The Dumas Club: The Ninth Gate

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  IIII. (The Latin numeral appears in this form, not the more usual IV). FOR. N.N OMN. A.QUE: A jester stands in front of a stone labyrinth. The entrance is also closed. Three dice on the ground, showing the numbers 1, 2, and 3.

  V. FR.ST.A.: A miser, or merchant, is counting out a sack of gold pieces. Behind him, Death holds an hourglass in one hand and a pitchfork in the other.

  VI. DlT.sco M.R.: A hangman, like the one in the tarot, hands tied behind his back, is hanging by his foot from the battlements of a castle, next to a closed postern. A hand in a gauntlet sticks out of a slot window holding a flaming sword.

  VII. DIS.S. P.TI.R MAG: A king and a beggar are playing chess on a board with only white squares. The moon can be seen through the window. Beneath a window next to a closed door, two dogs are fighting.

  VIII. vie. i.T VIR.: Next to the wall of a city a woman kneels on the ground, offering up her bare neck to the executioner. In the background there is a wheel of fortune with three human figures: one at the top, one going up, and one going down.

  VIIII. (Also in this form, not the usual numeral IX). N.NC SC.O TEN.EBR. LUX: A naked woman riding a seven-headed dragon. She holds an open book, and a half-moon hides her sex. On a hill in the background there is a castle in flames. The door is closed, as in the other engravings.

  He stopped typing, stretched his stiffened limbs, and yawned. The room was in darkness beyond the cone of light from his work lamp and his computer screen. Through the window came the pale glow of streetlights. He went to the window and looked out, not quite knowing what he expected to see. A car waiting at the curb, perhaps, its headlights off and a dark figure inside. But nothing attracted his attention except, for a moment, the siren of an ambulance fading among the dark masses of buildings. He looked at the clock on the nearby church tower: it was five minutes past midnight.

  He sat down again at the computer and the book. He examined the first illustration—the printer’s mark on the title page, the snake with its tail in its mouth, which Aristide Torchia had chosen as the symbol of his work. SIC LUCEAT LUX. Snakes and devils, invocations and hidden meanings. He lifted his glass to drink a sarcastic toast to Torchia’s memory. The man must have been very brave, or very stupid. You paid a high price for that kind of thing in seventeenth-century Italy, even if it was printed cum superiorum privilegio veniaque.

  But then Corso stopped and cursed out loud, looking into the dark corners of the room, for not having noticed before. “With the privilege and license of the superiors.” That wasn’t possible.

  Without taking his eyes from the page, he sat back in his chair and lit another of his crushed cigarettes. Spirals of smoke rose in the lamplight, a translucent gray curtain behind which the lines of print rippled.

  Cum superiorum privilegio veniaque didn’t make sense. Or else it was brilliantly subtle. The reference to the imprimatur couldn’t possibly mean a conventional authorization. The Catholic Church would never have allowed such a book in 1666, because its direct predecessor, the Delomelanicon, had been listed in the index of forbidden books for the previous hundred and fifty years. So Aristide Torchia wasn’t referring to a permission to print granted by the Church censors. Nor to a civil authority, the government of the republic of Venice. He must have had other superiors.

  THE TELEPHONE INTERRUPTED HIS thought. It was Flavio La Ponte. He wanted to tell Corso how he’d found, in with some books (he’d had to buy the whole lot, that was the deal), a collection of European tram tickets, 5,775 of them to be exact. All palindromic numbers, sorted by country in shoe boxes. He wasn’t joking. The collector had just died, and the family wanted to get rid of them. Maybe Corso knew someone who’d be interested. Naturally. La Ponte knew that the tireless, and pathological, activity of collecting 5,775 palindromic tickets was completely pointless. Who would buy such a stupid collection? Yes, the Transport Museum in London, that was a good idea. The English and their perversions... Would Corso deal with the matter?

  La Ponte was also worried about the Dumas chapter. He’d received two telephone calls, from a man and a woman who didn’t identify themselves, asking about “The Anjou Wine.” Which was strange, because La Ponte hadn’t mentioned the chapter to anyone and wasn’t intending to until he had Corso’s report. Corso told him of his conversation with Liana Taillefer and that he had revealed to her the identity of the new owner. “She knew you because you used to go and see her late husband. Oh, and by the way,” he remembered, “she wants a copy of the receipt.”

