The Dumas Club

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Like a pilgrimage. Or a field trip, as we’d say nowadays.” “That’s what I think,” the baroness agreed with satisfaction. Corso, now well and truly adopted, was moving quickly to the top of the class. “It must be more than coincidence that Aristide Torchia went to the three districts in which all the esoteric knowledge of the day was concentrated. And in a Prague whose streets still echoed with the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, where the last manuscripts of Chaldean magic and the Pythagorean keys, lost or dispersed after the murder of Metapontius, were to be found.” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice: Miss Marple about to confide in her best friend that she found cyanide in the tea cakes. “In that Prague, Mr. Corso, in those dark studies, there were men who practiced the carmina, the art of magic words, and necromancy, the art of communicating with the dead.” She paused, holding her breath, before whispering, “And goety ...” “The art of communicating with the devil.” “Yes.” She leaned back in her armchair, deliciously shocked by it all. She was in her element. Her eyes shone, and she was speaking quickly, as if she had much to say and too little time. “At that time, Torchia lived in a place where the pages and engravings that had survived wars, fires, and persecution were hidden.... The remains of the magic book that opens the doors to knowledge and power: the Delomelanicon, the word that summons the darkness.”

  She said it in a conspiratorial, almost theatrical tone, but she was also smiling, as if she didn’t quite take it seriously herself, or was suggesting that Corso maintain a healthy distance.

  “Once he had completed his apprenticeship, Torchia returned to Venice,” she went on. “Take note of this, because it’s important: in spite of the risks he would run in Italy, the printer left the relative safety of Prague to return to his hometown. There he published a series of compromising books that led to his being burned at the stake. Isn’t that strange?” “Seems as if he had a mission to accomplish.” “Yes. But given by whom?” The baroness opened The Nine Doors at the title page. “By authority and permission of the , superiors. Makes one think, doesn’t it? It’s very likely that Torchia became a member of a secret brotherhood in Prague and was entrusted with spreading a message. A kind of preaching.”

  “You said it yourself earlier: the gospel according to Satan.” “Maybe. The fact is that Torchia published The Nine Doors at the worst time. Between 1550 and 1666, humanist Neoplatonism and the hermetic and cabbalist movements were losing the battle amid rumors of demonism. Men like Giordano Bruno and John Dee were burned at the stake or died persecuted and destitute. With the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition grew unhindered. Created to fight heresy, it specialized in witches, wizards, and sorcery to justify its shadowy existence. And here they were offered a printer who had dealings with the devil.... Torchia made things easy for them, it must be said. Listen.” She turned several pages of the book at random. “Pot mvere im.go.” She looked at Corso. “I’ve translated numerous passages. The code is quite simple. T will bring wax images to life,’ it says. ‘And unhinge the moon, and put flesh back on dead bodies.’ What do you think of that?” “Rather childish. It seems stupid to die for that.” “Maybe. One never knows. Do you like Shakespeare?” “Sometimes.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ “

  “Hamlet was a very insecure man.”

  “Not everyone is able, or deserves, to gain access to these occult things, Mr. Corso. As the old saying goes, one must know and keep silent.”

  “But Torchia didn’t.”

  “As you know, according to the cabbala, God has a terrible and secret name.”

  “The tetragrammaton.”

  “That’s right. The harmony and balance of the universe rests upon its four letters.... As the Archangel Gabriel warned Mohammed: ‘God is hidden by seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. And were those veils to be lifted, even I would be annihilated.’ But God isn’t the only one to have such a name. The devil has one too. A terrible, evil combination of letters that summons him when spoken ... and unleashes terrifying consequences.”

  “That’s nothing new. It had a name long before Christianity and Judaism: Pandora’s box.”

  She looked at him with satisfaction, as if awarding top marks.

  “Very good, Mr. Corso. In fact, down through the centuries, we’ve always talked about the same things, but with different names. Isis and the Virgin Mary, Mitra and Jesus Christ, the twenty-fifth of December as Christmas or the festival of the winter solstice, the anniversary of the unconquered sun. Think of Saint Gregory. Even in the seventh century he was recommending that missionaries use the pagan festivals and adapt them to Christianity.”

