The Coral Thief (39 page)

F
D
ELEUZE HADN’T DRAWN THE MAP
, if Napoleon hadn’t lost at Waterloo … if the Dutch ambassador hadn’t been in Paris … if I hadn’t been on that mail coach … Like Jagot’s systems of surveillance and reports, like the corals on the seabed, all the little things, all the crossings and collisions, had added up to something unexpected and of consequence.

Doors and drawers were closed, cogs slid and turned into locking mechanisms. Each phoenix was eased back into place. The black velvet cover slipped back over the polished wood corners of the cabinet again.

They positioned the pieces of crate around the cabinet and then hammered them back into place. The boy riding on the dolphin disappeared into the dark blue-black, tangled sea.

Not a shred of cloth or splinter of wood remained behind that night on the floor of the vault around the crate; not a single finger-print
remained on a wall or glass cabinet. We took every last piece of dust with us back through the hole.

After Lucienne gave the order to put out the light, we climbed the staircase into the carnivore room by touch alone, closed the trapdoor, slid the rhinoceros skeleton back into place, listening for the catch, and made our way in single file through the dark into the hall of skeletons. We climbed the sweeping staircase, walked through the upper gallery of skulls into Cuvier’s house, where a household still slept, limbs heavy, dreams dense. We unlocked, opened, closed, and re-locked intersecting doors, slipped through the study rooms flanked by empty desks, down the narrow corridor past the row of bedrooms, down the main staircase, down the servants’ staircase, into the servants’ hall, where four servants had fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Then we were out through the window in the scullery into a garden, where a moon was just slipping out from behind a cloud.

Lucienne Bernard wanted to disappear, to be erased from Jagot’s records and from Jagot’s memory. She wanted that for all of them. But first, in order to make that happen, she had said we must stage some deaths. And that’s exactly what we did.

Silveira, Saint-Vincent, Lucienne, and I climbed over the gate into the buffalo paddock; our feet sank deep into the dark mud. The buffalos stood looking on, eyes large and wide, their breath frosted in the night air.

“I’ll catch up with you,” she said to Silveira and Saint-Vincent, who were already heading toward the entrance to the quarries. “Don’t wait. Leave a trail for us. I need a few minutes to catch my breath.”

As the two men disappeared into the bushes, she turned to me, her eyes full of tears: “You must go back now. We agreed. It’s time. Remember what to tell the guards—that you fell asleep in the museum;
you woke up and stumbled on the thieves; they were armed so you followed them out into the gardens. You tried to stop them, but they overpowered you.”

Somewhere over to the right we heard the sound of Jagot’s dogs.

“It’s too late,” I said, relieved at least temporarily from the pain of saying good-bye. “I can’t go back now. And anyway, Jagot expects me to bring you to him.”

“Can you run?” she asked.

We ran. It was a kind of instinct. We ran from the sound of the dogs through the trees. Lights started to appear in the houses to our left. I thought of Cuvier and his household rising, as if out of a hundred-year sleep, confused and in disarray—no fires lit, clothing scattered on floors, no servants awake or alert enough to tend or tidy.

We ran past the lake with the water birds where a single flamingo raised its head and looked toward us, past the paddock with the sheep and goats and alpaca and the small ruminating animals, through the gates of the menagerie where behind us we heard the elephants bellow in reply to the sounds of the dogs.

“We have to get to the other side of that house,” she said, pointing, “without being seen. It’s where the professors of mineralogy and agriculture live. Stick to this side of the shrubs. We haven’t got long. This place will be crawling with guards and gardeners any moment.”

We reached the hut in the center of a field; Silveira and Saint-Vincent, who had gone ahead, had left the door open. Inside, we closed and locked the door behind us, shutting out the sound of the dogs.

“Cuvier’s entrance to the quarries,” she said, nodding at the steps that spiraled down like an ammonite or a nautilus in the center of the stone floor. We picked up the lamp Silveira and Saint-Vincent had left us. “Number nine on Deleuze’s map. This staircase connects with hundreds of miles of quarry passageways; they stretch from here all the way over to Grenelle and Montrouge.”

