The Last Days of New Paris Read online

He had hurled himself screaming for cover, trying to shoot as he went, trying to bring training to mind as he cowered under fire. When he turned and hauled himself half upright, Iché was stood there in her grubby floral dress, still smoking hard, ignoring all the bullets that crashed around her, raising her right arm.

  She roared and a too-big eagle appeared and plunged straight for the men gathered at the cul-de-sac’s entrance. As Thibaut cowered and watched the wings beat down on them and they gasped and tried to run she had said something else and made a caterpillar longer and fatter than a horse with the head of a wicked bird, and it rippled after the eagle over the shattered brick. Thibaut heard cries and wet noises. Iché brought a bathtub full of glimmering, shredded mirror into presence and sent it skittering on its claw feet into the slack-faced Gestapo commander. It bumped him and caught him with all its grinding scintillas. He screamed and sent up a spray of blood and reflections.

  “I saw Iché manifest her own poems once,” he says. “Not many could do that.”

  “Maybe your comrades had some secret weapon, too,” Sam says. “I heard things.”

  “So you keep saying. I don’t know. I don’t know if they had what they wanted. If there was anything.”

  “Well, there were stories. About a fight. Between something manif of theirs—yours—and something Nazi—”

  “I heard rumors, too,” Thibaut interrupts, making her blink. “If they had a secret weapon it didn’t fucking work, did it?”

  “Is that why you’re leaving?” Sam says after a moment. He does not reply. “What was it happened in the forest?” she says. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I should’ve fucking left then,” he says. “As soon as I heard about that fiasco. That they were gone. But I stayed. We all stayed. Decided to follow the map.”

  His cell. Around a fire. Drinking to the memory of the dead. The identities of whom they were not even quite sure. They knew, though, from the tenor of the rumors they had already heard, the transmissions in garbled code passed on by runners at arrondissement edges, reaching them at last, from the shift in the atmosphere, for those like Thibaut who could feel it, that this failed assault changed things. That a chance had been lost, for their side.

  None of them slept that night, after the word reached them, word they could not be sure was true but were quite sure was true. They gathered together and talked quietly, tried to reconstruct which of the great booms across the city that they’d heard over the last week had been the noise of their comrades falling, according to what bad powers.

  Those who’d known them spoke about their times with those they thought gone. He had troubled his comrades, though, because Thibaut would tell no such stories of those who’d inducted him. He would say nothing. He fingered the Marseille card and thought of the scout who had come for him, whom he had turned away.

  After his refusal, that woman who had crossed such dangerous ground to find him had not spoken again. Someone else might have begged, or insisted. There was a long silence, and he made himself meet her eyes, and when at last she was certain he meant it she turned without a word and ascended the stairs.

  After a second’s hesitation he went after her. On the ground floor he had found Élise standing in confusion by a door that was ajar onto a backyard with a broken wall, the night and the streets, and the woman who had come unseen by any of his comrades now gone again the same way, back to whatever was being planned, without him.

  Later the names. Hérold. Raufast. Rius. Iché. That sickening roll-call.

  “But no,” he says to Sam. “I had to leave later. After the forest.” He looks down at the filthy nightdress he wears. “Yes, we found what we were looking for there. I mean, when we suspected the Brits wanted it, were after it, we wanted it more, didn’t we?”

  A last chance. They woke one morning and found that Cédric had left. “Screw him,” Pierre had said, but they all knew they were weaker without the priest, if demons attacked. Thibaut unfolded the spy’s map and proposed a plan.

  —

  In New Paris, Sacré-Cœur wears a clotty skin of black paint, and thrusting meters out from all its splendid vaulted windows where glass once was and its doorless doorways are shifting tram-lines. Thibaut and his crew trekked to the shadows of the ex-church, to where tracks shook like lizard tails, lashing the pavement and the roofs with a grind and whiplash of metal, moving, appearing in the fabric of the area, grinding into the ground as if they were old infrastructure, stretching abruptly out of sight, twitching to change positions, disappearing again.

