The Club Dumas

“Napoleon made the mistake of confusing Blucher with Grouchy. Military strategy is as risky as literary strategy. Listen, Corso, there are no innocent readers anymore. Each overlays the text with his own perverse view. A reader is the total of all he’s read, in addition to all the films and television he’s seen. To the information supplied by the author he’ll always add his own. And that’s where the danger lies: an excess of references caused you to create the wrong opponent, or an imaginary opponent.”

“The information was false.”

“No. The information a book provides is an objective given. It may be presented by a malevolent author who wishes to mislead, but it is never false. It is the reader who makes a false reading.”

Corso seemed to be thinking carefully. He shifted to face the garden in darkness. “Then there must be another author,” he said quietly.

He stood motionless. After a time he took the folder with “The Anjou Wine” from under his coat and put it to one side, on the moss-covered stone.

“This story has two authors,” he insisted.

“That’s possible,” I said, taking the Dumas manuscript. “And maybe one is more malevolent than the other. My story was the serial. You’ll have to look for the crime novel elsewhere.”

 XVI. A DEVICE WORTHY OF A GOTHIC NOVEL

“Here is the vexing part of the matter,” said Porthos.

“In the old days one didn ‘t have to explain anything.

One just fought because one fought.”

—A. Dumas, the vicomte de bragelonne

Leaning his head back against the driver’s seat, Lucas Corso looked at the view. He had pulled off onto the shoulder at the final bend of the road before it dipped into the town. Surrounded by ancient walls, the old quarter floated in mist from the river, suspended in the air like a ghostly blue island. It was a hazy world without light or shadow. A cold, hesitant dawn over Castille, with the first glim­mer of light showing roofs, chimneys, and bell towers to the east.

He wanted to look at the time, but water had got into his watch during the storm in Meung. The glass was misted and the dial illegible. Corso saw his exhausted eyes in the rearview mirror. Meung-sur-Loire, on the eve of the first Monday in April. They were now far away, and it was Tuesday. It had been a long return journey, and all the characters had faded into the distance: Balkan, the Club Dumas, Rochefort, Milady, La Ponte. Only the echoes of a story after the turning of the last page. The author striking the final key on the QWERTY keyboard, bottom row, second from the right. So with one arbitrary action there was no more than pages of type, strange, inert paper. Lives suddenly alien.

On that dawn so like awakening from a dream, Corso sat, dirty and unshaven, with reddened eyes. By his side, his old canvas bag containing the last extant copy of The Nine Doors. And the girl. That was all that remained on the shore after the tide went out. She moaned softly, and he turned to look at her. She was sleeping in the seat next to him, under her duffel coat, her head on his right shoulder. Breathing gently, her lips parted, occasionally shaken by small shivers that made her start. Then she’d moan again, quietly. A small vertical crease between her eyebrows made her look like an upset little girl. One hand protruded from under her coat. It was turned palm up, the fingers half open, as if she had just let something slip from them, or as if she was waiting.