The Coral Thief (9 page)

Visitors came here to see the museums, the bones, the animals in the menagerie, the glasshouses, the collections of exotic trees and plants; they came for assignations, for trysts, for stolen kisses; they
came because the sun was out or because it wasn’t. I came to see what I had lost and hoped to regain, a utopia, I thought, passing through the gates, handing over my coins. The center of a new world.

Daniel into the lions’ den, she’d said. I remembered that remark of hers as I stood just inside the main gate, looking down the straight sand-colored paths through the classically arranged flower beds, a series of lines that ran all the way to the Museum of Zoology ahead of
me, its yellow stone flushed with pink in the afternoon light. This museum of bones had once been the palace of a king.

Between the gates where I stood and the Museum of Zoology there were at least ten flower beds, each as big as an English field, planted with carefully labeled botanical and medical specimens from all over the world, every conceivable green in every possible texture: spiky, arched, fanned, and feathered. Explosions of late-summer flowers in reds, golds, whites, and oranges. Beyond them light glinted on the panes of a dozen glasshouses that lined the east and west sides of the rectangle like mirrors.

More than fifty families lived within the walls of the Jardin, Jameson had said. The professors lived alongside their assistants and families in the elegant houses that flanked the high walls. Hundreds of students attended the lectures or worked in the museums or libraries for the professors, producing scores of books and hundreds of papers on botany, chemistry, comparative anatomy, taxonomy, or mineralogy, or sorting, preparing, and mounting the thousands of bones, plants, fossils, pinned and boxed insects and butterflies, preserved snakes, and stuffed birds that were sent to the Jardin every year.

Daniel into the lions’ den. There were lions in the Jardin des Plantes over to my right, in the menagerie. Paris was a kind of Babylon, I thought then, but Daniel Connor … he was no biblical Daniel. That Daniel, the other one, was a kidnapped Jewish boy forced to live in the court of pagan Babylon on the banks of the Euphrates; that Daniel was the boy who remained steadfast, true to his principles, even among those seductive pagans. When they threw him in with the lions, the animals didn’t touch him. He was protected by his own virtuous edges.

My edges were disappearing.

No, I was not that Daniel. I was another one, not so steadfast or sure. I imagined the lions would finish me off without hesitation.
Paris will swallow you up
, she’d said.
Are you not afraid?

I found Jagot sitting in the palm glasshouse on the north bench under the blossoms of a scarlet rhododendron. He had taken off his jacket and had fallen asleep, his hands tucked behind his head. When my shadow fell across his face, his eyes snapped open like the eyes of a crocodile.

“M. Jagot, you have recovered my things?” I asked immediately, shaking his hand.

“
Non
, monsieur,” he said, stretching and yawning. “I am sorry to say, I have not. But I have other news. Certain information has come to me, M. Connor.”

“About what?”

“About you, monsieur. About your comings and goings. Also about Mme. Bernard. She has been asking questions about you. I have reports.” He opened up a notebook.

“Mme. Bernard?” I said. “Who is Mme. Bernard?”

“You know who Mme. Bernard is, M. Connor,” he said with a sigh. “You know her. She knows you.”

“What questions has she been asking?” I said, taking the seat beside him. “And if you have reports about her, you must know where she is. And if you know where she is—”

“She has disappeared again. We have no trace. That is of great annoyance to me. But my men tell me that before she disappeared Mme. Bernard was asking questions about you, M. Connor, about where you lived. It seems she has developed an interest in you. Do you know why that is? Can you help me to explain that? Have you seen her again?”

“No, monsieur, I have no idea why she has taken an interest in me. And I really can’t be sure that the wretched woman I spoke to on the mail coach
is
the same woman you’re looking for. It might be a mistake,” I said quickly, remembering the shadowy and tentative allegiance I had made to Lucienne Bernard in the Louvre and trying my best to extricate myself from the apparently dangerous place I seemed to have taken in Jagot’s investigation. “I think it is best if I withdraw my statement … It was dark. I can’t be certain what she looked like …”

Jagot leaned close to me, then reached out and cupped my chin in his hand, turning my face toward his for a moment. He spoke slowly. “You are a handsome man, M. Connor. And you have expectations. You have … promise.”

“Monsieur?” I was sweating now, profusely. Jagot’s acrid smell mingled with the sweet and overblown perfume of the rhododendrons.

“Life is short.” He sighed. “Sometimes these investigations take a long time. My men, they get impatient. They like results, they like the files to close, they like rewards. Impatient men are difficult to control.” He paused, nodding toward the end of the path. The one-armed man stood there leaning against the glass. “Have you anything to tell me, M. Connor? Something perhaps you might have forgotten?”

“I have seen her only once,” I stammered, understanding the threat implicit in his words.

“Yes,” he said. “I know that. You saw her at half past three on the afternoon of July twenty-third. In the Louvre, I understand. I looked for your report of that meeting in my file, M. Connor, yesterday, but I did not find it. Perhaps I did not look carefully enough.”

“I didn’t think it was—”

“Let us say that your report has gone missing. We will call it a bureaucratic error. We will say it is not important. Of course the next report you write for the Bureau will not go missing. And now, M. Connor, I must ask for your identity papers—your passport?”

“My passport, M. Jagot? Why do you need my passport?” I reached into my jacket pocket.

“We have rules in Paris, monsieur, and those rules say that a man or woman who is part of a police investigation cannot leave the city. Your papers will be safe with me, M. Connor. You have my word.” He took them from me and folded them into a silver case.

“For how long?” I stuttered. “I mean to return to England.”

“Until we know what is what, M. Connor. And how long does that take? Who is to say? Of course, if we find Mme. Bernard, or if someone brings her to us, then we close the files. We say this is finished
business. But until that moment, it is unfinished business. You may go now, monsieur, but you must not speak of our meeting. Not to anyone, you understand? It is a private matter.”

I stood up. “M. Jagot—” I began to remonstrate.

“Au revoir
, M. Connor.”

The one-armed man did not meet my eye as I passed him. He spat into the undergrowth.

Furious at Jagot’s veiled accusations and threats and conscious of being tangled up in a web that was as thick as a forest and over which I had no control, I resolved to walk in the Jardin until I had seized on a plan. I slipped into the lecture hall in the amphitheater between lectures, waiting until a group of students talking animatedly to a professor I did not recognize had spilled onto the gravel path outside. The empty lecture hall, curved seats raked high behind me, smelled of furniture wax and heated bodies; on the blackboard a chalked diagram of a cuttlefish, tentacles sprawling, had been marked with arrows and letters, all its parts labeled; over to the left on the same board someone had pinned a drawing of what looked like a crocodile. On the lecturer’s podium a series of monkey skulls had been arranged in a row.

Despite everything, I reasoned with myself, this particular knot would unravel in a few days, when Jagot had tracked down Lucienne Bernard and recovered my things. He would come to see my innocence. I might have gone to see the British ambassador to plead my case, or found a lawyer to petition for the return of my passport, but my story was now full of embarrassing kinks, each of which undermined my claim to innocence. Why had I not called the guard in the Louvre? Why had I failed to make a report to Jagot despite having given him my word? Why had I fallen asleep on the mail coach with objects of such value and consequence? No matter how you looked at it, it didn’t look good.

6