The Coral Thief (34 page)

“Saint-Vincent thinks there is no god. He is a heretic.”

“He might think it; he would not say it. He has principles. He keeps these things to himself.”

“And Manon?”

“Manon? She
would
say it. Out loud.
Oui
. She would shout it. Her mother was a Catholic. She died in torment, terrified of damnation. Manon watched that and it was enough for her. She
is
a heretic.”

“And Silveira?”

“He goes to synagogue. He reads the Torah. He keeps the Sabbath.”

“He believes?”

“No. Silveira has no god. He says it’s a Christian obsession, this insistence on God, on belief, on talking about it all the time. For him, it’s the rituals, his people,
l’histoire
, that matters. It is his anchor. The root of everything. Yes, I think that’s what he would say.”

“There it is,” she said once we’d made our way through the Jardin. “That building, with the green roof.” She gestured at a hut in the middle of a small enclosure just outside the Botany Gallery, where a few students waited in the rain. “I didn’t see it on the map until the other night, after I’d drunk the sleeping draft. It’s listed as number nine on the map. I tried to stay awake but… On the key you’ve labeled it as the entrance to the quarries. Is that what it is?”

“Yes. Inside the hut there’s a set of stone steps that lead down to the quarries.”

“Just as I had hoped. How did it get there?”

“You mean who built it? Men with spades and pickaxes and wheelbarrows, I expect. It goes a long way down.”

“Mais, non. Why
is it there?”

“Cuvier and Brongniart had it built a few years ago, when they
were writing the joint paper on the rock strata of the Paris basin, I think. They wanted to see the rock layers as far down under the city as it was possible to go. Cuvier uses the quarries for teaching occasionally, when he’s doing his lectures on fossil bones, but mostly the entrance is unused.”

“And the steps go all the way down to the main quarry system?”

“Straight down, yes.”

“Can you get me the key to the hut?”

“I’ve no idea where it’s kept. But I can probably find out. I’ll try,” I said, seeing her frustration. “If it’s important. But why?”

“Alors
. Jagot’s orders are that we leave the Jardin by the gate at the river entrance on the night of the party. He will wait for us there. That is where we’re supposed to hand over the diamond. And although he says he won’t, that is where he will arrest us. Instead we will change things a little. We will leave the Jardin a different way—we will go down Cuvier’s staircase, through the main quarry system, and then back up into the streets of Paris. We will do things my way.”

“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Jagot will never know how you got out. It will be as if you’ve disappeared completely.”

“Except that Jagot will still have Delphine. You forget that. Now, Daniel, listen to me. I want you to tell Jagot that we’re going out through the quarries. I want you to warn him that we will break the deal. Find a way to make sure he is waiting for us, exactly in the passage de Saint-Claire, and make sure he brings Delphine.”

“Why would you want me to do that? He’ll arrest you down there. You’ll lose your advantage. It’s madness.”

“Daniel, you must trust me. I have a new plan. I think I can see a way to rescue Delphine, take ourselves off Jagot’s list, and make sure you keep Cuvier’s patronage and your position at the Jardin. I want you to go to Jagot tomorrow and convince him that we have had a quarrel and you want revenge.”

“He won’t believe that.”

“Tell him you’ve been betrayed. Convince him you’re full of revenge.
Ask him for a reward. Then he’ll know he can trust you. Jagot understands greed. Tell him you’ve overheard me talking to Silveira about a theft in the Jardin and an escape through the quarries. Give him the details. Tell him we plan to meet in the passage de Saint-Claire at seven o’clock the morning after the party.”

“But he will be there waiting for you.”

“Exactement
. In the quarries I know my way and he does not. Down there we will be running the show. There are nearly two hundred miles to disappear into. It’s time we took ourselves off Jagot’s list.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We will be magicians after all. We’ll put on a little show of our own, in our subterranean theater. You don’t understand. You don’t see, do you?” I shook my head. “Jagot must have his revenge. We can’t change that. So we let him have his revenge. We make him think he has won. To do that, we must stage some deaths.”

24

N THE CORAL ROOM
of the locksmith’s atelier the stuffed crocodile had disappeared; the corals were almost gone; the shelves were bare. The room had a new echo to it. Wrapped in strips of purple silk torn from a dress abandoned by an émigrée who may or may not have survived the Terror, each piece of coral had been folded into the brittle darkness of the dried and shredded seaweed that filled the packing cases.

