The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Three

1950

“Thibaut,” the young scout had said. “They told me where you’d made your way. That you run things here.” The woman was exhausted and bedraggled but uninjured, and smiling to have made it through dangerous neighborhoods to find him.

He did not see or hear her arrive at the door to the cellar where he was working, until she called him by name, gently enough not to alert his comrades above. He reached for his gun at the sight of her but she tutted and shook her head with collegial imperiousness. “I’m Main à plume,” she said, and he believed her. That it was by some technique from the canon, some re-uttered poem in a novel context, that she had gained unseen entrance. He put his rifle down.

She spoke again and did not raise her voice.

“I came a long way, down rue des Martyrs, from the eighteenth, Montmartre,” she said. “There’s too much shit between here and the eighth. I’m glad I found you.”

“I don’t run things,” he said.

“Well. Seems you do. It’s you they wanted me to speak to, anyway.”

“They?”

“They knew where you’d be,” she said. “They—we—want you to join us. There’s a plan.”

She was vague, but almost brittle with excitement. Just beyond the edges of Paris’s Nazi-controlled center, the comrades were amassing.

Thibaut had fingered the card in his pocket. “Come on,” he said, “why do they want me?”, and watched her shock when he told her at last that he was protecting the ninth.

Thibaut coils and uncoils the whip he took. He winds it densely around itself to make it a baton. He slaps it against his palm.

“This shouldn’t work,” he says. “They can’t control manifs. They shouldn’t have even been there. No one should go into a forest.” He looks abruptly down, right at the pajamas he wears, about which Sam has said nothing. He has to gather himself a moment. “‘Confusedly,’” he says, “‘forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’”

“Desnos,” Sam says. “And that’s not a warning. That’s why I went in.”

“Was it worth it? To see legendary creatures?” He intends to shame her with the question, with his bitter tone, but she smiles and raises her camera.

In the remains of the Lycée Buffon, the old classrooms are empty but for dust and the carcasses of birds. Thibaut points his rifle at Sam. She does not cower. She places her bags by her feet, like someone standing on a railway platform.

“Listen, American,” he says. He tries to make his voice rough. “I’m Paris. Main à plume.” Liar, he thinks. I shouldn’t even be here. “I’ve fought devils, manifs, Nazis, collaborators, and I’ve killed them all.” The Marseille card is in his pocket, that secret counter of rebellion. “Why were they coming after you? I told you. I’ve never seen wolf-tables like that, or manifs obeying Nazis.”

“No? What about the aeropittura?” she says.

He blinks. “They hardly count,” he says. Actual fascist manifs, such as those rushing futurist plane-presences, remain very few. “And they don’t obey anyone, fascist or others, they just… lurch about…”

“Fauves?” she said. “The negligible old star?”

For a short time, art-shepherds from the Vichy curators of “Jeune France” had tried to direct the garish strutters walked out of Derain’s canvases, the confusing and melancholy point of gray light self-made from lines written by a Vichy enthusiast. The presences, though, were uncontrollable and underwhelming. Thibaut has heard nothing of the crude bright fauvist figures in a long time, but the star is supposed to still haunt the streets some nights, emanating bewilderment.

“The wolf-tables are Surrealist!” Thibaut shouts. “You can’t compare them to a poem by some stupid American, or fascist scrawls, or Derainist crap…”

“I’ve seen worse than those tables following orders,” Sam says. “A huge thing ripped right out of art. Don’t kid yourself the Reich can’t manifest things sometimes.”

Thibaut narrows his eyes. “You’re wrong,” he says.

She shrugs. “If all my films were developed, I could show you.”

“How do you know so much about all this?”

“You’re not a good interrogator. You’re moving on to new questions before I’ve answered the first ones. Why were they after me? Remember?”

“So why were they?”

“No, let’s skip forward, in fact. I know about all this because it’s my job. I came in weeks ago. I’m from New York. I’m a photographer, and a curator.”

“You came through the barricades?” Thibaut says. “From outside?”

“Come on. There are ways. You know that. Will you point the rifle somewhere else? I’ve done a decent enough job of staying out of sight, I thought. But when I was in the eighth I realized those officers were following me. With their… dogs. I went south through the Grand Palais. They must have followed.”

Does she understand what she’s saying? Boulevard Haussmann, the avenues des Champs-Élysées and de Friedland, Montaigne and George V: these and the neighboring streets of the sixteenth and seventeenth, around the Arc de Triomphe, are the Nazis’ redoubt.