  Every few minutes or hours, a tram would emerge from within and howl driverless out of the cavernous interior of the church and hurtle along one or other of these evanescent tracks into the city.

  The Main à plume found a place to wait, climbed a ladder of sinewy muscled arms that wriggled under their weight, to huddle in a street-corner bivouac, watching manifs that watched them back, looking out for Nazis and devils. Things were bleaker now they suspected a little of what had failed. The cobbles shifted before them to become rails. They waited and spoke little and mostly just watched the ground change, watched the wrong trams.

  Until after a day and a night, Thibaut, bleary-eyed, saw one streetcar come wormlike out and roll toward them, marked on its glass front, Bois de Boulogne.

  “Now!” he said. “Now!”

  The Main à plume came out of hiding running, swinging their grappling hooks, snagging the tram like a steer as it passed.

  “Jean fell.” Thibaut recalls the wail and slide. “He was too slow. But the rest of us got aboard.”

  They leaned exultant from rattling windows as the tram hurtled over graves and sent earth and headstones flying in Cimetière du Nord. Rails appeared before it and sank behind it into the earth. It explored and they hung on within.

  Into the seventeenth, rue Ganneron, savaging a way through the remains of close edifices of rues Dautancourt, Legendre, Lacroix. The vehicle’s lights shone onto broken inside walls. Out again, over railways where rolling stock moldered.

  “We went too fast to be caught,” Thibaut says. “Even when we went past Nazis.”

  To their terror, the tram coiled abruptly down the stairs into the vaults of Villiers Métro station, leapt onto the older waiting track and into the tunnels. Through glints of phosphorescence and ghosts. Howling in the dark. The partisans were too fearful to be raucous until it rose and was out again.

  At Porte Maillot the tracks the tram put down before it entered trees. Branches and leaves slapped the windows. They slowed. They were surrounded by the green. The engine stopped at last in a clearing, gently touching the buffers that grew to meet them out of the ground.

  For two days the city fighters scouted by foot in that dream-wood, leaving the tram for the thickets. They wandered in rough extending circles, cutting routes, checking the dead woman’s map.

  They caught two wolf-tables—the wild, skittish ones with foxlike parts—and used their wooden bodies to roast their flesh necks. Eating the meat of a manif was supposed to change you.

  “What was it that took your comrades?” Sam says.

  What monster does she think? A huge featureless manif woman holed by drawers that open to emit things? A clattering of Bellmer dolls crawling crablike on mannequin legs with ball-and-socket joints? Perhaps she imagines a squadron of devils and their Nazi invokers, SS torturers working with meters-high beasts bearded with stalactites of sulfur.

  No.

  They found the treasure at last, the pajamas marked by the star.

  They were flapping on a hanger in a tree, dancing in the wind, watched by owls. Thibaut and his comrades paused at the sight of them in the shadowed moonlight, at the feel of them. They crept toward the gilt thread.

  “I thought if they were anywhere they should have been in the Hauts-de-Seine,” Thibaut murmurs. “ ‘My pajamas balsam hammer gilt with azure.’ ” He quotes Simone Yoyotte’s poem, “Pajama-Speed,” from the pages of Légitime Défense. The cloth
was woven with legitimate defense. “It wasn’t me getting them.”

  Pierre was in front, reaching for the cloth, when a shot from the trees felled him.

  “We all went for cover,” Thibaut says. “We’d been found. Followed. I don’t know since when. We left tracks, for sure. I was right behind Pierre. I grabbed the nightclothes.” He fingered their hem. “I pulled them on. So they couldn’t hurt me.”

  What came for them out of the woods? What had tracked their incompetent scoutwork, using them to find this prize?

  Not even Nazis in uniform. Not animals from art, nor howling transplants from Hell. Murderous banalities. French men and women, living by theft, killing by surprise. They jumped into sight, making what they must have thought were savage sounds.

  Thibaut’s first poem-enhanced punch crushed a bandit’s face. Bullets pattered against him. For all his new strength, though, he saw in anguish that his comrades were dying, because he was still clumsy in these clothes.

