He was still smiling, desperate and bitter, when he fell asleep.
WHEN HE WOKE, THE first thing he saw was the gray light of dawn through the window. Too early. Confused, he tried to find his watch on the bedside table when he realized that the phone was ringing. He dropped the receiver twice before managing to lodge it between his ear and the pillow. “Hello?”
“This is your friend from last night. Remember? Irene Adler. I’m in the lobby. We have to talk. Now.” “What the hell...”
But she’d hung up. Cursing, Corso searched for his glasses. He threw back the sheets and pulled on his trousers, groggy and disconcerted. With sudden panic, he looked under the bed. The bag was still there, intact. He made an effort to focus on the things around him. Everything in the room was in order. It was outside that things were happening. He just had time to go to the bathroom and splash water on his face before she knocked at the door.
“Do you know what time it is?”
The girl was standing there in her blue duffel coat and with her rucksack on her back. Her eyes were even greener than Corso remembered.
“It’s half past six in the morning,” she said quietly. “And you have to get dressed right now.” “Have you gone crazy?”
“No.” She came into the room without being asked and looked around critically. “We don’t have much time.” “We?”
“You and I. Things have got rather complicated.” Corso snorted, angry. “It’s too early for jokes.” “Don’t be stupid.” She wrinkled her nose with a grave expression. Despite her youth and boyishness, she looked different, older, and more self-assured. “I’m serious.”
She put her rucksack on the unmade bed. Corso gave it back to her and showed her the door. “Go to hell,” he said.
She didn’t move, just looked at him intently. “Listen.” Her light eyes were very near, like liquid ice, so luminous against her tanned skin. “Do you know who Victor Fargas is?”
Corso caught sight of his own face in the mirror above the chest of drawers, beyond the girl’s shoulder. He was open-mouthed, like an idiot. “Of course I do.”
It had taken him several seconds to answer, and he was still blinking, confused. She waited, not entirely satisfied with his response to her words. It was obvious that her mind was on other things,
“He’s dead,” she said.
She said it neutrally, as if she’d just told him that Fargas had coffee for breakfast or went to the dentist. Corso took a deep breath, trying to take in what she’d just said. “That’s not possible. I was with him last night. He was fine.” “Well, he’s not now. He’s not fine at all.” “How do you know?” “I just do.”
Corso shook his head, suspicious, and went to get a cigarette. En route he saw the flask of Bols, so he took a swig. The gin hitting his empty stomach made him shudder. He waited, forcing himself not to look at the girl until he’d inhaled his first puff of smoke. He wasn’t at all happy with the part he was being forced to play this morning. He needed time to think. “The cafe in Madrid, the train, last night, and now this morning here in Sintra...” He counted on the fingers of his left hand, his cigarette in his mouth, his eyes half closed because of the smoke. “That’s a lot of coincidences, don’t you think?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I thought you were smarter than that. Who said anything about coincidences?”
“Why are you following me?”
“I like you.”
Corso didn’t feel like laughing. He twisted his mouth. “That’s ridiculous.”
She looked at him for a time, thoughtfully.
“I suppose it is,” she said at last. “You don’t exactly look breathtaking, always in that old coat and those glasses.”
“What is it, then?”
“Find another answer. Anything would do. But now get dressed, will you? We have to go to Fargas’s house.”
“We?”
“You and I. Before the police get there.”
THE DEAD LEAVES CRACKLED beneath their feet as they pushed the iron gate and walked up the path lined with broken statues and empty pedestals. The gray morning light cast no shadows, and above the stone staircase the sundial still showed no time. POSTUMA NECAT. The last one kills, Corso read again. The girl had followed his gaze.
“Absolutely true,” she said coldly and pushed the door. It was locked.
“Let’s try the back,” suggested Corso.
