The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “I moved out of the hotel and into lodgings with a friend,” I said. “It’s cheaper. I left word.”

  “Of course. So the concierge,” she said, “thinking I looked disreputable, wouldn’t give me your forwarding address. Of course. Quelle idiote. I should have known.”

  “But,” I said, “you were at the Fantasmagorie that night. You saw me. You could have spoken to me then.”

  “Jagot’s man was sitting right behind you. I saw him the moment you saw me. I had to take the back staircase out through the crypt. Listen, Daniel,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I want to give you back your things. Taking them was a stupid idea. I regretted it as soon as I thought about the price you would have to pay for losing them. Two hours,” she said. “I need just two hours. Meet me in the alley that runs off the passage des Petits-Pères at seven o’clock. Under the third lamp from the east. Exactly seven o’clock, you understand? And when I leave here, you mustn’t follow me, because Jagot’s man will follow you. Do you understand? You must not follow me.”

  She pushed me hard, as if shaking me from some state of stupefaction. I wanted to embrace her. Her promise to return my belongings, the turning back of time, the prospect of starting again, acted like a strong draft of laudanum. I didn’t think about Jagot or about how I was going to account for the recovery of the stolen goods. It didn’t even matter if her story was true or not. I was light-headed with expectation and relief.

  “Thank you. Yes, I understand,” I said. “Seven o’clock. Passage des Petits-Pères. Third streetlamp from the east.”

  “Now let me buy you a drink,” she said. “I need to steady my nerves, and it will throw Jagot’s man off the scent. He doesn’t recognize me dressed like this.”

  I followed her to the bar, watching her broad stride, her slight swagger, marveling at the woman’s body moving in the man’s clothes. Lucienne ordered two glasses of champagne and took a seat on a high stool at the bar next to a man with white hair who was smoking a cigar. I sat to her left. The white-haired man had cast down a calfskin copy of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and was slumped across the bar, intent on maintaining his flirtation with the barmaid. He seemed to have drunk rather too much brandy. Lucienne leaned toward him. “Bonjour, Alain,” she said.

  The man stiffened and, putting out his cigar, turned to look at her. “Excuse me, monsieur, but you are mistaken,” he said, looking ashen and disoriented. “My name is Thomas. Thomas Gutell. This young lady here will tell you. It’s Thomas Gutell.”

  “Forgive me, M. Gutell. You look remarkably like an old friend of mine, Citoyen Alain Saint-Vincent. He reads poetry too.” She picked up his book and opened it, running her eyes over the words. “Yes,” she said, “Byron. Yes. I like this. My friend Saint-Vincent would like this too. But, sadly, he is no longer in Paris. He was exiled for speaking out against the king. He has left the country, they say. Perhaps I should send him a copy of this book.”

  “Please, I assure you, it’s not a problem. It was an easy mistake to make.” The man who called himself M. Gutell took another gulp of his brandy. Lucienne stood up and passed a few coins to the barmaid, preparing to leave.

  “You have had good luck today, monsieur, at the card table?” Gutell seemed to want to keep the conversation going a little longer.

  “Yes. Very good.” She smiled and passed him back the book.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I don’t like the brandy here.”

  “Might I recommend the Café des Invalides?” he said. “The best time is around six o’clock, when the orchestra plays. The brandy there is very good.”

  “Six o’clock? Thank you, monsieur, for your recommendation. Enjoy your afternoon.” She nodded in my direction. “Au revoir, M. Connor,” she said. “Until later.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was half past five.

  7

  DID FOLLOW HER, despite the promise I had made, because in leaving the Palais, I took care to lose Jagot’s man. But I hadn’t lost him; he had only made himself invisible. After all these weeks of waiting, I couldn’t simply let her disappear again into that unfathomable city. I was elated at the prospect of a reprieve from my sentence of exile from the Jardin. But I still didn’t trust her.

