The Last Days of New Paris

  “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.”

  Chapter Eight

  1941

  Raymond Couraud smelt of sweat. He scowled in the heat and wiped his thin face on his shirt. He walked fast through country that, he supposed, a person might believe was simply spring fields and roads, little villages, churches, the mumbled greetings of locals. That was not the truth. There were the squadrons of Vichy militia. The border of the occupied zone, where the patrols became those of German soldiers.

  Raymond did not know what it was he had taken from Parsons’s room. It was contraband, though, something with no business in this world. The trembling little box made his skin prickle and his eyes dry. It had taken next to nothing to push open the door, to watch the American’s stupid face wheezing in sleep. Raymond had been gone before dawn. He blew a kiss down the road behind him. Sorry, Mary Jayne. Raymond could always sense a thing worth money. He recognized a commodity.

  He passed churches, their weathervanes twisting too fast. A dead bird was embedded in the bark of a tree. Raymond knew an offering when he saw one. One night he heard what sounded almost like cows. But there was too much irony in the lowing: something was mimicking cattle. There were things in France now he did not want to understand.

  His job was to take this thing, whatever it was, to Paris, and sell it to anyone who hated Nazis. He would go to Britain. He would cross the channel with his money and join the Free French. He would kill as many Germans as he could, and he would do so a rich man.

  —

  Paris: swastikas and Germans. Raymond walked past Nazi officers chatting in a pavement café just as if he were a harmless man. He crossed between bicycles under the Arc de Triomphe, watched a woman flirting with a young German officer and imagined killing them both. Shooting the man first, once in the head, then several in his dead body to make it dance while the treacherous woman screamed.

  There were not many places more dangerous for Raymond than Paris, but he was not afraid. He paid for a cheap room near the Tuileries. On a burning hot day he entered a chemist by avenue des Ternes and waited seemingly engrossed away from the counter among the packets and powders until the last of the other customers left. He turned and smiled at the shopkeeper.

  “Oh my God,” the man breathed. “Killer.”

  “Relax, Claude,” said Raymond. “I just need some contacts.”

  “I don’t have any! It’s too risky right now…”

  “Please. I don’t believe you. And even if it’s true, I need you to get back into it and spread the word. I have something to sell. I’ll be at Les Deux Magots. Usual cut if anyone comes through you.” Greed took hold of his old contact’s face.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Killer,” Claude pleaded.

  “I don’t know. Truly. You know the rumors.” He met the man’s gaze. “I’ve been down south, man. You know what it’s like down there? Now I know there’s a market in oddities. Let’s not play fools. Ever since those fuckers came, things’ve…” He shrugged.

  Since the Nazis. Since their black sun experiments, since whatever it was that was rising started rising. There was a market in books and objects that did not behave as objects should. Raymond had not believed until he saw Parsons’s battery.

  “Put out the word,” he said.

  —

  For two days, no one came. Raymond was patient. He sat in the café with his wares in a bag. He worked out who were the criminals, the waiters, the artists. The Resistance. Were the inhabitants of the villa cursing him? Doubtless. He felt scornful affection for Mary Jayne.

  On the third evening a big man in a painter’s smock sat opposite him and asked how much. Raymond quoted and the man got up and left without a word.

  He came back the next night, as Raymond had thought he would. Raymond walked through the bead curtain at the rear of the room. He put a bill in a waiter’s top pocket so the man would walk away. Raymond waited at the back of the kitchen. Implements swung on hooks. The big man came to him.

  Raymond opened his bag. Nestled in scrunched-up newspaper was Parsons’s box. The man’s eyes went wide.

  “May I touch?” he said. Raymond shook his head. Chefs pretended not to see.

  “You can see it’s something,” Raymond said. “I don’t know what and I don’t care. You want it?”

  “I want it,” the man said. “Is there room for negotiation?”

  Of course there was, of course that was how this always worked. But there was something in the man’s hesitation, in the slowness of his answers, the exact tenor of his agitation, that made Raymond say, “No.”

  There was a commotion from the café. Raymond slung the bag onto his shoulder and the other man looked back at the doorway and Killer knew that he had made a mistake. He had time to wonder if it was Claude who had sold him out, as an officer in dark leather swept the beads aside and entered.

  Raymond moved.

  Someone shouted, and waiters and cooks started to run. Raymond grabbed his supposed buyer by the hair and yanked him behind a thick spice cabinet.

  He heard calls in German and French. The man in his grip wriggled and Raymond smacked him in the face and pushed a pistol into his temple. The box crackled. Raymond Killer Couraud glanced out from behind the cabinet at SS men. There was one in plain clothes. His hands were up and glowing.

  “You can’t get out,” someone called.

  Raymond shoved his prisoner into view, pistol to the back of his head. “Shoot and you hit your boy,” he shouted.

  “We don’t want to hit anyone. We just want what you’re selling.”

  The man in the long coat was pouring off light. Raymond shielded his eyes. The man was a tracework of glow, his veins lit under his skin. His hands glimmered. Pots and pans rattled. He crooned and icicles formed on the ends of his fingers. Scum tapping power.

  Killer fired. An officer went down and there was a rapid burst of return fire and bullets smashed into the wall and took out his prisoner as Killer ducked back. It was freezing cold suddenly, and everything was out of control, and everything was too fast, and Killer fired without aiming, at where he hoped the glowing man was attempting his bastard invocation.

  That box was humming so loudly the bag seemed to sing. It shook. Something soared up and over and there was a thud as it landed inside, nestled by the battery, like a fat apple. “Nein!” someone shouted. “Nicht…”

  It was a grenade. Raymond grabbed for it. He scrabbled.

  Here came streaking jets of force out of the bad-magic man’s hands, power, words, occult light, all mixing with the buzzing box, and the grenade as it began to explode, and in the burst and black-powder and hermetic flare of all of that the stolen battery itself, the pump, the engine full of Surrealist dreams, went up.

  Jack Parsons’s box became a warhead.

  Nothing could hold it.

  A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.

  It unfolded.

  A whimper, a shriek, the burr of insects’ wings, the tolling of a bell, a city-wide outrushing, an explosion, a sweep and stream and a nova, megaton imaginary, of random and of dr
eams. That winnowing wind of Arnaud, of Lefebvre, Brassaï, Agar, Malkine, Aline Gagnaire and Desnos, Valentine Hugo, Masson, Allan-Dastros, Itkine, Kiki, Rius and Boumeester and Breton and all of them in all the world and all that they had loved and all that they’d ever dreamed up. A fucking storm, a reconfiguring, a shock wave of mad love, a burning blast of unconscious.

  Paris fell, or rose, or fell, or rose, or fell.

  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 w
ere 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.”