The Club Dumas

Night was falling when Corso got home. Inside his coat pocket his bruised hand throbbed painfully. He went to the bathroom, picked up his crumpled pajamas and a towel from the floor, and held the hand under a stream of cold water for five minutes. Then he opened a couple of cans and ate, standing in the kitchen.

It had been a strange and dangerous day. As he thought about it, he felt confused, though he was less worried than curious. For some time, he had treated the unexpected with the detached fatalism of one who waits for life to make the next move. His detachment, his neutrality, meant that he could never be the prime mover. Until that morning in the narrow street in Toledo, his role had been merely to carry out orders. Other people were the victims. Every time he lied or made a deal with someone, he stayed objective. He formed no relation­ships with the persons or things involved—they were simply tools of the trade. He remained on the side, a mercenary with no cause other than financial gain. The indifferent third man. Perhaps this attitude had always made him feel safe, just as, when he took off his glasses, people and objects became blurred, indistinct; he could ignore them by removing their sharp out­line. Now, though, the pain from his injured hand, the sense of imminent danger, of violence aimed directly at him and him alone, implied frightening changes in his world. Lucas Corso, who had acted as victimizer so many times, wasn’t used to being a victim. And he found it highly disconcerting.

In addition to the pain in his hand, his muscles were rigid with tension and his mouth was dry. He opened a bottle of Bols and searched for aspirin in his canvas bag. He always carried a good supply, together with books, pencils, pens, half-filled notepads, a Swiss Army knife, a passport, money, a bulg­ing address book, and books belonging to him and to others. He could, at any time, disappear without a trace like a snail into its shell. With his bag he could make himself at home wherever chance, or his clients, led him—airports, train sta­tions, dusty European libraries, hotel rooms that merged in his memory into a single room with fluid dimensions, where he would wake with a start, disoriented and confused in the dark­ness, searching for the light switch only to stumble upon the phone. Blank moments torn from his life and his consciousness. He was never very sure of himself, or of anything, for the first thirty seconds after he opened his eyes, his body waking before his mind or his memory.

He sat at his computer and put his notepads and several reference books on the desk to his left. On his right he put The Nine Doors and Varo Borja’s folder. Then he leaned back in the chair, letting his cigarette burn down in his hand for five minutes, bringing it to his lips only once or twice. During that time all he did was sip the rest of his gin and stare at the blank computer screen and the pentacle on the book’s cover. At last he seemed to wake up. He stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and, adjusting his crooked glasses, set to work. Varo Borja’s file agreed with Crozet’s Encyclopedia of Printers and Rare and Curious Books: