The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  Jagot’s man maddened me, but Fin was delighted with our police shadow.

  “Damn it, Daniel. Half of Paris is being followed,” he said. “Never before have so many surveillance reports been written on so many people. It’s brilliant. Everyone is being paid to watch everyone else. They are compiling reports on all the infidels and radicals in Paris. Anyone with an education is a suspect. Every student is listed as part of a conspiracy to invade the city or to bring Napoleon back. Someone told me yesterday the police actually believe that Napoleon has already escaped and is hiding in the quarries under the city with a large army. Paris is a powder keg. Jagot’s man isn’t interested in you, my friend. It’s Ramon and Evangelista he’ll be watching. They’ll put all the radicals on an exile list eventually. Make a clean sweep of it.”

  “Are you saying I’m not part of the intelligentsia?” I said, feigning hurt pride.

  “Yes, of course you are, but what kind of danger do you pose, my friend? Really? Daniel Connor is hardly a threat to national security. Believe me, it’s Evangelista and Ramon he’s after.”

  But Fin changed his mind, when, on August 4, I received a letter from M. Jagot written in a fine sloping hand, asking me to meet him at the Jardin des Plantes at three o’clock the following day.

  “Mon diable, Daniel,” Fin exclaimed. “A personal summons from Jagot. I have seriously underestimated you. You are on the surveillance list after all. That must mean that your thief is more important than I thought. Let me come with you? I’ll buy dinner for the rest of the week if you let me come. Daniel, it’s my chance to meet Jagot. You can’t rob me of that.”

  But, I pointed out with some relief, Jagot had insisted I come alone.

  Shamed by my blunder, I had not yet visited the Jardin des Plantes. But now with my appointment there, I was impatient to see with my own eyes everything I had dreamed of and read about. And I was full of hope. Perhaps Jagot had news. I stood on the Austerlitz Bridge looking across to the famous wrought-iron railings of the Jardin; the gates were open, the magnificent trees towering beyond them. I watched visitors spilling out of fiacres, gathering in groups with tour guides, clutching guidebooks and parasols, their servants following along behind with picnic baskets.

  Visitors came here to see the museums, the bones, the animals in the menagerie, the glasshouses, the collections of exotic trees and plants; they came for assignations, for trysts, for stolen kisses; they came because the sun was out or because it wasn’t. I came to see what I had lost and hoped to regain, a utopia, I thought, passing through the gates, handing over my coins. The center of a new world.

  Daniel into the lions’ den, she’d said. I remembered that remark of hers as I stood just inside the main gate, looking down the straight sand-colored paths through the classically arranged flower beds, a series of lines that ran all the way to the Museum of Zoology ahead of me, its yellow stone flushed with pink in the afternoon light. This museum of bones had once been the palace of a king.

  Between the gates where I stood and the Museum of Zoology there were at least ten flower beds, each as big as an English field, planted with carefully labeled botanical and medical specimens from all over the world, every conceivable green in every possible texture: spiky, arched, fanned, and feathered. Explosions of late-summer flowers in reds, golds, whites, and oranges. Beyond them light glinted on the panes of a dozen glasshouses that lined the east and west sides of the rectangle like mirrors.

  More than fifty families lived within the walls of the Jardin, Jameson had said. The professors lived alongside their assistants and families in the elegant houses that flanked the high walls. Hundreds of students attended the lectures or worked in the museums or libraries for the professors, producing scores of books and hundreds of papers on botany, chemistry, comparative anatomy, taxonomy, or mineralogy, or sorting, preparing, and mounting the thousands of bones, plants, fossils, pinned and boxed insects and butterflies, preserved snakes, and stuffed birds that were sent to the Jardin every year.

  Daniel into the lions’ den. There were lions in the Jardin des Plantes over to my right, in the menagerie. Paris was a kind of Babylon, I thought then, but Daniel Connor … he was no biblical Daniel. That Daniel, the other one, was a kidnapped Jewish boy forced to live in the court of pagan Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates; that Daniel was the boy who remained steadfast, true to his principles, even among those seductive pagans. When they threw him in with the lions, the animals didn’t touch him. He was protected by his own virtuous edges.

