The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Eight

1941

Raymond Couraud smelt of sweat. He scowled in the heat and wiped his thin face on his shirt. He walked fast through country that, he supposed, a person might believe was simply spring fields and roads, little villages, churches, the mumbled greetings of locals. That was not the truth. There were the squadrons of Vichy militia. The border of the occupied zone, where the patrols became those of German soldiers.

Raymond did not know what it was he had taken from Parsons’s room. It was contraband, though, something with no business in this world. The trembling little box made his skin prickle and his eyes dry. It had taken next to nothing to push open the door, to watch the American’s stupid face wheezing in sleep. Raymond had been gone before dawn. He blew a kiss down the road behind him. Sorry, Mary Jayne. Raymond could always sense a thing worth money. He recognized a commodity.

He passed churches, their weathervanes twisting too fast. A dead bird was embedded in the bark of a tree. Raymond knew an offering when he saw one. One night he heard what sounded almost like cows. But there was too much irony in the lowing: something was mimicking cattle. There were things in France now he did not want to understand.

His job was to take this thing, whatever it was, to Paris, and sell it to anyone who hated Nazis. He would go to Britain. He would cross the channel with his money and join the Free French. He would kill as many Germans as he could, and he would do so a rich man.

Paris: swastikas and Germans. Raymond walked past Nazi officers chatting in a pavement café just as if he were a harmless man. He crossed between bicycles under the Arc de Triomphe, watched a woman flirting with a young German officer and imagined killing them both. Shooting the man first, once in the head, then several in his dead body to make it dance while the treacherous woman screamed.

There were not many places more dangerous for Raymond than Paris, but he was not afraid. He paid for a cheap room near the Tuileries. On a burning hot day he entered a chemist by avenue des Ternes and waited seemingly engrossed away from the counter among the packets and powders until the last of the other customers left. He turned and smiled at the shopkeeper.

“Oh my God,” the man breathed. “Killer.”

“Relax, Claude,” said Raymond. “I just need some contacts.”

“I don’t have any! It’s too risky right now…”

“Please. I don’t believe you. And even if it’s true, I need you to get back into it and spread the word. I have something to sell. I’ll be at Les Deux Magots. Usual cut if anyone comes through you.” Greed took hold of his old contact’s face.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Killer,” Claude pleaded.

“I don’t know. Truly. You know the rumors.” He met the man’s gaze. “I’ve been down south, man. You know what it’s like down there? Now I know there’s a market in oddities. Let’s not play fools. Ever since those fuckers came, things’ve…” He shrugged.

Since the Nazis. Since their black sun experiments, since whatever it was that was rising started rising. There was a market in books and objects that did not behave as objects should. Raymond had not believed until he saw Parsons’s battery.

“Put out the word,” he said.

For two days, no one came. Raymond was patient. He sat in the café with his wares in a bag. He worked out who were the criminals, the waiters, the artists. The Resistance. Were the inhabitants of the villa cursing him? Doubtless. He felt scornful affection for Mary Jayne.

On the third evening a big man in a painter’s smock sat opposite him and asked how much. Raymond quoted and the man got up and left without a word.

He came back the next night, as Raymond had thought he would. Raymond walked through the bead curtain at the rear of the room. He put a bill in a waiter’s top pocket so the man would walk away. Raymond waited at the back of the kitchen. Implements swung on hooks. The big man came to him.

Raymond opened his bag. Nestled in scrunched-up newspaper was Parsons’s box. The man’s eyes went wide.

“May I touch?” he said. Raymond shook his head. Chefs pretended not to see.

“You can see it’s something,” Raymond said. “I don’t know what and I don’t care. You want it?”

“I want it,” the man said. “Is there room for negotiation?”

Of course there was, of course that was how this always worked. But there was something in the man’s hesitation, in the slowness of his answers, the exact tenor of his agitation, that made Raymond say, “No.”

There was a commotion from the café. Raymond slung the bag onto his shoulder and the other man looked back at the doorway and Killer knew that he had made a mistake. He had time to wonder if it was Claude who had sold him out, as an officer in dark leather swept the beads aside and entered.

Raymond moved.

Someone shouted, and waiters and cooks started to run. Raymond grabbed his supposed buyer by the hair and yanked him behind a thick spice cabinet.

He heard calls in German and French. The man in his grip wriggled and Raymond smacked him in the face and pushed a pistol into his temple. The box crackled. Raymond Killer Couraud glanced out from behind the cabinet at SS men. There was one in plain clothes. His hands were up and glowing.

“You can’t get out,” someone called.

Raymond shoved his prisoner into view, pistol to the back of his head. “Shoot and you hit your boy,” he shouted.

“We don’t want to hit anyone. We just want what you’re selling.”

The man in the long coat was pouring off light. Raymond shielded his eyes. The man was a tracework of glow, his veins lit under his skin. His hands glimmered. Pots and pans rattled. He crooned and icicles formed on the ends of his fingers. Scum tapping power.

Killer fired. An officer went down and there was a rapid burst of return fire and bullets smashed into the wall and took out his prisoner as Killer ducked back. It was freezing cold suddenly, and everything was out of control, and everything was too fast, and Killer fired without aiming, at where he hoped the glowing man was attempting his bastard invocation.

That box was humming so loudly the bag seemed to sing. It shook. Something soared up and over and there was a thud as it landed inside, nestled by the battery, like a fat apple. “Nein!” someone shouted. “Nicht…”

It was a grenade. Raymond grabbed for it. He scrabbled.

Here came streaking jets of force out of the bad-magic man’s hands, power, words, occult light, all mixing with the buzzing box, and the grenade as it began to explode, and in the burst and black-powder and hermetic flare of all of that the stolen battery itself, the pump, the engine full of Surrealist dreams, went up.

Jack Parsons’s box became a warhead.

Nothing could hold it.

A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.

It unfolded.

A whimper, a shriek, the burr of insects’ wings, the tolling of a bell, a city-wide outrushing, an explosion, a sweep and stream and a nova, megaton imaginary, of random and of dreams. That winnowing wind of Arnaud, of Lefebvre, Brassaï, Agar, Malkine, Aline Gagnaire and Desnos, Valentine Hugo, Masson, Allan-Dastros, Itkine, Kiki, Rius and Boumeester and Breton and all of them in all the world and all that they had loved and all that they’d ever dreamed up. A fucking storm, a reconfiguring, a shock wave of mad love, a burning blast of unconscious.

Paris fell, or rose, or fell, or rose, or fell.