The Coral Thief (15 page)

“Just stay to see the Venetian horses come down,” I said. “It will only be a few more days. Stay for five days. At least five more days.”

And so it began.

I traded the coral fossils that morning for five of her days, taking only the mammoth bone, the manuscript, and the notebooks from the locksmith’s atelier. A few hours later, I stepped out into the rain, as if into a new time, a new air. I’d find a way of explaining the disappearance of the corals, I thought. I would tell Cuvier they had been delayed in London and would arrive later in the year. I had become reckless.

I could hardly believe the reversal of my fortunes. Only the day before, utterly dejected, I had determined to resign my position and go home. Now that Lucienne had returned Cuvier’s manuscript and the mammoth bone, anything was possible. The doors were open, and not just the anticipated ones—the Jardin, the lectures, the job—but a new corridor of doors I never even imagined existed, and behind each of them was Lucienne Bernard, the beautiful savant, the thief, the woman who dressed as a man and who understood the language of corals. I felt as if I had been given the keys to the city.

If only we’d known. I had traded the coral fossils for five of her days. If I hadn’t been enraptured, if she hadn’t wanted to see the Venetian horses’ flight from the Arc, if Jagot’s man hadn’t followed me to the atelier as she had suspected he would … she might have gone. And she might have gotten away.

I knew there would be no hiding anything from Fin. I had not slept in my bed that night, and for Fin that would mean only one thing. I would have to have a story prepared. When I let myself back into the
lodgings the following evening, he was ready for me. He had come home early from the hospital, tidied the rooms, and then arranged himself on the chaise longue with a medical textbook. Despite his overwhelming curiosity, Fin had clearly intended to maintain, at least to start with, an apparently casual indifference to my reappearance. He failed.

“Bonsoir
, M. Connor,” he said, his eyes scrutinizing me over the top of the book.

“Bonsoir
, M. Robertson,” I replied. “You’re home early.”

“And you’re home late, my friend, by a small matter of an entire night.”

“It’s a fine evening out there. I passed a group of Prussian soldiers swimming under the Petit Pont, and there were circus performers on the quai. We should go out.”

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“I stopped off at the bathhouse on the river on the way home.”

“I mean before that.”

“Lunch. Before that, breakfast at the café on the rue de Rivoli. I had soup and cheese and half a loaf of bread. Then I went to the barbers in that little alleyway near the Tuileries this afternoon and had my hair cut.”

“Connor, I am losing my patience. You didn’t come home last night.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I stayed somewhere else.”

“Mon Dieu
. So Daniel Connor finally got lucky? Did you find a girl who was good enough for you? Will you see her again? What does she look like—blond, brunette, tall, short?”

“I’m going to dress for dinner,” I said. “Then I think we had better go out. We have some celebrating to do.”

I placed the wooden box containing the mammoth bone and the travel bag on the table, stepped into the bedroom, and closed the door.

A few moments later he called out,
“Mon diable!
Is this what I think it is? It’s a bloody mammoth bone.
Merde
. Did you find
her
as
well? The beautiful thief? And she just gave it all back to you? Just like that? You
must
have been good.”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said, grateful that he couldn’t see the flush on my face. “Fin, you know what this means?”

“I do indeed. Daniel Connor got lucky.
Mon diable—it’s
about time.”

“It means I’m back in the Jardin. It means I’m in time. I told Cuvier I’d start work at the end of August. I can now. I can start over—”

“Weren’t there other specimens apart from the mammoth bone and the manuscript?” Fin asked. “Fossils?”

“Yes, but I can find a way of explaining those. Look, Fin. This means I can start work at the Jardin. I will have money. I can pay the rent. I don’t have to go home. I can stay in Paris.”

“And her? Tell me about her—
immédiatement
. There is no time to lose. Fin is curious. Fin must not be kept waiting.”

