The Dumas Club: The Ninth Gate Read online

  “I’m going to Paris,” said Corso, watching the reflection of a fat woman putting coin after coin in a slot machine. It seemed as if the silly little tune and the colors, fruits, and bells would keep her there for all eternity, hypnotized and motionless but for her hand pushing the buttons. “To see about your ‘Anjou Wine.’ “

  His friend wrinkled his nose and gave him a sideways glance. Paris meant more expense, complications. La Ponte was a stingy, small-time bookseller.

  “You know I can’t afford it.”

  Corso slowly emptied his glass. “Yes, you can.” He took out a few coins and paid his round. “I’m going about something else.”

  “Oh yes?” said La Ponte, intrigued.

  Makarova put two more beers on the counter. She was large, blond, in her forties, and had short hair and a ring in one ear, a souvenir of her time on a Russian trawler. She wore narrow trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders. Her overdeveloped biceps weren’t the only masculine thing about her. She always had a lighted cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth. With her Baltic look and her way of moving, she looked like a fitter from a ball-bearing factory in Leningrad.

  “I read that book,” she told Corso, rolling her r’s. As she spoke, ash from her cigarette dropped onto her damp shirt. “That tart Bovary. Poor little fool.”

  “I’m so glad you grasped the heart of the matter.”

  Makarova wiped down the counter with a cloth. At the other end of the bar Zizi was watching as she worked the till. She was the complete opposite of Makarova: much younger, slight, and terribly jealous. Sometimes, just before closing time, they would quarrel drunkenly and come to blows, the last few regulars watching. Once, with a black eye after one of these rows, Zizi upped and left, furious and vindictive. Makarova wept copiously into the beer until Zizi returned three days later. That night they closed early and left with their arms around each other’s waist, kissing in doorways like two teenagers in love. “He’s off to Paris,” La Ponte said, nodding in Corso’s direction. “To see what he can pull out of the hat.”

  Makarova collected the empty glasses and looked at Corso through the smoke of her cigarette. “He’s always up to something,” she said in her flat, guttural tone.

  Then she put the glasses in the sink and went to serve some other customers, swinging her broad shoulders. Corso was the only member of the opposite sex who escaped her contempt, and she would proclaim this when she didn’t charge him for a drink. Even Zizi looked upon him with a certain neutrality. Once, when Makarova was arrested for punching a policeman in the face during a gay rights march, Zizi had waited all night on a bench in the police station. Corso called all his contacts in the police, stayed with her, and supplied sandwiches and a bottle of gin. It all made La Ponte absurdly jealous.

  “Why Paris?” he asked, though his mind was on other things. His left elbow had just prodded something deliciously soft. He was delighted to find that his neighbor at the bar was a young blonde with enormous breasts.

  Corso took another gulp of beer. “I’m also going to Sintra, in Portugal.” He was still watching the fat woman at the slot machine. She’d run out of coins and was now getting change from Zizi. “On some business for Varo Borja.”

  His friend made a whistling sound. Varo Borja, Spain’s leading book dealer. His catalogue was small and select. He was also well known as a book lover to whom money was no object. Impressed, La Ponte asked for more beer and more information, with that greedy look that automatically clicked on when he heard the word book. Although he admitted to being a miser and a coward, he wasn’t an envious man, except when it came to pretty, harpoonable women. In professional matters, he was always glad to get hold of good pieces with little risk, but he also had real respect for his friend’s work and clientele.

  “Have you ever heard of The Nine Doors?”

  The bookseller was searching slowly through his pockets, hoping that Corso would pay for this round too. He was also just about to turn and take a closer look at his voluptuous neighbor, but Corso’s words caused him to forget her instantly. He was openmouthed.

  “Don’t tell me Varo Borja’s after that book....”

  Corso put his last few coins on the counter. Makarova brought another two beers. “He’s had it for some time. He paid a fortune for it.”

  “I’ll bet he did. There are only three or four known copies.”

