The Club Dumas

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  XII. BUCKINGHAM AND MILADY

  The crime was committed with the help of a woman.

  —E. de Queiroz, THE MYSTERY OF THE SINTRA ROAD

  Corso sat on the bottom step, attempting to light a cigarette. Still too stunned, he hadn't recovered his spatial sense and couldn't get the match in the same plane as the tip of the cigarette. Also, one of the lenses in his glasses was cracked, and he had to squint with one eye to see with the other. When the flame reached his fingers, he dropped the match between his feet and kept the cigarette in his mouth. The girl, who had been collecting the contents of the bag strewn over the ground, came and handed the bag to him.

  "Are you all right?"

  Her tone was neutral, without concern or worry. She was probably annoyed at the stupid way that Corso had been taken by surprise in spite of her warning on the phone. He nodded, humiliated and confused. But he was comforted when he remembered the look on Rochefort's face just before the kick. The girl had struck precisely and cruelly, but she didn't follow up as Rochefort lay sprawled on his back. He didn't challenge her or try to retaliate, but turned over in pain and dragged himself away, while she, no longer interested in him, went to pick up the bag. Corso, had he been able, would have gone after the man and, without a second thought, throttled him until he'd extracted everything from him. But the girl might not have allowed that, and anyway he was too weak even to stand.

  "Why did you let him go?" Corso asked.

  They could make Rochefort out in the distance, a staggering figure that was now disappearing into the darkness around a bend of the riverbank, among moored barges that looked like ghost ships in the low mist. Corso pictured the man retreating, humiliated, his face swollen, wondering how on earth a woman could have done so much damage. Corso felt jubilant at this revenge.

  "We should have questioned the bastard," he complained.

  She'd retrieved her duffel coat and sat next to him, but didn't answer immediately. She seemed tired.

  "He'll come after us again," she said. She glanced at Corso before looking out at the river. "Be more careful next time."

  He took the damp cigarette from his mouth and started turning it over in his fingers, which made it fall apart.

  "I would never have believed..."

  "Men don't. Until they get their faces pushed in."

  Then he saw that she was bleeding. It wasn't much: a trickle of blood from nose to lip.

  "Your nose," he said stupidly.

  "I know," she said, touching her face and looking at the blood on her fingers.

  "How did he do that to you?"

  "It was my fault." She wiped her fingers on her jeans. "When I fell on top of him. We bumped heads."

  "Where did you learn to do that kind of thing?"

  "What kind of thing?"

  "I saw you, by the water." Corso moved his hands in a clumsy imitation of her movement. "Giving him what he deserved."

  She smiled gently and stood up, brushing the back of her jeans.

  "I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things."

  With her bloody nose she looked impossibly young. She put the bag over her shoulder and held out her hand to help him. He was surprised by her firm grip. When he stood up, all his bones ached.

  "I thought angels fought with lances and swords."

  She was sniffing, holding her head back to stop the blood. She looked at him sideways, annoyed.

  "You've looked at too many Diirer engravings, Corso. And see where that's got you."

  THEY RETURNED TO THE hotel via the Pont Neuf and the passageway along the Louvre, without any more incidents. By the light of a street lamp he saw that the girl was still bleeding. He took his handkerchief from his pocket, but when he tried to help her, she took it from him and held it to her nose herself. She walked, absorbed in her own thoughts. Corso glanced at her long, bare neck and perfect profile, her matte skin in the hazy light from the lamps of the Louvre. He couldn't tell what she was thinking. She walked with the bag on her shoulder her head slightly forward which made her look determined stubborn Occasionally when they turned a dark corner her eyes darted and she put the hand holding the handkerchief down by her side walking tense and alert Under the archways of the Rue de Rivoli where there was more light she seemed to relax When her nose stopped bleeding she returned his handkerchief stained with dry blood Her mood improved She didn't seem to find it so reprehensible that he let himself be caught like a fool She put her hand on his shoulder a couple of times as if they were two old friends returning from a walk. It was a spontaneous, natural gesture. But maybe she was also tired and needed support. Corso, his head clearing with the walk, found it pleasant at first. Then it began to trouble him. The feel of her hand on his shoulder awakened a strange feeling in him, not entirely disagreeable but unexpected. He felt tender, like the soft center of a candy.

