The Last Days of New Paris

There was a pleasure in some of the process and accoutrements, relics of wizardry that had embarrassed the Enlightenment. Other necessities, though, stank of clericalism, and the partisans were disgusted that they were efficacious. It was with distaste that Thibaut and Élise took a bag of crucifixes, bottles of holy water, bells, to Father Cédric. Élise made a joke — she, the rabbi’s granddaughter, carrying such things. The old priest performed desultory benedictions and they paid him in cigarettes and food.

“Turn the other cheek, Father,” said Élise at his expression. “Find some Free French if you want willing sheep to patronize. Until then, this is a marriage of inconvenience. You want to walk? There’s the door.”

He was safer in their company, and they in his. An uncomfortable symbiosis. The Surrealists despised his calling, and he them for their militant atheism, but everyone knew it helped to have a priest perform certain absurdities of his trade if it was demons you had to fight.

“Why?” Thibaut asked Élise when they left again. “Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.”

“Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.

However they might mock and bully him, Thibaut’s crew had a degree of unfriendly respect for Cédric: whatever else the man was, he was Resistance. In these streets, his very tradition had become unlikely dissent. Unlike so many clergy, he had refused to make any peace at all with the new Church of Paris, or with its leader, Robert Alesch.

For months before the reconfiguration, the Abbé Alesch had been a well-known preacher against the Nazis. A very few intimates had known, too, that he worked as part of Jeannine Picabia’s clandestine network, réseau Gloria. He’d been courier and confidant, able, as a priest, to pass through the zones, carrying messages and contraband. His Gloria comrades called him “Bishop,” and he heard their confessions.

He was a double-agent. In the S-Blast’s aftermath, he had sold his comrades to his Nazi paymasters, and almost every one of them had died. Alesch, V-man, informer, paid not thirty pieces of silver but twelve thousand francs a month.

Two austere activists, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and her lover, the Irishman Beckett, had escaped from the carnage of Gloria. They had gotten word out of Alesch’s perfidy, but he had not cowered. Rather, he had inaugurated a theology of betrayal. A Catholicism of collaboration — with the German invaders, and with those invaders from below. Rome denounced him, and he denounced Rome back. He made himself Bishop in his own Führer-funded church.

On their hatred for Alesch, Cédric and the Surrealists could agree.

—

At twilight the fighters had ascended to the roofscape, their guns loaded with that sardonically blessed ammunition. In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish — not to mention Nazis — so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.

Thibaut was ready for manifs. He had his expertise, he could perform cathexis, or use a weapon itself manifested against them.

Humans, of course, could be killed with almost anything.

The partisans picked like wood-gatherers through copses of chimneys. Among the old bricks, dead crows, slates, and gutters, Thibaut saw pendulums and figures made of string. The detritus of the surreal, evanescent unconsciousnesses. There were doors at roofs’ edges. Dim things walking too close, at which he would not look.

Then the faint sound of screaming. They approached warily. With the sky huge around them, the Main à plume reached the source of noise. They stared down into a warehouse’s cracked skylight as if it were a scrying pool.

Far below, a man in robes spasmed suspended in the air above the chamber’s dusty floor. He thrashed amid monsters.

A trumpet-nosed beast with fish eyes swung a cudgel in brutal percussion. A legless thing with bat wings thrashed him with its spiked and suckered tail. Rag doll animals chewed the man’s fingers and gouged him with their horns.

“My God,” Virginie whispered. “Come on.” The resistance fighters grit their teeth in disgust and quickly readied weapons. A lizard-like doll-thing snarled, a hairy pig-faced assailant leered between assaults.

“Wait,” Thibaut managed to say. He held up his hand. “Look. Look at his clothes.”

“Get out of the way, Thib,” said Pierre, aiming through the glass.

“Wait. He moved just like that a moment ago,” Thibaut said. The man screamed again. “Listen.” Moments passed, and the distinct wavering cry repeated. “Look at the devils,” Thibaut said. “Look at him.”

The floating man’s eyes were unfocused and as flat as concrete. There was a precision to his sand-colored robes, his beard. He wailed and writhed and his cries grew neither louder nor quieter and the blood pattered unendingly beneath him in a pool that did not spread.

“Those demons,” Thibaut said at last, “are too healthy. They’re repeating like a scratched record. They aren’t demons. And what they’re torturing isn’t a man.”

—