The Club Dumas

“Son of a bitch,” said Corso. And with that he took his contract to be terminated.

he made FOR THE gray light at the foot of the steps, beneath the arch leading to the courtyard. There, by the well and the marble lions, before the gate that led to the street, he stopped and breathed deeply, savoring the fresh, clean morning air. He searched in his coat for the crumpled pack with one remaining cigarette. He put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He stood there a moment while the first ray of the sun, which he’d left behind on entering the city, reached him, red and slanting. It slipped between the gray stone facades of the square, projecting the shadow of the wrought-iron gate on his face, and making him half-close his sleepless, weary eyes. Then the light grew, spreading slowly to fill the entire patio. The Venetian lions bowed their marble manes as if receiving a caress. The same glow, first red, then luminous as a suspension of gold dust, enveloped Corso. And at that instant, at the top of the stairs, beyond the last door of the kingdom of the shadows, where the calm light of dawn would never reach, there was a cry. A pierc­ing, inhuman scream, full of horror and despair, in which he could barely recognize the voice of Varo Borja.

Not turning around, Corso pushed the gate and went out into the street. With each step he seemed to move a great distance away from what he was leaving behind, as if, in only a few seconds, he had retraced his steps on a journey that had taken him too long.

He stopped in the middle of the square, dazzled, enveloped in blinding sunlight. The girl was still in the car, and Corso shivered with deep, selfish delight when he saw that she hadn’t disappeared with the remnants of the night. She smiled tenderly, looking impossibly young and beautiful, with her hair cut short like a boy’s, her tanned skin, her tranquil eyes fixed on him, waiting. And all the golden, perfect light reflected in the liquid green of her eyes—the light driving back the dark angles of the ancient city, the shadow of the bell towers, and the pointed arches of the square—seemed to radiate from her smile as Corso went to meet her. He looked down at the ground as he walked, resigned, ready to bid his own shadow farewell. But there was no shadow at his feet.

Behind him, in the house guarded by four gargoyles beneath the eaves, Borja was no longer screaming. Or perhaps he was screaming from a dark place too far away to be heard from the street. Nunc scio: now I know. Corso wondered if the Ceniza brothers had used resin or wood to forge the illustration, lost through the whim of a child or the barbarity of a collector, in book number one. Although, as he thought of their pale, skilled hands, he inclined to think that they had carved it in wood, basing it on Mateu’s Bibliography. That’s why things didn’t tally for Varo Borja: in the three copies, the final engraving was a forgery. Ceniza sculpsit. For love of their art.

He was laughing under his breath, like a cruel wolf, as he leaned over to light his last cigarette. Books play that kind of trick, he thought. And everyone gets the devil he deserves.