  GRUBER WAS ON DUTY that evening. He allowed himself a brief, inquisitive glance at the pair—Corso in his damp, dirty coat, his glasses cracked, the girl with her face stained with blood—but otherwise remained expressionless. He raised an eyebrow courteously and nodded, indicating that he was at Corso's disposal, but Corso gestured that he didn't need anything. Gruber handed him a sealed envelope and both room keys. They stepped into the elevator, and Corso was about to open the envelope when he saw that the girl's nose was bleeding again. He put the message in his pocket and gave her his handkerchief again. The elevator stopped at her floor. Corso said she should call a doctor, but the girl shook her head and got out of the elevator. After a moment of hesitation, he followed her. She had dripped some blood on the carpet. In the room, he made her sit on the bed, then went to the bathroom and soaked a towel in water.

  "Hold this against your neck and lean your head back."

  She obeyed without a word. All the energy she'd shown down by the river seemed to have evaporated. Maybe because of the nosebleed. He took off her coat and shoes and lay her on the bed, putting the pillow under her back. Like an exhausted little girl, she let him. Before turning off all the lights except for the one in the bathroom, Corso looked around. Other than a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo above the washbasin, the only belongings he could see were her duffel coat, the rucksack open on the sofa, the postcards bought the day before with The Three Musketeers, a gray sweater, a couple of T-shirts, and a pair of white panties drying on the radiator. He looked at the girl, embarrassed. He wasn't sure whether he ought to sit on the edge of the bed or elsewhere. His feeling from the Rue de Rivoli was still there in his stomach. He couldn't leave. Not until she felt better. In the end he decided to remain standing. He had his hands in his coat pockets, and with one of them he could feel the empty flask of gin. He glanced greedily at the liquor cabinet, its hotel seal still unbroken. He was dying for a drink.

  "You were great down there by the river," he said. "I haven't thanked you."

  She smiled sleepily. But her eyes, with pupils dilated in the darkness, followed Corso's every move. "What's going on?" he asked.

  She looked back at him with irony, implying that his question was absurd.

  "They obviously want something you have."

  "The Dumas manuscript? Or The Nine Doors?"

  The girl sighed. None of this is terribly important, she seemed to be saying.

  "You're clever, Corso," she said at last. "By now you should have a theory."

  "I have too many. What I don't have is any proof."

  "A person doesn't always need proof."

  "That's only in crime novels. All Sherlock Holmes or Poirot has to do is guess who the murderer is and how he committed the crime. He invents the rest and tells it as if he knew it was a fact. Then Watson or Hastings congratulates him admiringly and says, 'Well done. That's exactly how it happened.' And the murderer confesses. The idiot."

  "I'd congratulate you."

  This time there was no irony in her voice. She was watching him intently, waiting for him to say or do something.

  He shifted uneasily.
"I know," he said. The girl still held his gaze, as if she truly had nothing to hide. "But I wonder why."

  He was about to add, "This is real life, not a crime novel," but didn't. At this point in the story, the line between fantasy and reality appeared rather tenuous. The flesh-and-blood Corso, having an ID, a known place of residence, and a physical presence, of which his aching bones—after the episode on the stone steps—were proof, Was increasingly tempted to see himself as a real character in an imaginary world. But that wasn't good. From there it was only a small step to believing he was an imaginary character who thinks he's real in an imaginary world Only a small step to going nuts And he wondered whether someone some twisted novelist or drunken writer of cheap screenplays at that very moment saw him as an imaginary character in an imaginary world who thought he wasn't real That really would be too much.

