The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Yes," said Borja. "Though there's a small error in Mateu: it states that there are eight illustrations, when there are nine of them.... But formal authenticity means little. According to the bibliographies, the Fargas and Ungern copies are also authentic."

  "Maybe all three are."

  Borja shook his head. "That's not possible. The records of Torchia's trial leave no doubt: only one copy was saved." He smiled mysteriously. "I have other proof."

  "Such as?"

  "It doesn't concern you."

  "Then why do you need me?"

  Borja pushed back his chair and stood up.

  "Come with me."

  "I've already told you," Corso said, shaking his head, "I'm not remotely interested in this."

  "You're lying. You're burning with curiosity. You'd do the job for free."

  He took the check and put it in his vest pocket. Then he lead Corso up a spiral staircase to the floor above. Borja's office was at the back of his house. The house was a huge medieval building in the old part of the city, and he'd paid a fortune for it. He took Corso along a corridor leading to the hall and main entrance; they stopped at a door that opened with a modern security keypad. It was a large room with a black marble floor, a beamed ceiling, and ancient iron bars at the windows. There was a desk, leather armchairs, and a large stone fireplace. All the walls were covered with glass cabinets full of books and with prints in beautiful frames. Some of them by Holbein and Durer, Corso noted.

  "Nice room," he said. He'd never been here before. "But I thought you kept your books in the storeroom in the basement...."

  Borja stopped at his side. "These are mine. They're not for sale. Some people collect chivalric or romantic novels. Some search for Don Quixotes or uncut volumes.... All the books you see here have the same central character: the devil."

  "Can I have a look?"

  "That's why I brought you here."

  Corso took a few steps forward. The books had ancient bindings, from the leather-covered boards of the incunabula to the morocco leather decorated with plaques and rosettes. His scuffed shoes squeaked on the marble floor as he stopped in front of one of the cabinets and leaned over to examine its contents: De spectris et apparitionibus by Juan Rivio, Summa diabolica by Benedicto Casiano, La haine de Satan by Pierre Crespet, the Steganography of Abbot Tritemius, De Consummatione saeculi by St. Pontius... They were all extremely rare and valuable books, most of which Corso knew only from bibliographical references.

  "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?" said Borja, watching Corso closely. "There's nothing like that sheen, the gold on leather, behind glass.... Not to mention the treasures these books contain: centuries of study, of wisdom. Answers to the secrets of the universe and the heart of man." He raised his arms slightly and let them drop, giving up the attempt to express in words his pride at owning them all. "I know people who would kill for a collection like this."

  Corso nodded without taking his eyes off the books. "You, for instance," he said. "Although you wouldn't do it yourself. You'd get somebody to do the killing for you."

  Borja laughed contemptuously. "That's one of the advantages of having money—you can hire henchmen to do your dirty work. And remain pure yourself."

  Corso looked at the book dealer. "That's a matter of opinion," he said. He seemed to ponder the matter. "I despise people who don't get their hands dirty. The pure ones."

  "I don't care what you despise, so let's get down to serious matters."

  Borja took a few steps past the cabinets, each containing about a hundred volumes. "Ars Diavoli..." He opened the one nearest to him and ran his finger over the spines of the books, almost in a caress. "You'll never see such a collection anywhere else. These are the rarest, most choice books. It took me years to build up this collection, but I was still lacking the prize piece."

  He took out one of the books, a folio bound in black leather, in the Venetian style, with no title on the outside but with five raised bands on the spine and a golden pentacle on the front cover. Corso took it and opened it carefully. The first printed page, the title page, was in Latin: DE UMBRARUM REGNI NOVEM PORTIS, The book of the nine doors of the kingdom of shadows. Then came the printer's mark, place, name, and date: Venetiae, apud Aristidem Torchiam. M.DC.LX.VI. Cum superiorum privilegio veniaque. With the privilege and permission of the superiors.

  Borja was watching to see Corso's reaction.

  "One can always tell a book lover," he said, "by the way he handles a book."

