The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  Thibaut and Sam trek through the fifteenth. Sam says she’s never seen these streets, but she moves confidently, checking her books. They duck undercover at the sound of firing or demonic burning, the wrong rhythms of a manif’s hooves. They pass over a coming-together of railway lines. Not knowing why, Thibaut lets her lead.

  There are sounds below them. In the shadows under the bridge, black smoke hangs and discolors the ground. Sam stares. Thibaut watches its drifts. He sees that it shifts against the wind. That it takes shapes.

  Fumages, smoke figures wafting in and out of presence. They bicker soundlessly over the body of a man: they rip his clothes and stain him with soot and lift him in snagging gusts.

  The presences stop. They drop their corpse. They look slowly up at Thibaut and Sam, smoke heads rising. He sees hesitation in the manifs, as they watch him without eyes. He can see them overcome it, that something has changed and it will not hold them.

  He says, “Move.”

  —

  Sam fumbles with her camera as she starts to run. He tries to remonstrate, to speed her up, he reaches for it but she slaps him away with startling strength. Air shifts as they stumble into the fourteenth. Sam is behind him now and Thibaut turns and sees that she is kneeling in a sudden wind. She holds her camera up with one hand, the other on the ground.

  The fumages have risen. They are on the bridge. His heart accelerates at the sight. They move, half in half out of coagulation, a roiling mass of smuts. They reach, and come for her.

  Before he can step toward them, try to make them flinch again, the wind kicks up. It squalls right through them and the fumages struggle and start to wisp apart. They cannot coalesce. They strain to stay, but it blows hard and they dissipate in shreds and their smoke faces silently scream as they are snatched away.

  Thibaut puts his hand over his eyes while the buffeting air subsides. He turns to her at last and Sam’s face is blank.

  “Did you get them?” Thibaut says. She looks uncomprehending and he points at her camera. She still holds it up.

  “Oh. I think so.”

  It smells like tar on the rue Vercingétorix. Sam leads them to a black door.

  —

  Thibaut uses the strength his nightclothes give him to pull the remains of a car apart. It is so rusted its metal barely screams. He piles the pieces up into a hind. Sam unfolds a tripod and camera, points it at the door of 54 rue du Château. Mucky gray curtains cover the windows.

  “So,” Thibaut says. “What’s here?”

  “I’ve got a good number of manifs already,” Sam says. “The horse head. The stone woman you saw. I’ve been to the Trocadero.” The demolished music hall came back the day after the S-Blast. It contains lions. Sam grows excited as she continues her description. “But I need as many as I can get. All of them. If I’m right,” she says, “something very particular gets born here tonight.”

  “How do you know?”

  She points at her books. “I read between the lines.”

  —

  When she was very young, she tells him, she wanted to be a witch. Everything she says makes Thibaut feel callow. He is sure she is wondering why he keeps her company.

  She wants to tell him how she came to be caught up by the art that now makes Paris what it is.

  “First it was monster pictures,” she says. “Devils and bogeymen. Witches, alchemy, magic. Then from there to here. I’m hardly the first to come that way. Think of Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry? Flamel and Breton? You’ve read the ‘Second Manifesto.’ ‘I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.’ ”

  “That’s not what he meant by that,” Thibaut says.

  “He said he wanted to find the Philosopher’s Stone!”

  “And he said he wanted to lose it again.”

  They look at each other. Sam even smiles.

  “From devils to Bosch to Dalí,” she says. “From him to all this. To the manifestos. That’s why I’m here.”

  She hesitates, then continues quickly. “When information started to come out after the blast, information about the blast, I had to come. You just don’t know what it was like, to see that footage.”

  “No. I was too busy being the footage.”

  “I’m not suggesting it was easier for you.” She looks away, at the corpse of a crow. “I was in the gallery.” She sounds as if she is trying to recall a dream. “Everyone was screaming at all these crazy, jerky pictures coming out of Paris, all the manifs. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ And I knew exactly what they all were. I knew the poems and the pictures and I knew what I was looking at.”

