The Last Days of New Paris

What came for them out of the woods? What had tracked their incompetent scoutwork, using them to find this prize?

Not even Nazis in uniform. Not animals from art, nor howling transplants from Hell. Murderous banalities. French men and women, living by theft, killing by surprise. They jumped into sight, making what they must have thought were savage sounds.

Thibaut’s first poem-enhanced punch crushed a bandit’s face. Bullets pattered against him. For all his new strength, though, he saw in anguish that his comrades were dying, because he was still clumsy in these clothes.

He leapt an enhanced leap and overshot by many meters and fell down with the fight behind him. A ghastly comedy. A man knifed Bernard and another shot Brigitte in the back while Thibaut staggered and tried to come for them.

Two ambushers fell to Main à plume shots but the assassins had managed to filch a couple of Surrealist techniques, too, and as Thibaut watched, Élise cried out and was turned to cloud. He ran to gather her but she was vapor, and gone. Patrice was eaten by a flock of wooden birds at which he batted, and which he could not destroy. Thibaut struggled with his jerky strength as his comrades fell.

At last the surviving bandits ran. Thibaut sank to his knees in his armor, wearing the treasure they’d come for. He knelt among his dead.

“It wasn’t demons,” he says to Sam. “Nor manifs or Nazis. Just Parisians.”

I am going, he told himself at last when he stood up from his grieving, his slaughtered friends around him. This was what did it, not the unseen catastrophe of his leaders. This little local murder. I’m done. The mission is vacant.

He set out.

I’m done with this dream.

—

Sam says, “I can help you get out.”

Thibaut asks himself why he isn’t just expending the last charge of these insurrectionary nightclothes to smash through the siege and run, to leave the ruins of Paris for the ruins of France beyond. Are these really the city’s last days?

“It’ll be a beautiful book,” he says at last.

“You can help,” she says. “I can show you how to get out. But first, I need more pictures.”

He wants the book. He realizes it with slow wonder. He wants to help with it. Thibaut has learned to obey such intuitions.

Too, he wants to know what Sam’s real mission is.

He grips the exquisite corpse’s cord. He does not know what it is he does, nor how, to have it follow him, but his heart accelerates. If you’d been with us, he thinks at it. In that forest.

—

“That SOE woman,” Sam says. “You said she could make the Vélo do things.”

“Well, she was trying.”

“The rumors outside are there’s all kinds of experiments. Not just art stuff: occult, too.” She looks into the sky. “Allies working on manifs. Nazis on manifs. Allies trying to crack demons. I heard that some manif version of Baudelaire was sacrificed by Nazis.”

Thibaut says nothing. He suspects that she’s speaking of the Baudelaire of the Marseille deck, Genius of Desire. The sibling of which he carries.

“When I was coming in,” Sam says, “I kept hearing that more Teufel Unterhandleren are on their way in.”

These are the military specialists that cajole the pained demon refugees, with knick-knacks and incantations, according to the terms of contested treaties. They work in close conjunction with Paris’s fascist church, poring over relics and books of banishment, under plaster crucified Christs wearing swastikas, with devils painted at their feet staring up in resentful thrall. “For the glory of God,” Alesch has declared, “we crook his cross, and in his name we command not only his still-risen angels but those angels fallen.”

His order barters with devils. Alesch’s priests are not exorcists: they are anti-exorcists.

“I kept hearing all these stories,” Sam says. “About new factors. About something called Fall Rot.”

Chapter Four. 1941

“I can’t believe it.” Mary Jayne Gold’s voice shook. “After the trouble he gave me? He brings someone here we’ve never even met? Has he lost his mind?”

“I don’t know,” said Miriam Davenport. “You saw him — he’s in a queer way.”

Mary Jayne put her finger to her lips as Fry stomped back. He glowered at the two women. Davenport was dark and short, Gold tall and fair. An absurdly perfect juxtaposition, standing to either side of the dark wood table by bundled herbs and half-drunk bottles of wine.

“I’m sorry but it is not the same,” he said at last. “I heard you. Mary Jayne, I’m sorry but Raymond is a criminal. He broke in here.” Mary Jayne stood with her hands on her hips. “Whereas this Jack, this Jack Parsons…he’s just a lost young man—”

“You have no idea who he is,” said Miriam.

“He was so excited about that Colquhoun woman,” Fry said.

“Whom you also don’t know,” said Miriam.

“No. But André told me about her. And Parsons is interested in the movement…I’ve only asked him to join us for supper.” Now he beseeched. “I think he’ll amuse André and Jacqueline.”