  I followed her through the crowd, down the stairs, and out into the arched cloisters of the Palais Royal gardens, where Russian and Austrian soldiers stood among groups of women dressed in grubby white and pale yellow chiffon dresses that clung to their thighs, buttons undone. The women were soliciting, goading, beguiling, pointing to the upper rooms of the brothel. Racolage. Money and sex. Soldiers roamed the cloistered courtyard with glistening eyes, selecting the women with the finest skin or fullest figures, as if they were choosing fruit from some stall. It disgusted and fascinated me. The prostitutes in Edinburgh, thin and cold, lined up along the streetlamps down by the harbor, looked nothing like this. These men and women reminded me of the strutting and preening peacocks in the menagerie of the Jardin, with all the plumage and fur that adorned the soldiers’ helmets and the women’s headdresses. Small ornamental dogs played among the furls of trousers and skirts.

  I watched Lucienne slipping through the groups of men and women in the cloisters. One or two of the women greeted her. The prostitutes parted to let her pass. She was known here despite her disguise. Respected, it seemed. What curious history had produced that respect, I wondered.

  My passage through the cloisters was different. The women rose from both sides, stepping toward me from behind the arches with rouged faces and shining eyes, taunting me, rousing me, and yes, my body betrayed me with every touch. Warm fingers brushed against the insides of my thighs as I passed; painted mouths whispered profanities. A few steps farther a blond woman with a missing tooth took my hand and pressed it to her breast, where I felt a nipple harden beneath chiffon.

  I kept my eyes resolutely forward, focused them on a series of arches above my head; I concentrated on reading the faded letters advertising the wares of the numerous shops to left and right: CHANGE DE TOUTES SORTES DE MONNAIE, OMBRES CHINOISES SÉRAPHINE, CAFÉ AMERICAIN, CABINET DE CONSULTATION À L’ENTRESOL. I watched her slip through an arch and step out into the bright late-afternoon light.

  She stopped to look around her, then walked toward a woman in a white dress who was sitting on a bench under a plane tree, reading a book to a small dark-haired child. The seated woman’s hair was gathered into a knot on the top of her head with a twist of purple silk in a way that reminded me of Grecian statues. She was small and neat, elegant. Delphine, the child from the mail coach, was sitting on the woman’s lap, her eyes fixed on the book. She seemed to be struggling to stay awake.

  Lucienne stood very still a few feet away, watching the woman read to the child, until the girl, glancing up, saw her, clambered off the woman’s lap and ran across the grass toward her mother. Lucienne took Delphine in her arms and swung her up into the air and spun her around, the soft burnt-orange cloth of the child’s dress fluttering up around her. Then the three of them, animated and laughing, sat down under the plane tree in the long shadows and Lucienne tipped out the gold coins she had won at the card table into the grass for the child to play with. It was a pretty picture.

  Only a few hours before, I had decided to return home. Now I was watching Lucienne Bernard sitting in the Palais Royal gardens dressed in the clothes of a man, with the child Delphine and another woman, who might be a cousin or a friend.

  What if her promise had been a ruse to throw me off? I wondered, considering how quickly I had believed her. I had already begun to question whether instead of following her, I should be sending word to Jagot to bring his men. But I had no choice, I reasoned. I would follow her to her lodgings, make a careful note of everything I saw or heard, and then, if she failed to appear with my belongings in the passage des Petits-Pères at seven o’clock, I would go straight to the Bureau. Then Jagot and his men would go and retrieve my papers, the corals, the mammoth-bone specimens, and t
he precious manuscript pages, and arrest Lucienne and her associates. And I would go to Cuvier and start again. Properly this time. Almost a month had passed, but the work on Cuvier’s book would be there just the same. I need an army of assistants to complete my great work, he had written in that letter to Jameson. He would still need me.

  Lucienne walked with the woman and the child into the warren of streets lined with brothels and gambling dens. At a fork in the road they separated, Lucienne walking in one direction, the woman and the child in the other. When Delphine glanced back over her shoulder for a moment, she saw me. Her black eyes lingered on me, and she smiled.

  I found, to my relief, that Lucienne had been distracted by the shops and the people passing her. I followed at a distance through crowded streets, watching for the scrap of sea-green silk and the head of sleek black hair moving out there in front of me. Black like crow feathers.

