recognizes, and the thing screams and scurries on, and Thibaut shoots.

It’s a little dying devil, a thing like a shrunken man with a shrunken horse’s head. Sam’s voice and Thibaut’s bullets have torn through its weak hexes.

I came low, it is whirring to itself. To come home. To try to come home, hush, I came low.

That small demonicide is the only one necessary. Thibaut can hardly believe it. They ascend at last, shuddering, into the air beyond old Paris, with the light flooding his eyes.

It has been a very long time since he breathed the air beyond the arrondissements. It smells of architecture. Thibaut opens his eyes on the roof of Drancy and waits for Sam’s word.

This zone has long been evacuated, under rains of bombs. It is far less touched by manifestation than the streets he knows, but more shattered and deserted, quotidian ruin.

They have moved fast, with care and silence. Thibaut’s urgency communicates itself, and the exquisite corpse folded space for them a little, so they stalked the miles to Drancy more quickly than they should. Now the sun hauls up. Thibaut and Sam look down at an empty corridor below a cracked skylight.

“You said you saw the brekerman before,” Thibaut says. “When?”

Sam glances at him, and looks back through the glass.

“Why me?” Thibaut says. “Why did you bring me?”

“You came with me,” she says. “And that was good, because of that thing.” She looks at the exquisite corpse standing like a chimney at the roof’s edge. “They’ve never liked me, manifs. It would never let me get close.”

Thibaut looks at the sky. “You’ve been using me to get to a manif? For whatever this is? Were you looking for someone like me?”

“How could I have been? You came to me, in the forest.”

“Still, though. I don’t know how but you tracked me down.”

“Don’t give yourself that out,” she says. She puts her hands on the slats of the roof. Deep in the building, Thibaut hears a faint wind rushing. “You want to know the truth? The truth is if I could’ve tracked someone like you down, I would’ve done. Because yes I wanted someone manif-friendly. Because I wanted a manif. But I was just being chased, and you just came to help.

“You’re the Surrealist. You’re the one who taps objective chance. You wanted to know about Fall Rot. You wanted to know what’s happening. Well, Paris heard you, Thibaut. It was you who found me.”

She grimaces with effort and the wind below increases.

“What are you doing?” Thibaut says.

“Do you think OSS could have got us out of the Rex?” she says through gritted teeth. “Jesus, it’s strong here! You think the Americans could have got us through the Métro?” Her hands are not steady.

Thibaut remembers the wind dispersing smoke ghosts on the bridge. Sam’s camera is round her neck, but it isn’t the camera that’s vibrating now, it’s her, her sinews stretching in her neck, the scleras of her eyes darkening. Whatever is happening in the building is pouring not out of the camera but through her.

“So you wanted me with you because this thing listens to me,” Thibaut says. “Because it could get into the café.”

“It doesn’t like me,” she gasps. “It can smell something on me.” She smiles. “I’m secret service, yes, but not American, OSS. That was you who said that. Come on. Not the Americans or the Brits. Nor the French or Canadians or any of them.” Her hands flatten into the roof so hard they seem to press into its substance. There is a slamming. In the courtyard below, from all over Drancy, soldiers emerge into the daylight.

“I never gave up that occult stuff I told you about,” Sam gasps. “You already know what I’m telling you, Thibaut—you’ve watched me. And there’s nowhere you can go, and nothing you can do. And yes you’re my enemy but the Nazis are my enemies, too, more, and they’re yours, too.

“Devils and Nazis don’t work together well. They have to collaborate, they’re bound together, there are treaties, whether they like it or not. That’s what magic is. And the S-Blast or something locked the gates. I would love to call for backup, as you put it, but the routes are closed, so my employers sent me in. Because I’m from here, so I’m not trapped. And I know this world better than any of them.”

She opens one hand in front of him, and it’s covered in frost, and then in darkness. “I’m black ops, yes, and I’m in deep. Double. I am on the OSS books but that’s cover, Thibaut. I work for an agency colloquially known as Bad Marrow. And neither you nor I could ever say its real name, not with our mouths. It’s the secret service of the underplace.

