The Club Dumas

V. REMEMBER

This is the point at which I enter the stage for the second time. Corso came to me again and he did so, I seem to remember, a few days before leaving for Portugal. As he told me later, by then he already suspected that the Dumas manuscript and Varo Borja's Nine Doors were only the tip of iceberg. To understand it all he first needed to locate the other stories, all knotted together like the tie Enrique Taillefer used to hang himself. It wouldn't be easy, I told him, because in literature there are never any clear boundaries. Everything is dependent on everything else, and one thin is superimposed on top of another. It all ends up as a complicated intertextual game, like a hall of mirrors or those Russian dolls. Establishing a specific fact or the precise source involves risks that only some of my very stupid or very confident colleagues would dare take. It would be like saying that you can see the influence of Quo Vadis, but not Suetonius or Appollonius of Rhodes, on Robert Graves. As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. And When I want to know something, I look it up in books—their memory never fails.

"Count Rochefort is one of the most important secondary characters in The Three Musketeers," I explained to Corso when he came to see me. "He is the cardinal's agent, a friend of Milady's, and the first enemy that d'Artagnan makes. I can pinpoint the exact date: the first Monday of April 1625, in Meung-sur-Loire.... I refer to the fictional Rochefort of course, although a similar character did exist. Gatien de Courtilz described him, in the supposed Memoirs of the real d'Artagnan, a man with the name of Rosnas. But the Rochefort with the scar didn't exist in real life. Dumas took the character from another book, the Mémoires de MLCDR (Monsieur le comte de Rochefort), possibly apocryphal and also attributed to Courtilz. Some say that that book could refer to Henri Louis d'Aloigny, Marquis de Rochefort, born around 1625, but that's stretching things."

I looked out at the lights of the evening traffic in the avenues beyond the window of the café where I meet with my literary friends. A few of them were sitting with us around a table covered with newspapers, cups, and smoking ashtrays—two writers, a painter down on his luck, a woman journalist on the rise, a stage actor, and four or five students, the kind who sit in a corner and don't open their mouths, watching you as if you were God. Corso sat among them, still in his coat. He leaned against the window, drank gin, and occasionally took notes.

"To be sure," I added, "the reader who goes through the sixty-seven chapters of The Three Musketeers waiting for the duel between Rochefort and d'Artagnan is in for a disappointment. Dumas settles the matter in three lines, and is rather underhand about it. Because when we next meet Rochefort in Twenty Years After, he and d'Artagnan have fought three times, and Rochefort bears as many scars as a result. Nevertheless no hatred remains between them. Instead they have the twisted respect for each other that is possible only between two old enemies. Once again fate has decreed that they fight on different sides, but now they are friendly, complicit, two gentlemen who have known each other for twenty years.... Rochefort falls out of favor with Mazarin, breaks out of the Bastille, and helps the Duke of Beaufort escape. He conspires in the Fronde rebellion and dies in the arms of d'Artagnan, who has stabbed him with his sword, failing to recognize him in all the confusion. 'You were my fate,' Rochefort more or less says to the Gascon. 'I recovered from three of your sword wounds, but I will not recover from the fourth.' And he dies. 'I have just killed an old friend,' d'Artagnan later tells Porthos. This is the only epitaph Richelieu's former agent is given."

My words provoked a lively discussion with several factions. The actor hadn't taken his eyes off the woman journalist all afternoon. He was an old heartthrob who'd played Monte Cristo in a television series. Encouraged by the painter and the two writers, he launched into a brilliant account of his recollections of the characters. In this way we moved from Dumas to Zevaco and Paul Feval, and ended by once again confirming Sabatini's indisputable influence on Salgari. I seem to recall that somebody timidly mentioned Jules Verne but was shouted down by all present. Verne's cold, soulless heroes had no place in a discussion of passionate tales of cloak and dagger.

