The Club Dumas

The concierge took a card from under the desk. “Irene Adler,” he read. “British passport, issued two months ago. Nineteen years old. Address: 223B Baker Street, London.” “Don’t joke with me, Gruber.” “I’d never take such a liberty, Mr. Corso. That’s what it says here.”

There was the hint, the faintest suggestion of a smile on the face of the old SS Waffen. Corso had seen him smile only once: the day the Berlin Wall came down. He observed Gruber’s white crew cut, stiff neck, hands arranged symmetrically, wrists resting exactly on the edge of the desk. Old Europe, or what was left of it. Gruber was too old to go back home and risk finding that nothing was as he remembered; not the bell tower in Zagreb, not the warm, blond peasant girls smelling of fresh bread, not the green plains with rivers and bridges that he had seen blown up twice—once in his youth, in the retreat from Tito’s guerrillas, and then on TV, autumn 1991, in the faces of the Serbian Chetniks. Corso could picture Gruber in his room standing in front of a dusty portrait of the Emperor Franz Joseph, taking off the maroon jacket with little golden keys on the lapels as if it were his Austro-Hungarian army jacket. He probably played Radetsky’s March on a record player, drank a toast with a glass of Montenegran liqueur, and masturbated to videos of the Empress Sissy.

The girl was no longer looking at the display but now at Corso. 223B Baker Street, he repeated to himself and felt the urge to guffaw. He wouldn’t have been in the least surprised had a bellboy appeared with an invitation from Milady de Winter to take tea at If Castle or at the palace in Ruritania with Richelieu, Professor Moriarty, and Rupert de Hentzau. Since this was a literary matter, it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world.

He asked for a phone book and looked up Baroness Ungern’s number. Then, ignoring the girl’s stare, he went to the phone booth in the lobby and made an appointment for the following

day. He also tried Varo Borja’s number in Toledo, but there was no answer.

he was watching television with the sound down: a film with Gregory Peck surrounded by seals, a fight in a hotel ballroom, two schooners side by side, waves crashing against the bow, heading north in full sail, toward true freedom which begins only ten miles off the nearest coast. At Corso’s elbow a bottle of Bols, its level below the Plimsoll line, stood guard on the bedside table like an old, alcoholic grenadier on the eve of battle, between The Nine Doors and the folder with the Dumas manuscript.

Corso took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were red from cigarette smoke and gin. On the bed, with the pre­cision of an archaeologist, he had laid out the fragments of book number two rescued from the fireplace in Victor Fargas’s house. There wasn’t much left: the boards, protected by the covering of leather, were less damaged, but of the rest there remained no more than charred margins and a few barely legible para­graphs. He picked up one of the pieces, made yellow and brittle by the fire:... si non obig.nem me. ips.s fecere, f.r q.qe die, lib. do vitam m.m sicut tm.... This came from one of the bottom corners. He examined it for a few moments, then searched for the same page in book number one. It was page 89, and the two paragraphs were identical. He did the same with as many paragraphs as he could, managing to identify sixteen. It was impossible to tell where another twenty-two of the fragments came from; they were too small or too damaged. Eleven more fragments were blank, and he identified only one, thanks to a crooked 7 that was the third and only legible digit in the page number, page 107.

The cigarette had burned down and was burning his lips. He stubbed it out in the ashtray, then took a swig of the Bols directly from the bottle. He was wearing an old cotton khaki shirt with big pockets, sleeves rolled up, and a crumpled tie. On the TV, the man from Boston standing by the helm was embracing a Russian princess. They both moved their lips soundlessly, happy and in love under a Technicolor sky. The only noise in the room was the gentle rattling of the window-panes caused by the traffic rumbling by, two floors below, head­ing for the Louvre.