His sharp eyes had already detected the book under my jacket. Isaac stared at me questioningly. I took the book out and showed it to him.
“Carax,” he said. “I’d say there are at most ten people in this town who know of him, or who have read this book.”
“Well, one of them is intent on setting fire to it. I can’t think of a better hiding place than this.”
“This is a cemetery, not a safe.”
“Exactly. What this book needs is to be buried where nobody can find it.”
Isaac glanced suspiciously down the alleyway. He opened the door a few inches and beckoned me to slip inside. The dark, unfathomable vestibule smelled of wax and damp. An intermittent drip could be heard in the gloom. Isaac gave me the lamp to hold while he put his hand in his coat and pulled out a ring of keys that would have been the envy of any jailer. When, by some imponderable science, he found the right one, he inserted it into a bolt under a glass case full of relays and cogwheels, like a large music box. With a twist of his wrist, the mechanism clicked and levers and fulcrums slid in an amazing mechanical ballet until the large door was clamped by a circle of steel bars that locked into place in the stone wall.
“The Bank of Spain couldn’t do better,” I remarked, impressed. “It looks like something out of Jules Verne.”
“Kafka,” Isaac corrected, retrieving the oil lamp and starting off toward the depths of the building. “The day you come to realize that the book business is nothing but an empty plate and you decide you want to learn how to rob a bank, or how to set one up, which is much the same thing, come and see me and I’ll teach you a few tricks about bolts.”
I followed him through corridors that I still remembered, flanked with fading frescoes of angels and shadowlike creatures. Isaac held the lamp up high, casting a flickering bubble of red light. He limped slightly, and his frayed flannel coat looked like an undertaker’s. It occurred to me that this man, somewhere between Charon and the librarian at Alexandria, seemed to belong in one of Julián Carax’s novels.
“Do you know anything about Carax?” I asked.
Isaac stopped at the end of a gallery and looked at me with indifference. “Not much. Only what they told me.”
“Who?”
“Someone who knew him well, or thought so at least.”
My heart missed a beat. “When was that?”
“When I still had use for a comb. You must have been in swaddling clothes. And you don’t seem to have come on much, quite frankly. Look at yourself: you’re shaking.”
“It’s my wet clothes, and it’s very cold in here.”
“Is it? Well, next time pray send advance notice of your call, and I’ll turn on the fancy central heating system to welcome you, little rosebud. Come on, follow me. My office is over there. There’s a stove and something for you to wrap yourself in while we dry your clothes. And some Mercurochrome and peroxide wouldn’t go amiss either. You look as if you’ve just been dropped from a police van.”
“Don’t bother, really.”
“I’m not bothering. I’m doing it for me, not for you. Once you’ve passed through this door, you play by my rules. This cemetery admits only books. You might catch pneumonia, and I don’t want to call the morgue. We’ll see about the book later. In thirty-eight years, I have yet to see one that will run away.”
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am—”
“Then don’t. If I’ve let you in, it’s out of respect for your father. Otherwise I would have left you in the street. Now, do follow me. If you behave yourself, I might consider telling you what I know of your friend Julián Carax.”
Out of the corner of my eye, when he thought I couldn’t see him, I noticed that, despite himself, he was smiling mischievously. Isaac clearly seemed to relish the role of sinister watchdog. I also smiled to myself. There was no doubt in my mind about to whom the face on the door knocker belonged.
·10·
ISAAC THREW A COUPLE OF BLANKETS OVER MY SHOULDERS AND offered me a cup of some steaming concoction that smelled of hot chocolate and hotter liquor.
“You were saying about Carax…”
“There’s not much to say. The first person I heard mention Carax was Toni Cabestany, the publisher. I’m talking about twenty years ago, when his firm was still in business. Whenever he returned from one of his scouting trips to London, Paris, or Vienna, Cabestany would drop by and we’d chat for a while. We were both widowers by then, and he would complain that we were now married to the books, I to the old ones and he to his ledgers. We were good friends. On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he’d just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julián Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929. Seems that Carax worked nights as a pianist in some small-time brothel in Pigalle and wrote during the day in a shabby attic in Saint-Germain. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carax had published a couple of novels in France, which had turned out to be total flops. No one gave him the time of day in Paris, and Cabestany had always liked to buy cheap.”
“So did Carax write in Spanish or in French?”
“Who knows? Probably both. His mother was French, a music teacher, I believe, and he’d lived in Paris since he was about nineteen or twenty. Cabestany told me that his manuscripts arrived in Spanish. Whether they were a translation or the original, he didn’t care. His favorite language was money, the rest was neither here nor there. It occurred to Cabestany that perhaps, by a stroke of luck, he might place a few thousand copies in the Spanish market.”
“Did he?”
Isaac frowned as he poured me a bit more of his restorative potion. “I think the one that sold most,The Red House, sold about ninety copies.”