The Paris Deadline by Max Byrd

up. "That," she said as she shook on her coat, "is most unlikely. The police were very clear. He was an old man alone in his shop. There was a robbery. Pure coincidence."
         "Somebody did hit me on the head," I reminded her, "that same day."
         "I'm surprised it doesn't happen every day. You're a very exasperating man."
         "They hit me while I had the duck."
         "Which you had in a wrapped package that nobody could see inside. And you were coming out of the incredibly expensive Ritz, not your awful room on the rue de Beast."
         "Rue du Dragon. An English synonym for bad-tempered person."
         I handed her the blue trilby hat and she began buttoning her coat perversely, from the male point of view, from bottom to top. My mother had done it all the time.
         "Tell me about Henri Saulnay," I said.
         Her fingers stopped moving. "There's nothing to tell. I only met him two days ago, because he's a toymaker and they use him sometimes to repair the automates at the Conservatory. I needed somebody to help with the talk. I didn't really like him very much."
         "You know, the first time I saw you," I said, "it was on the rue Lamartine and a man—"
         She finished buttoning the coat with an impatient twirl of her fingers and jammed the hat on her head like a sock. "Like many men I've known, Mr. Keats, you seem to confuse conversation with autobiography. Fascinating as your Parisian memoirs must be, I'm really not in the mood. Right now I'm thinking maybe I should just go see Mrs. McCormick in person, myself. I could probably take a train to Nice first thing in the morning and be waiting on the dock when she comes back from her cruise."
         I stood up and pulled back her chair. "Well, she's not that easy to talk to," I said. "I'd let Root handle it. She likes him. He can make a long-distance call on a Trib telephone and if we're lucky she won't put up a fuss and he can have it shipped back to Paris, as she likes to say, toot sweet."
         Elsie put her hands in her pockets and cocked her head. "Why do I think, Mr. Keats," she said, "that there's something you've forgotten to tell me?"
         I put my hands in my pockets and cocked my head the other way. "Nothing at all. Absitoively, posilutely."
         The same ghost of a smile crossed her lips, and for just an instant her face relaxed and softened. Through the window behind her I could see the short, straight figure of Major Cross coming down the sidewalk.
         "You talk funny," she said, and turned and left.

    Major Cross was a career librarian who had metamorphosed into a military man. Or vice versa. He, at least, didn't confuse autobiography with conversation. From West Point in 1918, he told me, he had gone straight to General Pershing's staff for the battle of Saint Mihiel, as record keeper and logistics officer, and from there to President Wilson's staff of archivists and historians at the Paris Peace Conference. But that was really all he wanted to say about himself.
         We sat down at my table and ordered, at the Army's expense, a plate of cheese and a bottle of 1923 Santenay and he explained that since it was a Friday night and I undoubtedly had social engagements to pursue, he only wanted to give me copies of a few sample interviews he had already conducted with other Moles. After I'd read them, he thought, we could schedule a formal meeting at his office with a stenographer. Then he would edit, send it to Washington, and I would be officially quits with the Army, if not with Colonel McCormick.
         "Next week?" he said, pulling open his manila folder and holding his pen poised above a little calendar grid. "Say, Monday afternoon?"
         I swirled the wine in my glass and watched the snowflakes beginning to fill the air outside, earlier than predicted in the Trib , little silent distant artillery puffs of white.
         "So what do you know about Dr. Robert Goddard and his liquid-fuelled