The Club Dumas

and foie gras, her lips moistened with Burgundy, as she stroked his side with her bare foot. I know you hate it, Lucas Corso, but you’ll just have to put up with it. I got you in profile on the bridge watching the barges pass underneath, you almost look handsome this time, you bastard. Nikon was Ashkenazi, with large eyes. Her father had been number 77,843 in Treblinka, saved by the bell in the last round. Whenever Israeli soldiers appeared on TV, invading places in huge tanks, she jumped off the bed, naked, and kissed the screen, her eyes wet with tears, whispering “Sha-lom, shalom” in a caressing tone. The same tone she used when she called Corso by his first name, until the day she stopped. Nikon. He never got to see the photograph of him leaning on the Pont des Arts, watching the barges pass under the arches. In profile, almost looking handsome, you bastard.

When he looked up, Nikon had gone. Another woman was by his side. Tall, with tanned skin, a short boyish haircut, and eyes the color of freshly washed grapes, almost colorless. For a second he blinked, confused, until everything fell back into place. The present cut cleanly, like a scalpel. Corso, in profile, in black and white (Nikon always worked in black and white), fluttered down into the river and was swept downstream with the dead leaves and the rubbish discharged by the barges and the drains. Now, the woman who wasn’t Nikon was holding a small, leather-bound book. She was holding it out to him.

“I hope you like it.”

The Devil in Love, by Jacques Cazotte, the 1878 edition. When he opened it, Corso recognized the prints from the first edition in a facsimile appendix: Alvaro in the magic circle before the devil, who asks, “Che vuoi?”; Biondetta untangling her hair with her fingers; the handsome boy sitting at the harpsichord ... He chose a page at random:

... man emerged from a handful of earth and water. Why should a woman not be made of dew, earthly vapors, and rays of light, of the condensed residues of a rainbow? Where does the possible lie? And where the impossible?

He closed the book and looked up. His eyes met the smiling eyes of the girl. Below, in the water, the sun sparkled in the wake of a boat, and lights moved over her skin like the reflec­tions from the facets of a diamond.

“Residues of a rainbow,” quoted Corso. “What do you know of any of that?”

She ran her hand through her hair and turned her face to the sun, closing her eyes against the glare. Everything about her was light: the reflection of the river, the brightness of the morning, the two green slits between her dark eyelashes.

“I know what I was told a long time ago. The rainbow is the bridge between heaven and earth. It will shatter at the end of the world, once the devil has crossed it on horseback.”

“Not bad. Did your grandmother tell you that?”

She shook her head. She looked at Corso again, absorbed and serious.

“I heard it told to a friend, Bileto.” As she said the name, she stopped a moment and frowned tenderly, like a little girl revealing a secret. “He likes horses and wine, and he’s the most optimistic person I know. He’s still hoping to get back to heaven.”

they crossed to the other side of the bridge. Strangely, Corso felt that the gargoyles of Notre-Dame were watching him from a distance. They were forgeries, of course, like so many other things. They and their infernal grimaces, horns, and goatee beards hadn’t been there when honest master builders had looked up, sweaty and proud, and drunk a glass of eau-de-vie. Or when Quasimodo brooded in the bell towers

over his unrequited love for the gypsy Esmeralda. But ever since Charles Laughton, as the hideous hunchback who resem­bled them, and Gina Lollobrigida in the remake—Technicolor, as Nikon would have specified—were executed in their shadow, it was impossible to think of Notre-Dame without the sinister neomedieval sentinels. Corso imagined the bird’s-eye view: the Pont Neuf, and beyond it, narrow and dark in the luminous morning, the Pont des Arts over the gray-green band of river, with two tiny figures moving imperceptibly toward the right bank. Bridges and rainbows with black Caronte barges gliding slowly beneath the pillars and vaults of stone. The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.

