Free The Paris Deadline by Max Byrd

that's why I asked."
         He pushed his plate away and signaled our waiter for another coffee. Then he pulled out a pipe, a leather tobacco pouch, and various shiny metal tools for loading, tamping, ballasting, and igniting it. Pipe smokers ordinarily carry more equipment than a coal miner. Young Bill Shirer had only taken up his pipe a few weeks ago and still hadn't mastered all of its subtleties. He had started it, he told me, to look older and impress French girls, but in fact Bill Shirer's main ambition in life, as everybody knew at the Trib , was to be posted away to eastern Europe, where he was convinced the next great war would start, and he was certain that a pipe and a trench coat would do the trick.
         I signaled for another cup of coffee myself and squinted through the window at the rain.
         "I'm taking it from a guy in my hôtel," Bill said, between noisy puffs, "Jewish guy. He works as a clerk at J.P. Morgan, but he speaks German, and I give him English lessons back. Did you see this?"
         He handed me a copy of that morning's Tribune and pointed to a story about a Montmartre artist's model who had been arrested as a spy for a "Foreign Power." She was caught taking photographs at a French military airfield. The government wouldn't identify the foreign power, but the story (byline "Wm. S. Shirer") strongly hinted that it must be Germany.
         "Well, I wouldn't believe everything you read in the paper, Bill."
         There was always a kind of two-beat pause with Shirer, while he decided whether you had made a joke. He puffed, then smiled.
         "What I don't understand," he said, "is how you and Root are such good friends." He pushed the paper aside and handed me a little stack of note cards and two fat brown envelopes. "You're not really alike at all. You're like a monk, compared to him. This is what I could find so far."
         I looked at the note cards first, but they were in Shirer's tiny crabbed handwriting and would need to be deciphered later, when I was alone. The two fat envelopes each contained a copy of a different scholarly journal, both of them stamped "Property of the American Library of Paris." The first was the "Bulletin of Modern European History," published by Columbia University Press, and the second was something called "Publications of the American Anthropological Association."
         I turned the pages of the first one, while Shirer talked with his pleasant midwestern earnestness about the German menace to world peace, which he and many other students of world affairs—but not the French—devoutly believed in. The French were still too busy rebuilding after the war to do much more than sneer at the defeated and sulking Germans, which they did constantly and nastily. To call somebody like Henri Saulnay "Boche" was actually pretty mild. Two years ago, in 1924, they had self-righteously banned German athletes from coming to the Olympics in Paris.
         But like most of us they had no idea of what victory had actually cost. Over his desk at the Trib , Shirer had tacked a translation

from a speech by the National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler: "It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain. No, we do not ask for pardon. We demand—Vengeance!"
         One of these days, Shirer liked to say, Hitler and his so-called 'Nazis' would be all over Germany like snakes coming out of a drain.
         But on December 11, 1926, in a little café I liked on the rue Montmartre, what I was thinking about was not the accelerating future, but the distant and placid past.
         The article Shirer had marked in the "Bulletin of Modern European History" was titled "The Automatons of Jacques de Vaucanson," the production of someone named Parvis Mansur, who was an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr. I had read only the first two or three paragraphs before Shirer finished his coffee with a loud gulp and tapped his watch.
         "You said we ought to get