The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “Why would you want me to do that? He’ll arrest you down there. You’ll lose your advantage. It’s madness.”

  “Daniel, you must trust me. I have a new plan. I think I can see a way to rescue Delphine, take ourselves off Jagot’s list, and make sure you keep Cuvier’s patronage and your position at the Jardin. I want you to go to Jagot tomorrow and convince him that we have had a quarrel and you want revenge.”

  “He won’t believe that.”

  “Tell him you’ve been betrayed. Convince him you’re full of revenge. Ask him for a reward. Then he’ll know he can trust you. Jagot understands greed. Tell him you’ve overheard me talking to Silveira about a theft in the Jardin and an escape through the quarries. Give him the details. Tell him we plan to meet in the passage de Saint-Claire at seven o’clock the morning after the party.”

  “But he will be there waiting for you.”

  “Exactement. In the quarries I know my way and he does not. Down there we will be running the show. There are nearly two hundred miles to disappear into. It’s time we took ourselves off Jagot’s list.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “We will be magicians after all. We’ll put on a little show of our own, in our subterranean theater. You don’t understand. You don’t see, do you?” I shook my head. “Jagot must have his revenge. We can’t change that. So we let him have his revenge. We make him think he has won. To do that, we must stage some deaths.”

  24

  N THE CORAL ROOM of the locksmith’s atelier the stuffed crocodile had disappeared; the corals were almost gone; the shelves were bare. The room had a new echo to it. Wrapped in strips of purple silk torn from a dress abandoned by an émigrée who may or may not have survived the Terror, each piece of coral had been folded into the brittle darkness of the dried and shredded seaweed that filled the packing cases.

  Lucienne’s flight back to safety in Italy, now postponed until after an audacious theft that might still take her in another direction, to Toulon, was now prepared for. Packing cases had been nailed down, labels glued to wood. Her departure was inevitable, I knew, but the waiting was almost intolerable. Alone for a few minutes one afternoon, I found a label pasted onto the corner of one box written in a hand I did not recognize: Ufficio Postale, La Spezia, Italia. La Spezia. I couldn’t even remember where that was—somewhere to the north, perhaps, up near Turin. Only one cabinet remained, the long table, and the map. Soon she too would disappear—they all would, taking flight again like the swallows that gathered along the Paris rooftops.

  All that autumn there had been rumors that Napoleon was already back in Paris, hiding in the quarries and planning to retake the city, rumors carried by lantern men, fiacre drivers, and street sweepers passed on to anyone who would listen. Some wine smugglers even claimed that they had seen the Emperor down there; he had an army, they said, that might come up through the ventilation shafts at any time, night or day.

  The stone quarries ran like a rabbit warren for hundreds of miles beneath the Parisian streets. They had been mined for thousands of years, it was said, rock carved out and hauled up to provide the stone with which to build the city.

  When gases from the shallow and overcrowded graves in the Les Innocents cemetery asphyxiated a family living in a basement nearby in the rue de la Lingérie in the last years of the eighteenth century, police lieutenant general Alexandre Lenoir proposed closing all the Paris graveyards, disinterring the bones, and building an ossuary in one section of the abandoned quarries. Grave diggers worked at night, then carried the bones on covered carts through the streets; laborers carried the bones down into the quarries in sacks. The great leveling had begun even before the Revolution, people said, when the bones of murderers and nobles, priests, mistresses, and maids became mixed up belowground without headstone or marking.

  Twenty years later, in 1809, the emperor Napoleon appointed an ex-viscount turned mining engineer called Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury to oversee the quarries and the catacombs, to map them and make them safe. Héricart, now inspector general of underground works, walked the streets aboveground and below, directed the decorative rearrangement of the bones in the area that housed the catacombs, named and inscribed large sections of the tunnels to ensure that no one would get lost down there or starve to death, and counted and mapped sixty-three shafts or wells—puits—all over the city, a catalogue of holes, some with steps, some just holes. Some were ventilation shafts, some abandoned wells. In 1815 there were sixty-three entrances to the quarries and catacombs, sixty-three holes into the underground of Paris, and one of them began in the Jardin des Plantes.

