The Club Dumas

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.”