The Coral Thief (13 page)

“Everything,” I said, “is ruined. I have no money, no job, and no prospects.”

“M. Connor. You are hurting me.”

“You have destroyed everything for me.” But I let her go all the same. She brushed her hands along her shoulders, smoothing down the folds of her jacket.

“I
told
you,” she said. “I tried to find you. You broke your promise.” She glanced nervously up the street. “You said you wouldn’t follow me. You have no idea how dangerous that was.”

“Dangerous?”
I could hear the sneer in my voice.

“Dangerous for
me
. Yes. But then that doesn’t matter to you.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “How long was I supposed to wait for you? Weeks? Months? What are you doing? Is this some kind of game?”

“Don’t,” she said.

She walked away from me a little. I kept close.

“I know who you are,” I said clumsily, “and what you do. I know all about you.”

Suddenly, afraid she would slip away again, I lunged toward her but stumbled, falling against her, pushing her hard. She fell toward the wall, tripping over some boxes and hitting her shoulder; then, regaining her balance, she turned, stepped toward me, and hit me across the face with her fist. The sound of the blow, her knuckles across my jaw, echoed against the walls. A caged bird was singing above us, repeating its refrain over and over.

“You know nothing. You are blind,” she said, rubbing her hand, “as blind as it is possible to be, monsieur. You have no idea. You see nothing beyond yourself.”

I kicked the wall several times. Everything else around me in the gathering twilight seemed to be turning to water.

“Merde,”
I said. “Damn. Damn. Damn. That hurt. I hate this. What do you want me to do? I agree to anything. Everything. I will do … whatever. I am tired. I just want to—”

“What? What is it you want?”

“I came to Paris to make something of myself. You have no idea how hard I have worked or how long I have waited to get this position. You have no idea how difficult it was to persuade my father to let me travel here. And in a single night you have ruined everything.”

“And what does that something look like, Daniel, this thing that you will make of yourself?” She was leaning against the wall next to
me. “The Grand Tour, then home for church on Sundays, a practice, a spell on the town council, conversations with ladies taking tea in the afternoons? What will you make of yourself, M. Connor?”

“If I had gone to Cuvier in the first place,” I said, “or done anything halfway sensible, I might have been able to salvage something….” I closed my eyes and watched the small pinpricks of light puncturing the darkness.

“But then there would be no now.” Her voice had softened. “Keep your eyes closed,” she said, moving closer to me, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Now tell me what color you see when I do this.”

I saw blue when she kissed me, there in the darkening alley. I could not open my eyes, afraid that if I did, I would wake up back in my room, or somewhere she wasn’t, where there was no smell of bergamot mixed with old beer and something like crushed herbs from the cobbles, somewhere not blue.

“Blue?” she said when I answered her. “I see purple.”

When I opened my eyes, the street was darker; the edges of everything had softened; the colors had drained away. Down at the end of the alley the lamplighter lowered a lamp on its rope pulley, lit it, and pulled it back up into place.

“I have no plan, Daniel,” she said. “I am making this up as I go along. I make mistakes. Everything about this—about you—gets under my skin. The Caravaggio boy, the coral fossils, the clever questions you ask in those notebooks of yours, your beautiful drawings. I have dreamt about you—I was trying to talk to you, but you were shouting. But … there are other things. Things you don’t know about and … you are—”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t trust me.”

“Shhh,” she said, and kissed me again. I could feel her breath, see
her eyebrows thick and dark, the crow’s-feet around her eyes. I closed my eyes again, and in the darkness I could see flowers opening infinitely slowly, rust-colored petals against dark blue, stamens dusted gold.

“Doucement,”
she said. “Come inside. There’s always someone listening. Everywhere.” She looked up and down the street, pointed toward white sheets that billowed in the wind like sails. A shutter banged shut.

“But the man in the café? Gutell.”

“Saint-Vincent?” she said. “His real name is Saint-Vincent. He’s gone. There’s no one here.”