  La Ponte laughed at the other end of the line. There was no damn receipt. Taillefer had sold it to him, and that was that. But if the lovely widow wanted to discuss the matter, he added, laughing lewdly, he’d be delighted. Corso mentioned the possibility that before he died Taillefer might have told someone about the manuscript. La Ponte didn’t think so; Taillefer had been very insistent that the matter be kept secret until he himself gave a sign. In the end, he never gave a sign, unless hanging himself from the light fixture was one. “It’s as good a sign as any,” said Corso. La Ponte agreed, chuckling cynically. Then he asked about Corso’s visit to Liana Taillefer. After a couple more lecherous comments, La Ponte said good-bye. Corso hadn’t mentioned the incident in Toledo. They agreed to meet the following day.

  After he hung up, Corso went back to The Nine Doors. But his mind was on other things. He was drawn back to the Dumas manuscript. Finally he went and got the folder with the white and blue pages. He rubbed his painful hand and called up the Dumas directory. The computer screen began to flicker. He stopped at a file called Bio:

  Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, Alexandre. Born 24.7.1802. Died 5.12.1870. Son of Thomas Alexandre Dumas, general of the Republic. Author of 257 volumes of novels, memoirs, and stories. 25 volumes of plays. Mulatto on his father’s side. His black blood gave him certain exotic features. Appearance: tall, powerful neck, curly hair, fleshy lips, long legs, physically strong. Character: bon vivant, Jickle, overpowering, liar, unreliable, popular. He had 27 known mistresses, 2 legitimate children and 4 illegitimate. He made several fortunes and squandered them on parties, travel, expensive wines, and flowers. He lost all the money earned from his writing by extravagant spending on mistresses, friends, and hangers-on who besieged his castle home at Montecristo. When he fled Paris, it was to escape his creditors, not for political reasons, like his friend Victor Hugo. Friends: Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet, Gerard de Nerval, Nodier, George Sand, Berlioz, Theojile Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, and others. Enemies: Balzac, Badere, and others.

  None of this really got him anywhere. He felt he was stumbling around in the dark, surrounded by countless false or useless clues. And yet there had to be a link somewhere. With his good hand he typed Dumas.nov:

  Novels by Alexandre Dumas that appeared in installments: 1831: Historical scenes (Revue des Deux Mondes). 1834: Jacques I and Jacques II (Journal des Enfants). 1835: Elizabeth of Bavaria (Dumont). 1836: Murat (La Presse). 1837: Pascal Bruno (La Presse), Story of a Tenor (Gazette Musicale). 1838: Count Horatio (La Presse), Nero’s Night (La Presse), The Arms Hall (Dumont), Captain Paul (Le Siecle). 1839: Jacques Ortis (Dumont), The Life and Adventures of John Davys (Revue de Paris), Captain Panphile (Dumont). 1840: The Fencing Master (Revue de Paris). 1841: Le Chevalier d’Harmental (Le Siecle). 1843: Sylvandire (La Presse), The Wedding Dress (La Mode), Albine (Revue de Paris), Ascanio (Le Siecle), Fernande (Revue de Paris), Amaury (La Presse). 1844: The Three Musketeers (Le Siecle), Gabriel Lambert (La Chronique), The Regent’s Daughter (Le Commerce), The. Corsican Brothers (Democratie Pacifique), The Count of Monte Cristo (Journal des Debats), Countess Bertha (Hetzel), Story of a Nutcracker (Hetzel), Queen Margot (La Presse). 1845: Nanon (La Patrie), Twenty Years After (Le Siecle), Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge (Democratie Pacifique)} The Lady ofMonsoreau (Le Constitutional), Madame de Conde (La Patrie). 1846: The Viscountess of Cambes (La Patrie), The Half-Brothers (Le Commerce), Joseph Balsam (La Presse), Pessac Abbey (La Patrie). 1847: The Forty-Five (Le Constitu-tionnel), Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (Le
Siecle). 1848: The Queen’s Necklace (La Presse). 1849: The Weddings of Father Olifus (Le Constitutionnel). 1850: God’s Will (Evenement), The Black Tulip (Le Siecle), The Dove (Le Siecle), Angel Pitou (La Presse). 1851: Olympe de Cleves (Le Siecle). 1852: God and the Devil (Le Pays), The Comtesse de Charny (Cadot), Isaac La-quedem (Le Constitutionnel). 1853: The Shepherd of Ashbourn (Le Pays), Catherine Blum (Le Pays). 1854: The Life and Adventures of Catherine-Charlotte (Le Mousquetaire), The Brigand (Le Mousquetaire), The Mohicans of Paris (Le Mousquetaire), Captain Richard (Le Siecle), The Page of the Duke of Savoy (Le Constituionnel). 1856: The Companions of Jehu (Journal pour Tous). 1857: The Last Saxon King (Le Monte-Cristo), The Wolf Leader (Le Siecle), The Wild Duck Shooter (Cadot), Black (Le Constitutionnel). 1858: The She-Wolves of Machecoul (Journal Pour Tous), Memoirs of a Policeman (Le Siecle), The Palace of Ice (Le Monte-Cristo). 1859: The Frigate (Le Monte-Cristo), Ammalat-Beg (Moniteur Universel), Story of a Dungeon and a Little House (Revue Europeenne), A Love Story (Le Monte-Cristo). 1860: Memoirs of Horatio (Le Siecle), Father La Ruine (Le Siecle), The Marchioness of Escoman (Le Constitutionnel), The Doctor of Java (Le Siecle), Jane (Le Siecle). 1861: A Night in Florence (Levy-Hetzel). 1862: The Volunteer of 92 (Le Monte-Cristo). 1863: The Saint Felice (La Presse). 1864: The Two Dianas (Levy), Ivanhoe (Pub. du Siecle). 1865: Memoirs of a Favorite (Avenir National), The Count of Moret (Les Nouvelles). 1866: A Case of Conscience (Le Soleil), Parisians and Provincials (La Presse), The Count of Mazarra (Le Mousquetaire). 1867: The Whites and the Blues (Le Mousquetaire), The Prussian Terror (La Situation). 1869: Hector de Sainte-Hermine (Moniteur Universel), The Mysterious Physician (Le Siecle), The Marquis’s Daughter (Le Siecle).

