The Coral Thief (17 page)

Not long after I began work at the Jardin, and when I complained that I knew nothing of her friends, Lucienne Bernard took me to the Café Zoppi in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Manon Laforge, the woman I had seen in the Palais gardens, and Alain Saint-Vincent were playing cards in an alcove behind a curtain, and it was here, she said, that Rousseau had once played cards with a famous widow whose name she had now forgotten.

The first thing Alain Saint-Vincent said to me was: “M. Connor,
je suis un homme mort
.” That was typical of Alain, I later discovered. He was theatrical and melodramatic.
I am a dead man
. He meant only:
I am losing at cards
.

“Not yet, Alain, not quite yet,” Lucienne said, glancing at his hand.

“Well, well,” Alain replied, tucking his cards into his top pocket
and reaching over to shake my hand. “One of Cuvier’s protégés. That is one for the books. Lucienne, can you lend me two thousand francs? Manon has stripped me of my very last coins. She has no compassion.” He pulled out a chair for me to sit on. “You play cards, M. Connor?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“I will teach you. Never trust a man who does not play cards. Let’s play on.”

“Impossible, Alain,” Manon said. “You know the rules. No money, no cards.”

Lucienne leaned forward and pushed some notes into Alain’s top pocket.

“Enough?” she said.

“Yes. Are you sure?”

“Of course. You’d do the same for me if it was the other way around. We owe you.”

“You’ve paid it back a thousand times.”

Alain Saint-Vincent smoked too many cigars and drank too much whisky; he had a cough that sounded painful. He looked older than both Manon and Lucienne and he had a high forehead with fine lines, and expressive eyebrows. His clothes looked expensive and were brightly colored; his shirts had fine lace cuffs. Although he was charming and verbose, he liked to pick fights. He was supposed to be in hiding, but he did not seem to know how to hide or to make himself invisible.

Manon Laforge was short, slim, and muscular, more like an acrobat than a dancer. Her black hair was cut short, but sometimes she wore a turban in the fashion of the day, and bangles, I remember that. There was something of the Gypsy about her, with all that jewelry and the silk around her hair. Yet she was quiet and untheatrical.

Manon didn’t like me much. I could see that from the start. She didn’t trust me, and she didn’t like that Lucienne trusted me. She didn’t like it that I stayed in the atelier. Clearly she thought that was a
mistake. When she talked her eyes flickered back and forth to Lucienne. The two of them shared secrets, and I didn’t like that. They were kin. They lived together in Italy. They traveled together, cooked together. They told each other jokes; they laughed at the same things.

“How old are you, M. Connor. Fourteen? Fifteen?” Saint-Vincent asked. I refused to rise to the provocation.

“Twenty-three.”

“And such a charming English accent. Twenty-three. You don’t get much younger than that. Or prettier.”

Manon kept her eyes fixed on Lucienne, who looked nervous, edgy. Lucienne took a cigar from Saint-Vincent, lit it, drew a few breaths, grimaced, and stubbed it out in an ashtray.

“Time was when we didn’t have to pull the curtain across in the Café Zoppi,” she said.

“You have a bad memory, Lucienne Bernard,” Alain said. “It’s been like this for the past twenty years. Since when have you minded? At least you have only Jagot to watch out for. I have to look out for Wellington’s spies as well as the French royal guard.
Banishment
. The shame of it. Who are they to say that I am expelled from France? Who has the right to say that?”

“You backed the wrong horse, my friend.” Lucienne drew up a chair for herself. “Banishment? That’s the worst of it? What about Saint Helena, the countess, the three Corsican brothers … shall I go on?”

“I was right to speak out against the restoration of that fat, good-for-nothing king and his fat, good-for-nothing government. I’m just not lucky, that’s all. I have not been lucky, no.”

But Lucienne would not let him off the hook. “It might have helped if you hadn’t criticized the new king so publicly. What were they supposed to do with you after that? Eh?
Quoi?
Ignore you? And don’t go claiming political heroism. You’ve been switching sides for years. You were a royalist until Napoleon marched on Paris this spring. You can’t have it both ways.”

“It doesn’t look good, Alain,” Manon jibed. “M. Connor, does this man look like a political hero to you?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never met one.”

“I am a war veteran,” Alain said. “An esteemed scientist. No one in the world knows as much as I do about marine botany or algae. I am a former director of the Department of Maps and Records in the ministry. I was wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz.”

“Keep your voice down,” Lucienne hissed.

“Did you know that the bastards have canceled my war pension?” Alain had taken a knife to an apple and was peeling it in one continuous spiral, slowly and carefully. Now he jabbed the blade into the fruit, cut off a quarter, and put it into his mouth.

