The Coral Thief (23 page)

HEN
I
KNOCKED
at the locksmith’s atelier two days later, answering a note she had sent, Lucienne came to the door wearing her workman’s trousers, her shirt undone and her feet bare. She seemed tired and her face was swollen. When I looked more closely, I could see that it was also bruised.

“What happened?” I asked, alarmed. “Somebody did this to you, didn’t they? Somebody attacked you … When … where? Was it just one man or several? I’ll find them—the cowards.”

“In the alleyway, down there, last night. Just one man. But for God’s sake, Daniel, I told you before, I don’t need rescuing. I can look after myself.” She turned away coldly.

At the other end of the workroom, through the frame of the half-open door, a woman and a man sat at a table in conversation, their attention focused on the table itself, where they appeared to be playing cards. Manon Laforge and Alain Saint-Vincent, surrounded by corals and shells and packing cases. As I stepped into the atelier, Lucienne, seeing the direction of my gaze, walked back toward that room and pulled the door closed.

“What kind of miserable coward would attack a woman in an alleyway?” I asked. “Did he rob you? Did he touch you? Was it …? Was it a man, a boy tall, short, fat, thin? Did you see his face?”

“Yes, I saw his face.”

“Then you must make a report. Someone must find him.”

“Make a report? Yes, of course. Go to the police, yes. Daniel, you know I can’t do that. Be quiet. I need you to listen.”

Through the closed door I could hear the others talking in French; I could hear fragments of speech now and again. Lucienne ran her hand through her hair and looked at me as if she was trying to frame a question. A single strand of hair stuck to her face.

“Everything is good for you again at the Jardin, yes? Cuvier trusts you. You are doing well there.” I wasn’t sure what frightened me more, the coldness of her manner or the menacing implications of this night attack.

“Yes,” I said, lowering my voice. “What is this, Lucienne? Somebody has attacked you and you won’t tell me who or why. And now you want to talk about my work at the museum. You never tell me anything. You don’t trust me. You treat me as if I am a boy, as if I am useless. What
am
I to you, Lucienne?”

She didn’t answer. She seemed to be struggling with herself, walking up and down the room, about to speak and then not. I opened the front door and walked toward the top of the staircase, looking down through its curves and angles to the floor below. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just leave. I kicked the wall and then turned back.

When I came back in to the room, Lucienne was looking toward the door. I slumped into a low chair in a corner, defeated.

She shrugged. “You think such bad things of me,” she said. “You think I have no feelings for you. You are a blind man.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I
am
a blind man. You have made me blind. And I can’t leave you. You can’t ask me to do that. Please. Whatever has happened … however bad things are, let me help. There must be something I can do. But I can’t do anything unless you tell me what’s happening … He might come back.”

“There is trouble,” she said. “Bad trouble. Like a spiders web. You will get caught in it too and it will get worse. But I can’t get out of it. I asked you once to help me, and then I changed my mind. But now I need to ask you again.”

She opened a drawer, took out a piece of folded paper, and passed it to me. “I should have left Paris before. I was so stupid.”

I began to unfold the paper she had given me.

“It’s a map of the Jardin des Plantes,” she said. “An old one. It’s of no use to me. It doesn’t have any of the new buildings on it, the ones they’ve built in the last five years. I need to know where everyone in the Jardin lives, and I need a detailed map of Cuvier’s museum, with all the new exits and entrances, including the cellars. I need the names of all the people who live in the buildings, from the guards to Cuvier’s family. I need to know how the locking systems work. Even the feeding times in the menagerie. And I need the information soon, very soon. Three weeks or sooner. The clock is ticking. Do you think you can do that? Is it possible?”

Lucienne’s face and posture were utterly impassive now.

“A man came to see me yesterday,” she continued, pacing, “someone I used to know, someone I worked with before. He came with a commission—a job—for us. I said no. Saint-Vincent and Manon, they said no. I said to him, we don’t do that work anymore. But this time he says we can’t choose. And he won’t let me leave Paris until we bring him what he wants. He’s dangerous.”

She gestured to the bruise on her face, the swelling and the cut. I imagined a knife. A blade flashing in the light. Her hands were grazed and cut. She had fought back. It was difficult to imagine she wouldn’t. I felt an ache cut through me like a knife. I couldn’t protect her and she didn’t want me to. And I felt guilty. Deep down, I’d always known she’d have to pay for the time she’d stolen and the risks she’d taken. She’d stayed in Paris for me—or at least partly for me. I could have made her go.

“Yesterday?” I said. “For God’s sake, why didn’t you send for me?”

“I didn’t need you yesterday,” she said sharply. “Today I do. I
haven’t slept, worrying about it, about you. You have everything ahead of you. This will be a big risk. You could lose everything—”

“I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “It’s my fault this has happened. I persuaded you to stay in Paris. You wouldn’t be here now, if—”

“No,” she said. “I stayed. You didn’t make me. That’s not your responsibility. It’s mine.”

