The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott Read Free Book Online Page A

of blue silk around her head that matched her dress and made her look like a drawing of a famous Parisian actress I had once seen. She wore pearl earrings. I could see the colors of the squares and rectangles of paintings reflected on their convex surfaces. Jagot had called her Lucienne Bernard. She looked like no thief I had ever imagined.
    I looked around for the guard and for Jagot’s man but could see only other visitors standing looking at the sculptures. Everything continued as before. I felt a hot rush to my head. Until we were closer tothe guard, the best thing to do was to keep her talking, I thought. I only wanted her to return the things she had taken. I didn’t much care how.
    “You took my papers and a package, a case, from the mail coach,” I said, slowly, still trying to prompt a conversation that would lead to a restoration of my belongings. “Can we go and get them? I need them, you see. They’re very important. Without them—”
    “You’ve shaved,” she said, smiling. “You look different in daylight. Younger. It’s strange, isn’t it, how different people look in different places and at different times of the day. As if there were many versions of us coming and going all the time.”
    I put my hand to my jaw, feeling the roughness of the new growth. “My shaving mirror’s too small,” I said. “I cut myself this morning.”
    She began to walk around the Laocoön slowly, looking at it, not at me. I followed her.
    “My things?” I struggled to control the panic in my voice.
    “You look tired,” she said softly, stopping to look at me.
    She had a way of suddenly plunging into intimacy—a touch, a step too close, a question, a look held for just a few moments too long—and then, as soon as she had invoked it, she would abandon it, returning to a formal distance. And in conversation she would plunge too, from one subject to another, from distance to a seductive proximity, like a hare doubling back toward the hounds to disorient them. It was as if she was perpetually both whispering secrets and withholding them. Now she was running her fingers down a pink vein in the white marble of Laocoön’s arm.
    “I
am
tired,” I said. “I haven’t had much sleep. I’ve been worried, you see. Worried about the papers and the specimens you took. I didn’t know how to find you. I didn’t know what to do or where to go to report them missing.”
    An Englishwoman opposite me, clutching a catalogue to her as she would a Bible in church, ushered her two daughters out of the room, tutting. Too much naked male flesh—even in marble.
    “We are some of the last people who will see all of this under one roof,” Lucienne Bernard said. “In a few weeks this room will be empty. All of Napoleon’s stolen art will be returned to where it was before the war.”
    “Before the war?” I said, disoriented by the sudden change of subject.
    “Napoleon took all the statues in here from the Vatican gardens when he invaded Rome. Now the pope wants them back and your Duke of Wellington has agreed. Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre, is procrastinating, but without Napoleons protection he will have to give them up. Wellington will send his soldiers if he doesn’t. The Prussians want their paintings back too. It won’t be long.”
    I was estimating the distance to the door and, to the guard, trying to calculate the likely consequences of anything I might do. “Please,” I said, my words sharpening. “Don’t play games with me. It’s not fair.”
    “Now all the empty monasteries and the houses of émigrés in Paris are stacked high with the paintings and statues and collections that Napoleon took from the palaces of Europe—”
    “Madame,” I said. “I have been polite. I have been in earnest. I have pleaded with you. Entreated you. But you seem to want to talk only about art. Please. I have no time for conversation about these things. I am expected at the Jardin des Plantes. You took my belongings.