“It will swallow you up,” I said. “You said that, that night on the mail coach. ‘Paris will swallow you up.’ It’s going to swallow us both.”

“Just concentrate,” she said, taking the first steps down. “Watch where you put your feet. These steps are wet.”

Bits of earth or mortar, displaced by our footsteps, tumbled down from stone to stone with a dull echo. I kept my shoulder to the wall, soiling my coat and cuffs with chalky dirt.

“Forty-nine steps,” she said. “Héricart’s book says there are forty-nine steps. It’s nine meters deep.”

Here and there on the walls, I could see marks in red chalk where someone, possibly Cuvier himself, had circled the imprint of a small fossil in the rock, and here and there, too, were lines where he had marked out the shift from one level of strata to another. This was another of Cuvier’s theatrical stages: Cuvier, or Brongniart perhaps, had pasted various drawings and diagrams to the walls—one in particular represented a cross section of strata—labeled
étages. Étage—
stage, story of a building, strata. All three at once.

At the bottom of the forty-nine steps we stood at the entrance to the quarries. I hadn’t expected the ceiling to be so flat, or the walls to be so white; even here in the darkness the walls hewn from white stone gleamed under the light from the lamp. The ceiling, low enough to touch, was cracked and split in places.

“Silveira’s left us a mark,” she said holding up the lamp to show me a black ink mark signed underneath with two letters,
DS—
Davide Silveira—and a circle with a single dot inside. “All we have to do is follow Silveira’s trail through to the passage de Saint-Claire. That’s what we agreed, if we got separated. We’ve used the quarries before.”

“You know them? You can get us out? Without a map?”

“You can’t
know
the quarries. They’re like a dark polyp with a thousand tentacles that spread out underneath the streets. You have to respect them. We’ve had to hide down here several times. We have about an hour left of the lamp.”

The numerous passages that forked off to the right and the left were all exactly the same as the one we were following—long, low, white. The light from the lamp illuminated only a few feet ahead of us; who knew what was beyond? I could imagine all sorts of horrors
down there in the darkness: things with feathers, fur, claws, creatures of nightmare—or soldiers’ limbs severed and festering. Bones. I could imagine anything.

We followed the circles with the dot at the center.

“Be careful where you step,” she said. “There have been collapses—houses falling down, streets folding in.”

“So why don’t they close them? Seal up all the entrances and refill the tunnels? Make them safe.”

“There are hundreds of miles of tunnels, Daniel. What would you fill them with? They’re so big you could hide the whole population of Paris down here. The revolutionaries used the tunnels for hiding and for getting around the city. Before that, smugglers. But all sorts of people use them now. Some of these passageways open up into caverns with high roofs. I’ve seen printing presses down here, and near the Marais there’s an illegal mint under the moneylender’s house.”

“A mint, underground?”

“We only saw it through a crack in an adjoining wall. It was a cavern full of tools and furnaces, crucibles, chemicals, and blocks of metal, and in the middle there was a minting machine, operated by five or six workmen. People say there’s a Knights Templar temple down here somewhere.”

We reached a crossing point where passageways met and where the ceiling stretched far up above us. It was supported by pillars, five or six roughly hewn blocks of stone placed on top of one another without mortar or cement. Some were deeply cracked. Between the pillars there were heaps of debris and broken stone that appeared to be the result of some recent catastrophe. The silence was so deep here that I could almost imagine being able to hear a spider spinning its web twenty feet across to the other side of the cavern. I could hear water dripping at regular intervals.

“It’s much noisier at the other end, under Montmartre or Saint-Germain,” she said. “You can hear carriages on the cobbles above, sometimes, dogs barking.”

“We’re still underneath the Jardin, I suppose,” I said. “Not much to hear.”

“And we’re lower than usual,” she said, looking around the wall to find the next of Silveira’s marks that would indicate which of the seven or eight passageways we should take.