They went around the house, past the tiled fountain with the chubby stone angel, eyes empty and hands cut off, water still trickling from its mouth into the pond. Surprisingly composed, the girl—Irene Adler or whatever her name was—went ahead of Corso in her blue duffel coat, the rucksack on her back. She walked, her long supple legs in jeans, her stubborn head tilted forward with the determined air of someone who knows exactly where she is going. Unlike Corso. He had overcome his doubt and let the girl lead him. He was leaving the questions for later. Clearheaded after a quick shower, carrying in his canvas bag all that was important to him, he could think of nothing now but Victor Fargas’s Nine Doors, book number two.
They got in without difficulty through the French window that led from the garden into the drawing room. On the ceiling, dagger aloft, Abraham was still watching over the books lined up on the floor. The house seemed deserted.
“Where’s Fargas?” asked Corso.
The girl shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“You said he was dead.”
“He is.” After glancing at her surroundings, at the bare walls and the books, she picked up the violin from the sideboard and looked at it curiously. “What I don’t know is where he is.”
“You’re lying.”
She placed the violin under her chin and plucked at the strings before putting it back in its case, unhappy with the sound. Then she looked at Corso.
“Oh ye of little faith.”
She was smiling again, absently. To Corso her composure, incongruously mature, seemed both deep and frivolous. This young lady behaved according to a strange code of conduct, motivated by things that were more complex than her age and appearance let one suppose.
Suddenly, these thoughts—the girl, the strange events, even the supposed corpse of Victor Fargas—all left Corso’s mind. On the threadbare rug that depicted the battle of Arbelas, between books on satanic arts and the occult, there was a gap. The Nine Doors was no longer there.
“Shit,” he said.
He muttered it again as he knelt beside the row of books.
His expert glance, accustomed to finding a book instantly, went back and forth without success. Black morocco, five raised bands, no title on the exterior, a pentacle on the cover. Umbrarum regni, etc. He wasn’t mistaken. A third of the mystery, exactly thirty-three point endless threes percent, had vanished.
“Shit.”
It couldn’t have been Pinto, he wouldn’t have had time to
organize anything. The girl was watching him as if waiting for him to do something interesting. Corso stood up.
“Who are you?”
It was the second time in less than twelve hours that he’d asked the question, but to two different people. Things were getting complicated far too quickly. For her part, the girl held his gaze, not reacting to the question. After a time she looked away into empty space. Or possibly at the books lined up on the floor.
“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “You’d be better off wondering where the book has gone.”
“What book?”
She looked at him again but said nothing. He felt incredibly stupid.
“You know too much,” he told the girl. “Even more than I do.”
Again she shrugged. She was looking at Corso’s watch.
“You don’t have much time.”
“I don’t give a damn how much time I have.”
“That’s up to you. But there’s a flight from Lisbon to Paris in five hours, from Portela Airport. We can just make it.”
God. Corso shivered under his coat, horrified. She soun
ded like an efficient secretary, schedule book in hand, listing her boss’s appointments for the day. He opened his mouth to complain. And so young with those disturbing eyes. Damned little witch.
“Why should I leave now?”
“Because the police might arrive.”
“I don’t have anything to hide.”
The girl smiled indefinably, as if she had just heard a funny but very old joke. Then she put her rucksack on her back and waved good-bye.
“I’ll bring you cigarettes in prison. Though they don’t sell your brand here in Portugal.”
She went out into the garden without a backward glance at the room. Corso was about to go after her and stop her. Then he saw something in the fireplace.
After a moment of disbelief, he went over to it. Very slowly, so that things might return to normal. But when he reached the fireplace and leaned on the mantelpiece, he saw that the damage was irreversible. In the brief interval between last night and this morning, a minute period of time compared to their centuries-old contents, the antiquarian bibliographies had gone out of date. There now remained not three known copies of The Nine Doors, but only two. The third, or what was left of it, was still smoldering among the embers.
He knelt, taking care not to touch anything. The binding, no doubt because of the leather covering, was less damaged than the pages inside. Two of the five raised bands on the spine were intact, and the pentacle was only half burned. But the pages had been almost entirely consumed by the flames. There were only a few charred edges, with fragments of print. Corso held his hand over the still-warm remains.