  He leapt an enhanced leap and overshot by many meters and fell down with the fight behind him. A ghastly comedy. A man knifed Bernard and another shot Brigitte in the back while Thibaut staggered and tried to come for them.

  Two ambushers fell to Main à plume shots but the assassins had managed to filch a couple of Surrealist techniques, too, and as Thibaut watched, Élise cried out and was turned to cloud. He ran to gather her but she was vapor, and gone. Patrice was eaten by a flock of wooden birds at which he batted, and which he could not destroy. Thibaut struggled with his jerky strength as his comrades fell.

  At last the surviving bandits ran. Thibaut sank to his knees in his armor, wearing the treasure they’d come for. He knelt among his dead.

  “It wasn’t demons,” he says to Sam. “Nor manifs or Nazis. Just Parisians.”

  I am going, he told himself at last when he stood up from his grieving, his slaughtered friends around him. This was what did it, not the unseen catastrophe of his leaders. This little local murder. I’m done. The mission is vacant.

  He set out.

  I’m done with this dream.

  —

  Sam says, “I can help you get out.”

  Thibaut asks himself why he isn’t just expending the last charge of these insurrectionary nightclothes to smash through the siege and run, to leave the ruins of Paris for the ruins of France beyond. Are these really the city’s last days?

  “It’ll be a beautiful book,” he says at last.

  “You can help,” she says. “I can show you how to get out. But first, I need more pictures.”

  He wants the book. He realizes it with slow wonder. He wants to help with it. Thibaut has learned to obey such intuitions.

  Too, he wants to know what Sam’s real mission is.

  He grips the exquisite corpse’s cord. He does not know what it is he does, nor how, to have it follow him, but his heart accelerates. If you’d been with us, he thinks at it. In that forest.

  —

  “That SOE woman,” Sam says. “You said she could make the Vélo do things.”

  “Well, she was trying.”

  “The rumors outside are there’s all kinds of experiments. Not just art stuff: occult, too.” She looks into the sky. “Allies working on manifs. Nazis on manifs. Allies trying to crack demons. I heard that some manif version of Baudelaire was sacrificed by Nazis.”

  Thibaut says nothing. He suspects that she’s speaking of the Baudelaire of the Marseille deck, Genius of Desire. The sibling of which he carries.

  “When I was coming in,” Sam says, “I kept hearing that more Teufel Unterhandleren are on their way in.”

  These are the military specialists that cajole the pained demon refugees, with knick-knacks and incantations, according to the terms of contested treaties. They work in close conjunction with Paris’s fascist church, poring over relics and books of banishment, under plaster crucified Christs wearing swastikas, with devils painted at their feet staring up in resentful thrall. “For the glory of God,” Alesch has declared, “we crook his cross, and in his name we command not only his still-risen angels but those angels fallen.”

  His order barters with devils. Alesch’s priests are not exorcists: they are anti-exorcists.

  “I kept hearing all these stories,” Sam says. “About new factors. About something called Fall Rot.”

  Chapter Four

  1941

  “I can’t believe it.” Mary Jayne Gold’s voice shook. “After the trouble he gave me? He brings someone here we’ve never even met? Has he lost his mind?”

  “I don’t know,” said Miriam Davenport. “You saw him—he’s in a queer way.”

  Mary Jayne put her finger to her lips as Fry stomped back. He glowered at the two women. Davenport was dark and short, Gold tall and fair. An absurdly perfect juxtaposition, standing to either side of the dark wood table by bundled herbs and half-drunk bottles of wine.

  “I’m sorry but it is not the same,” he said at last. “I heard you. Mary Jayne, I’m sorry but Raymond is a criminal. He broke in here.” Mary Jayne stood with her hands on her hips. “Whereas this Jack, this Jack Parsons…he’s just a lost young man—”

  “You have no idea who he is,” said Miriam.

  “He was so excited about that Colquhoun woman,” Fry said.

  “Whom you also don’t know,” said Miriam.

  “No. But André told me about her. And Parsons is interested in the movement…I’ve only asked him to join us for supper.” Now he beseeched. “I think he’ll amuse André and Jacqueline.”

