The Club Dumas

be found in this book.”

“What a lousy world,” said Corso. “Even Lucifer has to re­sort to the small print.”

“You must understand. Nowadays people will swindle you out of anything. Even their soul. His clients slip away and don’t comply with their contractual obligations. The devil’s fed up and he has every reason to be.”

“What else is in the book? What do the nine engravings mean?”

“In principle they’re puzzles that have to be solved. Used in conjunction with the text, they confer power. And provide the formula for constructing the magic name to make Satan appear.”

“Does it work?” “No. It’s a forgery.” “Have you tried it yourself?” Frieda Ungern looked shocked.

“Can you see me at my age, standing in a magic circle, invoking Beelzebub? Please. However much he looked like John Barrymore fifty years ago, a beau ages too. Can you imagine the disappointment at my age? I prefer to be faithful to the memories of my youth.”

Corso looked at her in mock surprise. “But surely you and the devil... Your readers take you for a committed witch.”

“Well, they’re mistaken. What I look for in the devil is money, not emotion.” She looked at the window. “I spent my, husband’s fortune building up this collection, so I have to live off my royalties.”

“Which are considerable, I’m sure. You’re the queen of the

bookshops.”

“But life is expensive, Mr. Corso. Very expensive, especially when one has to make deals with people like our friend Mr. Montegrifo to get the rare books one wants. Satan serves as a good source of income nowadays, but that’s all. I’m seventy years old. I don’t have time for gratuitous, silly fantasies, spin­sters’ dreams.... Do you understand?”

It was Corso’s turn to smile. “Perfectly.”

“When I say that this book is a forgery,” continued the baroness, “it’s because I’ve studied it in depth. There’s some­thing in it that doesn’t work. There are gaps in it, blanks. I mean this figuratively, because my copy is in fact complete. It belonged to Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s mistress. She was a high priestess of Satanism and managed to have the ritual of the Black Mass included in the palace routine. There is a letter from Madame de Montespan to Madame De Peyrolles, her friend and confidante, in which she complains of the inefficacy of a book which, she states, ‘has all that which the sages specify, and yet there is something incorrect in it, a play on words which never falls into the correct sequence.’ “ “Who else owned it?”

“The Count of Saint Germain, who sold it to Cazotte.” “Jacques Cazotte?”

“Yes. The author of The Devil in Love, who was guillotined in 1792. Do you know the book?”

Corso nodded cautiously. The links were so obvious that they were impossible. “I read it once.”

Somewhere in the apartment a phone rang, and the secre­tary’s steps could be heard along the corridor. The ringing stopped.

“As for The Nine Doors” the baroness continued, “the trail went cold here in Paris, at the time of the Terror after the revolution. There are a couple of subsequent references, but they’re very vague. Gerard de Nerval mentions it in passing in one of his articles, assuring us that he saw it at a friend’s house.” Corso blinked imperceptibly behind his glasses. “Dumas was a friend of his,” he said, alert.

“Yes. But Nerval doesn’t say at whose house. The fact is, nobody saw the book again until the Petain collaborator’s col­lection was auctioned, which is when I got hold of it....”

Corso was no longer listening. According to the legend, Gerard de Nerval hanged himself with the cord from a bodice, Madame de Montespan’s. Or was it Madame de Maintenon’s?

Whoever it belonged to, Corso couldn’t help drawing worrying

parallels with the cord from Enrique Taillefer’s dressing gown.

The secretary came to the door, interrupting his thoughts.

Somebody wanted Corso on the telephone. He excused himself and walked past the tables of readers out into the corridor, full of yet more books and plants. On a walnut corner table there was an antique metal phone with the receiver off the hook.

“Hello.”

“Corso? It’s Irene Adler.”

“So I gather.” He looked behind him down the empty cor­ridor. The secretary had disappeared.  “I was surprised you weren’t still keeping a lookout. Where are you calling from?” “The bar on the corner. There’s a man watching the house. That’s why I came here.”

For a moment Corso just breathed slowly. Then he bit off a hangnail. It was bound to happen sooner or later, he thought with twisted resignation. The man was part of the landscape, or the furniture. Then, although he knew it was pointless, he said:

“Describe him.”

“Dark, with a mustache and a big scar on his face.” The girl’s voice was calm, without any trace of emotion or awareness of danger. “He’s sitting in a gray BMW across the street.” “Has he seen you?”

“I don’t know. But I can see him. He’s been there an hour. He got out of the car twice: first to look at the names at the door, and then to buy a newspaper.”

Corso spat the hangnail out of his mouth and sucked his thumb. It smarted. “Listen. I don’t know what the man’s up to. I don’t even know if the two of you are part of the same setup. But I don’t like him being near you. Not at all. So go back to the hotel.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Corso. I’ll go where I have to.” She added, “Regards to Treville,” and hung up.

Corso made a gesture halfway between exasperation and sarcasm, because he was thinking the same thing and didn’t like the coincidence. He stood for a moment looking at the receiver before hanging up. Of course, she was reading The Three Musketeers. She’d even had the book open when he saw her from the window. In chapter 3, having just arrived in Paris, and during an audience with Monsieur de Treville, commander of the king’s musketeers d’Artagnan sees Rochefort from the window. He runs after him, bumps into Athos’s shoulder, Porthos’s shoulder belt, and Aramis’s handkerchief. Regards to Treville. It was a clever joke, if it was spontaneous. But Corso didn’t find it at all funny.

After he hung up, he stood thinking for a moment in the darkness of the corridor. Maybe that’s exactly what they were expecting him to do: rush downstairs after Rochefort, sword in hand, taking the bait. The girl’s call might even have been part of the plan. Or maybe—and this was really getting convoluted—it had been a warning about the plan, if there was one. That’s if she was playing fair-^Corso was too experienced to put his hand in the fire for anybody.

Bad times, he said to himself again. Absurd times. After so many books, films, and TV shows, after reading on so many different possible levels, it was difficult to tell if you were seeing the original or a copy; difficult to know whether the image was real, inverted, or both, in a hall of mirrors; difficult to know the authors’ intentions. It was as easy to fall short of the truth as to overshoot it with one’s interpretations. Here was one more reason to feel envious of his great-grandfather with the gren­adier’s mustache and with the smell of gunpowder floating over the muddy fields of Flanders. In those days a flag was still a flag, the Emperor was the Emperor, a rose was a rose was a rose. But now at least, here in Paris, something was clear to Corso: even as a second-level reader he was prepared to play the game only up to a certain point. He no longer had the youth, the innocence, or the desire to go and fight at a place chosen by his opponents, three duels arranged in ten minutes, in the grounds of the Carmelite convent or wherever the hell it might be. When the time came to say hello, he’d make sure he approached Rochefort with everything in his favor, if pos­sible from behind, with a steel bar in his hand. He owed it to him since that narrow street in Toledo, not forgetting the in­terest accrued in Sintra. Corso would settle his debts calmly. Biding his time.

 XI. THE BANKS OF THE SEINE

This mystery is considered insoluble for the very same

reasons that should lead one to consider it soluble.

—E. A. Poe, THE  MURDERS  IN  THE  RUE  MORGUE

The code is simple,” said