They emerged opposite the Louvre and stopped at a traffic light before crossing. Corso shifted the strap of his canvas bag on his shoulder and glanced absently to right and left. The traffic was heavy, and he happened to notice one of the passing cars. He froze, turned to stone like a gargoyle on the cathedral. “What’s the matter?” asked the girl when the lights turned green and she saw that Corso wasn’t moving. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

He had. Not one but two. They were in the back of a taxi already moving off in the distance, engaged in animated con­versation, and they hadn’t noticed Corso. The woman was blond and very attractive. He recognized her immediately despite her hat and the veil covering her eyes. Liana Taillefer. Next to her, an arm around her shoulders, showing his best side and stroking his curly beard vainly, was Flavio La Ponte.

 X. NUMBER THREE

They suspected that he had no heart.

—R. Sabatini, SCARAMOUCHE

Corso  had  a  rare  knack:  he could make a loyal ally of a stranger instantly, in return for a tip or even a smile. As we’ve seen, there was something about him—his half-calculated clumsiness, his customary, friendly rabbit expression, his air of absentminded helplessness which was nothing of the sort—that won people over. This happened to some of us. And it happened to Gruber, the concierge of the Louvre Concorde, with whom Corso had had dealings for fifteen years. Gruber was dry and imperturbable, with a crew cut and a permanent poker player’s expression around the mouth. Dur­ing the retreat of 1944, when he was sixteen years old and a Croat volunteer in the Horst Wessel Eighteenth Panzergrena-dier division, a Russian bullet hit him in the spine. It left him with an Iron Cross Second Class and three fused vertebrae for life. This was why he was so stiff and upright behind the re­ ception desk, as if he were wearing a steel corset. “I need a favor, Gruber.” “Yes, sir.”

He almost clicked his heels as he stood to attention. The impeccable burgundy jacket with the gold keys on the lapels gave the old exile a military air, very much to the taste of the Central Europeans who stayed at the hotel. After the fall of Communism and the fragmenting of the Slav hordes, they ar­rived in Paris to glance at the Champs-Elysees out of the corners of their eyes and dream of a Fourth Reich.

“La Ponte, Flavio. Nationality Spanish. Also Herrero, Liana, though she may be going by the name of Taillefer or de Taillefer. I want to know if they’re at a hotel in the city.”

He wrote the names on a card and handed it to Gruber, together with five hundred francs. Corso always gave tips or bribes with a shrug, as if to say, “I’ll do the same for you sometime.” It made it such a friendly-conspiratorial exchange, it was difficult to tell who was doing whom a favor. Gruber, who murmured a polite “Merci m’sieu”to Spaniards on package tours, to Italians in loud ties, and to Americans with airline bags and baseball caps for a miserable ten-franc tip, took Corso’s banknote without a word or even a nod. He just slipped it in his pocket with an elegant, semicircular movement of the hand and a croupier’s impassive gravity, reserved for the few, like Corso, who still knew how to play the game. Gruber had learned the job in the days when a guest had only to raise an eyebrow for hotel employees to come running. The dear old Europe of international hotels was now reduced to a few cognoscenti.

“Are the lady and gentleman staying together?”

“I don’t know.” Corso frowned. He pictured La Ponte emerg­ing from the bathroom in an embroidered dressing gown and Taillefer’s widow lying on the bed in a silk nightgown. “I’d like to know that too.”

Gruber bowed imperceptibly. “It’ll take a few hours, Mr. Corso.”

“I know.” He glanced down the corridor that led from the lobby to the dining room. The girl was there, her duffel coat under her arm and her hands in her pockets, examining a dis­play of perfumes and silk scarves. “What about her?”

The concierge took a card from under the desk. “Irene Adler,” he read. “British passport, issued two months ago. Nineteen years old. Address: 223B Baker Street, London.” “Don’t joke with me, Gruber.” “I’d never take such a liberty, Mr. Corso. That’s what it says here.”

There was the hint, the faintest suggestion of a smile on the face of the old SS Waffen. Corso had seen him smile only once: the day the Berlin Wall came down. He observed Gruber’s white crew cut, stiff neck, hands arranged symmetrically, wrists resting exactly on the edge of the desk. Old Europe, or what was left of it. Gruber