As for the journalist, one of those fashionable young ladies with a column in a leading Sunday newspaper, her literary memory began with Milan Kundera. So she remained in a state of cautious expectation, agreeing with relief whenever a title, anecdote, or character (the Black Swan, Yañez, Nevers's sword wound) stirred some memory of a film glimpsed on TV. Meanwhile, Corso, with a hunter's calm patience, looked steadily at me over his glass of gin, waiting for a chance to return the conversation to the original subject. And he succeeded, making the most of an awkward silence that fell when the journalist said that, anyway, she found these adventure stories rather lightweight, I mean kind of superficial, don't you think?

Corso chewed the end of his pencil:

"And how do you see Rochefort's role in history, Mr. Balkan?" he asked.

They all looked at me, in particular the students, two of them girls. I don't know why, but in certain circles I'm considered a high priest of letters and every time I open my mouth, people expect to hear pearls of wisdom. A review of mine, in the appropriate literary magazine, can make or break a writer who's starting out. Absurd, certainly, but that's life. Think of the last Nobel prizewinner, the author of I, Onan and In Search of Myself and the ultrasuccessful Oui, C'est Moi. It was I who made him a household name fifteen years ago, with a page and a half in Le Monde on April Fools' Day. I'll never forgive myself, but that's how things work.

"At first, Rochefort is the enemy," I said. "He symbolizes the hidden forces, darkness.... He is the agent of the satanic conspiracy surrounding d'Artagnan and his friends, of the cardinal's plot growing in the shadows, threatening their lives...."

I saw one of the students smile, but I couldn't tell if her absorbed, slightly mocking expression was a result of my comments or of private thoughts that had nothing to do with the discussion. I was surprised because, as I've said, students tend to listen to me with the awe of an editor of the Osservatore Romano getting the exclusive rights to one of the Pope's encyclicals. So it made me look at her with interest. Although she'd already caught my eye at the beginning, when she joined us, because of her unsettling green eyes. She was wearing a blue duffel coat and carried a pile of books under her arm. Her chestnut hair was cut short, like a boy's. Now she sat at a slight distance, not quite part of the group. There are always a few young people at our table, literature students that I invite for a coffee. But this girl had never attended before. It was impossible to forget her eyes. In contrast to her tanned face, their color was so light, it was almost transparent. A slender, supple girl, one could tell she spent a lot of time outdoors. Under her jeans her long legs were no doubt also tanned. And I noticed another thing about her: she wore no rings, no watch, no earrings. Her ears weren't pierced.

"Rochefort is also the man glimpsed, never caught," I went on. "A mysterious mask with a scar. He stands for paradox and d'Artagnan's powerlessness. D'Artagnan is always in pursuit but never quite catches up with him. He tries to kill him but only manages to do so by mistake twenty years later. By then Rochefort is not an adversary but a friend."

"Your d'Artagnan's a bit jinxed," said one of my circle, the older of the two writers. He'd sold only five hundred copies of his last novel, but he earned a fortune writing mysteries under the perverse pseudonym of Emilia Forster. I looked at him gratefully, pleased by his opportune remark.

"Absolutely. The love of his life gets poisoned. Despite all his exploits and services to the crown of France, he spends twenty years as an obscure lieutenant in the musketeers. And in the last lines of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, when he is finally awarded the marshal's staff, which has taken him four volumes and four hundred and twenty-five chapters to achieve, he is killed by a Dutch bullet."

"Like the real d'Artagnan," said the actor, who had managed to place his hand on the fashionable woman columnist's thigh.

I took a sip of coffee before nodding. Corso was staring at me intently.

"There are three d'Artagnans," I explained. "Of the first, Charles de Batz Castlemore, we know that he died on the twenty-third of June 1673, from a shot in the throat during the siege of Maastricht, as reported in the Gazette de France at the time. Half his men fell with him. Apart from this posthumous detail, in life he was only slightly more fortunate than his fictional namesake."

"Was he a Gascon too?"

"Yes, from Lupiac. The village still exists, and he is commemorated by a stone plaque there: 'D'Artagnan, whose real name was Charles de Batz, was born here around 1615. He died in the siege of Maastricht in 1673.'"

