The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "They always have." The girl was staring at the muddy river as if it were carrying away her memories. Corso saw her smile thoughtfully, absently. "I never knew an impartial god. Or devil." She turned to him suddenly—her earlier thoughts seemed to have been washed downstream. "Do you believe in the devil, Corso?"

  He looked at her intently, but the river had also washed away the images that filled her eyes seconds before. All he could see there now was liquid green, and light.

  "I believe in stupidity and ignorance." He smiled wearily at the girl. "And I think that the best cut of all is the one you get here. See?" He pointed at his groin. "In the femoral artery. While you're in somebody's arms."

  "What are you so afraid of, Corso? That I'll put my arms around you? That the sky'll fall on you?"

  "I'm afraid of wooden horses, cheap gin, and pretty girls. Especially when they give me presents. And when they go by the name of the woman who defeated Sherlock Holmes."

  They continued walking and were now on the wooden planks of the Pont des Arts. The girl stopped and leaned on the metal rail, by a street artist selling tiny watercolors.

  "I like this bridge," she said. "No cars. Only lovers and old ladies in hats. People with nothing to do. This bridge has absolutely no common sense."

  Corso said nothing. He was watching the barges, masts down, pass between the pillars that supported the iron structure. Nikon's steps had once echoed alongside his on that bridge. He remembered that she too stopped at a stall that sold watercolors. Maybe it was the same one. She wrinkled her nose, because her light meter couldn't deal with the dazzling sunshine that came slanting across the spire and towers of Notre-Dame. They bought foie gras and a bottle of Burgundy. Later they had it for dinner in their hotel room, sitting on their bed watching one of those wordy discussions on TV with huge studio audiences that the French like so much. Earlier, on the bridge, Nikon had taken a photograph of him without his knowing. She confessed this, her mouth full of bread and foie gras, her lips moistened with Burgundy, as she stroked his side with her bare foot. I know you hate it, Lucas Corso, but you'll just have to put up with it. I got you in profile on the bridge watching the barges pass underneath you almost look handsome this time, you bastard. Nikon was Ashkenazi, with large eyes. Her father had been number 77,843 in Treblinka, saved by the bell in the last round. Whenever Israeli soldiers appeared on TV, invading places in huge tanks, she jumped off the bed, naked, and kissed the screen her eyes wet with tears, whispering "Shalom, shalom" in a caressing tone. The same tone she used when she called Corso by his first name, until the day she stopped. Nikon. He never got to see the photograph of him leaning on the Pont des Arts, watching the barges pass under the arches. In profile almost looking handsome, you bastard.

  When he looked up, Nikon had gone. Another woman was by his side. Tall, with tanned skin, a short boyish haircut, and eyes the color of freshly washed grapes, almost colorless. For a second he blinked, confused, until everything fell back into place. The present cut cleanly, like a scalpel. Corso, in profile, in black and white (Nikon always worked in black and white), fluttered down into the river and was swept downstream with the dead leaves and the rubbish discharged by the barges and the drains. Now, the woman who wasn't Nikon was holding a small, leather-bound book. She was holding it out to him.

  "I hope you like it."

  The Devil in Love, by Jacques Cazotte, the 1878 edition. When he opened it, Corso recognized the prints from the first edition in a facsimile appendix: Alvaro in the magic circle before the devil, who asks, "Che vuoi?"; Biondetta untangling her hair with her fingers; the handsome boy sitting at the harpsichord ... He chose a page at random:

  ... man emerged from a handful of earth and water. Why should a woman not be made of dew, earthly vapors, and rays of light, of the condensed residues of a rainbow? Where does the possible lie? And where the impossible?

  He closed the book and looked up. His eyes met the smiling eyes of the girl. Below, in the water, the sun sparkled in the wake of a boat, and lights moved over her skin like the reflections from the facets of a diamond.

  "Residues of a rainbow," quoted Corso. "What do you know of any of that?"

  She ran her hand through her hair and turned her face to the sun, closing her eyes against the glare. Everything about her was light: the reflection of the river, the brightness of the morning, the two green slits between her dark eyelashes.

  "I know what I was told a long time ago. The rainbow is the bridge between heaven and earth. It will shatter at the end of the world, once the devil has crossed it on horseback."

