The Coral Thief (29 page)

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.

20

UCIENNE AND SILVEIRA
arrived together a few minutes later, stooping through the low doorway with wet umbrellas. She looked tired. She wore Silveira’s robe, the long robe I had seen him wear in the room in the rue du Pet-au-Diable, fleece-lined with the silver embroidery, the robe that smelled of ginger and garlic, the desert, and the sea. I didn’t like seeing her in his clothes.

Both were quiet and serious. Silveira nodded to Saint-Vincent and Manon, his bow slightly mannered, his hand on his heart in, I supposed, an Arab greeting.
“Citoyens,”
he said, nodding to each of us in turn.

“Silveira,” Saint-Vincent answered, shaking his hand.

“Sabalair is not with you?” Manon said.

“But of course. He is downstairs, watching the street.”

“You weren’t followed?”

“No,” Lucienne said. “We came by boat and then through the underpass.”

“Half of Paris is looking for you, Silveira,” Saint-Vincent said. “You have put us all at risk coming here.”

“The other half of Paris is looking for you, M. Saint-Vincent,” he said. “All of Paris is looking for all of us, I believe. We could offer ourselves up for ransom. We would be rich.”

“You are already rich,
citoyen
. Do you need more?”

“That, my friend, is not your business.”

“Enough, now,” Lucienne said, glancing at me with a look of burdened weariness. “Stop. We have work to do. Daniel, do you have the map?”

I nodded. I could not speak.

Silveira’s clothes were dusty. He wore large gold rings on his fingers. Byron might have looked like this, I thought, after a night on the road. He wore no waistcoat, only a crumpled white cotton shirt. His face was deeply lined; it was the face not of a diamond trader but of a man who had spent most of his waking hours on board ship, where wind and rain had weathered him. He smelled of leather and brandy. He had shaved his neck and trimmed his beard since I had seen him in the rue du Pet-au-Diable, and I noticed a small cut on his neck.

In Lucienne, dressed today in a simple brown-and-gray-striped silk waistcoat under Silveira’s coat, I looked to see where the man became the woman, the woman the man, and failed to find the border.

“Daniel, I have the books and papers I promised you,” she said, passing me a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “I found them in an old trunk, when I was packing yesterday. There’s a copy of Lamarck’s
Philosophie zoologique
. You can keep it. I have two. And Erasmus Darwin’s
Zoonomia
. It’s heavy. And there’s a copy of Peysonnel’s paper on corals too.”

“Lucienne Bernard is a savant still,” Silveira said. “She thinks she will find the key to everything with her books and her microscopes. Soon she will tell us the reason for everything and why this bone fits into this socket and why ducks’ feet are webbed, and why corals have found three different ways to reproduce themselves, and why animals have no roots, and why plants don’t feel. Apparently there is an answer,
you see, M. Connor, and Lucienne is going to find it. Nothing else matters, eh, Lucienne?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” she said, meeting my eye. “There are other things that matter to me.”

Silveira interrupted. “Now she looks casual, even, how do you say, nonchalant? Perhaps, she says.
Peut-être
. And then she shrugs her shoulders. In truth, M. Connor, she thinks no one will find the answers to the fossils or to the origin of the earth until all the priests have gone. I say to her these beginnings of time will never be known, so why try. Let the philosophers argue. I tell her the priests will never go. I tell her we need the priests. I tell her she should give up her obsession with beginnings and think about the present and the future.”

“Tais-toi
, Silveira,” Manon said. “You are being quarrelsome. Enough.”

How might a man feel to learn that he is the father of a daughter he has never met? Angry, it seemed. This interminable duel of theirs, fought in deserts and on mountains, on the shore of the Dead Sea and in the marketplaces of Egypt and now in a warehouse overlooking the Jardin des Plantes—I wondered how it might have begun. Perhaps they no longer remembered.

Lucienne stood at the window peeling off pieces of paper to make a larger square in the glass. The rain had stopped during the night, but the trees had taken a battering from the storm so the chestnut tree outside looked as if it was holding on to its last leaves only by an act of absolute concentration; now and again four or five large yellow and brown leaves slipped away into midair, hovering for a moment before a gust caught them up.

