The Last Days of New Paris

Two men appear, in aprons and surgical masks. They heft a grinder and a chain saw.

“No,” Thibaut says, but he cannot issue orders backward through the screen.

The men silently fire up their tools. The exquisite corpse watches with its clutch of eyes. Its spider face tries to scuttle. Whatever holds it holds it well. The men bring their blades down.

The audience in the Rex is shouting. The machines touch where the components meet. Up sprays something too pale, too thick to be blood, as they take the manif apart.

The vivisectionists shove through the impossible body. The exquisite corpse reknits and billows out sawdust or shreds of cotton and the men cut faster, against the recalcitrance of Surrealist matter. Down go the saws.

And the corpse is nothing. Three everyday nothings. Remnants. Inanimate.

To dark. Light. More priests, scientists, someone carrying the parts of another manif. A man nods at the camera — he has no mustache, but Thibaut recognizes the dark-haired man who got away with Alesch.

The film blebs and the man is gone. For seconds there is only light. Then for an instant the screen is full of a new figure, a huge and lurching shadow with a terrible face, coming for the camera.

—

The Rex is tumult. The image is frozen. There are only those eyes like bowls of shadows, mouth like a tusked hole. It looms.

“That’s not a manif,” says Sam quietly, startling Thibaut amid the chaos. He did not hear her descend from the booth. “That’s a devil. But something’s wrong with it.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.” She hands him a few ends of film, and he holds them up and sees tiny exquisite corpses ripped into their components by machines, bleeding from tentacular toes, back-bent legs or mountain legs or twisted scarf legs, concentric-ring torsos with butter-knife arms, their lolling heads hammer and a sickle or knight’s helmet or a pair of bloodied kissing lovers. Exquisite executions.

“We know they’re learning to control manifs,” he says. They look at each other while the customers of the Rex holler. “The whip for the wolf-tables. The woman on the Vélo. She wasn’t on their side but they must know each other’s techniques. And now they’re using some manifs for sacrifices.”

“And there are devils,” Sam says. “They’re building up to something. You saw that man? Just before the last thing? The man from the jeep?”

“Maybe that’s Wolfgang Gerhard,” he says. “Of the Fall Rot project.”

“He might be calling himself that,” she says. “But that’s not his name. I recognize him and I know his name. His name is Josef Mengele.”

—

“How do you know all this?” Thibaut says at last. He is angry with himself for asking. “What does all this mean?”

Sam speaks quickly as the noise in the cinema increases, the Free French and others shouting about what they’ve seen. “What it means is some kind of plan. Mengele’s a specialist. He experiments. On human life, it was. And now he’s come in. In to Paris, to work with Alesch. Mengele’s not religious! He must need a specialist in devils. They’re collaborating. And with the K Commission, too. Manifs and devils and the changing of life.”

Thibaut says, “Fall Rot.”

“We have to get out of here,” Sam says. “Any second now they’ll close the door to this place and plan an idiotic, bound-to-fail all-out assault.”

“So,” Thibaut makes himself say. “Bring help.”

He meets Sam’s calm gaze. He can see her considering how to respond. No one can hear them in the uproar. “Come on,” he says, “stop playing. Just get help.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“You think I can’t see you?” he says. “That camera is not a camera. How do you know so much about all this? About the devils. Because you liked witches when you were a kid? Come on. You’re OSS.”

She looks very calm. If she is an agent of the American state, then she’s the ally of these Free French, and his enemy. Yet here he still is. She needs him for something still, he knows, and perhaps he needs her.

“Special Operations, yes,” she says, after a long moment. “That camera is a camera. But it has other uses, too.”

“You lied to me.”

“Of course.”

He blinks. “The woman on the Vélo was British, SOE. She was trying to find out about the Fall Rot program, too?”

“There’s a lot of us here,” she says. “She’d done well. We need to know what this program is. We can’t let them proceed.”

Thibaut turns from her in disgust and she hisses, literally hisses like an animal.

“Don’t you dare,” she says. “You wanted to come with me.”

“What about the book?” he says. He can barely believe his own words. He waits for her to laugh.

But she says, “What about it? The pictures are real. The book’ll be real. We’re putting together something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Perhaps,” she says with cold politeness, “you might join?”

“You’re my fucking enemy…”

“Yes.” A spy. He knows she understands him. She knows exactly how he opposes her.