The Last Days of New Paris (8 page)

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.”

“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.

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.