  "I'm not a book lover."

  "True. But sometimes you make one forget that you have the manners of a mercenary. When it comes to books, certain gestures can be reassuring. The way some people touch them is criminal."

  Corso turned more pages. All the text was in Latin, printed in handsome type on thick, quality paper that had withstood the passage of time. There were nine splendid full-page engravings, showing scenes of a medieval appearance. He paused over one of them, at random. It was numbered with a Latin V, together with one Hebrew and one Greek letter or numeral. At the foot, one word which was incomplete or in code: "FR.ST.A." A man who looked like a merchant was counting out a sack of gold in front of a closed door, unaware of the skeleton behind him holding an hourglass in one hand and a pitchfork in the other.

  "What do you think?" asked Borja.

  "You told me it was a forgery, but this doesn't look like one. Have you examined it thoroughly?"

  "I've gone over the whole thing, down to the last comma, with a magnifying glass. I've had plenty of time. I bought it six months ago, when the heirs of Gualterio Terral decided to sell his collection."

  The book hunter turned more pages. The engravings were beautiful, of a simple, mysterious elegance. In another one, a young girl was about to be beheaded by an executioner in armor, his sword raised.

  "I doubt that the heirs would have sold a forgery," said Corso when he'd finished examining it. "They have too much money, and they don't give a damn about books. The catalogue for the collection even had to be drawn up by Claymore's auctioneers.... And I knew old Terral. He would never have accepted a book that had been tampered with or forged."

  "I agree," said Borja. "And he inherited The Nine Doors from his father-in-law, Don Lisardo Coy, a book collector with impeccable credentials."

  "And he," said Corso as he placed the book on the desk and pulled out his notebook from his coat pocket, "bought it from an Italian, Domenico Chiara, whose family, according to the Weiss catalogue, had owned it since 1817...."

  Borja nodded, pleased. "I see you've gone into the matter in some depth."

  "Of course I have." Corso looked at him as if he'd just said something very stupid. "It's my job."

  Borja made a placating gesture. "I don't doubt Terral and his heirs' good faith," he clarified. "Nor did I say that the book wasn't old."

  "You said it was a forgery."

  "Maybe forgery isn't the word."

  "Well, what is it then? The book belongs to the right era." Corso picked it up again and flicked his thumb against the edge of the pages, listening. "Even the paper sounds right."

  "There's something in it that doesn't sound right. And I don't mean the paper."

  "Maybe the prints."

  "What's wrong with them?"

  "I would have expected copperplates. By 1666 nobody was using woodcuts."

  "Don't forget that this was an unusual edition. The engravings are reproductions of other, older prints, supposedly discovered or seen by the printer."

  "The Delomelanicon ... Do you really believe that?"

  "You don't care what I believe. But the book's nine original engravings aren't attributed to just anybody. Legend has it that Lucifer, after being defeated and thrown out of heaven, devised the magic formula to be used by his followers: the authoritative handbook of the shadows. A terrible book kept in secret, burned many times, sold for huge sums by the few privileged to own it ... These illustrations are really satanic hieroglyphs. Interpreted with the aid of the text
and the appropriate knowledge, they can be used to summon the prince of darkness."

  Corso nodded with exaggerated gravity. "I can think of better ways to sell one's soul."

  "Please don't joke, this is more serious than it seems.... Do you know what Delomelanicon means?"

  "I think so. It comes from the Greek: delo, meaning to summon. And melas: black, dark."

  Borja's laugh was high-pitched. He said in a tone of approval: "I forgot that you're an educated mercenary. You're right: to summon the shadows, or illuminate them ... The prophet Daniel, Hippocrates, Flavius Josephus, Albertus Magnus, and Leon III all mention this wonderful book. People have been writing only for the last six thousand years, but the Delomelanicon is reputed to be three times that old. The first direct mention of it is in the Turis papyrus, written thirty-three centuries ago. Then, between 1 B.C. and the second year of our era, it is quoted several times in the Corpus Hermeticum According to the Asclemandres, the book enables one to 'face the Light.' And in an incomplete inventory of the library at Alexandria, before it was destroyed for the third and last time in the year 646, there is a specific reference to the nine magic enigmas it contains.... We don't know if there was one copy or several, or if any copies survived the burning of the library.... Since then, its trail has disappeared and reappeared throughout history, through fires, wars, and disasters."

