The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “What should I say?”

  “Just keep talking.”

  “All right, all right.”

  A boy appeared from an alleyway slightly ahead to the right. He was older, perhaps fifteen. He stood there, legs slightly apart, blocking our path, a wooden bat in one hand. The smaller boys walked around and in front of us, pushing, babbling; I glanced behind me. Another older boy had stepped into the alley behind us. There was no way out. The boy with the bat looked at Lucienne, taking her in. Lucienne looked back at him, and touched her middle finger to the spot between her eyebrows. He said something to the younger boys that I couldn’t follow. They looked up at Lucienne and then dropped back. Suddenly we were alone in the alley with only the boy ahead. He touched his finger to the point between his eyes and then disappeared too, into the darkness.

  “Joaquim,” she said. “He knows me. He’s in charge around here.”

  I took a deep breath, my body still trembling. I had been prepared to fight.

  “Why do the Indians buy coral?” I asked, finally, remembering our conversation as we walked on.

  “Funeral rites. The more red coral you take with you on the pyre, the more important you are. They store it up ready to burn. It’s an investment. Let’s go.”

  “That’s strange,” I said, glancing into the darkness around us.

  “They don’t care for diamonds as much as we do,” she said. “It’s a matter of aesthetics.”

  “Why does he live here, then, if he’s a diamond dealer?”

  “He’s safe here. All his networks start in this square mile, but they stretch everywhere—London, Goa, Madras, Brazil. He used to have a house in the rue du Temple. That’s where I last saw him. Things must be difficult if he’s back here. He is hiding.”

  A head the alleyways led through an entrance to a narrow street. We quickened our pace. As we stepped out of the maze, I could still see the children watching us in small groups from openings that might have been rabbit holes. On the narrow and cobbled rue du Pet-au-Diable, most of the shop fronts were either boarded up for the evening or permanently closed, except for a pawnshop that carried a sign saying EZRA MOSES—CURIOSITÉS ET BRIC-À-BRAC over the window. Lucienne stopped in front of it. The street was almost deserted.

  “Bric-à-brac,” Lucienne said, lowering her voice. “It could mean anything. The old shops in this quarter are often fronts for something else. Jagot tried to establish an outpost down here, but he failed. Even his contacts can’t get him in here. They’ll tear down these old streets now; build wider ones, streets in which they can see. Streets like these hide people.”

  I could see our reflections framed in the window: two men, the younger one in a brown jacket, the older one in gray-green, running his hand casually over the old books that had been arranged on a small bookcase outside. Behind the glass, the window displayed suits of mail standing like ghosts, fantastic carvings, rusty weapons, shells and ornaments, figurines in china and wood and iron and ivory; tapestries and strange dreamlike furniture. A placard in one corner announced in French: “Watches and jewelry exchanged and repaired. Buttons, bullets, and teeth from the field of Waterloo.”

  “Bric-à-brac,” I repeated, recalling my anatomy lessons and the jars of body parts I had seen in the anatomy theaters of Edinburgh.

  “There are several curiosity dealers down here,” Lucienne said. “They don’t do much passing trade. They are more like agents. They sell objets to collectors: shells, furniture, relics, horns of unicorns—that kind of thing. Waterloo relics sell best of all now they say: weapons, buttons, even stones from the battlefield. A friend of mine, English, bought a Waterloo thumb, nail and everything, from a man in the Palais Royal. He keeps it in a bottle of gin. What a strange mixture of books. Look: Homer, cheap romances, Euclid, Descartes, and this …” She picked up a tattered copy of a small red leather book. “A life of the Polish Jew Salomon Maimon, philosopher.”

  A figure in worn clothing appeared at the door and looked at us both encouragingly. “Good day, sirs,” he said. His face belonged to a man of about thirty, but though he was only seven or so years older than I was, he looked much older, older even than Lucienne. He had a dark, far-off gaze.

  “What is the price of this book?” Lucienne asked slowly.

  The shopkeeper took the book and examined its flyleaf, saying, “There is no price, I’m afraid, sir. The shopkeeper is not in. He has gone to dinner. Will you wait?”

