The Club Dumas

They went around the house, past the tiled fountain with the chubby stone angel, eyes empty and hands cut off, water still trickling from its mouth into the pond. Surprisingly com­posed, the girl—Irene Adler or whatever her name was—went ahead of Corso in her blue duffel coat, the rucksack on her back. She walked, her long supple legs in jeans, her stubborn head tilted forward with the determined air of someone who knows exactly where she is going. Unlike Corso. He had over­come his doubt and let the girl lead him. He was leaving the questions for later. Clearheaded after a quick shower, carrying in his canvas bag all that was important to him, he could think of nothing now but Victor Fargas’s Nine Doors, book number two.

They got in without difficulty through the French window that led from the garden into the drawing room. On the ceiling, dagger aloft, Abraham was still watching over the books lined up on the floor. The house seemed deserted.

“Where’s Fargas?” asked Corso.

The girl shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“You said he was dead.”

“He is.” After glancing at her surroundings, at the bare walls and the books, she picked up the violin from the sideboard and looked at it curiously. “What I don’t know is where he is.”

“You’re lying.”

She placed the violin under her chin and plucked at the strings before putting it back in its case, unhappy with the sound. Then she looked at Corso.

“Oh ye of little faith.”

She was smiling again, absently. To Corso her composure, incongruously mature, seemed both deep and frivolous. This young lady behaved according to a strange code of conduct, motivated by things that were more complex than her age and appearance let one suppose.

Suddenly, these thoughts—the girl, the strange events, even the supposed corpse of Victor Fargas—all left Corso’s mind. On the threadbare rug that depicted the battle of Arbelas, between books on satanic arts and the occult, there was a gap. The Nine Doors was no longer there.

“Shit,” he said.

He muttered it again as he knelt beside the row of books.

His expert glance, accustomed to finding a book instantly, went back and forth  without success.  Black morocco, five raised bands, no title on the exterior, a pentacle on the cover. Umbrarum regni, etc. He wasn’t mistaken. A third of the mystery, exactly thirty-three point endless threes percent, had vanished.

“Shit.”

It couldn’t have been Pinto, he wouldn’t have had time to

organize anything. The girl was watching him as if waiting for him to do something interesting. Corso stood up.

“Who are you?”

It was the second time in less than twelve hours that he’d asked the question, but to two different people. Things were getting complicated far too quickly. For her part, the girl held his gaze, not reacting to the question. After a time she looked away into empty space. Or possibly at the books lined up on the floor.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “You’d be better off won­dering where the book has gone.”

“What book?”

She looked at him again but said nothing. He felt incredibly stupid.

“You know too much,” he told the girl. “Even more than I do.”

Again she shrugged. She was looking at Corso’s watch.

“You don’t have much time.”

“I don’t give a damn how much time I have.”

“That’s up to you. But there’s a flight from Lisbon to Paris in five hours, from Portela Airport. We can just make it.”

God. Corso shivered under his coat, horrified. She sounded like an efficient secretary, schedule book in hand, listing her boss’s appointments for the day. He opened his mouth to com­plain. And so young with those disturbing eyes. Damned little witch.

“Why should I leave now?”

“Because the police might arrive.”

“I don’t have anything to hide.”

The girl smiled indefinably, as if she had just heard a funny but very old joke. Then she put her rucksack on her back and waved good-bye.

“I’ll bring you cigarettes in prison. Though they don’t sell your brand here in Portugal.”

She went out into the garden without a backward glance at the room. Corso was about to go after her and stop her. Then he saw something in the fireplace.

After a moment of disbelief, he went over to it. Very slowly, so that things might return to normal. But when he reached the fireplace and leaned on the mantelpiece, he saw that the damage was irreversible. In the brief interval between last night and this morning, a minute period of time compared to their centuries-old contents, the antiquarian bibliographies had gone out of date. There now remained not three known copies of The Nine Doors, but only two. The third, or what was left of it, was still smoldering among the embers.

He knelt, taking care not to touch anything. The binding, no doubt because of the leather covering, was less damaged than the pages inside. Two of the five raised bands on the spine were intact, and the pentacle was only half burned. But the pages had been almost entirely consumed by the flames. There were only a few charred edges, with fragments of print. Corso held his hand over the still-warm remains.

He took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. He remembered how the logs had been piled up in the fireplace the night before. Judging by the ashes—the burned logs lay underneath the ashes of the book, nobody had raked over the embers—the fire had gone out with the book on top. He remembered seeing enough logs piled there to last about four or five hours. And the warm ashes indicated that the fire had gone out about the same number of hours ago. This made a total of eight to ten hours. Somebody must have lit the fire between ten o’clock and midnight, and then put the book in. And whoever had done so hadn’t hung around afterward to rake over the embers.

Corso wrapped in old newspaper what remains he could save from the fireplace. The page fragments were stiff and brittle, so it took him some time. As he did this, he noticed that the pages and cover had burned separately. Whoever had thrown

them into the fire had torn them apart so that they would burn more efficiently.

Once he retrieved all the pieces, he paused to glance around the room. The Virgil and the Agricola were where Fargas had put them. The De re metalica lined up with the others on the rug—and the Virgil on the table, just as Fargas had left it when, with the tone of a priest performing a ritual sacrifice, he had uttered the words “I think I’ll sell this one....” There was a sheet of paper between its pages. Corso opened the book. It was a handwritten receipt, unfinished.

Victor Coutinho Fargas, Identity Card No. 3554712, address: Quinta da Soledade, Carretera de Colares, km. 4, Sintra, Received with thanks the sum of 800,000 escudosfor the work in my possession,  ‘Virgil  Opera nunc recens accuratissime castigata... Venezia, Giunta, 1544.” (Essling 61. Sander 7671.) Folio, 10.587, Ic, 113 woodcuts. Complete and in good con­dition. The buyer...

There was no name or signature. The receipt had never been completed. Corso put the paper back and shut the book. Then he went to the room where he’d spent the previous afternoon, to make sure he’d left no trace, no papers with his handwriting, or anything like that. He also removed his cigarette butts from the ashtray and put them in his pocket, wrapped in another piece of newspaper. He looked around for a little while longer. His steps echoed through the empty house. No sign of the owner.

As he again passed the books on the floor, he stopped, tempted. It would have been so easy—a couple of conveniently small Elzevirs attracted his attention. But Corso was a sensible man. It would only complicate matters if things got nasty. So, with a sigh, he bade farewell to the Fargas collection.

He went out through the French window into the garden to look for the girl, dragging his feet through the leaves. He found her sitting on a short flight of steps that led to the pond. He could hear the water trickling from the