drawing parallels. He looked around at the church tower and the surrounding buildings. The facades still bore bishops’ coats of arms, and he reflected that this square too had once witnessed the bonfires of the Inquisition. After all, this was Toledo. A crucible for underground cults, initiation rites, false converts. And heretics.
He drank some more gin before going back to the book. The text, in an abbreviated Latin code, took up another hundred and fifty-seven pages, the final page being blank. Nine contained the famous engravings inspired, according to legend, by Lucifer himself. Each print had a Latin, Hebrew, and Greek numeral at the top, including a Latin phrase in the same abbreviated code. Corso ordered a third gin and went over them. They looked like the figures of the tarot, or old, medieval engravings: the king and the beggar, the hermit, the hangman, death, the executioner. In the last engraving a beautiful woman was riding a dragon. Too beautiful, he thought, for the religious morality of the time.
He found an identical illustration on a photocopy of a page from Mateu’s
Engraving 9 missing. Corso checked and saw that this was wrong. Engraving 9 was there in the copy he held, the copy formerly from the Coy, later the Terral-Coy Library, and now the property of Varo Borja. It must have been a printing error, or a mistake by Mateu himself. In 1929, when the
A clock somewhere struck three, and pigeons flew up from the tower and roofs. Corso shuddered gently, as if slowly coming to. He felt in his pocket and took out some money. He put it on the table and stood up. The gin made him feel pleasantly detached, blurring external sounds and images. He put the book and file in his canvas bag, slung it over his shoulder, then stood for a few seconds looking at the angry Pantocrator in the portico. He wasn’t in a hurry and wanted to clear his head, so he decided to walk to the train station.
When he reached the cathedral, he took a shortcut through the cloisters. He passed the closed souvenir kiosk and stood for a moment looking at the empty scaffolding over the murals undergoing restoration. The place was deserted, and his steps echoed beneath the vault. He thought he heard something behind him. A priest late to confession.
He came out through an iron gate into a dark, narrow street, where passing cars had taken chunks out of the walls. As he turned to the right, a car came from somewhere to the left. There was a traffic sign, a triangle warning that the street narrowed, and when Corso came to it, the car accelerated unexpectedly. He could hear it behind him, coming too fast, he thought as he turned to look, but he only had time to half-turn, just enough to see a dark shape bearing down on him. His reflexes were dulled by the gin, but by chance his attention was still on the traffic sign. Instinct pushing him toward it, he sought the narrow area of protection between the metal post and the wall. He slid into the small gap like a bullfighter hiding behind the barrier from the bull. The car managed to strike only his hand as it passed him. The blow was sharp, and the pain made his knees buckle. Falling onto the cobbles, he saw the car disappear down the street with a screech of tires.
Corso walked on to the station, rubbing his bruised hand. But now he turned every so often to look behind him, and his bag, with
IV. THE MAN WITH THE SCAR
—A. Dumas, THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
Night was falling when Corso got home. Inside his coat pocket his bruised hand throbbed painfully. He went to the bathroom, picked up his crumpled pajamas and a towel from the floor, and held the hand under a stream of cold water for five minutes. Then he opened a couple of cans and ate, standing in the kitchen.
It had been a strange and dangerous day. As he thought about it, he felt confused, though he was less worried than curious. For some time, he had treated the unexpected with the detached fatalism of one who waits for life to make the next move. His detachment, his neutrality, meant that he could never be the prime mover. Until that morning in the narrow street in Toledo, his role had been merely to carry out orders. Other people were the victims. Every time he lied or made a deal with someone, he stayed objective. He formed no relationships with the persons or things involved—they were simply tools of the trade. He remained on the side, a mercenary with no cause other than financial gain. The indifferent third man. Perhaps this attitude had always made him feel safe, just as, when he took off his glasses, people and objects became blurred, indistinct; he could ignore them by removing their sharp outline. Now, though, the pain from his injured hand, the sense of imminent danger, of violence aimed directly at him and him alone, implied frightening changes in his world. Lucas Corso, who had acted as victimizer so many times, wasn’t used to being a victim. And he found it highly disconcerting.
In addition to the pain in his hand, his muscles were rigid with tension and his mouth was dry. He opened a bottle of Bols and searched for aspirin in his canvas bag. He always carried a good supply, together with books, pencils, pens, half-filled notepads, a Swiss Army knife, a passport, money, a bulging address book, and books belonging to him and to others. He could, at any time, disappear without a trace like a snail into its shell. With his bag he could make himself at home wherever chance, or his clients, led him—airports, train stations, dusty European libraries, hotel rooms that merged in his memory into a single room with fluid dimensions, where he would wake with a start, disoriented and confused in the darkness, searching for the light switch only to stumble upon the phone. Blank moments torn from his life and his consciousness. He was never very sure of himself, or of anything, for the first thirty seconds after he opened his eyes, his body waking before his mind or his memory.
He sat at his computer and put his notepads and several reference books on the desk to his left. On his right he put