He took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. He remembered how the logs had been piled up in the fireplace the night before. Judging by the ashes—the burned logs lay underneath the ashes of the book, nobody had raked over the embers—the fire had gone out with the book on top. He remembered seeing enough logs piled there to last about four or five hours. And the warm ashes indicated that the fire had gone out about the same number of hours ago. This made a total of eight to ten hours. Somebody must have lit the fire between ten o’clock and midnight, and then put the book in. And whoever had done so hadn’t hung around afterward to rake over the embers.
Corso wrapped in old newspaper what remains he could save from the fireplace. The page fragments were stiff and brittle, so it took him some time. As he did this, he noticed that the pages and cover had burned separately. Whoever had thrown
them into the fire had torn them apart so that they would burn more efficiently.
Once he retrieved all the pieces, he paused to glance around the room. The Virgil and the Agricola were where Fargas had put them. The De re metalica lined up with the others on the rug—and the Virgil on the table, just as Fargas had left it when, with the tone of a priest performing a ritual sacrifice, he had uttered the words “I think I’ll sell this one....” There was a sheet of paper between its pages. Corso opened the book. It was a handwritten receipt, unfinished.
Victor Coutinho Fargas, Identity Card No. 3554712, address: Quinta da Soledade, Carretera de Colares, km. 4, Sintra, Received with thanks the sum of 800,000 escudosfor the work in my possession, ‘Virgil Opera nunc recens accuratissime castigata... Venezia, Giunta, 1544.” (Essling 61. Sander 7671.) Folio, 10.587, Ic, 113 woodcuts. Complete and in good condition. The buyer...
There was no name or signature. The receipt had never been completed. Corso put the paper back and shut the book. Then he went to the room where he’d spent the previous afternoon, to make sure he’d left no trace, no papers with his handwriting, or anything like that. He also removed his cigarette butts from the ashtray and put them in his pocket, wrapped in another piece of newspaper. He looked around for a little while longer. His steps echoed through the empty house. No sign of the owner.
As he again passed the books on the floor, he stopped, tempted. It would have been so easy—a couple of conveniently small Elzevirs attracted his attention. But Corso was a sensible man. It would only complicate matters if things got nasty. So, with a sigh, he bade farewell to the Fargas collection.
He went out through the French window into the garden to look for the girl, dragging his feet through the leaves. He found her sitting on a short flight of steps that led to the pond. He could hear the water trickling from the chubby angel’s mouth onto the greenish surface covered with floating plants. She was staring, engrossed, at the pond. Only the sound of his steps interrupted her contemplation and made her turn her head.
Corso put his canvas bag on the bottom step and sat down next to her. He lit the cigarette he’d had in his mouth for some time. He inhaled, his head to one side, and threw away the match. He turned to the girl.
“Now tell me everything.”
Still staring at the pond, she gently shook her head. Not abruptly or unpleasantly. On the contrary, the movement of her head, her chin, and the corners of her mouth was sweet and thoughtful, as if Corso’s presence, the sad, neglected garden, and the sound of the water were all peculiarly moving. She looked incredibly young. Almost defenseless. And very tired.
“We have to go,” she said so low that Corso scarcely heard her. “To Paris.”
“First tell me what your link is with Fargas. With all of this.”
She shook her head again, in silence. Corso blew out some smoke. The air was so damp that the smoke floated in front of him for a moment before gradually disappearing. He looked at the girl.
“Do you know Rochefort?”
“Rochefort?”
“Whatever his name is. He’s dark, with a scar. He was lurking around here last night.” As he spoke, Corso was aware of how silly it all was. He ended with an incredulous grimace, doubting his own memories. “I even spoke to him.”
The girl again shook her head, still staring at the pond.
“I don’t know him.”
“What are you doing here, then?”
“I’m looking after you.”
Corso stared at the tips of his shoes, rubbing his numb hands The tinkle of the water in the pond was beginning to get on his nerves. He took a last drag on his cigarette. It was about to burn his lips and tasted bitter.
“You’re mad, girl.”
He threw away the butt, stared at the smoke fading before his eyes.
“Completely mad,” he added.
She still said nothing. After a moment, Corso brought out his flask of gm and took a long swig, without offering her any He looked at her again.
