The Coral Thief (30 page)

I put another map on top of the first, the rectangular floor plan of a two-story building with four sides built around a courtyard: Cuvier’s museum. I had devised the map from a prose description written by Joseph Deleuze. Each new map took us farther in, farther down, farther into the heart of things, and closer to the diamond.

“The Comparative Anatomy Museum,” I said, smoothing out the folds in the paper. “It used to have an entrance directly onto the rue de Seine on the east side of the gardens, but that door was bricked up last year. The main entrance to the museum is therefore from the Jardin, through this door here.”

I ran my finger around the perimeter, showed them the long side of the building that housed the museum. I told them that Cuvier had fitted iron grilles to all of the windows at street level and had designated the rest of the building, the other three sides, as lodgings for his assistants. It was never empty.

“Impressive,” Lucienne said. “Cuvier has made the museum into a fortress. It’s impenetrable. And the vault? How do we get in?”

I described the entrance to the cellars through Room 2 of the museum, an entrance that had once been a trapdoor in a flour warehouse, and before that in a coach house. It was two doors, opening onto a staircase, that were now hidden by a plinth on a sliding mechanism that carried a full-sized rhino skeleton from Java. Room 2, I told them, was now the centerpiece of Cuvier’s museum, and was almost impossible to get into. Cuvier had ordered a refurbishment of the entire room and there was always someone in there, assembling or dismantling the bones for cleaning, rehanging them, repainting the signs, dusting the shelves, or polishing the floor.

“We will go in on the night of Brugmans’s visit,” she said. “The night that Cuvier gives a party in his honor. Those are our orders. The twenty-ninth of October. That’s fifteen days.”

“We break in during a
party?
You are joking,” Saint-Vincent said. “That’s suicide. So, we’re supposed to get into the Jardin past the armed guards here, who will be checking the papers of everyone who
goes in and out, into the museum to the private party, where we will be stopped again at the door here. During this party we get down into the cellars by moving a plinth with a skeleton of a rhino on it, find the cabinet, wherever it is, and the diamond, and get it and ourselves out again, all of this while there’s a party going on and the place is full of royalty, princes, and diplomats? Does Jagot think we’re magicians? Or just fools? It would be easier to rescue the Emperor from Saint Helena than to get that diamond from Cuvier’s museum.”

“The Emperor arrives on the prison island today, the papers say,” Manon said. “No one will rescue him now. No one can. He must know that. It is a bad end for him.”

“We’ve done more difficult jobs than this,” Lucienne said, sensing our spirits falling. “But we have to know what is what. One of us must watch the Jardin day and night from this room for at least a week. We will take turns watching and making notes. I want to know when the guards change, when the feeding times happen. We have to know every single routine and schedule.”

Silveira grinned broadly. “Lucienne is a magician,” he said. “She would rescue the Emperor from his prison island, if they asked her, if they gave her a ship and a map.”

“Manon is right,” Lucienne said. “You would need an army to rescue him now. There is no way back to Paris for him.”

“Or for us,” Saint-Vincent said gloomily. “There will be no way back for us either.”

21

UCIENNE CAME TO THE EMPTY WAREHOUSE
that night and found me struggling to stay awake in the leather chair placed at the window in the dark of the room, drinking brandy, watching the lights from the watchman’s lamps moving about in the Jardin, taking notes. Her mouth close to my ear:
Are you awake?
The smell of perfume, wood smoke, and brandy. I remember the heat of the brandy on my tongue; the mattress we found in the attic and pulled down in front of the fire. Naked amid dust and insects in the firelight, we watched the goings-on of the street through the moonlit night: the lights, the prostitutes, the watchmen checking doors and windows.

“What do you see?” Lucienne asked, her fingers on my back, sometime between two and three o’clock in the morning, as I leaned up against the window, peering out between the sheets of paper.

“You and your life,” I said. “And all the people in it.”

Draped in the gold-and-green brocaded curtains we had found in a box in a downstairs room, she began to describe how she and Manon and Delphine had lived for almost six years in an Italian village
she wouldn’t name, a house by the sea, buried in long grass, with no road, a house that was falling to dust, that had grass growing through some of the floorboards in the pantry, a house where you had to check your shoes and your sheets for the tiny scorpions that climbed in there, a house on the top of a hill with a path winding down to the cove, and a porch that looked out toward the sea.

The books were the biggest problem, she said. They swelled in the rain. They were the only valuable things in the house, the only things they worried about, but it always cost a little more than they had to move them into town for the winter. They always moved back into town for the winter. Things were easier. There are women who come and work for us, in the town, she said. They sweep and polish, cook and clean, make the fires and blacken the hearth. In town they had parties, dinners, conversations, and guests. “There are always guests, savants and philosophers passing through the house. Some stay all winter,” she said. “And then sometimes, when the mood takes me, when I get restless, I go, sometimes with Delphine, sometimes not, to Florence or Pisa.”

But even in town, she said, she missed Paris. Manon complained that she was always talking about Paris: the Jardin, the latest microscopes, the museums, the arguments you could have only there. There were things she wanted in Paris, she said; they weren’t the normal things that women want, like hats or gloves or lace; she missed the curiosity shops and the collectors, the museums and the people.

“I always knew we would have to come back,” Lucienne said. “Once Delphine was old enough. And I think I always knew something like this would happen. You can’t keep running away.”

La marche
. Lucienne’s life, her
marche
. It made me think of Ramon’s arm—stretched out among the wine bottles in our salon, his finger sweeping down from his shoulder and stopping at the fingernail—that night when he had told me about all the time there was on earth before man arrived.
Here is where human history begins
, he had said,
here at the fingernail. See how small we are and how late we have come
.

Hearing about Lucienne’s life, putting it together piece by piece, made me feel small—and late. For there were others behind me, others who had lain with her. Lucienne’s story stretched back into a history before I was born, a past that, like wind, snow, rain, and ice, had carved out the landscape she had come to be. This was a past that kept her on the run, not just from the consequences of her crimes, but from the cuts and blows of her memory.

“I wish I could erase all your histories,” I said. “I wish there was nothing before me. That the world and all the planets turned around this bed, that everything began and ended here, with just you and me. I wish you were entirely mine. And I know that’s selfish and stupid. And I know, before you say it, that Lucienne Bernard doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“Silveira? You speak of him?”

“Did you love him?” I needed to know, even if I didn’t like the answer, I thought.

“Yes. With a kind of madness—for years. I would have done anything for him. It was the same for him. But it is always a fight. We might have killed each other, I think, if we’d been left alone. It all came to an end in Montmartre when Silveira killed Jagot’s man. If he hadn’t killed Jagot’s man, Jagot’s man would have killed me. So you see, I owe him many things. He taught me many things. I was pregnant then, when Silveira killed Jagot’s man, but I didn’t know it. By the time I knew, we were hundreds of miles away from each other.”