  “Sound business sense. In essence it was a marketing operation: they were trying to attract somebody else’s customers.... Could you tell me what you know about Pandora’s boxes and such like. Including pacts with the devil.”

  “The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient. Gervase of Tilbury in the thirteenth century and Gerson in the fourteenth both mentioned it. As for pacts with the devil, the tradition goes back even further: from the Book of Enoch to Saint Jeronimus, through the cabbala and the Church Fathers. Not forgetting Bishop Theophilus, who was actually a ‘lover of knowledge,’ the historical Faust, and Roger Bacon. Or Pope Sylvester II, of whom it was said that he robbed the Saracens of a book that ‘contained all one needs to know.’ “ “So it was a question of obtaining knowledge.” “Of course. Nobody would take so much trouble, wandering to the very edge of the abyss, just to kill time. Scholarly de-monology identifies Lucifer with knowledge. In Genesis, the -devil in the form of a serpent succeeds in getting man to stop being a simpleton and gain awareness, free will, lucidity, knowledge, with all the pain and uncertainty that they entail.” The conversation of the evening before was too fresh so, inevitably, Corso thought of the girl. He picked up The Nine Doors and with the excuse of looking at it again in better light, he went to the window. She was no longer there. Surprised, he looked up and down the street, along the embankment and the stone benches under the trees, but couldn’t see her. He was puzzled but didn’t have time to think about it. Frieda Ungern was speaking again.

  “Do you like guessing games? Puzzles with hidden keys? In a way the book you’re holding is exactly that. Like any intelligent being, the devil likes games, riddles. Obstacle courses where the weak and incapable fall by the wayside and only superior spirits—the initiates—win.” Corso moved closer to the desk and put down the book, open at the frontispiece. The serpent with the tail in its mouth wound around the tree. “He who sees nothing but a serpent in the figure devouring its tail deserves to go no further.”

  “What is this book for?” asked Corso.

  The baroness put a finger to her lips like the knight in the first engraving. She was smiling.

  “Saint John of Patmos says that in the reign of the Second Beast, before the final, decisive battle of Armageddon, ‘only he who has the mark, the name of the Beast or the number of his name, will be able to buy and sell.’ Waiting for the hour to come, Luke (4:13) tells us at the end of his story about temptation that the devil, repudiated three times, ‘has withdrawn until the appropriate time.’ But the devil left several paths for the impatient, including the way to reach him, to make a pact with him.”

  “To sell him one’s soul.”

  Frieda Ungern giggled confidentially. Miss Marple with her cronies, engaged in gossip about the devil. You’ll never guess the latest about Satan. This, that, and the other. I don’t know where to start, Peggy my dear.

  “The devil learned his lesson,” she said. “He was young and naive, and he made mistakes. Souls escaped at the last minute through the false door, saving themselves for the sake of love, God’s mercy, and other specious promises. So he ended up including a nonnegotiable clause for the handing over of body and soul once the deadline had expired ‘without reserve of any right to redemption, or future recourse to God’s
mercy.’ The clause is in fact to be found in this book.”

  “What a lousy world,” said Corso. “Even Lucifer has to resort to the small print.”

  “You must understand. Nowadays people will swindle you out of anything. Even their soul. His clients slip away and don’t comply with their contractual obligations. The devil’s fed up and he has every reason to be.”

  “What else is in the book? What do the nine engravings mean?”

  “In principle they’re puzzles that have to be solved. Used in conjunction with the text, they confer power. And provide the formula for constructing the magic name to make Satan appear.”

  “Does it work?” “No. It’s a forgery.” “Have you tried it yourself?” Frieda Ungern looked shocked.

  “Can you see me at my age, standing in a magic circle, invoking Beelzebub? Please. However much he looked like John Barrymore fifty years ago, a beau ages too. Can you imagine the disappointment at my age? I prefer to be faithful to the memories of my youth.”

  Corso looked at her in mock surprise. “But surely you and the devil... Your readers take you for a committed witch.”