She held up a silver compass.

“I’m not going to get lost down here, not after last time.”

She’d located a mark on the entrance to another passageway; we plunged into its darkness, picking our way around roof falls, piles of rock, and pools of water. I kept my hand on the walls, feeling the changes in texture and the cold, rubbing the powdery limestone with my fingers, remembering that it was made up of the remains of thousands of sea creatures that had died on some seabed millions of years beyond my own rememberings.

“Look at these pillars,” Lucienne said. One good strike with a mallet, and you could knock one of these stones out. Then the whole ceiling would come in. They closed off the area under the Luxembourg Palace a few years ago after some lunatic claimed to have blown up all the pillars in the quarries directly underneath it.”

I reminded myself, with relief, that a great river ran between me and the bones lying stacked up in the catacombs on the other side. You could become very superstitious down here, I thought.

“I don’t want to die here,” she said suddenly, her nerve failing her. “I don’t want Delphine to die here. It’s too dark.”

“We’re safe,” I said. “All we have to do is find the passage de Saint-Claire. It can’t be far.”

“I have a bad feeling,” she said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

We stopped to listen. We could just hear the barking of dogs somewhere behind us.

“Are they loose?” I asked.

“No, they keep them on ropes. They can’t go fast. But they will be listening for us, sniffing us out. Put the lamp out,” she said. “Listen. They’re too close. If we are going to rescue Delphine we have to get to
the passage de Saint-Claire before they catch us. At this rate they’ll reach us first.”

Now I could hear voices ahead as well as behind.

“Damn. They’ve surrounded us. Put out the light.”

“But we won’t be able to see anything,” I said, doing as she asked.

I’m afraid of the dark, I thought, very afraid.

A shot.

Someone had shot a gun; the detonation echoed around in the vault. Stones fell into the pool of water at our feet. The ball from the carbine had struck the ceiling just a few feet from the arch above my head. I waited for the ceiling to fall in. It didn’t.

“You fool,” a voice said. “You’ll bring the whole city down on top of us. Put down the gun.”

“Say nothing,” she whispered, one hand feeling for my face in the darkness. Her fingertips traced the edges of my mouth. I felt for hers, pulling her to me in the moment in which I thought we were both about to die. Was I aroused by her or by the thought of my own death? Both were on my skin now.

“Say nothing,” she said. I kissed her hand, smelling the scent of mud and something like animal pelt.

“Jagot’s men are on both sides,” she said. “Our only chance of reaching the others in the passage is to take a side tunnel, but we must be absolutely silent.
Totalement silencieux.”

“No sudden moves,” Jagot shouted from somewhere close by. “No one move. Put the gun down.”

“He thinks we have a gun,” I whispered.

“We do,” she said. I could hear her easing something from the folds of her clothing.

“Mme. Bernard?” It was Jagot’s voice. Lucienne didn’t answer.

“We have your friend, Manon Laforge. And the child. Such an interesting child. A credit to you, madame. You can help me, Mme. Bernard.”

Still she did not answer.

He continued: “I hear you ask: How can I help you, M. Jagot? Well, Mme. Bernard, I am glad you asked. It is a good sign. You can help me by giving me the diamond and the boy. You must not harm the boy. Cuvier wants him. Now I hear you ask: ‘And what will you do for me, M. Jagot?’ And I say to you: I will let you slip away, Mme. Bernard, with your child. It is Silveira I want, and the boy. And the diamond,
naturellement
.”

“It’s not true,” I whispered. “Don’t make any deals with him. He won’t let you get away.”

“Put down the gun, Mme. Bernard,” Jagot called out, “or we will all die.”

“Madre.”
Delphine’s voice echoed in the tunnels. Then resolute, dragon-slaying Delphine called out quickly in Italian:
“Madre, i ragazzi sono qui. Li ho appena visti. C’è anche l’uomo con il dente d’oro. Non abbiate paura.”
Her voice went silent, muffled quickly by an unseen hand.