The Last Days of New Paris

“Devils and Nazis don’t work together well. They have to collaborate, they’re bound together, there are treaties, whether they like it or not. That’s what magic is. And the S-Blast or something locked the gates. I would love to call for backup, as you put it, but the routes are closed, so my employers sent me in. Because I’m from here, so I’m not trapped. And I know this world better than any of them.”

She opens one hand in front of him, and it’s covered in frost, and then in darkness. “I’m black ops, yes, and I’m in deep. Double. I am on the OSS books but that’s cover, Thibaut. I work for an agency colloquially known as Bad Marrow. And neither you nor I could ever say its real name, not with our mouths. It’s the secret service of the underplace.

“I’m a spy for Hell.”

—

Thibaut and Sam follow the exquisite corpse down smoke-filled hallways. Young German soldiers appear and raise their weapons.

Sam takes two out with witch-blasts, Thibaut a third with an ill-aimed burst of bullets. His heart shakes him. The manif ends another attack with a Surrealist assassination: the man at whom it stares sits suddenly down, undoes his buttons, looks into his body, now a cage filled with angry crows, and is still.

I’m working with Hell. Thibaut is giddy, not ashamed. Does he despise Hell, he thinks, more than he does the imperialists? Few of the devils want to be in Paris. They obey the Nazis truculently, where they do at all.

“You’re not one of them,” he says to Sam. He follows her through the hallways. He does not ask her why she might work for these infernal powers.

“Hell doesn’t want to risk open war with Germany,” she says. She glances around a corner and beckons him on. “A human agent’s deniable. There’s something happening here, but we don’t know what, even beyond the arrondissements, hexes block us seeing.”

“Why were you in the city?” Thibaut says. “Why’ve you not been here all along?”

“Because of Les Deux Magots. We had to get what was there. It was a buffoon who thought he was one of ours who did all this, somehow, you know. In ’41. An American idiot named Parsons. Then a thief called Couraud. We thought the machine might still be the key.” She shakes her head.

“When was it you saw the brekerman before?” Thibaut grabs Sam’s arm. He stops her in the corridor and makes her face him. “That head. In your film. And that photo of the huge arm. And the elephant Celebes was there…”

“Christ,” she says, in English. “Remove your hand from me. What I saw,” she says slowly, “was the brekerman that killed your teachers. That picture was the aftermath.”

“You were there? The ambush?”

Thibaut knows what ended Iché and the others now, in what shape the Nazi onslaught had come. That stamping marble man, then unbroken. His blood moves fast. “What happened?”

“To the statue?” Her stare is steady. “Celebes happened. One of the last of your people left alive must have invoked it, or attracted its attention. It came slamming in to fight. Just…too late. It smashed that brekerman apart, though. Is that a consolation? You saw what it did.”

For a moment Thibaut imagines. The elephant manif under a microclimate of swirling dark, sending walls crashing, stamping down the ruins with its four squat feet. Leaping and whipping with its trunk, rage withering the Nazi stone.

“Why were you there?” he says.

“It never would have worked,” she says, with what is almost care. “The Nazis knew about it. That’s why the brekerman was waiting. They’d infiltrated your cells. It was an ambush.”

“How do you know? How did you know to be there?”

For a moment she does not answer. “When I was in the eighth,” she says. “In their offices. You asked what pictures I had that got them chasing me? Well.” She shrugs. “I think they think I know more than I do, but I did see plans.”

Thibaut is breathing very fast. “For this counterattack? Did you say anything? You said nothing, didn’t you? You should have told them.” His voice rises until he is shouting into her face. “Did you try to tell the Main à plume what was coming?”

“I didn’t know what was coming, just that something would.” She is quite calm. “That was the point. I had no time to tell anyone, anyway.”

How many times had she said to him she wanted a picture of everything?

“You didn’t know what was coming but you hoped,” he says. “You didn’t tell them because you thought it might be this thing that’s here, this Fall Rot, that came. That you might find out what it was.”

“Yes,” she says. “I did. There was nothing I could’ve done to stop your comrades losing their lives in their idiotic attack. The Free French watched, you know that? They were there, too. But they didn’t intervene. I couldn’t have saved your people even if I’d wanted to but I thought maybe I could find out what this ‘Secret Invocation’ was the documents referred to. Sounded like they were having trouble with it. Imagine my surprise when it was just a manif.” Just Breker’s vulgarity.