  We entered the gilded passage des Panoramas. Storefronts displayed their wares behind polished glass; some goods spilled out onto the marbled walkway: fabrics, umbrellas, boots, flowers, cashmere shawls, books, prints, musical instruments. I ran my hands over cheap knickknacks, requisites in walnut shells, ragpickers’ baskets, Vendôme columns and obelisks containing thermometers. I was trying to disappear, to make myself look like any of the men and women captivated by the glittering cornucopia of the arcade.

  I followed her out into the boulevard Montmartre and down into the boulevard des Italiens, where she stopped at the Café des Invalides and took a seat at the window. I stepped into the dark corner of a shop doorway across the street. The reflections of carriages clattering by and parasolled women swam through the glass like fish. I crossed the road to see better and leaned against a wall just a few yards to the left of the window. It was six o’clock.

  Gutell arrived from the other end of the street, entered the café, and joined Lucienne at the table. She stood to kiss his cheek; he returned the kiss, looking around anxiously. They were clearly not strangers. Through the frame of the café window, I watched him offer her a cigar and Lucienne wave it away. As they talked, the smoke from his cigar curled up and around them. He had the air of a dandy, despite his evident agitation.

  Twenty minutes or so later they left the café together and I followed them down narrowing streets until finally they turned into a darkened alleyway, the passage des Petits-Pères, under lines of washing strung from the windows of upper lodgings. I waited at the corner, listening for their footsteps on the cobbles. I heard a bolt being pulled back, the creak of a large door opening and then closing. I glanced down the alleyway. It was empty, except for a cat and three mangy kittens that were chewing over some rotting bones. The two figures had disappeared. My heart began to pound.

  Venturing down the alley, I saw only one door large enough to have made the sound I had heard; it was made of dark wood, intricately carved, with two unpolished brass lion-head knockers, their manes rippling outward. It appeared to be the side door of what once must have been a building of some importance. There had been a sign here, but it had been wrenched off; I could see the holes where nails had been torn away, leaving a square of unblackened stone behind. I looked up. The windows were boarded over.

  I sat on a wooden crate outside the door, under the third street-lamp from the east. Perhaps Lucienne would honor her promise after all. Those things she had stolen from me were probably in there, behind that door, in that very building. Despite her explanation, it made my blood boil to think of the damage she had done; how close I had come to losing everything. And so I waited, watching the washerwomen come and go, listening to fragments of their conversations, the humming of flies, and the intermittent screech of swallows gathering on the rooftops.

  8

  HEN THE DOOR TO THE STREET opened and she came out alone, something broke inside me. All my careful strategies collapsed. I pushed her up against the wall, unconscious of anything except the need to stop her from disappearing again. She did not struggle. I felt the sea-green silk of her jacket against my hands, felt the muscle and bone of her shoulders under my grip. I smelled the faint scent of her sweat, noticed the flushed skin that took the shape of an island on her left cheek. She kept quite still, tilting her head backward slightly, as if she was expecting me to hit her. Suddenly, with my face up close to hers, her mouth there, like that, I became confused and disoriented.

  “Everything,” I said, “is ruined. I have no money, no job, and no prospects.”

  “M. Connor. You are hurting me.”

  “You have destroyed everything for me.” But I let her go all the same. She brushed her hands along her shoulders, smoothing down the folds of her jacket.

  “I told you,” she said. “I tried to find you. You broke your promise.” She glanced nervously up the street. “You said you wouldn’t follow me. You have no idea how dangerous that was.”

  “Dangerous?” I could hear the sneer in my voice.

  “Dangerous for me. Yes. But then that doesn’t matter to you.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “How long was I supposed to wait for you? Weeks? Months? What are you doing? Is this some kind of game?”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  She walked away from me a little. I kept close.

  “I know who you are,” I said clumsily, “and what you do. I know all about you.”

  Suddenly, afraid she would slip away again, I lunged toward her but stumbled, falling against her, pushing her hard. She fell toward the wall, tripping over some boxes and hitting her shoulder; then, regaining her balance, she turned, stepped toward me, and hit me across the face with her fist. The sound of the blow, her knuckles across my jaw, echoed against the walls. A caged bird was singing above us, repeating its refrain over and over.