  Since the blast, curators have been Virgils. Their monographs and catalogues now almanacs.

  “The S-Blast,” Sam says slowly, “took instructions.”

  She finds something in a copy of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and holds it open for him. Thibaut reads, “ ‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’ ”

  “They made suggestions,” she says.

  He’s read this before, a long time ago. He reads it again: provocations, once fanciful, now true, descriptions of Paris, from years before the explosion.

  “I’m lucky you heard my shots,” Sam says when he sits back. “Thank you again.”

  “Did you find phantoms in the forest?” Thibaut says. Her calm energy is beyond him. “ ‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh’?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And I took their picture. They’ll be in the book. I want the ruins. Soldiers. The Resistance.” She takes a picture of him in his nightclothes.

  “Is it not too dark?” he says.

  “Not for this camera.”

  Thibaut breathes deep and considers. A heavy hardback. Photographs, eulogy, the nights and days of Paris after the blast. Who will write the text?

  “So the Nazis saw you taking pictures and came after you,” he says. “With those wolf-tables. They think you’re a spy. What was it you photographed?”

  Sam examines her camera. “Mostly what I want is the manifs,” she says. He thinks he sees distaste when she says that, alongside her eagerness. “I’m not leaving until I catch them all.”

  They listen to the hooting of predators and the calls of prey astounded to exist. From behind the ripped-up car a feathered sphere the size of a fist rolls into view, sending up dust. It opens. In its center is a single, staring blue eye.

  Sam stares back at it.

  “It’s eating,” Thibaut says. “They live on looking.” It feels good to tell her things she does not know. “You can catch them and make them fat if you show them bright colors. Then we roast them.” The meat was greasy with everything they’d seen. A horde of the things rolls into view behind the first. Sam takes pictures as they regard her.

  Thibaut decides he will stay with her a while.

  —

  Mosquitoes come. “I heard about a cell of your people,” Sam says. “A big one, maybe the main one. That there was a plan. I heard they were ambushed.”

  Thibaut says nothing and he doesn’t look up. He continues to divide his food. He has bread and smoked meat. Sam has chocolate she says she bartered from an American secret agent on some mission of murder.

  “They’re all in here,” she says when she sees him looking at it. “This place is crawling with that kind. They’re on their own in here.”

  “This secret agent can’t have been very secret,” Thibaut says.

  She laughs. “He was at first. They always tell you in the end.”

  When the Germans sealed the city, the U.S. government, like every, expressed its outrage. And, also like the others, was relieved. That the manifs and their energies—and, or, the devils—would be contained.

  “But you can’t keep this in,” Sam says. “Best you can do is slow it. Things have started happening.”

  She tells him of the North Africa campaigns, the dragged-out misery of the Pacific, Europe after the rain. But what Thiba
ut wants to know most is what she can tell him about Paris. Because perhaps he has been too close to see. The mission is vacant.

  The glow of the nearest streetlight comes up, then wanes. An animal lands on a windowsill, a winged monkey with owl’s eyes. It watches them.

  From somewhere there is a loud crack and it flies instantly away. The building groans like a ship.

  Something is creaking within, something knocks and approaches. Something descends behind the door.

  “Fold over paper,” Sam whispers. “Fold it over and what might come out?”

  —

  Step step step. Sounds approach them, beyond the wood. A scratching and the slow slow click of a lock. The door swings open. Inside it is darker than the street.

  Thibaut does not breathe. With a careful jerking step, something comes out of the shadow.

  —

  A towering, swaying thing. Three meters tall. More. It blinks with alien gravity.

