The Club Dumas

lost, the retreat of the defeated legions: she was very young to remember such things. She smiled like a little girl both mischievous and innocent, and there were traces of fatigue under her eyes. She was sleepy and warm.

Corso swallowed. A part of him went up to her and pulled her T-shirt up over her tanned skin, undid her jeans, and lay her on the bed, among the remains of the book that could summon the forces of darkness. And sank into her warm flesh, settling scores with God and Lucifer, with the inexorable flow of time, with his own ghosts, with life and death. But the rest of him just lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke in silence. She stared at him for a long time, waiting for something, a gesture, a word. Then she said good night and went to the door. But in the doorway, she turned and slowly raised her hand, palm inward, index and middle fingers joined and pointing up­ ward. Her smile was both tender and conspiratorial, ingenuous and knowing. Like a lost angel pointing nostalgically at heaven.

baroness frieda ungern had two sweet little dim­ples when she smiled. She looked as if she had smiled con­ tinuously for the past seventy years, and it had left a permanently benevolent expression around her eyes and mouth. Corso, a precocious reader, had known since childhood that there are many different types of witch: wicked stepmothers, bad fairies, beautiful, evil queens, and even nasty old witches with warts on their noses. But despite all he’d heard about the septuagenarian baroness, he didn’t know to which category she belonged. She might have been one of those elderly ladies who live, as if cushioned by a dream, outside real life, where no unpleasantness ever intrudes upon their existence, but the depth of her quick, intelligent, suspicious eyes canceled that first im­ pression. So did the right sleeve of her cardigan hanging empty, her arm amputated above the elbow. Otherwise she was small and plump and looked like a French teacher at a boarding school for young ladies. In the days when “young ladies” still existed, that is. Or so Corso thought as he looked at her gray hair tied into a bun on the nape of her neck and at her rather masculine shoes worn with white ankle socks.

“Mr. Corso. Pleased to meet you.”

She held out her only hand—small, like the rest of her— with unusual energy and showed her dimples. She had a slight accent, more German than French. A certain Von Ungern, Corso remembered reading somewhere, had become notorious in Manchuria or Mongolia in the early twenties. A warlord of sorts, he had made a last stand against the Red Army at the head of a ragged army of White Russians, Cossacks, Chinese, deserters, and bandits. With armored trains, looting, killing, that sort of thing, concluding with a firing squad at dawn. Maybe he was a relation.

“He was my husband’s great-uncle. His family was Russian and emigrated to France with a fair amount of money before the revolution.” There was neither nostalgia nor pride in her tone. It had all happened in the past, to other people, to another family, she seemed to say. Strangers who disappeared before she even existed. “I was born in Germany. My family lost ev­erything under the Nazis. I was married here in France after the war.” She carefully removed a dead leaf from a plant by the window and smiled slightly. “I never could stand my in-laws’ obsession with the past: their nostalgia for St. Petersburg, the Tsar’s birthday. It was like a wake.”

Corso looked at the desk covered with books, the packed shelves. He calculated that there must have been a thousand volumes in that room alone. The most rare and valuable ones seemed to be there, from modern editions to ancient, leather-bound tomes.

“And what about all this?”

“That’s different. It’s material for research, not for worship. I use it to do my work.”

Times are bad, thought Corso, when witches, or whatever they are, talk about their in-laws and exchange their cauldron for a library, filing cabinets, and a place on the bestseller list.

