The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “A promise,” she said, by way of explanation. “Another reason I had to come back to Paris one last time.”

  Inside the paper was a long, thin splinter of green slate on which she had engraved Lucienne Bernard’s name and birth date: 1776–1794.

  “At least it is something,” she said, as she pushed the slate into the ground near the wall. “She wanted to die. I know what that feels like, for I did too. But she stood up and I sat down. I might have ended up down there with all the other bones. Instead I was given a life I didn’t want. When you have wanted to die as much as I have, it makes you reckless with your life afterward,” she said, then stopped. “But now there is Delphine, and I try not to be reckless. It is a resolution I have made.” She smiled sadly. “I don’t seem to be doing very well.”

  “Resolutions,” I said. “I have resolved to give up resolutions myself. I’m not very good at them either.” I kissed her.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m not upset. I don’t need your pity. I wanted you to see this garden, that’s all. I wanted you to see it with your own eyes. Everyone should see it. So that we remember just how noble the human species really is.”

  15

  HEN I KNOCKED at the locksmith’s atelier two days later, answering a note she had sent, Lucienne came to the door wearing her workman’s trousers, her shirt undone and her feet bare. She seemed tired and her face was swollen. When I looked more closely, I could see that it was also bruised.

  “What happened?” I asked, alarmed. “Somebody did this to you, didn’t they? Somebody attacked you … When … where? Was it just one man or several? I’ll find them—the cowards.”

  “In the alleyway, down there, last night. Just one man. But for God’s sake, Daniel, I told you before, I don’t need rescuing. I can look after myself.” She turned away coldly.

  At the other end of the workroom, through the frame of the half-open door, a woman and a man sat at a table in conversation, their attention focused on the table itself, where they appeared to be playing cards. Manon Laforge and Alain Saint-Vincent, surrounded by corals and shells and packing cases. As I stepped into the atelier, Lucienne, seeing the direction of my gaze, walked back toward that room and pulled the door closed.

  “What kind of miserable coward would attack a woman in an alleyway?” I asked. “Did he rob you? Did he touch you? Was it …? Was it a man, a boy tall, short, fat, thin? Did you see his face?”

  “Yes, I saw his face.”

  “Then you must make a report. Someone must find him.”

  “Make a report? Yes, of course. Go to the police, yes. Daniel, you know I can’t do that. Be quiet. I need you to listen.”

  Through the closed door I could hear the others talking in French; I could hear fragments of speech now and again. Lucienne ran her hand through her hair and looked at me as if she was trying to frame a question. A single strand of hair stuck to her face.

  “Everything is good for you again at the Jardin, yes? Cuvier trusts you. You are doing well there.” I wasn’t sure what frightened me more, the coldness of her manner or the menacing implications of this night attack.

  “Yes,” I said, lowering my voice. “What is this, Lucienne? Somebody has attacked you and you won’t tell me who or why. And now you want to talk about my work at the museum. You never tell me anything. You don’t trust me. You treat me as if I am a boy, as if I am useless. What am I to you, Lucienne?”

  She didn’t answer. She seemed to be struggling with herself, walking up and down the room, about to speak and then not. I opened the front door and walked toward the top of the staircase, looking down through its curves and angles to the floor below. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just leave. I kicked the wall and then turned back.

  When I came back in to the room, Lucienne was looking toward the door. I slumped into a low chair in a corner, defeated.

  She shrugged. “You think such bad things of me,” she said. “You think I have no feelings for you. You are a blind man.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “I am a blind man. You have made me blind. And I can’t leave you. You can’t ask me to do that. Please. Whatever has happened … however bad things are, let me help. There must be something I can do. But I can’t do anything unless you tell me what’s happening … He might come back.”

  “There is trouble,” she said. “Bad trouble. Like a spiders web. You will get caught in it too and it will get worse. But I can’t get out of it. I asked you once to help me, and then I changed my mind. But now I need to ask you again.”

