The Dumas Club: The Ninth Gate

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The girl was waiting in the departure lounge. Corso, still dazed and in no condition to tie up loose ends (there were loose ends all over the place), was surprised to see that she had been extremely efficient and managed to get them two plane tickets without any difficulty. “I just inherited some money” was her answer when, seeing that she had paid for both, he made an ironic remark about the limited funds she supposedly had. Afterward, during the two-hour flight from Lisbon to Paris, she refused to answer any of his questions. All in good time, she repeated, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, as if sneaking a glance, before she became absorbed in the trails of condensation left by the plane in the cold air. Then she fell asleep, or pretended to, resting her head on his shoulder. Corso could tell from her breathing that she was awake. It was a convenient way of avoiding questions that she wasn’t prepared, or allowed, to answer.

  Anyone else in his situation would have insisted on answers, would have shaken her out of her pretense. But Corso was a well-trained, patient wolf, with the instincts and reflexes of a hunter. After all, the girl was his only real lead in this unreal, novelistic, ridiculous situation. In addition, at this point in the script he had fully assumed the role of reader-protagonist that someone, whoever was tying the knots on the back of the rug, on the underside of the plot, seemed to be offering him with a wink that could be either contemptuous or conspiratorial, he couldn’t tell which.

  “Somebody’s setting me up,” Corso said out loud, nine thousand meters above the Bay of Biscay. He looked at the girl, but she didn’t move. Annoyed by her silence, he moved his shoulder away. Her head lolled for a moment. Then she sighed and made herself comfortable again, this time leaning against the window.

  “Of course they are,” she said at last, sleepily, scornfully, her eyes still closed. “Any idiot could see that.”

  “What happened to Fargas?”

  “You saw yourself,” she said after a moment. “He drowned.”

  “Who did it?”

  She turned her head slowly, from side to side, then looked out of the window. She slid her hand, slender, tan, with short unpainted nails, slowly across the armrest. She stopped at the edge, as if her fingers had come up against an invisible object.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Corso grimaced. He looked as if he was about to laugh, but instead showed his teeth.

  “It does to me. It matters a lot.”

  The girl shrugged. They weren’t concerned about the same things, she seemed to imply. They didn’t have the same priorities.

  Corso persisted. “What’s your part in all this?”

  “I already told you. To take care of you.”

  She turned and looked at him as directly as she had been evasive a moment ago. She slid her hand over the armrest again, as if to bridge the distance between her and him. She was altogether too near, so Corso moved away instinctively, embarrassed, uneasy. In the pit of his stomach, in Nikon’s wake, obscure, disturbing things stirred. The emptiness and pain were returning. In the girl’s eyes, silent eyes and without memory, he could see the reflection of ghosts from the past, he could feel them brush his skin.

  “Who sent you?”

  She lowered her lashes over her luminous eyes, and it was as if she had turned a page. There was nothing there anymore. The girl wrinkled her nose, irritated.

  “You’re boring me, Corso.”

  She turned to the window and looked at the view. The great expanse of blue flecked with tiny white threads was split in the distance by a yellow and ochre line. Land ho. France. Next stop, Paris. Or next chapter. To be continued in next week’s issue. Ending, sword raised, a cliffhanger typical of all romantic serials. He thought of the Quinta da Soledade, the water trickling from the fountain, Fargas’s body among the water lilies and dead leaves in the pond. He flushed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. With good reason, he felt like a man on the run. Absurd. Rather than fleeing by choice, he was being forced to.

  He looked at the girl and tried to size up his situation with the necessary objectivity. Maybe he wasn’t running away but toward something instead. Or maybe the mystery he was trying to escape was hidden in his own suitcase. “The Anjou Wine.” The Nine Doors. Irene Adler. The flight attendant, with a trained, fatuous smile, said something as she passed. Corso looked at her without seeing her, absorbed in his own thoughts. If only he knew whether the end of the story was already written, or whether he himself was writing it as he went along, chapter by chapter.

  He didn’t say another word to the girl. When they arrived at Orly, he ignored her, although he was aware of her walking behind him along the airport concourses. At passport control, after showing his identity card, he turned around to see what kind of document she had, but all he saw was a passport bound in black leather without any markings. It must have been European, because she went through the gate for EC citizens. Outside, while Corso was climbing into a taxi, giving his usual address, the Louvre Concorde, she slipped into the seat beside him. They drove to the hotel in silence. She got out first and let him pay the fare. The driver didn’t have any change, so Corso was slightly delayed. By the time he crossed the lobby, she had already checked in and was walking behind a porter who had her rucksack. She waved at Corso before she entered the elevator....

  “It’s a very nice shop. Replinger, Booksellers, it says. Autographs and historical documents. And it’s open.”

  She gestured to the waiter that she didn’t want to order and inclined her head toward Corso across the table, in the cafe on the Rue de Buci. Like a mirror her liquid eyes reflected the street, which itself was a reflection in the cafe window.

  “We could go there now.”

