The Club Dumas

“Well, you were wrong.” Now she was annoyed. “And I don’t know why you keep talking to me as if I were one of many. I’ve been alone for a long time.”

Centuries, Corso was sure. Centuries of solitude. He didn’t doubt that. He had embraced her naked body, drowned in the clarity of her eyes, been inside her, tasted her skin, felt the gentle throbbing of her neck against his lips. He’d heard her moan quietly, like a frightened child or like a lonely fallen angel in search of warmth. He’d watched her sleep with her fists clenched, tormented by nightmares of gleaming, blond archangels, implacable in their armor, as dogmatic as the God who made them march in time.

Now, thanks to her, although too late, he understood Nikon and her ghosts and the desperate way she clung to life. Nikon’s fear, her black-and-white photographs, her vain attempt to ex­orcise memories transmitted through the genes that survived Auschwitz, the number tattooed on her father’s skin, the Black Order that had been as old as the spirit and the curse of man. Because God and the devil could be one and the same thing, and everybody understood it in his own way.

But just as with Nikon, Corso was cruel. Love was too heavy a burden for him, and he didn’t have Porthos’s noble heart.

“Was that your mission?” he asked the girl. “Protecting The Nine Doors? I don’t think you’ll get a medal for it.” “That’s unfair, Corso.”

Almost the same words. Once again, Nikon left to drift, small and fragile. Who did she cling to now, to escape her nightmares?

He looked at the girl. Maybe Nikon’s memory was his pen­ance. But he was no longer prepared to accept it with resig­nation. He glimpsed his face in the rearview mirror: it was contracted into a lost, bitter expression.

“Is it? We lost two of the three books. And what about the pointless deaths of Fargas and the baroness?” They mattered lit­tle to him, but he was bitter. “You could have prevented them.” She shook her head, very serious, her eyes fixed on his. “Some things can’t be avoided, Corso. Some castles have to burn, and some men must hang. There are dogs destined to tear each other to pieces, virtuous people destined to be be­headed, doors destined to be opened for others to enter.” She frowned and bowed her head. “My mission, as you call it, was to make sure you reached the end of the journey safely.”

“Well, it’s been a long journey, only to end back at the starting point.” Corso indicated the town suspended in the mist. “And now I have to go down there.”

“You don’t have to. Nobody’s forcing you. You could just forget about it and leave.”

“Without finding out the answer?”

“Without undergoing the test. You have the answer within you.”

“That’s a pretty sentence. Put it on my headstone when I’m burning in hell.”

She gave him a gentle, friendly tap on the knee. “Don’t be an idiot, Corso. Things are as one wants them to be more often than people think. Even the devil can adopt different guises. Or qualities.”

“Remorse, for instance.”

“Yes. But also knowledge and beauty.” She again looked anxiously at the town. “Or power and wealth.”

“But the end result is the same: damnation.” He repeated his gesture of signing an imaginary contract. “You have to pay with the innocence of your soul.”

She sighed again. “You paid long ago, Corso. You’re still paying. It’s a strange habit, postponing it all till the end. Like the final act of a tragedy ... Everyone drags his own damnation with him from the beginning. As for the devil, he is no more than God’s pain; the wrath of a dictator caught in his own trap. The story told by the winners.”

“When did it happen?”

“A longer time ago than you can conceive. It was very hard. I fought for a hundred days and a hundred nights without hope or refuge.” An almost imperceptible smile played on her lips. “That’s the only thing I’m proud of— having fought to the end. I retreated but didn’t turn my back, surrounded by others also fallen from on high. I was hoarse with shouting out my fury, my fear and exhaustion. After the battle, I walked across a plain as desolate and lonely as eternity is cold.... I still sometimes come across a trace of the battle, or an old comrade who passes by without daring to look up.”

“Why me, then? Why didn’t you look for someone on the side of the winners? I win battles only on a scale of five thou­sand to one.”

