The Coral Thief (5 page)

“It’s worse. I was carrying a manuscript for Jameson—a copy of his preface to an English translation of Cuvier’s book. I was to give it to Cuvier for his approval. That was stolen too. And there were the fossil specimens I was supposed to give to him. Worth a fortune. Cuvier’s expecting them.”

“That’s not good. No, that’s not good at all …
Merde
. You
are
in trouble.”

“I think I will have to go home. Explain everything to Jameson. I’ll be finished of course. I feel so
stupid.”

“First things first. You’re in Paris after all. That has to be worth something. Let’s get breakfast and some more champagne and have a feast. We’ll wipe out your bad night and mine with a few good bottles. And then I will take you to the Bureau if you still want to go. But it won’t do any good. The men there won’t be interested in finding your things because there’s nothing in it for them. Breakfast?”

“Yes,” I said. I was too tired and hungry to argue.

“You brought your own knives, I hope,” he said. “You can’t get a pair of scissors or a scalpel or even a decent knife for eating with in Paris at the moment, not for love or money—and believe me, I’ve tried both.”

No, I thought, she hadn’t taken my dissecting instruments or knives—they were packed in the suitcases. That was something.

As we walked together to the first tavern, Fin threw information at me at every turn, pointing this way and that: the best place for
breakfast, the safest place to gamble, the cleanest swimming spot on the river, the cheapest boats for hire, the most beautiful waitresses, the reading rooms where you could pick up English newspapers, the best laundry service.

I tried hard to remember at least some of these details but couldn’t move Cuvier from the center of my vision: Cuvier, arms folded across his ample chest, looming over me, saying: “You did what, M. Connor? You fell asleep on the mail coach?” And behind him there were others waiting: Jameson, my father, my brothers. Daniel Connor was an idiot, a dunderhead; he couldn’t be trusted with anything.

And so it went on. The day stretched and tautened, glittered then darkened, each step a further numbing, a fading of Cuvier’s censorious gaze. Somewhere in the cloud of that first day, the dust from the road still on my skin, I saw into a city that even London could not match. They had said it would dazzle me. It did. Card tables, mirrors, glass, roulette, bar after bar, a music hall, a wax museum on the boulevard du Temple with effigies of the kings and queens of Europe; crayfish bisque at Beauvillier’s; women in feathers and lace in a bar paled into an oyster feast on the quai de la Rapée as Fin and I sat above the water watching the night boats carry freight up the Seine, listening to the watermen call out to one another.

“On Sundays,” Fin said, “the watermen over at La Rapée have their own show on the river in front of the Hôtel de Ville. They dive from high platforms and do triple twists. Then they have fireworks. If you sit here, you can watch them for free. It’s spectacular—all the colors of the costumes reflect in the water. Céleste’s brother is one of the watermen.”

“Céleste?”

“My girl. Most students strike up with shopgirls here. They call them
grisettes;
I don’t know why—there’s nothing gray about them. With your looks you’ll be fighting them off. They’re not like English
girls. They’re much more independent and—well, how to say it?—forward. And if they like you, well, they’ll show you they like you straight off. No messing about. You must meet her, Céleste. Sunday. She has some very pretty friends.”

How would I behave with such women? I wondered, imagining myself trying to be entertaining in a language that was still awkward to me. I could hear those
pretty friends
laughing at me already.

“I won’t be here on Sunday,” I said. “I’ll be heading home.”

“Nonsense, my friend. You give up far too easily. I told you. What happened to you, it wasn’t your fault. It could have happened to anyone. You just have to go and speak to Cuvier. And send a letter of explanation to Jameson. Straighten it out.”

“And then wait to be hung, drawn, and quartered? No thanks. I need sleep now,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed. “You’ve wiped me out. I’ve had far too much to drink.”

The water of the Seine was heavy and slow-moving. Down under the bridge a fight had broken out among a group of watermen.

“You’re going to need more stamina than that, my friend,” Fin said, “if we’re to share rooms.”

“Share rooms?”

“Well, there’s lodgings up for rent on the top floor of the hotel next door. Twenty francs a month. A bargain. Much cheaper than the hotel rates. View of the street. A small stove. I spoke to the concierge about it yesterday, told her I’d find someone to share with. And then you turn up this morning right on cue. It’s perfect. There’s not much furniture, but we can pick up some chairs and things from the flea market. What do you think? You and me, eh? We can move in a week. Once you’ve sorted things out with Cuvier.”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “But first I must go to the Bureau. First thing tomorrow morning.”

“Oh yes, the Bureau. The Bureau. Always the Bureau. Well, if you’re lucky you might meet the infamous Jagot—he runs the Bureau—and that really would be worth something. He’s at the center of
everything in Paris. He has spies all over the city. If anyone is going to tell you how to find your thief, he will. If he likes you, that is.”

“Jagot?”