  They had met again at breakfast, as Corso was reading the papers at one of the windows overlooking the Place du Palais Royal. She had said good morning and sat down at the table. Had devoured toast and croissants with a healthy appetite. Then looked at Corso, with a rim of milky coffee on her upper lip, like a little girl. “Where do we start?”

  So now there they were, two blocks from Achille Replinger’s bookshop. The girl had offered to go and find it while Corso drank his first gin of the day. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

  “We could go there now,” she said again.

  Corso still hesitated. He’d seen her tanned skin in his dreams. He was holding her hand, crossing a deserted plain at dusk. Columns of smoke rose on the horizon, volcanoes about to erupt. Occasionally they passed a soldier with a grave face, his armor covered with dust, who stared at them in silence, the man as distant and cold as the sullen Trojans of Hades. The plain was darkening on the horizon, and the columns of smoke grew thicker. The impassive, ghostly faces of the dead warriors contained a warning. Corso wanted to get away. He pulled the girl along by the hand, anxious not to leave her behind, but the air was becoming thick and hot, stifling, dark. Their flight ended in an interminable fall, an agony in slow motion. The darkness burned like an oven. The only link with the outside was his hand holding on to to hers in an effort to continue. The last thing he felt was her hand, its grip fading, finally turn to ash. And in front of him, in the darkness enveloping the burning plain and his mind, white marks, traces as fleeting as lightning, picked out the ghostly contour of a skull. It wasn’t pleasant to recall. To remove the taste of ash from his mouth and erase these horrors, Corso finished his glass of gin and looked at the girl. She was watching him, a disciplined collaborator waiting quietly for instructions. Serene, she simply accepted her strange part in the story. Her loyal expression was inexplicable.

  She stood up at the same time as he did. He put the canvas bag over his shoulder, and they made their way slowly toward the river. The girl, walking on the inside, occasionally stopped in front of a shopwindow, calling his attention to a picture, an engraving, a book. She looked at everything with wide eyes and intense curiosity and seemed nostalgic as she smiled thoughtfully, as if searching for traces of herself in those old things. As if, in some corner of her memory
, she shared a common past with the few survivors washed up by the tide after each of history’s inexorable shipwrecks.

  There were two bookshops, one on either side of the street, facing each other. Achille Replinger’s had a very old, elegant front of varnished wood, with a sign that said LIVRES ANCIENS, AUTOGRAPHES ET DOCUMENTS HISTORIQUES. Corso told the girl to wait outside, and she didn’t object. As he went to the door, he looked in the window and saw her reflection over his shoulder. She was on the other side of the street, watching him. A bell rang as he pushed the door open. There was an oak table, shelves full of old books, stands with folders of prints, and a dozen old wooden filing cabinets. These had letters in alphabetical order, carefully written in brass slots. On the wall was a framed autograph with the caption “Fragment of Tartuffe. Moliere.” Also, three good prints: Victor Hugo, Flaubert, and Dumas in the center.

  Achille Replinger was standing by the table. He was thickset and had a reddish complexion. Porthos with a bushy gray mustache and double chin overlapping the collar of his shirt, which was worn with a knitted tie. He was expensively but carelessly dressed. His jacket strained to contain his girth, and his flannel trousers were creased and sagging.

  “Corso ... Lucas Corso,” he said, holding Boris Balkan’s letter of introduction in his thick, strong fingers and frowning. “Yes, he called me the other day. Something about Dumas.”

  Corso put his bag on the table and took out the folder with the fifteen manuscript pages of “The Anjou Wine.” The bookseller spread them out in front of him, arching his brow.

  “Interesting,” he said softly. “Very interesting.”

  He wheezed as he spoke, breathing with difficulty like an asthmatic. He took his glasses from one of his jacket pockets and put them on after a brief glance at his visitor. He bent over the pages. When he looked up, he was smiling ecstatically.

  “Extraordinary,” he said. “I’ll buy it from you here and now.”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  Replinger seemed surprised. He pursed his lips, nearly pouting. “I thought...”

  “I just need an expert opinion. You’ll be paid for your time, of course.”

  Achille Replinger shook his head. He didn’t care about the money. Confused, he stopped to look at Corso mistrustfully a couple of times over his glasses. He bent over the manuscript again.

  “A pity,” he said at last. He regarded Corso with curiosity, as if wondering how on earth such a thing had fallen into his hands. “How did you get hold of it?”

  “I inherited it from an old aunt. Have you ever seen it before?”

  Still suspicious, Replinger looked over Corso’s shoulder, through the window at the street, as if someone out there might be able to give him some information about his visitor. Or maybe he was considering how to answer Corso’s question. He pulled at his mustache, as if it were false and he were making sure it was still in place, and smiled evasively.

  “Here in the quartier you can never be sure if you’ve seen something before.... This has always been a good area for people who deal in books and prints. People come here to buy and sell, and everything has passed several times through the same hands.” He paused to catch his breath, then looked at Corso uneasily. “I don’t think so.... No, I’ve never seen this manuscript before,” he said. He looked out at the street again, flushed. “I’d be sure if I had.”

  “So it’s authentic?” asked Corso.

