The Coral Thief (10 page)

FELT HER ALWAYS
, her presence in the shadows, like Jagot’s man. I imagined that she watched everything I did. If, a few days before, I had been confident that she would come and find me, now I feared that she would, knowing it would only implicate me further in Jagot’s eyes. At night she twisted in and out of my dreams, down labyrinths and alleyways, in and out of sight, tormenting me.

After Jagot’s threat in the Jardin, I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the course of reading I had assigned myself. Unable to leave Paris and now dependent on the success of the investigation, I began to sleep through most of the days, turning into a nocturnal creature, the companion of the night visitors Fin brought back to the salon: medical students with black rings under their eyes who talked of autopsies and typhus and skin diseases, and the philosophically minded ones who talked about transformism and taxonomy and homologies, and the artists’ models, shopgirls, and dancers. Mme. de Staël never appeared. I dared not think about what my father would say about this life I was now living. I told myself, still confident that order would be restored, that he might never need know.

I was walking home alone after a night spent drinking with Fin in the first week of August, down an alleyway off the rue de Chartres near the back entrance to the Théâtre de Vaudeville. It was dark and I was walking like one already asleep, one foot after the other, my footsteps echoing deep into the shadows. Two wooden cellar doors in the street were flung open. Out of the hole that opened up in the cobbles, three men dressed in women’s clothes—wigs, pearls, feathers, satin, and silk in red and gold and orange on black—lit from below, flurried up into the night like giant moths shaking out their wings. Manmoths, I thought, their faces turned to the moon, scaling the sides of buildings, eyes all pupil like hers, an entire night unto themselves.

I think sometimes, with the vantage of hindsight, that we were the lotus-eaters, Fin and I, Odysseus’s sailors resting on the peninsula of the African coast, intoxicated by the lotus flowers of Paris nights. The edges of dream and reality had shifted and I couldn’t say where they were anymore. The world of the Jardin des Plantes, with its taxonomies and classifications and labels, had receded, and the heady scientific and political conversations of the salon had filled the hole like an incoming tide. And in those dream nights, listening to Ramon and Evangelista and Céleste talk, I was coming to see certain things as if for the first time. The evidence they used to support their transformist ideas—fossils, strata, intermediate species, extinctions—was persuasive. The edges of time had stretched in that atelier in Saint-Germain—not my time, not this little life of mine, but the time that, in my mind, until now, had stretched back through history books, in straight lines, through kings and queens and wars and tribes, Romans and Britons, and then back through the fragments of Herodotus I remembered, to a garden where God made a woman from the rib of a man. It’s not that I hadn’t wondered about origins before, just that I had known only this one with the rib and the apple and the snake, and the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. And that version was still unassailable. It was in the Bible.

In Derbyshire I had been taught that questioning the truth of the Bible had eternal consequences. At the age of seven, sitting in the family
pew in my Sunday clothes in the chapel in Ashbourne, my father on one side, my brothers on the other, I had listened to the preacher deliver a lurid sermon about the various tortures of damnation. During the silent prayer that followed, I had seen Satan, or thought I had seen him, out of the corner of my eye, at the door of the vestry. He was a thing of scales, a malevolent creature; his hooves made a scuttling sound on the stone flags of the church. He had grinned at me. I did not sleep for days.

When Céleste asked what I’d been taught about God and I told her about seeing Satan at the vestry door and that as a child I had worried about eternity and how long it might be, she’d said that’s how the priests worked—through fear and trembling. It’s enough to send a child mad. You don’t have to believe it, she said. Just because they tell you there’s a hell, you don’t have to believe it. But then, I reminded myself later that night, my brother would say that Céleste was on Satan’s side. She was a heretic, after all. So she
would
say that.

When I saw Lucienne Bernard for the third time, actually saw her, in flesh and blood, not in my dreams, it was the night of August 10, in the crypt of a former Capuchin convent near the place Vendôme. Fin and Céleste had taken me to the Fantasmagorie—a distraction, Céleste said, for
le garçon perdu
, the lost boy, as she called me. A Belgian illusionist named Étienne-Gaspard Robertson had built a theater inside the crypt as a tourist attraction. They called it the theater of the dead.

I protested but I went. I was curious, of course.

It was seven o’clock. Dusk. The first dimly lit rooms of the convent, beyond the craggy door studded with metal, were arranged like a museum of scientific curiosities and optical illusions, small in scale and rather tawdry in the stony dank caverns of the convent. Beyond, in the curtained darkness of the refectory, a woman called
la Femme invisible
addressed us in English, her voice as loud as if she was standing
right next to us but she was invisible, a voice without a body, a mechanized ghost. I looked for an auditory apparatus in the walls, some kind of speaking tube, but could find nothing. She challenged us to ask her questions.

“And where will my friend find the woman who stole from him?” Fin asked.

“In the Palais Royal,” she said, “for if he has enough livres to pay, he can have the woman steal anything he likes, from wherever he likes.”

Each room became darker as we descended, following a single candle flame down stone steps through more curtains into the dampness of the crypt itself—the Salle de la Fantasmagorie. Here, once we had taken our seats, the assistant extinguished the guttering candle. I could hear muffled cries and laughter from Céleste and Fin, gasps and whispers from other members of the audience, but could see nothing, not even my hand in front of my face. Then the sound of wind and thunder came at us from all directions and on top of that the sound of a glass harmonica, invisible fingers tracing the curved lips of invisible glasses somewhere offstage. Robertson spoke in French and English by turns—murmuring something incoherent about immortality, death, and superstition. Despite myself, I could feel the hairs on my skin rise.