  My edges were disappearing.

  No, I was not that Daniel. I was another one, not so steadfast or sure. I imagined the lions would finish me off without hesitation. Paris will swallow you up, she’d said. Are you not afraid?

  I found Jagot sitting in the palm glasshouse on the north bench under the blossoms of a scarlet rhododendron. He had taken off his jacket and had fallen asleep, his hands tucked behind his head. When my shadow fell across his face, his eyes snapped open like the eyes of a crocodile.

  “M. Jagot, you have recovered my things?” I asked immediately, shaking his hand.

  “Non, monsieur,” he said, stretching and yawning. “I am sorry to say, I have not. But I have other news. Certain information has come to me, M. Connor.”

  “About what?”

  “About you, monsieur. About your comings and goings. Also about Mme. Bernard. She has been asking questions about you. I have reports.” He opened up a notebook.

  “Mme. Bernard?” I said. “Who is Mme. Bernard?”

  “You know who Mme. Bernard is, M. Connor,” he said with a sigh. “You know her. She knows you.”

  “What questions has she been asking?” I said, taking the seat beside him. “And if you have reports about her, you must know where she is. And if you know where she is—”

  “She has disappeared again. We have no trace. That is of great annoyance to me. But my men tell me that before she disappeared Mme. Bernard was asking questions about you, M. Connor, about where you lived. It seems she has developed an interest in you. Do you know why that is? Can you help me to explain that? Have you seen her again?”

  “No, monsieur, I have no idea why she has taken an interest in me. And I really can’t be sure that the wretched woman I spoke to on the mail coach is the same woman you’re looking for. It might be a mistake,” I said quickly, remembering the shadowy and tentative allegiance I had made to Lucienne Bernard in the Louvre and trying my best to extricate myself from the apparently dangerous place I seemed to have taken in Jagot’s investigation. “I think it is best if I withdraw my statement … It was dark. I can’t be certain what she looked like …”

  Jagot leaned close to me, then reached out and cupped my chin in his hand, turning my face toward his for a moment. He spoke slowly. “You are a handsome man, M. Connor. And you have expectations. You have … promise.”

  “Monsieur?” I was sweating now, profusely. Jagot’s acrid smell mingled with the sweet and overblown perfume of the rhododendrons.

  “Life is short.” He sighed. “Sometimes these investigations take a long time. My men, they get impatient. They like results, they like the files to close, they like rewards. Impatient men are difficult to control.” He paused, nodding toward the end of the path. The one-armed man stood there leaning against the glass. “Have you anything to tell me, M. Connor? Something perhaps you might have forgotten?”

  “I have seen her only once,” I stammered, understanding the threat implicit in his words.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know that. You saw her at half past three on the afternoon of July twenty-third. In the Louvre, I understand. I looked for your report of that meeting in my file, M. Connor, yesterday, but I did not find it. Perhaps I did not look carefully enough.”

  “I didn’t think it was—”

  “Let us say that your report has gone missing. We will call it a bureaucratic error. We will say it is not important. Of course the next report you write for the Bureau will not go missing. And now
, M. Connor, I must ask for your identity papers—your passport?”

  “My passport, M. Jagot? Why do you need my passport?” I reached into my jacket pocket.

  “We have rules in Paris, monsieur, and those rules say that a man or woman who is part of a police investigation cannot leave the city. Your papers will be safe with me, M. Connor. You have my word.” He took them from me and folded them into a silver case.

  “For how long?” I stuttered. “I mean to return to England.”

  “Until we know what is what, M. Connor. And how long does that take? Who is to say? Of course, if we find Mme. Bernard, or if someone brings her to us, then we close the files. We say this is finished business. But until that moment, it is unfinished business. You may go now, monsieur, but you must not speak of our meeting. Not to anyone, you understand? It is a private matter.”

  I stood up. “M. Jagot—” I began to remonstrate.