  “Why do you tell me all of this now, M. Connor?” Jagot had asked, sitting in the pews of the church of San-Roche, where I had asked him to meet me. The church smelled of mold; high arches swept in every direction, rhythmic curves of light against the darkness.

  “I am grateful, of course,” he said, peeling an orange. The juice fell in thick drops onto the brown wool of his trousers. “But it is a little unusual, n’est-ce pas? You and Lucienne Bernard are friends, no? That is what is in my files. It is unusual for friends to betray each other. Now you come to see me, I think: What is happening here?”

  “She has someone else,” I said. “There was a fight.”

  “M. Silveira?” Jagot said slowly, putting a segment of orange into his mouth. “Silveira is back in Lucienne Bernard’s bed and now you come to me to betray them? You are jealous, oui? You want revenge?”

  “Monsieur,” I said, “you told me to watch. You told me to listen. That’s what I have been doing. Watching and listening.”

  I was glad of the shadows in the church; the less Jagot could see me and read my expression, the better. Jagot, it seemed, had taken the bait. As far as he was concerned, I was a new opportunity. He had laid his elaborate trap for Lucienne and Silveira, and now here was Lucienne’s jilted lover, the jealous boy Daniel Connor, offering to help—in exchange, of course, for some reward. He might have tried to maintain a stony exterior, but Jagot’s delight was palpable.

  “And the man who commissioned this robbery,” Jagot said, his head tipped to one side as he watched my reactions closely, testing me to see how much I knew. “Do you have a name for him?”

  I was nervous.

  All you have to do is get Jagot to bring Delphine down to the quarries, Daniel, she had said. I don’t care what you do or say to make that happen, but everything depends on Jagot bringing Delphine down there.

  “No, monsieur,” I lied, returning his gaze. “I don’t know the name of the man behind this. That is something I can’t discover, although I have tried. They never use his name.”

  “And you say their rendezvous is in the passage de Saint-Claire—the morning after the theft? So all I have to do is to wait for them to come out—like rats from a sewer. Yes, that is good. So where will they come out, M. Connor? Where will I wait to catch my thieves?”

  “They will separate and go in different directions,” I said. “At least that’s the plan. They will all come up through different shafts. There are many entrances to the quarries, I think.”

  “Merde. That means we’ll have to go down ourselves,” Jagot said. “We’ll have to wait for them in the passage de Saint-Claire. That is where we must put out our nets.”

  “They know the quarries well,” I said. “Perhaps you need bait. Something to make sure you keep them there, to stop them from slipping through your fingers.”

  “Good idea, M. Connor.” He paused for a moment, calculating. “Bien sûr. The child. Perhaps when you have finished working for the baron, you will come and work for me. You have a mind that works like chess. I will need you to keep listening, of course. Tell Madame Bernard that all is forgiven. Convince her. Keep a notebook. Write down everything—even the little things. You must go with them into the museum that night—to make sure you bring them to me.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said, taking a deep breath—this was the most difficult part of my dissemblanc
e. Jagot must make me his inside man, but I must not agree to his plan too easily. It would make him suspicious. “You can’t ask me to do that,” I said. “It’s much too risky. What if they find out that I had told you? Silveira is dangerous. He might… I don’t know what he might do. And what about Cuvier?”

  “I will straighten everything out with Professor Cuvier afterward. You are valuable, monsieur. Already you are the senior aide-naturaliste in Cuvier’s museum, after—what is it?—three months. My men tell me that Baron Cuvier has plans for you. Your future is secure. Now, if you will help me to bring in these people who are also the enemies of Cuvier, you will see how your value increases even more for the baron.”

  And of course, I agreed.

  “You are an ambitious man, M. Connor,” Jagot said. “You are a credit to the baron.”