"It doesn't quite fit historically," said Corso, looking at his notes. "According to Dumas, d'Artagnan was eighteen at the start of the novel, around 1625. At that time the real d'Artagnan would have been only ten years old." He smiled like a clever, skeptical little rabbit. "Too young to handle a sword."

I agreed. "Yes. Dumas altered things so d'Artagnan could take part in the adventure of the diamond tags under Richelieu and Louis XIII. Charles de Batz must have arrived in Paris very young: he was listed among the guards of Monsieur Des Essarts's company in documents on the siege of Arras in 1640, and two years later in the Roussillon campaign. But he never served as a musketeer under Richelieu, because he joined the elite regiment only after Louis XIII's death. His real protector was Cardinal Jules Mazarin. There is indeed a gap of ten or fifteen years between the two d'Artagnans. But following the success of The Three Musketeers Dumas extended the action to cover almost forty years of France's history. In later volumes he adjusted his story to coincide better with real events."

"Which events have been verified? I mean, historical events in which the real d'Artagnan was involved?"

"Quite a few. His name appears in Mazarin's letters and in the correspondence of the Ministry of War. Like the fictional hero, he was the cardinal's agent during the Fronde rebellion, with important responsibilities at the court of Louis XIV. He was even entrusted with the delicate matter of detaining and escorting the finance minister Fouquet. All these events were confirmed in the letters of Madame de Sevigne. He could even have met the painter Velazquez on the Isle of Pheasants when he accompanied Louis XIV on the king's journey to meet his bride-to-be, Maria Theresa of Austria...."

"He was quite a man of the court then. Very different from Dumas's swashbuckling d'Artagnan."

I raised my hand in defense of Dumas's respect for the facts.

"Don't be fooled. Charles de Batz, or d'Artagnan, went on lighting to the end of his life. He served under Turenne in Flanders, and in 1657 was appointed lieutenant in the gray musketeers, which was equivalent to commander. Ten years later he became a captain in the musketeers and fought in Flanders, a post equivalent to cavalry general."

Corso was squinting behind his glasses.

"Excuse me." He leaned across the table toward me, pencil in hand. He'd been writing down a name or date. "In what year did this happen?"

"His promotion to general? 1667. Why did that draw your attention?"

He showed his incisors as he bit his lower lip. But only for an instant. "No reason." As he spoke, his face regained its impassivity. "That same year a certain person was burned at the stake in Rome. A strange coincidence...." Now he was staring at me blankly. "Does the name Aristide Torchia mean anything to you?"

I tried to remember. I had no idea. "Not a thing," I answered. "Does he have anything to do with Dumas?"

He hesitated. "No," he said at last, although he didn't seem very convinced. "I don't think so. But please go on. You were talking about the real d'Artagnan in Flanders."

"He died at Maastricht, as I've said, at the head of his men. A heroic death. The English and the French were besieging the town. They needed to cross a dangerous pass, and d'Artagnan offered to go first out of courtesy to his allies. A musket bullet tore through his jugular."

"He never got to be marshal, then."

"No. Alexandre Dumas deserves sole credit for giving the fictional d'Artagnan what a miserly Louis XIV refused his flesh-and-blood predecessor.... There are a couple of interesting books on the subject. You can take down the titles if you want. One is by Charles Samaran, D'Artagnan, capitaine des mousquetaires du roi, histoire veridique d'un heros de roman, published in 1912. The other one is Le vrai d'Artagnan, written by the Duke of Montesquieu-Fezensac, a direct descendant of the real d'Artagnan. Published in 1963, I think."