The girl turned to look into the distance. The sun was rising, and the first horizontal ray of light cut the morning air with a fine, reddish line that directly intersected her gaze. When she looked back at Corso, he felt vertigo as he peered into all the light reflected in her green eyes.

“Because lucidity never wins. And seducing an idiot has never been worth the trouble.”

Then she leaned over and kissed him very slowly, with infinite tenderness. As if she had had to wait an eternity to do so.

the mist slowly began to clear. It was as if the town, suspended in midair, had decided to sink its foundations back into the earth. The dawn shone on the gray-and-ochre mass of the Alcazar palace, the cathedral bell tower, and the stone bridge with its pillars in the dark waters of the river, resem­bling a sinister hand stretched between the two banks.

Corso started the engine. He let the car slide gently down the deserted road. As they descended, the light of the rising sun was left behind, held above them. The town gradually moved closer, and they slowly entered the world of cold hues and immense solitude that persisted in the remnants of blue mist.

He hesitated before he crossed the bridge, stopping the car beneath the stone arch that led onto it; hands on the steering wheel, head slightly bowed, and chin jutting out—the profile of an alert hunter. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, though they didn’t need it. He took his time, looking intently at the bridge, which without his glasses was a vague path with disturbingly imprecise outlines. He didn’t look at the girl but knew that she was watching him. He put on his glasses, ad­justing them on the bridge of his nose, and the landscape re­covered its sharp lines but was no more reassuring for that. The far bank looked dark. The current flowing between the pillars resembled the black waters of time, of Lethe. In the last patches of the night that refused to die, his sense of danger was tan­gible, acute, like a steel needle. Corso could feel the pulse beat­ing in his wrist when he grasped the stick shift. You can still turn back, he told himself. In that way, none of what happened has ever happened, and none of what will take place will ever take place. As for the practical value of Nunc scio, “Now I know,” coined by God or by the devil, that was highly dubious. He frowned. They were nothing but words. He knew that in a few minutes he would be on the other side of the bridge and river. Verbum dimissum custodial arcanum. He gazed up at the sky, looking for an archer with or without arrows in his quiver, before putting the car into gear and slowly moving on.

it WAS COLD OUTSIDE the car, so he turned up his collar. He could feel the girl’s intent gaze upon him as he crossed the street without looking back, holding The Nine Doors under his arm. She hadn’t offered to go with him, and for some obscure reason he knew that it was better this way. The house occupied almost an entire block, and its gray stone bulk presided over a narrow square, among medieval buildings whose closed win­dows and doors made them look like motionless film extras, blind and mute. The gray facade had four gargoyles on the eaves: a billy goat, a crocodile, a gorgon, and a serpent. There was a star of David on the Moorish arch above the wrought-iron gate that led to the interior courtyard with two Venetian marble lions and a well. It was all familiar to Corso, but he had never been so apprehensive on entering the house. He re­membered an old quotation: “Perhaps men who have been ca­ressed by many women cross the valley of shadows with less remorse, or less fear....” It went something like that. Maybe he hadn’t been caressed enough, because his mouth was dry, and he would have sold his soul for half a bottle of Bols. And The Nine Doors felt as if it contained nine lead plates instead of prints.

He pushed open the gate, but the silence remained unbro­ken. Not even his shoes caused the slightest echo as he crossed the courtyard, its paving stones worn down by ancient footsteps and centuries of rain. An archway led to the steep, narrow staircase. At the top he could see the dark, heavy door decorated with thick nails. It was closed: the last door. For an instant Corso winked sarcastically at empty space, to himself, baring his teeth. He was both involuntary author and butt of his own joke, or of his own error. An error carefully planned by an unscrupulous hand, and full of serpentine, illusory invitations to participate that had led him to certain conclusions, only for them to be refuted. In the end he’d had his conclusions con­firmed by the text itself, as if it had been a damned novel, which it wasn’t. Or what if it was? The fact is, the last thing he saw in the polished metal plate nailed to the door