  “You know nothing. You are blind,” she said, rubbing her hand, “as blind as it is possible to be, monsieur. You have no idea. You see nothing beyond yourself.”

  I kicked the wall several times. Everything else around me in the gathering twilight seemed to be turning to water.

  “Merde,” I said. “Damn. Damn. Damn. That hurt. I hate this. What do you want me to do? I agree to anything. Everything. I will do … whatever. I am tired. I just want to—”

  “What? What is it you want?”

  “I came to Paris to make something of myself. You have no idea how hard I have worked or how long I have waited to get this position. You have no idea how difficult it was to persuade my father to let me travel here. And in a single night you have ruined everything.”

  “And what does that something look like, Daniel, this thing that you will make of yourself?” She was leaning against the wall next to me. “The Grand Tour, then home for church on Sundays, a practice, a spell on the town council, conversations with ladies taking tea in the afternoons? What will you make of yourself, M. Connor?”

  “If I had gone to Cuvier in the first place,” I said, “or done anything halfway sensible, I might have been able to salvage something….” I closed my eyes and watched the small pinpricks of light puncturing the darkness.

  “But then there would be no now.” Her voice had softened. “Keep your eyes closed,” she said, moving closer to me, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Now tell me what color you see when I do this.”

  I saw blue when she kissed me, there in the darkening alley. I could not open my eyes, afraid that if I did, I would wake up back in my room, or somewhere she wasn’t, where there was no smell of bergamot mixed with old beer and something like crushed herbs from the cobbles, somewhere not blue.

  “Blue?” she said when I answered her. “I see purple.”

  When I opened my eyes, the street was darker; the edges of everything had softened; the colors had drained away. Down at the end of the alley the lamplighter lowered a lamp on its rope pulley, lit it, and pulled it back up into place.

  “I have no plan, Daniel,” she said. “I am making this up as I go along. I make mistakes. Everything about this—about you—gets under my skin. The Caravag
gio boy, the coral fossils, the clever questions you ask in those notebooks of yours, your beautiful drawings. I have dreamt about you—I was trying to talk to you, but you were shouting. But … there are other things. Things you don’t know about and … you are—”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t trust me.”

  “Shhh,” she said, and kissed me again. I could feel her breath, see her eyebrows thick and dark, the crow’s-feet around her eyes. I closed my eyes again, and in the darkness I could see flowers opening infinitely slowly, rust-colored petals against dark blue, stamens dusted gold.

  “Doucement,” she said. “Come inside. There’s always someone listening. Everywhere.” She looked up and down the street, pointed toward white sheets that billowed in the wind like sails. A shutter banged shut.

  “But the man in the café? Gutell.”

  “Saint-Vincent?” she said. “His real name is Saint-Vincent. He’s gone. There’s no one here.”

  She unlocked the door in the wall and led me into a courtyard. Untended trees, banana palms and figs, had grown up against the side of the building, arching over to make a jungle of moving shadows; an urn here and there that had once held flowers now filled with nothing but bare earth and a scattering of cigar butts. An old folding table had cracked and fallen onto its side; chairs lay scattered about like the limbs of something long dead.

  We crossed the courtyard and I followed her up a flight of stone steps covered with leaves. They led to an open door, the glass in its panels fractured in several places, and we entered a dusty hallway lined with doors, most boarded up. I translated the trades listed on the plaque in the hall: a printer, a knife grinder, an ironmonger, a linen trader, a locksmith, a dealer in curiosities. The house was silent except for the faint cooing of pigeons from an upper floor.

  “It was once very grand here,” she said, “before the Revolution. Then they divided it up to make workshops and lodgings, and now, well, there’s almost no one left. There’s Sandrine, the linen merchant, Pierre, the ink maker, both of them on the ground floor, and there’s me on the second floor. We share the building with the cats. Sandrine has five cats. If I were here more, I’d do something about the courtyard and mend a few things. What do you smell?”