The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  That was the problem with modern-day witches, thought Corso: they didn't have any secrets. Everything was out in the open, you could read all about them in any Who's Who or gossip column. Baronesses or not, they'd become predictable, vulgar. Torquemada would have been bored to death by it all.

  "Did your husband share your interest in this sort of thing?"

  "Not in the slightest. He never read a single book. He just made all my wishes come true like the genie of the lamp." Her amputated arm seemed to shudder for a moment in the empty sleeve of her cardigan. "An expensive book or a perfect pearl necklace, it was all the same to him." She paused and smiled with gentle melancholy. "But he was an amusing man, capable of seducing his best friends' wives. And he made excellent champagne cocktails."

  She was silent for a moment and looked around, as if her husband had left a glass behind.

  "I collected all this myself," she added, waving at her library, "one by one, down to the last book. I even chose The Nine Doors, after discovering it in the catalogue of a bankrupt former Pétain supporter. All my husband did was sign the check."

  "Why are you so interested in the devil?"

  "I saw him once. I was fifteen and saw him as clearly as I'm seeing you. He had a hard collar, a hat, and a walking stick. He was very handsome. He looked like John Barrymore as Baron Gaigern in Grand Hotel. So, like a fool, I fell in love." She became thoughtful again, her only hand in her cardigan pocket, as if remembering something distant. "I suppose that's why I was never really troubled by my husband's infidelities."

  Corso looked around, as if there might be someone else in the room, then leaned over confidentially.

  "Three centuries ago, you would have burned at the stake for telling me this."

  She made a guttural sound of amusement, stifling her laughter, and almost stood on tiptoe to whisper in the same tone: "Three centuries ago, I wouldn't have mentioned it to anyone. But I know a lot of people who would gladly burn me at the stake." She smiled again, showing her dimples. She was always smiling, Corso decided. But her bright, intelligent eyes remained alert, studying him. "Even now, in this day and age."

  She handed him The Nine Doors and watched him as he leafed through the book slowly, although he could barely contain his impatience to check if there were any differences in the nine engravings. Sighing to himself with relief, he found them intact. In fact, Mateu's Bibliography was wrong: none of the three books had the final engraving missing. Book number three was in worse condition than Varo Borja's, and Victor Fargas's before it was thrown into the fire. The lower half had been exposed to damp and almost all the pages were stained. The binding also needed a thorough cleaning, but the book seemed complete.

  "Would you like a drink?" asked the baroness. "I have tea and coffee."

  No potions or magic herbs, Corso thought with disappointment. Not even a tisane.

  "Coffee."

  It was a sunny day, and the sky over the nearby towers of Notre-Dame was blue. Corso went over to a window and parted the net curtains so he could see the book in better light. Two floors down, between the bare trees on the banks of the Seine, the girl was sitting on a stone bench in her duffel coat and reading a book. He knew it was The Three Musketeers, because he'd seen it on the table when they met at breakfast. Afterward he walked along the Rue de Rivoli, knowing that the girl was following fifteen or twenty paces behind. He deliberately ignored her, and she kept her distance. Now he saw her look up. She must have seen him clearly from down there, but she made no sign of recognition. Expressionless and still, she continued to watch him until he moved away from the window. When he looked out again, she had gone back to tier book, her head bowed.

  There was a secretary, a middle-aged woman with thick glasses moving among the tables and books, but Frieda Ungern brought the coffee herself, two cups on a silver tray, which she carried with ease. One glance from her told him not to offer help, and they sat down at the desk, the tray among all the books, plant pots, papers, and note cards.

  "What gave you the idea of setting up this foundation?"

  "It was for tax purposes. Also, now people come here, and I can find collaborators...." She smiled sadly. "I'm the last of the witches, and I felt lonely."

  "You don't look anything like a witch." Corso made the appropriate face, an ingenuous, friendly rabbit. "I read your Isis."

  Holding her coffee cup in one hand, she raised the stump of her other arm a little and at the same time tilted her head as if to rearrange her hair. Although incomplete, it was an unconsciously coquettish gesture, as old as the world itself and yet ageless.

  "Did you like it?"

  He looked her in the eyes as he raised his cup to his mouth. "Very much."

  "Not everyone did. Do you know what L'Osservatore Romano said? It regretted the demise of the Index of the Holy Office. And you're right." She indicated The Nine Doors that Corso had put by her on the table. "In the past I would have been burned at the stake, like the poor wretch who wrote the gospel according to Satan."