  He knew the quarries from before, he told me that day, from the days when every criminal in Paris knew them; he had often hidden there. Now every police agent must get to know the quarry tunnels, he insisted, their nodes and intersections, the places where they had been shored up to prevent the roof caving in, the places where the walls formed long passages as wide and high as streets or arcades, or where the tunnels lead to caves as large as churches.

  And he talked of Silveira. When Jagot talked of Silveira it was always with admiration. “Silveira has many women,” the police agent said that afternoon, “but it is always Paris and Dufour’s mistress Bernard that he returns to. So, when we watched Bernard, we also watched Trompe-la-Mort. He was always somewhere close by. Now they have come back to Paris. And I will catch them all in the same net. He returns to Mme. Bernard one time too many. And now there is a child. She brings the child to Paris, puts her in the convent in the rue de Picpus, and goes to find Silveira. And then I find her. Every thief has an Achilles’ heel, M. Connor.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” I say, “I remember.”

  T LONGWOOD, the Emperor was under constant surveillance. A guard of the Fifty-third Regiment, a park of artillery, and a company of the Sixty-sixth were permanently encamped at his gate, the soldiers’ spyglasses focused on the windows of the house. Between Longwood and the town a further post of twenty men encircled the entire headland and enclosure. At night the chain of sentries almost touched one another. Out to sea, two men-of-war patrolled the island and two frigates watched over the only two landing points.

  Longwood belongs to the termites, Las Cases complained, pointing out to General Marchand the corner of the billiard-room floor in Napoleon’s prison house that was riddled with holes. The termites—exiles too, shipwrecked, washed ashore on a Brazilian slave ship—now lived in the walls and floors of all the houses on the island, chewing wood into the pulp with which they built their own vast and dusty nests.

  Termites thrived in the damp of Longwood. Las Cases ordered logs to be burned in every fireplace, but the heat only turned the prison house into a hothouse and the mildew extended its silky threads still farther. The paper swelled. The doors stuck. The windows fogged up.

  As Napoleon, in his last six years, shored up paragraph after paragraph of his memoirs, spreading maps and diagrams of battles over the green baize of the billiard table, storing words that would themselves be rewritten and expanded by others, swelling into scores and then hundreds of books on the life and battles of the first French Emperor, the termites were eating their way through walls, floors, tables, and chairs. You could almost hear them. One day there would be nothing left of the Emperor’s prison house, not a single plank of original wood, window frame or floor. Dust to dust. And ashes to ashes. It was this reflection that kept the Emperor laboring at his memoirs until the end.

  25

  HE TWENTY-NINTH OF OCTOBER, the day of the party, arrived. At seven o’clock, at the gatehouse on the rue de Seine, while three uniformed guards checked identity papers and letters of invitation, I glimpsed the tiny shape of Jagot’s fiacre, curtains drawn, parked down where the street met the quai. I passed over my papers to the guards without looking back.

  “Can’t get the damned smell out,” Fin said when he met me by the corner of the amphitheater, where the shadows stretched across the clipped oval of grass. “I’ve washed and changed my clothes, but it’s in my skin—that smell… Wine spirits and arsenic soap. I’ve probably absorbed so much now that I’m as well preserved as those two-headed calves in Cuvier’s museum. Can you smell it? How bad is it?”

  I leaned toward him and sniffed. “You can smell it,” I said, “but it’s not too bad.”

  “I’m too tired to be sycophantic to Cuvier tonight,” he said. “I could sleep for a month at least. I’m only here because he wants a full turnout for Brugmans. Why can’t people get jobs just because they’re good? What was the bloody Revolution for, eh? Now everything depends on being nice to the baron and smelling good and having clean fingernails and a good reference to take back to the surgeons in England. I don’t want to be nice to the baron and my fingernails are filthy. I need a large glass of wine.”

  Inside the mirrored hall, among vases of orange and red-striped canna lilies, Cuvier’s wife and daughter, the melancholy Clémentine, dressed in black, received their guests. Liveried footmen took our coats. Upstairs in the parlor the baron stood robed in state among a group of fawning foreigners. Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier, member of the Institute of France, professor and administrator of the Museum of Natural History, member of the Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Society, et cetera. He was a pillar of the academy and a bastion of the French establishment. I counted ten footmen.

