The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Corso poured the rest of the brandy into the glass. He took out his notes and set to work. He had drawn three boxes on a sheet of paper. Each box contained a number and name:

  Page after page, he jotted down any difference between book number one and book number two, however slight: a stain on a page, the ink slightly darker in one copy than in the other. When he came to the first engraving, NEM. PERVT.T QUI N.N LEG. CERT.RIT, the horseman advising the reader to keep silent, he took out a magnifying glass with a power of seven from his bag and examined both woodcuts, line by line. They were identical. He noticed that even the pressure of the engravings on the paper, like that of the typography, was the same. The lines and characters looked worn, broken, or crooked in exactly the same places in both copies This meant that number one and number two had been printed one after the other or almost and on the same press As the Ceniza brothers would have put it Corso was looking at a pair of twins.

  He went on making notes. An imperfection in line 6 of [>] in book number two made him stop a moment, then he realized it was just an ink stain. He turned more pages. Both books had the same structure: two flyleaves and 160 pages stitched into twenty gatherings of eight. All nine illustrations in both books occupied a full page. They had been printed separately on the same type of paper, blank on the reverse, and inserted into the book during the binding process. They were positioned identically in both books:

  I. between pages 16 and 17

  II. 32–33

  III. 48–49

  IIII. 64–65

  V. 80–81

  VI. 96–97

  VII. 112–113

  VIII. 128–129

  VIIII. 144–145

  Either Varo Borja was raving, or this was a very strange job Corso had been sent on. There was no way that they were forgeries. At the most, they might both have come from an edition that was apocryphal but still dated from the seventeenth century. Number one and number two were the embodiment of honesty on printed paper.

  He drank the rest of the brandy and examined illustration II with his magnifying glass. CLAUS. PAT. T., the bearded hermit holding two keys, the closed door, a lantern on the ground. He had the illustrations side by side and suddenly felt rather silly. It was like playing Find the Difference. He grimaced. Life as a game. And books as a reflection of life.

  Then he saw it. It happened suddenly, just as something that has seemed meaningless, when viewed from the correct angle, all at once appears ordered and precise. Corso breathed out, as if he were about to laugh, astounded. All that emerged was a dry sound, like a laugh of disbelief but without the humor. It wasn't possible. One didn't joke with that kind of thing. He shook his head, confused. This wasn't a cheap book of puzzles bought at a railroad station. These books were three and a half centuries old. Their printer had lost his life over them. They had been included among the books banned by the Inquisition. And they were listed in all the serious bibliographies. "Illustration II. Caption in Latin. Old man holding two keys and a lantern, standing in front of a closed door..." But nobody had compared two of the three known copies, not until now. It wasn't easy bringing them together. Or necessary. Old man holding two keys. That was enough.

  Corso got up and went to the window. He stood there awhile, looking through the panes misted by his own breath. Varo Borja was right after all. Aristide Torchia must have been laughing to himself on his pyre at Campo dei Fiori, before the flames took away his sense of humor forever. As a posthumous joke it was brilliant.

  VIII. POSTUMA NECAT

  "Is anybody there?"

  "No."

  "Too bad. He must be dead."

  —M. Leblanc, ARSÈNE LUPIN

  Lucas Corso knew better than anyone that one of the main problems of his profession was that bibliographies were compiled by scholars who never actually saw the books cited; scholars relied instead on secondhand accounts and information recorded by others. An error or incomplete description could circulate for generations without being noticed. Then by chance it came to light. This was the case with The Nine Doors. Apart from its obligatory mention in the canonical bibliographies, even the most precise references had included only summary descriptions of the nine engravings without minor details. In the case of the book's second illustration all the known texts referred to an old man who looked like a sage or a hermit, standing before a door and holding two keys. But nobody had ever bothered to specify in which hand he held the keys Now Corso had the answer in the engraving in book number one the left and in book number two the right.

  He still had to find out what number three was like. But this wasn't possible yet. Corso stayed at the Quinta da Soledade until dark. He worked solidly in the light of the candelabra, taking copious notes, checking both books over and over again. He examined each engraving until he had confirmed his theory More proof emerged. At last he sat looking at his booty in the form of notes on a sheet of paper, tables and diagrams with strange links between them. Five of the engravings were not identical in both books. In addition to the old man holding the key in different hands in engraving II, the labyrinth in IIII had an exit in one of the books but not in the other. In illustration V of book one, Death brandished an hourglass with the sand in the lower half, while in book two the sand was in the half. As for the chessboard in number VII, in Varo Borja's copy the squares were all white while in Fargas's copy they were black. And in engraving VIII, the executioner poised to behead the young woman in one of the books became an avenging angel in the other through the addition of a halo.

