The Last Days of New Paris

Others hurl themselves at him, and his cotton nightclothes are suddenly as tough as metal. He swings his arms. The pajamas grip Thibaut, make him an instrument, propel him fast and hard. A wood-and-taxidermy predator reaches him, biting, and Thibaut’s clothed arm comes down and snaps its spine.

He stands between the woman and the wolf-tables, snarling as bestially as the pack. The tables inch forward. With a burst of creative chance Thibaut shoots the closest right in its snarl and sends it down in blood and sawdust.

There’s shouting from the forest. He can see two, three figures in the trees. SS uniforms. A man in a dark coat, calling in German. Quick! Be careful! The dogs—

A burly officer fires right at him out of the shadows. Thibaut howls. But the shots ricochet from his chest. The soldier frowns as Thibaut brings his own rickety old rifle up and shoots and misses of course and reloads while the man still watches, stupid and slow, and Thibaut fires again, this time with disponibilité, and puts him down.

Wolf-tables bite. A Nazi cracks a whip, to rally them, to gather them, and Thibaut snatches as the leather swings. It slaps and wraps his hand and makes it numb but he grips. By him the woman drops, pushes her fingers into the topsoil: the furniture that menaces her twitches and backs away. Thibaut yanks the whip-holder toward him by his weapon and punches him back again, sending him flying into the dark.

The Germans hesitate. The pack howls. Thibaut smacks a tree hard enough to make it quake, showing his pajama-ed strength. The attackers retreat, into the forest, back out of sight, toward the corridors of Les Invalides. The humans call as they run, and the little tables follow the sound, baring their teeth as the darkness takes them.

—

“Thank you,” the woman says. “Thank you.” She is gathering her fallen things. “Come on.” She speaks French with an American accent, a thin and cultured voice.

“What in hell was that?” Thibaut says. The man he just hit is dead. Thibaut goes through his pockets. “I’ve never seen anything like those things before.”

“They’re called wolf-tables,” the woman says. “Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner. We must go.”

Thibaut stares at her. Eventually he says, “Brauner’s have fox parts. Those tables were bigger than any I’ve seen, and their fur was more gray. They didn’t look like foxes. It’s as if they were crossbred. The soldiers called them ‘dogs.’ And they were doing what they were told. And…” He looks away from her. “As I say, I’ve never seen any manifs, including wolf-tables, like them before.” And they came right at me. They didn’t hesitate.

After a moment the woman says, “Please excuse me. Of course. I misunderstood.”

“Wolf-tables are scavengers,” Thibaut goes on. “One shot should have dispersed them.” They gorge themselves, trying to fill stomachs they don’t have, clogging up their throats till they vomit blood and meat and spit and then eating helplessly again. “Wolf-tables aren’t brave.”

“Of course you know manifs,” the woman says. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to be rude. But please…We have to go.”

“Who are you?”

She is a few years older than he. Her face is round with high flushed cheeks, her hair is dark and short. She looks at him from where she stoops among the roots.

“What are you doing here?” Thibaut says, and then instantly thinks he knows.

“I’m Sam,” she says. He takes her satchel. “Hey,” she says.

He upends the bag.

“What are you doing?” she shouts.

He scatters a camera, canisters of film, several battered books. The camera is not old. He feels no manif charge. These are not surreal objects. He stares at them. He was expecting scavenger spoils. He was expecting old gloves; a stuffed snake; things that are dusty; a wineglass half melted in lava and embedded in stone; bits of a typewriter; a barnacled book that has rested underwater; tweezers that change what they touch.

Thibaut had thought this woman a battle junkie, a magpie of war. Artifact hunters creep past the barricades to seek, extract, and sell stuff born or altered by the blast. Batteries of odd energies. Objects foraged out of the Nazis’ quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

He almost has more respect for his enemies than for the dealers in such goods. In the satchel Thibaut expected to find a spoon covered with fur; a candle; a pebble in a box. He blinks. He folds and unfolds the Nazi’s whip.

—

Sam checks the camera for damage. “What was that for?” she says.