  “Well, they’re mistaken. What I look for in the devil is money, not emotion.” She looked at the window. “I spent my, husband’s fortune building up this collection, so I have to live off my royalties.”

  “Which are considerable, I’m sure. You’re the queen of the

  bookshops.”

  “But life is expensive, Mr. Corso. Very expensive, especially when one has to make deals with people like our friend Mr. Montegrifo to get the rare books one wants. Satan serves as a good source of income nowadays, but that’s all. I’m seventy years old. I don’t have time for gratuitous, silly fantasies, spinsters’ dreams.... Do you understand?”

  It was Corso’s turn to smile. “Perfectly.”

  “When I say that this book is a forgery,” continued the baroness, “it’s because I’ve studied it in depth. There’s something in it that doesn’t work. There are gaps in it, blanks. I mean this figuratively, because my copy is in fact complete. It belonged to Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s mistress. She was a high priestess of Satanism and managed to have the ritual of the Black Mass included in the palace routine. There is a letter from Madame de Montespan to Madame De Peyrolles, her friend and confidante, in which she complains of the inefficacy of a book which, she states, ‘has all that which the sages specify, and yet there is something incorrect in it, a play on words which never falls into the correct sequence.’ “ “Who else owned it?”

  “The Count of Saint Germain, who sold it to Cazotte.” “Jacques Cazotte?”

  “Yes. The author of The Devil in Love, who was guillotined in 1792. Do you know the book?”

  Corso nodded cautiously. The links were so obvious that they were impossible. “I read it once.”

  Somewhere in the apartment a phone rang, and the secretary’s steps could be heard along the corridor. The ringing stopped.

  “As for The Nine Doors” the baroness continued, “the trail went cold here in Paris, at the time of the Terror after the revolution. There are a couple of subsequent references, but they’re very vague. Gerard de Nerval mentions it in passing in one of his articles, assuring us that he saw it at a friend’s house.” Corso blinked imperceptibly behind his glasses. “Dumas was a friend of his,” he said, alert.

  “Yes. But Nerval doesn’t say at whose house. The fact is, nobody saw the book again until the Petain collaborator’s collection was auctioned, which is when I got hold of it....”

  Corso was no longer listening. According to the legend, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself with the cord from a bodice, Madame de Montespan’s. Or was it Madame de Maintenon’s?

  Whoever it belonged to, Corso couldn’t help drawing worrying

  parallels with the cord from Enrique Taillefer’s dressing gown.

  The secretary came to the door, interrupting his thoughts.

  Somebody wanted Corso on the telephone. He excused himself and walked past the tables of readers out into the corridor, full of yet more books and plants. On a walnut corner table there was an antique metal phone with the receiver off the hook.

  “Hello.”

  “Corso? It’s Irene Adler.”

  “So I gather.” He looked behind him down the empty corridor. The secretary had disappeared. “I was surprised you weren’t still keeping a lookout. Where are you calling from?” “The bar on the corner. There’s a man watching the house. That’s why I came here.”

  For a moment Corso just breathed slowly. Then he bit off a hangnail. It was bound to happen sooner or later, he thought with twisted resignation. The man was part of the landscape, or the furniture. Then, although he knew it was pointless, he said:

  “Describe him.”

  “Dark, with a mustache and a big scar on his face.” The girl’s voice was calm, without any trace of emotion or awareness of danger. “He’s sitting in a gray BMW across the street.” “Has he seen you?”

  “I don’t know. But I can see him. He’s been there an hour. He got out of the car twice: first to look at the names at the door, and then to buy a newspaper.”

  Corso spat the hangnail out of his mouth and sucked his thumb. It smarted. “Listen. I don’t know what the man’s up to. I don’t even know if the two of you are part of the same setup. But I don’t like him being near you. Not at all. So go back to the hotel.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Corso. I’ll go where I have to.” She added, “Regards to Treville,” and hung up.

