The Last Days of New Paris

Since the S-Blast the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window have been industrial silos, tall and fat, crudely hammered metal. One seeps bloody vinegar from imperfect seals: the air they enter is full of its sour stink, the ground below wet and fermented. Through the wire-strengthened windows of the other tank is a thick pale swirl. It’s said that it contains sperm. Thibaut has often begged the sky to bomb it.

He barely sees it now. The manif takes them right, through the tangled wasteland of the gardens behind the church, and there at the furthest tip of the islet the Pont de l’Archevêché back over to the south side and the little bridge to neighboring Île Saint-Louis are both gone. Nothing but rubble in the river. There is nowhere to go.

They turn. The mud shudders. “They’ve found us,” Thibaut says.

—

Out of the darkness by the buttresses of Notre-Dame comes a dreadful thing.

“Christ,” Sam says. She lifts her camera. She looks almost exultant with fear. Thibaut shouts without words at what approaches.

A walking jag, a huge, broken white shard.

Aryan masterlegs, muscled in that Reich way, kick up dirt. At the height of a third storey is a waist, above which is what is left where a great body broke, a crack and a massive headless ruin. The right side is a crumbling stone slope, the left the remains of the torso that ascend to an armpit where one stump of biceps still swings.

At the thing’s feet scurry Wehrmacht and SS men. A familiar jeep in a gust of scab-colored smoke.

“What in hell is that?” Thibaut shouts. Fall Rot? he thinks. Is this staggering splinter the project?

“Nothing in Hell,” Sam says. “It’s a manif. A brekerman.”

“Breker?” shouts Thibaut. They got one of his to move?

Arno Breker’s looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures stare with vacant stares of notional mastery. Ubermensch twee, even in Paris they have all always been stubbornly lifeless, Thibaut has thought. But these legs are stamping closer.

Once it must have been a white marble man taller than a church, clapping stone hands; now it is cracked and split and half gone and still walking. Can living artwork die? Can it live, before it does?

“They got it upright again,” Sam whispers.

“Again?”

The camera clicks. The ruins of the brekerman rock back as if the sound has buffeted it. It steadies itself with its half-arm, comes forward. It stamps down trees and begins to run.

The soldiers follow, rifles up. The jeep chutters. In it is the driver they saw before and the man in full church regalia, two others in plain clothes. This time Thibaut can see the priest’s heavy, lined, debauched face, and he knows it, from news reports, from posters.

“Alesch,” he shouts. Alesch himself. The traitor-priest, head of the city’s demon-tilted church.

The foot soldiers run at Thibaut and Sam and the exquisite corpse. The broken Nazi manif comes.

Thibaut fires a useless shot. The stone legs raise a stone foot. He gazes dumbly up at it and sees that the thing is most lifelike on its underside, all folds, verucas, gnarls. It stamps. He leaps with pajama-aided bravery. His skirt parachutes and the filthy fabric flaps. Bullets hit him but the cotton hardens.

He shoots midair. Not at the broken manif but past it, and over the infantry, at the jeep behind them all. The driver jerks and spurts blood, and as the car veers the exquisite corpse reaches from somewhere and hauls Thibaut back from danger, taking his breath all out of him. It huffs, and the two closest soldiers fold away with wails into nothing, leave pencil sketches of themselves where they were standing. Thibaut sees the jeep spin and spray earth and slam with an ugly burst of metal into the church’s side.

Those brekerman legs run forward and with a great swing, kick the exquisite corpse in the center of its pile-up self. The Surrealist manif staggers mightily and sways and sheds bits of itself. Things wheel in the black sky.

Sam is behind an outcropping of wall, pinned by fire and blasts of Gestapo magic. She is aiming her camera, again, and Thibaut sees that what goes between it and the soldiers is a jet of bad energy. She takes their picture and blows them away. She takes a picture of the brekerman legs, too, but they brace against the impact and stand tall and come for her.

Coldly, suddenly, watching the broken brekerman withstand and the onslaught of the soldiers, Thibaut knows that even with whatever it is Sam deploys with her lenses, despite the wordless solidarity of the exquisite corpse, they will lose this fight.

From his pocket he pulls the Marseille card. And plays his hand.

—

The Siren of Keyholes becomes. Between Thibaut and the soldiers and the staggering Nazi manif is a wide-eyed woman, in smart and dated clothes. She is not like a person. The lines of her are not lines of matter.