There are others throughout the city, of course, like the isolated forces of the tenth he’d seen scattered by the Vélo, cut off from each other, or connected by guarded lines. But the headquarters of the SS is on avenue Hoche; the Hotel Majestique is where the military high command still exercises rump power. Rue Lauriston is the headquarters of the Active Group Hesse, French Gestapo auxiliaries, the Carlingue. Those streets are patrolled by officers and the most reliable of their devil-allies.

The whole zone is on military and demonic lockdown. The few Parisian civilians within serve its microeconomy. If manifs intrude there they are pushed out or ended with relentless force.

Very rarely, one resistance group or other might infiltrate, carry out some raid—a theft, the liberation of comrades, a spectacular act of violence. The last time was years ago, and it was Paris itself the rebels had attacked.

De Gaulle had been predictably aghast by the Arc’s changed configuration. When the dreams of the blast passed, the great structure was sedately on its side. The inside of its stone curve was wet, streaming with self-generated urine. A giant’s pissoir.

It delighted Thibaut and all the Main à plume. To the Free French it was grotesque. They sent bombers undercover past the torture rooms, barracks, and ministries where trapped functionaries made strange fascist plans. When dawn came the Free French soldiers triggered their ordnance and with a great blurt of smoke and fire exploded the sideways Arc, showering the streets with rubble and piss.

The stones still lie where they landed, now dry. De Gaulle said he was salvaging Paris’s honor.

It had been a blind, Thibaut knows, to detract attention from the failure of their earlier assault at Drancy, the camp outside the siege and the old city’s arrondissements. The closed, mysterious horseshoe citylet repelled the Free French, to their shame.

And now this tourist claims she walked in, walked out, of that controlled zone.

“I was taking pictures,” she says.

“Of what?”

“Everything. The last thing I saw was the Propagandastaffel.” The censors’ building, where fascist authorities oversee what remains of propaganda and art in a city where art hunts. Which is a great deal. She opens a bag and pulls out a canister of tightly coiled film. “To keep a record.”

She hands him one and nods permission. Thibaut unspools it a little, lets a streetlamp outside the window shine through it. He squints at the tiny images. Occluded streets in negative. Tanks by the pyramid in Parc Monceau, firing in formation at a great sickle-headed fish, a Lam manif swimming violently in the air. A humanish pillar. Thibaut looks closer. It is a woman made up of outsized pebbles, lying down on grass, her legs languorously in the water.

Sam opens her notebook for him to see her neat English handwriting.

“A book,” she says. “The Last Days of New Paris.”

He is quite still. “What?” he manages at last.

“I’m here to put all this down.” She looks at him quizzically. “You don’t think this can remain, do you? It can’t. It shouldn’t. But it’ll still be a tragedy when it ends. Don’t you think this city deserves marking?”

Thibaut unrolls a few more pictures, nervous to see the images of places he has never seen, in his own city. That he is leaving behind. There is so much of it. It is a world. Can it really be finished?

He looks closely at what she is showing him—the materials of a eulogy. These are his places.

“It’s hard to develop them here,” Sam says. “I’m out of chemicals. The rest will wait till I’m out.”

Negatives of soldiers and devils, machine-gun stations, ranks of vehicles, the Nazi zone. Embryos of a book. A first and last travelogue. “We need this,” she says. “For when it’s all done.”

He looks at tiny offices with swastikas on their walls, their desks bursting with paper. Close-ups of those papers. How did she get in?

Here: the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones. He squints. Le Chabanais, the walls of the great building dissolved, light glimmering through the resin that has set around suspended women and men and the opulence and billowing cloths and gilded fittings within. A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing with fleeting human face ooze-growing up boulevard Edgar Quinet. Thibaut frowns at the sight of an arm, the remains of a white statue, a broken human face six or seven feet high, lying with stern expression in a pile of foundations. Plumes of stone-dust.

Then the sweep of a gray flank. A house-sized curve. Thibaut blinks. “That’s Celebes,” he says.

Sam takes the film back. “Enough,” she says.

“It was. You saw Celebes.”

The most famous manif of Paris, the elephant Celebes. Like a gray-ridged stockpot the size of a warehouse, under a howdah of geometric shapes, bull-horned trunk swaying like a small train.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It was something. It was fast. I took a picture and ran. It was only a glimpse.”

