The Club Duma, or the Shadow of Richeleu
Arturo Perez-Reverte
The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. He hung motionless from a light fixture in the center of the room, and as the photographer moved around him, taking pictures the flashes threw the silhouette onto a succession of paintings, glass cabinets full of porcelain shelves of books, open curtains framing great windows beyond which the rain was falling.
The examining magistrate was a young man. His thinning hair was untidy and still damp, as was the raincoat he wore while he dictated to a clerk who sat on a sofa while he typed, his typewriter on a chair. The tapping punctuated the monotonous voice of the magistrate and the whispered comments of the policeman who were moving about the room.
"... wearing pajamas and a robe. The cord of the robe was the cause of death by hanging. The deceased has his hands bound in front of him with a tie. On his left foot he is still wearing one of his slippers, the other foot is bare...."
The magistrate touched the slippered foot of the dead man, and the body turned slightly, slowly, at the end of the taut silk cord that ran from its neck to the light fixture on the ceiling. The body moved from left to right, then back again, until it came gradually to a stop in its original position, like the needle of a compass reverting to north. As the magistrate moved away, he turned sideways to avoid a uniformed policeman who was searching for fingerprints beneath the corpse. There was a broken vase on the floor and a book open at a page covered with red pencil marks. The book was an old copy of The Vicomte de Bragelonne, a cheap edition bound in cloth. Leaning over the policeman's shoulder, the magistrate glanced at the underlined sentences:
"They have betrayed me," he murmured. "All is known!"
"All is known at last," answered Porthos, who knew nothing.
He made the clerk write this down and ordered that the book be included in the report. Then he went to join a tall man who stood smoking by one of the open windows.
"What do you think?" he asked.
The tall man wore his police badge fastened to a pocket of his leather jacket. Before answering, he took time to finish his cigarette, then threw it over his shoulder and out the window without looking.
"If it's white and in a bottle, it tends to be milk," he answered cryptically, at last, but not so cryptically that the magistrate didn't smile slightly.
Unlike the policeman, he was looking out into the street, where it was still raining hard. Somebody opened a door on the other side of the room, and a gust of air splashed drops of water into his face.
"Shut the door," he ordered without turning around. Then he spoke to the policeman. "Sometimes homicide disguises itself as suicide."
"And vice versa," the other man pointed out calmly.
"What do you think of the hands and tie?"
"Sometimes they're afraid they'll change their minds at the last minute ... If it was homicide, he'd have had them tied behind him."
"It makes no difference," objected the magistrate. "It's a strong, thin cord. Once he lost his footing, he wouldn't have a chance, even with his hands free."
"Anything's possible. The autopsy will tell us more."
The magistrate glanced once more at the corpse. The policeman searching for fingerprints stood up with the book.
"Strange, that business of the page," said the magistrate.
The tall policeman shrugged.
"I don't read much," he said, "but Porthos, wasn't he one of those ... Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan." He was counting with his thumb on the fingers of the same hand. He stopped, looking thoughtful. "Funny. I've always wondered why they were called the three musketeers when there were really four of them."
I. "THE ANJOU WINE"
The reader must be prepared to witness the most sinister scenes.
My name is Boris Balkan and I once translated The Charterhouse of Parma. Apart from that, I've edited a few books on the nineteenth-century popular novel, my reviews and articles appear in supplements and journals throughout Europe, and I organize summer-school courses on contemporary writers. Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid. Particularly these days, when suicide disguises itself as homicide, novels are written by Roger Ackroyd's doctor, and far too many people insist on publishing two hundred pages on the fascinating emotions they experience when they look in the mirror.
But let's stick to the story.
I first met Lucas Corso when he came to see me; he was carrying "The Anjou Wine" under his arm. Corso was a mercenary of the book world, hunting down books for other people. That meant talking fast and getting his hands dirty. He needed good reflexes, patience, and a lot of luck—and a prodigious memory to recall the exact dusty corner of an old man's shop where a book now worth a fortune lay forgotten. His clientele was small and select: a couple of dozen book dealers in Milan, Paris, London, Barcelona, and Lausanne, the kind that sell through catalogues, make only safe investments, and never handle more than fifty or so titles at any one time. High-class dealers in early printed books, for whom thousands of dollars depend on whether something is parchment or vellum or three centimeters wider in the margin. Jackals on the scent of the Gutenberg Bible, antique-fair sharks, auction-room leeches, they would sell their grandmothers for a first edition. But they receive their clients in rooms with leather sofas, views of the Duomo or Lake Constance and they never get their hands—or their consciences—dirty. That's what like Corso for.
He took his canvas bag off his shoulder and put it on the floor by his scuffed oxfords. He stared at the framed portrait of Rafael Sabatini that stands on my desk next to the fountain pen I use for correcting articles and proofs. I was pleased, because most visitors paid Sabatini little attention, taking him for an aged relative. I waited for Corso's reaction. He was half smiling as he sat down—a youthful expression, like that of a cartoon rabbit in a dead-end street. The kind of look that wins over the audience straightaway. In time I found out he could also smile like a cruel hungry wolf and that he chose his smiles to suit the circumstances. But that was much later. Now he seemed trustworthy, so I decided to risk a password.
"He was born with the gift of laughter," I quoted, pointing at the portrait. "... and with a feeling that the world was mad..."
Corso nodded slowly and deliberately. I felt a friendly complicity with him, which, in spite of all that happened later, I still feel. From a hidden packet he brought out an unfiltered cigarette that was as crumpled as his old overcoat and corduroy trousers. He turned it over in his fingers, watching me through steel-rimmed glasses set crookedly on his nose under an untidy fringe of slightly graying hair. As if holding a hidden gun, he kept his other hand in one of his pockets, a pocket huge and deformed by books, catalogues, papers, and, as I also found out later, a hip flask full of Bols gin.
"... and this was his entire inheritance." He completed the quotation effortlessly, then settled himself in the armchair and smiled again. "But to be honest, I prefer Captain Blood."
With a stern expression I lifted my fountain pen. "You're mistaken. Scaramouche is to Sabatini what The Three Musketeers is to Dumas." I bowed briefly to the portrait. "'He was born with the gift of laughter....' In the entire history of the adventure serial no two opening lines can compare."