The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  Two hours I waited—and it seemed I was one of the lucky ones.

  “M. Jagot will see you himself, M. Connor,” the clerk whispered, stooping to speak to me as quietly as he could. He looked impressed. “M. Jagot has taken an interest in your case. His room is the last door on the right at the end of the corridor.”

  Jagot’s clothes seemed too small for his large frame. Thickset and powerfully muscular, though perhaps no more than about five feet six inches tall, he looked, in those expensive but ill-fitting clothes, like a fruit about to split its skin. His face was red, sweaty, and swollen, his hair dry and unkempt, his chin unshaven. His hands were square and thick, with tufts of red hair sprouting on the knuckles. He looked out of place here. He was a man of the street, not a man at ease in an expensive office. But what I remember most about Jagot, after all these years, is those eyes of his—powerfully dissecting eyes of ice blue that didn’t look quite human. It wasn’t easy to bear the weight of his gaze. I never saw a single glimpse of kindness or empathy there, not even curiosity, just a relentlessly assessing stare, a measuring, as if he was perpetually translating your features into notes for his files.

  The room was dimly lit and largely empty apart from an entire wall of small oak drawers behind the desk—a filing cabinet that was still being built, extending around the walls, with row after row of little drawers and square brass handles. The room smelt of fresh paint, sawn wood, and glue. A map of Paris adorned another wall, the river blue, the borders of the arrondissements marked out in red.

  Jagot shook my hand without smiling and gestured for me to take the chair opposite him.

  “Welcome to Paris, M. Connor. You have had, my clerk tells me, some objects stolen. A woman. At night. Traveling alone?”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  He was watching me closely. “There are many thieves in Paris now,” he said, sitting back down again. “Many of the soldiers and prisoners of war who come back to the city have learned bad ways. They are all the same. A little of this, a little of that.”

  “I need to get my papers and packages back quickly,” I said. “It’s very important.”

  Jagot sat back in his chair and placed his hands together on the desk in front of him, interlocking his large fingers, scrutinizing me, taking his time. “Your stolen objects interest me, M. Connor. You say in your report: three letters of introduction from a professor in Edinburgh to the professors here in Paris; one manuscript from a translation of a work by Professor Cuvier; two notebooks—they are yours—yes? And some natural-history specimens, gifts for Professor Cuvier. But no money. Pas d’argent”. He underlined some details on the report and began to make notes in the margins.

  “No. There was money in my bag, but she didn’t take it.”

  From under his heavy eyebrows, Jagot looked up and said: “Pas d’argent. A woman steals from the mail coach at night, but she takes no money. Yes, that is what interests me, monsieur. The specimens—what were these things? Your report says only specimens in boxes, nothing more.”

  I concentrated hard to remember the words in French: “I think you would say trois fossiles rares et l’os d’un mammoutk.”

  He wrote this down. “Three fossils and the bone of a mammoth, yes. You say rare. How rare?”

  “The fossil corals and the mammoth bone were part of a valuable collection from Germany. Very rare. Worth a lot of money to the right collector. The manuscript was less valuable but more important. Cream pages with a blue cover. Dark blue. It was handwritten.”

  I tried not to let the panic show in my voice.

  “Yes, yes. I have all that. It is here in your report. It will be filed in our bureau des objets trouvés. If someone brings these objets to us, we will send you a letter. We have your address, yes? But there are no corals or bones there now, only the usual things—umbrellas, keys, eyeglasses, and the usual unusual things: a violin, a wooden leg, and an expensive set of pistols. A man brought in a monkey last week, you know. He found it on the roof of a brothel in the Notre-Dame de Lorette. I said to him, Monsieur, this is not an objet trouvé. It is an animal. It must go to the Fourriére des Animaux. Did you see your thief, M. Connor?”

  “Yes. But it was dark. She was sitting next to me. I fell asleep.”

  “Did anyone else see her? The other passengers?”

  “No. We were the only two people in the outside seats of the mail coach. The other passengers were inside. Except for the child she carried.”

  “Yes, the child. Tell me, monsieur, about the child. Slowly. This was the woman’s child, yes? Her daughter?”

  “I assumed so,” I said. “They looked very much alike.” I told him as much as I could, in as much detail as I could. I left out the bit about how the child had woken up and said “M. Napoleon, il est mort,” with her black eyes wide and fearful. Nor did I tell him about the smell of the woman, whose name I never had asked, the slight scent of bergamot about her or the way her cheek flushed in the shape of a continent, scarlet against olive, or the dark bow of her eyebrows, or the way her lips moved as she spoke. And I didn’t tell him about the mammoths lumbering or the ancient seabed she had described. Because—well, we didn’t see them, not in this world anyway. It was like a dream. These things did not belong in a police record.

  I tried to be as accurate as I could, but there was so little fact. I told him she appeared to be tall, but it was difficult to see her properly. I told him that the woman had mentioned a half-Portuguese, half-Indian magnetist called the abbé Faria who had taught her things. I didn’t even have a name for her. I told Jagot the child was called Delphine. That she was perhaps four or five years old. Jagot asked me a disproportionate number of questions about the child—the color of her skin, eyes, and hair, the language she spoke, her precise age. I did not tell him that the woman made me feel curious, hungry, and mute; that the thought of her, the smell of her, even the memory of her voice, filled me with intense desire.