  “Three,” specified Corso. “One in Sintra, in the Fargas collection. Another at the Ungern Foundation in Paris. The third, from the sale of the Terral-Coy Library in Madrid, was bought by Varo Borja.”

  Fascinated, La Ponte stroked his curly beard. Of course he had heard of Fargas, the Portuguese book collector. As for Baroness Ungern, she was a potty old woman who’d become a millionairess from writing books about demonology and the occult. Her recent book, Naked Isis, was a runaway bestseller in all the stores.

  “What I don’t understand,” said La Ponte, “is what you have to do with any of it.”

  “Do you know the book’s history?”

  “Vaguely,” said La Ponte.

  Corso dipped a finger in his beer and began to draw pictures on the marble counter. “Period: mid-seventeenth century. Scene: Venice. Central character: a printer by the name of Ar-istide Torchia, who had the idea of publishing the so-called Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a kind of manual for summoning the devil. It wasn’t a good time for that sort of thing: the Holy Office managed, without much trouble, to have Torchia handed over to them. He was charged with practicing satanic arts and all that goes with them, aggravated by the fact, they said, that he’d reproduced nine prints from the famous Delomelanicon, the occult classic that, tradition has it, was written by Lucifer himself.”

  Makarova had moved closer on the other side of the bar and was listening with interest, wiping her hands on her shirt. La Ponte, about to take another swallow of beer, stopped and asked, instinctively taking on the look of a greedy bookseller, “What happened to the book?”

  “You can imagine: all the copies went onto a big bonfire.” Corso frowned evilly. He seemed sorry to have missed it. “They also say that as they burned, you could hear the devil screaming.”

  Her elbows on Corso’s beer diagrams between the beer handles, Makarova grunted skeptically. With her blond, manly looks and her cool, Nordic temperament, she didn’t go in for these murky southern superstitions. La Ponte was more impressionable. Suddenly thirsty, he gulped down his beer. “It must have been the printer they heard screaming.” “It must have been.”

  Corso went on. “Tortured with the thoroughness the Inquisition reserved for dealing with the evil arts, the printer finally confessed, between screams, that there remained one book, hidden somewhere. Then he shut his mouth and didn’t open it again until they burned him alive. And then it was only to say Aagh.”

  Makarova smiled contemptuously at the fate of Torchia the printer, or maybe at the executioners who hadn’t been able to make him confess. La Ponte was frowning.

  “You say that only one of the books was saved,” he objected. “But before, you said there were three known copies.”

  Corso had taken off his glasses and was looking at them against the light to check how clean they were.

  “And that’s the problem,” he said. “The books have appeared and disappeared through wars, thefts, and fires. It’s not known which is the authentic one.”

  “Maybe they’re all forgeries,” Makarova suggested sensibly.

  “Maybe. So I have to find out whether or not Varo Borja was taken for a ride. That’s why I’m going to Sintra and Paris.” He adjusted his glasses and looked at La Ponte. “While I’m there, I’ll see about your manuscript as well.”

  The bookseller agreed thoughtfully, in the mirror eyeing the woman with the big breasts. “Compared to that, it seems ridiculous to make you waste your time on The Three Musketeers....”

  “What are you talking about?” said Makarova, no longer neutral. She was rea
lly offended. “It’s the best book I ever read!”

  She slammed her hands down on the counter for emphasis, making the muscles on her bare forearms bulge. Boris Balkan would be happy to hear that, thought Corso. Besides the Dumas novel, Makarova’s top-ten list of books, for which he was literary advisor, included War and Peace, Watership Down, and Patricia Highsmith’s Carol.

  “Don’t worry,” he told La Ponte, “I’ll charge the expenses to Varo Borja. But I’d say your ‘Anjou Wine’ is authentic. Who would forge something like that?”

  “People do all sorts of things,” Makarova pointed out sagely.

