The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “M. Brugmans, how are we to understand our future if we do not know our past? We need important collections of specimens for the anatomists to decipher; they are our libraries; they are books to be read. Students travel to Paris from all over the world; we teach them to read the language of bones. Here in this museum we have the Alexandria of natural history. It must not be broken up. The world will lose out. We will all lose out.

  “With the combined wealth of this collection, made as a gift from Holland to France, and the genius of French bone readers, we have a science that is creating a new world. Together the Dutch and the French are making a new highway into knowledge. Who will dare follow them?”

  As the crowd applauded, I maneuvered myself back toward the door frame, checking that the servants were in front of me, checking where the lights were. I stepped through the doorway and headed down the staircase lined with shelves displaying the skulls of horses, stags, and dolphins, then into the hall, where I slipped a few drops of Silveira’s strong opiate from a blue perfume bottle into each of the decanters of expensive Madeira that had been arranged on the table for the guests to drink after the speeches. Then I found the door to the cupboard under the staircase—unlocked, as I knew it would be—and stepped inside.

  27

  ROUCHED IN THE CUPBOARD I could now see everything. Through a chink in the door, I watched guests passing through the hall, heard their feet upon the staircase above me and their muffled voices. I saw the museum porter talking to Cuvier, taking instruction, rubbing his eyes; I saw old man Deleuze exchange a remark or two with Fin, who was biting his fingernails, yawning, and looking around for me.

  An hour later, once the last glimpses of light had disappeared, and the voices had gone silent, I pushed open the door of my cupboard and stepped into a lighter shade of dark. I walked through the bones across the hallway, feeling for the bottom of the balustrade, and followed it up the staircase so that I could stand for a moment at the top and survey the territory below. The glass from the chandelier seemed to have collected whatever last moments of light there were. In that setting, it looked like a great sea creature suspended like the whales and the dolphins, a great skeleton of glass, dangling its tentacles into a coal-dark sea.

  Then I walked down into the room of carnivores, where a little light falling through the windows to my left cast faint shadows of entangled bones onto the cabinets. I waited.

  A hand appeared at the fourth window from the right. I glimpsed three shapes up against the glass. A hand pushed the glass from the other side without a sound. A rope was thrown, and I caught it. Still there was no sound.

  First one, then two, then three hunched figures, balanced for a moment on the threshold of the window, then springing silently into the room like monkeys at the cirque du singe. Lucienne was closest, breathing a little fast. She reached out to touch me, her fingers brushing against my lips. She wore black trousers and a black shirt tied with a thick belt at her waist. She also had a piece of dark fabric wrapped around her head—they all did—and her face was blacked out.

  “The last guests left around twenty minutes ago,” I told her as she locked and bolted the window from the inside. “Cuvier and Laurillard had several glasses of Madeira together once Brugmans had gone. The opiate worked. Cuvier announced he was exhausted and disappeared off to his rooms. Mme. Cuvier and her daughters retired soon afterward. The servants will have helped themselves to the last of the wine in those decanters—they always do—and there’s no movement up there at all. From what I can tell, they’re all asleep.”

  Four thieves worked in the dark. We could do this with our eyes closed; we had rehearsed it endlessly in the warehouse across the street. Figures in black moving among the gleam of white skeletons. Four figures crouched around the wooden platform on which the rhino from the cape was mounted and slid the skeleton three feet to the side. Its head rocked slightly on its frame, teeth grinning inanely. On the floor I could see the dark outline of a trapdoor. Silveira pulled it open. The wooden steps, which were scarcely visible in the low light, disappeared below.

  It was dank and musty at the bottom of the steps. At first, I couldn’t see anything. Then I began to make out the edges of boxes and crates and rolled-up canvases stacked on top of one another. Once Lucienne had pulled the trapdoor closed, I lit the lamp. Four figures, three in black and me in a frock coat dressed for Cuvier’s party, stood staring at one another, dazed, letting our eyes adjust.