  These thoughts made his mouth unbearably dry. He stood in front of the girl, his hands in his pockets, his tongue like sandpaper. If I were imaginary, he thought with relief, my hair would stand on end, I'd exclaim "Woe is me!" and my face would be beaded with sweat. And I wouldn't be this thirsty. I drink, therefore I am. So he went to the liquor cabinet, broke the seal, took a miniature bottle of gin, and drank it in two gulps He was almost smiling when he stood up and shut the cabinet like someone closing a reliquary. Things gradually assumed their proper proportions.

  The room was fairly dark. The dim light from the bathroom slanted across the bed where the girl was still lying. He looked at her bare feet, her legs, the T-shirt spattered with dry blood. Then his gaze lingered over her long, tanned, bare neck. The half-open mouth showing the tips of her white teeth in the gloom. Her eyes still watching him intently. He touched the key to his room inside his coat pocket. He ought to leave.

  "Are you feeling better?"

  She nodded. Corso looked at his watch, although he didn't really care about the time. He didn't remember having switched on the radio as they came into the room, but there was music playing somewhere. A melancholy song, in French. A waitress in a bar, in a port, in love with a sailor.

  "Right. I've got to go."

  The woman on the radio went on singing. The sailor, predictably, had gone for good, and the girl in the bar gazed at his empty chair and the wet ring left by his glass on the table. Corso went to the bedside table to get his handkerchief and used the cleanest part to wipe his undamaged lens. Then he saw that the girl's nose was bleeding.

  "It's started again."

  A trickle of blood was running down to her mouth. She put her hand to her face and smiled stoically, looking at her bloodstained fingers.

  "It doesn't matter."

  "You ought to see a doctor."

  She half closed her eyes and shook her head. She looked helpless in the dim light of the room, dark spots of blood staining the pillow. Still holding his glasses, he sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned over to hold the handkerchief to her nose. As he did so, his shadow, outlined on the wall by the slanting light from the bathroom, seemed to hesitate a moment between light and darkness before disappearing into the corner.

  Then the girl did something strange, unexpected. She ignored the handkerchief he was offering her and stretched out her bloody hand to him. She touched his face and drew four red lines with her fingers, from his forehead to his chin. Instead of moving her hand away after this singular caress, she kept it there, damp and warm, while he felt drops of blood running down the four lines on his face. Her luminous irises reflected the light from the half-open door, and he shuddered, seeing in each the image of his lost shadow.

  Another song was playing on the radio, but neither of them was listening. The girl smelled of heat and fever, a gentle pulse throbbing under the skin of her bare neck. The room was light and dark, and things became lost in the deep shadows. She whispered something unintelligible very low, and light glinted in her eyes as she slipped her hand around his neck, spreading the trail of warm blood. With the taste of blood on his tongue, he leaned toward her, toward her soft, half-open mouth. She gave a gentle moan which seemed to come from far away, slow and monotonous, centuries-old. For a brief moment, in the pulse of her flesh all Lucas Corso's previous deaths came to life, as if brought by the current of a dark slow river whose waters were as thick as varnish He regretted that she didn't have a name that he could carve in his memory with that moment.

  It lasted only a second. Then, recovering his clearheadedness, he saw his other self sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his coat, mesmerized as she moved back slightly and undid her jeans, arching her back like a beautiful young animal. He watched her with a kind of internal, benevolent wink, with a familiar indulgence both weary and skeptical. More with curiosity than desire. As she slid her zipper open, the girl uncovered a dark triangle that contrasted with the white cotton panties that came down with her jeans. Her long, tanned legs, stretched out on the bed, took Corso's—both the Gorsos'— breath away just as they had kicked in Rochefort's teeth. Then she lifted her arms and took off her T-shirt She did it naturally neither flirtatious nor indifferent She kept her calm sweet eyes on him until her T-shirt covered her face Then the contrast was even greater—more white cotton this time sliding upward over tanned skin her firm warm flesh her slender waist her heavy, perfect breasts outlined against the light in the darkness her neck her half-open mouth and once again her eyes with all the light in them stolen from the sky With Corso's shadow in them like a soul locked in the bottom of a double crystal ball or emerald.