None of this information was obviously related to the Dumas manuscript, but Corso noted it down as if his life depended on it. Occasionally he looked up from his notepad and glanced at me inquisitively through his crooked glasses. Or he put his head to one side as if he were no longer listening, absorbed in his own thoughts. At that time, I knew all the facts about "The Anjou Wine," even certain keys to the mystery of which Corso was unaware. But I had no idea of the complex implications that The Nine Doors would have for this story. Despite his logical turn of mind, Corso was already beginning to glimpse sinister links between the facts at his disposal and—how shall I put it—the literary source of those facts. This may all appear rather confused but we must remember that this was how it seemed to Corso at the time. And although I am narrating the story after the resolution of its momentous events, the very nature of the loop—think of Fischer's paintings, or the work of that old trickster, Bach—forces us to return continually to the beginning and limit ourselves to the narrow confines of Corso's knowledge. The rule is to know and keep silent. Even it there foul play, without the rule there is no game.

"OK," said Corso once he'd written down the recommended titles. "That's the first d'Artagnan, the real one. And Dumas's fictional character is the third one. I'm assuming the connection between them is the book by Gatien de Courtilz you showed me the other day, the Memoirs of M. d'Artagnan."

"Correct. We can call him the missing link, the least famous of the three. A Gascon who is an intermediary, a literary character and a real person in one. The very same that Dumas used to create his character ... The writer Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras was a contemporary of d'Artagnan. He recognized the novelistic potential of the character and set to work. A century and a half later, Dumas found out about the book during a trip to Marseilles. His landlord had a brother who ran the municipal library. Apparently the brother showed Dumas the book, edited in Cologne in 1700. Dumas saw that he could make use of the story and asked to borrow the book. He never returned it."

"What do we know about this predecessor of Dumas's, Gatien de Courtilz?"

"Quite a lot. Partly because he had a sizable police file. He was born in 1644 or 1647 and was a musketeer, a bugler in the Royal-Etranger, which was a type of foreign legion of the time, and captain of the cavalry regiment of Beaupre-Choiseul. At the end of the war against Holland, in which d'Artagnan was killed, Courtilz remained in Holland and traded his sword for a pen. He wrote biographies, historical monographs, more or less apocryphal memoirs, shocking tales of gossip and intrigue at the French court. This got him into trouble. The Memoirs of M. d'Artagnan was astonishingly successful: five editions in ten years. But the book displeased Louis XIV. He disliked the irreverent tone used to recount certain details regarding the royal family and its entourage. As a result Courtilz was arrested on his return to France and held in the Bastille at His Majesty's pleasure until shortly before his death."

The actor made the most of my pause to slip in, quite irrelevantly, a quotation from "The Sun Has Set in Flanders" by Marquina. "Our captain," he recited, "gravely wounded led us, sparing no effort though in his final agony. Sirs, what a captain he was indeed that day...." Or something like that. It was a shameless attempt to shine in front of the journalist, whose thigh he now held with a proprietary air. The others, in particular the novelist who wrote under the pseudonym of Emilia Forster, were looking at him with either envy or barely concealed resentment.

After a polite silence, Corso decided to hand control of the situation back to me.

"How much does Dumas's d'Artagnan owe to Courtilz?" he asked.

"A great deal. Although in Twenty Years After and in Bragelonne he used other sources, the basic story of The Three Musketeers is to be found in Courtilz. Dumas applied his genius to it and gave it breadth, but it contained a rough outline of all the elements of the story: d'Artagnan's father granting his blessing, the letter to Treville, the challenge to the musketeers, who incidentally were brothers in the first draft. Milady also appears. And the two d'Artagnans were like two peas in a pod. Courtilz's character was slightly more cynical, more miserly, and less trustworthy. But they're the same."

Corso leaned forward slightly. "Earlier you said that Rochefort stands for the evil plot surrounding d'Artagnan and his friends. But Rochefort is just a henchman."

"Indeed. In the pay of His Eminence Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu..."

"The evil one," said Corso.

"The spirit of evil," commented the actor, determined to butt in.

Impressed by our foray into the subject of serials that afternoon, the students were taking notes or listening open-mouthed. The girl with the green eyes, however, remained impassive, slightly apart, as if she had only dropped in by chance.