  She opened a drawer, took out a piece of folded paper, and passed it to me. “I should have left Paris before. I was so stupid.”

  I began to unfold the paper she had given me.

  “It’s a map of the Jardin des Plantes,” she said. “An old one. It’s of no use to me. It doesn’t have any of the new buildings on it, the ones they’ve built in the last five years. I need to know where everyone in the Jardin lives, and I need a detailed map of Cuvier’s museum, with all the new exits and entrances, including the cellars. I need the names of all the people who live in the buildings, from the guards to Cuvier’s family. I need to know how the locking systems work. Even the feeding times in the menagerie. And I need the information soon, very soon. Three weeks or sooner. The clock is ticking. Do you think you can do that? Is it possible?”

  Lucienne’s face and posture were utterly impassive now.

  “A man came to see me yesterday,” she continued, pacing, “someone I used to know, someone I worked with before. He came with a commission—a job—for us. I said no. Saint-Vincent and Manon, they said no. I said to him, we don’t do that work anymore. But this time he says we can’t choose. And he won’t let me leave Paris until we bring him what he wants. He’s dangerous.”

  She gestured to the bruise on her face, the swelling and the cut. I imagined a knife. A blade flashing in the light. Her hands were grazed and cut. She had fought back. It was difficult to imagine she wouldn’t. I felt an ache cut through me like a knife. I couldn’t protect her and she didn’t want me to. And I felt guilty. Deep down, I’d always known she’d have to pay for the time she’d stolen and the risks she’d taken. She’d stayed in Paris for me—or at least partly for me. I could have made her go.

  “Yesterday?” I said. “For God’s sake, why didn’t you send for me?”

  “I didn’t need you yesterday,” she said sharply. “Today I do. I haven’t slept, worrying about it, about you. You have everything ahead of you. This will be a big risk. You could lose everything—”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “It’s my fault this has happened. I persuaded you to stay in Paris. You wouldn’t be here now, if—”

  “No,” she said. “I stayed. You didn’t make me. That’s not your responsibility. It’s mine.”

  “But why you? There must be other thieves in Paris, professionals like you who can do what this man wants. You can’t be the only one.”

  “Yes, but what he wants is in the Jardin des Plantes, it’s in Cuvier’s museum. And I know that museum better than any other thief in France. No one knows that building like I do. Or at least I used to. He knows that.”

  “What can be worth the trouble? Some old bones, a mummy or two? There’s nothing there.”

  “A diamond. One of the biggest in the world. It belongs to Denon, the director of the Louvre. Denon and Cuvier have made a deal. Cuvier is hiding some of Denon’s most valuable pieces in the cellar of the museum: a cabinet of curiosities, some paintings Denon won’t part with, and some Egyptian artifacts. In return for hiding them, Denon will help Cuvier negotiate with M. Brugmans.”

  “Cuvier is hiding Denon’s stolen collection? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Cuvier’s clever—he knows how to get what he wants. He always has. He’s a politician. He’ll do anything to keep that collection in his museum.”

  There was some kind of truth in what she said; I had seen Vivant Denon leaving Cuvier’s house se
veral times over the last several days, taking the back staircase. I had thought little of it at the time—Cuvier was always receiving some dignitary or other. The picture Lucienne painted of Cuvier’s dealings unsettled me. But then I thought of my own ambitions, that relentless acquisitive curiosity; in Cuvier’s position, would I have behaved any differently?

  “How long do you have?” I asked, finally.

  “The end of October. Denon has arranged for his collection to be taken out of the country then. So we have one month only. It’s almost impossible. Cuvier knows all of us, and his guards have descriptions. There are more locks in the museum now than there are in almost any bank in the city. I need you to get me in. There’s no one else who can do it.” She was dressing now, tucking in her shirt, taking the waistcoat from the back of the door and doing up the buttons one by one, arranging her hair and neckerchief carefully in front of the mirror near the window. “You don’t know this man, Daniel. If I could find a way out of it, I would. I promised Manon, for the sake of Delphine. I said there would be no more commissions. But this time we cannot choose.”