  At that moment, he knew that he wouldn't be able to do it. He sensed it with the lugubrious intuition that precedes certain events and marks them, even before they have taken place, with inevitable disaster. To be prosaic, Corso realized, as he threw the rest of his clothes on top of his coat at the foot of the bed, that his initial erection was now in visible retreat. Cut down in its prime. Or, as his Bonapartist great-great-grandfather would have said, "La Garde recule." Totally. Anxiously he hoped that, as he was standing against the light, his unfortunately flaccid state wouldn't be noticed. Very carefully he lay facedown next to her tanned, warm body waiting in the dark and used what the emperor, out on the muddy fields of Flanders, would have called an indirect-approach tactic—sizing up the terrain from the middle distance and making no contact in the critical zone. From a prudent distance he played for time in case Grouchy arrived with reinforcements; he caressed the girl and kissed her unhurriedly on the mouth and neck. But no luck. Grouchy was nowhere to be seen. The old fool was chasing Prussians miles from the battlefield. Corso's anxiety turned to panic as the girl moved nearer to him and slipped her firm, warm thigh between his thighs. She must have become aware of the extent of the disaster. He saw her smile, a slightly disconcerted smile, but encouraging, as if to say something like, "I know you can do it!" Then she kissed him with extreme tenderness and put out her hand, to help things along. And just when he felt her hand at the very epicenter of the drama, Corso went down completely. Like the Titanic. Straight to the bottom, no half measures The orchestra playing on deck, women and children first. The next twenty minutes were agony, atonement for all his sins. Heroic attacks meeting the immovable barrier of the Scottish fusiliers. The infantry on the attack glimpsing only the slightest chance of victory. Improvised incursions by the light infantry, in the vain hope of taking the enemy by surprise. Skirmishes of hussars and heavy charges by cuirassiers. But all attempts met with the same results—Wellington was messing around in a remote Belgian village while his pipers were playing the march of the Scots Greys in Corso's face. The Old Guard, or what remained of it, was glancing desperately in all directions, teeth clenched and face against the sheets, twenty minutes by the watch, which, for his sins, he hadn't removed. Drops of sweat the size of fists ran from the roots of his hair down his neck. He looked with wide staring eyes over the girl's shoulder, desperately wishing for a gun to shoot himself.

  SHE WAS ASLEEP. HE stretched out an arm, carefully so as not to wake her, and searched for a cigarette inside his coa
t. When it was lit, he propped himself up on an elbow and stared at her. She was on her back, naked, her head tilted back on the pillow spotted with dry blood, breathing gently through her half-open mouth. She still smelled of fever and warm flesh. In the glow from the bathroom, which traced her outline in light and shadow, Corso admired her perfect body. This, he told himself, is a masterpiece of genetic engineering. He wondered what mixture of blood, or mysteries, saliva, skin, flesh, semen, and chance had commingled to create her All women all females produced by the human species were there summed up in her eighteen- or twenty-year-old body He saw the pulse at her neck the almost imperceptible beat of her heart the gentle curve from her back to her waist widening at the hips He put out his hand and stroked the small curly triangle down where the skin was a little lighter between her thighs where he'd been unable to bivouac in the classic manner The girl had taken the situation with perfect good humor She'd made light of it and they'd drifted into a lighthearted friendly game once she understood that on Corso's part and in that particular bout there wasn't going to be any more action This eased the tension Lacking a gun—they shoot horses don't they?—in his blind rage he had wanted to dash his head against the corner of the bedside table in an attempt to crack his skull But he ended up discreetly punching the wall, almost breaking his hand. Surprised by that and the sudden tension of his body, she looked at him. The effort it took not to shout out in pain calmed him. He even managed to smile rather tensely and say that this usually happened to him only the first thirty times or so. She laughed, her arms around him, and kissed his eyes and mouth, amused and tender. You idiot, Corso. I don't mind at all. He did the only thing he could at that point—a meticulous play of fingers in the right place, with results that were, if not glorious, at least satisfactory. As she caught her breath, the girl stared at him for a long time in silence before kissing him slowly, conscientiously, until the pressure of her lips diminished and she fell asleep.