I had composed a story that would protect both Fin and Lucienne if Jagot came by asking questions. So as we walked toward the first bar, the sky fading from dark blue to pink on the horizon, the smell of garlic and spices heavy on the air, I told Fin that my thief wasn’t a thief at all but a widow called Mme. Rochefide—Victorine—and that she had taken my luggage by accident. I had seen her at the Palais Royal that afternoon, and she had taken me back to her lodgings to return my belongings and eventually one thing had led to another. Well, it was almost true. I felt slightly ashamed at the ease with which I could turn the philosopher-thief into a mysterious widow with a life story all of her own. Now all I had to do, I thought, was remember it.

“It was your first time, wasn’t it, Connor?” Fin said drunkenly, sometime in the early hours of the morning, propped against a seat in the Café des Deux Chats. “That’s something to drink to. You know there’s no shame in that. I’ll tell you a secret—Céleste was my first too … my first and only. There are not many people I would admit that to, you know. But you, my friend …”

He was asleep before he had finished the sentence.

Two days later I found Lucienne sitting on the steps of the Louvre, reading a newspaper, waiting for me. I stood nearby in the shadows watching her, remembering. I watched her for as long as I dared, my heart beating, sure she would disappear again, or turn into something with wings and fly up to circle the square.

The streets of Paris were hot and dusty; foreigners in holiday spirits made their way to the gallery to see the latest gaps in the walls. Everyone was talking. Wellington’s name was whispered everywhere. Defeating Napoleon at Waterloo had made him a kind of god. Now he had become the puppet master who controlled the strings in Paris. They said he had given the authorization for the Prussian army to enter the Louvre. Wellington was playing it slow, as diplomatically as he could, but he was lighting matches over a powder keg, the English papers said, sending soldiers into the Louvre like that.

The Parisians were incensed. These trophies Napoleon had brought back to Paris were for them, for France. They were theirs: their paintings, their Venetian horses, their sculptures. They belonged to Paris. And of course, everyone still half believed that Napoleon would stroll back into Paris as if nothing had happened and send all the ambassadors and diplomats and soldiers packing.

That day, against the stone steps, Lucienne was only a man, in a gray-green coat, slightly worn, brown breeches, and boots. This masquerade of hers was carefully put together, I thought, so that she would not stand out. She looked like a thousand artists or writers in Paris. She wore her hair falling straight around her face, in the way I had seen artists do. Would I have noticed, I wondered, if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t uncoiled her in candlelight? Would I have been able to pick her out from a crowd in a coffeehouse or bar, nudge my companion, and say:
That is a woman dressed as a man
. Almost certainly not. She
used no tricks. There was no false hair. She was only a very tall woman dressed as a man, and thus, understood to be so. And she was only one of many masqueraders in Paris, women who passed as men, men who passed as women, thieves turned police agents, thieves turned counts.

“Imagine the crowds there must have been here in the square,” she said, pointing down the place du Carrousel to where the four bronze horses made black muscular shapes against the sky on top of the Arc De Triomphe. “It’s seventeen years since they brought the horses to Paris—on carts in a long procession, flanked by animals from the menagerie—ostriches, camels, gazelles, and vultures—soldiers and a military band.”

“You saw it?” My shoulder brushed against hers. We both sat looking down the street to the Arc, its stone gleaming in the sun after two days of rain.

“No. I was in Egypt,” she said. “I read about it in the French papers there.”

“You went to Egypt?” I heard the incredulity in my voice, my own boyish awe and envy. “In Napoleon’s campaign?”

Napoleon had taken savants with him to Egypt—archaeologists, botanists, astronomers, doctors, and engineers. I knew that. He took them with him so that they might study Egypt and bring ancient knowledge back to France. That story of Napoleon and his savants and soldiers in Egypt was glorious to me. It seemed a uniquely imperial act. Jameson had read the newspaper descriptions of the expedition out to us in a lecture, describing with transparent envy the boatloads of scientific equipment and books that had accompanied the 167 savants. And for me there had been two men in particular who held my attention—Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Marie Jules Savigny. Geoffroy, then just twenty-six and already a professor at the Jardin des Plantes, was put in charge of all the vertebrate investigations, and Savigny, only twenty-one, the invertebrates.