  “M. Silveira?” Lucienne whispered.

  “Qui”? The shop assistant kept his eyes on Lucienne in rather too studied a way, I thought.

  “Silveira. Davide Silveira,” Lucienne repeated. “We will speak in English.” She too had become very still. The street children, who had slouched closer in the last few moments, began to whisper among themselves. Trompe-la-Mort. Trompe-la-Mort.

  “What makes you think you will find him here, monsieur? This shop belongs to Ezra Moses.” Then he paused and said: “Is he, perhaps, a relative of yours?”

  “Will you tell M. Moses,” Lucienne said, ignoring the question, “when he returns from his dinner, that M. Dufour has called and would like to see M. Silveira. Will you do that for me? We will wait in the café at the end of the street. Perhaps you will come and find us.”

  The shop assistant handed Lucienne the book wrapped in newspaper: “You are interested in Jewish history?”

  “Yes, I am,” Lucienne said quietly without smiling.

  “I believe M. Moses will take fifty sous, sir,” he said. “For the book.”

  “M. Moses will have one hundred sous for his trouble. We will be at the coffee shop. I trust we have an understanding. Dufour. Be sure you say that name to him.”

  “You had better step inside, M. Dufour. The coffee shop is not safe for … les étrangers. I will take your message to M. Moses and bring you a reply in an instant.”

  “As you wish.”

  “My name is Malachi. I am M. Moses’s nephew.”

  Inside the shop—which smelled of dust, damp, and great age—the lamps were turned down low, casting distorted shapes against dirty purple walls. Piled high on every side were small statues, relics, silver objects, carvings in ebony, open drawers full of silver spoons, pictures in gilt frames, armor, birds’ nests, and shells. A few minutes later Malachi returned, more ashen-faced than before. “You can go up,” he said. “Top of the stairs. First door to the right.”

  Behind the red velvet curtain that hung across part of the doorway, I could see a man sitting at a long oak desk beside some expensive optical equipment and a small, carved cabinet. An Oriental pirate, some dark-aged Aladdin, unshaven and brooding. He looked directly at us, assessing us as though we were objects to be traded. He wore a long robe of a dusky wine color trimmed with silver braid over a linen shirt and dark trousers, more like a corsair from The Arabian Nights than a Parisian dealer in corals and diamonds.

  “Silveira.” Lucienne’s voice established a tone. A distance.

  “Lucienne Bernard,” Silveira said. He did not stand or even smile; his eyes narrowed.

  Still no one moved. I stood behind Lucienne in the dark of the hallway, looking at the room through the door frame—rich golds and reds. A crimson room. A room from a painting. Hushed, private, sensuous. On the table there were several dishes of food. I could smell spices I didn’t recognize. A loaf of bread, a pomegranate sliced in half in a silver dish, its seeds gleaming like jewels in the half-light. I imagined a woman on a bed in the darkness of the far corner, naked, the line of her back curved against the coiled draperies of red satins and silks. But in that dark corner there was another man, dressed in black, standing very still, his hands together. He neither spoke nor acknowledged us. He was an old man. Tall and bulky with dark skin, a high forehead, and his white hair cut very short.

  “You remember Sabalair,” Silveira said. “He remembers you.”

  “M. Sabalair,” Lucienne said, nodding toward the old man.

  “Who’s the boy?” Silveira asked, w
aving a fly from the loaf of bread.

  “What boy?”

  “The boy behind you.”

  I shifted awkwardly. Lucienne turned and remembered me. “Daniel Connor,” she said.

  “One of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honest?”

  “Absolument.”

  As she stepped into the room, I took several steps toward Silveira and held out my hand across the desk. He shook it without much enthusiasm.

  “Enchanté, monsieur,” he said. I was clearly an inconvenience. There was a lilt in his voice, and a gold tooth became visible when he smiled. He had a large gold hoop in one ear and a chain around his neck, which moved when he did, shifting across the dark skin and white hairs of his chest. He pulled the folds of his gown around him, then gestured to Lucienne to take a seat opposite him. Silveira placed two or three mint leaves in two small glasses and reached for a silver teapot, pouring hot amber liquid into one.