  “Wasn’t it you who told me we can’t be inviting every lost soul?” Davenport said.

  “Something’s coming to an end,” Fry said. “Don’t you feel like that?” He was startled by his own words.

  He was the man who had chosen to vacate the villa himself rather than compromise it, being as he was an object of attention. The man who, in agonies, forbade his good friend Victor Serge from lodging there, deeming the communist dissenter too great a danger. Now it was Fry bringing home foundlings.

  “Parsons said he was a rocket scientist,” Miriam said.

  “So he’s a fantasist,” said Fry helplessly. “He’s harmless.” He barely knew what he was saying. “I think it’ll be all right. It’s only supper.”

  —

  The room in the old house was beautiful and fading. Jack Parsons looked out to the sprawling grounds, where a woman and a man chatted by the pond. Another man had climbed into a tree, was removing pictures from its branches, where they had been hung in strange exhibition.

  Parsons had come to France by trains and planes, planes and boats, the pulling in of favors, the paying of bribes. And at moments, when everything had militated against him, when the timing was quite wrong, the official obstruction too implacable, when his urgent, incompetent wanderings had seemed doomed, he had asserted his will.

  As many times before, in the U.S., he had flexed the muscles of the mind. As Aleister Crowley had taught him. As he whispered spells when the rockets he made went up. He was used to carefully, intensely interpreting after all such actions, to see if or how the world had responded, in if any subtle ways.

  Now in Europe, no such assiduous parsing of aftermaths was necessary. Here the effects were astonishing.

  He would speak commands to the universe. He would say to the train guard, “You’ve already seen my ticket,” would strain to make himself slightly invisible to police, to make time drag enough for him to make his connections. He would have been delighted with an instant’s uncertainty, a stuttering of wheels on the track. Instead the officials would usher him to a fine seat. The police would release their grip, and stand back to let him run. The train might lurch right back to where it had been three or four seconds before.

  Do what thou wilt. Magic was welling up here from below. It made him feel exhilarated but sick. Its deployment made him queasy. Maybe I can even read minds here, he thought.

  When he crossed the border, a few miles out to sea, when he came into French
waters lugging his cobbled and home-tooled equipment, Jack had felt the presence intensify. Something in France was quite wrong or quite right.

  He had, of course, nudged Varian Fry’s mind, tweaked him to let Parsons visit.

  “Let’s give this one more try.” Jack spoke, in his absence, to Von Karman, his boss and friend.

  Theodore Von Karman took Jack to work in the Aeronautical Laboratory. Von Karman indulged and liked him, forgave him what he thought eccentricities with respectful good humor. Mostly they talked rockets and math, at first. Politics was to come. A disciple in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Jack was not accustomed to admiring the mass of humanity: Von Karman he could not fail to.

  Von Karman had looked sick as news had started to emerge from Europe. “It is trouble,” he said.

  It was Von Karman who told Jack, without knowing that he was doing so, that there were words in Prague that might alter the storm of Europe. A presence he might invoke. Von Karman thought it only folklore. Jack, though, knew the truth, because of his other teacher. Von Karman nurtured his mathematics, the rigor of his rockets; Crowley nurtured his spirit, taught him of the other laws. One told Jack of the power in Prague; the other gave him the insight to know that it was, indeed, power.

  Now Jack could not get to Prague. But now, too, there was this not-coincidence, this house of Surrealists. They, too, were faithful to revolt and objective chance. Perhaps in their presence he might find, speak words close in transmogrifying power to those he had originally sought and planned to articulate.

  “They want to set free the unconscious,” Fry had told him. “Desire.” He shrugged. “You’d have to ask them,” he added, but Parsons did not think he would. With that gloss he understood why Colquhoun would be in both this group and in Crowley’s order. Their aims were the same.

  I’m leader of the Agape Lodge. Anointed by the great wizard himself, the young scientist was Crowley’s chosen. I’m an apostle of freedom. Like these guys. Here to help my friend.

  Jack Parsons was attuned to the unholy. He could tell there was magic from Hell in the ground of France, that someone was raising. He was certain that it could help him.