“You’re here to take pictures?” he says eventually, as if he’s sneering. As if he hadn’t gazed at them. He looks longingly at the film she holds. “To take pictures for a book?”

The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring, nor black and glowing darkly. It is not the shining rubbing of a great coin, smudged as if the sky was buckled paper. It looks everyday today.

Thibaut and Sam trek through the fifteenth. Sam says she’s never seen these streets, but she moves confidently, checking her books. They duck undercover at the sound of firing or demonic burning, the wrong rhythms of a manif’s hooves. They pass over a coming-together of railway lines. Not knowing why, Thibaut lets her lead.

There are sounds below them. In the shadows under the bridge, black smoke hangs and discolors the ground. Sam stares. Thibaut watches its drifts. He sees that it shifts against the wind. That it takes shapes.

Fumages, smoke figures wafting in and out of presence. They bicker soundlessly over the body of a man: they rip his clothes and stain him with soot and lift him in snagging gusts.

The presences stop. They drop their corpse. They look slowly up at Thibaut and Sam, smoke heads rising. He sees hesitation in the manifs, as they watch him without eyes. He can see them overcome it, that something has changed and it will not hold them.

He says, “Move.”

Sam fumbles with her camera as she starts to run. He tries to remonstrate, to speed her up, he reaches for it but she slaps him away with startling strength. Air shifts as they stumble into the fourteenth. Sam is behind him now and Thibaut turns and sees that she is kneeling in a sudden wind. She holds her camera up with one hand, the other on the ground.

The fumages have risen. They are on the bridge. His heart accelerates at the sight. They move, half in half out of coagulation, a roiling mass of smuts. They reach, and come for her.

Before he can step toward them, try to make them flinch again, the wind kicks up. It squalls right through them and the fumages struggle and start to wisp apart. They cannot coalesce. They strain to stay, but it blows hard and they dissipate in shreds and their smoke faces silently scream as they are snatched away.

Thibaut puts his hand over his eyes while the buffeting air subsides. He turns to her at last and Sam’s face is blank.

“Did you get them?” Thibaut says. She looks uncomprehending and he points at her camera. She still holds it up.

“Oh. I think so.”

It smells like tar on the rue Vercingétorix. Sam leads them to a black door.

Thibaut uses the strength his nightclothes give him to pull the remains of a car apart. It is so rusted its metal barely screams. He piles the pieces up into a hind. Sam unfolds a tripod and camera, points it at the door of 54 rue du Château. Mucky gray curtains cover the windows.

“So,” Thibaut says. “What’s here?”

“I’ve got a good number of manifs already,” Sam says. “The horse head. The stone woman you saw. I’ve been to the Trocadero.” The demolished music hall came back the day after the S-Blast. It contains lions. Sam grows excited as she continues her description. “But I need as many as I can get. All of them. If I’m right,” she says, “something very particular gets born here tonight.”

“How do you know?”

She points at her books. “I read between the lines.”

When she was very young, she tells him, she wanted to be a witch. Everything she says makes Thibaut feel callow. He is sure she is wondering why he keeps her company.

She wants to tell him how she came to be caught up by the art that now makes Paris what it is.

“First it was monster pictures,” she says. “Devils and bogeymen. Witches, alchemy, magic. Then from there to here. I’m hardly the first to come that way. Think of Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry? Flamel and Breton? You’ve read the ‘Second Manifesto.’ ‘I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism.’”

“That’s not what he meant by that,” Thibaut says.

“He said he wanted to find the Philosopher’s Stone!”

“And he said he wanted to lose it again.”

They look at each other. Sam even smiles.

“From devils to Bosch to Dalí,” she says. “From him to all this. To the manifestos. That’s why I’m here.”

She hesitates, then continues quickly. “When information started to come out after the blast, information about the blast, I had to come. You just don’t know what it was like, to see that footage.”

“No. I was too busy being the footage.”

“I’m not suggesting it was easier for you.” She looks away, at the corpse of a crow. “I was in the gallery.” She sounds as if she is trying to recall a dream. “Everyone was screaming at all these crazy, jerky pictures coming out of Paris, all the manifs. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ And I knew exactly what they all were. I knew the poems and the pictures and I knew what I was looking at.”

Since the blast, curators have been Virgils. Their monographs and catalogues now almanacs.

“The S-Blast,” Sam says slowly, “took instructions.”

