The Paris Deadline

by Byrd, Max

• ISBN13: 9781618580122
• ISBN10: 1618580124
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-16
• Publisher: Turner Pub Co

Summary

From bestselling historical novelist Max Byrd comes a new novel set against the dramatic backdrop of Paris in the Jazz Age-a fascinating suspense tale interwoven with rich historical detail. Paris, 1926. Newspaper reporter Toby Keats, a veteran of the Great War and the only American in Paris who doesn't know Hemingway, has lived a quiet life-until one day he comes into possession of a rare eighteenth-century automate, a very strange and somewhat scandalous mechanical duck. Highly sought after by an enigmatic American banker, European criminals, and the charming young American Elsie Short, the duck is rumored to hold the key to opening a new frontier in weapons technology for the German army, now beginning to threaten Europe once more. Haunted with his nightmarish past in the War, Toby pursues the truth behind the duck. From the boites of the Left Bank to the dark prehistoric caverns of southern France, The Paris Deadlineis a story of love, suspense, and mystery in a world stumbling toward catastrophe.

Excerpts

I was living in a one-room garret, a fourth-floor walk-up not much wider than a coat hanger, on the disreputable rue du Dragon in the 6th arrondissement.

And no, to get the question out of the way at once, I didn’t know Hemingway, though it was Paris and the year was 1926 and every other expatriate American in the city seemed to trip over his feet or lend him money as a daily occurrence. (Years later I did stand behind him in the mail line at American Express and listened to him denounce Woodrow Wilson in very loud and Hemingwayesque French, which had the slow, clear, menacing cadence of a bull’s hoof pawing the ground.)

The only literary person I actually did know, besides Gertrude Stein’s landlord, was the journalist who sat on the other side of the desk we shared at theChicago Tribuneoffices on the rue Lamartine. 

This was a slender, amiable young man named Waverley Root. He was twenty-six that year, the same as the century, five years younger than I was and therefore not quite old enough to have been in the war. Root was a remarkable person who wrote English like a puckish angel and spoke French as if he had a mouthful of cheese, and a decade or so later he was to find his true calling as a celebrated food critic for theNew York Herald. The last time I saw him he wore nothing but yellow shirts and had gotten so fat he appeared to have inflated himself in one push of a button, like a rubber raft on a ship.

But in those days celebrity was far over the horizon, and Waverley Root was simply another vagabond reporter who had washed up on the cobblestoned shores of the rue Lamartine in search of a job. He had gone to Tufts. I had gone to Harvard. He had worked for theNew York World. I had worked for theBoston Globe. He drank anisette, and I drank Scotch, and this small divergence in personal character accounted for the fact that on the chilly, rainy Monday morning of December 7, he was leaning against my chair, nursing a French hangover (as he nicely put it) rigid, classical, and comprehensive.

"Toby,” he said, “I will never drink alcohol again.”
“I know it.”
“An owl slept in my mouth last night. My teeth turned green. My poor eyes look like two bags of blood.”
“They look like two bags of ink.” I typed “30”—newspaperese for “The End”—on a sheet of yellow paper and swiveled to hand it, literally, through a hole in the wall. 

The Paris edition of theTribuneoccupied the top three floors of a rambling nineteenth-century structure that had not been designed with modern journalism in mind. Apart from the Managing Editor’s sanctum behind a frosted glass door, our editorial offices consisted of one long City Room, which held a collection of sprung leather chairs, a long oval table covered with typewriters and ashtrays, and a string of smaller rewrite desks like ours, crammed off to the sides and in the corners. All practically deserted, of course, at this time of the morning. Bedlam arrived later, with the regular reporters, at the civilized hour of noon.

The composing rooms were downstairs (we lowered copy by force of gravity, through a chute in the middle of the floor) and the printing presses were in the basement. Our copyeditors had been banished to an interior room mysteriously inaccessible to us except by going down two flights of stairs and up again three, hence the hole in the wall. More than one visitor, seeing a disembodied hand waving vaguely through a slot in the plaster, had been put in mind of the House of Usher.

“And there is no health in me,” Root said and sat down heavily on his side of the desk.
“It’s nine thirty-one,” I said. “She told us to be there at ten.”
Our urchinish French copy boy plopped a thick stack of rubber composing mats on my blotter, murmured “Mon cher Papa,” as he did every morning, and sidled away, smoking a torpedo sized Gitane, to the dark little basement cubby he inhabited down among the rolls of newsprint. He called me “Old Dad” because even at thirty-one, my hair was mostly silver-gray, almost white, like a policeman’s helmet. Many people, especially women, assumed sympathetically that something had turned it that way in the war, and if they were young and attractive, I had been known not to correct them.  In fact, it had simply happened overnight when I was nineteen, and for some obscure reason, possibly modesty, probably vanity, I had never tried to dye it.