  "Do you really believe in the devil, Baroness?"

  "Don't call me Baroness. It's ridiculous."

  "What would you like me to call you?"

  "I don't know. Mrs. Ungern. Or Frieda."

  "Do you believe in the devil, Mrs. Ungern?"

  "Sufficiently to dedicate my life, my collection, this foundation, many years of work, and the five hundred pages of my new book all to him." She looked at Corso with interest. He had taken off his glasses to clean them. His helpless smile completed the effect. "What about you?"

  "Everybody's asking me that lately."

  "Of course. You've been going around asking questions about a book that has to be read with a certain kind of faith."

  "My faith is limited," Corso said, risking a hint of sincerity. This kind of frankness often proved profitable. "Really, I work for money."

  The dimples appeared again. She must have been very pretty half a century ago, he thought. With both arms intact, casting spells or whatever they were, slender and mischievous. She still had something of that.

  "Pity," remarked Frieda Ungern. "Others, who worked for nothing, had blind faith in the book's protagonist. Albertus Magnus, Raymund Lully, Roger Bacon, none of them ever disputed the devil's existence, only his nature."

  Corso adjusted his glasses and gave a hint of a skeptical smile.

  "Things were different a long time ago."

  "You don't have to go that far back. 'The devil does exist, not only as a symbol of evil but as a physical reality.'" How do you like that? It was written by a pope, Paul VI. In 1974."

  "He was a professional," said Corso equably. "He must have had his reasons."

  "In fact all he was doing was confirming a point of doctrine: the existence of the devil was established by the fourth Council of Letran. In 1215..." She paused and looked at him doubtfully. "Are you interested in erudite facts? I can be unbearably scholarly if I try." The dimples appeared. "I always wanted to be at the top of the class. The smart aleck."

  "I'm sure you were. Did you win all the prizes?"

  "Of course. And the other girls hated me."

  They both laughed. Corso sensed that Frieda Ungern was now on his side. So he took two cigarettes from his coat pocket and offered her one. She refused, glancing at him apprehensively. Corso ignored this and lit his cigarette.

  "Two centuries later," continued the baroness as Corso bent over the lighted match, "Innocent VIII's papal bull Sumnis Desiderantes Affectibus confirmed that Western Europe was plagued by demons and witches. So two Dominican monks, Kramer and Sprenger, drew up the Malleus Malleficarum, a manual for inquisitors."

  Corso raised his index finger. "Lyon, 1519. An octavo in the Gothic style, with no author's name. At least not the copy I know."

  "Not bad." She looked at him, surprised. "Mine is a later one." She pointed at a shelf. "It's over there. "Published in 1668, also in Lyon. But the very first edition dated from 1486...." She shuddered, half closing her eyes. "Krame
r and Sprenger were fanatical and stupid. Their Malleus was a load of nonsense. It might even seem funny, if thousands of poor wretches hadn't been tortured and burned in its name."

  "Like Aristide Torchia."

  "Yes, like him. Although he wasn't remotely innocent."

  "What do you know about him?"

  The baroness shook her head, drank the last of her coffee, and shook her head again. "The Torchias were a Venetian family of well-to-do merchants who imported vat paper from Spain and France. As a young man Aristide traveled to Holland and was an apprentice of the Elzevirs, who had corresponded with his father. He stayed there for a time and then went to Prague."

  "I didn't know that."

  "Well, there you are. Prague was Europe's capital of magic and the occult, just as Toledo had been four centuries earlier.... Can you see the links? Torchia chose to live in Saint Mary of the Snows, the district of magic, near Jungmannove Square, where there is a statue of Jan Hus. Do you remember Hus at the stake?"

  "'From my ashes a swan will rise that you will not be able to burn.'"

  "Exactly. You're easy to talk to. I expect you know that. It must help you in your work." The baroness involuntarily inhaled some of Corso's cigarette smoke. She wrinkled her nose, but he remained unperturbed. "Now, where were we? Ah yes. Prague, act two. Torchia moves to a house in the Jewish quarter nearby, next to the synagogue. A district where the windows are lit up every night and the cabbalists are searching for the magic formula of the Golem. After a while he moves again, this time to the district of Mala Strana...." She smiled at him conspiratorially. "What does all this sound like to you?"

  "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. m.vere im.go" She looked at Corso. "I've translated numerous passages. The code is quite simple. 'I 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 gam 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 demonology 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 intelli
gent 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."