  Corso made a gesture halfway between exasperation and sarcasm, because he was thinking the same thing and didn’t like the coincidence. He stood for a moment looking at the receiver before hanging up. Of course, she was reading The Three Musketeers. She’d even had the book open when he saw her from the window. In chapter 3, having just arrived in Paris, and during an audience with Monsieur de Treville, commander of the king’s musketeers d’Artagnan sees Rochefort from the window. He runs after him, bumps into Athos’s shoulder, Porthos’s shoulder belt, and Aramis’s handkerchief. Regards to Treville. It was a clever joke, if it was spontaneous. But Corso didn’t find it at all funny.

  After he hung up, he stood thinking for a moment in the darkness of the corridor. Maybe that’s exactly what they were expecting him to do: rush downstairs after Rochefort, sword in hand, taking the bait. The girl’s call might even have been part of the plan. Or maybe—and this was really getting convoluted—it had been a warning about the plan, if there was one. That’s if she was playing fair-^Corso was too experienced to put his hand in the fire for anybody.

  Bad times, he said to himself again. Absurd times. After so many books, films, and TV shows, after reading on so many different possible levels, it was difficult to tell if you were seeing the original or a copy; difficult to know whether the image was real, inverted, or both, in a hall of mirrors; difficult to know the authors’ intentions. It was as easy to fall short of the truth as to overshoot it with one’s interpretations. Here was one more reason to feel envious of his great-grandfather with the grenadier’s mustache and with the smell of gunpowder floating over the muddy fields of Flanders. In those days a flag was still a flag, the Emperor was the Emperor, a rose was a rose was a rose. But now at least, here in Paris, something was clear to Corso: even as a second-level reader he was prepared to play the game only up to a certain point. He no longer had the youth, the innocence, or the desire to go and fight at a place chosen by his opponents, three duels arranged in ten minutes, in the grounds of the Carmelite convent or wherever the hell it might be. When the time came to say hello, he’d make sure he approached Rochefort with everything in his favor, if possible from behind, with a steel bar in his hand. He owed it to him since that narrow street in Toledo, not forgetting the interest accrued in Sintra. Corso would settle his debts calmly. Biding his time.

  XI. THE BANKS OF THE SEINE

  This mystery is considered insoluble for the very same

  reasons that should lead
one to consider it soluble.

  —E. A. Poe, THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

  The code is simple,” said

  Frieda Ungern, “consisting of abbreviations similar to those used in ancient Latin manuscripts. This may be because Aristide Torchia took the major part of the text word for word from another manuscript, possibly the legendary Delomelanicon. In the first engraving, the meaning is obvious to anyone slightly familiar with esoteric language: NEM. PERV.T QUI N.N LEG. CERT.RIT is obviously NEMO PERVENIT QUI NON LEGITIME CERTAVERIT.”

  “Only he who has fought according to the rules will succeed.”

  They were on their third cup of coffee, and it was obvious, at least on a formal level, that Corso had been adopted. He saw the baroness nod, gratified.

  “Very good. Can you interpret any part of this engraving?”

  “No,” Corso lied calmly. He had just noticed that in the baroness’s copy there were three, not four, towers in the walled city toward which the horseman rode. “Except for the character’s gesture, which seems eloquent.”

  “And so it is: he is turned to any follower, with a finger to his lips, advising silence.... It’s the tacere of the philosophers of the occult. In the background the city walls surround the towers, the secret. Notice that the door is closed. It must be opened.”

  Tense and alert, Corso turned more pages until he came to the second engraving, the hermit in front of another door, holding the key in his right hand. The legend read CLAUS. PAT.T. “CLAUSAE PATENT,” the baroness deciphered. “They open that which is closed. The closed doors ... The hermit symbolizes knowledge, study, wisdom. And look, at his side there’s the same black dog that, according to legend, accompanied Agrippa. The faithful dog. From Plutarch to Bram Stoker and his Dracula, not forgetting Goethe’s Faust, the black dog is the animal the devil most often chooses to embody him. As for the lantern, it belongs to the philosopher Diogenes who so despised worldly powers. All he requested of powerful Alexander was that he should not overshadow him, that he move because he was standing in front of the sun, the light.” “And this letter Teth?”