"For Dumas," I went on, "at least in the first part of The Musketeers cycle, Richelieu provided the character essential to all romantic adventure and mystery stories: the powerful enemy lurking in the shadows, the embodiment of evil. For the history of France, Richelieu was a great man. But in The Musketeers he is rehabilitated only twenty years later. Shrewd Dumas fitted in with reality without diminishing the novel's interest. He'd found another villain: Mazarin. This correction, even as voiced by d'Artagnan and his companions when they praise the nobility of their former enemy, is morally questionable. For Dumas it was a convenient act of contrition. Nevertheless in the first volume of the cycle, whether plotting Buckingham's murder, Anne of Austria's downfall, or giving carte blanche to the sinister Milady, Cardinal Richelieu is the embodiment of the perfect villain. His Eminence is to d'Artagnan what Prince Gonzaga is to Lagardère, or Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes. A mysterious, demonic presence."

Corso seemed about to interrupt me, which I thought odd. I was getting to know him and typically he wouldn't interrupt until the other person had delivered all his information, until every last detail had been squeezed out.

"You've used the word demonic twice," he said, looking over his notes. "And both times referring to Richelieu. Was the cardinal a devotee of the occult?"

His words had a strange effect. The young girl turned to look curiously at Corso. He was looking at me, and I was watching the girl. He awaited my answer, unaware of this strange triangle.

"Richelieu was keenly interested in many things," I explained. "In addition to turning France into a great power, he had time to collect pictures, carpets, porcelain, and statues. He was also an important book collector. He bound his books in calfskin and red morocco leather—"

"And had weapons of silver and three red angles on his coat of arms." Corso gestured impatiently. All this information was trivial and he didn't need me to tell him about it. "There's a very well-known Richelieu catalogue."

"The catalogue is incomplete, because the collection was broken up. Parts of it are now kept in the national library of France, the Mazarin library, and the Sorbonne, while other books are in private hands. He owned Hebrew and Syrian manuscripts, notable works on mathematics, medicine, theology, law, and history.... And you were right. Scholars were most surprised to find many ancient texts on the occult, from cabbala to black magic."

Corso swallowed without taking his eyes off mine. He seemed tense—a bowstring about to snap.

"Any book in particular?"

I shook my head before I answered. His insistence intrigued me. The girl was listening attentively, but it was apparent that she was no longer directing her attention at me. I said, "My information on Richelieu as a character in a serial doesn't go that far."

"What about Dumas? Was he, too, interested in the occult?"

Here I was emphatic:

"No. Dumas was a bon vivant who did everything out in the open, to the great enjoyment and shock of all those around him. He was also somewhat superstitious. He believed in the evil eye, wore an amulet on his watch chain, and had his fortune told by Madame Desbarolles. But I don't see him practicing black magic in the back room. He wasn't even a Mason, as he confesses in The Century of Louis XV. He had debts, and he was hounded by his publishers and his creditors—he was too busy to waste his time on such things. Perhaps when researching one of his characters once, he studied the subject, but never in much depth. I believe he drew all the Masonic practices described in Joseph Balsam and The Mohicans of Paris directly from Clavel's Picturesque History of Freemasonry."

"What about Adah Menken?"

I looked at Corso with respect. This was an expert's question.

"That was different. Adah-Isaacs Menken, his last lover, was an American actress. During the Exhibition of 1867, while attending a performance of The Pirates of the Savannah, Dumas noticed a pretty young woman on stage who had to grab hold of a galloping horse. The girl embraced the novelist as he left the theater and told him bluntly that she had read all his books and was prepared to go to bed with him immediately. Old Dumas needed a great deal less than that to become infatuated with a woman, so he accepted her tribute. She claimed to have been the wife of a millionaire, a king's mistress, a general's wife.... Actually she was a Portuguese Jew born in America and the mistress of a strange man who was both a pimp and a boxer. Her relationship with Dumas caused a great deal of scandal, because Menken liked to be photographed scantily clad and frequented number 107 Rue Malesherbes, Dumas's last house in Paris. She died from peritonitis after falling from a horse at the age of thirty-one."

"Was she interested in black magic?"