  He smiled, wondering how much the late Enrique Taillefer would have paid to obtain all those titles. His glasses were misted, so he took them off and carefully cleaned the lenses. The lines on the computer were now blurred, as were other strange images he couldn’t identify. With his glasses back on, the words on the screen became sharp again, but the images were still floating around, indistinct, in his mind, and without a key to give them any meaning. And yet Corso felt he was on the right path. The screen began to flicker again:

  Baudry, editor of Le Siecle. Publishes The Three Musketeers between the 14th of March and the llth of July 1844.

  He took a look at the other files. According to his information, Dumas had had fifty-two collaborators at different periods of his literary life. Relations with a large number of them had ended stormily. But Corso was only interested in one of the names:

  Maquet, Auguste-Jules. 1813-1886. Collaborated with Alexandre Dumas on several plays and 19 novels, including the most famous ones (The Count of Monte Cristo, Le Chevalier de la Maison Rouge, The Black Tulip, The Queen’s Necklace) and, in particular, the cycle of The Musketeers. His collaboration with Dumas made him famous and wealthy. While Dumas died penniless, Maquet died a rich man at his castle in Saint-Mesme. None of his own works written without Dumas survives.

  He looked at his biographical notes. There were some paragraphs taken from Dumas’s Memoirs:

  We were the inventors, Hugo, Balzac, Soulie, De Mussel, and myself, of popular literature. We managed, for better or worse, to make a reputation for ourselves with that kind of writing, even though it was popular....

  My imagination, confronted with reality, resembles a man who, visiting the ruins of an old building, must walk over the rubble, follow the passageways, bend down to go through doorways, so as to reconstruct an approximate picture of the original building when it was full of life, when joy jilled it with laughter and song, or when it echoed with sobs of sorrow.

  Exasperated, Corso looked away from the screen. He was losing the feeling, it was disappearing into the corners of his memory before he could identify it. He stood up and paced the dark room. Then he angled his lamp at a pile of books on the floor, against the wall. He picked up two thick volumes: a modern edition of the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas pere. He went back to his desk and began to leaf through them until three photographs caught his eye. In one of them, his African blood clearly visible in his curly hair and mulatto looks, Dumas sat smiling at Isabelle Constant, who, Corso gathered from the caption, was fifteen when she became the novelist’s mistress. The second photograph showed an older Dumas, posing with his daughter Marie. Here, at the height of his fame, the father of the adventure serial sat, good-natured and placid, before the photographer. The third photograph, Corso decided, was definitely the most amusing and significant. Dumas aged sixty-five, gray-haired but still tall and strong, his frock coat open to reveal a contented paunch, was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses. According to the text, “after the seances and sessions of black magic of which she was such a devotee, she liked to be photographed, scantily clad, with the great men in her life.” In the photograph, La Menken’s legs, arms, and neck were all bare, which was scandalous for the time. The young woman, paying more attention to the camera than to the object of her embrace, was leaning her head on the old man’s powerful right shoulder. As for him, his face showed the signs of a long life of dissipation, pleasure, and parties. His smile, between the bloated cheeks of a bon viveur, was satisfied, ironic. His expression for the photographer was teasing, crafty, seeking complicity. The fat old man with the shameless,passionate young girl who showed him off like a rare trophy: he, whose characters arid stories had made so many women dream. It was as if old Dumas was asking for understanding, having given in to the girl’s capricious wish to be photographed.

