The Club Dumas

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, there you are. Prague was Europe’s capital of magic and the occult, just as Toledo had been four centuries earlier... Can you see the links? Torchia chose to live in Saint Mary of the Snows, the district of magic, near Jungmannove Square, where there is a statue of Jan Hus. Do you remember Hus at the stake?”

“ ‘From my ashes a swan will rise that you will not be able to burn.’“

“Exactly. You’re easy to talk to. I expect you know that. It must help you in your work.” The baroness involuntarily in­haled some of Corso’s cigarette smoke. She wrinkled her nose, but he remained unperturbed. “Now, where were we? Ah yes. Prague, act two. Torchia moves to a house in the Jewish quarter nearby, next to the synagogue. A district where the windows are lit up every night and the cabbalists are searching for the magic formula of the Golem. After a while he moves again, this time to the district of Mala Strana....” She smiled at him conspiratorially. “What does all this sound like to you?”

“Like a pilgrimage. Or a field trip, as we’d say nowadays.” “That’s what I think,” the baroness agreed with satisfaction. Corso, now well and truly adopted, was moving quickly to the top of the class. “It must be more than coincidence that Aristide Torchia went to the three districts in which all the esoteric knowledge of the day was concentrated. And in a Prague whose streets still echoed with the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, where the last manuscripts of Chaldean magic and the Pythagorean keys, lost or dispersed after the murder of Metapontius, were to be found.” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice: Miss Marple about to confide in her best friend that she found cyanide in the tea cakes. “In that Prague, Mr. Corso, in those dark studies, there were men who practiced the carmina, the art of magic words, and necromancy, the art of communicating with the dead.” She paused, holding her breath, before whispering, “And goety ...” “The art of communicating with the devil.” “Yes.” She leaned back in her armchair, deliciously shocked by it all. She was in her element. Her eyes shone, and she was speaking quickly, as if she had much to say and too little time. “At that time, Torchia lived in a place where the pages and engravings that had survived wars, fires, and persecution were hidden.... The remains of the magic book that opens the doors to knowledge and power: the Delomelanicon, the word that summons the darkness.”

She said it in a conspiratorial, almost theatrical tone, but she was also smiling, as if she didn’t quite take it seriously herself, or was suggesting that Corso maintain a healthy distance.

“Once he had completed his apprenticeship, Torchia re­turned to Venice,” she went on. “Take note of this, because it’s important: in spite of the risks he would run in Italy, the printer left the relative safety of Prague to return to his hometown. There he published a series of compromising books that led to his being burned at the stake. Isn’t that strange?” “Seems as if he had a mission to accomplish.” “Yes. But given by whom?” The baroness opened The Nine Doors at the title page. “By authority and permission of the , superiors.  Makes  one think,  doesn’t it? It’s very likely that Torchia became a member of a secret brotherhood in Prague and   was   entrusted   with   spreading   a   message.   A   kind   of preaching.”

“You said it yourself earlier: the gospel according to Satan.” “Maybe. The fact is that Torchia published The Nine Doors at the worst time. Between 1550 and 1666, humanist Neoplatonism and the hermetic and cabbalist movements were losing the battle amid rumors of demonism. Men like Giordano Bruno and John Dee were burned at the stake or died per­secuted and destitute. With the triumph of the Counter- Reformation, the Inquisition grew unhindered. Created to fight heresy, it specialized in witches, wizards, and sorcery to justify its shadowy existence. And here they were offered a printer who had dealings with the devil.... Torchia made things easy for them, it must be said. Listen.” She turned several pages of the book at random. “Pot mvere im.go.” She looked at Corso. “I’ve translated numerous passages. The code is quite simple. T will bring wax images to life,’ it says. ‘And unhinge the moon, and put flesh back on dead bodies.’ What do you think of that?” “Rather childish. It seems stupid to die for that.” “Maybe. One never knows. Do you like Shakespeare?” “Sometimes.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ “

“Hamlet was a very insecure man.”

“Not everyone is able, or deserves, to gain access to these occult things, Mr. Corso. As the old saying goes, one must know and keep silent.”

