The Club Dumas

“Occupational hazard,” said Corso, shining the flashlight on his own face so that, from the floor, Rochefort could see his friendly smile. Then he kicked him in the head and heard it slam hard against the bottom step. He raised his foot to kick again, just to make sure, but one look told him it wasn’t nec­essary: Rochefort was lying with his mouth open and blood was trickling from his ear. Corso leaned over to see if the man was breathing and saw that he was. Then he opened his raincoat and rifled through his pockets. He took the switchblade, a wal­let full of money, a French ID, and the folder with the Dumas manuscript, which he put under his coat, between his belt and shirt. Then he pointed the flashlight beam at the staircase and went back up, to the top this time, where there was a landing with a door that had thick iron hinges and hexagonal nailheads. A crack of light filtered from beneath it. He stood motionless for some thirty seconds, trying to catch his breath and calm the beating of his heart. The solution to the mystery lay on the other side of the door, and he prepared to face it with his teeth clenched, the flashlight in one hand and Rochefort’s knife, which opened with a menacing click, in the other.

Knife in hand, hair soaked and disheveled, and eyes shining with homicidal determination—that’s how I saw Corso enter the library.

 XV. CORSO AND RICHELIEU

And I, who had created a short novel around him,

had been completely mistaken.

—Souvestre et Allain, FANTOMAS

The time has come to reveal the narrator. Faithful to the tradition that the reader of a mys­tery novel must possess the same information as the protagonist, I have presented the events only from Lucas Corso’s perspective, except on two occasions: chapters 1 and 5 of this story, when I had no choice but to appear myself. In both these cases, and as now for the third and final time, I used the first person for the sake of coherence. It would have been absurd to refer to myself as “he,” a publicity stunt that may have yielded dividends for Julius Caesar in his campaign in Gaul but would have been judged, in my case, and quite rightly, as unpardonable pedantry. There is another, more perverse reason: telling the story as if I were Dr. Sheppard addressing Poirot struck me as, if not ingenious (everybody does that sort of thing now), then an amusing device. After all, people write for amusement, or ex­citement, or out of self-love, or to have others love them. I write for some of the same reasons. To quote Eugene Sue, vil­lains who are all of a piece, if you’ll permit me the expression, are very rare phenomena. Assuming—and it may be too much to assume—that I am a villain.

The fact is that I, the undersigned, Boris Balkan, was there in the library, awaiting our guest. Corso entered suddenly, knife in hand and an avenging gleam in his eye. I noticed that he had no escort, which worried me slightly, although I retained my mask of imperturbability. Otherwise I had set the stage well: the library in darkness, a candelabrum burning on the desk before me, a copy of The Three Musketeers in my hands ... I even wore a red velvet jacket that was—it must have seemed like pure coincidence to Corso but was in fact nothing of the sort—strongly reminiscent of a cardinal’s purple.

My big advantage was that I was expecting Corso, with or without an escort, but he wasn’t expecting me. I made the most of his surprise. The knife he held was worrying, together with the menacing look in his eyes, so I decided to speak to forestall any move from him.

“Congratulations,” I said, closing the book as if his arrival had interrupted my reading. “You’ve managed to play the game right to the end.”

He stood staring at me from the other end of the room, and I have to say that I found his look of disbelief highly amusing.

“Game?” he managed to say hoarsely.

“Yes, game. Suspense, uncertainty, a high level of skill... The possibility of acting freely yet according to rules, as an end in itself. With a sense of tension and pleasure at the difference from ordinary life....” These were not my own words, but Corso wouldn’t know that. “Do you think that’s an adequate definition? As the second book of Samuel says: ‘Let the young men now arise, and play before us.’ Children are the perfect players and readers: they do everything with the utmost seri­ousness. In essence, games are the only universally serious ac­tivity. They leave no room for skepticism, wouldn’t you agree? However incredulous or doubting you might be, if you want to play, you have no choice but to follow the rules. Only the person who respects the rules, or at least knows and applies them, can win. Reading a book is the same: you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story.” I paused, trusting that my flow of words had had a sufficiently calming effect. “By the way, you didn’t get here on your own. Where is he?”