  “It must take over an hour to get his clothes off,” Fin said. “It’s practically a suit of armor. Do you think he wears a corset? One of Mme. Cuvier’s perhaps?” Fin had already had too much wine. He’d been drinking at the tavern after work with the taxidermists. Cuvier was in his purple robes that night, robes he had designed himself for official occasions, embroidered in gold and encrusted with medals.

  “Lamarck’s here,” I said. Over in the corner a tall, thin man with white hair leaned against a wall, sipping from a glass and talking to a small woman dressed in black. “That’s his daughter, Cornélie. She does all his writing for him now, to save his eyes. And that’s Geoffroy over there, talking to Sophie Duvaucel. And that’s Brongniart, the professor of mineralogy, and Desfontaines, professor of botany. Christ, they’re all here. Seven, no eight of the professors. It’s a united French front. The negotiations have begun.”

  “Cuvier looks like he’d be entirely at home in Versailles,” Fin said. “And there he is—the villain, Brugmans, well, villain at least as far as they’re concerned. Tonight he has all the power.”

  From where I was standing, Brugmans’s face was impassive, wide and full, but his eyes showed absolutely no expression at all. He was going through the motions, it seemed, as if he was a marionette. If he was enjoying the power of his position, I thought, he certainly wasn’t prepared to show it.

  As rector of the University of Leiden, Brugmans was familiar with the politics and machinations of men of science. He was a tireless negotiator: Joseph Banks had summoned him to London ten years before to negotiate a price for the 3,461 sheets of mounted dried flowers and plants that made up the herbarium of the dead George Clifford. It had been a delicate business.

  “M. Connor.” A woman’s voice. I turned to face Sophie Duvaucel, who had walked over to talk to us.

  “Mlle. Duvaucel, may I introduce my friend M. Robertson?”

  “Enchanté, mademoiselle,” Fin said a little stiffly, taking her hand.

  “I do believe,” she said in English, “that I overheard you two men speaking in English a few minutes ago. You know, I don’t believe anyone is supposed to be speaking in English this evening. I think the baron expects—”

  “Are we being chided, Mlle. Duvaucel?” I said.

  “No, quite the contrary. I was hoping that I might join you in your little act of rebellion. My English is weak, you see, and I think if we keep our vo
ices down, we might take a few turns in English without being overheard. It will add some danger to an evening that promises to be especially dull.” She smiled.

  “I think we could manage a little English,” Fin said grinning. “If you command it, I mean; we are not in a position to refuse.”

  “Oh, yes, I insist,” she said. “Would you oblige me by going through all these formalities of conversation in English?”

  “Mlle. Duvaucel,” Fin began, “we have not met before. I work for your father. I have recently joined the laboratory. I work alongside your brother M. Duvaucel, under the authority of M. Dufresne.”

  “I envy you, monsieur, all that skin.” Fin did not blink, nor—and I admired him for this—did he glance in my direction for support. Sophie, it seemed, was in high spirits. With the pressure of Brugmans’s imminent arrival, I had not seen much of her of late.

  “It’s messy, mademoiselle,” Fin said. “Not as good as it seems.”

  “No. There is not much in this world that is as good as it seems, n’est-ce pas?”

  “It depends,” I said. “On your expectations. Whether they are low or high.”

  “Oh, my expectations are, I believe, unusually high.”

  “Well, then, many things will not be as good as they seem.”

  “Bravo, how wise you are, M. Connor. Now I think it’s time to try a different subject. Now I will ask you about how you have been enjoying Paris. I hope you have been along to M. Reaux’s circus on the rue Saint-Honoré to see the Hottentot woman dance. M. Reaux has a rhinoceros on display there too. They call her the Hottentot Venus—the woman, that is, not the rhinoceros.”

  “No, mademoiselle. I have not.”

  “Then you must be quick, M. Connor. They say she is dying. All the men in Paris want to see the Hottentot woman dance, while there is still time.”