The Club Dumas

“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.