  “Well... In fact, yes.” Replinger wheezed as he stroked the blue pages. He seemed to be trying to stop himself from touching them. Finally he held one up between his thumb and forefinger. “Semirounded, medium-weight handwriting, no annotations or erasures ... Almost no punctuation marks, and unexpected capital letters. This is definitely Dumas at his peak, toward the middle of his life, when he wrote The Musketeers.” He’d become more animated as he spoke. Now he fell silent and lifted a finger. Corso could see him smiling beneath his mustache. He seemed to have reached a decision. “Wait just one moment.”

  He went over to one of the filing cabinets marked D and took out some buff-colored folders.

  “All this is by Alexandre Dumas pere. The handwriting is identical.”

  There were about a dozen documents, some unsigned or else initialed A. D. Some had the full signature. Most were short notes to publishers, letters to friends, or invitations.

  “This is one of his American autographs,” explained Replinger. “Lincoln requested one, and Dumas sent him ten dollars and a hundred autographs. They were sold in Pittsburgh for charity.” He showed Corso all the documents with restrained but obvious professional pride. “Look at this one. An invitation to dine with him on Montecristo, at the house he had built in Port-Marly. Sometimes he signed only his initials, and sometimes he used pseudonyms. But not all the autographs in circulation are authentic. At the newspaper The Musketeer, which he owned, there was a man called Viellot who could imitate his handwriting and signature. And during the last three years of his life, Dumas’s hands trembled so much he had to dictate his work.”

  “Why blue paper?”

  “He had it sent from Lille. It was made for him specially by a printer who was a great admirer. He almost always used this color, especially for the novels. Occasionally he used pale pink for his articles, or yellow for poetry. He used several different pens, depending on the kind of thing he was writing. And he couldn’t stand blue ink.”

  Corso pointed to the four white pages of the manuscript, with notes and corrections. “What about these?”

  Replinger frowned. “Maquet. His collaborator, Auguste Maquet. They are corrections made by Dumas to the original text.” He stroked his mustache. Then he bent over and read aloud in a theatrical voice: “Horrifying! Horrifying!” murmured Athas, as Porthos shattered the bottles and Aramis gave somewhat belated orders to send for a confessor.... Replinger broke off with a sigh. He nodded, satisfied, and then showed Corso the page. “Look: all Maquet wrote was: And he expired before d’Artagnan’s terrified companions. Dumas crossed out that line and added others above it, fleshing out the passage with more dialogue.”

  “What can you tell me about Maquet?” Replinger shrugged his powerful shoulders, hesitating. “Not a great deal.” Once again he sounded evasive. “He was ten years younger than Dumas. A mutual friend, Gerard de Nerval, recommended him. Maquet wrote historical novels without success. He showed Dumas the original version of one, Buvat the Good, or the Conspiracy of Cellamare. Dumas turned the story into The Chevalier d’Harmental and had it published under his name. In return Maquet was paid twelve hundred francs.”

  “Can you tell from the handwriting and the style of writing when ‘The Anjou Wine’ was written?”

  “Of course I can. It’s similar to other documents from 1844, the year of The Three Musketeers.... These white and blue pages fit in with his way of working. Dumas and his associate would piece the story together. From Courtilz’s D’Artagnan they took the names of their heroes, the journey to Paris, the intrigue with Milady, and the character of the innkeeper’s wife— Dumas gave Madame Bonacieux the features of his mistress, Belle Krebsamer. Constance’s kidnapping came from the Memoirs of De la Porte, a man in the confidence of Anne of Austria. And they obtained the famous story of the diamond tags from La Rochefoucauld and from a book by Roederer, Political and Romantic Intrigues from the Court of France. At that time, in addition to The Three Musketeers, they were also writing Queen Margot and The Chevalier de la Maison Rouge.”

  Replinger paused again for breath. He was becoming more and more flushed and animated as he spoke. He mentioned the last few titles in a rush, stumbling a little over the words. He was afraid of boring Corso, but at the same time he wanted to give him all the information he could.

  “There’s an amusing anecdote about The Chevalier de la Maison Rouge,” he went on when he’d caught his breath.

  “When the serial was announced with its original title, The Knight of Rougeville, Dumas received a letter of complaint from a marquis of the sam
e name. This made him change the title, but soon afterward he received another letter. ‘My dear Sir,’ wrote the marquis. ‘Please give your novel whatever title you wish. I am the last of my family and will blow my brains out in an hour.’ And the Marquis de Rougeville did indeed commit suicide, over some woman.”

  He gasped for air. Large and pink-cheeked, he smiled apologetically and leaned one of his strong hands on the table next to the blue pages. He looked like an exhausted giant, thought Corso. Porthos in the cave at Locmaria.

  “Boris Balkan didn’t do you justice. You’re an expert on Dumas. I’m not surprised you’re friends.”

  “We respect each other. But I’m only doing my job.” Replinger looked down, embarrassed. “I’m a conscientious Frenchman who works with annotated books and documents and handwritten dedications. Always by nineteenth-century French authors. I couldn’t evaluate the things that come to me if I wasn’t sure who wrote them and how. Do you understand?” “Perfectly,” answered Corso. “It’s the difference between a professional and a vulgar salesman.”