“I was in Egypt when the horses came to Paris,” Lucienne said,
“yes, at the end of July 1798. I went out as one of Geoffroy’s assistants. They made us wear uniforms. It was incredibly hot.”

“They made women wear uniforms?”

“I went as a man, of course,” she said, laughing. “They wouldn’t let women go to Egypt except as camp followers and I didn’t want to be a camp follower.” I pictured bright uniforms against white sand, thousands of men and boys a long way from home. Yes, I could imagine her there in Cairo’s streets, a French soldier moving through crowds of Mamluks, camels, and dancing girls.

“Geoffroy was collecting new species of fish,” she said. “So I went out with the fishermen on the coasts and rivers, or visited the fish stalls of remote fishing villages. Sharks, rays, puffer fish, lungfish, I brought them all back to Geoffroy, packed in cases of ice and straw. You can’t imagine all the different fish out there where the desert meets the fertile land, and fresh water and seawater join.”

“What was it like working with Geoffroy? Is he as brilliant as they say?”

“It was frustrating more than anything,” she said. “He worked so hard he made himself ill. He found a fish in the waters of the Nile that he decided was a
chalnon manquant—how
do you say that in English?”

“A missing link,” I said. “A fish?”

“When Geoffroy dissected it, he found bronchioles that looked like the lungs of a human. It changed everything for him. It made him see that we’ve all come from one form. I kept telling him it was the Red Sea corals we should be looking at. Further back. They’re the key, Geoffroy, I’d say, not the fish. But he wouldn’t listen. He could not see anything beyond that fish of his, not even when the British were camped right outside Alexandria.”

Now, as well as the drawings and descriptions of the Egyptian campaign I had seen or read in Jameson’s yellowing newspapers, I saw another world out there, one in which men quarreled over microscopes in brightly lit rooms with shelves of glass jars full of dead sea
creatures. And corals in a red sea. I wasn’t stupid. I knew, even then, that the Red Sea wasn’t red, but that’s what I saw when I closed my eyes: tentacled cream-and pink-tipped corals swaying in red water. And I saw her in the water among them, her hair undulating like sea snakes, her skin bare like the pictures of the half-naked Japanese pearl divers I had seen, diving like birds of prey.

“Look, see the soldiers over there, looking up,” she said. “They’re wondering how to take the horses down.” A group of English soldiers on the other side of the square were looking up at the Arc and pointing. “Just a few more days perhaps.”

“So Napoleon’s war trophies will go back to Venice, where they belong,” I said.

“They’ve been war trophies for a thousand years, at least,” she said. “Passed back and forth between emperors and invaders. Napoleon took them from Venice but before that the Venetians stole them from Constantinople. And before that the emperor Constantine took them from Rome, and the Romans had stolen them, or copied them, from the Greeks. So where should they go back to? Venice or Constantinople or Greece? Only they know where they began.”

“They’re made of bronze,” I said. “They can’t
know
anything.”

“You are so literal, M. Connor,” she said, laughing. “Where is your imagination?”

I wondered what we must look like—two men sitting together under the Arc looking up. We must have looked like brothers or friends. But we were lovers. I wanted to touch her again. The memory of her body tormented me.

“Where is Jagot’s man today?” she asked suddenly, looking up and down the street.

“He’s gone,” I said, trying not to show my satisfaction. “I lost him.”

“No one loses one of Jagot’s men,” she said. “Trust me. Jagot must have called off his surveillance for some reason … I wonder what that means.” She hesitated, calculating. “That will make things easier,” she said. “For the moment. Until I get out of Paris. What will you do now that you have your things back?”