  "Not bad. Did your grandmother tell you that?"

  She shook her head. She looked at Corso again, absorbed and serious.

  "I heard it told to a friend, Bileto." As she said the name, she stopped a moment and frowned tenderly, like a little girl revealing a secret. "He likes horses and wine, and he's the most optimistic person I know. He's still hoping to get back to heaven."

  THEY CROSSED TO THE other side of the bridge. Strangely, Corso felt that the gargoyles of Notre-Dame were watching him from a distance. They were forgeries, of course, like so many other things. They and their infernal grimaces, horns, and goatee beards hadn't been there when honest master builders had looked up, sweaty and proud, and drunk a glass of eau-de-vie. Or when Quasimodo brooded in the bell towers over his unrequited love for the gypsy Esmeralda. But ever since Charles Laughton, as the hideous hunchback who resembled them, and Gina Lollobrigida in the remake—Technicolor, as Nikon would have specified—were executed in their shadow, it was impossible to think of Notre-Dame without the sinister neomedieval sentinels. Corso imagined the bird's-eye view: the Pont Neuf, and beyond it, narrow and dark in the luminous morning, the Pont des Arts over the gray-green band of river, with two tiny figures moving imperceptibly toward the right bank. Bridges and rainbows with black Caronte barges gliding slowly beneath the pillars and vaults of stone. The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.

  They emerged opposite the Louvre and stopped at a traffic light before crossing. Corso shifted the strap of his canvas bag on his shoulder and glanced absently to right and left. The traffic was heavy, and he happened to notice one of the passing cars. He froze, turned to stone like a gargoyle on the cathedral.

  "What's the matter?" asked the girl when the lights turned green and she saw that Corso wasn't moving. "You look like you've seen a ghost!"

  He had. Not one but two. They were in the back of a taxi already moving off in the distance, engaged in animated conversation, and they hadn't noticed Corso. The woman was blond and very attractive. He recognized her immediately despite her hat and the veil covering her eyes. Liana Taillefer. Next to her, an arm around her shoulders, showing his best side and stroking his curly beard vainly, was Flavio La Ponte.

  X. NUMBER THREE

  They suspected that he had no heart.

  —R. Sabatini, SCARAMOUCHE

  Corso had a rare knack: he could make a loyal ally of a stranger instantly, in return for a tip or even a smile. As we've seen, there was something about him—his half-calculated clumsiness, his customary, friendly rabbit expression, his air of absentminded helplessness which was nothing of the sort—that won people over. This happened to some of us. And it happened to Gruber, the concierge of the Louvre Concorde, with whom Corso had had dealings for fifteen years. Gruber was dry and imperturbable, with a crew cut and a permanent poker player's expression around the mouth. during the retreat of 1944, when he was sixteen years old and a Croat volunteer in the Horst Wessel Eighteenth Panzergrenadier division, a Russian bullet hit him in the spine. It left him with an Iron Corss Seond Class and three fused vertebrae for life. This was why he was so stiff and upright behind the reception desk, as if he were wearing a steel corset.

  "I need a favor, Gruber."

  "Yes, sir."

&n
bsp; He almost clicked his heels as he stood to attention. The impeccable burgundy jacket with the gold keys on the lapels gave the old exile a military air, very much to the taste of the Central Europeans who stayed at the hotel. After the fall of Communism and the fragmenting of the Slav hordes, they arrived in Paris to glance at the Champs-Elysees out of the corners of their eyes and dream of a Fourth Reich.

  "La Ponte, Flavio. Nationality Spanish. Also Herrero, Liana, though she may be going by the name of Taillefer or de Taillefer. I want to know if they're at a hotel in the city."

  He wrote the names on a card and handed it to Gruber, together with five hundred francs. Corso always gave tips or bribes with a shrug, as if to say, "I'll do the same for you sometime." It made it such a friendly-conspiratorial exchange, it was difficult to tell who was doing whom a favor. Gruber, who murmured a polite "Merci m'sieu" to Spaniards on package tours, to Italians in loud ties, and to Americans with airline bags and baseball caps for a miserable ten-franc tip, took Corso's banknote without a word or even a nod. He just slipped it in his pocket with an elegant, semicircular movement of the hand and a croupier's impassive gravity, reserved for the few, like Corso, who still knew how to play the game. Gruber had learned the job in the days when a guest had only to raise an eyebrow for hotel employees to come running. The dear old Europe of international hotels was now reduced to a few cognoscenti.