  La Ponte agreed with Corso—forging such a document would be absurd. The late Taillefer had guaranteed its authenticity to him. It was in Dumas’s own hand. And Taillefer could be trusted.

  “I used to take him old newspaper serials. He’d buy them all.” He took a sip and then laughed to himself. “Good excuse to go and get a look at’ his wife’s legs. She’s a pretty spectacular blonde. Anyway, one day he opened a drawer and put ‘The Anjou Wine’ on the table. ‘It’s yours,’ he said straight out, ‘provided you get an expert opinion on it and put it on sale immediately.’ “

  A customer called, ordering a tonic water. Makarova told him to go to hell. She stayed where she was, her cigarette burning down in her mouth and her eyes half-closed because of the smoke. Waiting for the rest of the story.

  “Is that all?” asked Corso.

  La Ponte gestured vaguely. “Almost. I tried to dissuade him, because I knew he was crazy about that sort of thing. He would sell his soul for a rare book. But he’d made up his mind. ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll give it to someone else,’ he said. That touched a nerve, of course. My professional nerve, I mean.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” said Corso. “What other kind do you have?”

  La Ponte turned to Makarova for support. But one glance at her slate-gray eyes and he gave up. They were about as warm as a Scandinavian fjord at three in the morning.

  “It’s nice to feel loved,” he said bitterly.

  The man wanting a tonic water must really have been thirsty, Corso thought, because he was getting insistent. Makarova, looking at the customer out of the corner of her eye and not moving a muscle, suggested that he find another bar before she gave him a black eye. The man thought it over. He seemed to get the message. He left.

  “Enrique Taillefer was a strange man.” La Ponte ran his hand again through his thinning hair, still watching the blonde in the mirror. “He wanted me to sell the manuscript and get publicity for the whole business.” He lowered his voice so the blonde wouldn’t hear. “ ‘Somebody’s in for a surprise,’ Taillefer told me mysteriously. He winked at me, as if he was going to play a joke on someone. Four days later, he was dead.”

  “Dead,” repeated Makarova in her guttural way, savoring the word. She was more and more interested.

  “Suicide,” explained Corso.

  She shrugged, as if to say there wasn’t that much difference between suicide and murder. There was one doubtful manuscript and a definite corpse: quite enough for a conspiracy theory.

  On hearing the word suicide, La Ponte nodded lugubriously. “So they say.”

  “You don’t seem too sure.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s all a bit odd.” He frowned again, suddenly looking somber and forgetting the blonde in the mirror. “Smells fishy to me.”

  “Did Taillefer ever tell you how he got hold of the manuscript?”

  “At the beginning I didn’t ask. Then it was too late.”

  “Did you speak to his widow?”

  La Ponte brightened. He grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll save that story for another time.” He sounded like someone who has just remembered he has a brilliant trick up his sleeve. “That’ll be your payment. I can’t afford even a tenth of what you’ll get out of Varo Borja for his Book of the Nine Lies.”

  “I’ll do the same for you when you find an Audubon and become a millionaire. I’ll just collect my money later.”

  La Ponte looked hurt. For such a cynic, Corso thought, he seemed rather sensitive.

  “I thought you were helping me as a friend,” protested La Ponte. “You know. The Club of Nantucket Harpooneers. Thar she blows, and all that.”

  “Friendship,” said Corso, looking around as if waiting for someone to explain the word to him. “Bars and cemeteries are full of good friends.”

  “Who’s side are you on, damn it?”

  “On his own side,” sighed Makarova. “Corso’s always on his own side.” ‘

  La Ponte was disappointed to see the woman with the breasts leave with a smart young man who looked like a model. Corso was still watching the fat woman at the slot machine, who’d run out of coins again. She was standing with a

  disconcerted, blank look, her hands at her sides. Her place at the machine was taken by a tall, dark man. He had a thick black mustache and a scar on his face. For a fleeting moment Corso thought he looked familiar, but the impression vanished before he could grasp it. To the fat woman’s despair, the machine was now spewing out a noisy stream of coins.