  “What is all this stuff?” Silveira asked. “I didn’t expect all this.”

  “Cuvier has hidden the choicest pieces from the stadtholder’s cabinet down here too, by the looks of things,” Lucienne said. “We were right—it appears he is about to smuggle them out of Paris. Don’t be distracted by anything. We must concentrate. The crate we’re looking for has a label with a phoenix on it. It’s in the fourth room on the right off this corridor.” Jagot’s men, Lucienne had told me, had gotten to the Jardin porter, who had originally helped to carry the crates into the cellar. They had broken the bones in his right hand before he’d given them the information they wanted.

  “You won’t take anything?” Silveira said to Lucienne, grabbing her arm as we counted down the doors. “Only what we agreed on?”

  “No, of course not. The diamond’s the only piece we can sell, and the lock of Napoleon’s hair will do everything we need it to do. Trust me.”

  “That was what you said the last time, my friend.”

  Once we were in the fourth room on the right, and the crate with the phoenix—the largest of all the crates in the room—had been found, Lucienne turned to the rest of us. “We will take two objects only, remember. Nothing else. The lock of Napoleon’s hair from Vivant Denon’s private collection will be our calling card. Once we are out of Paris, I will send it to Denon, to show him where we have been. It will bring down Cuvier’s little kingdom for a while.”

  Alain began to unwrap a series of metal tools and levers.

  “Remember, no marks on the crate, Alain,” she said. “No one must know we’ve been in here. At least, not yet. Check everything before you touch it. That crate has to go back exactly as it was. No mistakes.”

  “I know, I know,” Saint-Vincent said, his face tight. “We’ve done this before.”

  The first pieces of wood came away easily. Alain leaned them up against the wall, making small colored dots and dashes on the inside with a pencil.

  “Thirty minutes past midnight,” he said, checking his pocket watch. “That gives us three hours at most.”

  As Manon and Alain lifted the first plank of wood off the top of the crate, I climbed onto some boxes in order to see down into the gap at the top.

  “My God,” I said.

  “What can you see?” Lucienne asked.

  “Shells, bits of red coral.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s the ugly little grotto on the top of the cabinet. Johannes Lencher’s work. There should be a cup mounted on silver in the middle of the corals and shells. Lined with silver with a little silver boy riding a dolphin.”

  “Yes. I see it.” I leaned forward and slipped my hand through the hole toward the silver child riding the dolphin.

  “Don’t touch it,” Silveira warned. “Don’t touch anything till Lucienne tells you.”

  “Touch the boy,” Lucienne said, “and you’ll almost certainly trigger a secondary locking mechanism inside. It will make my job much more difficult. So please don’t.”

  “The cup is made of coco-de-mer,” Silveira said. “Worth half a million in itself to the right person.”

  “No, Davide,” she said. “We agreed. Nothing but the diamond. You have the replica?”

  “Bien sûr.” He lifted the diamond replica from his pocket; it hung in the air like a fish glinting on a line in dark waters. “It will buy us a little time, if we need it.”

  Saint-Vincent and Silveira continued pulling away the layers of crate they had unscrewed and levered open, lifting the planks to one side, undress
ing the cabinet. I swung the lamp around, onto its inlaid surfaces. Six feet tall, it was a work of art—a fantasy, made of wood and amber, in every color imaginable.

  “Ferdinand of Tyrol had it built for his collection nearly two hundred years ago,” Lucienne whispered, running her fingers across the inlay. “Denon’s reliquary will be in the center somewhere, and the drawers will contain the rest of the collection. The diamond is in one of the inner cabinets. I don’t know how long it will take me to find it. All twenty-five drawers have separate locking mechanisms.”

  “You don’t have much time,” Saint-Vincent said. “We can’t be sure how long the opiate will last. It will have different effects on people.”