  He wrote down a few words on the report. “Bon, c’est bien.”

  “She talked about unusual things,” I said. “She seemed to know more than most women would.”

  “Such as?”

  “Geology. The Jardin des Plantes. Zoophytes. She had an extensive knowledge of natural philosophy.”

  “A female savant, monsieur. Yes, that is also interesting. There are many such women in Paris.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I am wasting your time.”

  “I am an enquêteur, M. Connor,” he said with a sigh. “All the information you give me goes into my files. It might not be useful now, only a small detail, but it will be useful one day. When all the little things begin to join up.”

  “Are they all full?” I asked, nodding toward the neat rows of drawers that lined the wall behind him.

  “My cabinet?” He turned and ran his hand over the smooth oak surfaces. “Soon all these drawers will be full, yes. Information, descriptions of faces, and histories of crimes—a card for every criminal in this country. It will be Jagot’s gift to France: a catalogue complète of thieves. These people want to be invisible, M. Connor. They try to hide in the shadows. I make them visible. I turn the light on them. And I think you will help me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “if I can.” The resolve of this man impressed and unnerved me. “But I don’t see how.”

  He leaned forward.

  “M. Connor, I’ll tell you something. The woman you describe, who steals from you—the woman who is tall and beautiful, with the scar across the back of her left hand, the skin that is dark, the hair and eyes black, the woman who is a savant and who steals your mammoth bone and your rare fossils, that woman, she goes by the name of Lucienne Bernard. She has other names too; she once was the lover of a clever Parisian lock breaker called Leon Dufour. This woman you describe and the man she works with now—the man they call Davide Silveira—are on a special list that I keep. With these people I have unfinished business. So, Lucienne Bernard is back in Paris. That is very interesting to me. You, M. Connor
, have become interesting to me.”

  “But what would such a woman want with my things?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  He closed his ledger. “We are finished for now, monsieur. There is nothing more for us to do. But you must understand one thing: If you see Mme. Bernard again, you will come back here, immediately. You understand? And you will ask for me personally. Will you give me your word?”

  I nodded, reassured. If Jagot was taking this case seriously, at least there was some hope that I might retrieve the manuscript and rescue my position. If Jagot could be discreet and quick in his investigation, the situation might yet be redeemed.

  When I left the offices of the Bureau de la Sûreté, I was followed by a man in a long shabby coat who appeared to have only one arm. A fairly new recruit by the look of him; he seemed unskilled in surveillance techniques.

  4

  ATER THAT AFTERNOON I walked to the Louvre in search of the Caravaggios, stopping first at a traiteur, where I ordered a bowl of thick beef soup with vermicelli for fifteen sols, noting down the price and the date in one of the new notebooks I had bought. I have them still, those small black leather notebooks, filled with tiny rows of numbers, totals and subtotals. It was a habit I had taken on at medical school when my meager allowance barely stretched to give me enough food for the day. Now in Paris I was rich it seemed, at least in comparison with my former life. But I had to make my inheritance last. Everything depended on that.

  I had to regulate my expenditure. The day spent with Fin had been expensive. Since entry to the Louvre was free to foreign visitors, I could spend an afternoon there and then come to a decision about what to do next. I couldn’t see Jagot’s man anymore, but I knew he was probably still out there somewhere. I began to feel affronted by the suspicion that being followed by a police agent implied. I am the victim of a crime, M. Jagot, not a suspect, I muttered to myself.

  Inside the Louvre, among the columns that held up the great vaulted ceiling of gilt and white plaster over the Long Gallery, artists had set up their easels as close as they could to the paintings. On the walls, paintings hung sometimes four or five deep, frames butting right up against frames. A vast Titian was juxtaposed on one side with a Veronese, on another with a Rubens; each overwhelming square of oiled flesh and theatrical gesture and drapery, each Saint Sebastian or Venus or Mars or Holy Family hanging up there, was being copied, imitated, studied, translated by one of scores of art students. Compared with the restrained and hushed galleries of Edinburgh, it was a riot of color and movement.

  The effects of the previous night’s drinking still hadn’t worn off. I was a mere sleepwalker in this strange gallery, my head thumping. I followed the crowds through to the Classical Gallery, where I stopped in front of the marble sculpture of Laocoön, the Greek priest, and his sons being attacked by sea snakes. It filled an entire alcove. The naked priest’s head was thrown back in agony, his sinews stretched tight in pain. The coils of the giant snakes were tangled around them all. One of the two sons, staring in mute horror at his brother and father, was trying to uncoil the snake from his right ankle.

  I was trying to remember the names of the sinews in Laocoön’s raised arm when I sensed her, the rustle of her skirt, the smell of her bergamot-laced perfume. I felt her hand on my arm and turned my head a fraction.

  My thief, in daylight, dressed in pale blue satin. She was standing next to me.

