The Last Days of New Paris

Von Karman liked that joke. He repeated it often. It pleased Jack, too, but for different reasons. Von Karman was right: to make life was to speak aleph where there was silence, to add one to a zero. Jack read everything he could find on Loew, the efforts and triumphs of that devout man.

Between the trajectories of rocket falls, rainbow-shapes and gravity, between his imaginings of the screamings across the sky that he would send the Nazis, Parsons, with exhausting care and thoroughness, developed an arithmetic of invocation, an algebra of ritual. A witching plan.

I’ll go to Prague, he decided at last. He checked his proofs. I’m an engineer: I’ll make an engine. I’ll do the math in the grounds of the ghetto. I’ll bring back this golem.

He could do it. He looked forward to its swinging steps, its thick clay hands cleaving storm troopers, its purging of the city. That would shake up this war. Screw it, he thought. I’ll do it for Theo.

And now here he was trapped in France by war and devil-science. In the room Fry had lent him, before descending, Jack Parsons had unwound the jury-rigged engine he had constructed to make his mathematics actual, to unfold the world. Batteries; sensors; an abacus; wires and circuits; transistors.

Colquhoun, Crowley’s most desired and this guy Breton’s collaborator, she had to be a gate, right?

But look. Look around this absurd room in this violent halfway town. Jack was among fops and artists. His time had been wasted.

Chapter Five. 1950

Thibaut has always said “Fall Rot” in English: an injunction; two verbs, or a noun and a verb; seasonal decay.

“Case Red,” Sam says. “It’s German. I think it’s something big.” She watches him closely. “You’ve heard of it,” she says.

In the economy of rumor, the partisans of Paris are always listening for stories of their enemies. Of any mention of Rudy de Mérode, of Brunner, of Goebbels and Himmler, of William Joyce or Rebatat or Hitler himself. Myth, spycraft, bullshit. “What do you know about someone called Gerhard?” Thibaut says. That name he has heard once, and once only, when the dying woman whispered it to him.

“Wolfgang Gerhard.” She says it slowly. “Nothing. But I’ve heard of him. A Wehrmacht deserter sold me that name at the border. He said it’s turning up in the chatter. Along with Fall Rot. Which I’d already heard of, Fall Rot, from a man in Sebastopol. That’s a bad place now. Full of devils.” She smiles oddly.

“He’d been into Paris, this guy, and got rich on what he brought out,” Sam says. “He didn’t care about Ernst, Matta, Tanning, Fini, he just wanted things. He had one of you-know-who’s telephone, that was…” Her hands describe it. “A lobster. With wires. If you held it to your ear it would grab for you and get its legs tangled in your hair, but it could tell you secrets. It never said anything to me. It didn’t like me. But this guy told me it once whispered to him, ‘Fall Rot’s coming.’ ”

“That’s why you’re here,” says Thibaut. “To find out about this Fall Rot. Not to take photographs.” He feels betrayed.

“I am here for photographs. For The Last Days of New Paris. Remember?” She is playful in a way he doesn’t understand. “And to find a few other things out, too. A bit of information. That’s true. You don’t have to stay with me.”

Thibaut beckons the exquisite corpse through the dust of ruins. Sam flinches at its approach. “They’re chasing you,” Thibaut says. “You got a picture of something that got the Nazis worked up enough to track you. What is it has them so worried?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I have a lot of pictures. I’d have to get out to develop them to figure it out and there’s more to photograph first. I can’t leave. I don’t know what’s going on yet. Don’t you want to know about Fall Rot?”

What Thibaut has wanted is out. To outrace those who follow, now maybe to find whatever image in Sam’s films holds some secret Nazi weakness, to use it against them. But to his own surprise something in him, even now, stays faithful to his Paris. He’s buoyed by the thought of Sam’s book, that swan song, that valedictory to a city not yet dead. He wants the book, and there are pictures to take. When he tries to think of leaving, Thibaut’s head gets foggy. It’s madness, but Not yet, he thinks, not before we’ve finished.

The book is important. He knows this.

He imagines an oversized volume, bound in leather, with hand-drawn endpapers. Or another, rougher edition, rushed out by some backstreet press. Thibaut wants to hold it. To see photographs of these walls on which the crackwork whispers and scratch-figures etched with keys shift; of the impossibilities he has fought, that now walk with him.

—

Are they hunting images, then, as well as information about Fall Rot? Whatever else, Thibaut decides, yes, they are.