Corso cursed emphatically under his breath, as if he were muttering a prayer. He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.
He got goose bumps. Just like a vulgar fan.
it WAS NIGHT BY the time he left. He paused in the doorway a moment and glanced to the left and right, but saw nothing to worry him. The gray BMW had disappeared. A low mist was rising from the river, flowing over the stone parapet and sliding along the damp paving stones. The yellowish glow of the street lamps, illuminating successive stretches of the embankment, was reflected on the ground, lighting up the empty bench where the girl had been sitting.
He went to the bar. He searched for her face among the people standing at the bar or sitting at the narrow tables at the back, but couldn’t find her. He sensed that a piece of the jigsaw was out of place, something that had been setting off alarm signals intermittently in his brain ever since her call to warn him of Rochefort’s reappearance. Corso, whose instincts had become a great deal sharper recently, could smell danger in the deserted street, in the damp vapor rising from the river and trailing to the door of the bar where he was standing. He shook his shoulders to rid himself ,of the feeling. He bought a packet of Gauloises and gulped down two gins one after the other. They made his nostrils dilate, and everything fell slowly into place, like a picture coming into focus. The alarms faded in the distance, and echoes from the outside world were now comfortably softened. Holding a third gin, he went to sit down at an empty table by the slightly misted window. He looked out at the street, the quayside, and the mist sliding over the parapet and swirling up as the wheels of a car cut through it. He sat there for a quarter of an hour, looking for any unusual signs, his canvas bag on the floor by this feet. In it were most of the answers to the mystery posed by Varo Borja. The book collector hadn’t wasted his money.
In the first place, Corso had now solved the problem of the differences between eight of the nine engravings. Book number three differed from the other two copies in engravings I, III, and VI. In engraving I, the walled city with the horseman riding toward it had only three towers, not four. In engraving III, there was an arrow in the archer’s quiver, while in the Toledo and Sintra copies the quiver was empty. And in engraving VI, the hanged man hung by his right foot, but the figures in books one and two hung by their left. He could now fill in the comparative table he’d started in Sintra.
ENGRAVINGS
I
II
III
mi
V
VI
VII
VIII
VIIII
One
Four
Left
No
No
Sand
Left
White
No
No
towers
hand
arrow
exit
down
foot
board
halo
diff.
Two
Four
Right
No
Exit
Sand
Left
Black
Halo
No
towers
hand
arrow
up
foot
board
diff.
Three
Three
Right
Arrow
No
Sand
Right
White
No
No
towers
hand
exit
up
foot
board