  “It’s a more complicated locking system than I had expected. I want Daniel in here with me. Both of you listen out at the bottom of the stairs. Tell me if you can hear anything moving up there.”

  Lucienne produced a roll of midnight-blue velvet and silk from her bag. “Tools,” she said. “Arrange them from left to right exactly as I hand them to you. Pull over that box there. I need a table. Now take off your jacket and put that across the top. Yes, like that. Now the tools. Be quick. Concentrate.”

  I placed the tools in order across the dark wool of my frock coat: blades and scalpels; keys, master keys, wax, needles, and wires. These were the tools of the locksmith and the tools of the thief.

  I passed Lucienne the master key. She slipped it into the lock opening. With a single turn to the right, the panel doors swung open to reveal a series of boxes, even more intricately inlaid than the outer ones. I shuddered. Outside somewhere, up there in the distance of the garden, I heard the faint echo of a buffalo bellowing into the night air. A long way from home, I thought, running my eyes over the elaborate mosaic of ambers and ebonies, geometric designs, squares inside circles, rectangles, triangles, repeating in endless succession in the illusory corridor made by the mirrors on the inside of the doors.

  Twenty-five drawers were arranged around a central arched display case, fitted out like a stage. A tiny metal ring was attached to each drawer, and each was decorated with the silhouette of an eagle, wings outstretched.

  “Don’t touch,” Lucienne said quickly as I reached out my hand toward one of the drawers. “You have to do it in the right sequence. Touch one randomly and the others will deadlock against you. Then we’ll never get in.”

  “There are no keyholes,” I said.

  “The birds are the keys.”

  “The eagles?”

  “They’re not eagles. They’re phoenixes. The sequence is hidden in the birds in some way, in the pattern of their wings and heads. Hold the lamp back over in the corner for a moment. It’s too bright.”

  I did as she said, casting her back into semidarkness.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Feeling the wings for a number and sequence pattern. Keep the light still and talk to me.” Lucienne’s delicate fingers played over the edge of the bird on the top right-hand drawer.

  “Where did you learn to do all of this?”

  “Dufour. He was the best locksmith in France. He taught me.”

  Lucienne was going through the drawers now, pulling them out one by one. She passed me a hard, polished object. “What do you think that is?”

  “No idea,” I said, placing the object close to the lamp.

  “It’s the horn of a gazelle. Just the tip. Coated in gold and sold as a unicorn’s horn.” She picked out a branch of highly polished red coral and passed it to me. I ran my fingers over its twists and turns. She slipped something or some things—I didn’t see clearly enough—into her waistcoat pocket.

  “Now that the drawers are open, the central cupboard should be easy. Here,” she said, “come closer. Regard. I would guess that no more than a few dozen people have ever seen inside. Now it’s your turn. Put the lamp on the table there. Now, here.” She took my hand. “Put your finger just here on this mechanism. Pull it a little toward you, and then turn it sharply to the right.”

  I did. Nothing happened.

  “Too heavy-handed. Try again. Do it with your eyes closed. Feel it. Toward you, and then a flick to the right.”

  I did. It slid away suddenly, yielding itself. The door behind the mirror opened. Inside there was only one object, about a foot high-something like a cross between a silver goblet, a lamp, and a miniature cathedral, complete with a fish-scaled spire and flying buttresses.

  “Bravo,” she said, and when she kissed me, my knees buckled so that I had to steady myself against the wall. All of this—the darkness, the smell of her, the boxes and the levers and the locks, aroused me.

  “Denon’s reliquary,” she said, lifting it out carefully and placing it among the tools scattered across the wool. She reached for the lamp. “Now, if anyone needed proof of the madness of the director of the Louvre, here it is. He has adapted a rare medieval reliquary to hold the smallest objects in his collection. See, the drawers in the middle section are all labeled. They hold the powdered bones of people who have become legends: El Cid, the Castilian knight who conquered Valencia; Ximines, the medieval Spanish theologian and philosopher; Inês de Castro, the murdered queen of Portugal; and Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, who was poisoned with mercury.”

