The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott Read Free Book Online

recruit by the look of him; he seemed unskilled in surveillance techniques.

4
    ATER THAT AFTERNOON I walked to the Louvre in search of the Caravaggios, stopping first at a
traiteur
, where I ordered a bowl of thick beef soup with vermicelli for fifteen sols, noting down the price and the date in one of the new notebooks I had bought. I have them still, those small black leather notebooks, filled with tiny rows of numbers, totals and subtotals. It was a habit I had taken on at medical school when my meager allowance barely stretched to give me enough food for the day. Now in Paris I was rich it seemed, at least in comparison with my former life. But I had to make my inheritance last. Everything depended on that.
    I had to regulate my expenditure. The day spent with Fin had been expensive. Since entry to the Louvre was free to foreign visitors, I could spend an afternoon there and then come to a decision about what to do next. I couldn’t see Jagot’s man anymore, but I knew he was probably still out there somewhere. I began to feel affronted by the suspicion that being followed by a police agent implied.
I am the victim of a crime, M. Jagot, not a suspect
, I muttered to myself.
    Inside the Louvre, among the columns that held up the great vaulted ceiling of gilt and white plaster over the Long Gallery, artists had set up their easels as close as they could to the paintings. On the walls, paintings hung sometimes four or five deep, frames butting right up against frames. A vast Titian was juxtaposed on one side with a Veronese, on another with a Rubens; each overwhelming square of oiled flesh and theatrical gesture and drapery, each Saint Sebastian or Venus or Mars or Holy Family hanging up there, was being copied, imitated, studied, translated by one of scores of art students. Compared with the restrained and hushed galleries of Edinburgh, it was a riot of color and movement.
    The effects of the previous night’s drinking still hadn’t worn off. I was a mere sleepwalker in this strange gallery, my head thumping. I followed the crowds through to the Classical Gallery, where I stopped in front of the marble sculpture of Laocoön, the Greek priest, and his sons being attacked by sea snakes. It filled an entire alcove. The naked priest’s head was thrown back in agony, his sinews stretched tight in pain. The coils of the giant snakes were tangled around them all. Oneof the two sons, staring in mute horror at his brother and father, was trying to uncoil the snake from his right ankle.

    I was trying to remember the names of the sinews in Laocoön’s raised arm when I sensed her, the rustle of her skirt, the smell of her bergamot-laced perfume. I felt her hand on my arm and turned my head a fraction.
    My thief, in daylight, dressed in pale blue satin. She was standing next to me.
    If I was angry almost beyond words in that moment of recognition—especially now that I knew I had been the innocent prey of a practiced thief—I determined not to show it. I kept my wits about me, focusing on only one thing—the return of the stolen objects.
    “You have no idea how relieved I am to see you, madame,” I said, turning to face her, each phrase tumbling over the next. “Of course … your bag and my bag, they were next to each other amongst the luggage, and it was dark and you were in a hurry, perhaps. It was an easy mistake to make. It wasn’t your fault. Anyone might have—”
    “I saw you sitting by the Seine,” she said, “and I followed you in here. Isn’t it terrible?” she said, looking at the Laocoön. “To make pain beautiful like that—it is a great art.” That gravelly voice of hers, the slow, seductive way she spoke.
    She was as tall as I was, perhaps even a little taller. Nearly six feet—unnervingly tall for a woman. In the daylight her skin was darker than I remembered and her beauty even more striking. Her black hair curled around the edges of her face. She wore no hat; instead she had twisted a swathe