“I’m a spy for Hell.”

Thibaut and Sam follow the exquisite corpse down smoke-filled hallways. Young German soldiers appear and raise their weapons.

Sam takes two out with witch-blasts, Thibaut a third with an ill-aimed burst of bullets. His heart shakes him. The manif ends another attack with a Surrealist assassination: the man at whom it stares sits suddenly down, undoes his buttons, looks into his body, now a cage filled with angry crows, and is still.

I’m working with Hell. Thibaut is giddy, not ashamed. Does he despise Hell, he thinks, more than he does the imperialists? Few of the devils want to be in Paris. They obey the Nazis truculently, where they do at all.

“You’re not one of them,” he says to Sam. He follows her through the hallways. He does not ask her why she might work for these infernal powers.

“Hell doesn’t want to risk open war with Germany,” she says. She glances around a corner and beckons him on. “A human agent’s deniable. There’s something happening here, but we don’t know what, even beyond the arrondissements, hexes block us seeing.”

“Why were you in the city?” Thibaut says. “Why’ve you not been here all along?”

“Because of Les Deux Magots. We had to get what was there. It was a buffoon who thought he was one of ours who did all this, somehow, you know. In ’41. An American idiot named Parsons. Then a thief called Couraud. We thought the machine might still be the key.” She shakes her head.

“When was it you saw the brekerman before?” Thibaut grabs Sam’s arm. He stops her in the corridor and makes her face him. “That head. In your film. And that photo of the huge arm. And the elephant Celebes was there…”

“Christ,” she says, in English. “Remove your hand from me. What I saw,” she says slowly, “was the brekerman that killed your teachers. That picture was the aftermath.”

“You were there? The ambush?”

Thibaut knows what ended Iché and the others now, in what shape the Nazi onslaught had come. That stamping marble man, then unbroken. His blood moves fast. “What happened?”

“To the statue?” Her stare is steady. “Celebes happened. One of the last of your people left alive must have invoked it, or attracted its attention. It came slamming in to fight. Just… too late. It smashed that brekerman apart, though. Is that a consolation? You saw what it did.”

For a moment Thibaut imagines. The elephant manif under a microclimate of swirling dark, sending walls crashing, stamping down the ruins with its four squat feet. Leaping and whipping with its trunk, rage withering the Nazi stone.

“Why were you there?” he says.

“It never would have worked,” she says, with what is almost care. “The Nazis knew about it. That’s why the brekerman was waiting. They’d infiltrated your cells. It was an ambush.”

“How do you know? How did you know to be there?”

For a moment she does not answer. “When I was in the eighth,” she says. “In their offices. You asked what pictures I had that got them chasing me? Well.” She shrugs. “I think they think I know more than I do, but I did see plans.”

Thibaut is breathing very fast. “For this counterattack? Did you say anything? You said nothing, didn’t you? You should have told them.” His voice rises until he is shouting into her face. “Did you try to tell the Main à plume what was coming?”

“I didn’t know what was coming, just that something would.” She is quite calm. “That was the point. I had no time to tell anyone, anyway.”

How many times had she said to him she wanted a picture of everything?

“You didn’t know what was coming but you hoped,” he says. “You didn’t tell them because you thought it might be this thing that’s here, this Fall Rot, that came. That you might find out what it was.”

“Yes,” she says. “I did. There was nothing I could’ve done to stop your comrades losing their lives in their idiotic attack. The Free French watched, you know that? They were there, too. But they didn’t intervene. I couldn’t have saved your people even if I’d wanted to but I thought maybe I could find out what this ‘Secret Invocation’ was the documents referred to. Sounded like they were having trouble with it. Imagine my surprise when it was just a manif.” Just Breker’s vulgarity.

“You let them die!”

“I needed to know what the Nazis had. So I could stop them. Your comrades,” she says the word mockingly, “were going to die, anyway. I work for Hell, Thibaut.”