"So they say. She liked ceremonies where she would dress in a tunic, burn incense, and make offerings to the Prince of Darkness.... Sometimes she claimed to be possessed by Satan, in various ways that today we might describe as pornographic. I'm sure old Dumas never believed a word of it, but he must have enjoyed the whole performance. It seems that when Menken was possessed by the devil, she was very hot in bed."

There was laughter around the table. I even allowed myself a slight smile, but the girl and Corso remained serious. She seemed to be thinking, her light-colored eyes intent on Corso while he nodded slowly, though he was now distracted and distant. He was looking out the window at the streets and seemed to be searching in the night, in the silent flow of car lights reflected in his glasses, for the lost word, the key to uniting all these different stories that floated like dead leaves on the dark waters of time.

I NOW MOVE ONCE more into the background, as the near-omniscient narrator of Lucas Corso's adventures. In this way, with the information Corso later confided to me, the tragic events that followed can be put into some sort of order. So we come to the moment when, returning home, he sees that the concierge has just swept the hallway and is about to leave. He passes him as the man is bringing the garbage cans up from the basement.

"They came to fix your TV this afternoon, Mr. Corso."

Corso had read enough books and seen enough films to know what that meant. So he couldn't help laughing, much to the concierge's astonishment.

"I haven't had a television for ages."

The concierge let out a stream of confused apologies but Corso barely paid attention. It was all beginning to seem wonderfully predictable. Since this was a question of books, he had to approach the problem as a lucid, critical reader, not as the hero of a dime novel, which was what somebody was trying to make of him. Not that he had any choice: he was by nature cool and skeptical. He wasn't the kind to break into a sweat and moan, "Oh no!"

"I hope I haven't done anything wrong, Mr. Corso."

"Not at all. The repairman was dark, wasn't he? With a mustache and a scar on his face?"

"Exactly."

"Don't worry. He's a friend of mine. A bit of a joker."

The concierge sighed with relief. "That's a weight off my mind, Mr. Corso."

Corso wasn't worried about The Nine Doors or the Dumas manuscript. When he wasn't carrying them with him in his canvas bag, he left them for safekeeping at Makarova's bar. That was the safest place for any of his things. So he climbed the stairs calmly, trying to picture the coming scene. By now he had become what some refer to as a second-level reader, and he would have been disappointed had he been met by too stereotypical a scene. He was relieved when he opened the door. There were no papers strewn on the floor, no opened drawers, not even armchairs slashed with knives. It was all tidy, just as he'd left it in the early afternoon.

He went to his desk. The boxes of floppy disks were in their place, the papers and documents in their trays just as he remembered them. The man with the scar, Rochefort or whoever the hell he was, was certainly efficient. But there are limits to everything. When he switched on the computer, Corso smiled triumphantly.

DAGMAR PC 555K (SI) ELECTRONIC PLC

LAST USED AT 19:35/THU/3/21

A> ECHO OFF

A>

Used at 19:35 that day, the screen stated. But Corso hadn't touched the computer in the last twenty-four hours. At 19:35 he was with us around the table at the café, while the man with the scar was lying his way into Corso's apartment.

Corso found something else, which he hadn't noticed at first, by the telephone. It hadn't been left there by chance, out of carelessness on the part of the mysterious visitor. In the ashtray, among the butts put out by Corso himself, he found a fresh one that wasn't his. It was a Havana cigar almost completely burnt down, but the band was intact. He held it up by the tip. He couldn't believe it. Then, gradually, as he understood, he laughed, showing his eyeteeth like a malicious, angry wolf.

The brand was Montecristo. Naturally.

FLAVIO LA PONTE HAD had a visitor too. A plumber, in his case.

"It's not funny, damn it," he said by way of a greeting. He waited for Makarova to serve the gin and then emptied the contents of a small cellophane packet onto the counter. The cigar end was identical, and the band was also intact.

"Edmond Dantes strikes again," said Corso.

La Ponte couldn't get into the spirit of the thing. "Well, he smokes expensive cigars, the bastard." His hand was trembling, and he spilled some gin down his curly blond beard. "I found it on my bedside table."