  There were more differences. Close examination through the magnifying glass yielded unexpected results. The printer's marks hidden in the woodcuts contained another subtle clue. A.T., Aristide Torchia, was named as the sculptor in the engraving of the old man, but as the inventor only in the same engraving in book number two, while, as the Cemza brothers had pointed out, the signature in book number one was L.F. The same difference occurred in four more illustrations. This could mean that all the woodcuts were carved by the printer himself but that the original drawings for his engravings were created by somebody else. So it wasn't a matter of a forgery dating from the same era as the books or of apocryphal reprintings. It was the printer, Torchia himself, "by authority and permission of the superiors," who had altered his own work in accordance with a preestablished plan. He had signed the engravings he changed to make sure it was clear that L.F. had created the others. Only one copy remains, he told his executioners. Whereas in fact he had left three copies, and a key that might possibly turn them into a single one. The rest of his secret he took with him to the grave.

  Corso resorted to an ancient collating system: the comparative tables used by Umberto Eco in his study of the Hanau. Having set out in order on paper the illustrations that contained differences, he obtained the following table:

  As for the engraver's marks, the variations in the signatures A.T. (the printer, Torchia) and L.F. (unknown? Lucifer?) that corresponded to sculptor or inventor were set out as follows:

  A strange code. But Corso at last had something definite. He now knew that there was a key of some sort. He stood up slowly, as if afraid that all the links would vanish before his eyes. But he was calm, like a hunter who is sure that he will catch his prey at the end, however confusing the trail.

  Hand. Exit. Sand. Board. Halo.

  He glanced out the window. Beyond the dirty panes, silhouetting a branch, a remnant of reddish light refused to disappear into the night.

  Books one and two. Differences in illustrations 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8.

  He had to go to Paris. Book number three was there, together with the possible solution to the mystery. But he was now preoccupied with another matter, something he had to deal with urgently. Varo Borja had been categorical. Now that Corso was sure he wouldn't be able to obtain book number two by conventional methods, he had to devise a plan to acquire it by means that were not conventional. With the minimum risk to Fargas, and to Corso himself, of course. Something gentle and discreet. He took ou
t his diary from his coat pocket and searched for the phone number he needed. It was the perfect job for Amilcar Pinto.

  One of the candles had burned down and went out with a small spiral of smoke. Corso could hear the violin being played somewhere in the house. He laughed dryly again, and the flames of the candelabra made shadows dance on his face as he leaned over to light a cigarette. He straightened and listened. The music was a lament that floated through the dark empty rooms with their remnants of dusty, worm-eaten furniture, painted ceilings, stained walls covered with spiderwebs and shadows; with their echoes of footsteps and voices extinguished long ago. And outside, above the rusty railings, the two statues, one with its eyes open in the darkness, the other covered by a mask of ivy, listened motionless, as time stood still, to the music that Victor Fargas played on his violin to summon the ghosts of his lost books.

  CORSO RETURNED TO THE village on foot, his hands in his coat pockets and his collar turned up. It took him twenty minutes on the deserted road. There was no moon, and he walked into large patches of darkness beneath the black canopy of trees. The almost total silence was broken only by the sound of his shoes crunching on the gravel at the side of the road, and by the channels of water coursing down the hill between rockrose and ivy, invisible in the darkness.

  A car came from behind and overtook him. Corso saw his own shadow, saw its enlarged, ghostly outline glide undulating across the nearby tree trunks and farther dense woods. Only when he was again enveloped in shadow did he breathe out and feel his tense muscles relax. He wasn't one who expected ghosts around every corner. Instead he viewed things, however extraordinary they were, with the southern fatalism of an old soldier, a fatalism no doubt inherited from his great-greatgrandfather Corso. However much you. spurred your horse in the opposite direction, the inevitable was always lurking at the gate of the nearest Samarkand picking its nails with a Venetian dagger or Scottish bayonet Even so since the incident in the street in Toledo Corso felt understandably apprehensive every time he heard a car behind him.

  Maybe because of this, when the lights of another car pulled up beside him, Corso turned sharply and moved his canvas bag to his other shoulder. He found his bunch of keys inside his coat pocket. It was not much of a weapon, but with it he could poke out the eye of an attacker. But there seemed no reason to worry. He saw a large, dark shape, like that of an old berlin carriage, and inside, lit by the faint glow from the dashboard, the profile of a man. His voice was friendly, well educated.

  "Good evening..." The accent was indefinable, neither Portuguese nor Spanish. "Do you have a match?"

  The request might be genuine, or just a pretext, Corso couldn't be sure. But, asked for a light, he didn't need to run or brandish his sharpest key. He let go of the keys, took out his matches, and lit one, shielding the flame with his hand.

  "Thanks."

  There was the scar, of course. It was an old one, long and vertical, from the temple to halfway down the left cheek. Corso got a close look as the man leaned forward to light his Montecristo cigar. Corso held the light long enough to glimpse the thick, black mustache and dark eyes watching him intently from the gloom. Then the match went out, and it was as if a black mask covered the stranger's face. The man became a shadow again, his outline barely distinguishable in the faint light from the dashboard.

  "Who in the hell are you?"

  Not a particularly brilliant question. In any case, it came too late. The question was drowned out by the sound of the engine accelerating. The twin red points of the car's taillights were already receding into the distance, leaving a fleeting trail against the dark ribbon of road. The red shone more intensely for an instant as the car turned a corner, then disappeared as if it had never been.

