The Club Dumas

“My hands? What you mean is that my soul burns in the torments of hell. I thought I’d explained. The book to be sacrificed can never be one to which I am indifferent. What meaning would this painful act have otherwise? A sordid trans­action determined by market forces, several cheap books instead of a single expensive one ...” Scornful, he shook his head vio­lently. He looked around grimly, searching for someone on whom to vent his anger. “These are the ones I love best. They shine above the rest for their beauty, for the love they have inspired. These are the ones I walk hand in hand with to the brink of the abyss.... Life may strip me of all I have. But it won’t turn me into a miserable wretch.”

He paced aimlessly about the room. The sad scene, his bad leg, his shabby clothes all added to his weary, fragile appear­ance.

“That’s why I remain in this house,” he went on. “The ghosts of my lost books roam within its walls.” He stopped in front of the fireplace and looked at the pile of logs in the hearth. “Sometimes I feel they come back to demand that I make amends. So, to placate them, I take up the violin that you see there and I play for hours, wandering through the house in darkness, like one of the damned....” He turned to look at Corso, was silhouetted against the dirty window. “The wander­ing book collector.” He walked slowly to the table and laid a hand on each book, as if he had delayed making his decision until that moment. Now he smiled inquiringly.

“Which one would you choose, if you were in my place?” Corso fidgeted, uneasy. “Please, leave me out of this. I’m lucky enough not to be in your place.”

“That’s right. Very lucky. How clever of you to realize. A stupid man would envy me, I suppose. All this treasure in my house ... But you haven’t told me which one to sell. Which son to sacrifice.” His face suddenly became distorted with anguish, as if the pain were in his body too. “May his blood taint me and mine,” he added in a very low, intense voice, “unto the seventh generation.”

He returned the Agricola to its place on the rug and stroked the parchment of the Virgil, muttering, “His blood.” His eyes were moist and his hands shook uncontrollably. “I think I’ll sell this one,” he said.

Fargas might not be out of his mind yet, but he soon would be. Corso looked at the bare walls, the marks left by pictures on the stained wallpaper. The highly unlikely seventh gener­ation didn’t give a damn about any of this. Like Lucas Corso’s own, the Fargas line would end here. And find peace at last. Corso’s cigarette smoke rose up to the decrepit painting on the ceiling, straight up, like the smoke from a sacrifice in the calm of dawn. He looked out the window, at the garden overrun with weeds, searching for a way out, like the lamb tangled in the brambles. But there was nothing but books. The angel let go of the hand that held up the knife and went away, weeping. And left Abraham alone, the poor fool.

Corso finished his cigarette and threw it into the fireplace. He was tired and cold. He had heard too many words within these bare walls. He was glad there were no mirrors for him to see the expression on his face. He looked at his watch with­out noticing the time. With a fortune sitting there on the old rugs and carpets, Victor Fargas had more than paid their price in suffering. For Corso it was now time to talk business. “What about The Nine Doors?” “What about it?”

“That’s what brought me here. I assume you got my letter.” “Your letter? Yes, of course. I remember. It’s just that with all of this ... Forgive me. The Nine Doors. Of course.”

He looked around, bewildered, like a sleepwalker who has just been jolted awake. He suddenly seemed infinitely tired, after a long ordeal. He lifted a finger, requesting a minute to think, then limped over to a corner of the room. Some fifty books were lined up there on a faded French rug. Corso could just make out that the rug depicted Alexander’s victory over Darius.

“Did you know,” asked Fargas, pointing at the scene on the Gobelin, “that Alexander used his rival’s treasure chest to store Homer’s books?” He nodded, pleased, looking at the Mace­donian’s threadbare profile. “He was a fellow book collector. A good man.”

Corso didn’t give a damn about Alexander the Great’s lit­erary tastes. He knelt and read the titles printed on some of the spines and front edges. They were all ancient treatises on magic, alchemy, and demonology. Les trois livres de I’Art, De­structor omnium rerum, Disertazioni sopra le apparizioni de’ spiriti e diavoli, De origine, moribus et rebus gestis Satanae...

“What do you think?” asked Fargas.

“Not bad.”