“Where’s Fargas?”
She took a moment to answer, still absorbed, lost. At last she indicated with her chin. “Over there “
Corso followed the direction of her gaze. In the pond beneath the thread of water from the mouth of the mutilated angel with empty eyes, he saw the vague outline of a man floating facedown among the water lilies and dead leaves
IX. THE BOOKSELLER ON
THE RUE BONAPARTE
“My friend,” Athos said gravely, “remember that the dead are the only ones whom one does not risk
meeting again on this earth.”
—A. Dumas, THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Lucas Corso ordered a second gin and settled back comfortably in the wicker chair. It was pleasant in the sun. He was sitting on the terrace of the Cafe Atlas on the Rue de Buci, in a rectangle of light that framed the tables. It was one of those cold, luminous mornings when the left bank of the Seine crawls with people: disoriented Japanese, Anglo-Saxons in sneakers with metro tickets marking their place in a Hemingway novel, ladies with baskets full of lettuces and baguettes, and slender gallery owners who’ve had their noses fixed, all heading for a cafe during their lunch break. An attractive young woman was looking in the window of a luxury charcuterie, on the arm of a middle-aged, well-dressed man who might have been an antique dealer or a scoundrel, or both. There was also a Harley Davidson with all its shiny chrome, a bad-tempered fox terrier tied up at the door of an expensive wine shop, a young man with braids playing the flute outside a boutique. And at
the table next to Corso’s, a couple of very elegant Africans kissing on the mouth in a leisurely way, as if they had all the time in the world and as if the arms race, AIDS, and the hole in the ozone layer were all insignificant on that sunny Parisian morning.
He saw her at the end of the Rue Mazarin, turning the corner toward the cafe where he waited. With her boyish looks, her duffel coat open over her jeans, her eyes like two points of light against her suntan, visible from a distance in the crowd, in the street overflowing with dazzling sunlight. Devilishly pretty, La Ponte would no doubt have said, clearing his throat and turning his best side—where his beard was a little thicker and curlier—to her. But Corso wasn’t La Ponte, so he didn’t say or think anything. He just gave a hostile glance at the waiter, who was putting a glass of gin on his table—”Pas d’Bols, m’sieu”—and handed him the exact amount on the bill—”Service compris, young man”—before looking back at the approaching girl. As far as love went, Nikon had left him a hole in the stomach the size of a clipful of bullets. That was enough love. Nor was Corso sure whether he had, now or ever, a good profile. And he was damned if he cared, anyway.
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with his handkerchief. The street was a series of vague outlines, of shapes with blurred faces. One stood out and became clearer as it drew nearer, although it never grew completely sharp: short hair, long legs, and white sneakers acquired definition as he focused on her with difficulty. She sat down in the empty chair.
“I found the shop. It’s a couple of blocks away.”
He put his glasses back on and looked at her without answering. They had traveled together from Lisbon, leaving Sintra for the airport posthaste, as old Dumas would have said. Twenty minutes before departure, Corso phoned Amilcar Pinto to tell him that Fargas’s torment as a book collector was over and that the plan was canceled. Pinto would still be paid the sum agreed, for his trouble. Apart from being surprised—the call had woken him—Pinto reacted fairly well. All he said was, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Corso, you and I didn’t see each other last night in Sintra.” But he promised he’d make some discreet inquiries into Fargas’s death. After he heard about it officially, of course. For the time being, he knew nothing and didn’t want to, and as for the autopsy, Corso should hope that the forensic report would give the cause of death as suicide. Just in case, Pinto would pass the description of the individual with the scar on to the relevant departments as a possible suspect. He’d keep in touch by phone. He urged Corso not to come back to Portugal for a while. “Oh, and one last thing,” added Pinto as the departure of the Paris flight was being announced. Next time, before he thought of involving a friend in murder, Corso should think twice. Corso hurriedly protested his innocence as the phone swallowed his last escudo. Yeah, yeah, said Pinto, that’s what they all say.
The Dumas Club: The Ninth Gate Page 17
