The Coral Thief (7 page)

“I saw you sitting by the Seine,” she said, “and I followed you in here. Isn’t it terrible?” she said, looking at the Laocoön. “To make pain beautiful like that—it is a great art.” That gravelly voice of hers, the slow, seductive way she spoke.

She was as tall as I was, perhaps even a little taller. Nearly six feet—unnervingly tall for a woman. In the daylight her skin was darker than I remembered and her beauty even more striking. Her black hair curled around the edges of her face. She wore no hat; instead she had twisted a swathe of blue silk around her head that matched her dress and made her look like a drawing of a famous Parisian actress I had once seen. She wore pearl earrings. I could see the colors of the squares and rectangles of paintings reflected on their convex surfaces. Jagot had called her Lucienne Bernard. She looked like no thief I had ever imagined.

I looked around for the guard and for Jagot’s man but could see only other visitors standing looking at the sculptures. Everything continued as before. I felt a hot rush to my head. Until we were closer to
the guard, the best thing to do was to keep her talking, I thought. I only wanted her to return the things she had taken. I didn’t much care how.

“You took my papers and a package, a case, from the mail coach,” I said, slowly, still trying to prompt a conversation that would lead to a restoration of my belongings. “Can we go and get them? I need them, you see. They’re very important. Without them—”

“You’ve shaved,” she said, smiling. “You look different in daylight. Younger. It’s strange, isn’t it, how different people look in different places and at different times of the day. As if there were many versions of us coming and going all the time.”

I put my hand to my jaw, feeling the roughness of the new growth. “My shaving mirror’s too small,” I said. “I cut myself this morning.”

She began to walk around the Laocoön slowly, looking at it, not at me. I followed her.

“My things?” I struggled to control the panic in my voice.

“You look tired,” she said softly, stopping to look at me.

She had a way of suddenly plunging into intimacy—a touch, a step too close, a question, a look held for just a few moments too long—and then, as soon as she had invoked it, she would abandon it, returning to a formal distance. And in conversation she would plunge too, from one subject to another, from distance to a seductive proximity, like a hare doubling back toward the hounds to disorient them. It was as if she was perpetually both whispering secrets and withholding them. Now she was running her fingers down a pink vein in the white marble of Laocoön’s arm.

“I
am
tired,” I said. “I haven’t had much sleep. I’ve been worried, you see. Worried about the papers and the specimens you took. I didn’t know how to find you. I didn’t know what to do or where to go to report them missing.”

An Englishwoman opposite me, clutching a catalogue to her as she would a Bible in church, ushered her two daughters out of the room, tutting. Too much naked male flesh—even in marble.

“We are some of the last people who will see all of this under one roof,” Lucienne Bernard said. “In a few weeks this room will be empty. All of Napoleon’s stolen art will be returned to where it was before the war.”

“Before the war?” I said, disoriented by the sudden change of subject.

“Napoleon took all the statues in here from the Vatican gardens when he invaded Rome. Now the pope wants them back and your Duke of Wellington has agreed. Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre, is procrastinating, but without Napoleons protection he will have to give them up. Wellington will send his soldiers if he doesn’t. The Prussians want their paintings back too. It won’t be long.”

I was estimating the distance to the door and, to the guard, trying to calculate the likely consequences of anything I might do. “Please,” I said, my words sharpening. “Don’t play games with me. It’s not fair.”

“Now all the empty monasteries and the houses of émigrés in Paris are stacked high with the paintings and statues and collections that Napoleon took from the palaces of Europe—”

“Madame,” I said. “I have been polite. I have been in earnest. I have pleaded with you. Entreated you. But you seem to want to talk only about art. Please. I have no time for conversation about these things. I am expected at the Jardin des Plantes. You took my belongings. I trust you still have them. We have only to arrange for me to pick them up. I will send someone. Please give me an address, and I will do the rest.”

“Your notebooks—” she said.

“You’ve been reading my notebooks?” I said, my voice constricted. No one had read those notebooks. They were full of speculations, ideas about species and strata and comparative anatomy, mixed with poetry, drawings, and observations about people, women I had seen, private feelings.

“Your work on homology is very good,” she said, “very interesting. You have insight and curiosity. But you are reading the wrong books.”

“You shouldn’t have looked at my notebooks.”

She saw me glance toward the guard. We were both waiting for me to do something. Her black eyes, now very close, glittered. Was she daring me?

“And if I refuse to return them?” she said, leaning up against a marble pillar with that maddening flicker of a smile that seemed to hover about her mouth whenever she talked to me. “What then?”

Fragments of conversation in several languages reached us from men and women crossing and recrossing the space, the sound of shoes on marble, the keys of a guard, the creak of a door. Somewhere far away, a gunshot.

“I have money,” I said.

She laughed. “I don’t want your money.” I watched the guard begin his walk down the gallery.

“I’m going to have you arrested,” I said, grabbing her arm. “I shall call the guard.”

