Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (18 page)

But the colonel wasn't
from Piedmont, and he seemed flattered by Belbo's
reaction.

"Yes indeed. Such is the
plan, the ordonation, in its marvel-ous simplicity and coherence.
And there's something else. If you take a map of Europe and Asia
and trace the development of the plan beginning with the castle in
the north and moving from there to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to
Agarttha, from Agarttha to Chartres, from Chartres to the shores of
the Mediterranean, and from there to Stonehenge, you will find that
you have drawn a rune that looks more or less like
this."

[...]

"And?" Belbo
asked.

"And the same rune,
ideally, would connect the main centers of Templar esotericism:
Amiens, Troyes¡XSaint Bernard's domain at the edge of the Foret
d'Orient¡XReims, Chartres, Rennes-le-Chateau, and
Mont-Saint-Michel, a place of ancient druidic worship. The rune
also recalls the constellation of the Virgin."

"I dabble in astronomy,"
Diotallevi said shyly. "The Virgin has a different shape, and I
believe it contains eleven stars..."

The colonel smiled
indulgently. "Gentlemen, gentlemen, you know as well as I do that
everything depends on how you draw the lines. You can make a wain
or a bear, whatever you like, and it's hard to decide whether a
given star is part of a given constellation or not. Take another
look at the Virgin, make Spica the lowermost point corresponding to
the Provengal coast, use only five stars, and you'll see a striking
resemblance between the two outlines."

"You just have to decide
which stars to omit," Belbo said.

"Precisely," the colonel
agreed.

"Listen," Belbo said,
"how can you rule out the possibility that the meetings did take
place as scheduled and that the knights are now hard at
work?"

"Because I perceive no
symptoms, and allow me to add, ¡¥unfortunately.' No, the plan was
definitely interrupted. And perhaps those who were to carry it to
its conclusion no longer exist.

The groups of the
thirty-six may have been broken up by some worldwide catastrophe.
But some other group of men with spirit, men with the right
information, could perhaps pick up the thread of the plot. Whatever
it is, that something is still there. I'm looking for the right
men. That's why I want to publish the book: to encourage reactions.
And at the same time, I'm trying to make contact with people who
can help me look for the answer in the labyrinth of traditional
learning. Just today I managed to meet the greatest expert on the
subject. But he, alas, luminary that he is, couldn't tell me
anything, though he expressed great interest in my story and
promised to write a preface..."

"Excuse me," Belbo
asked, "but wasn't it unwise to confide your secret to this
gentleman? You told us yourself about Ingolf's
misstep..."

"Please," the colonel
replied. "Ingolf was a bungler. The person I'm in contact with is a
scholar above suspicion, a man who doesn't venture hasty
conclusions. Today, for instance, he asked me to wait a little
longer before showing my work to a publisher, until I had resolved
all the controversial points. I didn't want to antagonize him, so I
didn't tell him I was coming here. But I'm sure you can understand
how impatient I am, having come this far in my task. The
gentleman...oh, to hell with discretion! I don't want you to think
I'm bragging idly. He is Rakosky."

He paused for our
reaction.

Belbo disappointed him.
"Who?"

"Rakosky. The Rakosky!
The authority on traditional studies, the former editor of Les
Cahiers du Mysterel"

"Oh, that Rakosky,"
Belbo said. "Yes, yes, of course..."

"Before writing the
final version of my book, I'll wait to hear this gentleman's
advice. But I wanted to move as quickly as possible, and if I could
come to an agreement with your firm in the meantime...As I said, I
am eager to stir up reactions, to collect new information...There
are people who surely know but won't speak...Around 1944,
gentlemen, though he knew the war was lost, Hitler began talking
about a secret weapon that would allow him to turn the situation
around. He was crazy, people said. But what if he wasn't crazy? You
follow me?" His forehead was bathed in sweat, and his moustache
bristled like a feline's whiskers. "In any event," he said, "I'm
casting the bait. We'll see if anyone bites."

