The Club Dumas

CORSO returned To THE village on foot, his hands in his coat pockets and his collar turned up. It took him twenty minutes on the deserted road. There was no moon, and he walked into large patches of darkness beneath the black canopy of trees. The almost total silence was broken only by the sound of his shoes crunching on the gravel at the side of the road, and by the channels of water coursing down the hill between rockrose and ivy, invisible in the darkness.

A car came from behind and overtook him. Corso saw his own shadow, saw its enlarged, ghostly outline glide undulating across the nearby tree trunks and farther dense woods. Only when he was again enveloped in shadow did he breathe out and feel his tense muscles relax. He wasn’t one who expected ghosts around every corner. Instead he viewed things, however extraordinary they were, with the southern fatalism of an old soldier, a fatalism no doubt inherited from his great-great­grandfather Corso. However much you spurred your horse in the opposite direction, the inevitable was always lurking at the gate of the nearest Samarkand, picking its nails with a Venetian dagger or Scottish bayonet. Even so, since the incident in the street in Toledo, Corso felt understandably apprehensive every time he heard a car behind him.

Maybe because of this, when the lights of another car pulled up beside him, Corso turned sharply and moved his canvas bag to his other shoulder. He found his bunch of keys inside his coat pocket. It was not much of a weapon, but with it he could poke out the eye of an attacker. But there seemed no reason to worry. He saw a large, dark shape, like that of an old berlin carriage, and inside, lit by the faint glow from the dashboard, the profile of a man. His voice was friendly, well educated.

“Good evening...” The accent was indefinable, neither Portuguese nor Spanish. “Do you have a match?”

The request might be genuine, or just a pretext, Corso couldn’t be sure. But, asked for a light, he didn’t need to run or brandish his sharpest key. He let go of the keys, took out his matches, and lit one, shielding the flame with his hand.

“Thanks.”

There was the scar, of course. It was an old one, long and vertical, from the temple to halfway down the left cheek. Corso got a close look as the man leaned forward to light his Montecristo cigar. Corso held the light long enough to glimpse the thick, black mustache and dark eyes watching him intently from the gloom. Then the match went out, and it was as if a black mask covered the stranger’s face. The man became a shadow again, his outline barely distinguishable in the faint light from the dashboard.

“Who in the hell are you?”

Not a particularly brilliant question. In any case, it came too late. The question was drowned out by the sound of the engine accelerating. The twin red points of the car’s taillights were already receding into the distance, leaving a fleeting trail against the dark ribbon of road. The red shone more intensely for an instant as the car turned a corner, then disappeared as if it had never been.

The book hunter stood motionless by the side of the road, trying to piece the picture together. Madrid, outside Liana Taillefer’s house. Toledo, his visit to Varo Borja. And Sintra, after an afternoon at Victor Fargas’s house. There were also Dumas’s serials, a publisher hanged in his study, a printer burned at the stake with his strange manual... And among all this, shadowing Corso: Rochefort, a fictional, seventeenth-century swordsman reincarnated as a uniformed chauffeur of luxury cars. Responsible for an attempted hit-and-run incident, and breaking and entering. A smoker of Montecristo cigars. A smoker without a lighter.

Corso swore gently under his breath. He’d have given a rare incunabulum, in good condition, to punch the face of whoever was writing this ridiculous script.

AS SOON as HE got back to the hotel, he made several phone calls. First he dialed the Lisbon number in his notebook. He was lucky, Amilcar Pinto was at home. He ascertained as much in a conversation with Pinto’s bad- tempered wife. Through the black Bakelite earpiece he could hear the sound of a television blaring in the background, the high-pitched crying of children,

and adult voices arguing violently. Finally Pinto came to the phone. They agreed to meet in an hour and a half, the time it would take the Portuguese to travel the fifty kilometers to Sintra. Having arranged this, Corso looked at his watch and called Varo Borja. The book collector wasn’t home. Corso left a message on the answering machine and dialed Flavio La Ponte’s number in Madrid. La Ponte wasn’t home either, so Corso hid his canvas bag on top of the wardrobe and went out for a drink. The first thing he saw as he pushed open the door of the small hotel lounge was the girl. It couldn’t be anyone else: her cropped hair giving her a boyish look, her skin as tanned as if it were August. She sat in an armchair, reading in the cone of light from a lamp, her legs stretched out and crossed on the chair opposite. She was barefoot, in jeans and a white cotton T-shirt, her sweater around her shoulders. Corso stopped, his hand on the doorknob, an absurd feeling hammering at his brain. This was too much of a coincidence.

Incredulous, he went up to the girl. He was almost by her side when she looked up from her book and fixed her green eyes on him with their deep, liquid clarity that he remembered so well from the train. He stopped, not knowing what to say. He had the strange sensation that he was going to fall into those eyes.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming to Sintra,” he said.

“Nor did you.”

She smiled calmly as she said it, looking neither surprised nor embarrassed. She seemed sincerely pleased to see him.

“What are you doing here?” asked Corso.

She removed her feet from the chair and gestured for him to have a seat. But the book hunter remained standing.

“Traveling,” said the girl, and she showed him her book. It wasn’t the same one as on the train. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. “Reading. And bumping into people unexpectedly.”

“Unexpectedly,” repeated Corso like an echo.

He’d bumped into too many people for one evening, whether unexpectedly or not. He found himself trying to establish a link between her presence at the hotel and Rochefort’s appearance on the road. From the right angle, all these things would fit together, but he could not find that angle. He didn’t even know where to start.

“Won’t you sit down?”

He did so, vaguely anxious. The girl shut her book and regarded him curiously. “You don’t look like a tourist,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Are you working?”

“Yes.”

“Any job in Sintra must be interesting.”

That’s all I need, thought Corso, adjusting his glasses. Being interrogated after everything I’ve been through, even if it’s by an extremely young, beautiful girl. Maybe that was the prob­lem. She was too young to be dangerous. Or maybe that was where the danger lay. He picked up the girl’s book from the table and flicked through it. It was a modern English edition, some of the paragraphs underlined in pencil. He read one:

His eyes remained fixed in the diminishing light and growing darkness. That preternatural blackness that seems to be saying to God’s most luminous and sublime creation: “Give me space. Stop shining.”

“You like Gothic novels?”

“I like to read.” She bowed her head slightly, and the light made a foreshortened outline of her bare neck. “And to hold ‘ books. I always carry several in my rucksack when I travel.”

“Do you travel a lot?”

“Yes. I’ve been traveling for ages.”

Corso  winced  at her  answer.   She  said  it very  seriously, frowning slightly, like a child talking about serious matters.

“I thought you were a student.”

“I am sometimes.”

Corso put the Melmoth back on the table.

“You’re a strange young lady. How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? Sometimes your expression changes, as if you were older.”

“Maybe I am. One’s expressions are influenced by what one has experienced and read. Look at you.”