The Club Dumas

She smiled. Irene Adler, 223B Baker Street. The cafe in Madrid, the train, that morning in Sintra... The battle lost, the retreat of the defeated legions: she was very young to remember such things. She smiled like a little girl both mischievous and innocent, and there were traces of fatigue under her eyes. She was sleepy and warm.

Corso swallowed. A part of him went up to her and pulled her T-shirt up over her tanned skin, undid her jeans, and lay her on the bed, among the remains of the book that could summon the forces of darkness. And sank into her warm flesh, settling scores with God and Lucifer, with the inexorable flow of time, with his own ghosts, with life and death. But the rest of him just lit a cigarette and breathed out smoke in silence. She stared at him for a long time, waiting for something, a gesture, a word. Then she said good night and went to the door. But in the doorway, she turned and slowly raised her hand, palm inward, index and middle fingers joined and pointing up­ward. Her smile was both tender and conspiratorial, ingenuous and knowing. Like a lost angel pointing nostalgically at heaven.

baroness frieda ungern had two sweet little dim­ples when she smiled. She looked as if she had smiled con­tinuously for the past seventy years, and it had left a permanently benevolent expression around her eyes and mouth. Corso, a precocious reader, had known since childhood that there are many different types of witch: wicked stepmothers, bad fairies, beautiful, evil queens, and even nasty old witches with warts on their noses. But despite all he’d heard about the septuagenarian baroness, he didn’t know to which category she belonged. She might have been one of those elderly ladies who live, as if cushioned by a dream, outside real life, where no unpleasantness ever intrudes upon their existence, but the depth of her quick, intelligent, suspicious eyes canceled that first im­pression. So did the right sleeve of her cardigan hanging empty, her arm amputated above the elbow. Otherwise she was small and plump and looked like a French teacher at a boarding school for young ladies. In the days when “young ladies” still existed, that is. Or so Corso thought as he looked at her gray hair tied into a bun on the nape of her neck and at her rather masculine shoes worn with white ankle socks.

“Mr. Corso. Pleased to meet you.”

She held out her only hand—small, like the rest of her— with unusual energy and showed her dimples. She had a slight accent, more German than French. A certain Von Ungern, Corso remembered reading somewhere, had become notorious in Manchuria or Mongolia in the early twenties. A warlord of sorts, he had made a last stand against the Red Army at the head of a ragged army of White Russians, Cossacks, Chinese, deserters, and bandits. With armored trains, looting, killing, that sort of thing, concluding with a firing squad at dawn. Maybe he was a relation.

“He was my husband’s great-uncle. His family was Russian and emigrated to France with a fair amount of money before the revolution.” There was neither nostalgia nor pride in her tone. It had all happened in the past, to other people, to another family, she seemed to say. Strangers who disappeared before she even existed. “I was born in Germany. My family lost ev­erything under the Nazis. I was married here in France after the war.” She carefully removed a dead leaf from a plant by the window and smiled slightly. “I never could stand my in-laws’ obsession with the past: their nostalgia for St. Petersburg, the Tsar’s birthday. It was like a wake.”

Corso looked at the desk covered with books, the packed shelves. He calculated that there must have been a thousand volumes in that room alone. The most rare and valuable ones seemed to be there, from modern editions to ancient, leather-bound tomes.

“And what about all this?”

“That’s different. It’s material for research, not for worship. I use it to do my work.”

Times are bad, thought Corso, when witches, or whatever they are, talk about their in-laws and exchange their cauldron for a library, filing cabinets, and a place on the bestseller list.