The Dumas Club

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  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 Ruritania 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, lib. do vitam m.m sicut tm.... 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 page 89, and the two paragraphs were identical. He did the same with as many paragraphs 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, page 107.

  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 cafe; 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 divided 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.

  Speaking of tricks. The doorbell rang, and Corso opened it to find the girl standing there. He had just had time to hide book number one and the Dumas manuscript carefully under the cover. She was barefoot and wearing her usual jeans and white T-shirt.

  “Hello, Corso. I hope you’re not intending to go out tonight.”

  She didn’t come in but stood at the door with her thumbs in her pockets. She was frowning, as if expecting bad news.

  “You can relax your guard,” he reassured her.

  She smiled, relieved. “I’m exhausted.”

  He turned his back on her and went to the bedside table. The bottle of gin was empty, so he started searching the liquor cabinet until he stood up triumphantly holding a miniature bottle of gin. He emptied it into a glass and took a sip. The girl was still at the door.

  “They took the engravings. All nine of them.” He waved his glass at the fragments of book number two. “They burned the rest so it wouldn’t show. That’s why all of it was not burned. They made sure some pieces were left intact so the book would be recorded as officially destroyed.”

  She cocked her head to one side, looking at him intently. “You’re clever.”

  “Of course I am. That’s why they involved me.” The girl took a few steps around the room. Corso saw her bare feet on the carpet, next to the bed. She was examining the charred bits of paper.

  “Fargas didn’t burn the book,” he added. “He wasn’t capable of something like that.... What did they do to him? Was it suicide, like Enrique Taillefer?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She picked up a piece of paper and looked at the words. “Find your own answers,” she said. “That’s why they involved you.” “What about you?”

  She was reading silently, moving her lips as if she knew the words. When she put the fragment down on the bed, her smile was too old for her years.

  “You already know why I’m here: I have to look after you. You need me.”

  “What I need is more gin.”

  He cursed to himself and finished his drink, trying to hide his impatience, or his confusion. Damn everything. Emerald green, luminous white—her eyes and that smile against her tanned skin, her bare, straight neck, warm and alive. Can you believe it, Corso. Even now, with all you have to deal with, you’re thinking about her tanned arms, her fine wrists, her long fingers. He noticed also that her breasts, under her tight-fitting T-shirt, were magnificent. He hadn’t been able to get a good look at them before. He imagined them tanned and heavy under the white cotton, imagined flesh of clarity and shadow. Once again he was struck by her height. She was as tall as he was. Maybe taller. “Who are you?”

  “The devil,” she said. “The devil in love.”

  And she laughed. The book by Gazette was on the sideboard, next to the Memoirs of Saint Helena and some papers. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Then she laid one finger on it and turned to Corso.

  “Do you believe in the devil?”

  “I’m paid to believe in him. On this job anyway.”

  She nodded slowly, as if she knew what he was going to say. She watched Corso with curiosity, her lips parted, waiting for a sign or gesture that only she would understand.

  “Do you know why I like this book, Corso?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Because the protagonist is sincere. His love isn’t just a trick to damn a soul. Biondetta is tender and faithful. She admires in Alvaro the same things the devil admires in mankind: his courage, his independence....” Her eyelashes lowered over her light irises for a moment. “His desire for knowledge and his lucidity.”

  “You seem very well informed. What do you know of all this?”

  “Much more than you imagine.”

  “I don’t imagine anything. Everything I know about the devil and his loves and hates comes from literature: Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, then Faust and The Brothers Karamazov.” He made a vague, evasive gesture. “I know Lucifer only secondhand.”

  Now she was looking at him mockingly. “And which devil do you prefer? Dante’s?”

  “No. Much too terrifying. Too medieval for my taste.”

  “Mephistopheles?”

  “Not him, either. He’s too pleased with himself. Too much a trickster, like a crooked lawyer... Anyway, I never trust people who smile a lot.”

  “What about the one in The Karamazovs?”

  Corso made a face. “Petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.”

  He paused. “I suppose the devil I prefer is Milton’s fallen angel.” He looked at her with interest. “That’s what you were hoping I would say.”

