The Club Dumas

VI. DlT.sco M.R.: A hangman, like the one in the tarot, hands tied behind his back, is hanging by his foot from the battlements of a castle, next to a closed postern. A hand in a gauntlet sticks out of a slot window holding a flaming sword.

VII. DIS.S. P.TI.R MAG: A king and a beggar are playing chess on a board with only white squares. The moon can be seen through the window. Beneath a window next to a closed door, two dogs are fighting.

VIII. vie. i.T VIR.: Next to the wall of a city a woman kneels on the ground, offering up her bare neck to the ex­ecutioner. In the background there is a wheel of fortune with three human figures: one at the top, one going up, and one going down.

VIIII. (Also in this form, not the usual numeral IX). N.NC SC.O TEN.EBR. LUX: A naked woman riding a seven-headed dragon. She holds an open book, and a half-moon hides her sex. On a hill in the background there is a castle in flames. The door is closed, as in the other engravings.

He stopped typing, stretched his stiffened limbs, and yawned. The room was in darkness beyond the cone of light from his work lamp and his computer screen. Through the window came the pale glow of streetlights. He went to the window and looked out, not quite knowing what he expected to see. A car waiting at the curb, perhaps, its headlights off and a dark figure inside. But nothing attracted his attention except, for a moment, the siren of an ambulance fading among the dark masses of buildings. He looked at the clock on the nearby church tower: it was five minutes past midnight.

He sat down again at the computer and the book. He examined the first illustration—the printer’s mark on the title page, the snake with its tail in its mouth, which Aristide Torchia had chosen as the symbol of his work. SIC LUCEAT LUX. Snakes and devils, invocations and hidden meanings. He lifted his glass to drink a sarcastic toast to Torchia’s memory. The man must have been very brave, or very stupid. You paid a high price for that kind of thing in seventeenth-century Italy, even if it was printed cum superiorum privilegio veniaque.

But then Corso stopped and cursed out loud, looking into the dark corners of the room, for not having noticed before. “With the privilege and license of the superiors.” That wasn’t possible.

Without taking his eyes from the page, he sat back in his chair and lit another of his crushed cigarettes. Spirals of smoke rose in the lamplight, a translucent gray curtain behind which the lines of print rippled.

Cum superiorum privilegio veniaque didn’t make sense. Or else it was brilliantly subtle. The reference to the imprimatur couldn’t possibly mean a conventional authorization. The Catholic Church would never have allowed such a book in 1666, because its direct predecessor, the Delomelanicon, had been listed in the index of forbidden books for the previous hundred and fifty years. So Aristide Torchia wasn’t referring to a per­mission to print granted by the Church censors. Nor to a civil authority, the government of the republic of Venice. He must have had other superiors.

THE TELEPHONE INTERRUPTED HIS thought. It was Flavio La Ponte. He wanted to tell Corso how he’d found, in with some books (he’d had to buy the whole lot, that was the deal), a collection of European tram tickets, 5,775 of them to be exact. All palindromic numbers, sorted by country in shoe boxes. He wasn’t joking. The collector had just died, and the family wanted to get rid of them. Maybe Corso knew someone who’d be interested. Naturally. La Ponte knew that the tireless, and pathological, activity of collecting 5,775 palindromic tickets was completely pointless. Who would buy such a stupid collec­tion? Yes, the Transport Museum in London, that was a good idea. The English and their perversions... Would Corso deal with the matter?

La Ponte was also worried about the Dumas chapter. He’d received two telephone calls, from a man and a woman who didn’t identify themselves, asking about “The Anjou Wine.” Which was strange, because La Ponte hadn’t mentioned the chapter to anyone and wasn’t intending to until he had Corso’s report. Corso told him of his conversation with Liana Taillefer and that he had revealed to her the identity of the new owner. “She knew you because you used to go and see her late husband. Oh, and by the way,” he remembered, “she wants a copy of the receipt.”