The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “M. Connor,” Cuvier said one evening, stopping abruptly as he swept by the desk where I was working late to finish the description of the Black-crested Tern. Accompanied by his stepdaughter, Sophie Duvaucel, he was on his way to his Thursday-evening salon. He cleared his throat before continuing, “M. Connor, you have set a pace for the completion of this volume that is to be commended. You have an attitude to your work that is to be commended. Mlle. Duvaucel says you are to be depended upon in all things. You are discreet, trustworthy. These are important qualities. I commend you, sir. I do indeed. I have been asked to recommend three or four young men for a position at the University of Leiden. I would like to put your name forward, M. Connor. It is a prestigious post. Once you have finished here, of course, with the bird volume. In perhaps two or three years’ time. You understand?”

  “Thank you, Baron,” I said, trying not to show my excitement. “I am grateful to be of use.”

  “What he means, M. Sycophant,” Sophie said a few minutes later when Cuvier had left the room, “is that you must not refuse the Leiden job if it is offered to you. He also has plans to send you and my brother to Sumatra, plans that will involve considerable discretion. You will need to think about that, if you want to be of use, of course.” She smiled. “Are you discreet, M. Connor? Yes, I think you are. Discreet, charming, and completely unfathomable. That’s a fine combination. There will be important rewards, of course, for such work. Positions of consequence. Now, you must excuse me. The baron does not like to be kept waiting.”

  I had heard of positions such as these—such men were Cuvier’s eyes and ears, planted in the universities and laboratories and courts of Europe, or in the colonial outposts of Asia, employed not only as important collectors and field assistants, but also as assistants to his rivals, other natural philosophers in the British or Dutch colonies who were putting together collections to rival Cuvier’s. Parts of such collections, they said, would occasionally go missing en route from one country to another. Important and rare skeletons sometimes disappeared. There were always explanations—a ship that had run aground off a rocky coast, a cart that had lost a wheel in the jungles of India, an attack by natives on the border of Tibet. An entire boatload of hundreds of stuffed exotic birds had once disappeared on the Madeira River somewhere between Pôrto Velho and Abuná. It was never found.

  These assistants of his were always well rewarded, their names listed in footnote after footnote of Cuvier’s published works, their reputations accelerated, their work in the universities of Europe guaranteed. “It is a case of keeping up, staying ahead of the game,” Sophie said, “for the reputation and honor of France, of course.” Yes, I wanted to say. This is exactly what I have always dreamed of. But there was something in her tone that suggested such a post might be a mixed blessing. It was always difficult to read Mlle. Duvaucel. Sometimes she seemed to mean exactly the opposite of what she said. Only a few days before I had found her staring out the library window and when she had asked me about work, I had turned to her and said: “But you, mademoiselle, are you happy here? Does the work not burden you?”

  “What a strange question,” she said, smiling. “You know, no one has asked me that before. M. Connor, since it is you who ask, I consider myself to be one of the most privileged women in France. Here in the Jardin I do a hundred things every day that no other woman can do anywhere in the world. You see what I do. You see how busy I am. I read scientific papers and books. I don’t have to wait for my brothers to finish with them—the baron sees that they come straight to me. I read to the baron; I translate for him, edit for him. I have his confidence and I argue with his conclusions. I mount specimens. I draw; I classify. I host the baron’s salons, where I meet some of the most interesting men in Europe. In a few years, I will travel to England with the baron. Look at what I might have been—what my convent friends have become. Married. Bored. With nothing to do. No, M. Connor, the work here at the Jardin does not burden me. You think like a man.”

  Brugmans was now in Paris, staying at the Hôtel Royal; he also was waiting, biding his time. He was a good ambassador and he knew how to apply pressure. There was going to be no rushing into the Jardin with soldiers for him. He wanted to make Cuvier sweat. He knew how it was going to be: First Cuvier would offer replicas of the specimens; Brugmans would refuse. Cuvier would try again. He would refuse again. A dance. Repetition with variation. Eventually the Dutch ambassador would agree to take replicas in exchange for a thick portfolio of political concessions, treaties, and trade agreements. Stalling was essential. The choreography must be slow if he was to return with all the trade agreements he had been entrusted to negotiate.

  In the library each day I watched Cuvier. Tormented by this waiting for Brugmans to act, he became increasingly irascible. He found fault with everything. He walked up and down, moving from one desk to another, never stopping for long. None of the assistants dared mention Brugmans’s name. Under the pressure of waiting, tired from the long hours on the book, and preoccupied by what I knew was being planned in the locksmith’s atelier, I was often distracted, weighed down by a vague sense of guilt and dread. I had begun to avoid sharing lunch with Achille and Joseph, even Fin, using my work as an excuse to stay in the museum. Sophie Duvaucel quietly hovered over all of us, checking our drawings, collecting manuscripts, returning books to their place on the shelves, fetching specimens from other museums or books from other libraries. She was always calm, always ahead of the game.

  19

  N THE SECOND WEEK OF OCTOBER torrents of rain made the roads almost impassable. It was dark all day long and gusts of wind rattled the panes of glass in the windows.

  Since our descent into the rue du Pet-au-Diable I had barely seen Lucienne or heard from her. I had called at the atelier several times, but there was no one at home. I struggled with jealousy; there were so many questions I had no answers to. It had been impossible to gauge, that day in the darkened room above the curiosity shop, what Lucienne felt for Silveira now. I could no longer think of her without thinking of the Portuguese diamond dealer. I saw them in room after room, limbs intertwined: in the red room off the marketplace in Jaffa, in a white tent with wind-billowed walls, in the room in the atelier among the cats and the corals, in the bed where I had been.

  At night, sleepless, I walked through the streets of the city peering down into the workings of cellars and alleyways that opened up everywhere in the streets or picking my way through the rubble of the changing cityscape.

  “She’ll be back,” Fin said, guessing the cause of my return to the rooms on the rue de l’École and the reason for my midnight wanderings. “You’ll see. Just give it a few days. Just give it time.”

  She had sent me a note on the morning of October 8 to tell me that she was leaving Paris for a few days but that I was not to be concerned; she had preparations to make and would be back in Paris on the fourteenth. She hoped, she wrote, that the map might be ready by then. Her tone was cool. She offered no explanation or apology.

  On the afternoon of October 14, Lucienne called a meeting. I slipped away from the unfinished illustration of the Dwarf Warbler and the pile of notes that accompanied it, notes that I had yet to turn into a full natural history of the bird. It was easy to claim illness. I had lost weight and I was pale and hollow-eyed. Sophie kept urging me to take better care of myself.

  The address was a building on the rue de Seine, which ran down the east side of the Jardin. Silveira had rented an old warehouse that faced the high wall of the Jardin, not quite directly opposite Cuvier’s museum but almost. The house agent, who had been paid more generously than he had expected by a man whose business card read “Abraham Fuerguerer, Trader in Diamonds,” asked no questions. The building and the three or four on either side had been bought up by speculators, so the rent was cheap. They would be demolished six months later to make way for new apartment blocks and a wider street.

  When I arrived that morning in the rain, carrying a copy of Deleuze’s finished
map, someone had placed a painted sign on the iron railing outside the house that read ATTENTION. RESTAURATION EN COURS. DÉFENSE D’ENTRER. There were bags of plaster and a few bricks arranged on the steps and an old wheelbarrow was turned upside down among some flowerpots.

  It was Manon Laforge who met me at the door that opened off an alleyway down the side of the building. She was wearing the white dress again, a very simple white cotton dress, muddied now along the hem. She showed me through the ground floor and up a steep and very narrow staircase to a long dusty room on the third floor. Oak rafters and beams black with age lined the ceiling, and the floor was littered with boxes and piles of books with a few bookshelves along one of the walls.

  The six long windows facing the Jardin were covered by pages from old books that Manon had glued across each pane of glass. There were a few gaps so that it was possible to see out and across to the Jardin without being seen by anyone in the street. Daylight illuminated print running in all directions, casting the words of Molière or Racine or Rousseau onto the opposite wall, upside down, right side up, inverted.

  A long polished workable scattered with papers, books, maps, and drawings occupied the center of the room, surrounded by a few chairs of different shapes and sizes. A fire burned in the hearth.

  “You look ill,” Manon said once I had slumped into a chair near the fire and pulled off my wet boots. “Is there something wrong with you?”

  “She’s back?” I said, glancing toward the door.

  I wondered later whether if I hadn’t looked quite so dejected and broken, she would have said anything to me that day. For if Manon hadn’t been struck with compassion for me then, a compassion that disarmed both of us, it’s difficult to imagine where things might have ended up.

  “Yes, yes. She’s back. Everything is all right. You have nothing to worry about. Really. She’s angry with everyone else, not you.”

  Her sympathy, that look of understanding she had for the hollow-eyed signs of my distress, undid me. The questions that had kept me walking through long nights all spilled out at once.

  “Was he with her? When she went away? Did he go too? Silveira?”

  “Of course. She had to talk to him about something.”

  “She’s told him? That he’s Delphine’s father? Why does he need to know?”

  “You know, then? D’accord. We disagreed about whether Silveira should know. We quarreled about it. She didn’t want him to know but I did. Delphine was beginning to ask questions, and, well, I said it would be wrong not to tell her who her father was, and if she knew, so should he. I had strong feelings about that. Well, I would, wouldn’t I, Lucienne said. I had so little to lose. She did, of course, have something to lose. That’s why she came to Paris. There were other things too—the corals, other people she wanted to find, but it was Silveira she came for. We have stayed in Paris too long looking for him, and see what has happened. I don’t like Silveira. He’s impetuous and unreliable, and he’s been nothing but trouble in the past, but I still think he had to know. And now, we won’t be able to get out of Paris again without his help.”

  “What does Lucienne have to lose?”

  “Her liberty—the way she lives. You don’t know Silveira.”

  “Has he seen Delphine?” That scene—the father and the daughter—I could hardly bear to imagine that.

  “No one can see Delphine, Daniel. Lucienne should have told you. I told her she should tell you. Jagot has Delphine under guard at the convent at Picpus. She blames me. Well, she blames everyone, mostly herself. And she does not sleep. She makes herself ill.”

  “Jagot?” I said. “Why Jagot?” I was so tired I was afraid I was caught somewhere between my dreams about Jagot and this room on the rue de Seine.

  “Jagot is the man who attacked Lucienne, Daniel. Jagot is the man who commissioned us to do this job. He will keep Delphine under guard until Lucienne brings him the diamond. No visits are permitted. The nuns do what they can, but it’s dangerous for them too. Lucienne always said Jagot would find her. I underestimated him.”

  “Jagot commissioned this? What does he want? The diamond or Silveira?” I was sick with dread, seeing piece by piece the part I had almost certainly played in bringing Jagot not only to Lucienne’s atelier but also to the door of the convent. All Jagot had had to do was to follow me and set a series of traps in my wake.

  “He wants both,” Manon said. “And he’ll get both. He’s clever. Silveira will be a big prize for Jagot. Once he has Silveira in Toulon, the Society of Ten Thousand will fall and Jagot’s power in France will be beyond question. He will have as many men as he asks for. And there’s a reward for Silveira. But if the diamond goes missing, which it will of course—that’s part of Jagot’s plan—then no one will suspect him of being the thief, even if Denon accuses him of it directly. Denon is going down; Jagot is going up.”

  I had been blind, just as Lucienne had said. Completely blind. It’s the little things that matter, Jagot had said. Nothing is insignificant. Eventually all the little things start to add up.

  All thieves have an Achilles’ heel, Jagot had said to me in the fiacre that day. You just have to find it. In this case the Achilles’ heel was the five-year-old daughter of Lucienne Bernard and Davide Silveira, a child that Jagot had traced to a convent on the rue de Picpus.

  “It’s barbaric,” I said. “Jagot is a monster to use a child in that way.”

  “He’s only doing what everyone else in Paris is doing—scavenging, picking over the remains of Napoleon’s treasures. He is a vulture like the rest. He uses Lucienne because she is one of the best thieves in Paris, and because through her he can reach Silveira.”

  “One thief to catch another,” I said. It might have been one of Jagot’s mantras. “So Jagot is going to make Lucienne betray Silveira to save Delphine?”

  “That’s what he wants her to do, yes.”

  “And will she?”

  “Never. She will never betray Silveira. She will think of some other way. But it will be very dangerous. I want to tell you to leave Paris, Daniel Connor,” Manon said, taking a seat next to me by the fire, her fine features softened by the flames. “I say to Lucienne that it is bad luck, the boy being involved—he is young and unpredictable. How else can we do it, Manon? she says. How else can we get in? And then she tells me about the guards and the window locks and the security checks. And she asks me, and my trouble is that I too can see no other way. I don’t like it. I don’t like the plan. I don’t think it will work. So I say to you, M. Connor, if anything goes wrong … if you are responsible for anything that goes bad …”

  “I know,” I said, “I know. Don’t you think I feel responsible enough already?”

  “We are all responsible, monsieur—”

  She didn’t finish. Saint-Vincent had arrived with a bottle of port and some pastries from the Café des Mille Colonnes carried in a white box tied with a pink ribbon.

  “Sacré Dieu … Saint-Vincent,” Manon exclaimed, putting her hand to her heart. “I thought you were a ghost. Don’t do that to me. I’m not so young.”

  “I’m sorry.” He grinned, nodding at me. “I have my own key. This looks cozy. What have you two been talking about?”

  “I was showing M. Connor around,” she said. “I was telling him about the book dealer who rented this place. I’ve used some of the old books M. Monsard left to cover up the windows so that we can’t be seen from the Jardin. We are lucky. Another four or five months and this whole building will be gone. There are beds upstairs and an old printing press on the floor below.”

  I stood up and went over to the window to look through one of the gaps in the printed pages. I could see the high brick wall of the Jardin and a building beyond that.

  How might a man feel, I wondered, after six years of silence, to be told that a woman he had loved and lost and searched for had borne his child but had not told him? What might he feel if that child was now in mortal danger, only a few streets away, yet beyond his reach? />
  “Well, M. Mapman,” Saint-Vincent said. “What can you see over there, over the wall?”

  I described everything I could see, trying to impose my memorized aerial view—Deleuze’s map of the Jardin—onto the few buildings and trees we could now see rising from behind the walls. As I did so, I tried to shake off the effect of Manon’s revelations and that phrase of hers—if anything goes wrong.

  Down in the street, fiacres scattered muddy water from their wheels. A fine haze hung in the air now that the rain had eased. Students came and went with umbrellas, dodging the fiacres and the puddles.

  The east wall of the Jardin des Plantes stretched to the right and left in front of me, old brick, in different shades of red, orange, and pink, joining up the gaps between houses. Plants grew in the cracks. A wall and a terrace of houses broken only by the small arched entrance to the gardens, where five security guards sat in a guardhouse playing cards, taking it in turns to question and search each person as they went in or out.

  I pointed out the red roof of the blacksmith’s directly opposite us, and Cuvier’s museum, which was the largest building on this side of the wall, its windows boarded up and grilles fitted. Then Cuvier’s house next door, then his laboratory. Geoffroy’s house was farther down, all the curtains closed. Then Thouin’s house and beyond that the trees that marked the site of the experimental garden.

  “Look,” I said as church bells struck six o’clock. “The third window on the left of Cuvier’s house. There’s light. Right on time. He’s just walked back through the top floor of the museum and into the side entrance to his bedroom. He’s dressing for dinner. He is very punctual.”

  Down there in the street, through the rain making deltas on the window, I watched another fiacre make its way down the street. A fiacre pulled by a horse I recognized. Jagot’s fiacre. You are blind, Daniel Connor, Lucienne had said to me repeatedly, and the extent of my blindness astonished and silenced me now. Here was the man pulling the strings.