  “Delphine?” I said. “Manon was going to take her back to Italy …”

  “It’s too late,” she said. “If only Manon had gone yesterday … She wanted to, but I’d made a promise to take Delphine to Malmaison to show her Napoleon’s house. She wanted to see it before they left …” She paused, her eyes full of tears. “Daniel, what if he finds out about her? What if he finds out where Delphine is?”

  “He won’t,” I said. “Not if you do what he tells you to.”

  I was struggling now, weighing up the risks—an illustrious future lost, perhaps even prison—against what was at stake, thinking not just of Lucienne and her accomplices but of Delphine in the convent garden.

  “Just a map?” I asked. “That’s all you need from me?”

  “Just a map.”

  “I know someone,” I said, thinking. “Joseph Deleuze could draw up a map. He knows the garden and the museum like no one else does. I could try.”

  “Will he do it quickly?” she asked, turning to look at me. “I can’t do anything until I have a map. I don’t even know if it’s possible to get in there until I’ve seen it. It must be very detailed, very accurate. Then I can make a plan.”

  So that was it. Just a map, she said. As if the map was of little consequence. But a few minutes after we had begun to talk about the map and Deleuze, we both knew the threshold had been crossed, and the details of that crossing and what it meant would be determined later.

  Why did Daniel Connor take this path rather than the one he was supposed to take, the one he thought he wanted to take, what Rev. Samuels would call the righteous path, the one that went with Cuvier, with hard work, apprenticeship, patronage, the one that would almost certainly lead to success? Why instead did he take the path that led into the muddy and shadowy labyrinths with the heretics and the thieves? You’d have to ask him that. I am no longer that Daniel Connor. That one, that boy, is many Daniels ago. Several lost skins ago.

  Desire was there from the beginning. That I remember. But that’s an easy explanation for why the boy on the mail coach became the boy of the labyrinths and salons and gambling houses, for how the anatomy student became a thief. A philosopher-thief took me to her bed and talked of time stretching back so far it made my head spin, talked of water moving over mountain ranges over millions and millions of years, drip on drip, small rivulets carving rock; she whispered of colonies of corals creating continents, of the minute skeletons of chalk creatures making cliffs, of seabeds heaving up and slowly pushing fossilized oyster beds to the peaks of mountains hundreds of miles up and away from the sea; she murmured of continents drifting apart and back together again; and she entwined and enraveled mind and body so you stopped knowing where one finished and the other began.

  People talk about falling among thieves. I fell among thieves in the city of Paris in 1815, except that it didn’t feel like a falling at all—it felt like a flight.

  “My people,” she said, nodding toward the closed door. “They’ll be your people now. You can trust them with anything.”

  One of the first things that Manon said that day when Lucienne finished explaining about the map, was: “Lucienne, Alain’s found Silveira.”

  “Davide?” Lucienne’s voice was quiet and steely. She glanced at Alain, who looked away before he spoke.

  “Yes. In Paris. I heard some rumors a few days ago, and had some friends look for him in the old Jewish quarter. One of them sent word this morning.”

  “Vraiment?”

  “He’s back in the rue du Pet-au-Diable,” Manon added

  “Merde. Merde. It was always like this. He’s always too late. I’ve been looking for him for weeks, and now he just turns up in the rue du Pet-au-Diable when it’s too damn late. I wonder if Jagot knows. It won’t be long. If we know he’s there, Jagot will know.”

  “My man said that Silveira has Sabalair with him,” Alain said. “That makes a difference. Jagot won’t move in on them until the time is right. And if they are in the rue du Pet-au-Diable, Jagot hasn’t a chance—Silveira can disappear like a ghost in those streets. My man said Silveira is back in Paris looking for you, Lucienne. Word reached him that you were here.”