She finds something in a copy of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and holds it open for him. Thibaut reads, “‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’”

“They made suggestions,” she says.

He’s read this before, a long time ago. He reads it again: provocations, once fanciful, now true, descriptions of Paris, from years before the explosion.

“I’m lucky you heard my shots,” Sam says when he sits back. “Thank you again.”

“Did you find phantoms in the forest?” Thibaut says. Her calm energy is beyond him. “‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh’?”

“Yes,” she says. “And I took their picture. They’ll be in the book. I want the ruins. Soldiers. The Resistance.” She takes a picture of him in his nightclothes.

“Is it not too dark?” he says.

“Not for this camera.”

Thibaut breathes deep and considers. A heavy hardback. Photographs, eulogy, the nights and days of Paris after the blast. Who will write the text?

“So the Nazis saw you taking pictures and came after you,” he says. “With those wolf-tables. They think you’re a spy. What was it you photographed?”

Sam examines her camera. “Mostly what I want is the manifs,” she says. He thinks he sees distaste when she says that, alongside her eagerness. “I’m not leaving until I catch them all.”

They listen to the hooting of predators and the calls of prey astounded to exist. From behind the ripped-up car a feathered sphere the size of a fist rolls into view, sending up dust. It opens. In its center is a single, staring blue eye.

Sam stares back at it.

“It’s eating,” Thibaut says. “They live on looking.” It feels good to tell her things she does not know. “You can catch them and make them fat if you show them bright colors. Then we roast them.” The meat was greasy with everything they’d seen. A horde of the things rolls into view behind the first. Sam takes pictures as they regard her.

Thibaut decides he will stay with her a while.

Mosquitoes come. “I heard about a cell of your people,” Sam says. “A big one, maybe the main one. That there was a plan. I heard they were ambushed.”

Thibaut says nothing and he doesn’t look up. He continues to divide his food. He has bread and smoked meat. Sam has chocolate she says she bartered from an American secret agent on some mission of murder.

“They’re all in here,” she says when she sees him looking at it. “This place is crawling with that kind. They’re on their own in here.”

“This secret agent can’t have been very secret,” Thibaut says.

She laughs. “He was at first. They always tell you in the end.”

When the Germans sealed the city, the U.S. government, like every, expressed its outrage. And, also like the others, was relieved. That the manifs and their energies—and, or, the devils—would be contained.

“But you can’t keep this in,” Sam says. “Best you can do is slow it. Things have started happening.”

She tells him of the North Africa campaigns, the dragged-out misery of the Pacific, Europe after the rain. But what Thibaut wants to know most is what she can tell him about Paris. Because perhaps he has been too close to see. The mission is vacant.

The glow of the nearest streetlight comes up, then wanes. An animal lands on a windowsill, a winged monkey with owl’s eyes. It watches them.

From somewhere there is a loud crack and it flies instantly away. The building groans like a ship.

Something is creaking within, something knocks and approaches. Something descends behind the door.

“Fold over paper,” Sam whispers. “Fold it over and what might come out?”

Step step step. Sounds approach them, beyond the wood. A scratching and the slow slow click of a lock. The door swings open. Inside it is darker than the street.

Thibaut does not breathe. With a careful jerking step, something comes out of the shadow.

A towering, swaying thing. Three meters tall. More. It blinks with alien gravity.

It stands like a person under a great weight, swaying on two trim legs. At its waist it is made of lines, offcuts of industry. A tilted anvil-like workbench, bits and machine pieces higher than Thibaut’s head. He stares up at a pole of fetish objects. A clamping bench on engine parts on patient human feet. At the top of it all, an old man’s too-big bearded face looks down at him with obscure curiosity. In his beard, a steam train the size of a cudgel, its chimney venting smoke into the bristles. The old man wears a larva on his head. Some limb-long bright caterpillar, gripping an outsized leaf. It wriggles and the leaf-hat flutters, hedgerow chic.

A random totality, components sutured by chance. It stands. Thibaut stares at this thing. It looks back at him, as the first manif he ever met, its cousin, did through its helmet grill, years before.

Sam’s camera clicks. “Exquisite,” she whispers. For the first time, Thibaut hears fear in her voice. “Exquisite corpse.”

An ugly percussion shocks them out of awe. There are shouts and shots. Out of the dark, German soldiers come running.

Thibaut ducks behind the remains of the car and fires.

Behind the attacking Nazis a jeep is rocking over the rubble toward them. How long have these soldiers been waiting?

