The Club Dumas

the characters had faded into the distance: Balkan, the Club Dumas, Rochefort, Milady, La Ponte. Only the echoes of a story after the turning of the last page. The author striking the final key on the QWERTY keyboard, bottom row, second from the right. So with one arbitrary action there was no more than pages of type, strange, inert paper. Lives suddenly alien.

On that dawn so like awakening from a dream, Corso sat, dirty and unshaven, with reddened eyes. By his side, his old canvas bag containing the last extant copy of The Nine Doors. And the girl. That was all that remained on the shore after the tide went out. She moaned softly, and he turned to look at her. She was sleeping in the seat next to him, under her duffel coat, her head on his right shoulder. Breathing gently, her lips parted, occasionally shaken by small shivers that made her start. Then she’d moan again, quietly. A small vertical crease between her eyebrows made her look like an upset little girl. One hand protruded from under her coat. It was turned palm up, the fingers half open, as if she had just let something slip from them, or as if she was waiting.

Corso thought again about Meung, and about the journey. And Boris Balkan two nights earlier, standing next to him on ‘ the terrace still wet from the rain. Holding the pages of “The Anjou Wine,” Richelieu had smiled like an old opponent, both admiring and sympathetic. “You’re unusual, my friend.” He had offered these final words as a consolation or farewell; they were the only words with any meaning. The rest—an invitation to join the other guests—were uttered as a formality. Not that Balkan wanted to get rid of him—actually, he had seemed disappointed when Corso left. But Balkan knew that Corso would refuse to come inside. Corso in fact stayed on the terrace for some time, alone, leaning on the balustrade, listening to the echo of his own defeat. He slowly came to and looked around, remembering where he was. He walked away from the brightly lit windows and returned unhurriedly to the hotel, wandering through dark streets. He didn’t come across Rochefort again, and at the Auberge Saint-Jacques he was told that Milady too had left. They both departed from his life and returned to the nebulous region from which they had come, fictional characters once more, as cryptic as chess pieces. La Ponte and the girl he found without difficulty. He hadn’t worried about La Ponte but felt relief when he saw that she was still there. He’d thought —feared—that he would lose her along with the other char­acters in the story. He took her quickly by the hand, before she too vanished in the dust of the library of the castle of Meung, and led her to the car as La Ponte watched. Corso saw him receding in the rearview mirror. La Ponte looked lost, shouting, appealing to their long, much-abused friendship, not under­standing what was going on. Like a discredited, useless har-pooner, not to be trusted, abandoned with some bread and three days’ supply of water, left to drift. “Try to reach Batavia, Mr. Bligh.” But then, at the end of the street, Corso stopped the car and sat with his hands on the wheel, looking at the road ahead, the girl staring, curious, at his profile. La Ponte wasn’t a real character either. With a sigh, Corso put the car in reverse and went back to collect him. For the next day and night, until they left him at a traffic light on a street in Madrid, La Ponte said not one word. He didn’t even protest when Corso told him the Dumas manuscript was gone. There wasn’t much he could say.

Corso glanced at the canvas bag at the sleeping girl’s feet. The defeat was painful, of course, like a knife wound in his memory. He knew he’d played according to the rules—legitime certaverit— but had gone in the wrong direction. At the very moment of victory, however partial and incomplete it was, all pleasure at winning had been snatched from him. The victory had been imaginary. It was like defeating imaginary ghosts, or punching the wind, or shouting at silence. Maybe that’s why Corso was now staring suspiciously at the city suspended in the mist, waiting, before entering it, to make sure that its foun­dations were firmly rooted in the ground.

He could hear the girl’s gentle, rhythmic breathing at his shoulder. He stared at her bare neck between the folds of the duffel coat. He moved his hand until he could feel the heat of her warm flesh throbbing in his fingers. As always, her skin smelled of youth and fever. In his imagination and in his memory he could easily follow the long, curving lines of her slender body, down to her bare feet by her sneakers and the bag. Irene Adler. He still didn’t know what to call her. But he could re­member her naked body in the shadows, the curve of her hips traced by the light, her parted lips. Impossibly beautiful and silent, absorbed in her own youth and at the same time as serene as tranquil waters, with the wisdom of ages. And in the luminous eyes watching him intently from the shadows, the reflection, the dark image of Corso himself amid all the light snatched from the sky.

She was watching him now, her emerald green eyes framed by long lashes. She had woken and was moving sleepily, rubbing against him. Then she sat up, alert. She looked at him.

“Hello, Corso.” Her duffel coat slid to her feet. Her white T-shirt clung to her perfect torso, as supple as a beautiful young animal’s. “What are we doing here?”

“Waiting.” He gestured at the town, which seemed to be floating in the mist from the river. “For it to become real.”

She looked, not understanding at first. Then she smiled slowly.

“Maybe it never will,” she said.

“Then we’ll stay here. It’s not such a bad place, up here, with the strange, unreal world at our feet.” He turned to the girl. “I’ll give you everything, if you prostrate yourself and adore me. Isn’t that the kind of offer you’re going to make me?”

The girl’s smile was full of tenderness. She bowed her head, thoughtful, then looked up and held Corso’s gaze.

“No, I’m poor,” she said.

“I know.” It was true. Corso didn’t have to read it in the clarity of her eyes. “Your luggage, and the train compartment ... It’s strange. I always thought you all had unlimited wealth, out there, at the end of the rainbow.” His smile was as sharp as the knife he still had in his pocket. “Peter Schlemiel’s bag of gold.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” Now she was pursing her lips obsti­nately. “I’m all I have.”

This was true too, and Corso had known it from the start. She had never lied. Both innocent and wise, she was faithful and in love, chasing after a shadow.

“I see.” He made a gesture in the air, as if wielding an imaginary pen. “Aren’t you going to give me a document to sign?”

“A document?”

“Yes. It used to be called a pact. Now it would be a contract with lots of small print, wouldn’t it? ‘In the event of litigation, the parties are to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of...’ That’s a funny thing. I wonder which court covers this.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Why did you choose me?”

“I’m free,” she sighed sadly, as if she’d paid the price for her right to say it. “I can choose. Anyone can.”

Corso searched in his coat for his crumpled pack of ciga­rettes. There was only one left. He took it out and stared, un­decided whether to put it in his mouth or not. He put it back in the pack. Maybe he’d need a smoke later. He was sure he would.

“You knew from the beginning,” he said, “that there were two completely unrelated stories. That’s why you never cared about the Dumas strand. Milady, Rochefort, Richelieu—they were nothing but film extras to you. Now I understand why you were so passive. You must have been horribly bored. You just flicked the pages of your Musketeers, watching me make all the wrong moves....”

She was looking through the windshield at the town veiled in blue mist. She started to raise her hand but let it drop, as if what she was about to say was pointless. “All I could do was go with you,” she answered. “Everyone has to walk certain paths alone. Haven’t you heard of free will?” She smiled sadly. “Some of us have paid a very high price for it.”

“But you didn’t always stay on the sidelines. That night, by the Seine ... Why did you help me against Rochefort?”

She touched the canvas bag with her bare foot. “He was after the Dumas manuscript. But The Nine Doors was in there too. I just wanted to avoid any stupid interference.” She shrugged. “And I didn’t want him to hit you.”

“What about Sintra? You warned me about the Fargas business.”

“Of course. The book was tied up with it.”

“And then the key to the meeting in Meung...”

“I didn’t know about it. I just worked it out from the novel.”

Corso made a face. “I thought you were all omniscient.”