The Club Dumas

She’d retrieved her duffel coat and sat next to him, but didn’t answer immediately. She seemed tired.

“He’ll come after us again,” she said. She glanced at Corso before looking out at the river. “Be more careful next time.”

He took the damp cigarette from his mouth and started turning it over in his fingers, which made it fall apart.

“I would never have believed ...”

“Men don’t. Until they get their faces pushed in.”

Then he saw that she was bleeding. It wasn’t much: a trickle of blood from nose to lip.

“Your nose,” he said stupidly.

“I know,” she said, touching her face and looking at the blood on her fingers.

“How did he do that to you?”

“It was my fault.” She wiped her fingers on her jeans. “When I fell on top of him. We bumped heads.”

“Where did you learn to do that kind of thing?”

“What kind of thing?”

“I saw you, by the water.” Corso moved his hands in a clumsy imitation of her movement. “Giving him what he de­served.”

She smiled gently and stood up, brushing the back of her jeans.

“I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things.”

With her bloody nose she looked impossibly young. She put the bag over her shoulder and held out her hand to help him. He was surprised by her firm grip. -When he stood up, all his bones ached.

“I thought angels fought with lances and swords.”

She was sniffing, holding her head back to stop the blood. She looked at him sideways, annoyed.

“You’ve looked at too many Diirer engravings, Corso. And see where that’s got you.”

they returned to the hotel via the Pont Neuf and the passageway along the Louvre, without any more incidents. By the light of a street lamp he saw that the girl was still bleeding. He took his handkerchief from his pocket, but when he tried to help her, she took it from him and held it to her nose herself. She walked, absorbed in her own thoughts. Corso glanced at her long, bare neck and perfect profile, her matte skin in the hazy light from the lamps of the Louvre. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She walked with the bag on her shoulder, her head slightly forward, which made her look determined, stubborn. Occasionally, when they turned a dark corner, her eyes darted, and she put the hand holding the handkerchief down by her side, walking tense and alert. Under the archways of the Rue de Rivoli, where there was more light, she seemed to relax. When her nose stopped bleeding, she re­turned his handkerchief stained with dry blood. Her mood im­proved. She didn’t seem to find it so reprehensible that he let himself be caught like a fool. She put her hand on his shoulder a couple of times, as if they were two old friends returning from a walk. It was a spontaneous, natural gesture. But maybe she was also tired and needed support. Corso, his head clearing with the walk, found it pleasant at first. Then it began to trou­ble him. The feel of her hand on his shoulder awakened a strange feeling in him, not entirely disagreeable but unex­pected. He felt tender, like the soft center of a candy.

gruber was ON DUTY that evening. He allowed himself a brief, inquisitive glance at the pair—Corso in his damp, dirty coat, his glasses cracked, the girl with her face stained with blood—but otherwise remained expressionless. He raised an eyebrow courteously and nodded, indicating that he was at Cor-so’s disposal, but Corso gestured that he didn’t need anything. Gruber handed him a sealed envelope and both room keys. They stepped into the elevator, and Corso was about to open the envelope when he saw that the girl’s nose was bleeding again. He put the message in his pocket and gave her his hand­kerchief again. The elevator stopped at her floor. Corso said she should call a doctor, but the girl shook her head and got out of the elevator. After a moment of hesitation, he followed her. She had dripped some blood on the carpet. In the room, he made her sit on the bed, then went to the bathroom and soaked a towel in water.

“Hold this against your neck and lean your head back.” She obeyed without a word. All the energy she’d shown down by the river seemed to have evaporated. Maybe because of the nosebleed. He took off her coat and shoes and lay her on the bed, putting the pillow under her back. Like an ex­hausted little girl, she let him. Before turning off all the lights except for the one in the bathroom, Corso looked around. Other than a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo above the wash­basin, the only belongings he could see were her duffel coat, the rucksack open on the sofa, the postcards bought the day before with The Three Musketeers, a gray sweater, a couple of T-shirts, and a pair of white panties drying on the radiator. He looked at the girl, embarrassed. He wasn’t sure whether he ought to sit on the edge of the bed or elsewhere. His feeling from the Hue de Rivoli was still there in his stomach. He couldn’t leave. Not until she felt better. In the end he decided to remain standing. He had his hands in his coat pockets, and with one of them he could feel the empty flask of gin. He glanced greedily at the liquor cabinet, its hotel seal still unbro­ken. He was dying for a drink.

“You were great down there by the river,” he said. “I haven’t thanked you.”

She smiled sleepily. But her eyes, with pupils dilated in the darkness, followed Corso’s every move. “What’s going on?” he asked.

She looked back at him with irony, implying that his ques­tion was absurd.

“They obviously want something you have.” “The Dumas manuscript? Or The Nine Doors?” The girl sighed. None of this is terribly important, she seemed to be saying.

“You’re clever, Corso,” she said at last. “By now you should have a theory.”

“I have too many. What I don’t have is any proof.”

“A person doesn’t always need proof.”

“That’s only in crime novels. All Sherlock Holmes or Poirot has to do is guess who the murderer is and how he committed the crime. He invents the rest and tells it as if he knew it was a fact. Then Watson or Hastings congratulates him admiringly and says, ‘Well done. That’s exactly how it happened.’ And the murderer confesses. The idiot.”

“I’d congratulate you.”

This time there was no irony in her voice. She was watching him intently, waiting for him to say or do something.

He shifted uneasily. “I know,” he said. The girl still held his gaze, as if she truly had nothing to hide. “But I wonder why.”

He was about to add, “This is real life, not a crime novel,” but didn’t. At this point in the story, the line between fantasy and reality appeared rather tenuous. The flesh-and-blood Corso, having an ID, a known place of residence, and a physical pres­ence, of which his aching bones—after the episode on the stone steps—were proof, was increasingly tempted to see himself as a real character in an imaginary world. But that wasn’t good. From there it was only a small step to believing he was an imaginary character who thinks he’s real in an imaginary world. Only a small step to going nuts. And he wondered whether someone, some twisted novelist or drunken writer of cheap screenplays, at that very moment saw him as an imagi­nary character in an imaginary world who thought he wasn’t real. That really would be too much.

These thoughts made his mouth unbearably dry. He stood in front of the girl, his hands in his pockets, his tongue like sandpaper. If I were imaginary, he thought with relief, my hair would stand on end, I’d exclaim “Woe is me!” and my face would be beaded with sweat. And I wouldn’t be this thirsty. I drink, therefore I am. So he went to the liquor cabinet, broke the seal, took a miniature bottle of gin, and drank it in two gulps. He was almost smiling when he stood up and shut the cabinet like someone closing a reliquary. Things gradually as­sumed their proper proportions.

The room was fairly dark. The dim light from the bathroom slanted across the bed where the girl was still lying. He looked at her bare feet, her legs, the T-shirt spattered with dry blood. Then his gaze lingered over her long, tanned, bare neck. The half-open mouth showing the tips of her white teeth in the gloom. Her eyes still watching him intently. He touched the key to his room inside his coat pocket. He ought to leave.

“Are you feeling better?”

She nodded. Corso looked at his watch, although he didn’t really care about the time. He didn’t remember having switched on the radio as they came into the room, but there was music playing somewhere. A melancholy song, in French. A waitress in a bar, in a port, in love with a sailor. “Right. I’ve got to go.”

The woman on the radio went on singing. The sailor, pre­dictably, had gone for good, and the girl in the bar gazed at his empty chair and the wet ring left by his glass on the table. Corso went to the bedside table to get his