The Coral Thief (4 page)

S THE COACH MADE ITS WAY
along the length of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, I looked for my thief among the soldiers in vividly colored uniforms and the men and women pushing handcarts, carrying flowers, wood, fruit, and vegetables into the city from outlying farms. Narrow cobbled roadways to each side trickled with stinking water; ancient lanterns hung from ropes overhead. All down the street, as far as I could see, haberdashers were hanging long strips of bright calico outside their shops like flags. On street corners old men clustered around smoky braziers, roasting fish and meat. I was hungry.

I tried to make out the full magnitude of what had happened. Professor Jameson, I reminded myself, seeking to build bridges between British and French science now that the war was finally over, had entrusted me with gifts and a manuscript to take to Professor Cuvier, probably the most important man of science in France. The specimens and the manuscript were irreplaceable. The loss was not only an embarrassment, it was a scandal. This would almost certainly mean
my return to the gray streets of Edinburgh, or to my father’s house, shamed. Even if I went to the police and could make myself understood, even if the specimens were found and returned, the story would be the same: Daniel Connor had lost the rare and irreplaceable gifts entrusted to his care because he had dropped his guard and fallen asleep on the mail coach, seduced into a false sense of security by a beautiful woman. It was pitiable.

The mail coach turned into a wide covered courtyard, where half a dozen other coaches were drawing up at the same time. Drivers were unloading towers of luggage from roofs; porters were bustling about and attendants shouting. “Dis way, sare; are you for ze Otel of Rhin?” “Hôtel Bristol, sare!” Cards were thrust into hands; English voices jabbered. “Hicks, Hicks, take the coats and umbrellas.” “Count the packages, John. There should be twenty-seven.” There were nurserymaids, carpetbags, hatboxes, cloaks, and trunks everywhere.
“Enfin,”
I heard an old lady say to her daughters, yawning and rubbing her eyes with her cambric handkerchief,
“nous voilà!”

“Hôtel Corneille,” I said to the first porter who met my eye. Grinning, he lifted my three suitcases onto his handcart and set off on foot. I followed close behind, lest the man suddenly take off with the rest of my possessions. On each side of the street shopkeepers were opening up their doors to morning trade, setting up their windows and storefronts; waiters put out tables; fiacre drivers washed down the wheels of their carriages at the street pumps or brushed down their horses.

Paris was now a military encampment for the Allies. Everywhere uniforms made a mosaic of color in the morning sun—helmets, bearskins, two-pointed hats, plumes, epaulettes, sunbursts and grenade ornaments, standards, cravats, buckles, and shoulder cloaks. The British, someone had said, had set up camp right in the middle of the Champs-Élysées, their white conical tents clustered along the walkways under the plane and chestnut trees. Russian soldiers, young men with flaxen hair, round caps, and tightly tapered waists, sat about smoking and telling stories in the cafés. Prussians were in blue, Hungarians in
dark green, Austrians in white, British in red, French in blue and red decorated with silver.

Was I glad Napoleon Bonaparte had fallen? No. Of course not. None of us at Edinburgh had been glad, despite what we might have said at the dinner tables of our professors or in the company of our elders. Napoleon Bonaparte, not Welllington, was the real giant killer.

Of course I had kept silent when my father muttered over his morning newspaper, saying how he would hang the captured Corsican bastard if he were in charge in Paris, how he’d make a public spectacle of him. And there was the fact that it was only after Wellington had defeated Napoleon on that battlefield at Waterloo that my father finally gave his consent to my European travels. “British order,” he had declared, thumping the dinner table with his fist, “is exactly what those barbarians need. We’ll show those French savages a thing or two.”

Now the decadent, aristocratic atmosphere made it almost impossible to imagine the ferocity of the mobs that had so recently surged through here. A military band played music at the door of one hotel where, the porter told me, the Emperor of Austria had his quarters. Valets carried out chairs from the hotel and placed them under the shade of the trees.

My spirits began to lift.