“And what will you say to the guard?” she said, her face suddenly close to mine. “How will you prove that I am the woman you saw in the dark on the mail coach? I will deny it of course. My French is better than yours, and I have excellent identity papers. It’s all about evidence, you see. I shall tell the guard that you accosted me. That you are a little drunk. That I have never seen you before. I think you had better take your hand off my arm.”

“I will take you myself to the Bureau de la Sûreté.”

“Take
me?” Her black eyes flashed. “You propose to take me by force to the Bureau?” she whispered. “Do you think a man like you can force a woman like me to go anywhere and not be stopped? If I call out, people will be concerned for my safety. It is quite a distance from here to the Île de la Cité.”

She had paralyzed me a second time, I thought, like a wasp with its prey. I let go of her arm. I had stepped into a spell, across a threshold. Curiosity had prevented me from calling out when I first saw her, and the delay had been critical. Her talk. Her voice. I had wanted her to talk to me. I began to plead like a child.

“Yes, yes, I will give them back to you,” she said, “but come. Walk this way. I want to show you something. If you have time, of course, M. Connor. I know you are in a great hurry.”

She turned away from the Laocoön toward the door to the Long Gallery, where scores of fashionably dressed visitors crowded in front of paintings by Veronese, Titian, Rubens, and Raphael. We walked through arches of light falling slantways from the tall windows onto the marble floor, easing our way between groups, slipping in and out of hushed conversations. I watched her black slippers appear and disappear beneath the blue silk drapery of her skirts, offering the occasional glimpse of white lace.

“Taking me to the Bureau will not get your things back. That will do nothing for you. And it will be bad for me. I think you had better sit down, Daniel. You are pale.” She gestured to a marble seat in an alcove. I sat down, my hands and legs shaking. She took the seat next to me.

“Jameson will never trust me with anything again,” I said. “Without those things I have no job, nothing…”

She didn’t respond. She was watching a woman dressed in gray who was sitting nearby. Her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown back from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek. Her white bonnet made a halo around her braided dark brown hair. She was not looking at the paintings; her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight that fell across the floor.

“What would you have me do?” I asked.

“You need do nothing now. I wanted to show you the Caravaggio boy, that’s all,” she said. “Look. There he is.” She gestured up to a painted boy. “He is the image of you. See? The hair. The eyes. The flushed face. He has just stolen something for himself, don’t you think? Look at the pleasure in his face. As if he has lost his virtue for the first time.” She turned to look at me and said, “First you are pale, and now you are flushed.”

“I am angry…”

“You will have to trust me, I think.”

“What do you want?”

She hesitated for a moment and then said quietly, “I need something from you. There is something that only you can get for me.”

“I won’t make deals with a thief.”

“No,” she said, and sighed, “I didn’t think you would.”

The bells of Notre Dame struck out across the city, marking four o’clock.

“I must go now,” she said, standing. “I will keep your papers and your bones for the moment. Then in a few days I will come and find you and explain. Wait for me, Daniel Connor. I will bring your things back. I promise you that. And then perhaps you will do something for me.”

And, yes, I let her walk away. Some unaccountable instinct made me trust her. I watched her disappear down into another hole in the city, back into the shadows.

I said nothing to Fin that night; I did not return to the Bureau and ask for Jagot. I kept my secret, biding my time, conscious that I was tied to this woman by an invisible thread and that I was already complicit in something I did not understand.

I walked back to the Caravaggio boy that afternoon. From high on the crowded wall he stared down at me, his face knowing, goading me, his pleasure in his own transgression palpable. What had she seen there in the face of that painted boy that she could also see in me?

That night I dreamed of Laocoön. I was entangled in the coils of the snakes, but they were flesh, not marble. They were in my mouth and around my ankles, so that I couldn’t stand. And somewhere in a darkened and empty Louvre, where Titian women walked and Caravaggio boys took off their clothes, a seated woman in a blue satin dress leaned toward me and said, “Daniel, I have a confession to make. All this time we have been talking, I have wanted to kiss you. There is
something about your mouth, I think, that makes me want to … kiss you.”

I woke and sat up, sweating, shaking, aroused, and saw Fin sleeping there on the pallet bed I had made up for him on the other side of the room, in the moonlight. He was breathing heavily, lying on his back, sprawled, as if all those long and heavy limbs of his had fallen from some great height. I dressed and took myself out into the Paris night and walked, through labyrinths and alleyways and in and out of the lost colonnades and stone staircases of imagined great universities, until I no longer wanted to kiss her back.

5

HE FOLLOWING DAY
the sun disappeared and a gray sky settled over the city. The concierge brought me a package that had been delivered to the hotel that morning. Inside, an unsigned note said only:
I have been called away. I will write again in a few days. Wait for me
. She knew where I lived, then. The package also contained an ornate shaving mirror, considerably bigger than my own, and a copy of Rousseau’s
Confessions
.