  Corso looked doubtful. "That's always the case. All magic books have the same pedigree: from Thoth to Nicholas Flamel.... Once, a client of mine who was fascinated by alchemy asked me to find him the bibliography quoted by Fulcanelli and his followers. I couldn't convince him that half the books didn't exist."

  "Well, this one did exist. It must have, for the Holy Office to list it in its Index. Don't you think?"

  "It doesn't matter what I think. Lawyers who don't believe their clients are innocent still get them acquitted."

  "That's the case here. I'm hiring you not because you believe but because you're good."

  Corso turned more pages of the book. Another engraving, numbered I, showed a walled city on a hill. A strange unarmed horseman was riding toward the city, his finger to his lips requesting complicity or silence. The caption read: NEM. PERV.T QUI N.N LEG. CERT.RIT.

  "It's in an abbreviated but decipherable code," explained Borja, watching him. "Nemo pervenit qui non legitime certaverit."

  "Only he who has fought according to the rules will prevail?"

  "That's about it. For the moment it's the only one of the nine captions that we can decipher with any certainty. An almost identical one appears in the works of Roger Bacon, a specialist in demonology, cryptography, and magic. Bacon claimed to own a Delomelanicon that had belonged to King Solomon, containing the key to terrible mysteries. The book was made of rolls of parchment with illustrations. It was burned in 1350 by personal order of Pope Innocent VI, who declared: 'It contains a method to summon devils.' In Venice three centuries later, Aristide Torchia decided to print it with the original illustrations."

  "They're too good," objected Corso. "They can't be the originals: they'd be in an older style."

  "I agree. Torchia must have updated them."

  Another engraving, number III, showed a bridge with gate towers spanning a river. Corso looked up and saw that Borja was smiling mysteriously, like an alchemist confident of what is cooking in his crucible.

  "There's one last connection," said the book dealer. "Giordano Bruno, martyr of rationalism, mathematician, and champion of the theory that the Earth rotates around the sun..." He waved his hand contemptuously, as if all this was trivial. "But that was only part of his work. He wrote sixty-one books, and magic played an important role in them. Bruno makes specific reference to the Delomelanicon, even using the Greek words delo and melas, and he adds: 'On the path of men who want to know, there are nine secret doors.' He goes on to describe the methods for making the Light shine once more. 'Sic luceat Lux,' he writes, which is actually the motto"—Borja showed Corso the printer's mark: a tree split by lighting, a snake, and a motto—"that Aristide Torchia used on the frontispiece of The Nine Doors.... What do you think of that?"

  "It's all well and good. But it all comes to the same. You can make a text mean anything, especially if it's old and full of ambiguities."

  "Or precautions. Giordano Bruno forgot the golden rule for survival: Scire, tacere. To know and keep silent. Apparently he knew the right things, but he talked too much. And there are more coincidences: Bruno was arrested in Venice, declared an obdurate heretic, and burned alive in Rome at Campo dei Fiori in February 1600. The same journey, the same places, and the same dates that marked Aristide Torchia's path to execution sixty-seven years later: he was arrested in Venice, tortured in Rome, and burned at Campo dei Fiori in February 1667. By then very few people were being burned at the stake, and yet he was."

  "I'm impressed," said Corso, who wasn't in the least.

  Borja tutted reprovingly.

  "Sometimes I wonder if you believe in anything."

  Corso seemed to consider that for a moment, then shrugged. "A long time ago, I did believe in something. But I was young and cruel then. Now I'm forty-five: I'm old and cruel."

  "I am too. But there are things I still believe in. Things that make my heart beat faster."

  "Like money?"