  “Take a seat, boy, over there by the window. Here, finish off these.” He got up and placed a small terra-cotta dish on the mahogany table by the window seat and passed me a fork, a napkin, and the glass of mint tea into which he had sprinkled something that looked like chopped walnuts. I did not like being called a boy.

  “Quails,” he said, gesturing at the dish. “They’re good, but you can’t buy good ginger in Paris anymore. They need more ginger. Fresh. Grated, not powdered.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Just eat,” he said. “They are good.”

  I cut into the brown flesh of the small bird, releasing hot juices flecked with lemon seeds and slivers of ginger. Silveira waited, his back to Lucienne, watching me.

  “What do you think? The ginger is not good enough, is it? I will order some from Goa, good, fresh ginger.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” Lucienne said.

  “What?”

  “Your obsession with food.”

  “Obsession, you call it? You of all people.”

  Something indefinable passed between the two of them, an atmosphere, an intimacy, a presence greater than the two bodies they occupied. A history as pungent as ginger. Silveira took his seat back at the desk.

  “What brings you to Paris?” Lucienne asked. “They told me you were in Goa.”

  “People say many things. Goa, Madras … yes. What happened to your face?”

  “Rien. Nothing of consequence.” Through the window on the street, I could see that the boys had found another man to plague, their dark shapes swarming around him. He stood still trying to wave them away, without success. He seemed old and tired, easy prey.

  “You have a commission, Lucienne.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You come to find me. And you are just a little bit afraid, I think. You bring the boy to protect you. I like that.”

  “What?”

  “That you are a little afraid. That is new.”

  “You have Sabalair,” she said. I glanced over at the old man standing in the shadows. He didn’t even look up at the sound of his name.

  “Yes, I have Sabalair.”

  “And you think I’m afraid of you?” She smiled. “Have I ever been?”

  “It is more complicated than that. I think you must have a good reason to come back to Paris. And if you have a commission, you need money. That is why you come to me. C’est vrai?”

  “C’est vrai.”

  “So what is it this time?”

  “The museum in the Jardin.”

  “Again? You can’t go back in there.”

  “So people keep telling me.”

  “It would be easier for you to break in to the Banque nationale … and what could Cuvier have left in there that you could possibly want? You must have all the corals now.”

  “We’ve done it before.”

  “It’s not a good investment.”

  “You haven’t heard what the commission is yet. You don’t know.”

  “Go ahead.” Silveira stood to pour more mint tea and passed me some bread. “You Englishmen need to be taught how to eat. Too many meat pies and bad beer.”

  “What’s the trade like now—diamonds, I mean?” Lucienne asked, changing the subject.

  “Horrible. All the big buyers, the English dukes and earls, they want to buy pieces of old France—Sèvres porcelain, chandeliers, portraits, furniture. Collectors are everywhere. That is why I am here. Diversifying. You know, you can sell everything now in Paris. I could sell my own skin if I could do without it.”

  “Diversifying?”

  “Exactly. They want objects with history. Not just diamonds, but diamonds with history. Do you remember that little room off the marketplace in Jaffa, Lucienne? The one with the red walls.”

  “I remember plague in Jaffa. I remember the leeches in the water. I don’t remember the room off the marketplace.”

  “The sandstorm.”

  “No, I don’t remember the sandstorm.”

  “I remember the sandstorm. Sabalair remembers the sandstorm. You do remember, Sabalair, don’t you? The dead horse, digging her out of that tent? Once she was grateful. She owes us her life. Now she forgets. If I ask her, perhaps she will even say she has forgotten the sound of the desert fox we heard at midnight in the sands of the Wadi Rum.”

  Sabalair said nothing. He did not move. His face showed no expression.

  “So you have become a dealer in Sèvres porcelain?” Lucienne asked. “Not like you to settle for so little. You should be buying up Napoleon’s things. Someone has paid a fortune for his carriage, they say, and his wardrobe and horses, even his Dutch coachman. They will all go to England, like a traveling circus.”

