The Club Dumas

signs. I just sat on the toilet seat nice and quiet until they left.”

“My hero.”

“Better safe than sorry. Look at this.” He handed Corso a folded piece of paper. “They left this behind, under an ashtray with a Montecristo cigar end in it.”

Corso had trouble focusing on the handwriting. The note was written in ink, in an attractive copperplate hand with com­plicated flourishes on the capitals:

It is by my order and for the benefit of the State that the bearer of this note has done what he has done.

3rd of December 1627 Richelieu

Despite the situation, he almost burst out laughing. It was the safe-conduct granted at the siege of La Rochelle when Milady demanded d’Artagnan’s head, later stolen at gunpoint by Athos (Bite if you can, viper) and used to justify the woman’s execution to Richelieu at the end of the novel.... In short, too much for a single chapter. Corso staggered to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and put his head under the stream of cold water. Then he looked at himself: puffy eyes, unshaven, and dripping with water. Not a pretty sight. And his head was buzz­ing like a wasps’ nest. What a way to start the day.

La Ponte appeared in the mirror beside him, handing him a towel and his glasses.

“By the way,” he said, “they took your bag.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Hey, I don’t know why you’re taking it out on me. All I did was get laid.”

anxious, corso crossed the hotel lobby, trying to think quickly. But with every passing minute it became more unlikely that he would catch the fugitives. All was lost except for a single link in the chain, book number three. They still had to get hold of it, and that offered, at least, the possibility of getting to them, provided he moved quickly. While La Ponte paid for the room, Corso went to the phone and dialed Frieda Ungern’s number. But the line was busy. He called the Louvre Concorde and asked for Irene Adler’s room. He wasn’t sure how things stood on that front, but he calmed down a little when he heard the girl’s voice. He let her know the sit­uation in a few words and asked her to meet him at the Ungern Foundation. He hung up as La Ponte was coming toward him, very depressed, putting his credit card back in his wallet.

“The bitch. She left without paying the bill.”

“Serves you right.”

“I’ll kill her, with my own hands, I swear.”

The hotel was extremely expensive and La Ponte was out­raged at her treachery. He had a clearer idea now what was going on, and was gloomy as Ahab bent on revenge. They climbed into a taxi, and Corso gave the driver Baroness Ungern’s address. En route he told La Ponte the rest of the story—the train, the girl, Sintra, Paris, the three copies of The Nine Doors, Fargas’s death, the incident by the river... La Ponte listened and nodded, incredulous at first and then stunned.

“I’ve been living with a viper,” he moaned, shuddering.

Corso was in a bad mood. He remarked that vipers very rarely bit cretins. La Ponte thought about that. He didn’t seem offended.

“She’s a determined woman,” he said. “And what a body!”

In spite of his resentment at the recent dent in his finances, his eyes shone lecherously as he stroked his beard.

“What a body,” he repeated with a silly little smile.

Corso was staring out the window. “That’s exactly what the Duke of Buckingham said.”

“Who’s the Duke of Buckingham?”

“In The Three Musketeers. After the episode with the dia­mond tags, Richelieu entrusts Milady with the duke’s murder. But the duke imprisons her when she returns to London. There she seduces her jailer, Felton, an idiot like you but in a more puritanical, fanatical guise. She persuades him to help her es­cape, and while they’re at it, to murder the duke.”

“I don’t remember that episode. So what happened to Felton?”

“He stabs the duke. He’s executed later. I don’t know whether for the murder or just for being stupid.”

“At least he didn’t have to pay the hotel bill.” They were driving along the Quai de Conti, near where Corso had had his next-to-last encounter with Rochefort. Just then La Ponte remembered something.

“Doesn’t Milady have a mark on her shoulder?”

Corso nodded. They were passing the stone steps he’d fallen down the night before.

“Yes,” he answered. “Branded by the executioner with a red-hot iron. The mark of criminals. She already has it when she’s married to Athos. D’Artagnan discovers it when he sleeps with her, and the discovery almost gets him killed.”

“It’s odd. Liana has a mark too, you know.”

“On her shoulder?”

“No, on her hip. A small tattoo. Very pretty, in the shape of a fleur-de-lis.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I swear.”

Corso didn’t remember seeing a tattoo. But he’d hardly had time to notice that kind of thing during the brief encounter with Liana Taillefer at his apartment. It seemed like years ago. One way or another, things were getting out of control. This was more than a matter of quaint coincidences. It was a pre­meditated plan, too complex and dangerous for the perfor­mances of Liana Taillefer and her henchman to be dismissed as mere parody. Here was a plot with all the classic ingredients of the genre, and somebody—aptly, an Eminence Grise—must be pulling the strings. He felt Richelieu’s note in his pocket. It was too much. And yet, the key to the mystery had to lie in its very strangeness and novelistic nature. He remembered something he’d read once, in Edgar Allan Poe or Conan Doyle: “This mystery seems insoluble for the very reasons that make it soluble: the excessive, outre nature of the circumstances.”

“I’m still not sure whether this is one big hoax or an elab­orate plot,” he said aloud.

La Ponte had found a hole in the plastic seat and was ner­vously tugging at it. “Whatever it is, I don’t like it.” He whispered even though there was a pane of safety glass between them and the driver. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“That’s the problem. I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t we go to the police?”

“And say what? That Milady and Rochefort, Cardinal Richelieu’s agents, have stolen from us a chapter of The Three Musketeers and a book for summoning Lucifer? That the devil has fallen in love with me and been incarnated as a twenty-year-old girl who now acts as my bodyguard? What would you do if you were Inspector Maigret and I came and told you all that.”

“I’d assume you were drunk.”

“There you are.”

“What about Varo Borja?”

“That’s another thing.” Corso groaned anxiously. “I don’t even want to think about it. When he finds out that I’ve lost his book....”

The taxi was making its way slowly through the morning traffic. Corso looked at his watch impatiently. At last they reached the bar where he’d sat the night before. There were people hanging around on the pavement and no entry signs on the corner. As he got out of the taxi, Corso saw a police van and a fire engine. He clenched his teeth and swore loudly, making La Ponte start. Book number three had got away too.

THE GIRL came toward them through the crowd, the small rucksack on her back and her hands in her coat pockets. There were still faint traces of smoke rising from the roofs.

“The fire started at three A.M.,” she said, taking no notice of La Ponte, as if he didn’t exist. “The firemen are still inside.”

“What about Baroness Ungern?”

She made a vague gesture, not exactly indifferent, but re­signed, fatalistic. As if it had been preordained. “Her charred remains were found in the study. That’s where the fire started. The neighbors say it must have been an accident. A cigarette not properly put out.”

“The baroness didn’t smoke,” said Corso.