Thibaut fires as they come and tries to focus and counts and calculates what he can see. There are too many. His heart slams. Too many. He holds his breath and reaches into his pocket, for the card, this time, he thinks, in time.

But the exquisite corpse is striding into the road. The soldiers gape and fire. It raises its limbs and all the German bullets, even those misaimed, curve in the air, fly right into it, stud its body with resonant sounds.

Some of those shots were at Thibaut.

The soldiers have nets and strange engines. He can feel them. A lasso whips and snares the manif. In the jeep Thibaut sees two men, a thickset uniformed driver, a black-coated priest. He glances at Sam and she looks as if she is saying a prayer. Thibaut slams his rope cosh, the twisted wolf-table lash, against the ground.

The exquisite corpse leaps. For the moment of its jump everyone in the Paris street feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase.

The world torques—

—and Thibaut and Sam and the exquisite corpse are standing a long way from where they were, meters from the Nazis. There is the silence of confusion.

The rope still snags the manif, stretching back into a now-distant engine on the jeep’s flatbed. A pulley starts to grind, and the cord tightens, strains to reel the exquisite corpse in.

It tugs back like a playful horse. It turns in ancient-eyed attention to the officers of the Reich. It puffs out its cheeks and semaphores its limbs, wheezes into its beard, rips into the street with the edges of its machinery body.

A tear full of white. The edges of reality break. The Nazis stagger on the wrong side and broken bits of car crumble into that papery void.

The exquisite corpse nods, and the Nazis all lurch and fall and slide away as if it shoved them.

Sam is running away from the rip and the soldiers. Thibaut hesitates, grips with his innard sinews, and goes to the exquisite corpse. He pats it gently with the tip of the rope-cudgel.

Its body resonates under his tap like a hollow oven. It turns slowly and looks down at him with its man’s head and eyes. He moves back. With skittish steps, the manif follows him.

“Come on!” Sam shouts. The Nazis fire from beyond the reknitting hole, and Thibaut spreads his pajamas into a shield, like a weaponized sail, and, the exquisite corpse behind him, he runs.

“Did you smell the exhaust from that jeep?” Thibaut says.

“Blood smoke,” Sam says. “That doesn’t run on petrol any more. They must’ve refit it with the help of demons.”

“They were trying to snag this thing,” Thibaut says. “Like with the wolf-tables. They’re trying to control manifs. And they almost did.”

“Not this one they didn’t,” Sam says. She looks back uneasily and away again. “They didn’t have a hope.”

It treads behind them.

Thibaut has unwound his cosh and dangled the table-wrangler’s cord around one of the manif’s metal extrusions, what are not quite limbs. It is not a leash—it is not taut and Thibaut would never consider pulling—but he has one end of it and the manif does not object to wearing it, and joined by the bond the living art comes with Thibaut as though he holds its hand.

It is morning, a part of the city all razed into a flat ashy vista. They are in rubble full of birdcages. Some are empty, some contain silent watchful birds. A broken screen; a litter of toys’ heads cracked like shells; a motionless little girl-thing standing in her white dress and watching with a featureless hole where a child would have features. From her they keep their distance and their gazes. Far ahead of them a baby’s face the size of a room protrudes from the ground like some whaleback, staring skyward. It squawls quietly. Sam takes a picture.

Beyond boxes of preserved butterflies, they see drapery hanging from trees. They hear spectral guns. This place is a shooting range haunted by ghost bullets.

“This is Toyen’s landscape,” says Sam.

“I know what it is,” Thibaut says. “I’m Main à plume.”

The exquisite corpse picks through the dust. Sam looks at it with the same expression that she wore the previous night, when she at last slowed under a balcony poised during its deliquescence, and turned and stared at the manif.

She could not stop herself rearing back at the sight, and the exquisite corpse reared, too, and stamped. In alarm, Thibaut tried to hush it, had concentrated his attention to that end. To his amazement the thing calmed.

“They don’t like me,” Sam said.

“Manifs?” he said. “They don’t have any opinion about you.”

But when he at last persuaded her to take the rope, the exquisite corpse bared its teeth, and Sam let it go.

“It seems to know you’re an ally,” she said.

Now Thibaut flexes his intuition again. The manif exhales exhaust from its beard-train. It follows him like something that knows something.

In the sky a storm of birds takes the shape of one great bird, then of a dancing figure, before they scatter. Sam takes a picture of that, too.

