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to
them.
To your pals.”
    “My friend who knows her is called André,” said Fry, after a long silence.
    “Mine’s called Aleister.”
    “André Breton.”
    “Aleister Crowley.”

Chapter Three
    1950
    “Thibaut,” the young scout had said. “They told me where you’d made your way. That you run things here.” The woman was exhausted and bedraggled but uninjured, and smiling to have made it through dangerous neighborhoods to find him.
    He did not see or hear her arrive at the door to the cellar where he was working, until she called him by name, gently enough not to alert his comrades above. He reached for his gun at the sight of her but she tutted and shook her head with collegial imperiousness. “I’m Main à plume,” she said, and he believed her. That it was by some technique from the canon, some re-uttered poem in a novelcontext, that she had gained unseen entrance. He put his rifle down.
    She spoke again and did not raise her voice.
    “I came a long way, down rue des Martyrs, from the eighteenth, Montmartre,” she said. “There’s too much shit between here and the eighth. I’m glad I found you.”
    “I don’t run things,” he said.
    “Well. Seems you do. It’s you they wanted me to speak to, anyway.”
    “They?”
    “They knew where you’d be,” she said. “They—we—want you to join us. There’s a plan.”
    She was vague, but almost brittle with excitement. Just beyond the edges of Paris’s Nazi-controlled center, the comrades were amassing.
    Thibaut had fingered the card in his pocket. “Come on,” he said, “why do they want
me
?”, and watched her shock when he told her at last that he was protecting the ninth.

    Thibaut coils and uncoils the whip he took. He winds it densely around itself to make it a baton. He slaps it against his palm.
    “This shouldn’t work,” he says. “They can’t control manifs. They shouldn’t have even been there. No one should go
into
a forest.” He looks abruptly down, right atthe pajamas he wears, about which Sam has said nothing. He has to gather himself a moment.“ ‘Confusedly,’ ” he says, “ ‘forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’ ”
    “Desnos,” Sam says. “And that’s not a warning. That’s
why
I went in.”
    “Was it worth it? To see legendary creatures?” He intends to shame her with the question, with his bitter tone, but she smiles and raises her camera.
    In the remains of the Lycée Buffon, the old classrooms are empty but for dust and the carcasses of birds. Thibaut points his rifle at Sam. She does not cower. She places her bags by her feet, like someone standing on a railway platform.
    “Listen, American,” he says. He tries to make his voice rough. “I’m Paris. Main à plume.”
Liar,
he thinks.
I shouldn’t even be here.
“I’ve fought devils, manifs, Nazis, collaborators, and I’ve killed them all.” The Marseille card is in his pocket, that secret counter of rebellion. “Why were they coming after you? I told you. I’ve never seen wolf-tables like that, or manifs obeying Nazis.”
    “No? What about the
aeropittura
?” she says.
    He blinks. “They hardly count,” he says. Actual fascist manifs, such asthose rushing futurist plane-presences, remain very few. “And they don’t
obey
anyone, fascist or others, they just…lurch about…”
    “Fauves?” she said. “The negligible old star?”
    For a short time, art-shepherds from the Vichy curatorsof “Jeune France” had tried to direct the garish strutters walked out of Derain’s canvases, the confusing and melancholy point of gray light self-made from lines written by a Vichy enthusiast. The presences, though, were uncontrollable and underwhelming. Thibaut has heard nothing of the crude bright fauvist figures in a long time, but the star is supposed to still haunt the streets some nights, emanating bewilderment.
    “The wolf-tables are
Surrealist
!” Thibaut shouts. “You can’t compare them to a