  “It could be anyone’s bones,” I said.

  “Oh, they are all authenticated,” she said, her eyes shining in the darkness. “They have to be. There’s a lot of money in relics. There will be signed documents. Certificates.”

  “Signed by whom?”

  “Authenticators. People who authenticate.”

  “Take me with you,” I said suddenly, “to Italy.”

  “And what would you do there, in Italy, M. Daniel Connor? You have work to do, places to go, questions to find the answers to.” She pulled out some objects from the drawers of the reliquary: “Molière, La Fontaine, Voltaire—that’s a tooth, one of Voltaire’s teeth—and a lock of Desaix’s hair. I’ve seen more than a hundred of Voltaire’s teeth,” she said. “All of them authenticated.”

  She was still leaning over the reliquary. I stepped toward her, and placed my hand on the back of her neck, caressing her there where skin met hair, full of longing.

  “Non, non, Daniel, we’ll make mistakes,” she said, pushing me away. “We can’t make mistakes.”

  I examined the reliquary, its filigree and arches and colored glass and ornamental leaves and handles, delicate under my fingers. Denon had given over the third side of the reliquary to his new Napoleon relic collection. There were six drawers, only two of them filled: one with the lock of hair given to Denon in Egypt, another with a signature torn from a letter.

  “Look,” I said, lifting a jewel from an unlabeled drawer between two others, one labeled EL CID and the other NAPOLEON. “Is this it?” I asked, passing her both the lock of hair and the diamond.

  “The Satar diamond. One diamond,” she said, clapping her hands together. “And one lock of an Emperor’s hair to topple another.”

  28

  F DELEUZE HADN’T DRAWN THE MAP, if Napoleon hadn’t lost at Waterloo … if the Dutch ambassador hadn’t been in Paris … if I hadn’t been on that mail coach … Like Jagot’s systems of surveillance and reports, like the corals on the seabed, all the little things, all the crossings and collisions, had added up to something unexpected and of consequence.

  Doors and drawers were closed, cogs slid and turned into locking mechanisms. Each phoenix was eased back into place. The black velvet cover slipped back over the polished wood corners of the cabinet again.

  They positioned the pieces of crate around the cabinet and then hammered them back into place. The boy riding on the dolphin disappeared into the dark blue-black, tangled sea.

  Not a shred of cloth or splinter of wood remained behind that night on the floor of the vault around the crate; not a single finger-print remained on a wall or glass cabinet. We took every last piece of dust with us back through the hole.

  After Lucienne gave the
order to put out the light, we climbed the staircase into the carnivore room by touch alone, closed the trapdoor, slid the rhinoceros skeleton back into place, listening for the catch, and made our way in single file through the dark into the hall of skeletons. We climbed the sweeping staircase, walked through the upper gallery of skulls into Cuvier’s house, where a household still slept, limbs heavy, dreams dense. We unlocked, opened, closed, and re-locked intersecting doors, slipped through the study rooms flanked by empty desks, down the narrow corridor past the row of bedrooms, down the main staircase, down the servants’ staircase, into the servants’ hall, where four servants had fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Then we were out through the window in the scullery into a garden, where a moon was just slipping out from behind a cloud.

  Lucienne Bernard wanted to disappear, to be erased from Jagot’s records and from Jagot’s memory. She wanted that for all of them. But first, in order to make that happen, she had said we must stage some deaths. And that’s exactly what we did.

  Silveira, Saint-Vincent, Lucienne, and I climbed over the gate into the buffalo paddock; our feet sank deep into the dark mud. The buffalos stood looking on, eyes large and wide, their breath frosted in the night air.

  “I’ll catch up with you,” she said to Silveira and Saint-Vincent, who were already heading toward the entrance to the quarries. “Don’t wait. Leave a trail for us. I need a few minutes to catch my breath.”