Lucienne’s flight back to safety in Italy, now postponed until after an audacious theft that might still take her in another direction, to Toulon, was now prepared for. Packing cases had been nailed down, labels glued to wood. Her departure was inevitable, I knew, but the waiting was almost intolerable. Alone for a few minutes one afternoon, I found a label pasted onto the corner of one box written in a hand I did not recognize:
Ufficio Postale, La Spezia, Italia. La Spezia
. I couldn’t even remember where that was—somewhere to the north, perhaps, up near Turin. Only one cabinet remained, the long table, and the map. Soon she too would disappear—they all would, taking flight again like the swallows that gathered along the Paris rooftops.

All that autumn there had been rumors that Napoleon was already back in Paris, hiding in the quarries and planning to retake the city, rumors carried by lantern men, fiacre drivers, and street sweepers passed on to anyone who would listen. Some wine smugglers even claimed that they had seen the Emperor down there; he had an army, they said, that might come up through the ventilation shafts at any time, night or day.

The stone quarries ran like a rabbit warren for hundreds of miles beneath the Parisian streets. They had been mined for thousands of years, it was said, rock carved out and hauled up to provide the stone with which to build the city.

When gases from the shallow and overcrowded graves in the Les Innocents cemetery asphyxiated a family living in a basement nearby in the rue de la Lingérie in the last years of the eighteenth century, police lieutenant general Alexandre Lenoir proposed closing all the Paris graveyards, disinterring the bones, and building an ossuary in one section of the abandoned quarries. Grave diggers worked at night, then carried the bones on covered carts through the streets; laborers carried the bones down into the quarries in sacks. The great leveling had begun even before the Revolution, people said, when the bones of murderers and nobles, priests, mistresses, and maids became mixed up belowground without headstone or marking.

Twenty years later, in 1809, the emperor Napoleon appointed an ex-viscount turned mining engineer called Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury to oversee the quarries and the catacombs, to map them and make them safe. Héricart, now inspector general of underground works, walked the streets aboveground and below, directed the decorative rearrangement of the bones in the area that housed the catacombs, named and inscribed large sections of the tunnels to ensure that no one would get lost down there or starve to death, and counted and mapped sixty-three shafts or wells—puit
s
—all over the city, a catalogue of holes, some with steps, some just holes. Some were ventilation
shafts, some abandoned wells. In 1815 there were sixty-three entrances to the quarries and catacombs, sixty-three holes into the underground of Paris, and one of them began in the Jardin des Plantes.

“Why do you tell me all of this now, M. Connor?” Jagot had asked, sitting in the pews of the church of San-Roche, where I had asked him to meet me. The church smelled of mold; high arches swept in every direction, rhythmic curves of light against the darkness.

“I am grateful, of course,” he said, peeling an orange. The juice fell in thick drops onto the brown wool of his trousers. “But it is a little unusual,
n’est-ce pas?
You and Lucienne Bernard are friends, no? That is what is in my files. It is unusual for friends to betray each other. Now you come to see me, I think: What is happening here?”

“She has someone else,” I said. “There was a fight.”

“M. Silveira?” Jagot said slowly, putting a segment of orange into his mouth. “Silveira is back in Lucienne Bernard’s bed and now you come to me to betray them? You are jealous,
oui?
You want revenge?”

“Monsieur,” I said, “you told me to watch. You told me to listen. That’s what I have been doing. Watching and listening.”

I was glad of the shadows in the church; the less Jagot could see me and read my expression, the better. Jagot, it seemed, had taken the bait. As far as he was concerned, I was a new opportunity. He had laid his elaborate trap for Lucienne and Silveira, and now here was Lucienne’s jilted lover, the jealous boy Daniel Connor, offering to help—in exchange, of course, for some reward. He might have tried to maintain a stony exterior, but Jagot’s delight was palpable.

“And the man who commissioned this robbery,” Jagot said, his head tipped to one side as he watched my reactions closely, testing me to see how much I knew. “Do you have a name for him?”

I was nervous.

All you have to do is get Jagot to bring Delphine down to the quarries, Daniel
, she had said.
I don’t care what you do or say to make that happen, but everything depends on Jagot bringing Delphine down there
.

“No, monsieur,” I lied, returning his gaze. “I don’t know the name of the man behind this. That is something I can’t discover, although I have tried. They never use his name.”

“And you say their rendezvous is in the passage de Saint-Claire—the morning after the theft? So all I have to do is to wait for them to come out—like rats from a sewer. Yes, that is good. So where will they come out, M. Connor? Where will I wait to catch my thieves?”