The Club Dumas

be returned. The board then allocates it to another applicant. A member may never freely dispose of it.”

“Is that what Enrique Taillefer tried to do?”

“In a way. He was an ideal applicant, and a model member of the Club Dumas until he broke the rules.”

Corso finished his gin. He put the glass down on the mossy balustrade and said nothing for a moment, staring intently at the lights of the reception room. He shook his head.

“That’s no reason to murder someone,” he said quietly, as if to himself. “I can’t believe that all these people...” He looked at me stubbornly. “They’re all well known, respectable. They’d never get mixed up in something like this.”

I suppressed my impatience. “You’re blowing things out of all proportion.... Enrique and I were friends for some time. We shared a fascination for this kind of fiction, although his taste in literature wasn’t on a level with his enthusiasm. The fact is, his success as a publisher of bestselling cookbooks meant he could spend time and money on his hobby. And to be fair, if anybody deserved to be a member of the club, it was Enrique. That’s why I recommended his admission. As I said, we shared, if not in our tastes, at least in our enthusiasm.”

“You shared more than that, I seem to remember.”

Corso’s sarcastic smile had returned, and I found it highly irritating. “I could tell you that that’s none of your business,” I retorted. “But I want to explain. Liana has always been very special, as well as very beautiful. She was a precocious reader. Do you know that at sixteen she had a fleur-de-lis tattooed on her hip? Not on the shoulder, like her idol, Milady de Winter, so that her family and the nuns at her boarding school wouldn’t find out. What do you think of that?”

“Very moving.”

“You don’t seem very moved. But I assure you she’s an ad­mirable person. The fact is that, well... we became intimate. You’ll recall that earlier I mentioned the heritage that is the lost paradise of childhood. Well Liana’s heritage is The Three Musketeers. She was fascinated by the world depicted in its pages. She decided to marry Enrique after meeting him by chance at a party where they spent the evening exchanging quotes from the novel. He was already a very wealthy pub­lisher.”

“It was love at first sight,” said Corso.

“I don’t know why you say it like that. They married for the most sincere reasons. The thing is that, in the long run, even for someone as good-natured as his wife, Enrique could be tiresome.... We were good friends, and I often visited them. Liana...” I put my glass on the balustrade next to his empty one. “Anyway. You can imagine the rest.” “Yes, I can. Very clearly.”

“I wasn’t talking about that. She became an excellent col­laborator. So much so that, four years ago, I sponsored her entry to the society. She owns chapter 37, ‘Milady’s Secret.’ She chose it herself.”

“Why did you set her on me?”

“Let’s take this one step at a time. Not long ago, Enrique became a problem. Instead of limiting himself to the very profitable business of cookbooks, he decided to write a serial. But the novel was awful. That is a fact. Absolutely awful, be­lieve me. He brazenly plagiarized all the plots of the genre. It was called—”

“The Dead Man’s Hand.”

“Exactly. Even the title wasn’t his. And what’s worse, un­believably, he wanted Dumas & Co. to publish it. I refused, of course. His monstrous creation would never have been approved by the board. Anyway, Enrique had more than enough money to publish it himself, and I told him so.”

“I assume he took it badly. I saw his library.”

“Badly? That is something of an understatement. The ar­gument took place in his study. I can still picture him, small and chubby, standing very straight, on tiptoe, staring at me with wild eyes. He looked as if he might burst a blood vessel. All very unpleasant. He said he’d decided to devote his whole life to writing. And who was I to judge it. That was up to posterity. I was a biased critic, an insufferable pedant, and on top of everything I was playing around with his wife. This absolutely stunned me—I didn’t realize he knew. But appar­ently Liana talks in her sleep, and between cursing d’Artagnan and his friends (whom, by the way, she hates as if she had known them personally) she’d revealed the whole affair to her husband.... You can imagine my predicament.”

“Very difficult for you.”

