The Coral Thief (40 page)

“She says Silveira’s here,” Lucienne whispered. “She’s seen him.”

“All you have to do,” Jagot called out, “is give the boy the diamond and then send him toward me. Slowly. M. Connor?”

“Answer him,” she whispered. “He still thinks you’re his. One-word answers only. When I squeeze your arm, stop.”

“Yes,” I called out.

“Can you see me if I lift up my lamp?”

“Yes.”

I could see a group of black forms and the glimmer of a lamp at the end of the tunnel making a ruddy circle in the vault. We drew in close to the side of the wall as the circle of lamplight rose and widened.

“Mme. Bernard,” Jagot continued. “You have no choice. You run. We run. We have light. You have none. There are six of us. Two of you. You’re not stupid. All you have to do is give the boy the diamond and send him to us.”

“I’m not going back,” I whispered. “I’m coming with you.”

There was a low whistle from where the gunshot sound had come.
Almost inaudible. Two long, low whistles and one short. I had last heard that sound in the rue du Pet-au-Diable.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Joaquim and the other boys. Silveira must have realized we were going to be cut off by Jagot’s men before we reached the passage, so he sent for them. Look, now Jagot’s men are closing in on us from the other end.”

The air had been thick but now I could feel a slight movement around us, not quite a breeze. She felt it too. I looked up. Above us, where the ball had hit the pillar, a deep crack had opened up in the stone. Dust was falling around us. A sudden flash lit up the cavern, and in that moment I saw boys—the boys from the rue du Pet-au-Diable, their faces blackened, like night creatures, their eyes bright and wide. There were seven or eight of them. There was a scuffle, more dust, the gasp and cry of a child.

Something had happened. I could hear several voices shouting and above them Jagot, speaking in French, panicked, the lights from the lanterns scattering in different directions. “Where is she?” he shouted. “Where is the child? Find the damned child.”

Then came Manon’s voice. “Delphine’s safe, Lucienne,” she called. “Joaquim and his boys have her.” Then a groan—the sound of a punch or a blow. Manon had been silenced again.

“Daniel,” Lucienne said quietly, “you have to go with them. Call out. Tell him I have a gun to your head. Buy me some time. We have to get Manon out.”

I didn’t hesitate. “She has a gun. She says she’s going to kill me.”

“Mme. Bernard, put the gun down.”

“Daniel,” she whispered. “It’s time. Take this. I’m putting it in your pocket. The diamond. Tell Jagot you have it. Tell him I’ve put the diamond in your pocket.”

“I have the diamond,” I said. “I have the diamond.”

“Now walk toward him,” she said. “Walk toward the light down there.” Then suddenly she pulled me back to her. She put her hands
on my shoulders and brushed down my suit, smoothing out its folds. “This suit has seen better days,” she said, kissing me so the darkness turned to blue and gold. “Now walk. Walk, damn you, or I will shoot you myself.”

As I staggered forward, there was another explosion; rock falling; noise, dust, a blow to the head. I swear I saw feathers as I fell, great wings beating down there in the darkness. That’s one way landscapes change—with a catastrophe, a rockfall, violence, and revolution, theatrical and spectacular. I heard only the dust falling and the clock ticking.

29

HERE DID THE GUNSHOT COME FROM?
I was lucky, they said, very lucky. Lucienne’s gun had gone off accidentally, they told me, just as she released me and pushed me toward Jagot. Her gun had fired a shot upward into the ceiling and had dislodged one of the stone pillars, already weakened by the first shot. This had brought down the ceiling. Lucienne Bernard, Davide Silveira, and their child, Delphine Bernard, Manon Laforge, and Alain Saint-Vincent had all been buried under the rockfall.

Or at least Jagot thought so. Cuvier did too. And exactly how many people died down there in the darkness of the quarries that night, M. Jagot? Two gunshots. Four thieves and a child caught in the wrong place.

But who knows for sure? The quarries do. I do. Or at least I came to know. Not by sudden revelation—an encounter on a train; a face recognized in a crowd. No, I watched and I listened for news of them. I read newspapers and I asked questions; I waited and, piece by piece, I put fragments together. One of them was a newspaper report about the giraffe that walked to Paris.

In 1826, the pasha of Egypt sent a giraffe to the king of France as a token of his esteem. Her keeper walked with her from Marseilles through sleepy villages, mile by mile, down the same roads the bronze Venetian horses had taken, and into the Jardin des Plantes. Crowds lined the streets. Bands played.

In May of that year, the giraffe’s keeper walked her from the elephant rotunda, out of the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes, past the ticket booth, under the cedar of Lebanon, and up to the top of the labyrinth and the bronze pavilion. All of this had happened, the newspaper reporters wrote, because an inmate in the debtor’s prison who called himself Simon-Vincent, who was a botanist and had once fought in the Battle of Austerlitz, had asked to see the animal. Concessions were made. Though the botanist was not allowed to leave the prison, the warden had allowed him to climb onto the roof, accompanied of course by a guard, for a period of thirty minutes. A giraffe, the prisoner had said, was not to be missed. He had seen butterflies in Saint Helena, reptiles in the caves of Maastricht, the wings of great birds in the quarries of Paris; he would not miss the sight of the first giraffe in the Jardin des Plantes. How very French, the reporter from
The Times
wrote. How very French.

