The Club Dumas

But that was all a long time ago. Corso turned off the light. Outside it was still raining. In his bedroom he lit one last cig­arette. He sat motionless on the edge of the bed in the dark, listening for an echo of her absent breathing. Then he put out his hand to stroke her hair, no longer spilling over the pillow. Nikon was his only regret. The rain was coming down harder now, and the .droplets on the window broke the faint light outside into minute reflections, sprinkling the sheets with mov­ing dots, black trails, tiny shadows plunging in no particular direction, like the shreds of a life. “Lucas.”

He said his own name out loud, as she used to. She was the only one who’d always called him that. The name was a symbol of the common homeland, now destroyed, that they had once shared. Corso focused his attention on the tip of his cigarette glowing red in the darkness. Once he’d thought he really loved Nikon. When he found her beautiful and intelligent, infallible as a papal encyclical, and passionate, like her black-and-white photographs: wide-eyed children, old people, dogs with faithful expressions. When he watched her defending the freedom of peoples and signing petitions for the release of imprisoned in­tellectuals, oppressed ethnic minorities, things like that. And seals. Once she’d even managed to get him to sign something about seals.

He got up from the bed slowly, so as not to wake the ghost sleeping by his side, listening for the sound of her breathing. Sometimes he almost heard it. “You’re as dead as your books, Corso. You’ve never loved anyone.” That was the first and last time she’d used his surname. The first and last time she’d re­fused him her body, before leaving him for good. In search of the child he’d never wanted.

He opened the window and felt the cold damp night as rain splashed against his face. He took one last puff of his cigarette and then dropped it into the shadows, a red dot fading into the darkness, the curve of its fall broken, or hidden.

That night, it was raining on other landscapes too. On the footprints Nikon left behind. On the fields of Waterloo, great-great-grandfather Corso and his comrades. On the red-and-black tomb of Julien Sorel, guillotined for believing that with Bonaparte’s death the bronze statues lay dying on old forgotten paths. A stupid mistake. Lucas Corso knew better than anyone that an itinerant, clearheaded soldier could still choose his battlefield and get his wages, standing guard alongside ghosts of paper and leather, amidst the hangover from a thousand failures.

 III. MEN OF WORDS AND MEN OF ACTION

“The dead do not speak.”

“They speak if God wishes it,” retorted Lagardere.

—P. Feval, THE HUNCHBACK

The secretary’s heels clicked loudly on the polished wood floor. Lucas Corso followed her down the long corridor—pale cream walls, hidden lighting, am­bient music—until they came to a heavy oak door. He obeyed her sign to wait there a moment. Then, when she moved aside with a perfunctory smile, he went into the office. Varo Borja was sitting in a black leather reclining chair, between half a ton of mahogany and a window with a magnificent panoramic view of Toledo: ancient ochre rooftops, the Gothic spire of the cathedral silhouetted against a clean blue sky, and in the back­ground the large gray mass of the Alcazar palace.

“Do sit down, Corso. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You’ve had to wait.”

It wasn’t an apology but a statement of fact. Corso frowned. “Don’t worry. Only forty-five minutes this time.”

Varo Borja didn’t even bother to smile as Corso sat down in the armchair reserved for visitors. The desk was completely clear except for a complicated, high-tech telephone and intercom system. The book dealer’s face was reflected in the desk surface, together with the view from the window as a backdrop. Varo Borja was about fifty. He was bald, with a tan acquired on a sun bed, and he looked respectable, which was far from the truth. He had sharp, darting little eyes. He hid his excessive girth beneath tight-fitting, exuberantly patterned vests and custom-made jackets. He was some sort of marquis, and his checkered past included a police record, a scandal over fraud, and four years of prudently self-imposed exile in Brazil and Paraguay.

“I have something to show you.”

He had an abrupt manner, bordering on rudeness, which he cultivated carefully. Corso watched him walk over to a small glass cabinet. Borja opened it with a tiny key on a gold chain pulled from his pocket. He had no public premises, apart from a stand reserved at the major international fairs, and his cata­logue never included more than a few dozen titles. He would follow the trail of a rare book to any corner of the world, fight hard and dirty to obtain it, and then sell it, profiting from the vagaries of the market. On his payroll at any one time he had collectors, curators, engravers, printers, and suppliers like Lucas Corso.

“What do you think?”