“I was on my way out,” Thibaut says to her abruptly.

“When I found you.”

Sam waits.

“A while back, I met a woman riding a manif,” Thibaut starts again.

“The Vélo,” says Sam. “I heard something about that…”

“You heard?” Thibaut can feel the card in his pocket. “Well, I was there when her passenger died. And when I went through what she was carrying… I think she was a spy. Like your chocolate man.”

“Naturally.”

“British. SOE.” Thibaut holds up the cord he carries. “She was controlling her manif with leather, too. Or trying to. We didn’t keep the thong: we should’ve done. She had a map. With stars drawn on it, and notes.”

“What did the notes say?”

A constellated Paris. They had pulled the dirty thing from her inside pocket. “Most of them were crossed out,” Thibaut says. “They were the names of lost objects. They were famous manif things.” Thibaut looks at her and can see she understands. “I thought maybe she was a magpie. She was artifact hunting, for sure. But perhaps it wasn’t for her.”

“Had she found any?”

He feels as if the playing card is moving in his pocket. “Well,” he says. “She had none on her. Maybe she crossed them off when she found out they were gone.”

“Or took them and passed them on.”

He licks his lips. “So anyway,” he says. “Eventually, we used it. The map. Of course. My comrades and I. Went looking. Went to the Bois de Boulogne.”

“Why?”

“Because that was where there was a star that wasn’t crossed out.”

“I mean why eventually? Why didn’t you go hunting straightaway?”

“Oh.” He keeps his eyes on the horizon. “I persuaded them to wait.” His comrades had not known what for, but they had agreed. “I’d heard something about that other plan you mentioned. Never knew the details. Just that it was some assault. I thought we should wait, see if we heard anything. In case it succeeded.” She says nothing so he must continue.

“It didn’t,” he whispers. “It went wrong. Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita, a lot of others. They died.”

“I heard,” Sam says. “Do you know what happened?”

“I think the enemy got wind of it. They hit first. And they must’ve had some… weapon.” He bares his teeth. “I don’t know exactly what but our people—it was the best of us who died. The best. The Nazis must’ve had something ready to go into those streets.” He could, might have been there, with the now-dead. Then he would be dead, too.

Except if his presence would have changed things.

Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché. A day full of flat light, the two of them patrolling, she showing the rookie the area. A routine sweep of a quiet zone. Expecting nothing, they walked into the remains of a battered lot, and an ambush.

He had hurled himself screaming for cover, trying to shoot as he went, trying to bring training to mind as he cowered under fire. When he turned and hauled himself half upright, Iché was stood there in her grubby floral dress, still smoking hard, ignoring all the bullets that crashed around her, raising her right arm.

She roared and a too-big eagle appeared and plunged straight for the men gathered at the cul-de-sac’s entrance. As Thibaut cowered and watched the wings beat down on them and they gasped and tried to run she had said something else and made a caterpillar longer and fatter than a horse with the head of a wicked bird, and it rippled after the eagle over the shattered brick. Thibaut heard cries and wet noises. Iché brought a bathtub full of glimmering, shredded mirror into presence and sent it skittering on its claw feet into the slack-faced Gestapo commander. It bumped him and caught him with all its grinding scintillas. He screamed and sent up a spray of blood and reflections.

“I saw Iché manifest her own poems once,” he says. “Not many could do that.”

“Maybe your comrades had some secret weapon, too,” Sam says. “I heard things.”

“So you keep saying. I don’t know. I don’t know if they had what they wanted. If there was anything.”

“Well, there were stories. About a fight. Between something manif of theirs—yours—and something Nazi—”

“I heard rumors, too,” Thibaut interrupts, making her blink. “If they had a secret weapon it didn’t fucking work, did it?”

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Sam says after a moment. He does not reply. “What was it happened in the forest?” she says. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I should’ve fucking left then,” he says. “As soon as I heard about that fiasco. That they were gone. But I stayed. We all stayed. Decided to follow the map.”

His cell. Around a fire. Drinking to the memory of the dead. The identities of whom they were not even quite sure. They knew, though, from the tenor of the rumors they had already heard, the transmissions in garbled code passed on by runners at arrondissement edges, reaching them at last, from the shift in the atmosphere, for those like Thibaut who could feel it, that this failed assault changed things. That a chance had been lost, for their side.