Sam clenches her fist and opens her mouth in a sudden wordless shout, and Thibaut hears windows blow out on other floors. He wants to say more but men have appeared in the corridor, again, guards are firing machine guns at the exquisite corpse. It staggers but rallies. It steps through intervening space to stave in their heads. It pushes open a door and, polite as a curate, waits for its companions.

“After this,” Sam says, “we can have this out. But now? Shall we?” She indicates the way. Thibaut looks at her, at the flickering light in the threshold.

When after long moments he says nothing, she heads for it, and he follows.

A huge chamber. The center of Drancy has been hollowed into an emptiness fringed by the remnants of pipes and doorways, walls, where once there were bunks and berths, offices, laboratories, torture chambers, before the undesirables of Vichy were moved elsewhere. The room is full of terrible machines.

Panicked scientists and SS officers prod at gauges and dials below an Alesch crucifix. They have stayed behind as Sam’s hexes send fires through the building. On one wall above them is a big sigil it hurts Thibaut’s head to see.

In the center of the cavernous room priests are circled around a heaving tarpaulin-shrouded bulk. They are linked by chains and wires, a fence of men. They are fervently praying, clicking rosaries.

Beneath the shroud something huge is raging. It howls and moves.

Right below the crucifix Thibaut sees Alesch himself, sees him see them back. Alesch raises his hands in a kind of murderous cringe.

A uniformed man steps forward, pistol raised. An almost boyish face under dark sweat-slick hair, his mouth in a crooked gap-toothed grimace. Josef Mengele. He aims at the intruders and all his Gestapo aim, too.

Sam snaps, her witched camera blasting a man apart. Thibaut raises his own rifle, flexing his innards as hard as he can when he shoots and a flock of owl-headed jugs plummet from nothing to harass the Gestapo.

The exquisite corpse runs at the Germans. The soldiers fire. Their bullets do nothing. Someone shouts a curse. The manif reaches them. It hits with its hammers, breaking Nazi hands and bones and weapons as they scream and shoot it again.

“Take Alesch out!” Sam shouts. “And Mengele!” She scrambles for cover. The exquisite corpse is making for the priests now. “Call it off, quick!” she calls. “Sic it on the fucking doctor!”

And Thibaut shouts at it but the manif has its fury up. He tries to stop it, scrunching up his eyes, but if it hears his unvocalized plea it ignores him. It reaches the circle of prayers.

It leaps as it comes, its legs go stiff, it descends. It tramples a priest.

The man falls and dies. The chains that link him to his fellows snap.

One by one they begin to scream. They stare at their dead colleague. There is the sound of tearing canvas.

“Wait,” shouts Sam. “It’s broken the circle! Those machines…”

“What have you done?” someone yells in French.

From under the shroud, a shell roars out. A line of fire blasts a hole in the wall.

There is silence. Fingers grip the torn hole from beneath. They clutch. Something bellows.

The priests are pulling off the wires that link them, scrabbling to get away. Alesch is shouting, flattened against the wall, and Mengele is running. The thing beneath the tarpaulin grips it and begins to tear. With a wall-cracking cry, the beast uncovers itself, rips itself to light.

Fall Rot.

Caterpillar treads grind. The oilcloth falls shredded to unveil a tank. A Panzer III, stained by conflict, rolls forward on the concrete. From the front of the chassis, in front of the gun-turret, protrudes the torso and head of a giant. A man.

Fall Rot.

He is vast. He wears an outsized German helmet. His skin is cold white, his veins and muscles marked as if by wormtracks. He drips shadows from his eyes. His mouth is full of sharp teeth. He bunches immense arms.

The demon is a centaur of tank and great man-shape. It is festooned with German flags.

“They’ve made their own demon,” Sam screams. Absurd as ever, she raises her camera and begins to run right at Fall Rot. Her face is pure hate. “They built it…”

Made under German orders, by Mengele’s biological researches and Alesch’s toxic faith, from the broken matter of Hell’s natives and from the energies of manifested executed art and their own murderous tech. To be a loyal demon, to be made of Nazi triumph. The avatar of the defeat of France.