Corso teased him. "You should take things more calmly, Flavio. You've got to be hard." He patted him on the shoulder. "Remember the Nantucket Harpooners' Club."

La Ponte shook his hand, frowning. "I was hard, until I turned eight. Back then I understood the virtue of survival. After that I got a bit softer."

Between gulps of gin Corso quoted Shakespeare. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and so on. But La Ponte wasn't about to be reassured by quotations. At least not by that type.

"I'm not scared, really," he said thoughtfully, looking down. "What worries me is losing things ... like money. Or my incredible sexual powers. Or my life."

These were weighty arguments, and Corso had to admit that there could be uncomfortable developments. La Ponte added that there were other clues: strange clients wanting to purchase the Dumas manuscript at any price, mysterious phone calls in the night...

Corso sat up, interested. "You're getting calls in the middle of the night?"

"Yes, but they don't say anything. There's a moment or two of silence, and then they hang up."

While La Ponte was recounting his misfortunes, Corso felt the canvas bag he had retrieved moments earlier. Makarova had kept it under the counter all day, between boxes of bottles and barrels of beer.

"I don't know what to do," ended La Ponte tragically.

"Why don't you sell the manuscript and have done with it? Things are getting out of hand."

La Ponte shook his head and ordered another gin. A double.

"I promised Enrique Taillefer that the manuscript would go on public sale."

"Taillefer's dead. And anyway, you've never kept a promise in your life."

La Ponte agreed gloomily, as if he didn't want to be reminded. But then he suddenly brightened. A slightly dazed expression showed through his beard. If you tried hard, you could take it for a smile.

"By the way, guess who called."

"Milady."

"Almost. Liana Taillefer."

Corso looked at his friend wearily. Then he picked up his glass and emptied it in one long gulp. "You know what, Flavio?" he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sometimes it seems that I've read this book before."

La Ponte was frowning again.

"She wants 'The Anjou Wine' back," he explained. "Just as it is, without authentification or anything..." He took a drink, then smiled uncertainly at Corso. "Strange, isn't it, this sudden interest?"

"What did you tell her?"

La Ponte raised his eyebrows. "That it wasn't in my hands. That you have the manuscript and I've signed a contract with you."

"That's a lie. We haven't signed anything."

"Of course it's a lie. But this way I put everything on you if things get nasty. And it doesn't mean I can't consider any offers. I'm going to have dinner with the lovely widow one evening. To discuss business. I'm the daring harpooner."

"You're not a harpooner. You're a dirty, lying bastard."

"Yes. England made me, as that pious old goody-goody Graham Greene would have said. At school my nickname was Wasn't Me.... Did I ever tell you how I passed Math?" He raised his eyebrows again, tenderly nostalgic at the memory. "I'm a born liar."

"Well, be careful with Liana Taillefer."

"Why?" La Ponte was admiring himself in the bar mirror. He smiled lewdly. "I've had the hots for that woman ever since I started taking serials over to her husband. She's got a lot of class."

"Yes," admitted Corso, "a lot of middle class."

"What do you have against her?"

"There's something funny going on."

"That's fine by me, if it involves a beautiful blonde."

Corso tapped his finger against the knot of his tie. "Listen, idiot. In mysteries the friend always dies. Don't you see? This is a mystery and you're my friend." He winked at him for emphasis. "So you'll be bumped off."

Obstinately clinging to his dreams of the widow, La Ponte wouldn't be intimidated. "Oh, come on. I've never hit the jackpot before. Anyway I told you where I intend to take the bullet: in the shoulder."

"I'm serious. Taillefer's dead."

"He committed suicide."

"Who knows? More people could die."

"Well, you go and die, you bastard, ruining my fun."

The rest of the evening consisted of variations on the same theme. They left after five or six more drinks and agreed to speak on the phone once Corso got to Portugal. La Ponte, rather unsteady on his feet, left without paying, but he did give Corso Rochefort's cigar butt. "Now you have a pair," he told him.