The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

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 youpoint 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’schanged 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