  “Well, his timing’s perfect, hein? It is quite the reunion now.”

  Alain, hearing the flint in Lucienne’s voice, changed the subject, veering back from the edge of something dark that had entered the room with Davide’s name. “It’s impossible, you know,” he said. “We can’t get into the museum again. They have more guards in there now and a whole set of new locks. We might as well put the chains on our wrists and ankles and go straight to Toulon.”

  Manon intervened. “Remember that job in the rue Saint-Pierre? You cut the glass in five seconds and cleaned out in seventeen. You said that was impossible. For you everything is always impossible—until you do it.”

  Lucienne turned to the others. “We are going to need more money. I need to rent two floors of a house overlooking the Jardin and it won’t be cheap. We must have equipment and transport, and we’ll need a set of false documents. That will cost more money than I have.”

  “Reuben?” Manon asked.

  “No. Reuben’s retired.”

  “Who then?”

  Lucienne walked back to the window. “Silveira,” she said.

  Alain turned on her. “Are you mad?”

  “We have no choice. We need him. I’m going to see him. Tomorrow.”

  “Start with the pawnshop in the rue du Pet-au-Diable,” said Saint-Vincent. “I asked around yesterday. He’s not been back long. And take Daniel with you.”

  16

  HE RUE DU PET-AU–DIABLE runs through the Jewish quarter of the city, the name an ancient echo of derision and prejudice. An old menhir stood on that spot in the Marais, near a house that had been used as a synagogue until the Jews were expelled in the twelfth century; locals called it the Hôtel du Pet-au-Diable, the house of the devil’s fart. The medieval French poet and notorious thief and murderer François Villon even wrote a ballad about it. Its name survived in the street name. The Parisian Jews who worshipped there, of course, did not survive.

  Lucienne and I took a narrow street off the rue Tisserand that led into a maze of more narrow, covered passageways, unlit and, in the early evening, dark and forbidding and muddy underfoot. A child, a small boy with a dirty face and bare feet, stood pressed up against the wall in the first alley.

  “Are you lost, mister? Want some help?” he said and grinned. Then he said something else, which I couldn’t follow. It still surprised me that no one could tell that Lucienne was a woman in man’s clothes. This boy took us both for men. He didn’t question it.

  “No, we know where we’re going,” Lucienne said, passing the boy a coin.

  “Why don’t we get him to take us there?”

  “Have you learned nothing in Paris, Daniel? If I ask him to take us, he’ll lead us into a cul-de-s
ac, and then he and his little friends will rob us—and then probably beat us too.”

  “But he’s so young.”

  “Oh, believe me, his friends will be older.”

  Behind us in the darkness, I heard the boy give a sequence of whistles, some short, some long. More alleys led off to the right and to the left. When I peered down into them I could see small groups of children looking toward us, whispering to one another. Eyes bright in the darkness like wolves.

  “We’d better be quick or they’ll head us off,” she said, urgency in her voice.

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I’d risk us getting lost down here?”

  “But this M. Silveira is rich?” To either side, the ornate carved doorways of derelict hotels showed signs of richer times. Now the smell of urine and rotting meat rose from the walls and the mud beneath our feet.

  “Yes. Very. He’s in the diamond trade. His family ships red coral from the Mediterranean coast to Goa. They trade the coral for diamonds, ship the diamonds back to London for cutting and polishing, then sell them. They have a monopoly. A very successful one.”

  I imagined Silveira sitting on a golden throne in a warehouse full of red and white coral, a pile of tangled and polished branches stacked high behind him.

  Suddenly the whistle was answered by another ahead. And to the side. As we reached the next junction, we were surrounded by children, boys jostling us, converging on us, pushing and talking. “Monsieur, monsieur. Are you lost? Let me show you … We take you … This way. This way. You go left here and then take the second right …”

  “Just don’t speak to them,” Lucienne said. “Don’t be drawn in. Keep talking to me and look straight ahead.”