The Club Dumas

was his own, very real face. A distorted image that combined the name on the plate with his own shape, the light behind him in the archway over the stairs that led down to the courtyard and the street. His last stop on a strange journey to the other side of the shadows.

He rang. Once, twice, three times. No answer. The brass button was dead; there had been no sound inside when he pressed it. In his pocket he felt the crumpled pack containing his last cigarette. Again he decided against lighting it. He rang the bell a fourth time. And a fifth. He clenched his fist and knocked hard, twice. Then the door opened. Not with a sinister creak, but smoothly, on greased hinges. And without any dra­matic effects, quite casually, Varo Borja stood in the doorway.

“Hello, Corso.”

Borja didn’t seem surprised to see him. There were beads of sweat all over his bald head, and he was unshaven. His shirt­sleeves were rolled up and his vest undone. He looked tired, with dark rings under his eyes from a sleepless night. But his eyes shone feverishly. He didn’t ask what Corso was doing there at such an hour, and he seemed barely to notice the book under Corso’s arm. He stood there without moving, as if he had just been interrupted during some meticulous job, or dream, and just wanted to get back to it.

Here was the man responsible. Corso knew it, seeing his own stupidity materialize before him. Of course. Varo Borja— millionaire, international book dealer, famous collector, and methodical murderer. With an almost scientific curiosity, Corso scrutinized the face before him. He tried now to isolate the features, the clues that should have alerted him so much earlier. Signs overlooked; angles of madness, horror, or shadow in those familiar, vulgar features. But he couldn’t see anything. Only a feverish, distant expression devoid of curiosity or passion, lost in images far removed from the man now at his door. Though Corso was holding the cursed book. It had been he, Varo Borja, in the shadow of that same book, following Corso’s footsteps like an evil snake, who had killed Victor Fargas and Baroness Ungern. Not only to reunite the twenty-seven engravings and combine the nine correct ones but also to cover all traces and make sure that nobody else would solve the riddle set by Torchia, the printer. For the entire plot, Corso had been a tool to confirm a theory that proved correct—that the real book was distributed over three copies. He was also the victim of any repercussions involving the police. Now, paying twisted homage to his own instincts, Corso remembered how he felt looking up at the paintings on the ceiling of the Quinta da Soledade. Abra­ham’s sacrifice with no alternative victim: he was the scapegoat. And Borja, of course, was the dealer who went to see Victor Fargas to purchase one of his treasures every six months. That day, while Corso was visiting Fargas, Borja was in Sintra fi­nalizing the details of his plan, waiting for confirmation of his theory that all three copies were needed to solve Torchia’s rid­dle. Fargas’s half-written receipt was intended for him. That’s why Corso hadn’t been able to get hold of Borja when he phoned his house in Toledo. Then later that same evening, before going to his final appointment with Fargas, Borja had called Corso at the hotel, pretending he was making an inter­ national call. Corso had not only confirmed Borja’s suspicions about the book but also given him the key to the mystery, thus condemning Fargas and the baroness. With bitter certainty Corso could see the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. When you set aside all the false clues that pointed to the Club Dumas, Varo Borja was the key to every inexplicable event in that other, diabolic, strand of the plot. It was enough to make you laugh out loud. If the whole damn business had been at all funny, that is.

“I’ve brought the book,” Corso said, showing Borja The Nine Doors.

Borja nodded vaguely and took the book, barely glancing at it. He had his head slightly turned to the side, as if listening for a sound behind him, inside the house. After a moment he noticed Corso again and blinked, surprised that he was still there.

“You’ve given me the book. What else do you want?”

“To be paid for the job.”

Borja stared at him uncomprehendingly. It was obvious that his thoughts were miles away. At last he shrugged, as if to say that it had nothing to do with him. He went back into the house, leaving it up to Corso whether to shut the door, stay where he was, or leave the way he’d come.

Corso followed him through another door into a room off the corridor and vestibule. The shutters were closed so no light could enter, and the furniture had been pushed to the far end, leaving the black marble floor empty. Some of the glass book­cases were open. The room was lit by dozens of candles that had almost burned down. Wax was dripping everywhere: on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace, on the floor, on the furniture and objects in the room. The candles gave off a trem­ulous, reddish light that danced at the least draft or movement. The room smelled like a church, or a crypt.

Still taking no notice of Corso, Borja stopped in the middle of the room. There, at his feet, a circle approximately three feet in diameter was marked out in chalk, containing a square divided into nine boxes. The circle was surrounded by Roman numerals and strange objects: a piece of string, a water clock, a rusty knife, a dragon-shaped silver bracelet, a gold ring, a metal brazier full of burning charcoal, a glass vial, a small mound of earth, a stone. But Corso winced when he saw the other things strewn on the floor. Many of the books he’d ad­ mired, books lined up on shelves a few days earlier, now lay ruined, dirty, with pages torn out. The pages were covered with drawings and underlinings and full of strange marks. Candles burned on top of several of the books, and thick drops of wax dripped onto their covers or open pages. Some candles, gutter­ing, had signed the paper. Among this wreckage Corso recog­nized the engravings from the copies of The Nine Doors belonging to Victor Fargas and Baroness Ungern. They were mixed up with the others on the floor and also covered with wax drips and mysterious annotations.

He bent to look more closely at the remains, not quite able to believe the magnitude of the disaster. One engraving from The Nine Doors, number VI, the man hanging by his right foot instead of his left, had been half burned away by the flickering flame of a candle. Two copies of engraving VII, one with a white chessboard and the other with a black one, lay beside a 1512 Theatrum diabolicum torn from its binding. Another en­graving, I, protruded from the pages of a De magna imperfec-taque opera by Valerio Lorena, an extremely rare incunabulum that Borja had shown Corso not long ago, barely allowing him to touch it. It was now on the floor, battered and torn.

“Don’t touch anything,” he heard Varo Borja say. Borja was standing before the circle, leafing through his copy of The Nine Doors, engrossed. He seemed to see not the pages themselves but something beyond them, something inside the square and circle on the floor, or even farther away: in the depths of the earth.

Corso looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He stood up slowly. As he did so, the flames around him flickered.

“It makes no difference if I touch anything,” he said, ges­turing at the books and papers that lay scattered over the floor. “After what you’ve done.”

“You don’t know anything, Corso. You think you do, but you don’t. You’re ignorant and very stupid. The kind who believes chaos is random and ignores the existence of a hidden order.”

“Don’t talk rubbish. You’ve destroyed everything, and you had no right to. Nobody has.”

“You’re wrong. In the first place they’re my books. And what’s more important, their purpose is to be used. They had practical rather than artistic or aesthetic value. As one travels along the path, one must make sure that no one else can follow. These books have now served their purpose.”

“Madman. You deceived me from the start.”

Borja didn’t seem to be listening. He stood motionless, hold­ing the remaining copy of The Nine Doors, scrutinizing en­graving I.

“Deceived?” He kept his eyes fixed on the book as he spoke, which underlined his contempt for Corso. “You do yourself too much honor. I hired you without telling you my reasons or my intentions. A servant does not participate in the decisions of whoever is paying him. You were to steal the items I wanted and at the same time incur the technical consequences of cer­tain unavoidable actions. I should imagine that as we speak, the police in both Portugal and France are closing in on you.”

“What about you?”

“I’m far removed from all of that, and quite safe. In a little while nothing will matter.”

Then, to Corso’s horror, he tore the page with the engraving from The Nine Doors.

“What are you doing?”

Varo Borja was calmly tearing out more pages.

“I’m burning my boats, my bridges behind me. And moving into terra incognita.” One by one, he tore the