But their protections were precarious. The encircling prayer is gone, and Fall Rot rampages.

It grabs two crawling priests, one head in each fist. It slaps them together, killing them offhandedly, swings their limp bodies as clubs against their comrades.

It howls in what should never have been a language, spews dirt and exhaust. Sam comes for it, spitting magic.

Mengele hauls Alesch by his robes and screams at him to focus. The room is filling with smoke and rubble and crawling priests and wounded soldiers. The Nazi doctor stands in the construct devil’s path. He slaps Alesch’s face and points.

Fall Rot rolls toward them.

“Sie werden mir gehorchen,” Mengele shouts. Alesch makes some holy sign. Fall Rot winces and swats the air.

Behind that man-shape the tank’s gun swivels so the barrel smacks into Fall Rot’s pale side. It keeps pushing. “My God,” Thibaut whispers.

The devil howls as the metal shoves brutally right into its body. It shatters ribs, rips skin that fountains blood, pushes aside innards and organs and plows on in. The devil screams.

The gun rips right through Fall Rot and the demon’s chest reknits imperfectly in its wake, bones jostling back roughly into position, blood drying, skin fusing inaccurately. The weapon sucks free from the other side of Fall Rot’s meat with an audible plop.

“Sie…” Mengele says, and goes silent. He raises his pistol and fires repeatedly into the demon’s flesh. He does not miss. Fall Rot keeps coming. The gun turns, dripping Fall Rot’s blood. Alesch shouts a prayer, pushes Mengele forward.

The demon laughs and fires. The doctor disappears in a blast of blood and flame and mortar.

The exquisite corpse attacks.

The manif rushes for Fall Rot, clicking in a frenzy, all its hate for the devilish pushing it hard and bringing its transmuting attentions to bear. With a scream of gears, Fall Rot lurches forward. It backhands the exquisite corpse, sends it spinning.

The made demon and the living art circle each other. The manif stalks, staring with its old-man eyes. The machine-demon swivels jerkily, keeps the art in its sights. Its gun grinds back into Fall Rot’s body, making it bay, and the barrel stops midway through the meat, aiming through the sternum.

The manif’s limbs are twitching, reaching for energies so the air vibrates. But it has never faced a devil like this. Fall Rot rolls forward, barrel pointing squarely at the exquisite corpse.

Thibaut shouts a wordless warning but Fall Rot does not fire. It looks quizzical. It reaches out and grabs its adversary, one huge long-nailed hand at each of the manif’s joints. Those claws tense. The exquisite corpse shudders.

The devil-thing made by science and demonology, built to obey and disobeying that injunction, infernal avatar of an invasion, lifts its face and croons.

With one awful wrenching motion Fall Rot rips the exquisite corpse apart.

There is a blast of energy, a great release. Everyone quakes. The manif’s components scatter. The engines whine.

When Thibaut’s head clears he looks up to see the devil sucking at the ragged end of the exquisite corpse’s head. It licks at the broken machine parts where it tore the art apart. Thibaut retches. The devil laps.

They made this demon manifophagic. That’s the energy, Thibaut understands. The fuel is the sacrifice of manifs, that’s what kept this secret channel open, so they could grab Hell-flesh and make this. It eats art.

Fall Rot throws the exquisite corpse’s head in one direction, its human legs in another.

Sam calls Thibaut’s name. She is wrestling with Alesch. Thibaut staggers toward her. He raises his gun but cannot fire at the bishop for fear of hitting her. They are fighting in the dust, by the gauges and dials. Thibaut feels the shake of tank treads. Fall Rot is coming.

He sees Sam stab Alesch with a sharpened tripod leg. The bishop screams and convulses. She gets him to the floor and kneels over him and brings her weapon down again. He moans. She bellows into the camera that protrudes from him.

