The Last Days of New Paris

Don’t discuss anything with those you don’t know. The Gestapo are watching, the Kundt Commission is in town. But there was something in Parsons’s voice.

—

The Café Pelikan was crowded. Refugees, intellectuals, a smattering of Marseille scum.

“What do you know about Surrealism?”

Jack Parsons scratched his chin. “Art, right? Not much. Is that what she does? I know Colquhoun from kind of another context. Mr. Fry, listen.” He leaned forward. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m en route to Prague.”

“You can’t get to Prague,” Fry said. “I still don’t know how you even made it here.”

“I just…made my way. And I have to keep going. I have a job to do. This goddamn war. It’s like you said: in the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”

Did I say that? “I’m just a clerk…” Fry said.

“Come on. I know you run this committee. This Emergency Rescue Committee.” Fry looked quickly around them, but Parsons was unperturbed. “Everyone in the office was talking. I know you have some place in the suburbs, and you look after people, artists, try to get them out—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I’m going to level with you.” Parsons was gabbling. “I want to go to Prague because if I get there, there are some words I think I can make do things they wouldn’t normally do. But now everyone’s saying I can’t get there. So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”

Fry smiled. “I have a friend who would agree,” he said. “ ‘Objective chance,’ he’d call it.”

“Uh huh? See, that person in your magazine is connected to exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to do. Ithell Colquhoun.” He made it sound like a bell ringing. “What’s your connection?”

“One of my friends knows her,” Fry said. “The one who shares your view on coincidence, in fact. She visited him last year, I believe, in Paris. It was he who made this pamphlet. I believe she’s a painter and a writer. I haven’t even read this yet.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” said Parsons. “Who made that?”

With an effort, Fry did not answer. “How do you know Colquhoun’s work?” he said instead.

“A kind of mentor of mine knew her. Spoke real highly of her, too. That’s why you got me excited. Here’s what I’m wondering. Like I said, there’s something I wanted to do in Prague. Now I’m stuck here. But what if that’s okay? This guy I got a lot of respect for, well, he has a lot of respect for Colquhoun. So if she’s one of these Surrealists, maybe they have the same kind of ideas he does. And I do. So maybe I want to talk to them. To your pals.”

“My friend who knows her is called André,” said Fry, after a long silence.

“Mine’s called Aleister.”

“André Breton.”

“Aleister Crowley.”

Chapter Three. 1950

“Thibaut,” the young scout had said. “They told me where you’d made your way. That you run things here.” The woman was exhausted and bedraggled but uninjured, and smiling to have made it through dangerous neighborhoods to find him.

He did not see or hear her arrive at the door to the cellar where he was working, until she called him by name, gently enough not to alert his comrades above. He reached for his gun at the sight of her but she tutted and shook her head with collegial imperiousness. “I’m Main à plume,” she said, and he believed her. That it was by some technique from the canon, some re-uttered poem in a novel context, that she had gained unseen entrance. He put his rifle down.

She spoke again and did not raise her voice.

“I came a long way, down rue des Martyrs, from the eighteenth, Montmartre,” she said. “There’s too much shit between here and the eighth. I’m glad I found you.”

“I don’t run things,” he said.

“Well. Seems you do. It’s you they wanted me to speak to, anyway.”

“They?”

“They knew where you’d be,” she said. “They — we — want you to join us. There’s a plan.”

She was vague, but almost brittle with excitement. Just beyond the edges of Paris’s Nazi-controlled center, the comrades were amassing.

Thibaut had fingered the card in his pocket. “Come on,” he said, “why do they want me?”, and watched her shock when he told her at last that he was protecting the ninth.

Thibaut coils and uncoils the whip he took. He winds it densely around itself to make it a baton. He slaps it against his palm.

“This shouldn’t work,” he says. “They can’t control manifs. They shouldn’t have even been there. No one should go into a forest.” He looks abruptly down, right at the pajamas he wears, about which Sam has said nothing. He has to gather himself a moment. “ ‘Confusedly,’ ” he says, “ ‘forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’ ”

“Desnos,” Sam says. “And that’s not a warning. That’s why I went in.”