Then a succession of ghostly figures seemed to be flung into the air above us; luminous shapes, some close enough to touch, flew out over our heads: glimmering sea creatures swimming in dark seas, an Egyptian girl, the three Graces flickering into the shape of skeletons, Macbeth, a nun, witches at Sabbath, the severed head of Medusa, Orpheus looking for Eurydice. I searched for the telltale light of the magic lantern behind the side curtains but found nothing. The phantoms moved in every direction, lunging at us, too quick to trace.

It was in the midst of that incessant flickering of smoky lights, the spirit illusions lunging across our heads, that for a moment, just for a second or two, I saw Lucienne Bernard, her head among the other heads in the audience, only three or four rows away. Her face, lit
briefly by the glare of the lamps, stared back at me, her eyes dark. I saw surprised recognition on her face, then alarm, even, perhaps, fear. But though I stood to try to find my way to her, stumbling among the seats, Robertson extinguished the lights, and when he lit them again to illuminate the next spectacle—the skeleton of a young woman arranged on a pedestal, holding a champagne glass—Lucienne had gone, her seat empty.

“Remember the Fantasmagorie,” Robertson’s voice boomed, plunging us into darkness again. “Remember thy end.”

We went straight to the bar in the Palais Royal after that for brandies, losing ourselves on the way. I said nothing. I was not sure of what I had really seen among the shadows and the specters. I kept looking out for her though, down the streets that ran off the place Vendôme. I was sure she was close by, watching, perhaps even following us. She would show herself, I was certain. But she didn’t.

“These damned alleyways and cul-de-sacs, they drive me mad,” Fin complained. Take any of the names of the streets at random—say, see, on your map here—the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs. That’s the Street of the Cross and the Little Fields; the rue Vide-Gousset, that’s the Street of the Pickpocket, of course, which leads to the passage des Petits-Pères, presumably a nickname given to a monastic order; here’s the rue des Mauvais Garçons, the street of the Bad Boys, the rue de la Femme-sans-Tête, the Road of the Headless Woman, and the rue du Chat qui Pêche, the Road of the Cat Who Fishes.
Alors
. It’s bric-a-brac. Nonsense. A bit of this, a bit of that … all cluttered together with no logic, no plan—”

“You are a philistine,” Céleste taunted back. “I am glad you’re not in charge in Paris. You would number and file everything. It’s beautiful. I like the old house names too, so much better than the numbers—Star of Gold and Name of Jesus and Basket of Flowers or Hunting Box or the Court of the Two Sisters. They’re like a poem.”

Céleste was right of course, though I wouldn’t have agreed with her then. Later those streets disappeared in the renovations and the
planning reforms to make way for gaslights and arcades and order. All that time, as Fin and Céleste talked and argued, the reality of my situation was becoming clearer with each step. The fact that Lucienne had left the Fantasmagorie and had failed to reappear meant only one thing: She had no intention of coming to find me or of returning my things. And if Jagot couldn’t find her, no one could.

“Paris is an ocean,” a lawyer called Honoré said to me in a bar on the place Vendôme later that night. We were very drunk. “You can take as many soundings as you like, but you’ll never reach the bottom of it. You can survey it, draw it, describe it. But, however thorough you are, however careful and scrupulous, something is always just beyond your reach. There will always be another unmapped cave, monsters, pearls, things undreamt of, overlooked by everyone else.”

“If only I could go to church,” I said. For a moment I longed to be able to pray for help and to have the confidence that salvation would be granted.

“Go to church,” the lawyer said. “But it won’t help you. Kill or be killed. Deceive or be deceived. That’s the law in Paris. God has given up on this city. He has given up on you, my friend.”

I had not been to church since I arrived in Paris, despite the promises I had made to my family. I knew where the four Protestant churches were on the Paris map; I had even walked past two of them—Sainte-Marie on the rue Saint-Antoine and Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre. Both times I had stopped, looked up at the stone façades, and walked on. I had felt a guilty sense of liberation in that drift into the glitter of the city; my soul was no doubt in grave danger, I thought, and then I confess I forgot about the condition of my soul.

In Edinburgh there had been rumors the previous summer about a student called John Rivers who had gone mad after several months studying anatomy in the hospitals of Paris. He had given himself up
to the seductions of the infidels, Jameson had told us. He spent too long listening to the lectures of the materialists and the atheists. An English pastor had found him wandering the streets of Paris at dawn, scarcely dressed and raving about his soul. God abandoned me in the dissecting rooms of Salpêtrière, he’d said. I am already in hell. Then, once his family had sent him to an expensive sanatorium in the Alps, Rivers went completely silent for seven long months. It was a form of catalepsy brought on by overwork and spiritual conflict, Jameson said. I glimpsed John Rivers once on his return from Paris, wandering around Edinburgh in the rain, scratching at his face.

I went to church the following day hoping to find some solace and with a new resolve to untangle myself. First I walked to the Protestant church on the rue d’Aguesseau where Bishop Luscombe’s sermon sent me to sleep so that I woke up shivering in an empty church. Then I went to the church on the rue Bouloi where Mr. Newstead, the pastor, preached about redemption and grace to a congregation mostly composed of English dissenters. Afterward, in the churchyard, I tried to talk to the pastor about redemption, but I was no longer sure what I wanted to be redeemed from.

A few days later, Jagot climbed out of a fiacre outside our lodgings just as I was leaving. He was dressed as a laborer in dusty clothes flecked with paint and mud, a cap pulled down low over his forehead. This was one of his famous street disguises, I presumed. I came slowly down the steps, my hands in my pockets, feeling his eyes taking in details—my height, posture, clothing, even the color of my shoelaces, turning me into a report. Jagot must know everything there was to know about me by now, I thought. My name. My address. The birthmark on my back. Was there a card for me yet? What would it say?

“I need to ask you a few questions, M. Connor,” he said.