“It took me a long time to glue up that paper,” Manon said. “Don’t take it off again.”

“It makes me feel hemmed in,” Lucienne said. “There’s no light in here.”

“Now, Citizen Connor,” Silveira went on, “Lucienne Bernard will tell you, of course, that it is important to be free. She will tell you that
freedom is important above all things. To be free to think, to ask questions, free from the kings and the priests and men like Cuvier. She is a fighter for freedom, M. Connor.”

Lucienne turned back to face him, her black eyes flashing.

“Freedom to think, yes, that matters. Freedom to ask questions, that matters too. Clever students like Daniel come to Paris believing every thought is possible here. It isn’t. It was, but it isn’t anymore. The priests, kings, aristocrats, they are coming back, and what freedom we had—it will go. And yes, I do believe that freedom matters. Because for a short time we had it.”

They both seemed entirely oblivious to the rest of us.

“Freedom to think?” Silveira said. “That is nothing. What about rights? They gave us Jews equal rights during the Revolution. They made us equal to everyone else in France—in law. Already, in just five years, those rights have gone. Already it is hard to be a Jew in this city. My people are leaving again. Yes, we can think, but now Davide Silveira must hide in rooms above a curiosity shop in the rue du Pet-au-Diable.”

“At least you
had
rights, even if they took them away again,” Lucienne hissed. “For all the noble rhetoric of the Revolution, did anyone suggest giving women rights? What did the Revolution do for us?
Égalité?
It is all empty rhetoric. We are still slaves to the laws and petty tyrannies of men. If we have the right to go to the guillotine, to fight alongside our brothers at the barricades, why do women not have the right to mount the platform of government? That matters. I care about that.”

“The price of bread is rising again. That matters. Five thousand babies are left at the Foundling Hospital every year. That matters.”

“You are not hiding because you are a Jew, Silveira,” Manon interrupted. “You are hiding because Jagot has you on his list, because of crimes.”

“That is a family matter,” he said. “Jagot has a long memory.”

“Everything is a family matter for you, Silveira,” Lucienne said.
“
L’honneur de la famille. Sacristi
. You will get us all killed for your family honor. The map?” she said, turning abruptly to me. “Daniel?”

I unfolded my copy of Deleuze’s map of the Jardin and spread it across the table, securing its edges with pots and books, grateful to have something to do to escape the cross fire of accusation and counteraccusation. The others took seats around the table. Saint-Vincent lit the lamp and poured coffee from the pot on the fire.

The map was a long, vertical oblong. To the north the wide ribbon of the river ran horizontally across the thick grainy paper, crisscrossed by quais and bridges. Inside the oblong of the walled garden there were two distinct halves. To the right, a series of boxes marked out in right angles the various borders and buildings around the edges. To the left, the menagerie grounds were all curves and twists, a series of winding paths and circles. And down in the bottom left-hand corner were the spiraling paths of the labyrinth where I had sat with Lucienne. Each section on the map was marked with a number.

“There’s a key,” I said. “Deleuze has numbered everything. I’ve copied it out in English and French.”

Over the top of the map I placed another piece of paper—a list. It had forty-seven numbers corresponding to locations on the map: the beehives, the labyrinth, the cedar of Lebanon, a dairy, the park and hut for the zebra, the garden for experiments, borders for aquatic plants, flowers for ornament, greenhouses, hot frames, seed gardens. It was like a poem, I thought.

“It’s good,” she said. “Very good. I hope M. Deleuze is getting some sleep now. Show me, Daniel,” she said softly. “Show me everything that is important, everything new. We must make a plan. We must make the very best plan.”

As I described what they had in front of them—the four entrances to the Jardin, heavily guarded, the number of guards, the locking systems, the gates checked night and day, the keys checked in and out, the windows locked, grated, barred, checked, and double-checked—the impossibility of the task became increasingly evident.