A radio, too, tuned to an afterlife channel? She reaches up and presses buttons on the Nazi engines.

Fall Rot gropes with its big hands and its big face smiles. Its gun pulls free of its body.

Sam keeps pressing as the demon comes, quick sequences repeated until there is a sudden static crack. “Here!” Sam shouts in English. “It’s open! It’s here!”

Fall Rot will go loose in Paris. It will eat the manifs of Paris, and grow stronger.

It raises its arms and Sam screams into her camera again, and the room rumbles.

Fall Rot looks down.

A bass roar grows. Louder and higher, it rises with Doppler shift. There’s a screaming across the below as if a plane races through great caverns and tunnels, keeps on getting louder and louder until it is unbearable, until Thibaut and Sam clap their hands to their ears and he sees Fall Rot do the same, its expression anguished, and Thibaut feels his insides quiver and something rushes up toward the light.

The flat earth detonates.

A convulsion. Thibaut is thrown back hard in a blaze of shattered stone.

A bomb-blast. A raid from beneath. Thibaut glimpses fire and an explosion billowing up through the earth, an igniting plume, shoving into the tank-centaur, enveloping it in fire, flame that roars up, makes Fall Rot roar, too, in agony it doesn’t understand, goes up then stops, a frozen moment of conflagration. A still moment.

Which then as he watches reverses very suddenly and fast, like rewound film, and sucks everything away. Rushes back into the new chasm. Takes the tank-thing Fall Rot rushing with it, into the deep, leaving not a trace. Returns to the pit.

Thibaut lies coughing for a long time. A huge crater slides down into black. There is no tank, no tank-ruin, no too-big human torso visible. Thibaut stands.

A second percussion sounds, a quieter, crackling blast in another room close by, and he cowers. But it is quickly gone and Thibaut rises again.

“I got through to them,” Sam whispers. Thibaut’s ears are ringing but he can hear her. “This little gate cracked open. I got it wider.” With the energies of sacrifice. With what she did to Alesch. “They had to come up for this. For that… thing.”

She leans against a wall. Sparks burst from the machinery. A few researchers are still alive, are moving, crawling in the dust. “That,” Sam shouts at them, “was definitely against the fucking treaties.”

“You said they… your bosses… couldn’t intervene,” Thibaut says. “Or wouldn’t.”

“There was a block in place. You saw what the priests were doing until the manif… stopped them. And my bosses wanted to avoid confrontation. But I got through. And they couldn’t let that lie. There’ll be a serious diplomatic incident.”

Thibaut laughs at that a long time, hurting his wound. Even Sam smiles.

They stumble through the ruin while the Germans still alive crawl away from them. When he reaches it, Thibaut hesitates, then picks up the exquisite corpse’s head.

It is half as big again as his own, but fleshy and light as papier-mâché. It moves its eyes to watch him, sadly. Some last bolus of life. The train in its beard makes a little hffhffhff sound. The caterpillar does not pulse.

They go into the hallway. At the end is a cell containing a pile of terrible objects. Farmyard pieces, a rotting elephant head, leaves, tennis rackets, big-eyed fish, limbs, a pistol, a tiny figurine, a pile of saucepans, a globe.

“Those are all from exquisite corpses,” Thibaut says. A charnel heap of components, a grave of ripped-up manifestation. Opposite them is another bank of machines, an engine and a single bunk like a prisoner’s. Thibaut’s stomach heaves at the smell of decaying image.

“They’ve been harnessing what bleeds out of the manifs,” Sam says.

Three walls are cracked, chaotic. One side of the room is perfectly neat, perfectly, unnaturally tidy. Its window is unbroken, its wall papered.

“I heard another noise from here,” Thibaut says. He sifts through the pile with the barrel of his rifle. He probes with his hand and the soft decay of actualized dream fouls his fingers.

Sam smiles and Thibaut does not smile back. He is thinking of the Main à plume who died. He looks at the flawless wall.

“It must have just kicked out a lot of energy when your bosses blew up that thing,” Thibaut says.