She unlocked the door in the wall and led me into a courtyard. Untended trees, banana palms and figs, had grown up against the side of the building, arching over to make a jungle of moving shadows; an urn here and there that had once held flowers now filled with nothing but bare earth and a scattering of cigar butts. An old folding table had cracked and fallen onto its side; chairs lay scattered about like the limbs of something long dead.

We crossed the courtyard and I followed her up a flight of stone steps covered with leaves. They led to an open door, the glass in its panels fractured in several places, and we entered a dusty hallway lined with doors, most boarded up. I translated the trades listed on the plaque in the hall: a printer, a knife grinder, an ironmonger, a linen trader, a locksmith, a dealer in curiosities. The house was silent except for the faint cooing of pigeons from an upper floor.

“It was once very grand here,” she said, “before the Revolution. Then they divided it up to make workshops and lodgings, and now, well, there’s almost no one left. There’s Sandrine, the linen merchant, Pierre, the ink maker, both of them on the ground floor, and there’s me on the second floor. We share the building with the cats. Sandrine has five cats. If I were here more, I’d do something about the courtyard and mend a few things. What do you smell?”

“Cats,” I said. “I can smell cats and damp.”

“Yes, it belongs to the cats now, finally, and the pigeons. We are the trespassers.”

At the top of an ornate cast-iron balustrade that swept upward around a staircase that spiraled to a skylight perhaps a hundred feet above me, I could see the flurried shapes of what looked like pigeons. We climbed the stairs to the second floor in the dusty half-light. If I had thought I had a plan only an hour before, I abandoned it now. I had decided only to trust her.

I had no idea what that would mean.

On the second floor she stopped to unlock a door. A small painted sign on the wall read SERRURIER. Locksmith. Jagot had said that Lucienne’s lover had been a lock breaker or a locksmith, called Duluc, or Duford. No,
Dufour
. Leon Dufour.

We stepped into a dark room lined with shelves and all the paraphernalia of a locksmiths art—metal saws, metal presses and molds, boxes of screws and levers. The air was thick with the smell of metal and dust. Cobwebs hung heavy from the tables and walls. Some cupboards had been draped with grimy sheets, encrusted here and there with pigeon droppings. A fragment of song drifted up from a street seller below.

“The locksmith, Dufour …,” I said, imagining him and his tall lover, here in the striped light of hot afternoons, and then I tried not to think about that. “Is he here?”

“He died,” she said. “Dufour is dead.”

“Who was he?”

“A friend. Someone who lived here once. A locksmith and a poet. He left me all of this, so sometimes I am Dufour, the locksmith.” She gestured at her clothes. “Today I am Dufour the locksmith. Tomorrow I am a linen dealer or a botanical illustrator or a printer’s assistant. In Paris I am many people. Dressed like this, I can come and go as I please.”

I felt a stirring, a heat spreading through my body. Yes, I thought.
I would give you anything if you would just kiss me again
.

“I’m not used to having guests here in the atelier. Can I offer you some wine? I have a bottle of Burgundy here somewhere, I think. Come.”

I was not prepared for what came next. Behind the room of locks and keys and dust, the locksmiths workshop, was another room.

“My cabinet,” she said.

It might have been a cave beneath the sea. The last of the evening light fell onto shelves covered with spiraled shells, the intricate branchings of red corals, and the fanned shapes of sponges. Shelves covered every wall and in the center stood cabinets, with drawers of different lengths and widths, among packing cases from which dried seaweed spilled out. A stuffed crocodile hung suspended from a rafter; giant conch shells lay on the floor. A long table covered with dusty books and papers ran almost the length of the window, scattered with small cream-colored labels threaded with red silk.

“My specimens,” I muttered. “They’re here? You stole them. For this? A collection?”

“Yes, they’re here somewhere. I’ll find them for you. But first you must have some wine.” She reached for a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine from a cupboard and blew the dust off them, uncorking the bottle a moment later.