“Extremely. Although the worst was yet to come. Enrique stormed. He said that if he was mediocre, Dumas wasn’t much of a writer either. Where would Dumas have been without Auguste Maquet, whom he wretchedly exploited? The proof lay in the white and blue pages of ‘The Anjou Wine,’ which En­rique kept in his safe.... The argument became even more heated. He called me an adulterer—rather an old-fashioned insult—and I called him a moron, adding a few snide com­ments about his latest cookbook successes. I ended up comparing him to the baker in Cyrano.... ‘I’ll get my revenge,’ he said, sounding rather like the Count of Monte Cristo. Til publicize the fact that your beloved Dumas was a big cheat who appro­priated other people’s work. I’ll make the manuscript public, and everyone will see how the old fraud produced his serials. I don’t give a damn about the rules of the society. That chap­ter’s mine, and I’ll sell it to whoever I like. And you can go to hell.’“

“He got nasty.”

“You don’t know how furious a spurned author can become. My remonstrations were to no avail. He threw me out. Later I learned from Liana that he’d called that bookseller, La Ponte, to offer him the manuscript. He must have thought himself very clever and devious, like Edmond Dantes. He wanted to create a scandal without being directly implicated; he wanted to keep his reputation intact. That’s how you became involved. You can understand my surprise when you came to see me with The Anjou Wine.’“

“You certainly didn’t show it.”

“I had my reasons. With Enrique dead, Liana and I had assumed that the manuscript was lost.”

I saw Corso search his coat for one of his crumpled cigarettes. He put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He paced the terrace. “Your story’s ridiculous,” he said at last. “No Edmond Dantes would commit suicide before savoring his revenge.”

I nodded, although he had his back to me and couldn’t see my gesture.

“Well, more than that happened,” I admitted. “The day after our conversation, Enrique came to my house in a final attempt to persuade me. I’d had enough. And I won’t put up with black­mail. So, not quite realizing what I was doing, I dealt him the death blow. His serial was not only very bad, it felt familiar. I went to my library, searched for an old edition of The Popular Illustrated Novel, a little-known late-nineteenth-century publi­cation, and opened it at the first page of a story written by a certain Amaury de Verona and titled ‘Angeline de Gravaillac, or Unsullied Virtue.’ Well, you can imagine the sort of thing. As I read the first paragraph aloud, Enrique went pale, as if the ghost of Angeline had risen from the grave. Which it more or less had. Assuming nobody would remember the story, he had plagiarized it, copied it almost word for word, except for one chapter he took whole from Fernandez y Gonzalez, in fact the best part of the story. I was sorry I didn’t have my camera to take a picture of Enrique. He put his hand to his forehead as if to exclaim, ‘Curses!’ but couldn’t actually get the word out. He just made a kind of gurgling sound, as if he was suffocating.

Then he turned, went home, and hanged himself from the light fixture.”

Corso was listening. The forgotten cigarette was still in his mouth, unlit.

“Then things became complicated,” I went on, sure that he was now starting to believe me. “You already had the manu­script, and your friend La Ponte wasn’t willing, at first, to part with it. I couldn’t go around playing Arsene Lupin, I have a reputation to protect. That’s why I gave Liana the task of re­trieving the chapter. The date of the annual meeting was ap­proaching, and we had to find a new member to replace Enrique. I admit, Liana did make a few mistakes. First, she went to see you....” I cleared my throat, embarrassed. I didn’t want to go into details. “Then she tried to enlist La Ponte, to have him get ‘The Anjou Wine’ back. But I didn’t know how tenacious you could be.... The problem is that Liana had al­ways dreamed of an adventure like her heroine’s, full of de­ception, amorous trysts, and persecution. And this episode, based on the stuff of her dreams, gave such an opportunity. So she went after you enthusiastically. Til bring you the manuscript bound in the skin of that Corso,’ she promised. I told her not to get carried away. I realize now that the mistake was mine: I encouraged her in her fantasy, releasing the Milady that had been inside her ever since she first read The Three Musketeers.”

“I wish she’d read something else. Like Gone with the Wind. She could have identified with Scarlett O’Hara and pestered Clark Gable instead of me.”

“Yes, she went a bit over the top. It’s a pity you took it so seriously.”

Corso rubbed a spot behind his ear. I could imagine what he was thinking: the one who really took it seriously