She says, “It was an abomination.”

I saved Paris, Thibaut makes himself think. Destroyed a new utter demon. I saved the world. He feels flat. Outside, the sunlight hits them differently than it did within the old city.

Is this it? Are they done?

“Where are the soldiers?” he says.

They stagger on, alone and unmolested. They strain to hear attackers they are sure must be coming, but there is nothing. Relieved, confused, straining to stay alert, Thibaut and Sam haul past dirty broken buildings and rubbled corners. They keep their weapons in their hands in these ghost neighborhoods stained by war, wandering, Thibaut realizes, back toward the old arrondissements.

And then abruptly they are in a jarringly perfect stretch of Paris. The loveliest town and houses. Perfect fronts, vibrant colors, crackless. Even the sky seems brighter.

Sam and Thibaut come to a bewildered stop. Where is everyone? And how is this quarter so clean?

The streets are empty, the sun is high, the shadows are small. The streets feel scoured.

Why don’t we have to stay down? Thibaut thinks they should be creeping through the shells of buildings. Where are soldiers? He looks at pretty houses without war damage.

“Something doesn’t make sense,” Thibaut says.

“Really?” Sam says. “Just one thing?”

They walk on a long time. Immaculate undamaged streets. They see no one.

They pass a big hotel. It is picturesque, spotless, deserted.

“The thing is, Fall Rot was already awake,” Thibaut says slowly. “Maybe it wasn’t him that they were having trouble manifesting. That they were sacrificing things for. They wrote there was something like that, right? That they had trouble with, trying to bring up. But Fall Rot was already manifest. Maybe they realized they couldn’t make Fall Rot work. Maybe they were even trying to get rid of it, but they couldn’t kill it. But what if it was something else they couldn’t invoke. Until Fall Rot was taken down.” Sam is still. “By your bosses. You heard that noise. There was a lot of energy when Fall Rot died, for sure. Maybe enough, at last, for whatever.

“When you killed it,” Thibaut says, “maybe that was like another sacrifice.”

He looks into the eyes of the manif head he still carries. “If killing an exquisite corpse feeds Fall Rot,” he whispers, “what does killing Fall Rot feed?”

Sam and Thibaut look at each other. Neither speaks.

They begin to run. Through streets that aren’t just too scrubbed, too perfect, too empty for these times, but that have never looked as they do now. That do not look real. Thibaut feels like a stain, a smut of dirt.

“We thought it was manifs to feed demons,” Sam says. “What if it’s the other way? And they’ve been trying to call up a manif?”

Of what power?

They have been experimenting to control such art. Wolf-tables rallying to the whip. The brekerman, obeying orders as it collapsed.

“They’ve been trying to summon something,” Sam says. They hear gunshots. “In secret. And failing.”

“Only,” Thibaut says, “we succeeded.”

On the rue de Paris, running west toward the edge of the twentieth arrondissement, they see at last the rise of the city barricade at the end of this strange chintz. There by the German positions, jeeps, guns, mortars, the ready troops, the city is abruptly chaotic again, grime and imperfection again, smashed apart and becoming dust.

Between them and the waiting Nazi guards, where the walls change, is a slight figure in a brown suit.

The young man walks slowly toward the old city, as if in a dream or a slowed-down film. His footsteps take too long to land. He wears archaic clothes, trousers that balloon out from pulled-up socks. His hair is a strange pale parted black.

Sam has gone quite white. She says, “No.” As the young man approaches them, the German troops fire.

And Thibaut almost falls in astonishment because he sees the man unconcerned by any of the bullets that hit him, he sees him look hard at the closest shooter. And where the man looks, a house rises.

Emerging instantly from nothing, clean, freshly painted, fussily rendered, pale, almost translucent. And the soldier, all the soldiers who were where the house is now are just gone. Replaced, with a sweep of attention, disappeared from this scene.

The façades of Paris reappear, as the figure stares, and they are prettier and more perfect than they have ever looked, and they are quite empty.

