The Club Dumas

over his unrequited love for the gypsy Esmeralda. But ever since Charles Laughton, as the hideous hunchback who resem­bled them, and Gina Lollobrigida in the remake—Technicolor, as Nikon would have specified—were executed in their shadow, it was impossible to think of Notre-Dame without the sinister neomedieval sentinels. Corso imagined the bird’s-eye view: the Pont Neuf, and beyond it, narrow and dark in the luminous morning, the Pont des Arts over the gray-green band of river, with two tiny figures moving imperceptibly toward the right bank. Bridges and rainbows with black Caronte barges gliding slowly beneath the pillars and vaults of stone. The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.

They emerged opposite the Louvre and stopped at a traffic light before crossing. Corso shifted the strap of his canvas bag on his shoulder and glanced absently to right and left. The traffic was heavy, and he happened to notice one of the passing cars. He froze, turned to stone like a gargoyle on the cathedral. “What’s the matter?” asked the girl when the lights turned green and she saw that Corso wasn’t moving. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

He had. Not one but two. They were in the back of a taxi already moving off in the distance, engaged in animated con­versation, and they hadn’t noticed Corso. The woman was blond and very attractive. He recognized her immediately despite her hat and the veil covering her eyes. Liana Taillefer. Next to her, an arm around her shoulders, showing his best side and stroking his curly beard vainly, was Flavio La Ponte.

 X. NUMBER THREE

They suspected that he had no heart.

—R. Sabatini, SCARAMOUCHE

Corso  had  a  rare  knack:  he could make a loyal ally of a stranger instantly, in return for a tip or even a smile. As we’ve seen, there was something about him—his half-calculated clumsiness, his customary, friendly rabbit expression, his air of absentminded helplessness which was nothing of the sort—that won people over. This happened to some of us. And it happened to Gruber, the concierge of the Louvre Concorde, with whom Corso had had dealings for fifteen years. Gruber was dry and imperturbable, with a crew cut and a permanent poker player’s expression around the mouth. Dur­ing the retreat of 1944, when he was sixteen years old and a Croat volunteer in the Horst Wessel Eighteenth Panzergrena-dier division, a Russian bullet hit him in the spine. It left him with an Iron Cross Second Class and three fused vertebrae for life. This was why he was so stiff and upright behind the re­ception desk, as if he were wearing a steel corset. “I need a favor, Gruber.” “Yes, sir.”

He almost clicked his heels as he stood to attention. The impeccable burgundy jacket with the gold keys on the lapels gave the old exile a military air, very much to the taste of the Central Europeans who stayed at the hotel. After the fall of Communism and the fragmenting of the Slav hordes, they ar­rived in Paris to glance at the Champs-Elysees out of the corners of their eyes and dream of a Fourth Reich.

“La Ponte, Flavio. Nationality Spanish. Also Herrero, Liana, though she may be going by the name of Taillefer or de Taillefer. I want to know if they’re at a hotel in the city.”

He wrote the names on a card and handed it to Gruber, together with five hundred francs. Corso always gave tips or bribes with a shrug, as if to say, “I’ll do the same for you sometime.” It made it such a friendly-conspiratorial exchange, it was difficult to tell who was doing whom a favor. Gruber, who murmured a polite “Merci m’sieu”to Spaniards on package tours, to Italians in loud ties, and to Americans with airline bags and baseball caps for a miserable ten-franc tip, took Corso’s banknote without a word or even a nod. He just slipped it in his pocket with an elegant, semicircular movement of the hand and a croupier’s impassive gravity, reserved for the few, like Corso, who still knew how to play the game. Gruber had learned the job in the days when a guest had only to raise an eyebrow for hotel employees to come running. The dear old Europe of international hotels was now reduced to a few cognoscenti.

“Are the lady and gentleman staying together?”

“I don’t know.” Corso frowned. He pictured La Ponte emerg­ing from the bathroom in an embroidered dressing gown and Taillefer’s widow lying on the bed in a silk nightgown. “I’d like to know that too.”

Gruber bowed imperceptibly. “It’ll take a few hours, Mr. Corso.”

“I know.” He glanced down the corridor that led from the lobby to the dining room. The girl was there, her duffel coat under her arm and her hands in her pockets, examining a dis­play of perfumes and silk scarves. “What about her?”