  “Au revoir, M. Connor.”

  The one-armed man did not meet my eye as I passed him. He spat into the undergrowth.

  Furious at Jagot’s veiled accusations and threats and conscious of being tangled up in a web that was as thick as a forest and over which I had no control, I resolved to walk in the Jardin until I had seized on a plan. I slipped into the lecture hall in the amphitheater between lectures, waiting until a group of students talking animatedly to a professor I did not recognize had spilled onto the gravel path outside. The empty lecture hall, curved seats raked high behind me, smelled of furniture wax and heated bodies; on the blackboard a chalked diagram of a cuttlefish, tentacles sprawling, had been marked with arrows and letters, all its parts labeled; over to the left on the same board someone had pinned a drawing of what looked like a crocodile. On the lecturer’s podium a series of monkey skulls had been arranged in a row.

  Despite everything, I reasoned with myself, this particular knot would unravel in a few days, when Jagot had tracked down Lucienne Bernard and recovered my things. He would come to see my innocence. I might have gone to see the British ambassador to plead my case, or found a lawyer to petition for the return of my passport, but my story was now full of embarrassing kinks, each of which undermined my claim to innocence. Why had I not called the guard in the Louvre? Why had I failed to make a report to Jagot despite having given him my word? Why had I fallen asleep on the mail coach with objects of such value and consequence? No matter how you looked at it, it didn’t look good.

  N THE FOURTH OF AUGUST, the HMS Bellerophon, which had been anchored off the coast of Torbay for almost a week, finally set sail, heading for deeper waters. Beyond the gaze of the English journalists, who had positioned their telescopes at all the seaward—facing windows of all the lodging houses of Plymouth hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous greatcoat, the Emperor of France was about to board a new ship, the HMS Northumberland, a forty—four-gun ship of the line. The Bellerophon, for all its fighting glory, for all the mythology of its name, was not fit or young enough, the admirals said, to take the Emperor the full distance to Saint Helena, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, thirteen hundred miles from the nearest landmass. On board, the Emperor, his spirits low, began a new game of cards.

  Two days before, when the state official had read out a letter from the British government announcing that the prisoner of war was to be exiled to the island of Saint Helena and permitted to take with him only three officers, his surgeon, and twelve servants, Napoleon had protested violently. “What am I to do on this little rock at the end of the world?” he roared. “The climate is too hot for me. No, I will not go to Saint Helena. Botany Bay is better than Saint Helena. If your government wishes to put me to death, they may kill me here.” But within a few hours, his anger had dissipated and he had returned to the deck to show himself to the large crowds who had gathered in boats in the bay to catch a glimpse of him.

  On the morning of August 4 when the Bellerophon set out to sea to make its way to the Northumberland, the number of boats in the bay had increased to dangerous levels. Every boat in Devon had been commandeered by tourists it seemed. In the chaos, a cutter that had been circling the Bellerophon to keep away the large crowds ran down a boat full of spectators. Several people, including two women, died in the waves.

  “Be it so,” the Emperor said to his secretary, Comte Las Cases, later that evening. “On this desolate rock we will write our memoirs. We must be employed—occupation is the scythe of time. After all, what must a man do but fulfill his destiny? Mine is yet to be completed.”

  6

  FELT HER ALWAYS, her presence in the shadows, like Jagot’s man. I imagined that she watched everything I did. If, a few days before, I had been confident that she would come and find me, now I feared that she would, knowing it would only implicate me further in Jagot’s eyes. At night she twisted in and out of my dreams, down labyrinths and alleyways, in and out of sight, tormenting me.

  After Jagot’s threat in the Jardin, I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the course of reading I had assigned myself. Unable to leave Paris and now dependent on the success of the investigation, I began to sleep through most of the days, turning into a nocturnal creature, the companion of the night visitors Fin brought back to the salon: medical students with black rings under their eyes who talked of autopsies and typhus and skin diseases, and the philosophically minded ones who talked about transformism and taxonomy and homologies, and the artists’ models, shopgirls, and dancers. Mme. de Staël never appeared. I dared not think about what my father would say about this life I was now living. I told myself, still confident that order would be restored, that he might never need know.