  It stands like a person under a great weight, swaying on two trim legs. At its waist it is made of lines, offcuts of industry. A tilted anvil-like workbench, bits and machine pieces higher than Thibaut’s head. He stares up at a pole of fetish objects. A clamping bench on engine parts on patient human feet. At the top of it all, an old man’s too-big bearded face looks down at him with obscure curiosity. In his beard, a steam train the size of a cudgel, its chimney venting smoke into the bristles. The old man wears a larva on his head. Some limb-long bright caterpillar, gripping an outsized leaf. It wriggles and the leaf-hat flutters, hedgerow chic.

  A random totality, components sutured by chance. It stands. Thibaut stares at this thing. It looks back at him, as the first manif he ever met, its cousin, did through its helmet grill, years before.

  Sam’s camera clicks. “Exquisite,” she whispers. For the first time, Thibaut hears fear in her voice. “Exquisite corpse.”

  —

  An ugly percussion shocks them out of awe. There are shouts and shots. Out of the dark, German soldiers come running.

  Thibaut ducks behind the remains of the car and fires.

  Behind the attacking Nazis a jeep is rocking over the rubble toward them. How long have these soldiers been waiting?

  Thibaut fires as they come and tries to focus and counts and calculates what he can see. There are too many. His heart slams. Too many. He holds his breath and reaches into his pocket, for the card, this time, he thinks, in time.

  But the exquisite corpse is striding into the road. The soldiers gape and fire. It raises its limbs and all the German bullets, even those misaimed, curve in the air, fly right into it, stud its body with resonant sounds.

  Some of those shots were at Thibaut.

  The soldiers have nets and strange engines. He can feel them. A lasso whips and snares the manif. In the jeep Thibaut sees two men, a thickset uniformed driver, a black-coated priest. He glances at Sam and she looks as if she is saying a prayer. Thibaut slams his rope cosh, the twisted wolf-table lash, against the ground.

  The exquisite corpse leaps. For the moment of its jump everyone in the Paris street feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase.

  The world torques—

  —and Thibaut and Sam and the exquisite corpse are standing a long way from where they were, meters from the Nazis. There is the silence of confusion.

  The rope still snags the manif, stretching back into a now-distant engine on the jeep’s flatbed. A pulley starts to grind, and the cord tightens, strains to reel the exquisite corpse in.

  It tugs back like a playful horse. It turns in ancient-eyed attention to the officers of the Reich. It puffs out its cheeks and semaphores its limbs, wheezes into its beard, rips into the street with the edges of its machinery body.

  A tear full of white. The edges of reality break. The Nazis stagger on the wrong side and broken bits of car crumble into that papery void.

  The exquisite corpse nods, and the Nazis all lurch and fall and slide away as if it shoved them.

  Sam is running away from the rip and the soldiers. Thibaut hesitates, grips with his innard sinews, and goes to the exquisite corpse. He pats it gently with the tip of the rope-cudgel.

  Its body resonates under his tap like a hollow oven. It turns slowly and looks down at him with its man’s head and eyes. He moves back. With skittish steps, the manif follows him.

  “Come on!” Sam shouts. The Nazis fire from beyond the reknitting hole, and Thibaut spreads his pajamas into a shield, like a weaponized sail, and, the exquisite corpse behind him, he runs.

  —

  “Did you smell the exhaust from that jeep?” Thibaut says.

  “Blood smoke,” Sam says. “That doesn’t run on petrol any more. They must’ve refit it with the help of demons.”

  “They were trying to snag this thing,” Thibaut says. “Like with the wolf-tables. They’re trying to control manifs. And they almost did.”

  “Not this one they didn’t,” Sam says. She looks back uneasily and away again. “They didn’t have a hope.”

  It treads behind them.

  Thibaut has unwound his cosh and dangled the table-wrangler’s cord around one of the manif’s metal extrusions, what are not quite limbs. It is not a leash—it is not taut and Thibaut would never consider pulling—but he has one end of it and the manif does not object to wearing it, and joined by the bond the living art comes with Thibaut as though he holds its hand.