“But Torchia didn’t.”

“As you know, according to the cabbala, God has a terrible and secret name.”

“The tetragrammaton.”

“That’s right. The harmony and balance of the universe rests upon its four letters.... As the Archangel Gabriel warned Mohammed: ‘God is hidden by seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. And were those veils to be lifted, even I would be annihilated.’ But God isn’t the only one to have such a name. The devil has one too. A terrible, evil combination of letters that summons him when spoken ... and unleashes terrifying consequences.”

“That’s nothing new. It had a name long before Christianity and Judaism: Pandora’s box.”

She looked at him with satisfaction, as if awarding top marks.

“Very good, Mr. Corso. In fact, down through the centuries, we’ve always talked about the same things, but with different names. Isis and the Virgin Mary, Mitra and Jesus Christ, the twenty-fifth of December as Christmas or the festival of the winter solstice, the anniversary of the unconquered sun. Think of Saint Gregory. Even in the seventh century he was recom­mending that missionaries use the pagan festivals and adapt them to Christianity.”

“Sound business sense. In essence it was a marketing opera­tion: they were trying to attract somebody else’s customers.... Could you tell me what you know about Pandora’s boxes and such like. Including pacts with the devil.”

“The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient.  Gervase  of Tilbury  in the thirteenth  century and Gerson in the fourteenth both mentioned it. As for pacts with the devil, the tradition goes back even further: from the Book of Enoch to Saint Jeronimus, through the cabbala and the Church Fathers. Not forgetting Bishop Theophilus, who was actually a ‘lover of knowledge,’ the historical Faust, and Roger Bacon. Or Pope Sylvester II, of whom it was said that he robbed the Saracens of a book that ‘contained all one needs to know.’ “ “So it was a question of obtaining knowledge.” “Of course. Nobody would take so much trouble, wandering to the very edge of the abyss, just to kill time. Scholarly de-monology identifies Lucifer with knowledge. In Genesis, the   -devil in the form of a serpent succeeds in getting man to stop being  a  simpleton  and  gain  awareness,  free  will,  lucidity, knowledge, with all the pain and uncertainty that they entail.” The conversation of the evening before was too fresh so, inevitably, Corso thought of the girl. He picked up The Nine Doors and with the excuse of looking at it again in better light, he went to the window. She was no longer there. Surprised, he looked up and down the street, along the embankment and the stone benches under the trees, but couldn’t see her. He was puzzled but didn’t have time to think about it. Frieda Ungern was speaking again.

“Do you like guessing games? Puzzles with hidden keys? In a way the book you’re holding is exactly that. Like any intel­ligent being, the devil likes games, riddles. Obstacle courses where the weak and incapable fall by the wayside and only superior spirits—the initiates—win.” Corso moved closer to the desk and put down the book, open at the frontispiece. The serpent with the tail in its mouth wound around the tree. “He who sees nothing but a serpent in the figure devouring its tail deserves to go no further.”

“What is this book for?” asked Corso.

The baroness put a finger to her lips like the knight in the first engraving. She was smiling.

“Saint John of Patmos says that in the reign of the Second Beast, before the final, decisive battle of Armageddon, ‘only he who has the mark, the name of the Beast or the number of his name, will be able to buy and sell.’ Waiting for the hour to come, Luke (4:13) tells us at the end of his story about temp­tation that the devil, repudiated three times, ‘has withdrawn until the appropriate time.’ But the devil left several paths for the impatient, including the way to reach him, to make a pact with him.”

“To sell him one’s soul.”

Frieda Ungern giggled confidentially. Miss Marple with her cronies, engaged in gossip about the devil. You’ll never guess the latest about Satan. This, that, and the other. I don’t know where to start, Peggy my dear.

“The devil learned his lesson,” she said. “He was young and naive, and he made mistakes. Souls escaped at the last minute through the false door, saving themselves for the sake of love, God’s mercy, and other specious promises. So he ended up in­cluding a nonnegotiable clause for the handing over of body and soul once the deadline had expired ‘without reserve of any right to redemption, or future recourse to God’s mercy.’ The clause is in fact to