The Club Dumas

You will accept the pact of alliance that I offer you, surren­dering myself to you. And you will promise me the love of women and the flower of maidens, the honor of nuns, the rank, pleasures, and riches of the powerful, princes, and ecclesiastics. I will fornicate every three days and the intoxication will be pleasing to me. Once a year I will pay homage to you in confirmation of this contract signed with my blood. I will tread upon the sacraments of the Church and I will address prayers to you. I will fear neither rope nor sword nor poison. I will pass among the plague-ridden and the lepers without sullying my flesh But above all I will possess the Knowledge for which my first parents renounced paradise. By virtue of this pact you will erase me from the book of life and enter me in the black book of death And beginning now I will live for twenty happy years on man’s earth But then I will go with you to your kingdom and curse God.

There was another note on the back of the card, relating to a paragraph deciphered on another page:

I will recognize your servants, my brothers, by the sign im­pressed on some part of their body, here or there, a scar or your mark....

Corso cursed emphatically under his breath, as if he were mut­tering a prayer. He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.

He got goose bumps. Just like a vulgar fan.

it WAS NIGHT BY the time he left. He paused in the door­way a moment and glanced to the left and right, but saw noth­ing to worry him. The gray BMW had disappeared. A low mist was rising from the river, flowing over the stone parapet and sliding along the damp paving stones. The yellowish glow of the street lamps, illuminating successive stretches of the em­bankment, was reflected on the ground, lighting up the empty bench where the girl had been sitting.

He went to the bar. He searched for her face among the people standing at the bar or sitting at the narrow tables at the back, but couldn’t find her. He sensed that a piece of the jigsaw was out of place, something that had been setting off alarm signals intermittently in his brain ever since her call to warn him of Rochefort’s reappearance. Corso, whose instincts had become a great deal sharper recently, could smell danger in the deserted street, in the damp vapor rising from the river and trailing to the door of the bar where he was standing. He shook his shoulders to rid himself ,of the feeling. He bought a packet of Gauloises and gulped down two gins one after the other. They made his nostrils dilate, and everything fell slowly into place, like a picture coming into focus. The alarms faded in the distance, and echoes from the outside world were now com­fortably softened. Holding a third gin, he went to sit down at an empty table by the slightly misted window. He looked out at the street, the quayside, and the mist sliding over the parapet and swirling up as the wheels of a car cut through it. He sat there for a quarter of an hour, looking for any unusual signs, his canvas bag on the floor by this feet. In it were most of the answers to the mystery posed by Varo Borja. The book collector hadn’t wasted his money.