“Henri Jagot. Poacher turned gamekeeper. He’s famous across Europe. He was one of the most successful thieves in France until ten years ago; one of only three or four people to have escaped the prison at Toulon. Now he runs the Bureau. They say he’s modeled his surveillance methods on Napoleon’s secret police. He’s good.”

“A thief runs the Bureau? How can that be?”

“Ex-thief. The chief of police offered him a deal. He gave them information, they gave him his freedom and police protection. So he worked undercover in the prisons of Bicêtre and La Force for years—really dangerous work—he’d have been killed if the prisoners had found out he was working for the police. He’s brutal, they say, unstoppable and ambitious. But he’s good. He won’t be interested in you, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because he works on commission, of course. The price on your thief’s head won’t be big enough. But you must go anyway. File that report. You won’t rest until you do.”

3

NCE INSIDE THE OFFICES
of the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité the next morning, I found a long line of people sitting on chairs in a windowless corridor with scuffed blue walls and highly polished floors. Most people sat staring at nothing, clutching documents; others read newspapers or talked in hushed voices. A child started to spin a hoop down the long corridor until a clerk admonished her.

Another clerk standing behind a hatch took down details from the queue of new arrivals—name, address, nature of complaint. He asked questions and crossed boxes on his form. In his questions I heard words and phrases that I had not heard spoken before:
cambriolage, un vol avec armes, un vol sans armes
. With weapon. Without weapon. Known to victim. Not known. I watched him flush with irritation when a woman said she didn’t know whether her necklace had been taken from her bedroom or her sitting room. Such distinctions seemed to be important as a way of defining the type of crime more exactly.

When my turn arrived and I had answered all his questions, the
clerk gave me a numbered ticket and gestured toward a chair. There was no clock here. Sensible idea, I thought, not to have a clock when people might have to wait hours, perhaps whole days. Time slips by more quickly without a clock. Instead you had to wait for the sound of the hourly bells from Notre Dame. They were especially loud in the blue corridor as we were virtually sitting in the shadow of the great cathedral.

I could hear my brother Samuel’s voice as if he was sitting next to me. Samuel, the brother who was closest to me in age and who was studying for the ministry, would certainly have said that this theft was God’s way of telling me I had taken the wrong path, reminding me that the pursuit of natural knowledge was always a chimera, a vanity. My mother would always nod wisely when Samuel talked like that.
Come home, Daniel. Come home
, they whispered.

Once Samuel and I had collected butterflies, fossils, and newts, dissected frogs, read the reports of the scientific societies in the local paper, shared a tutor, kept up with the latest geological theories. Now that Samuel was entering the church, he had put away his collections and his instruments, and we argued about God. When I asked him a string of rational but vaguely heretical questions about transubstantiation or the precise nature of the relationship between God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, Samuel’s answer was always the same: that if I prayed for long enough and with sufficient humility, God would show me the way. That pious refusal to answer my questions infuriated me. Samuel had given me an expensive copy of Paley’s
Evidences of Christianity
for my journey to Paris in the hope that it would strengthen my faith. I had not opened it. I tried to pray there in that corridor at the Bureau but failed.

Two hours I waited—and it seemed I was one of the lucky ones.

“M. Jagot will see you himself, M. Connor,” the clerk whispered, stooping to speak to me as quietly as he could. He looked impressed. “M. Jagot has taken an interest in your case. His room is the last door on the right at the end of the corridor.”

Jagot’s clothes seemed too small for his large frame. Thickset and powerfully muscular, though perhaps no more than about five feet six inches tall, he looked, in those expensive but ill-fitting clothes, like a fruit about to split its skin. His face was red, sweaty, and swollen, his hair dry and unkempt, his chin unshaven. His hands were square and thick, with tufts of red hair sprouting on the knuckles. He looked out of place here. He was a man of the street, not a man at ease in an expensive office. But what I remember most about Jagot, after all these years, is those eyes of his—powerfully dissecting eyes of ice blue that didn’t look quite human. It wasn’t easy to bear the weight of his gaze. I never saw a single glimpse of kindness or empathy there, not even curiosity, just a relentlessly assessing stare, a measuring, as if he was perpetually translating your features into notes for his files.

The room was dimly lit and largely empty apart from an entire wall of small oak drawers behind the desk—a filing cabinet that was still being built, extending around the walls, with row after row of little drawers and square brass handles. The room smelt of fresh paint, sawn wood, and glue. A map of Paris adorned another wall, the river blue, the borders of the arrondissements marked out in red.

Jagot shook my hand without smiling and gestured for me to take the chair opposite him.

“Welcome to Paris, M. Connor. You have had, my clerk tells me, some objects stolen. A woman. At night. Traveling alone?”

“Yes. That’s it.”

He was watching me closely. “There are many thieves in Paris now,” he said, sitting back down again. “Many of the soldiers and prisoners of war who come back to the city have learned bad ways. They are all the same. A little of this, a little of that.”