The Club Dumas

  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 Cazotte 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 despises, 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 lookin
g 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.

  "Very moving," he said. "All those old soldiers searching for the sea."

  She blinked, as if now, with her face in the light, she didn't understand what he was saying. There was no longer a shadow on the bed. The fragments of the book were merely pieces of charred paper. All he had to do was open the window, and a gust of air would blow them all over the room.

  She smiled. Irene Adler, 223B Baker Street. The café in Madrid, the train, that morning in Sintra ... The battle lost, the retreat of the defeated legions: she was very young to remember such things. She smiled like a little girl both mischievous and innocent, and there were traces of fatigue under her eyes. She was sleepy and warm.

  Corso swallowed. A part of him went up to her and pulled her T-shirt up over her tanned skin, undid her jeans, and lay her on the bed, among the remains of the book that could summon the forces of darkness. And sank into her warm flesh, settling scores with God and Lucifer, with the inexorable flow of time, with his own ghosts, with life and death. But the rest of him just lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke in silence. She stared at him for a long time, waiting for something, a gesture, a word. Then she said good night and went to the door. But in the doorway, she turned and slowly raised her hand, palm inward, index and middle fingers joined and pointing upward. Her smile was both tender and conspiratorial, ingenuous and knowing. Like a lost angel pointing nostalgically at heaven.

  BARONESS FRIEDA UNGERN HAD two sweet little dimples when she smiled. She looked as if she had smiled continuously for the past seventy years, and it had left a permanently benevolent expression around her eyes and mouth. Corso, a precocious reader, had known since childhood that there are many different types of witch: wicked stepmothers, bad fairies beautiful evil queens and even nasty old witches with warts on their noses. But despite all he'd heard about the septuagenarian baroness, he didn't know to which category she belonged. She might have been one of those elderly ladies who live, as if cushioned by a dream, outside real life, where no unpleasantness ever intrudes upon their existence, but the depth of her quick, intelligent, suspicious eyes canceled that first impression. So did the right sleeve of her cardigan hanging empty, her arm amputated above the elbow Otherwise she was small and plump and looked like a French teacher at a boarding school for young ladies In the days when "young ladies" still existed that is Or so Corso thought as he looked at her gray hair tied into a bun on the nape of her neck and at her rather masculine shoes worn with white ankle socks.

  "Mr. Corso. Pleased to meet you."

  She held out her only hand—small, like the rest of her—with unusual energy and showed her dimples. She had a slight accent, more German than French. A certain Von Ungern, Corso remembered reading somewhere, had become notorious in Manchuria or Mongolia in the early twenties. A warlord of sorts, he had made a last stand against the Red Army at the head of a ragged army of White Russians, Cossacks, Chinese, deserters, and bandits. With armored trains, looting, killing, that sort of thing, concluding with a firing squad at dawn. Maybe he was a relation.

  "He was my husband's great-uncle. His family was Russian and emigrated to France with a fair amount of money before the revolution." There was neither nostalgia nor pride in her tone. It had all happened in the past, to other people, to another family, she seemed to say. Strangers who disappeared before she even existed. "I was born in Germany. My family lost everything under the Nazis. I was married here in France after the war." She carefully removed a dead leaf from a plant by the window and smiled slightly. "I never could stand my inlaws' obsession with the past: their nostalgia for St. Petersburg, the Tsar's birthday. It was like a wake."

  Corso looked at the desk covered with books, the packed shelves. He calculated that there must have been a thousand volumes in that room alone. The most rare and valuable ones seemed to be there, from modern editions to ancient, leather-bound tomes.

  "And what about all this?"

  "That's different. It's material for research, not for worship. I use it to do my work."

  Times are bad, thought Corso, when witches, or whatever they are, talk about their in-laws and exchange their cauldron for a library, filing cabinets, and a place on the bestseller list. Through the open door he could see more books in the other rooms and in the corridor. Books and plants. There were pots of them all over the place: the windowsills, the floor, the wooden shelves. It was a large, expensive apartment with a view of the river and, in another time, of the bonfires of the Inquisition. There were several reading tables occupied by young people who looked like students, and all the walls were covered with books. Ancient, gilded bindings shone from between the plants. The Ungern Foundation contained the largest collection in Europe of books on the occult. Corso glanced at the titles closest to him. Daemonolatriae Libri by Nicholas Remy. Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo. De Daemonialitate et Incubus et Sucubus by Ludovico Sinistrari. In addition to having one of the best catalogues of demonology, and a foundation named after her late husband the baron, Baroness Ungern enjoyed a solid reputation as a writer of books on magic and witchcraft. Her last book, Isis, the Naked Virgin, had been on the bestseller list for three years. The Vatican boosted sales by publicly condemning the work, which drew worrying parallels between a pagan deity and the mother of Christ. There were eight reprints in France, twelve in Spain, and seventeen in Catholic Italy.

  "What are you working on at the moment?"

  "It's called The Devil, History and Legend An irreverent biography. It'll be ready by the beginning of next year."

  Corso stopped at a row of books. His attention had been drawn by the Disquisitionum Magicarum by Martin del Rio, the three volumes of the Lovaina first edition, 1599–1600: a classic on demonic magic.

  "Where did you get hold of this?"

  Frieda Ungern must have been considering how much information to provide, because she took a moment to answer.

  "At an auction in Madrid in '89. I had a great deal of trouble preventing your compatriot, Varo Borja, from acquiring it." She sighed, as if still recovering from the effort. "And money. I would never have managed it without help from Paco Montegrifo. Do you know him? A delightful man."

  Corso smiled crookedly. Not only did he know Montegrifo, the head of the Spanish branch of Claymore's Auctioneers, he had worked with him on several unorthodox and highly profitable deals. Such as the sale, to a certain Swiss collector, of a Cosmography by Ptolemy, a Gothic manuscript dating from 1456, which had mysteriously disappeared from the University of Salamanca not long before. Montegrifo found himself in possession of the book and used Corso as an intermediary. The entire operation had been clean and discreet, and included a visit to the Ceniza brothers' workshop, where a compromising stamp had been removed. Corso deli
vered the book himself to Lausanne. All included in his thirty percent commission.

  "Yes, I know him." He stroked the spines of the several volumes of the Disquisitionum Magicarum and wondered what Montegrifo charged the baroness for rigging the auction in her favor. "As for the Martin del Rio, I've only seen a copy once before, in the collection of the Jesuits in Bilbao.... Bound in a single piece of leather. But it's the same edition."

  As he spoke, he moved his hand along the row of books, touching some. There were many interesting volumes, with quality bindings in vellum, shagreen, parchment. Many others were in mediocre or poor condition, and looked much used. Nearly all had markers in them, strips of white card covered with small, spiky handwriting in pencil. Material for her research. He stopped in front of a book that looked familiar: black, no title, five raised bands on the spine. Book number three.

  "How long have you had this?"

  Now, Corso was a man of steady nerves. Especially at this stage in the story. But he'd spent the night sorting through the ashes of number two and couldn't prevent the baroness from noticing something peculiar in his tone of voice. He saw that she was looking at him suspiciously despite the friendly dimples in her youthful old face.

  "The Nine Doors? I'm not sure. A long time." Her only hand moved quickly and deftly. She took the book from the shelf effortlessly and, supporting the spine in her palm, opened it at the first page, decorated with several bookplates, some very old. The last one was an arabesque design with the name Von Ungern and the date written in ink. Seeing it, she nodded nostalgically. "A present from my husband. I married very young. He was twice my age. He bought the book in 1949."