The Club Dumas

power, he had time to collect pictures, carpets, porcelain, and statues. He was also an important book collector. He bound his books in calfskin and red morocco leather—”

“And had weapons of silver and three red angles on his coat of arms.” Corso gestured impatiently. All this information was trivial and he didn’t need me to tell him about it. “There’s a very well-known Richelieu catalogue.”

“The catalogue is incomplete, because the collection was bro­ken up. Parts of it are now kept in the national library of France, the Mazarin library, and the Sorbonne, while other books are in private hands. He owned Hebrew and Syrian man­uscripts, notable works on mathematics, medicine, theology, law, and history.... And you were right. Scholars were most surprised to find many ancient texts on the occult, from cabbala to black magic.”

Corso   swallowed  without  taking  his  eyes  off mine.   He seemed tense—a bowstring about to snap. “Any book in particular?”

I shook my head before I answered. His insistence intrigued me. The girl was listening attentively, but it was apparent that she was no longer directing her attention at me. I said, “My information on Richelieu as a character in a serial doesn’t go that far.”

“What about Dumas? Was he, too, interested in the occult?” Here I was emphatic:

“No. Dumas was a bon vivant who did everything out in the open, to the great enjoyment and shock of all those around him. He was also somewhat superstitious. He believed in the evil eye, wore an amulet on his watch chain, and had his for­tune told by Madame Desbarolles. But I don’t see him practic­ing black magic in the back room. He wasn’t even a Mason, as he confesses in The Century of Louis XV. He had debts, and he was hounded by his publishers and his creditors—he was too busy to waste his time on such things. Perhaps when re­searching one of his characters once, he studied the subject, but never in much depth. I believe he drew all the Masonic prac­tices described in Joseph Balsam and The Mohicans of Paris directly from Clavel’s Picturesque History of Freemasonry.” “What about Adah Menken?”

I looked at Corso with respect. This was an expert’s question. “That was different. Adah-Isaacs Menken, his last lover, was an American actress. During the Exhibition of 1867, while at­tending a performance of The Pirates of the Savannah, Dumas noticed a pretty young woman on stage who had to grab hold of a galloping horse. The girl embraced the novelist as he left the theater and told him bluntly that she had read all his books and was prepared to go to bed with him immediately. Old Dumas needed a great deal less than that to become infatuated with a woman, so he accepted her tribute. She claimed to have been the wife of a millionaire, a king’s mistress, a general’s wife.... Actually she was a Portuguese Jew born in America and the mistress of a strange man who was both a pimp and a boxer. Her relationship with Dumas caused a great deal of scandal, because Menken liked to be photographed scantily clad and frequented number 107 Rue Malesherbes, Dumas’s last house in Paris. She died from peritonitis after falling from a horse at the age of thirty-one.”

“Was she interested in black magic?”

“So they say. She liked ceremonies where she would dress in a tunic, burn incense, and make offerings to the Prince of Darkness.... Sometimes she claimed to be possessed by Satan, in various ways that today we might describe as pornographic. I’m sure old Dumas never believed a word of it, but he must have enjoyed the whole performance. It seems that when Menken was possessed by the devil, she was very hot in bed.”

There was laughter around the table. I even allowed myself a slight smile, but the girl and Corso remained serious. She seemed to be thinking, her light-colored eyes intent on Corso while he nodded slowly, though he was now distracted and distant. He was looking out the window at the streets and seemed to be searching in the night, in the silent flow of car lights reflected in his glasses, for the lost word, the key to uniting all these different stories that floated like dead leaves on the dark waters of time.

I NOW MOVE ONCE more into the background, as the near-omniscient narrator of Lucas Corso’s adventures. In this way, with the information Corso later confided to me, the tragic events that followed can be put into some sort of order. So we come to the moment when, returning home, he sees that the concierge has just swept the hallway and is about to leave. He passes him as the man is bringing the garbage cans up from the basement.

“They came to fix your TV this afternoon, Mr. Corso.”

Corso had read enough books and seen enough films to know what that meant. So he couldn’t help laughing, much to the concierge’s astonishment.

“I haven’t had a television for ages.”

The concierge let out a stream of confused apologies but Corso barely paid attention. It was all beginning to seem won­derfully predictable. Since this was a question of books, he had to approach the problem as a lucid, critical reader, not as the hero of a dime novel, which was what somebody was trying to make of him. Not that he had any choice: he was by nature cool and skeptical. He wasn’t the kind to break into a sweat and moan, “Oh no!”

“I hope I haven’t done anything wrong, Mr. Corso.” “Not at all. The repairman was dark, wasn’t he? With a mustache and a scar on his face?” “Exactly.”

“Don’t worry. He’s a friend of mine. A bit of a joker.” The concierge sighed with relief. “That’s a weight off my mind, Mr. Corso.”

Corso wasn’t worried about The Nine Doors or the Dumas manuscript. When he wasn’t carrying them with him in his canvas bag, he left them for safekeeping at Makarova’s bar. That was the safest place for any of his things. So he climbed the stairs calmly, trying to picture the coming scene. By now he had become what some refer to as a second-level reader, and he would have been disappointed had he been met by too stereotypical a scene. He was relieved when he opened the door. There were no papers strewn on the floor, no opened drawers, not even armchairs slashed with knives. It was all tidy, just as he’d left it in the early afternoon.

He went to his desk. The boxes of floppy disks were in their place, the papers and documents in their trays just as he re­membered them. The man with the scar, Rochefort or whoever the hell he was, was certainly efficient. But there are limits to everything. When he switched on the computer, Corso smiled triumphantly.

DAGMAR PC 555K (SI) ELECTRONIC PLC

LAST USED AT 19:35/THU/3/21

A>  ECHO OFF

A>

Used at 19:35 that day, the screen stated. But Corso hadn’t touched the computer in the last twenty-four hours. At 19:35 he was with us around the table at the cafe, while the man with the scar was lying his way into Corso’s apartment.

Corso found something else, which he hadn’t noticed at first, by the telephone. It hadn’t been left there by chance, out of carelessness on the part of the mysterious visitor. In the ashtray, among the butts put out by Corso himself, he found a fresh one that wasn’t his. It was a Havana cigar almost completely burnt down, but the band was intact. He held it up by the tip. He couldn’t believe it. Then, gradually, as he understood, he laughed, showing his eyeteeth like a malicious, angry wolf.

The brand was Montecristo. Naturally.

flavio la ponte had had a visitor too. A plumber, in his case.

“It’s not funny, damn it,” he said by way of a greeting. He waited for Makarova to serve the gin and then emptied the contents of a small cellophane packet onto the counter. The cigar end was identical, and the band was also intact.

“Edmond Dantes strikes again,” said Corso.

La Ponte couldn’t get into the spirit of the thing. “Well, he smokes expensive cigars, the bastard.” His hand was trembling, and he spilled some gin down his curly blond beard. “I found it on my bedside table.”

Corso teased him. “You should take things more calmly, Flavio. You’ve got to be hard.” He patted him on the shoulder. “Remember the Nantucket Harpooners’ Club.”

La Ponte shook his hand, frowning. “I was hard, until I turned eight. Back then I understood the virtue of survival. After that I got a bit softer.”

Between gulps of gin Corso quoted Shakespeare. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and so on. But La Ponte wasn’t about to be reassured by quotations. At least not by that type.

“I’m not scared, really,” he said thoughtfully, looking down. “What worries me is losing things... like money. Or my in­credible sexual powers. Or my life.”