  —

  It is morning, a part of the city all razed into a flat ashy vista. They are in rubble full of birdcages. Some are empty, some contain silent watchful birds. A broken screen; a litter of toys’ heads cracked like shells; a motionless little girl-thing standing in her white dress and watching with a featureless hole where a child would have features. From her they keep their distance and their gazes. Far ahead of them a baby’s face the size of a room protrudes from the ground like some whaleback, staring skyward. It squawls quietly. Sam takes a picture.

  Beyond boxes of preserved butterflies, they see drapery hanging from trees. They hear spectral guns. This place is a shooting range haunted by ghost bullets.

  “This is Toyen’s landscape,” says Sam.

  “I know what it is,” Thibaut says. “I’m Main à plume.”

  The exquisite corpse picks through the dust. Sam looks at it with the same expression that she wore the previous night, when she at last slowed under a balcony poised during its deliquescence, and turned and stared at the manif.

  She could not stop herself rearing back at the sight, and the exquisite corpse reared, too, and stamped. In alarm, Thibaut tried to hush it, had concentrated his attention to that end. To his amazement the thing calmed.

  “They don’t like me,” Sam said.

  “Manifs?” he said. “They don’t have any opinion about you.”

  But when he at last persuaded her to take the rope, the exquisite corpse bared its teeth, and Sam let it go.

  “It seems to know you’re an ally,” she said.

  Now Thibaut flexes his intuition again. The manif exhales exhaust from its beard-train. It follows him like something that knows something.

  In the sky a storm of birds takes the shape of one great bird, then of a dancing figure, before they scatter. Sam takes a picture of that, too.

  “I was on my way out,” Thibaut says to her abruptly.

  “When I found you.”

  Sam waits.

  “A while back, I met a woman riding a manif,” Thibaut starts again.

  “The Vélo,” says Sam. “I heard something about that…”

  “You heard?” Thibaut can feel the card in his pocket. “Well, I was there when her passenger died. And when I went through what she was carrying…I think she was a spy. Like your chocolate man.”

  “Naturally.”

  “British. SOE.” Thibaut holds up the cord he carries. “She was controlling her manif with leather, too. Or trying to. We didn’t keep the thong: we should’ve done. She had a map. With stars drawn on it, and notes.”r />
  “What did the notes say?”

  A constellated Paris. They had pulled the dirty thing from her inside pocket. “Most of them were crossed out,” Thibaut says. “They were the names of lost objects. They were famous manif things.” Thibaut looks at her and can see she understands. “I thought maybe she was a magpie. She was artifact hunting, for sure. But perhaps it wasn’t for her.”

  “Had she found any?”

  He feels as if the playing card is moving in his pocket. “Well,” he says. “She had none on her. Maybe she crossed them off when she found out they were gone.”

  “Or took them and passed them on.”

  He licks his lips. “So anyway,” he says. “Eventually, we used it. The map. Of course. My comrades and I. Went looking. Went to the Bois de Boulogne.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that was where there was a star that wasn’t crossed out.”

  “I mean why eventually? Why didn’t you go hunting straightaway?”

  “Oh.” He keeps his eyes on the horizon. “I persuaded them to wait.” His comrades had not known what for, but they had agreed. “I’d heard something about that other plan you mentioned. Never knew the details. Just that it was some assault. I thought we should wait, see if we heard anything. In case it succeeded.” She says nothing so he must continue.

  “It didn’t,” he whispers. “It went wrong. Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita, a lot of others. They died.”

  “I heard,” Sam says. “Do you know what happened?”

  “I think the enemy got wind of it. They hit first. And they must’ve had some…weapon.” He bares his teeth. “I don’t know exactly what but our people—it was the best of us who died. The best. The Nazis must’ve had something ready to go into those streets.” He could, might have been there, with the now-dead. Then he would be dead, too.

  Except if his presence would have changed things.

  Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché. A day full of flat light, the two of them patrolling, she showing the rookie the area. A routine sweep of a quiet zone. Expecting nothing, they walked into the remains of a battered lot, and an ambush.