  "Don't make fun of me. Money is the key that opens the door to man's dark secrets. And it pays for your services. And grants me the only thing in the world I respect: these books." He took a few steps along the cabinets full of books. "They are mirrors in the image of those who wrote them. They reflect their concerns, questions, desires, life, death ... They're living beings: you have to know how to feed them, protect them..."

  "And use them."

  "Sometimes."

  "But this one doesn't work."

  "No."

  "You've tried it."

  It was a statement, not a question. Borja looked at Corso with hostility. "Don't be absurd. Let's just say I'm certain it's a forgery, and leave it at that. Which is why I need to compare it to the other copies."

  "I still say it doesn't have to be a forgery. Books often differ even if they're part of the same edition. No two books are the same really. From birth they all have distinguishing details. And each book lives a different life: it can lose pages, or have them added or replaced, or acquire a new binding.... Over the years two books printed on the same press can end up looking entirely different. That might have happened to this one."

  "Well, find out. Investigate The Nine Doors as if were a crime. Follow trails, check each page, each engraving, the paper, the binding.... Work your way backward and find out where my copy comes from. Then do the same with the other two, in Sintra and in Paris."

  "It would help if I knew how you learned that yours was a forgery."

  "I can't tell you. Trust my intuition."

  "Your intuition is going to cost you a lot of money."

  "All you have to do is spend it."

  He pulled the check from his pocket and gave it to Corso, who turned it over in his fingers, undecided.

  "Why are you paying me in advance? You never did that before."

  "You'll have a lot of expenses to cover. This is so you can get started." He handed him a thick bound file. "Everything I know about the book is in there. You may find it useful."

  Corso was still looking at the check. "This is too much for an advance."

  "You may encounter certain complications...."

  "You don't say." As he said this, he heard Borja clear his throat. They were getting to the crux of the matter at last.

  "If you find out that the three copies are forgeries or are incomplete," Borja said, "then you'll have done your job and we'll settle up." He paused briefly and ran his hand over his tanned pate. He smiled awkwardly at Corso. "But one of the books may turn out to be authentic. In which case, you'll have more money at your disposal. Because I'll want it by whatever means, and without regard for expense."

  "You're joking."

&n
bsp; "Do I look as if I'm joking, Corso?"

  "It's against the law."

  "You've done illegal things before."

  "Not this kind of thing."

  "Nobody's ever paid you what I'll pay you."

  "How can I be sure of that?"

  "I'm letting you take the book with you. You'll need the original for your work. Isn't that enough of a guarantee?"

  The jarring sound again, warning him. Corso was still holding The Nine Doors. He put the check between the pages like a bookmark and blew some imaginary dust off the book before returning it to Borja.

  "Before, you said that with money you could pay people to do anything. Now you can test that out yourself. Go and see the owners of the books and do the dirty work yourself."

  He turned and walked toward the door, wondering how many steps he'd take before the book dealer said anything. Three.

  "This business isn't for men of words," said Borja. "It's for men of action."

  His tone had changed. Gone was the arrogant composure and the disdain for the mercenary he was hiring. On the wall, an engraving of an angel by Diirer gently beat its wings behind the glass of a picture frame, while Corso's shoes turned on the black marble floor. Next to his cabinets full of books and the barred window with the cathedral in the background, next to everything that his money could buy, Varo Borja stood blinking, disconcerted. His expression was still arrogant; he even tapped the book cover with disdain. But Lucas Corso had learned to recognize defeat in a man's eyes And fear.

  His heart was beating with calm satisfaction as, without a word, he retraced his steps. As he approached Borja, he took the check poking out from between the pages of The Nine Doors. He folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. Then he took the file and the book.

  "I'll be in touch," he said.

  He realized that he'd thrown the dice. That he'd moved to the first square in a dangerous game of Snakes and Ladders and that it was too late to turn back. But he felt like playing. He went down the stairs followed by the echo of his own dry laughter. Varo Borja was wrong. There were things money couldn't buy.