“I’ve never seen anything—”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “You will see larger collections than this even a few streets away. The comtesse de Sévignon—”

“May I, can I look?” I asked, opening a drawer of coiled and netted and tentacled white corals arranged against dark blue velvet. “How long have you had all of these? Are they all stolen? How long have you—”

“Most of them are the remains of my grandmother’s collection. She left it to me when she died. Some are from the Red Sea. Others are new. All of them are rare and worth a great deal of money. Some,
yes,” she said with a smile, “have been
acquired
. Stolen. It is more than a collection to me. It has a certain history, of course, which gives it importance, but I am also writing a book.”

She opened a drawer and lifted out a black fan coral, running her fingertips along its delicate netted fibers. She passed it to me, telling me how it had been plucked from the bed of the Red Sea by a diver from Alexandria, who later sold it in the port of Al Qusayr to a Dutch sailor who was buying up corals for a ships captain who knew something about corals and collectors. In a London auction room leased by a Russian prince, the novelist Horace Walpole procured it for his friend the Duchess of Portland, who placed it in the museum shed built for her coral and shell collection at Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire. That’s where it stayed, until her death in 1786, when her entire collection—the birds’ nests, the corals, the snuffboxes, the paintings, the china, the birds’ eggs, the fossils—was sold to pay off the duchess’s debts.

“My grandmother sent her agents to London to buy the duchess’s corals,” she said. “The trouble was, half of the other coral collectors in Europe were there and the prices were impossible. She had to sell three paintings to get the pieces she wanted, and this was one of them. This little piece of black coral from the Red Sea. She sold a Rembrandt drawing for this.”

Lucienne Bernard was an aristocrat, then, or at least her family had been. How had someone from such a background ended up as a common thief hunted by Jagot?

“Why, though?” I asked, handing her back the coral. “Why did she go to such trouble? Why do you?”

“My grandmother collected corals because she loved rare and exotic things. It’s different for me. My interest is philosophical. The corals know things we do not know,” she said.

“What do you mean
know?
They don’t have minds or eyes or souls. They can’t know anything.”

She placed the piece of coral on the table and wrapped it in thin
white paper; she marked the paper with some symbols and letters, tied it with red silk, and put it in the packing case deep in the dried seaweed. She took another coral specimen from a drawer and did the same.

“They know how old the earth is,” she said. “They know how life on earth began. They know how animals have changed down there on the seabed, the way bodies have mutated and transformed from fishes to reptiles. They’ve seen it. They know it.”

“That’s ridiculous.” She talked like a poet, I thought, not at all like any natural philosopher I had met.

“Alors,”
she said. “Perhaps they can’t
tell
us, but we can read them, like we read a book or a clock and find out. The corals are a clock to tell us how old the earth is.”

“But we know how old the earth is,” I said, “or at least how long it is since the last great catastrophe that wiped everything out. Three thousand years. Cuvier has settled that.”

“But Cuvier is wrong, and it’s easy to
prove
he is wrong. If a coral reef grows at the rate of an inch a year,” she said, making the distance between her forefinger and thumb, “and some reefs are a thousand feet thick, how many years would it have taken them to grow?”

I did the calculations. “Around twelve thousand years,” I said. “That can’t be right.”

I was supposed to be taking the corals back, I reminded myself, not listening to her criticism of Cuvier’s work. But, despite my intentions, I was rapt.

“Oui, c’est vrai. C’est merveilleux, n’est-ce pas?
Think about it. The reefs are even all the way through, which means they can’t have been disturbed. It means there have been no catastrophes, no boiling seas, no eruptions or tidal waves or angels of the apocalypse for
at least
twelve thousand years. Cuvier’s wrong—he just has to look at the corals properly to see that. But he won’t.”

I nodded toward the packing cases, almost afraid to ask the question. “You really
are
going then? Leaving Paris?”

“I came back to Paris to move my collection,” she said, “to take everything back to Italy. Nothing is safe here now that Paris is occupied. But it has taken much longer than I expected. I need to leave quickly—in a few days.” She passed me a glass of wine. “I wanted to give you your things before I left. To apologize. You had fallen asleep and I was curious to see what you were taking to Cuvier, and, well, once I had seen two coral fossils from the Ambras collection in your box, they were more than I could resist. Did you know that they once belonged to Ferdinand II? Still, I shouldn’t have taken them, and now I can give them back.”