The Club Dumas

he WOKE AT DAYBREAK. The girl was sleeping pressed against him. For some time he didn’t move in order not to wake her. He made himself stop thinking about what had hap­pened or might happen. He closed his eyes and drifted, enjoying the peace of the moment. He could feel her breath on his skin. Irene Adler, 223B Baker Street. The devil in love. The outline in the mist confronting Rochefort. The blue duffel coat falling slowly, unfolding, onto the quayside. And Corso’s shadow in her eyes. She slept, relaxed and tranquil, aware of nothing. He couldn’t link the images in his mind logically. At that moment, logic had no appeal. He felt lazy and content. He put his hand between her warm thighs and kept it there, very still. Her naked body, at least, was real.

Later, he got out of bed carefully and went to the bathroom. In the mirror he saw that he still had traces of dried blood on his face, and also, as the result of his encounter with Rochefort and the stone steps, a bluish bruise on his left shoulder, and another across a couple of ribs, which hurt when he pressed it. He had a quick wash and went to look for a cigarette. As he was searching in his coat, he found the note Gruber had handed him.

He cursed under his breath for having forgotten it, but there was nothing he could do about that now. So he opened the envelope and went back to the light in the bathroom to read the note. It was brief and its contents—two names, a number, and an address—made him smile malevolently. He glanced at himself again in the mirror. His hair was matted, and he needed a shave. He put on his glasses as if arming himself, a mean wolf off to hunt. He picked up his clothes and canvas bag quietly, and gave the sleeping girl a last glance. Maybe it was going to be a beautiful day after all. Buckingham and Milady were about to choke on their breakfast.

the hotel crillon was too expensive for Flavio La Ponte. Enrique Taillefer’s widow must have been paying the bill. Corso reflected on this as he paid his taxi on the Place Concorde and crossed the marble lobby to the stairs and room 206. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and no sound when he rapped loudly three times. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered. The Brotherhood of Nantucket Harpooners was about to be dissolved. Corso didn’t know if he was sorry or not. He and La Ponte had once imagined an alternative version of Moby-Dick. Ishmael writes the story, places the manuscript in the caulked coffin, and drowns with the rest of the crew of the Peguod Queequeg is the only survivor, the wild harpooner with no intellectual pretensions. In time he learns to read. One day he reads his friend’s novel and discovers that Ishmael’s account and his own memories of what happened are completely dif­ferent. So he writes his own version of the story. Call me Queequeg the story begins, and he titles it A Whale. From the harpooner’s point of view, Ishmael was a pedantic scholar who blew things out of proportion. Moby Dick wasn’t to blame, he was a whale like any other. It was all a matter of an incom­petent captain wanting to settle a personal score instead of filling barrels with oil. “What does it matter who tore his leg off?” writes Queequeg. Corso could remember the scene around the table in Makarova’s bar. Makarova, with her masculine, Nordic reserve, listening carefully as La Ponte explained the use of the caulking on the carpenter’s coffin while Zizi looked on jealously from the other side of the bar. In those days, if Corso dialed his own number, Nikon would answer—he always pictured her emerging from the darkroom, her hands wet with fixative. That’s what happened the night they rewrote Moby-Dick. They all ended up at Corso’s place, emptied more bottles, and watched a John Huston movie on the VCR. They drank a toast to old Melville when the Rachel, searching the seas for her lost sons, at last finds another orphan.