The Club Dumas

Speaking of tricks. The doorbell rang, and Corso opened it to find the girl standing there. He had just had time to hide book number one and the Dumas manuscript carefully under the cover. She was barefoot and wearing her usual jeans and white T-shirt.

“Hello, Corso. I hope you’re not intending to go out tonight.”

She didn’t come in but stood at the door with her thumbs in her pockets. She was frowning, as if expecting bad news.

“You can relax your guard,” he reassured her.

She smiled, relieved. “I’m exhausted.”

He turned his back on her and went to the bedside table. The bottle of gin was empty, so he started searching the liquor cabinet until he stood up triumphantly holding a miniature bottle of gin. He emptied it into a glass and took a sip. The girl was still at the door.

“They took the engravings. All nine of them.” He waved his glass at the fragments of book number two. “They burned the rest so it wouldn’t show. That’s why all of it was not burned. They made sure some pieces were left intact so the book would be recorded as officially destroyed.”

She cocked her head to one side, looking at him intently. “You’re clever.”

“Of course I am. That’s why they involved me.” The girl took a few steps around the room. Corso saw her bare feet on the carpet, next to the bed. She was examining the charred bits of paper.

“Fargas didn’t burn the book,” he added. “He wasn’t capable of something like that.... What did they do to him? Was it suicide, like Enrique Taillefer?”

She didn’t answer right away. She picked up a piece of paper and looked at the words. “Find your own answers,” she said. “That’s why they involved you.” “What about you?”

She was reading silently, moving her lips as if she knew the words. When she put the fragment down on the bed, her smile was too old for her years.

“You already know why I’m here: I have to look after you. You need me.”

“What I need is more gin.”

He cursed to himself and finished his drink, trying to hide his impatience, or his confusion. Damn everything. Emerald green, luminous white—her eyes and that smile against her tanned skin, her bare, straight neck, warm and alive. Can you believe it, Corso. Even now, with all you have to deal with, you’re thinking about her tanned arms, her fine wrists, her long fingers. He noticed also that her breasts, under her tight-fitting T-shirt, were magnificent. He hadn’t been able to get a good look at them before. He imagined them tanned and heavy un­der the white cotton, imagined flesh of clarity and shadow. Once again he was struck by her height. She was as tall as he was. Maybe taller. “Who are you?”

“The devil,” she said. “The devil in love.”

And she laughed. The book by Gazette was on the sideboard, next to the Memoirs of Saint Helena and some papers. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Then she laid one finger on it and turned to Corso.

“Do you believe in the devil?”

“I’m paid to believe in him. On this job anyway.”

She nodded slowly, as if she knew what he was going to say. She watched Corso with curiosity, her lips parted, waiting for a sign or gesture that only she would understand.

“Do you know why I like this book, Corso?”

“No. Tell me.”

“Because the protagonist is sincere. His love isn’t just a trick to damn a soul. Biondetta is tender and faithful. She admires in Alvaro the same things the devil admires in mankind: his courage, his independence....” Her eyelashes lowered over her light irises for a moment. “His desire for knowledge and his lucidity.”

“You seem very well informed. What do you know of all this?”

“Much more than you imagine.”

“I don’t imagine anything. Everything I know about the devil and his loves and hates comes from literature: Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, then Faust and The Brothers Karamazov.” He made a vague, evasive gesture. “I know Lucifer only secondhand.”

Now she was looking at him mockingly. “And which devil do you prefer? Dante’s?”

“No. Much too terrifying. Too medieval for my taste.”

“Mephistopheles?”

“Not him, either. He’s too pleased with himself. Too much a trickster, like a crooked lawyer... Anyway, I never trust peo­ple who smile a lot.”

“What about the one in The Karamazovs?”

Corso made a face. “Petty. A civil servant with dirty nails.”

He paused. “I suppose the devil I prefer is Milton’s fallen an­gel.” He looked at her with interest. “That’s what you were hoping I would say.”

She smiled enigmatically, her thumbs still in her pockets. He’d never seen anyone wear jeans like that. It needed her long legs, of course. The legs of a young girl hitchhiking at the roadside, her rucksack at her feet and all the light in the world in those damned green eyes.

“How do you see Lucifer?” she asked.

“No idea.” Corso grimaced, indifferent. “Taciturn and silent, I suppose. Boring.” His expression became acid. “On a throne in a deserted hall. At the center of a cold, desolate, monotonous kingdom where nothing ever happens.”