  She smiled enigmatically, her thumbs still in her pockets. He’d never seen anyone wear jeans like that. It needed her long legs, of course. The legs of a young girl hitchhiking at the roadside, her rucksack at her feet and all the light in the world in those damned green eyes.

  “How do you see Lucifer?” she asked.

  “No idea.” Corso grimaced, indifferent. “Taciturn and silent, I suppose. Boring.” His expression became acid. “On a throne in a deserted hall. At the center of a cold, desolate, monotonous kingdom where nothing ever happens.”

  She looked at him in silence. “You surprise me, Corso,” she said at last.

  “I don’t know why. Anyone can read Milton. Even me.” She moved slowly around the bed, in a semicircle, keeping the same distance from it, until she was standing between him and the lamp. Whether by design or not, her shadow fell across the fragments of The Nine Doors spread out on the bedcover. “You’ve just mentioned the price that has to be paid.” Her face was now in darkness, against the light. “Pride, freedom ... Knowledge. Whether at the beginning or at the end, you have to pay for everything. Even for courage, don’t you think? And don’t you think a lot of courage is needed to face God?”

  Her words were a soft murmur in the silence that filled the room, the silence that slipped under the door and through the gaps around the window. Even the noise of the traffic in the street outside seemed to fade. Corso looked at one silhouette, then the other. First the shadow stylized across the bedcover and the fragments of the book, then the body standing against the light. He wondered which was more real.

  “With all those archangels,” she, or her shadow, added. There was bitterness in her words, a contemptuous breath, a sigh of defeat. “Beautiful and perfect. As disciplined as Nazis.” At that moment she wasn’t young. She seemed to be carrying the weariness of the ages: an obscure inheritance, the guilt of others, which he, surprised, couldn’t identify. He thought that maybe neither the shadow across the bed nor the outline against the light was real.

  “There’s a painting in the Prado. Do you remember it, Corso? Men with knives standing before horsemen with their swords. I’ve always thought that the fallen angel looked like that when he rebelled. With the same lost expression as those poor bastards with only knives. The courage of desperation.” She moved slightly as she spoke, only a few inches, but as she did so, her shadow came nearer to Corso’s, as if it had a will of its own.

  “What do you know about any of that?” he asked. “More than I want to.”

  Her shadow now almost touched his. He retreated instinctively, leaving a section of light between them, on the bed.

  “Imagine him,” she said in the same absorbed tone. “The most beautiful of the fallen angels plotting alone in his empty palace... He clings desperately to a routine he despi
ses, but which at least allows him to hide his grief. To hide his failure.” The girl laughed gently, joylessly, as if from a great distance. “He misses heaven.”

  The shadows had now come together and almost merged among the fragments of book snatched from the fireplace at the Quinta da Soledade. The girl and Corso, on the bed, with the nine doors of the kingdom of other shadows, or maybe the same shadows. Singed paper, incomplete clues, a mystery shrouded in several veils, by the printer, by time, and by fire. Enrique Taillefer swinging, his feet dangling in empty space, at the end of a silk cord. Victor Fargas floating facedown in the murky waters of the pond. Aristide Torchia burning at Campo dei Fiori, shouting the name of the father, not looking at heaven but at the ground beneath his feet. Old Dumas writing,

  sitting at the top of the world. While here in Paris, very near where Corso now was, another shadow, of a cardinal whose library contained too many books on the devil, held all the threads of the plot.

  The girl, or her outline against the light, moved toward Corso. Only a single step, but enough for his shadow to disappear under hers.

  “It was worse for those who followed him.” It took Corso a moment to understand who she meant. “Those he dragged down with him: soldiers, messengers, servants by trade and by calling. Some mercenaries, like you... Many didn’t even realize that they were choosing between submission and freedom, between God and mankind. Out of habit, with the absurd loyalty of faithful soldiers, they followed their leader in rebellion and defeat.”

  “Like Xenophon’s ten thousand,” teased Corso.

  She was silent a moment, surprised by his accuracy.

  “Maybe,” she said at last. “Out in the world alone, they still hope that their leader will one day take them home.”

  Corso bent to look for a cigarette, and his shadow reappeared. Then he switched on the other lamp, on the bedside table, and the dark outline of the girl disappeared as her face was illuminated. Her light eyes were fixed on him. She seemed young again.