  After all, she was young and pretty, her skin soft and her mouth passionate, this girl that life had kept for him on the last lap of his journey, only three years before his death. The old devil.

  Dumas was embracing Adah Menken, one of his last mistresses.

  Corso shut the book and yawned. His watch, an old chronometer that he often forgot to wind up, had stopped at a quarter past midnight. He went and opened the window and breathed in the cold night air. The street was still deserted.

  It was all very strange, he thought as he went back to his desk and turned off the computer. His eyes came to rest on the folder with the manuscript. He opened it mechanically and took another look at the fifteen pages covered with two different types of handwriting, eleven of the pages blue, four of them white. Apres de nouvelles presque desesperees du roi... Upon almost desperate news from the king... In the pile of books on the floor he found a huge red tome, a facsimile edition— J. C. Lattes, 1988—containing the entire cycle of The Musketeers and Monte Cristo in the Le Vasseur edition with engravings, published shortly after Dumas’s death. He found the chapter “The Anjou Wine” on page 144 and started to read, comparing it with the original manuscript. Except for a small error here and there, the texts were identical. In the book, the chapter was illustrated with two drawings by Maurice Leloir, engraved by Huyot. King Louis XIII arriving at the siege of La Rochelle with ten thousand men, four horsemen at the head of his escort, holding their muskets, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and jacket of de Treville’s company. Three of them are without doubt Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. A moment later they will be meeting their friend d’Artagnan, still a simple cadet in Monsieur des Essarts’s company of guards. The Gascon still doesn’t know that the bottles of Anjou wine, a gift from his mortal enemy Milady, Richelieu’s agent, are poisoned. She wants to avenge the insult done to her by d’Artagnan. He has passed himself off as the Comte de Wardes, slipped into her bed, and enjoyed a night of love that should have been the count’s. To make matters worse, d’Artagnan has by chance discovered Milady’s terrible secret, the fleur-de-lis on her shoulder, the shameful mark branded on her by the executioner’s iron. With such preliminaries, and given Milady’s disposition, the contents of the second illustration are easy to guess: as d’Artagnan and his companions watch in astonishment, the manservant Fourreau expires in terrible agony after drinking the wine intended for his master. Sensitive to the magic of a text he hadn’t read in twenty years, Corso came to the passage where the musketeers and
d’Artagnan are speaking about Milady:

  ‘Well,” said d’Artagnan to Atkos. “So you see, dear friend It is a fight to the death.”

  Athos nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know. But do you think it’s really her?”

  “I am sure of it”

  “Nevertheless, I confess I still have doubts.”

  “And the fleur-de-lis on her shoulder?”

  “She is an Englishwoman who must have committed some crime in France, and who has been marked for her crime.”

  “Athos, that woman is your wife, I tell you,” repeated d’Artagnan. “Do you not recall that both marks are identical?”

  “Nevertheless I would have sworn that the woman was dead, I hanged her very well”

  This time it was d’Artagnan who shook his head.

  ‘Well? What are we to do?” said the young man.

  ‘We certainly can’t go on like this, with a sword hanging eternally over our heads,” said Athos. ‘We must find a way out of this situation.”

  “But how?”

  “Listen, try to have a meeting with her and explain everything. Tell her: ‘Peace or war! My word as a gentleman that I will never say or do anything against you For your part, give me your solemn word to do nothing against me. Otherwise I will go to the Chancellor, the King, the executioner, I will incite the Court against you, I will denounce you as a marked woman, I will have you put on trial, and should you be acquitted, then upon my word as a gentleman, I will kill you myself, in any corner, as I would a rabid dog.’“

  “I am delighted with this plan,” said d’Artagnan.