The Club Dumas

“I suppose he must.” Corso gave his best neutral smile. “But I’m getting paid to make sure.” He kept smiling. They were coming to the difficult part. “By the way, speaking of money, I was told to make you an offer.”

The book collector’s curiosity turned to suspicion. “What kind of offer?”

“Financial. And substantial.” Corso laid his hand on the sec­ond copy. “You could solve your money problems for some time.”

“Would it be Varo Borja paying?”

“It could be.”

Fargas stroked his chin. “He already has one of the books. Does he want all three of them?”

The man might have been a little insane, but he was no fool. Corso gestured vaguely, not wanting to commit himself. Perhaps. One of those things collectors get into their heads. But if Fargas sold the book, he would be able to keep the Virgil. “You don’t understand,” said Fargas. But Corso understood only too well. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with the old man.

“Forget it,” he said. “It was just a thought.” “I don’t sell at random. I choose the books. I thought I’d made that clear.”

The veins on the back of his tensed hands were knotted. He was becoming irritated, so Corso spent the next few minutes in placatory mode. The offer was a secondary matter, a mere for­mality. What he really wanted, he said, was to make a com­parative study of both books. At last, to his relief, Fargas nodded in agreement.

“I don’t see any problem with that,” he said, his mistrust receding. It was obvious that he liked Corso. If he hadn’t, things would have gone quite differently. “Although I can’t offer you many creature comforts here....”

He led him down a bare passage to another, smaller room, which had a dilapidated piano in one corner, a table with an old bronze candelabrum covered with wax drips, and a couple of rickety chairs.

“At least it’s quiet here,” said Fargas. “And all the window-panes are intact.”

He snapped his fingers, as if he’d forgotten something. He disappeared for a moment and returned holding the rest of the bottle of brandy.

“So Varo Borja finally managed to get hold of it,” he re­peated. He smiled to himself, as if at some thought that obvi­ously caused him great satisfaction. Then he put the bottle and glass on the floor, at a safe distance from the two copies of The

Nine Doors. Like an attentive host he looked around to make sure that everything was in order, then said ironically, before leaving, “Make yourself at home.”

Corso poured the rest of the brandy into the glass. He took out his notes and set to work. He had drawn three boxes on a sheet of paper. Each box contained a number and name:

Page after page, he jotted down any difference between book number one and book number two, however slight: a stain on a page, the ink slightly darker in one copy than in the other. When he came to the first engraving, NEM. PERVT.T QUI N.N LEG. CERT.RIT, the horseman advising the reader to keep silent, he took out a magnifying glass with a power of seven from his bag and examined both woodcuts, line by line. They were iden­tical. He noticed that even the pressure of the engravings on the paper, like that of the typography, was the same. The lines and characters looked worn, broken, or crooked in exactly the same places in both copies. This meant that number one and number two had been printed one after the other, or almost, and on the same press. As the Ceniza brothers would have put it, Corso was looking at a pair of twins.

He went on making notes. An imperfection in line 6 of page 19 in book number two made him stop a moment, then he realized it was just an ink stain. He turned more pages. Both books had the same structure: two flyleaves and 160 pages stitched into twenty gatherings of eight. All nine illustrations in both books occupied a full page. They had been printed separately on the same type of paper, blank on the reverse, and

inserted into the book during the binding process. They were positioned identically in both books:

I. between pages 16 and 17

II. 32-3?

III. 48-49

UII. 64-65

V. 80-81

VI. 96-97

VII. 112-113

VIII. 128-129 VIIII. 144-145

Either Varo Borja was raving, or this was a very strange job Corso had been sent on. There was no way that they were forgeries. At the most, they might both have come from an edition that was apocryphal but still dated from the seventeenth century. Number one and number two were the embodiment of honesty on printed paper.

He drank the rest of the brandy and examined illustration II with his magnifying glass. CLAUS. PAT. T., the bearded hermit holding two keys, the closed door, a lantern on the ground. He had the illustrations side by side and suddenly felt rather silly. It was like playing Find the Difference. He grimaced. Life as a game. And books as a reflection of life.