  If I was angry almost beyond words in that moment of recognition—especially now that I knew I had been the innocent prey of a practiced thief—I determined not to show it. I kept my wits about me, focusing on only one thing—the return of the stolen objects.

  “You have no idea how relieved I am to see you, madame,” I said, turning to face her, each phrase tumbling over the next. “Of course … your bag and my bag, they were next to each other amongst the luggage, and it was dark and you were in a hurry, perhaps. It was an easy mistake to make. It wasn’t your fault. Anyone might have—”

  “I saw you sitting by the Seine,” she said, “and I followed you in here. Isn’t it terrible?” she said, looking at the Laocoön. “To make pain beautiful like that—it is a great art.” That gravelly voice of hers, the slow, seductive way she spoke.

  She was as tall as I was, perhaps even a little taller. Nearly six feet—unnervingly tall for a woman. In the daylight her skin was darker than I remembered and her beauty even more striking. Her black hair curled around the edges of her face. She wore no hat; instead she had twisted a swathe of blue silk around her head that matched her dress and made her look like a drawing of a famous Parisian actress I had once seen. She wore pearl earrings. I could see the colors of the squares and rectangles of paintings reflected on their convex surfaces. Jagot had called her Lucienne Bernard. She looked like no thief I had ever imagined.

  I looked around for the guard and for Jagot’s man but could see only other visitors standing looking at the sculptures. Everything continued as before. I felt a hot rush to my head. Until we were closer to the guard, the best thing to do was to keep her talking, I thought. I only wanted her to return the things she had taken. I didn’t much care how.

  “You took my papers and a package, a case, from the mail coach,” I said, slowly, still trying to prompt a conversation that would lead to a restoration of my belongings. “Can we go and get them? I need them, you see. They’re very important. Without them—”

  “You’ve shaved,” she said, smiling. “You look different in daylight. Younger. It’s strange, isn’t it, how different people look in different places and at different times of the day. As if there were many versions of us coming and going all the time.”

  I put my hand to my jaw, feeling the roughness of the new growth. “My shaving mirror’s too small,” I said. “I cut myself this morning.”

  She began to walk around the Laocoön slowly, looking at it, not at me. I followed her.

  “My things?” I struggled to control the panic in my voice.

  “You look tired,” she said softly, stopping to look at me.

  She had a way of suddenly plunging into intimacy—a touch, a step too close, a question, a look held for just a few moments too long—and then, as soon as she had invoked it, she would abandon it, returning to a formal distance. And in conversation she would plunge too, from one subject to another, from distance to a seductive proximity, like a hare doubling back toward the hounds to disorient them. It was as if she was perpetually both whispering secrets and withholding them. Now she was running her fingers down a pink vein in the white marble of Laocoön’s arm.

  “I am tired,” I said. “I haven’t had much sleep. I’ve been worried, you see. Worried about the papers and the specimens you took. I didn’t know how to find you. I didn’t know what to do or where to go to report them missing.”

  An Englishwoman opposite me, clutching a catalogue to her as she would a Bible in church, ushered her two daughters out of the room, tutting. Too much naked male flesh—even in marble.

  “We are some of the last people who will see all of this under one roof,” Lucienne Bernard said. “In a few weeks this room will be empty. All of Napoleon’s stolen art will be returned to where it was before the war.”

  “Before the war?” I said, disoriented by the sudden change of subject.

  “Napoleon took all the statues in here from the Vatican gardens when he invaded Rome. Now the pope wants them back and your Duke of Wellington has agreed. Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre, is procrastinating, but without Napoleons protection he will have to give them up. Wellington will send his soldiers if he doesn’t. The Prussians want their paintings back too. It won’t be long.”

  I was estimating the distance to the door and, to the guard, trying to calculate the likely consequences of anything I might do. “Please,” I said, my words sharpening. “Don’t play games with me. It’s not fair.”

  “Now all the empty monasteries and the houses of émigrés in Paris are stacked high with the paintings and statue
s and collections that Napoleon took from the palaces of Europe—”

  “Madame,” I said. “I have been polite. I have been in earnest. I have pleaded with you. Entreated you. But you seem to want to talk only about art. Please. I have no time for conversation about these things. I am expected at the Jardin des Plantes. You took my belongings. I trust you still have them. We have only to arrange for me to pick them up. I will send someone. Please give me an address, and I will do the rest.”

  “Your notebooks—” she said.

  “You’ve been reading my notebooks?” I said, my voice constricted. No one had read those notebooks. They were full of speculations, ideas about species and strata and comparative anatomy, mixed with poetry, drawings, and observations about people, women I had seen, private feelings.

  “Your work on homology is very good,” she said, “very interesting. You have insight and curiosity. But you are reading the wrong books.”

  “You shouldn’t have looked at my notebooks.”

  She saw me glance toward the guard. We were both waiting for me to do something. Her black eyes, now very close, glittered. Was she daring me?

  “And if I refuse to return them?” she said, leaning up against a marble pillar with that maddening flicker of a smile that seemed to hover about her mouth whenever she talked to me. “What then?”