None of them slept that night, after the word reached them, word they could not be sure was true but were quite sure was true. They gathered together and talked quietly, tried to reconstruct which of the great booms across the city that they’d heard over the last week had been the noise of their comrades falling, according to what bad powers.

Those who’d known them spoke about their times with those they thought gone. He had troubled his comrades, though, because Thibaut would tell no such stories of those who’d inducted him. He would say nothing. He fingered the Marseille card and thought of the scout who had come for him, whom he had turned away.

After his refusal, that woman who had crossed such dangerous ground to find him had not spoken again. Someone else might have begged, or insisted. There was a long silence, and he made himself meet her eyes, and when at last she was certain he meant it she turned without a word and ascended the stairs.

After a second’s hesitation he went after her. On the ground floor he had found Élise standing in confusion by a door that was ajar onto a backyard with a broken wall, the night and the streets, and the woman who had come unseen by any of his comrades now gone again the same way, back to whatever was being planned, without him.

Later the names. Hérold. Raufast. Rius. Iché. That sickening roll-call.

“But no,” he says to Sam. “I had to leave later. After the forest.” He looks down at the filthy nightdress he wears. “Yes, we found what we were looking for there. I mean, when we suspected the Brits wanted it, were after it, we wanted it more, didn’t we?”

A last chance. They woke one morning and found that Cédric had left. “Screw him,” Pierre had said, but they all knew they were weaker without the priest, if demons attacked. Thibaut unfolded the spy’s map and proposed a plan.

In New Paris, Sacré-Cœur wears a clotty skin of black paint, and thrusting meters out from all its splendid vaulted windows where glass once was and its doorless doorways are shifting tram-lines. Thibaut and his crew trekked to the shadows of the ex-church, to where tracks shook like lizard tails, lashing the pavement and the roofs with a grind and whiplash of metal, moving, appearing in the fabric of the area, grinding into the ground as if they were old infrastructure, stretching abruptly out of sight, twitching to change positions, disappearing again.

Every few minutes or hours, a tram would emerge from within and howl driverless out of the cavernous interior of the church and hurtle along one or other of these evanescent tracks into the city.

The Main à plume found a place to wait, climbed a ladder of sinewy muscled arms that wriggled under their weight, to huddle in a street-corner bivouac, watching manifs that watched them back, looking out for Nazis and devils. Things were bleaker now they suspected a little of what had failed. The cobbles shifted before them to become rails. They waited and spoke little and mostly just watched the ground change, watched the wrong trams.

Until after a day and a night, Thibaut, bleary-eyed, saw one streetcar come wormlike out and roll toward them, marked on its glass front, Bois de Boulogne.

“Now!” he said. “Now!”

The Main à plume came out of hiding running, swinging their grappling hooks, snagging the tram like a steer as it passed.

“Jean fell.” Thibaut recalls the wail and slide. “He was too slow. But the rest of us got aboard.”

They leaned exultant from rattling windows as the tram hurtled over graves and sent earth and headstones flying in Cimetière du Nord. Rails appeared before it and sank behind it into the earth. It explored and they hung on within.

Into the seventeenth, rue Ganneron, savaging a way through the remains of close edifices of rues Dautancourt, Legendre, Lacroix. The vehicle’s lights shone onto broken inside walls. Out again, over railways where rolling stock moldered.

“We went too fast to be caught,” Thibaut says. “Even when we went past Nazis.”

To their terror, the tram coiled abruptly down the stairs into the vaults of Villiers Métro station, leapt onto the older waiting track and into the tunnels. Through glints of phosphorescence and ghosts. Howling in the dark. The partisans were too fearful to be raucous until it rose and was out again.

At Porte Maillot the tracks the tram put down before it entered trees. Branches and leaves slapped the windows. They slowed. They were surrounded by the green. The engine stopped at last in a clearing, gently touching the buffers that grew to meet them out of the ground.

For two days the city fighters scouted by foot in that dream-wood, leaving the tram for the thickets. They wandered in rough extending circles, cutting routes, checking the dead woman’s map.

They caught two wolf-tables—the wild, skittish ones with foxlike parts—and used their wooden bodies to roast their flesh necks. Eating the meat of a manif was supposed to change you.

“What was it that took your comrades?” Sam says.

What monster does she think? A huge featureless manif woman holed by drawers that open to emit things? A clattering of Bellmer dolls crawling crablike on mannequin legs with ball-and-socket joints? Perhaps she imagines a squadron of devils and their Nazi invokers, SS torturers working with meters-high beasts bearded with stalactites of sulfur.