“It was never Fall Rot,” says Sam. “Kill Fall Rot and we have called up a manif. Oh dear God. It’s bringing a city.”

The young man makes it with every look, is reestablishing Paris in pastel outlines, no not reestablishing but establishing newly, a simpering pretense, as it had never been. A cloying imaginary.

“They’ve found a self-portrait,” Sam says.

The last of the Nazi soldiers are scattering before the annihilating gaze finds them. Now the young man is turning slowly back toward Thibaut and Sam.

“He never could paint people,” Sam whispers. “He always left them out. Painted everything empty. Even when he drew himself, he couldn’t do features…”

The figure turns and Thibaut glimpses its faceless face. Empty. A faint graphite sweep where there should be eyes. Blank as an egg. A poor, cowardly rendition, by a young bad artist.

“It’s a self-portrait,” he hears Sam repeat. She and Thibaut reach for each other, hold each other up in fear.

Thibaut says, “Of Adolf Hitler.”

And they try to run, and as Thibaut shouts for her and grabs her pack and as the watercolor manif’s attention sweeps toward her, Sam moves with more than human strength. She moves to get them away with speed and motion borrowed from her paymasters below. Her eyes flicker and a corona flares around them and she leaps, reaching, straining for the cover of a wall—

—and she slows in her trajectory and lets go of Thibaut as the Hitler-manif turns and eyelessly stares and takes her in and all around her the broken buildings become postcard-perfect in the cone of that regard. And Sam herself freezes. She is in the air and the self-portrait looks at her and she is just gone.

Gone. Sam is unpersoned. Effaced in the manif’s gaze.

Thibaut crawls backward and bites back her name. The street is pretty, and empty of her.

Too slow, too late, he understands that the manif is looking in his direction, now.

He hurls himself into the window of a cellar. As he falls, the glass heals behind him, brittle as sugar, as the Hitler-manif revises history, brings its vision to bear.

Behind the new façade its stare invokes, the rot of war remains. Thibaut still has hold of Sam’s bag, and Sam herself is gone.

He climbs stairs and gets bearings fast and pushes out through another window for a side-street not yet in the manif’s field of view.

There really is no Sam. In the distance Thibaut can see some last German soldiers, injured and slow. The watercolor manif must glance at their blockade, because it goes, imperfect for the desired scenery. A featureless street appears in its place. As the manif’s look takes in the soldiers, they, too, are instantly not there.

A little blank-faced nonentity bringing peace and prettiness, ending the rubble. Where there is discord, there it brings peace. Not even of death, but of nihil. Paris will be an empty city of charming houses.

This is what the Führer’s self-portrait proclaims.

Thibaut braces against a perfect wall. He stays out of sight as it passes. He cranes out behind it and aims at the manif. He shoots. He misses. The manif walks on. Thibaut fires again and it ignores him. He wails as it crosses the threshold of old Paris. It brings its terrible emptying picturesquing gaze to his embellished home.

The watercolor will raise a quaint city. And everything will end. The struggles of the manifs, the angry smoke, the muttering walls, the fighters for conviction, the partisans of freedom and the degradation. Human muck, ready to live and die.

Thibaut hears the smacking of lips. In his hand, the head of the exquisite corpse is moving. He can see a pulse in its larva. Its beard-train lets out a little smoke.

The face smiles at him. It looks knowing. It meets his eye.

Thibaut begins to run. He takes the pretty street behind the watercolor, the seer of empty buildings. The manif of the Führer. The face of the exquisite corpse mutters encouragement from Thibaut’s grip.

The Hitler-manif stands at the border of the old city. It hears Thibaut and starts to turn.

And Thibaut has no plan. No idea. Just before the deadening, emptying stare hits him, he simply hurls what he holds.

The exquisite corpse’s head catches the manif’s look in his place and it does not disappear. It flies through the air at the featurelessness. It hits it full on.

Thibaut blinks. He looks down at himself. He is still there. He remains unseen.