In the rooms I had taken in the hotel in Saint-Germain, as close as I could afford to the Académie des sciences on the rue de l’École de Médecine, I washed, changed my clothes, and sat down to think. I had no idea how I was going to explain to the police what had happened. A woman thief, traveling with a child, had stolen a letter and notebooks that were useless to her and specimens whose value I could not believe she fully understood. She had not taken my money. It made no sense. A few hours ago I had a letter from Professor Jameson to Professor Cuvier commending me to elite circles of medical and scientific
savants in Paris and precious gifts to present. Now everything was gone. Without Cuvier’s references and support there would be no conversations in the leafy courtyards and colonnades of great universities; there would be no illustrious future among Europe’s savants.

I paced the small bedroom between the window and the sink for twenty minutes or so, talking to myself, veering light-headedly between self-accusation and outrage. It was only when I bruised my right hand badly by punching the wall several times that I decided to find the Bureau de la Sûreté.

I poured water from the jug beside the sink into a basin and found my razor and the small pot of shaving cream. Since I had left Edinburgh these daily rituals had come to be important. They provided a kind of tethering, a connection to home. Rising at seven o’clock, a morning walk, breakfast, a shave. I studied my face in the cracked mirror as my skin became visible with each sweep of the razor. It was a face that seemed to look different every morning and, despite the familiar features—black curls, blue eyes, a full mouth, the tiny scar on my chin where the hair wouldn’t grow—I did not recognize myself.

I was trying to remember the features of the woman’s face so I could report the theft to the men at the Bureau when there was a knock on the door. A heavily built, bearded young man with bright eyes stood on the threshold of the hotel landing, clutching a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Before I had time to speak, he had stepped into my room, set the bottle and glasses down, and clasped my hand warmly.

“A fellow countryman,” he said in a lilting Scottish accent. “The concierge has been talking about you for days, ever since you wrote to reserve the rooms. It’s been M. Connor this and M. Connor that. She calls you
the young English gentleman
. Well, well. My name’s William, William Robertson, from the Western isles. I was at the medical school at Edinburgh too—been in Paris a year. I moved into the hotel a couple of weeks ago. It’s expensive but closer to work. I thought a celebration might be in order. I’ve been saving this.” He held up the
bottle. “It’s not as cold as it should be, I’m afraid, but who’s complaining?” He placed the glasses on the table and uncorked the bottle with his teeth. “Glad to meet you, M. Connor.”

“Daniel,” I said. “Daniel Connor. Mr. Robertson, can you tell me where the Bureau de la Sûreté is?”

“Actually, everyone calls me Fin,” he said, “because I’m supposed to look like a fish. It’s the mouth, I think.” He passed me a glass of champagne and began to look over my books and equipment, which lay scattered on the bed.

“I don’t think you look like a fish,” I said, though I realized that he did, now that I thought about it. A big fish of course, with a large mouth.

“You might not think that a man with a beard could actually resemble a fish,” he said, peering at himself in the looking glass over the fireplace, moving his jaw around roughly, opening and closing his mouth, grimacing. “But it appears that I do. To others, of course, not to myself. It was just a joke at first—Salomon’s little joke—but it stuck. I don’t mind. Anyway, Daniel Connor, I’d be glad to show you the ropes. If it’s ropes you want.”

“I’d be grateful if—”

“You know, Paris is completely infested with medical students from Edinburgh. There’s practically a colony of us over at the École de médecine, and at the lectures in the Jardin des Plantes. But there are students from everywhere else too—Romania, Hungary, Spain, Russia. You’ve come at a good time. Where are you headed?”

“The Jardin des Plantes. I’m supposed to start working for Cuvier, and I thought I’d sign up for the winter lectures as well. Comparative anatomy’s my line, or at least it is for the moment, but—”

“Aha. A job with Cuvier? Impressive. None of that philosophy’s for me. Brain just won’t do it. I spend my days walking the hospitals between the École de Médecine and the teaching clinic at the Hôtel Dieu, following the coattails of Sanson the surgeon—amputating. That’s my line.” He made a gesture as if he was sawing through logs.