  The book hunter stood motionless by the side of the road, trying to piece the picture together. Madrid, outside Liana Taillefer's house. Toledo, his visit to Varo Borja. And Sintra, after an afternoon at Victor Fargas's house. There were also Dumas's serials, a publisher hanged in his study, a printer burned at the stake with his strange manual... And among all this, shadowing Corso: Rochefort, a fictional, seventeenth-century swordsman reincarnated as a uniformed chauffeur of luxury cars. Responsible for an attempted hit-and-run incident, and breaking and entering. A smoker of Montecristo cigars. A smoker without a lighter.

  Corso swore gently under his breath. He'd have given a rare incunabulum, in good condition, to punch the face of whoever was writing this ridiculous script.

  AS SOON AS HE got back to the hotel, he made several phone calls. First he dialed the Lisbon number in his notebook. He was lucky, Amilcar Pinto was at home. He ascertained as much in a conversation with Pinto's bad-tempered wife. Through the black Bakelite earpiece he could hear the sound of a television blaring in the background, the high-pitched crying of children, and adult voices arguing violently. Finally Pinto came to the phone. They agreed to meet in an hour and a half, the time it would take the Portuguese to travel the fifty kilometers to Sintra. Having arranged this, Corso looked at his watch and called Varo Borja. The book collector wasn't home. Corso left a message on the answering machine and dialed Flavio La Ponte's number in Madrid. La Ponte wasn't home either, so Corso hid his canvas bag on top of the wardrobe and went out for a drink.

  The first thing he saw as he pushed open the door of the small hotel lounge was the girl. It couldn't be anyone else: her cropped hair giving her a boyish look, her skin as tanned as if it were August. She sat in an armchair, reading in the cone of light from a lamp, her legs stretched out and crossed on the chair opposite. She was barefoot, in jeans and a white cotton T-shirt, her sweater around her shoulders. Corso stopped, his hand on the doorknob, an absurd feeling hammering at his brain. This was too much of a coincidence.

  Incredulous, he went up to the girl. He was almost by her side when she looked up from her book and fixed her green eyes on him with their deep, liquid clarity that he remembered so well from the train. He stopped, not knowing what to say. He had the strange sensation that he was going to fall into those eyes.

  "You didn't tell me you were coming to Sintra," he said.

  "Nor did you."

  She smiled calmly as she said it, looking neither surprised nor embarrassed. She seemed sincerely pleased to see him.

  "What are you doing here?" asked Corso.

  She removed her feet from the chair and gestured for him to have a seat. But the book hunter remained standing.

  "Traveling," said the girl, and she showed him her book. It wasn't the same one as on the train. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. "Reading. And bumping into people unexpectedly."

  "Unexpectedly," repeated Corso like an echo.

  He'd bumped into too many people for one evening, whether unexpectedly or not. He found himself trying to establish a link between her presence at the hotel and Rochefort's appearance on the road. From the right angle, all these things would fit together, but he could not find that angle. He didn't even know where to start.

  "Won't you sit down?"

  He did so, vaguely anxious. The girl shut her book and regarded him curiously. "You don't look like a tourist," she said.

  "I'm not."

  "Are you working?"

  "Yes."

  "Any job in Sintra must be interesting."

  That's all I need, thought Corso, adjusting his glasses. Being interrogated after everything I've been through, even if it's by an extremely young, beautiful girl. Maybe that was the problem. She was too young to be dangerous. Or maybe that was where the danger lay. He picked up the girl's book from the table and flicked through it. It was a modern English edition, some of the paragraphs underlined in pencil. He read one:

  His eyes remained fixed in the diminishing light and growing darkness. That preternatural blackness that seems to be saying to God's most luminous and sublime creation: "Give me space. Stop shining."

  "You like Gothic novels?"

  "I like to read." She bowed her head slightly, and the light made a foreshortened outline o
f her bare neck. "And to hold books. I always carry several in my rucksack when I travel."

  "Do you travel a lot?"

  "Yes. I've been traveling for ages."

  Corso winced at her answer. She said it very seriously, frowning slightly, like a child talking about serious matters.

  "I thought you were a student."

  "I am sometimes."

  Corso put the Melmoth back on the table.

  "You're a strange young lady. How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? Sometimes your expression changes, as if you were older."

  "Maybe I am. One's expressions are influenced by what one has experienced and read. Look at you."

  "What's the matter with me?"

  "Have you ever seen yourself smile? You look like an old soldier."

  He shifted slightly in his seat, embarrassed. "I don't know how an old soldier smiles."

  "Well, I do." The girl's eyes darkened. She was searching in her memory. "Once I knew ten thousand men who were looking for the sea."

  Corso lifted an eyebrow in mock-interest. "Really. Is that something you read or experienced?"

  "Guess." She stopped and looked at him intently before adding, "You seem like a clever man, Mr. Corso."

  She stood up, taking the book from the table and her white sneakers off the floor. Her eyes brightened, and Corso recognized the reflections in them. He saw something familiar in her gaze.

  "Maybe we'll see each other around," she said as she left.

  Corso had no doubt that they would. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to or not. Either way, the thought lasted only a moment. As she left, the girl passed Amilcar Pinto at the door.