The manif is wrestling with a head too large, a head that has fallen over its own. Like a carnival costume. The exquisite corpse’s head sways as the watercolor staggers. The mask blocks its eyes. It blocks the unembellishing gaze that fixes the ruins into nothing.

The self-portrait struggles below it and Thibaut can feel the waves of the watercolor’s cloying attention. The face of the exquisite corpse winces. It grows translucent. It is almost banished from this vista by the stare beneath. But with a growl, the exquisite corpse screws up its own presence, and stays right there.

There is an unfolding. A shuffling of presence.

Now the watercolor wears some misplaced boot on one foot, a manif boot abruptly appeared. Its head was not chosen by its artist. The faceless manif of Adolf Hitler is randomizing. There is a fluttering, a cascade of options. As Thibaut watches a quick clicking circuit of alternative objects comes into place as the manif’s head. Now its legs are not its legs, but a succession of other things, in random stutter. Its body, too. It is becoming a triple figure.

And though he can still see the brown of its original suit and the distinctive and ugly emptiness of its head slip into position repeatedly among the parts that have started to make it up, to concatenate randomly, the flailing manif is no more defined by them than by the fruit, the bricks, the lizards, the windows and lavender and railway lines and endless other things that are suddenly, also, for instants, its components.

It is becoming exquisite corpse. It is remade. It is without artist.

And in its wake, as its wan precision is replaced by that stochastic rigor, that self-dreamed dream, the buildings that it saw into twee perfection are less perfect again. They quiver. Their colors bleed. They are too saturated, their lines are wrong again. They remember their cracks. And then with breaths of stone-dust they are back to ruination, or are not there, or are battered by age, scarred with the stuff of history, again. Paris is Paris.

There is a scream. A swallow. The light changes. The sun scuttles forward, eager to end this day. Thibaut sinks to his knees. He kneels before the entrance to Paris. He bows his head. The city is as it was.

Standing in front of Thibaut, where the Hitler had been, is his exquisite corpse. Tall again. Old-man face, leaf in his hair. Anvil-and-pieces body. It leans—no, Thibaut realizes, no. It is bowing. It is taking leave.

Thibaut stands, too, so that he can bow back.

The exquisite corpse turns and steps politely away from him, over the threshold, into the nineteenth. Where soon enough, the civilians, the partisans, will know that something has happened.

It will not be long before the occupiers reestablish control of these borders. This plan to remake the city has failed, so they will return to their original methods of control, and plot again. Thibaut is outside, alone since the manif looked. For a few hours, at this point, the borders will be open.

The exquisite corpse is turning up boulevard Sérurier. Its body parts flicker like a timetable display, between options. It rebuilds itself: four-part, this time, feet underwater, a woman’s legs, a body like some cubist rumination, flattened head, a puckered-lip dream. It walks on, into the city, where it will keep changing.

Thibaut looks east, into streets outside the old city that are no longer sickly perfect but are still, for a while, empty.

He can go almost anywhere. He looks away from the city’s heart, for a long time.

And turns back, at last, to the arrondissements he has known since he was a child. Where there is still a fight.

He is wistful, enjoying the air beyond the limits, knowing it will be a long time until he can breathe it again. His way is clear.

There are other cameras in Paris, to find.

The Last Days of New Paris needs writing. Even though these are not the last days, he decides.

Thibaut grants Sam’s memory a moment. He wishes her something. I have a mission, he thinks. The mission. Start from scratch, redo history, make it mine. A new book.

He puts her notebook and her films in her bag. Thibaut shoves it deep into a hole in the brick of the barricade. The limits of the zone. He makes her records, the evidence of treachery and machinations, secret plans, spells and dissenting art, part of the substance of the edge. For someone to find.

The sun picks out the edges of the affected part, the crumble where there was destruction. He waits until he sees bats in the sky. Then, bruised and tired, triumphant and unsure, Thibaut takes a deep breath and steps over the boundary, back into New Paris, the old city.