  "Are the lady and gentleman staying together?"

  "I don't know." Corso frowned. He pictured La Ponte emerging from the bathroom in an embroidered dressing gown and Taillefer's widow lying on the bed in a silk nightgown. "I'd like to know that too."

  Gruber bowed imperceptibly. "It'll take a few hours, Mr. Corso."

  "I know." He glanced down the corridor that led from the lobby to the dining room. The girl was there, her duffel coat under her arm and her hands in her pockets, examining a display of perfumes and silk scarves. "What about her?"

  The concierge took a card from under the desk.

  "Irene Adler," he read. "British passport, issued two months ago. Nineteen years old. Address: 223B Baker Street, London."

  "Don't joke with me, Gruber."

  "I'd never take such a liberty, Mr. Corso. That's what it says here."

  There was the hint, the faintest suggestion of a smile on the face of the old SS Waffen. Corso had seen him smile only once: the day the Berlin Wall came down. He observed Gruber's white crew cut, stiff neck, hands arranged symmetrically, wrists resting exactly on the edge of the desk. Old Europe, or what was left of it. Gruber was too old to go back home and risk finding that nothing was as he remembered; not the bell tower in Zagreb, not the warm, blond peasant girls smelling of fresh bread not the green plains with rivers and bridges that he had seen blown up twice—once in his youth in the retreat from Tito's guerrillas and then on TV autumn 1991 in the faces of the Serbian Chetniks Corso could picture Gruber in his room standing in front of a dusty portrait of the Emperor Franz Joseph taking off the maroon jacket with little golden keys on the lapels as if it were his Austro Hungarian army jacket He probably played Radetsky's March on a record player drank a toast with a glass of Montenegran liqueur, and masturbated to videos of the Empress Sissy.

  The girl was no longer looking at the display but now at Corso. 223B Baker Street, he repeated to himself and felt the urge to guffaw. He wouldn't have been in the least surprised had a bellboy appeared with an invitation from Milady de Winter to take tea at If Castle or at the palace in Rumania with Richelieu, Professor Moriarty, and Rupert de Hentzau. Since this was a literary matter, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  He asked for a phone book and looked up Baroness Ungern's number. Then, ignoring the girl's stare, he went to the phone booth in the lobby and made an appointment for the following day. He also tried Varo Borja's number in Toledo, but there was no answer.

  HE WAS WATCHING TELEVISION with the sound down: a film with Gregory Peck surrounded by seals, a fight in a hotel ballroom, two schooners side by side, waves crashing against the bow, heading north in full sail, toward true freedom which begins only ten miles off the nearest coast. At Corso's elbow a bottle of Bols, its level below the Plimsoll line, stood guard on the bedside table like an old, alcoholic grenadier on the eve of battle, between The Nine Doors and the folder with the Dumas manuscript.

  Corso took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were red from cigarette smoke and gin. On the bed, with the precision of an archaeologist, he had laid out the fragments of book number two rescued from the fireplace in Victor Fargas's house. There wasn't much left: the boards, protected by the covering of leather, were less damaged, but of the rest there remained no more than charred margins and a few barely legible paragraphs. He picked up one of the pieces, made yellow and brittle by the fire:... si non obig.nem me. ips.s fecere, f.r q.qe die tib. do vitam m.m sicut t.m. ... This came from one of the bottom corners He examined it for a few moments then searched for the same page in book number one It was [>] and the two paragraphs were identical He did the same with as many parapranhs as he could, managing to identify sixteen. It was impossible to tell where another twenty two of the fragments came from; they were too small or too damaged Eleven more fragments were blank and he identified only one thanks to a crooked 7 that was the third and only legible digit in the page number [>].

  The cigarette had burned down and was burning his lips. He stubbed it out in the ashtray, then took a swig of the Bols directly from the bottle. He was wearing an old cotton khaki shirt with big pockets, sleeves rolled up, and a crumpled tie. On the TV, the man from Boston standing by the helm was embracing a Russian princess. They both moved their lips soundlessly, happy and in love under a Technicolor sky. The only noise in the room was the gentle rattling of the window-panes caused by the traffic rumbling by, two floors below, heading for the Louvre.

