The Club Dumas

Then he saw it. It happened suddenly, just as something that has seemed meaningless, when viewed from the correct angle, all at once appears ordered and precise. Corso breathed out, as if he were about to laugh, astounded. All that emerged was a dry sound, like a laugh of disbelief but without the hu­mor. It wasn’t possible. One didn’t joke with that kind of thing. He shook his head, confused. This wasn’t a cheap book of puz­zles bought at a railroad station. These books were three and a half centuries old. Their printer had lost his life over them. They had been included among the books banned by the Inquisition. And they were listed in all the serious bibliographies. “Illustration II. Caption in Latin. Old man holding two keys and a lantern, standing in front of a closed door...” But nobody had compared two of the three known copies, not until now. It wasn’t easy bringing them together. Or necessary. Old man holding two keys. That was enough.

Corso got up and went to the window. He stood there awhile, looking through the panes misted by his own breath. Varo Borja was right after all. Aristide Torchia must have been laughing to himself on his pyre at Campo dei Fiori, before the flames took away his sense of humor forever. As a posthumous joke it was brilliant.

 VIII. POSTUMA NECAT

“Is anybody there?” “No.”

“Too bad. He must be dead.”

—M. Leblanc, arsEne LUPIN

Lucas Corso knew better than anyone that one of the main problems of his profession was that bibliographies were compiled by scholars who never ac­tually saw the books cited; scholars relied instead on secondhand accounts and information recorded by others. An error or in­complete description could circulate for generations without be­ing noticed. Then by chance it came to light. This was the case with The Nine Doors. Apart from its obligatory mention in the canonical bibliographies, even the most precise references had included only summary descriptions of the nine engravings, without minor details. In the case of the book’s second illustra­tion, all the known texts referred to an old man who looked like a sage or a hermit, standing before a door and holding two keys. But nobody had ever bothered to specify in which hand he held the keys. Now Corso had the answer: in the engraving in book number one, the left, and in book number two, the right.

He still had to find out what number three was like. But this wasn’t possible yet. Corso stayed at the Quinta da Soledade until dark. He worked solidly in the light of the candelabra, taking copious notes, checking both books over and over again. He examined each engraving until he had confirmed his theory. More proof emerged. At last he sat looking at his booty in the form of notes on a sheet of paper, tables and diagrams with strange links between them. Five of the engravings were not identical in both books. In addition to the old man holding the key in different hands in engraving II, the labyrinth in IIII had an exit in one of the books but not in the other. In illus­tration V of book one, Death brandished an hourglass with the sand in the lower half, while in book two the sand was in the upper half. As for the chessboard in number VII, in Varo Borja’s copy the squares were all white while in Fargas’s copy they were black. And in engraving VIII, the executioner poised to behead the young woman in one of the books became an aveng­ing angel in the other through the addition of a halo.

There were more differences. Close examination through the magnifying glass yielded unexpected results. The printer’s marks hidden in the woodcuts contained another subtle clue. A.T., Aristide Torchia, was named as the sculptor in the en­graving of the old man, but as the inventor only in the same engraving in book number two, while, as the Ceniza brothers had pointed out, the signature in book number one was L.F. The same difference occurred in four more illustrations. This could mean that all the woodcuts were carved by the printer himself but that the original drawings for his engravings were created by somebody else. So it wasn’t a matter of a forgery dating from the same era as the books or of apocryphal reprint-ings. It was the printer, Torchia himself, “by authority and permission of the superiors,” who had altered his own, work in accordance with a preestablished plan. He had signed the en­gravings he changed to make sure it was clear that l.f. had created the others. Only one copy remains, he told his execu­tioners. Whereas in fact he had left three copies, and a key that might possibly turn them into a single one. The rest of his secret he took with him to the grave.

Corso resorted to an ancient collating system: the compara­tive tables used by Umberto Eco in his study of the Hanau. Having set out in order on paper the illustrations that contained differences, he obtained the following table:

I

II

III

nil

V

VI

VII

VIII

vim

One

left

no

sand

white

no

hand

exit

down

board

halo

Two

right