I had other glimpses too—in a new encyclopedia published in Paris and all the rage in London in the 1830s. There were entries by people whose names I half remembered, including one on corals and time. I recognized the voice. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There was no signature to the entry, just the initials LB. A thief, a heretic, and a philosopher who is buried now, I’d guess, in Italy somewhere near Florence, in a grave near to that of a diamond dealer called Silveira. Who knows what names are inscribed there.

In 1818,
The Times
carried a report of a diamond that sold for a considerable sum in Madras, India. A trading agent acting on behalf of an English duke had bought it from a Portuguese jeweler’s agent called Sabalair in the back streets of the city. The agent had since vanished from Madras. A jeweler in London subsequently identified the duke’s diamond as the famous Satar diamond, which had disappeared
without a trace from Spain ten years earlier and was once said to be in a private collection that had been owned illegally in Paris by Vivant Denon, artist, antiquary, and friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. The provenance of the diamond was difficult to trace, the journalist explained. It had, some said, been stolen during a robbery in the Jardin des Plantes. What
The Times
journalist didn’t report, but what was common knowledge among the thieves in Paris, was that a diamond had been recovered from that robbery, but that it had subsequently turned out to be a paste replica made, it was believed, in a Portuguese jewelry shop in the rue du Pet-au-Diable. The police agent leading the inquiry, M. Henri Jagot, had of course been furious at the discovery of the forgery but was said to be even more enraged by the thought that the real diamond had disappeared in the roof fall that had killed the thieves he had been pursuing.

Lamarck’s bones are scattered in the catacombs under Paris. Burdened with debt, his devoted daughters buried him in a pauper’s grave in the Montparnasse cemetery in 1829. Later, when they closed down that cemetery under new public-health laws, his bones were dug up and scattered into the miles of patterned bones in the catacombs. It’s poignant, when you think about how many bones and shells Lamarck catalogued and labeled so carefully when his sight was good, that at the end no one wrote a label or carved a tombstone for him.

In 1832, Cuvier was buried in a marble tomb in the cemetery at Père Lachaise, a tomb he shared with his daughter Clémentine, who had died four years earlier from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two, on the eve of her wedding. That same day Sophie Duvaucel, devastated at the toll her sister’s death had taken on her stepfather’s health, broke off her engagement to the young English lawyer Sutton Sharpe, in order to assist her stepfather with the fish volume of
Le Règne animal
. She had few regrets about those years, she told her husband when she finally married a widower, Admiral Ducrest de Villeneuve, in 1834, adopting his three children. My work at the Jardin des Plantes, she said, was the making of me.

Napoleon died from a stomach tumor on Saint Helena in 1821. There had been escape plots, but it was said that the Emperor had refused to be a part of any of them. He knew there was no way off the island, and even if there had been, beyond it, even in America, there was nowhere to hide. He was buried in the valley of the willows in an unmarked tomb.

And me? Well, things could never have stayed the same. I had taken a step into the undergrowth, where branchings and forkings chanced along a different axis, and I had begun to see the sublime contingency that is at the root of all things. I had found a set of different answers there.

I stayed in Paris through the rest of the winter of 1815, working alongside Sophie Duvaucel as a much valued and depended-upon secretary to the baron. I ran errands, translated books, wrote letters, took dictation, mounted and arranged specimens, and I began a new notebook. Sophie said I had changed. She always said it was the accident in the quarries, the shock of it. But I knew that it was the disappearance of the heretics from Paris; they disappeared with the shadows as the gaslights lit up more and more streets, leaving an emptiness there. By the end of the winter, the Jardin des Plantes had become the Jardin du Roi again, and once Cuvier had written his obituary for Lamarck, publicly mocking him, calling him a poet, a builder of castles in the air, a romancer, there was not much left in the Jardin that Lucienne Bernard might have fought for, except Geoffroy, who emerged from his darkened rooms in 1818 with a book called
Philosophical Anatomy
, which caused a stir. When Fin, who had married Céleste and was making a good living for himself in London as a trainee surgeon, sent me notice of a position at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, I took it. I was ready to leave Paris.

The London I returned to, the London of West Smithfield, and the anatomy students and young doctors of Saint Barts, was full of radical materialist ideas because so many of the students I worked alongside had also studied in Paris just as I had. Those men understood
transmutation, and like Ramon and Evangelista and Céleste, they translated it into reformist politics. In the taverns and the back rooms of student lodgings around Smithfield and in the pages of the new radical medical journals, they called for the appropriation of church property, for working-class suffrage, universal education, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the end of privilege. It was a dangerous time. Young London doctors talked of Geoffroy and Lamarck not as heretics but as revolutionaries, as prophets of democracy and political enlightenment.