“But why you? There must be other thieves in Paris, professionals like you who can do what this man wants. You can’t be the only one.”

“Yes, but what he wants is in the Jardin des Plantes, it’s in Cuvier’s museum. And I know that museum better than any other thief in France. No one knows that building like I do. Or at least I used to. He knows that.”

“What can be worth the trouble? Some old bones, a mummy or two? There’s nothing there.”

“A diamond. One of the biggest in the world. It belongs to Denon, the director of the Louvre. Denon and Cuvier have made a deal. Cuvier is hiding some of Denon’s most valuable pieces in the cellar of the museum: a cabinet of curiosities, some paintings Denon won’t part with, and some Egyptian artifacts. In return for hiding them, Denon will help Cuvier negotiate with M. Brugmans.”

“Cuvier is hiding Denon’s stolen collection? That’s ridiculous.”

“Cuvier’s clever—he knows how to get what he wants. He always has. He’s a politician. He’ll do anything to keep that collection in his museum.”

There was some kind of truth in what she said; I had seen Vivant Denon leaving Cuvier’s house several times over the last several days, taking the back staircase. I had thought little of it at the time—Cuvier was always receiving some dignitary or other. The picture Lucienne painted of Cuvier’s dealings unsettled me. But then I thought of my own ambitions, that relentless acquisitive curiosity; in Cuvier’s position, would I have behaved any differently?

“How long do you have?” I asked, finally.

“The end of October. Denon has arranged for his collection to be taken out of the country then. So we have one month only. It’s almost impossible. Cuvier knows all of us, and his guards have descriptions. There are more locks in the museum now than there are in almost any bank in the city. I need you to get me in. There’s no one else who can do it.” She was dressing now, tucking in her shirt, taking the waistcoat from the back of the door and doing up the buttons one by one, arranging her hair and neckerchief carefully in front of the mirror near the window. “You don’t know this man, Daniel. If I could find a way out of it, I would. I promised Manon, for the sake of Delphine. I said there would be no more commissions. But this time we cannot choose.”

“Delphine?” I said. “Manon was going to take her back to Italy …”

“It’s too late,” she said. “If only Manon had gone yesterday … She wanted to, but I’d made a promise to take Delphine to Malmaison to show her Napoleon’s house. She wanted to see it before they left …” She paused, her eyes full of tears. “Daniel, what if he finds out about her? What if he finds out where Delphine is?”

“He won’t,” I said. “Not if you do what he tells you to.”

I was struggling now, weighing up the risks—an illustrious future lost, perhaps even prison—against what was at stake, thinking not just of Lucienne and her accomplices but of Delphine in the convent garden.

“Just a map?” I asked. “That’s all you need from me?”

“Just a map.”

“I know someone,” I said, thinking. “Joseph Deleuze could draw up a map. He knows the garden and the museum like no one else does. I could try.”

“Will he do it quickly?” she asked, turning to look at me. “I can’t do anything until I have a map. I don’t even know if it’s possible to get in there until I’ve seen it. It must be very detailed, very accurate. Then I can make a plan.”

So that was it. Just a map, she said. As if the map was of little consequence. But a few minutes after we had begun to talk about the map and Deleuze, we both knew the threshold had been crossed, and the details of that crossing and what it meant would be determined later.

Why did Daniel Connor take this path rather than the one he was supposed to take, the one he thought he wanted to take, what Rev. Samuels would call the righteous path, the one that went with Cuvier, with hard work, apprenticeship, patronage, the one that would almost certainly lead to success? Why instead did he take the path that led into the muddy and shadowy labyrinths with the heretics and the thieves? You’d have to ask him that. I am no longer that Daniel Connor. That one, that boy, is many Daniels ago. Several lost skins ago.

Desire was there from the beginning. That I remember. But that’s an easy explanation for why the boy on the mail coach became the boy of the labyrinths and salons and gambling houses, for how the anatomy student became a thief. A philosopher-thief took me to her bed and talked of time stretching back so far it made my head spin, talked of water moving over mountain ranges over millions and millions of years, drip on drip, small rivulets carving rock; she whispered of colonies of corals creating continents, of the minute skeletons of chalk creatures making cliffs, of seabeds heaving up and slowly pushing fossilized oyster beds to the peaks of mountains hundreds of miles up and away from the sea; she murmured of continents drifting apart and back together again; and she entwined and enraveled mind and body so you stopped knowing where one finished and the other began.

People talk about falling among thieves. I fell among thieves in the city of Paris in 1815, except that it didn’t feel like a falling at all—it felt like a flight.

“My people,” she said, nodding toward the closed door. “They’ll be your people now. You can trust them with anything.”

One of the first things that Manon said that day when Lucienne finished explaining about the map, was: “Lucienne, Alain’s found Silveira.”

“Davide?” Lucienne’s voice was quiet and steely. She glanced at Alain, who looked away before he spoke.