No.

They found the treasure at last, the pajamas marked by the star.

They were flapping on a hanger in a tree, dancing in the wind, watched by owls. Thibaut and his comrades paused at the sight of them in the shadowed moonlight, at the feel of them. They crept toward the gilt thread.

“I thought if they were anywhere they should have been in the Hauts-de-Seine,” Thibaut murmurs. “‘My pajamas balsam hammer gilt with azure.’” He quotes Simone Yoyotte’s poem, “Pajama-Speed,” from the pages of Légitime Défense. The cloth was woven with legitimate defense. “It wasn’t me getting them.”

Pierre was in front, reaching for the cloth, when a shot from the trees felled him.

“We all went for cover,” Thibaut says. “We’d been found. Followed. I don’t know since when. We left tracks, for sure. I was right behind Pierre. I grabbed the nightclothes.” He fingered their hem. “I pulled them on. So they couldn’t hurt me.”

What came for them out of the woods? What had tracked their incompetent scoutwork, using them to find this prize?

Not even Nazis in uniform. Not animals from art, nor howling transplants from Hell. Murderous banalities. French men and women, living by theft, killing by surprise. They jumped into sight, making what they must have thought were savage sounds.

Thibaut’s first poem-enhanced punch crushed a bandit’s face. Bullets pattered against him. For all his new strength, though, he saw in anguish that his comrades were dying, because he was still clumsy in these clothes.

He leapt an enhanced leap and overshot by many meters and fell down with the fight behind him. A ghastly comedy. A man knifed Bernard and another shot Brigitte in the back while Thibaut staggered and tried to come for them.

Two ambushers fell to Main à plume shots but the assassins had managed to filch a couple of Surrealist techniques, too, and as Thibaut watched, Élise cried out and was turned to cloud. He ran to gather her but she was vapor, and gone. Patrice was eaten by a flock of wooden birds at which he batted, and which he could not destroy. Thibaut struggled with his jerky strength as his comrades fell.

At last the surviving bandits ran. Thibaut sank to his knees in his armor, wearing the treasure they’d come for. He knelt among his dead.

“It wasn’t demons,” he says to Sam. “Nor manifs or Nazis. Just Parisians.”

I am going, he told himself at last when he stood up from his grieving, his slaughtered friends around him. This was what did it, not the unseen catastrophe of his leaders. This little local murder. I’m done. The mission is vacant.

He set out.

I’m done with this dream.

Sam says, “I can help you get out.”

Thibaut asks himself why he isn’t just expending the last charge of these insurrectionary nightclothes to smash through the siege and run, to leave the ruins of Paris for the ruins of France beyond. Are these really the city’s last days?

“It’ll be a beautiful book,” he says at last.

“You can help,” she says. “I can show you how to get out. But first, I need more pictures.”

He wants the book. He realizes it with slow wonder. He wants to help with it. Thibaut has learned to obey such intuitions.

Too, he wants to know what Sam’s real mission is.

He grips the exquisite corpse’s cord. He does not know what it is he does, nor how, to have it follow him, but his heart accelerates. If you’d been with us, he thinks at it. In that forest.

“That SOE woman,” Sam says. “You said she could make the Vélo do things.”

“Well, she was trying.”

“The rumors outside are there’s all kinds of experiments. Not just art stuff: occult, too.” She looks into the sky. “Allies working on manifs. Nazis on manifs. Allies trying to crack demons. I heard that some manif version of Baudelaire was sacrificed by Nazis.”

Thibaut says nothing. He suspects that she’s speaking of the Baudelaire of the Marseille deck, Genius of Desire. The sibling of which he carries.

“When I was coming in,” Sam says, “I kept hearing that more Teufel Unterhandleren are on their way in.”

These are the military specialists that cajole the pained demon refugees, with knick-knacks and incantations, according to the terms of contested treaties. They work in close conjunction with Paris’s fascist church, poring over relics and books of banishment, under plaster crucified Christs wearing swastikas, with devils painted at their feet staring up in resentful thrall. “For the glory of God,” Alesch has declared, “we crook his cross, and in his name we command not only his still-risen angels but those angels fallen.”

His order barters with devils. Alesch’s priests are not exorcists: they are anti-exorcists.

“I kept hearing all these stories,” Sam says. “About new factors. About something called Fall Rot.”