  “Diamonds,” Silveira said, “are what I know best. But in Paris everyone wants the old set diamonds. The English dukes and barons, they send their agents to me. Old diamonds, they say. We want very old diamonds. But most of them have been bought, I say to them. They are difficult to get.”

  “What do you know about the Satar diamond?”

  Silveira laughed and tipped his head back. “Someone has told you a bad story, my friend. The Satar is a myth invented by the East India Company.”

  “Denon has it.” I watched Lucienne with rising admiration. Her pacing was impeccable. If this was a kind of duel, Lucienne Bernard and Davide Silveira knew all the moves.

  “In Paris?” he said, his voice rising.

  “Yes. In the Montserrat Cabinet.”

  “The cabinet’s in Paris? It was in Spain.”

  “Your informers are slipping, Silveira. The diamond’s been in Paris for ten years in Denon’s collection in the quai Voltaire, hidden inside a mummy in an Egyptian sarcophagus. But two weeks ago it was placed in the vaults of Cuvier’s museum in the Jardin, inside the Montserrat Cabinet. Denon has asked Cuvier to hide it for him.”

  “Mon Dieu. You are being truthful with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exclusive trading rights?”

  “Yes,” Lucienne said. “Absolutely. Do you think you might have a buyer?”

  “I can set up a bidding war even before you have it; my rich Englishmen will give fortunes for it, especially when I tell them they are in competition with one another. Excellent. Yes. This will be most interesting. I have a condition.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to go in there with you this time. The museum.”

  “Out of the question. Too much of a risk,” she said, firmly. “Besides, Saint-Vincent will never agree to it.”

  “Saint-Vincent is in Paris? But I heard he was on the exile list.”

  “He was. He’s in hiding.”

  “Just make him agree. Whatever Lucienne Bernard says goes, yes? Or does it?”

  “This has a history, Silveira. You know that. We can’t pretend nothing happened.”

  “So let’s get it right this time. No mistakes.”

  It was that day in the velveted room above the pawnshop in the rue du Pet-au-Diable that something else began to shadow the longing
that I felt for her. The French call it la jalousie. I wouldn’t have known what to call it then. As if something had passed for a second over the sun, the realization had come to me as soon as I had seen Silveira’s face—that he, Silveira, not the poet-locksmith Dufour, who died in Toulon, was Delphine’s father.

  If the physical similarities between the corsair and the spirited raven-haired child were striking to me, I wondered, what must they have seemed like to her, Lucienne Bernard, struggling to give nothing away as she looked into the face of the father of her child, who, I also saw, had no idea that he was a father? It would be another two weeks before either of us talked about what I had recognized in the room above the curiosity shop, as Silveira provoked her with talk of sandstorms and horses and tents and the red room off the marketplace in Jaffa. She expected me to keep that secret to myself, and I did.

  NE AFTERNOON IN EARLY OCTOBER, having crossed the equator and successfully navigated the vicissitudes of the trade winds, the sailors of the HMS Northumberland hauled aboard an enormous shark. Dragging it out of the waves was one thing; wrestling it, still alive, onto the deck of the ship was quite another. The Emperor, interrupted in dictating his memoirs below deck, hearing the shouting above, climbed up onto the poop deck, where the Bertrand children and Emmanuel, the fifteen-year-old son of Las Cases, had gathered at a safe distance to watch.

  The admiral’s warning cry came too late, for as Napoleon approached to examine the patterning on the creature’s dorsal fin, the shark, now in its death throes and gasping for air, brought that tail across the deck in a final spasm, knocking over five sailors and the Emperor. When Las Cases, his son, and the two generals rushed to pull Napoleon out from under the tail of the now-dead shark, they were certain the impact had broken both his legs, for the Emperor’s cream-colored breeches were covered in blood. It was Emmanuel Las Cases who pointed out that the blood had in fact come from the shark. The Emperor, visibly shaken but only bruised, was carried back to his cabin, where his surgeon attended him. After a glass of brandy, he sent a note to the captain requesting that the shark’s bones be stripped and boiled and then sent directly to Professor Cuvier, care of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.