  Nikon loved that kind of thing. Corso remembered how she would be moved, like a sentimental little girl, by a couple kissing against a cloudy sky to the sound of violins and "The End" across the screen. Sometimes, munching on potato chips at the cinema or in front of the television, she'd lean on Corso's shoulder and cry quietly, gently, for a long time, her eyes fixed on the screen. It might be Paul Henreid singing the Marseillaise in Rick's café; Rutger Hauer dying, head bowed, in the final shots of Blade Runner; John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in front of the fireplace at Innisfree; Custer and Arthur Kennedy on the eve of Little Big Horn; O'Toole as Jim deceived by Gentleman Brown; Henry Fonda on his way to the O. K. Corral; or Marcello Mastroianni up to his waist in a pond at a spa retrieving a woman's hat, waving to right and left, elegant, imperturbable, and in love with a pair of dark eyes. Nikon was happy crying over it all, and she was proud of her tears. It's because I'm alive, she'd say afterward, laughing, her eyes still wet. Because I'm part of the rest of the world and I'm glad I am. Films are for everyone, collective, generous, with children cheering when the cavalry arrives. They're even better on TV: two can watch and comment. But your books are selfish. Solitary. Some of them can't even be read, they fall to bits if you open them. A person who's interested only in books doesn't need other people, and that frightens me. Nikon was eating the last potato chip and watching him intently, her lips parted, searching his face for signs of an illness that would soon manifest itself. Sometimes you frighten me.

  Happy endings. Corso pressed a button on the remote, and the image disappeared from the screen. Now he was in Paris and Nikon was somewhere in Africa or the Balkans photographing children with tragic eyes. Once, in a bar, he thought he caught sight of her on the news, in the chaotic shots of a bombardment. She was surrounded by terrified fleeing refugees, her hair in a plait, cameras around her neck and one at her eye, backed by smoke and flames. Nikon. Of all the universal lies she accepted unquestioningly, the happy ending was the most absurd. The hero and heroine lived happily ever after, and the ending seemed indisputable, definitive. No questions asked about how long love or happiness lasts in that "forever" that can be divi
ded into lifetimes, years, months. Even days. Until the very end, their inevitable end, Nikon refused to accept that the hero might have drowned two weeks later when his boat struck a reef in the Southern Hebrides. Or that the heroine was run over by a car three months later. Or that maybe everything turned out differently, in a thousand different ways one of them had an affair, one of them became bitter or bored, one of them wanted to back out. Maybe nights full of tears, silence, and loneliness followed that screen kiss. Maybe cancer killed him before he was forty. Maybe she lived on and died in an old folks' home at the age of ninety. Maybe the handsome officer turned into a pathetic ruin, his wounds becoming hideous scars and his glorious battles forgotten by all And maybe old and defenseless the hero and heroine suffered ordeals without the strength to fight or defend themselves tossed this way and that by the storms of life by stupidity by cruelty by the miserable human condition.

  Sometimes you frighten me, Lucas Corso.

  FIVE MINUTES BEFORE ELEVEN that night, he solved the mystery of the fire at Victor Fargas's house. Although it didn't make things any clearer. He looked at his watch as he stretched and yawned. Glancing again at the fragments spread out on the bedcover, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror next to the old postcard, which was stuck into the wooden frame, of the hussars outside Reims cathedral. He was disheveled, unshaven, and his glasses sat crookedly on his nose. He started to laugh, one of his bad-tempered, wolflike, twisted laughs reserved for special occasions. And this was one. All the fragments of The Nine Doors that he had managed to identify came from pages with text. No trace remained of the nine engravings or the frontispiece. There were two possibilities: either they had burned in the fire or—more likely, considering the torn-off cover—somebody had taken them before throwing the rest of the book into the flames. Whoever it was must have thought himself, or herself, very clever. Or themselves. Maybe, after the unexpected sighting of La Ponte and Liana Taillefer at the traffic light, he should get used to the third person plural. The question was whether the clues Corso was following were his opponent's mistakes or tricks. In either case they were very elaborate.