The Club Dumas

His expert glance, accustomed to finding a book instantly, went back and forth  without success.  Black morocco, five raised bands, no title on the exterior, a pentacle on the cover. Umbrarum regni, etc. He wasn’t mistaken. A third of the mystery, exactly thirty-three point endless threes percent, had vanished.

“Shit.”

It couldn’t have been Pinto, he wouldn’t have had time to

organize anything. The girl was watching him as if waiting for him to do something interesting. Corso stood up.

“Who are you?”

It was the second time in less than twelve hours that he’d asked the question, but to two different people. Things were getting complicated far too quickly. For her part, the girl held his gaze, not reacting to the question. After a time she looked away into empty space. Or possibly at the books lined up on the floor.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “You’d be better off won­dering where the book has gone.”

“What book?”

She looked at him again but said nothing. He felt incredibly stupid.

“You know too much,” he told the girl. “Even more than I do.”

Again she shrugged. She was looking at Corso’s watch.

“You don’t have much time.”

“I don’t give a damn how much time I have.”

“That’s up to you. But there’s a flight from Lisbon to Paris in five hours, from Portela Airport. We can just make it.”

God. Corso shivered under his coat, horrified. She sounded like an efficient secretary, schedule book in hand, listing her boss’s appointments for the day. He opened his mouth to com­plain. And so young with those disturbing eyes. Damned little witch.

“Why should I leave now?”

“Because the police might arrive.”

“I don’t have anything to hide.”

The girl smiled indefinably, as if she had just heard a funny but very old joke. Then she put her rucksack on her back and waved good-bye.

“I’ll bring you cigarettes in prison. Though they don’t sell your brand here in Portugal.”

She went out into the garden without a backward glance at the room. Corso was about to go after her and stop her. Then he saw something in the fireplace.

After a moment of disbelief, he went over to it. Very slowly, so that things might return to normal. But when he reached the fireplace and leaned on the mantelpiece, he saw that the damage was irreversible. In the brief interval between last night and this morning, a minute period of time compared to their centuries-old contents, the antiquarian bibliographies had gone out of date. There now remained not three known copies of The Nine Doors, but only two. The third, or what was left of it, was still smoldering among the embers.

He knelt, taking care not to touch anything. The binding, no doubt because of the leather covering, was less damaged than the pages inside. Two of the five raised bands on the spine were intact, and the pentacle was only half burned. But the pages had been almost entirely consumed by the flames. There were only a few charred edges, with fragments of print. Corso held his hand over the still-warm remains.

He took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. He remembered how the logs had been piled up in the fireplace the night before. Judging by the ashes—the burned logs lay underneath the ashes of the book, nobody had raked over the embers—the fire had gone out with the book on top. He remembered seeing enough logs piled there to last about four or five hours. And the warm ashes indicated that the fire had gone out about the same number of hours ago. This made a total of eight to ten hours. Somebody must have lit the fire between ten o’clock and midnight, and then put the book in. And whoever had done so hadn’t hung around afterward to rake over the embers.

Corso wrapped in old newspaper what remains he could save from the fireplace. The page fragments were stiff and brittle, so it took him some time. As he did this, he noticed that the pages and cover had burned separately. Whoever had thrown

them into the fire had torn them apart so that they would burn more efficiently.

Once he retrieved all the pieces, he paused to glance around the room. The Virgil and the Agricola were where Fargas had put them. The De re metalica lined up with the others on the rug—and the Virgil on the table, just as Fargas had left it when, with the tone of a priest performing a ritual sacrifice, he had uttered the words “I think I’ll sell this one....” There was a sheet of paper between its pages. Corso opened the book. It was a handwritten receipt, unfinished.