Through the open door he could see more books in the other rooms and in the corridor. Books and plants. There were pots of them all over the place: the windowsills, the floor, the wooden shelves. It was a large, expensive apartment with a view of the river and, in another time, of the bonfires of the Inquisition. There were several reading tables occupied by young people who looked like students, and all the walls were covered with books. Ancient, gilded bindings shone from be­tween the plants. The Ungern Foundation contained the largest collection in Europe of books on the occult. Corso glanced at the titles closest to him. Daemonolatriae Libri by Nicholas Remy. Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo. De Daemonialitate et Incubus et Sucubus by Ludovico Sinistrari. In addition to having one of the best catalogues of demonology, and a foundation named after her late husband the baron, Baroness Ungern enjoyed a solid reputation as a writer of books on magic and witchcraft. Her last book, Isis, the Naked Virgin, had been on the bestseller list for three years. The Vatican boosted sales by publicly condemning the work, which drew worrying parallels between a pagan deity and the mother of Christ. There were eight reprints in France, twelve in Spain, and seventeen in Catholic Italy.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“It’s called The Devil, History and Legend. An irreverent biography. It’ll be ready by the beginning of next year.”

Corso stopped at a row of books. His attention had been drawn by the Disquisitionum Magicarum by Martin del Rio, the three volumes of the Lovaina first edition, 1599—1600: a classic on demonic magic.

“Where did you get hold of this?”

Frieda Ungern must have been considering how much in­formation to provide, because she took a moment to answer.

“At an auction in Madrid in ‘89. I had a great deal of trou­ble preventing your compatriot, Varo Borja, from acquiring it.” She sighed, as if still recovering from the effort. “And money. I would never have managed it without help from Paco Montegrifo. Do you know him? A delightful man.”

Corso smiled crookedly. Not only did he know Montegrifo, the head of the Spanish branch of Claymore’s Auctioneers, he had worked with him on several unorthodox and highly profitable deals. Such as the sale, to a certain Swiss collector, of a Cosmography by Ptolemy, a Gothic manuscript dating from 1456, which had mysteriously disappeared from the University of Salamanca not long before. Montegrifo found himself in pos­session of the book and used Corso as an intermediary. The entire operation had been clean and discreet, and included a visit to the Ceniza brothers’ workshop, where a compromising stamp had been removed. Corso delivered the book himself to Lausanne. All included in his thirty percent commission.

“Yes, I know him.” He stroked the spines of the several volumes of the Disquisitionum Magicarum and wondered what Montegrifo charged the baroness for rigging the auction in her favor. “As for the Martin del Rio, I’ve only seen a copy once before, in the collection of the Jesuits in Bilbao.... Bound in a single piece of leather. But it’s the same edition.”

As he spoke, he moved his hand along the row of books, touching some. There were many interesting volumes, with quality bindings in vellum, shagreen, parchment. Many others were in mediocre or poor condition, and looked much used. Nearly all had markers in them, strips of white card covered with small, spiky handwriting in pencil. Material for her re­search. He stopped in front of a book that looked familiar: black, no title, five raised bands on the spine. Book number three.

“How long have you had this?”

Now, Corso was a man of steady nerves. Especially at this stage in the story. But he’d spent the night sorting through the ashes of number two and couldn’t prevent the baroness from noticing something peculiar in his tone of voice. He saw that she was looking at him suspiciously despite the friendly dimples in her youthful old face.

“The Nine Doors? I’m not sure. A long time.” Her only hand moved quickly and deftly. She took the book from the shelf effortlessly and, supporting the spine in her palm, opened it at the first page, decorated with several bookplates, some very old. The last one was an arabesque design with the name Von Ungern and the date written in ink. Seeing it, she nodded nos­talgically. “A present from my husband. I married very young. He was twice my age. He bought the book in 1949.”

That was the problem with modern-day witches, thought Corso: they didn’t have any secrets. Everything was out in the open, you could read all about them in any Who’s Who or gossip column. Baronesses or not, they’d become predictable, vulgar. Torquemada would have been bored to death by it all.

“Did your husband share your interest in this sort of thing?”

“Not in the slightest. He never read a single book. He just made all my wishes come true like the genie of the lamp.” Her amputated arm seemed to shudder for a moment in the empty sleeve of her cardigan. “An expensive book or a perfect pearl necklace, it was all the same to him.” She paused and smiled with gentle melancholy. “But he was an amusing man, capable of seducing his best friends’ wives. And he made excellent champagne