  Makarova offered Corso one last beer on the house. La Ponte had to pay for his own this time.

  II. THE DEAD MAN’S HAND

  Milady smiled, and d’Artagnan felt that he would go to hell and back for that smile.

  —A. Dumas, THE THREE MUSKETEERS

  There are inconsolable widows, and then there are widows to whom any adult male would be delighted to provide the appropriate consolation. Liana Taillefer was undoubtedly the second kind. Tall and blond, with pale skin, she moved languorously. She was the type of woman who takes an age to light a cigarette and looks straight into a man’s eyes as she does so. She had the cool composure that was a result of knowing that she looked a little like Kim Novak, with a full, almost overgenerous figure, and that she was the sole beneficiary of the late Enrique Taillefer, Publisher, Ltd., who had a bank account for which the term solvent was a pale euphemism. It’s amazing how much dough a person can make, if you’ll excuse the feeble pun, from publishing cookbooks, such as The Thousand Best Desserts of La Mancha or all fifteen bestselling editions of that classic, The Secrets of the Barbecue. The Taillefers lived in part of what had once been the palace of the Marques de Los Alumbres, now converted into luxury apartments. In matters of decor, the owners seemed to have more money than taste. This could be the only excuse for placing a vulgar Lladro porcelain figure—a little girl with a duck, noted Lucas Corso dispassionately—in the same glass cabinet with a group of little Meissen shepherds, for which the late Enrique Taillefer, or his wife, must have paid some sharp antique dealer a handsome sum. There was a Biedermeier desk, of course, and a Steinway piano standing on a luxurious oriental rug. And a comfortable-looking, white leather sofa on which Liana Taillefer was sitting at that moment, crossing her extraordinarily shapely legs. She was dressed, as befits a widow, in a black skirt. It came to just above the knee when she sat, but hinted at voluptuous curves higher up, curves hidden in mystery and shadow, as Lucas Corso later put it. I would add that Corso’s comment should not be ignored. He looked like one of those dubious men you can easily imagine living with an elderly mother who knits and brings him cocoa in bed on a Sunday morning; the kind of son you see in films, a solitary figure walking behind the coffin in the rain, with reddened eyes and moaning “Mama” inconsolably, like a helpless orphan. But Corso had never been helpless in his life. And when you got to know him better, you began to wonder if he had ever had a mother.

  “I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this,” said Corso.

  He sat facing the widow, still in his coat, his canvas bag on his knees. He held himself straight on the edge of the seat. Liana Taillefer’s large ice-blue eyes studied him from top to toe, determined to pigeonhole him in some known category of the male species. He was sure she’d find it difficult. He submitted to her scrutiny, trying not to create any particular impression. He was familiar with the procedure, and he kn
ew that at that moment he didn’t rate very high in the estimation of Enrique Taillefer’s widow. This limited the inspection to a kind of contemptuous curiosity. She’d kept him waiting for ten minutes, after he’d had a skirmish with a maid who’d taken him for a salesman and tried to slam the door in his face. But now the widow was glancing at the plastic folder that Corso had taken out of his bag, and the situation changed. As for him, he tried to hold Liana Taillefer’s gaze through his crooked glasses, avoiding the roaring reefs—to the south her legs and to the north her bust (exuberant was the word, he decided, having pondered the matter for some time), which was molded to devastating effect by her black angora sweater.

  “It would be a great help,” he added at last, “if you could tell me whether you knew about this document.”

  He handed her the folder, and as he did so accidentally brushed her hand with its long blood-red fingernails. Or maybe it was her hand that brushed his. Whichever, this slight contact showed that Corso’s prospects were looking more favorable. He adopted a suitably embarrassed expression, just enough to show her that bothering beautiful widows wasn’t his specialty. Her ice-blue eyes weren’t on the folder now, they were watching Corso with a flicker of interest.