  I was walking home alone after a night spent drinking with Fin in the first week of August, down an alleyway off the rue de Chartres near the back entrance to the Théâtre de Vaudeville. It was dark and I was walking like one already asleep, one foot after the other, my footsteps echoing deep into the shadows. Two wooden cellar doors in the street were flung open. Out of the hole that opened up in the cobbles, three men dressed in women’s clothes—wigs, pearls, feathers, satin, and silk in red and gold and orange on black—lit from below, flurried up into the night like giant moths shaking out their wings. Manmoths, I thought, their faces turned to the moon, scaling the sides of buildings, eyes all pupil like hers, an entire night unto themselves.

  I think sometimes, with the vantage of hindsight, that we were the lotus-eaters, Fin and I, Odysseus’s sailors resting on the peninsula of the African coast, intoxicated by the lotus flowers of Paris nights. The edges of dream and reality had shifted and I couldn’t say where they were anymore. The world of the Jardin des Plantes, with its taxonomies and classifications and labels, had receded, and the heady scientific and political conversations of the salon had filled the hole like an incoming tide. And in those dream nights, listening to Ramon and Evangelista and Céleste talk, I was coming to see certain things as if for the first time. The evidence they used to support their transformist ideas—fossils, strata, intermediate species, extinctions—was persuasive. The edges of time had stretched in that atelier in Saint-Germain—not my time, not this little life of mine, but the time that, in my mind, until now, had stretched back through history books, in straight lines, through kings and queens and wars and tribes, Romans and Britons, and then back through the fragments of Herodotus I remembered, to a garden where God made a woman from the rib of a man. It’s not that I hadn’t wondered about origins before, just that I had known only this one with the rib and the apple and the snake, and the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. And that version was still unassailable. It was in the Bible.

  In Derbyshire I had been taught that questioning the truth of the Bible had eternal consequences. At the age of seven, sitting in the family pew in my Sunday clothes in the chapel in Ashbourne, my father on one side, my brothers on the other, I had listened to the preacher deliver a lurid sermon about the various tortures of damnation. During the silent prayer that followed, I had seen Satan, or thought I had seen h
im, out of the corner of my eye, at the door of the vestry. He was a thing of scales, a malevolent creature; his hooves made a scuttling sound on the stone flags of the church. He had grinned at me. I did not sleep for days.

  When Céleste asked what I’d been taught about God and I told her about seeing Satan at the vestry door and that as a child I had worried about eternity and how long it might be, she’d said that’s how the priests worked—through fear and trembling. It’s enough to send a child mad. You don’t have to believe it, she said. Just because they tell you there’s a hell, you don’t have to believe it. But then, I reminded myself later that night, my brother would say that Céleste was on Satan’s side. She was a heretic, after all. So she would say that.

  When I saw Lucienne Bernard for the third time, actually saw her, in flesh and blood, not in my dreams, it was the night of August 10, in the crypt of a former Capuchin convent near the place Vendôme. Fin and Céleste had taken me to the Fantasmagorie—a distraction, Céleste said, for le garçon perdu, the lost boy, as she called me. A Belgian illusionist named Étienne-Gaspard Robertson had built a theater inside the crypt as a tourist attraction. They called it the theater of the dead.

  I protested but I went. I was curious, of course.

  It was seven o’clock. Dusk. The first dimly lit rooms of the convent, beyond the craggy door studded with metal, were arranged like a museum of scientific curiosities and optical illusions, small in scale and rather tawdry in the stony dank caverns of the convent. Beyond, in the curtained darkness of the refectory, a woman called la Femme invisible addressed us in English, her voice as loud as if she was standing right next to us but she was invisible, a voice without a body, a mechanized ghost. I looked for an auditory apparatus in the walls, some kind of speaking tube, but could find nothing. She challenged us to ask her questions.