The Paris Deadline Read Online Free PDF Page B

nephew. In the second place, given the French telephone system, nobody would go to the trouble of calling me five times and breaking into my room, not for a toy like that, when you could buy a brand-new toy for next to nothing at the Samaratine. Is the nephew real, by the way?"
         "He's fictional," she said glumly. She shoveled, God bless her, two heaping spoonsful of sugar into the already sweetened chocolate. "I was going to call him Conrad if you asked."
         "Conrad Short?"
         "Short is my real name. I work for the Thomas Edison Company, if you must know. I'm here in Paris on business."
         "You're an inventor?" I had a hard time keeping the surprise out of my voice. Even in the third decade of the twentieth century, when progress had broken all the moulds, I had never heard of a female inventor, certainly not one who looked like young Elsie Short.
         She wrinkled her nose, and I thought she might growl. Instead, she stuck out her lower lip and appeared to come to a decision.
         "I work for the Talking Doll Division of Mr. Edison's company," she said rather formally, and produced from the purse a square white business card with her name on it, followed by "Thomas A. Edison Company, West Orange, New Jersey," and a little drawing of a lightbulb.
         "All right."
         "I'm what you might call a kind of scout, or roving agent."
         "All right again."
         "You've probably never heard of Mr. Edison's Doll Company," Elsie Short said, cocking her head as if to gauge the full extent of my ignorance.
         "I'm an only child," I said, "no sisters, no nieces, no dolls."
         "Well, not many people remember it now. But almost as soon as he invented the phonograph—you have heard of the phonograph?—Mr. Edison began to try to make it smaller, miniature, in fact. He likes to make his inventions on the smallest scale he can. In 1878 he actually exhibited a doll right here in Paris that had a little phonograph built right into its body."
         She dove into the purse again and came out with a glossy 2x3 photograph of a repellently ugly pigtailed doll. It had pursed lips and enormous fat cheeks and was wearing a billowing white garment that somebody in West Orange, New Jersey might think was an Alpine milkmaid's dress. Out of the top of her head, like a smokestack, rose a freakish horn-shaped funnel.
         Elsie Short made a sympathetic face.
         "I know. That's the speaker for the phonograph. The doll was almost two feet tall. You put in a wax recording cylinder and wound her up in the back and out of the funnel she recited 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Jack and Jill.' Mr. Edison eventually made the phonograph a little smaller, but the speaker still came out of the top of her head. He set up a factory and manufactured several thousand of them, but they never sold well, and the factory went out of business in 1890."
         She replaced the photograph in the purse. "As you may imagine," she said, "Mr. Edison is not a man who gives up easily. He's seventy-eight years old and he's still full of projects. About a year ago he decided to start a new doll factory, with an improved phonograph. But he also wanted a much prettier doll, and the truth is, the American doll industry doesn't amount to much.

Most dolls sold at home are actually made here in France or in Germany. My job is to find five or six perfect models to hold the new and improved phonograph, and buy the rights to them."
         She shook her blonde helmet of hair and selected a small, bright, vulnerable smile from her repertoire. "I've only been in Europe two weeks, and when I saw the duck in that store window I thought he would be a terrific novelty item—he could quack and waddle and recite a nursery rhyme through his beak."
         "Who was Jacques de Vaucanson?"
         The smile wobbled a little, but held firm. "Jacques de Vaucanson," she said, "was an eighteenth-century inventor of automates. And so