“Amputating?”

“The soldiers are still coming in from Waterloo. Hundreds of them, laid out on mats in the hospital corridors, legs and arms black with gangrene. The smell is so vile you can hardly breathe in some rooms. Most of them are beyond saving, but we have a go anyway. All the foreign anatomy students are learning their trade with the hacksaw too. Long hours and good money. And sometimes Sanson lets you do dissection and autopsy work on the corpses.”

“It’s almost impossible to get hold of bodies in Edinburgh now,” I said. “The anatomy professors have to make them last for weeks. They even fight over them.”

“Christ. There are hundreds here every week. The hospitals send most of the corpses over to the anatomy clinics while they’re still warm. Can I buy you a drink?”

The bottle was already half empty. I was thirsty and had drunk the two glasses of champagne as if it had been lemonade. I wasn’t used to drinking. In Edinburgh I’d never had enough money as my father had kept my allowance deliberately small in order to ensure that I kept away from what he called “fleshly temptations.” It had been as much as I could do to pay the bills for the oatmeal and potatoes, which most of the medical students lived on, and I was always hungry.

“No. I mean, yes,” I said, grateful for the blurred feeling the champagne had made in my head. “Let me buy
you
a drink. I have some money here somewhere. I’ve never been to France before. You know, I think I might need breakfast.” I tipped my bag onto the bed, searching for the French money I had exchanged, money that was now mine to spend as I chose. “I haven’t worked out the coins yet.”

“Your French—is it any good?”

“It’s getting better. I can speak a little German too and read Greek and Latin.”

“Got a good stomach?”

“I think so. What for—alcohol or dissection?”

“Both. I did three amputations last night, you know: a hand, two
legs. The hand was the worst. More nerves. More blood. As soon as we’ve bandaged up the poor sods, they’re out on the streets in their uniforms, begging—there are lines of them in the arcades in the Palais Royal. They make decent money. And the wooden-leg makers in Paris have never had it so good. They’ll be out of business soon though, now that Napoleon has been taken. No more wars, no more wooden legs.”

“Embryology was my specialism,” I said. “In Edinburgh at least. I don’t think I’d be very good at amputations.”

A flock of pigeons flew past the window, casting shadows on the whitewashed wall.

“I tell you,” Fin said. “I always need several drinks after the night shift to make sure those bloody limbs don’t come flying at me in my dreams.”

He glanced over at the map unfolded on my bed. “You don’t want to use those guidebooks,” he said. “They’ll only take you to the places all the English tourists go—all the bloody sights. You’ll be on the same carousel as Lady Bloody Carmichael and little Georgiana and all their cronies. Just plunge in, I say. Find your bearings. I’ll show you around. Be glad to. I’ve got the day off, you know. You are a lucky man. William Robertson will give you a personal tour of Paris. Where do you want to start?”

“The Bureau de la Sûreté,” I said.

“Why the bollocks would you want to go there?”

“I’m in trouble,” I said.

“There’s no trouble you can’t get out of,” Fin said, clapping me on the back. “What have you done to your hand?” My knuckles were grazed and swollen. “A fight? Already?”

“Stupid,” I said. All the connecting words were beginning to disappear.

I told Fin about the papers and the fossils. Well, I tried to explain, but of course, I couldn’t. There was no logic to it. I could see the consequences though. I could see the future rolling out—or rather not
rolling out—clearly enough. No chance to prove to Cuvier that Jameson was right to choose me over the rest, no way to prove that I was
exceptional
. All that work, all that time—the late nights, the exams and books—come to nothing.

“I’m sure Cuvier’s a reasonable man,” Fin said, taking a chair in the corner where the morning sun fell in slanting lines. “You know what I would do? I’d write to Jameson and get him to send another set of letters. That should take a week or two at most. And then you can start over.”