“That’s the law,” Manon said. “Exiled botanists don’t get pensions.”

“Why didn’t you leave Paris? It’s been two months since they banished you,” Lucienne said. “I bet there’s a woman in the story somewhere.”

“What are you implying?” Alain looked hurt.

“And where is your wife?” Manon asked.

“In Bordeaux. I can’t even go there.”

“The decision to put you on that list was made high up.”

“Cuvier or one of his cronies,” Saint-Vincent said. “He had a word with the authorities, didn’t he? Now that he’s councillor of state he’ll find a way of exiling everyone who has ever challenged him.”

Lucienne, aware of my presence, changed the subject before I had a chance to question Saint-Vincent’s allegations about Cuvier.

“Davide?” Lucienne asked. “Have you found him? Have you asked at the curiosity dealers?”

“Not yet,” Manon said, her face darkening. “He’ll find us before we find him. Did you read about Coignard? They found his body in the Seine yesterday morning. He’d been tortured and his hands and feet had been cut off. People are saying it was Jagot—an old score. They say Coignard was supposed to be a lesson to the others on the list. Lucienne, we have to leave Paris.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. We will. We’ll be long gone before he catches up with us.”

“Tell me something no one else in the world knows about you,” Lucienne said as we lay in her bed that night. “A secret.”

So I told her about the carved boat my father had bought for my older brother when I was ten and he was twelve, and how I wanted it so much that I had thrown it out of the window into the nettle patch, where no one would find it. I told her about the day I had stolen a key to open my father’s desk and look among his papers in the hope that I would find letters from my real parents. I told her that I had always been sure that there was a secret in the house, something everyone, including the servants, covered up, and that I often went looking for it—whatever it was—whenever the house was empty.

I told her that, in looking for this one secret about me, I had found out all sorts of secrets that belonged to other people—that I had once seen my older brother touching one of the maids in a way he shouldn’t have; that I discovered from hiding in the butler’s pantry that the servants had ways of keeping the younger maids out of my brother’s reach; that my mother didn’t really have an illness because I had seen her walk perfectly well when my father was away on business, and that I had once seen her kiss a man who was not my father. I told her that, to me as a child, the world had seemed full of astonishing secrets, and that I had even kept a notebook in shorthand full of the secrets I had collected.

Lucienne laughed. “And no one knows any of those things?” she said. “Only I know that the toy boat is in the nettle patch? And that your mother sometimes kisses a man who is not your father?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I only saw her do it once. It was my father’s brother. My uncle. She still writes letters to him. I was shocked, of course, but now it seems rather ordinary. I wonder how many secrets there are in Paris. Now tell me something about you that no one knows. A secret.”

“A secret?” she said. “There is a man who comes to my bed—”

“There is?” I said, sitting up suddenly.

“He has black curls and a scar on his chin and he looks like a Caravaggio boy, except that when he gets serious, or cross, or jealous, he doesn’t look like a Caravaggio boy at all. When he talks to me, when I see how the world looks to him, how full of expectation and curiosity and ambition he is, I can see the world as it looked to me twenty years ago, when everything seemed possible, when I thought I could find all the secrets too and solve all the mysteries. Before the Revolution. But, you know, the secrets, they just multiply. One question answered just makes another in its place.”

“And am I a secret?” I said.

“I think Manon might know,” she said. “Manon knows everything, whether I tell her or not.”

I wanted to ask about Delphines father, the locksmith Dufour, but I didn’t know how, so I began to approach the question from another direction. “Delphine,” I said. “Will she go to school?”

“Absolutely not. She does not need to go to school. Manon and I have raised her in the spirit of Rousseau. We live in the country and we teach her and she teaches herself. She has no tutors. Even at the convent the nuns give her the run of the library. She has no lessons. My grandmother raised me the same way; she read Rousseau’s
Émile
when it was first published, so I was lucky. I was very free. I had a library and a garden and the finest microscope in Marseilles. Delphine is five now and she asks even more questions than you do. Even more
than I did at her age. And now most of her questions are about Napoleon.”

“Why Napoleon? It seems a strange passion for a child.”

“She met him once at the ambassadors house in Florence. He played a game of vingt-et-un with her and let her win. I think she believed he was invincible until Waterloo, that he was a kind of god. It is a hard lesson for her to learn. She still thinks he’s going to be rescued.”

“Perhaps he
will
be rescued,” I said. “We don’t know. There are hundreds of miles of ocean to be crossed before he reaches Saint Helena.”

And as we began to talk of who might rescue Napoleon, that important question of Delphine’s father was lost again.