The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  Static came rushing through them all. Breton frowned, Lamba laughed, Varo showed her teeth. Everyone looked at Jack Parsons.

  And he gasped as they opened their papers because he had already understood what the game was, how it worked, what it would unveil. The artists flattened out what they held, and what they had drawn, in planless collaboration, were impossible things.

  Figures neither evolved nor designed. Coagula of fleeting and distinct ideas and chance. Parsons’s battery clicked. The room began to fill with something unseen.

  These weren’t demons they’d drawn, not the goats and beasts of Hell. They were objective chance, chimeras for this era.

  Jack saw a figure with the head of a singing bird, its body a clock with the pendulum swinging, its legs a mass of fish tails deftly done in pen and ink. A sketched-out bear face on a coffin, walking on clown’s feet. A mustached man, rendered as if by a child, his body a buxom leopard’s, rooted like a plant. Exquisite corpses, tasting new wine.

  The artists laughed. The needles on the gauges swung as Parsons’s battery filled. He could feel energies coiling out of these heads, these drawings, this room, into his wires.

  It wasn’t just drink making people giddy now. Not just the exquisite corpses they drew, nor any other game. It was the sense of something ending, a shutter closing. A noose—yes—tightening. A last song.

  They played again, made beasts of collective unconscious. It grew darker with every round. Outside the trees waved their twig fingers as if clutching for art. They gave up wood memories. Parsons could feel the images that had hung from them slip into his machine.

  He blinked rapidly, glimpsed things fleet past him, glimmers, presences as if from the Surrealists’ papers, their games. No one else looked up.

  The room was filling with history, with this ebbing movement, of Surrealism, of Marx and Freud and coincidence, the revolution of cities, liberation, and the random. Knowledge poured out of everyone and left them still knowing, and drunker, their defenses down.

  And in the hills where he hid, Hans Bellmer shook. His dolls and his inkwork charged the battery. Marc Chagall dreamed and the needles spasmed. On her island, Claude Cahun looked at Suzanne Malherbe with utter urgency and they shared anger and love, a determination. A thread stretched from each of them to the Villa Air-Bel.

  Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but who were the spirit of this spirit, the inspirations behind and unsung practitioners of this ferocious art, echoed in France. Rushed in. Through the glass. Into Jack Parsons’s battery.

  The older work of renegades, the poems of Aragon before his capitulation to the man of steel. The heroes of the past breathed dead breath into the machine, the singer of Maldoror, Rigaut, the ghosts of Rimbaud, the ruminations of Vaché, which never went away, had never gone and never would and which were always and forever part of France, all flared up like tracer bullets. And came down again, plugholing into a collection.

  Into the machine.

  —

  The box hummed like a wasp; otherwise the room was quiet. People came slowly back from wherever they had been.

  Everyone blinked except Raymond. He stared at the box.

  Mary Jayne sighed. “Did you enjoy yourself?” she said.

  Parsons laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. His voice shook. “It was terrific. Thank you for having me.”

  Breton closed his eyes. “This,” he said in French, “was an excellent night.”

  “We’re glad you came,” said Varian Fry to Jack.

  “Me, too. More than I can say.”

  —

  Jack listened to French night birds. Here he was in the moonlight with a battery full of distillate, of this overlapping thing, this Surrealism. That was a freedom right there.

  Parsons knew how to take a substance, render it, burn it and use it.

  What can I power with this? he thought. He would build a freedom machine. Home, he thought. I’ll tell Von Karman. We’ll build a new rocket. Armed with this. We’ll blow that fucking Reich away.

  —

  In the early morning Miriam and Mary Jayne sat in the garden drinking ersatz coffee, full of shyness they could not explain. They prodded the grass with their toes.

  They heard Jack Parsons’s first shout and looked up. He raised his voice and bellowed again and hammered on the window with his fist.

  They ran up the stairs and entered his room to see him tousled and undressed and screaming. Aghast, throwing clothes out of his suitcase, looking for the battery.

  Which was not there.

  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 figur
es 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, an
d 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.