Free The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

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.”

Chapter Four
    1941
    “I can’t believe it.” Mary Jayne Gold’s voice shook. “After the trouble he gave
me
? He brings someone here we’ve never even met? Has he lost his mind?”
    “I don’t know,” said Miriam Davenport. “You saw him—he’s in a queer way.”
    Mary Jayne put her finger to her lips as Fry stomped back. He glowered at the two women. Davenport was dark and short, Gold tall and fair. An absurdly perfect juxtaposition, standing to either side of the dark wood table by bundled herbs and half-drunk bottles of wine.
    “I’m sorry but it is
not
the same,” he said at last. “I heard you. Mary Jayne, I’m sorry but Raymond is a
criminal.
He broke in here.” Mary Jayne stood with her hands on her hips. “Whereas this Jack, this Jack Parsons…he’s just a lost young man—”
    “You have no idea who he is,” said Miriam.
    “He was so excited about that Colquhoun woman,” Fry said.
    “Whom you also don’t know,” said Miriam.
    “No. But André told me about her. And Parsons is interested in the movement…I’ve only asked him to join us for supper.” Now he beseeched. “I think he’ll amuse André and Jacqueline.”
    “Wasn’t it you who told me we can’t be inviting every lost soul?” Davenport said.
    “Something’s coming to an end,” Fry said. “Don’t you feel like that?” He was startled by his own words.
    He was the man who had chosen to vacate the villa himself rather than compromise it, being as he was an object of attention. The man who, in agonies, forbade his good friend Victor Serge from lodging there, deeming the communist dissenter too great a danger. Now it was Fry bringing home foundlings.
    “Parsons said he was a
rocket scientist,
” Miriam said.
    “So he’s a fantasist,” said Fry helplessly. “He’s harmless.” He barely knew what he was saying. “I think it’ll be all right. It’s only supper.”
    —
    The room in the old house was beautiful and fading. Jack Parsons looked out to the sprawling grounds, where a woman and a man chatted by the pond. Another man had climbed into a tree, was removing pictures from its branches, where they had been hung in strange exhibition.
    Parsons had come to France by trains and planes, planes and boats, the pulling in of favors, the paying of bribes. And at moments, when everything had militated against him, when the