From what I knew and
thought of Belbo then, I expected him to show the colonel out with
some polite words. But he didn't. "Listen, Colonel," he said, "this
is enormously interesting, regardless of whether you sign a
contract with us or with someone else. Do you think you could spare
another ten minutes or so?" He turned to me. "It's late, Casaubon,
and I've kept you too long already. Can we meet
tomorrow?"

I was being dismissed.
Diotallevi took my arm and said he was leaving, too. We said
good-bye. The colonel shook Diotallevi's hand warmly and gave me a
nod accompanied by a chilly smile.

As we were going down
the stairs, Diotallevi said to me: "You're probably wondering why
Belbo asked you to leave. Don't think he was being rude. He's going
to make the colonel an offer. It's a delicate matter. Delicate, by
order of Signer Gar-amond. Our presence would be an
embarrassment."

As I learned later,
Belbo meant to cast the colonel into the maw of
Manutius.

I dragged Diotallevi to
Pilade's, where I had a Campari and he a root beer. Root beer, he
said, had a monkish, archaic taste, almost Templar.

I asked him what he
thought of the colonel.

"All the world's
follies,"he replied, "turn up in publishing houses sooner or later.
But the world's follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of
the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility." Then
he excused himself; he had to go. "This evening, a feast awaits
me," he said.

"A party?"

He seemed dismayed by my
frivolity. "The Zohar," he explained. "Lekh Lekha. Passages still
completely misunderstood."

The Graal...is a weight
so heavy that creatures in the bondage of sin are unable to move it
from its place.

¡XWolfram von
Eschenbach, Parzival, IX, 477

I hadn't taken to the
colonel, yet he had piqued my interest. You can be fascinated even
by a tree frog if you watch it long enough. I was savoring the
first drops of the poison that would carry us all to
perdition.

I went back to see Belbo
the following afternoon, and we talked a little about our visitor.
Belbo said the man had seemed a mythomaniac to him. "Did you notice
how he quoted that Rakosky, or Rostropovich, as if the man were
Kant?"

"But these are typical
old tales," I said. "Ingolf was a lunatic who believed them, and
the colonel is a lunatic who believes Ingolf."

"Maybe he believed him
yesterday and today he believes something else. Before he left, I
arranged an appointment for him with¡Xwell, with another publisher,
a firm that's not choosy and brings out books financed by the
authors themselves. He seemed enthusiastic. But I just learned that
he didn't show up. And¡Ximagine¡Xhe even left the photocopy of that
message here. Look. He leaves the secret of the Templars around as
if it were of no importance. That's how these characters
are."

At this moment the phone
rang. Belbo answered: "Good morning, Garamond Press, Belbo
speaking. What can I do for you?...Yes, he was here yesterday
afternoon, offering me a book...Sorry, that's rather confidential.
If you could tell me..."

He listened for a few
seconds, then, suddenly pale, looked at me and said: "The colonel's
been murdered, or something of the sort." He spoke into the phone
again: "Excuse me. I was talking to Signer Casaubon, a consultant
of mine who was also present at yesterday's conversation...Well,
Colonel Ardenti came to talk to us about a project of his, a story
I consider largely fabrication, about a supposed treasure of the
Templars. They were medieval knights..."

Instinctively, he put
his hand around the mouthpiece as if to talk privately, then took
his hand away when he saw I was watching. He spoke with some
hesitation: "No, Inspector De Angelis, the colonel discussed a book
he wanted to write, but only in vague terms...What, both of us?
Now? All right, give me the address."

He hung up and was
silent for a while, drumming his fingers on the desk. "Sorry,
Casaubon," he said. "I'm afraid I've dragged you into this. I
didn't have time to think. That was a police inspector named De
Angelis. It seems the colonel was staying in an apartment hotel,
and somebody claims to have found him there last night,
dead..."

"Claims? The inspector
doesn't know if it's true or not?"

"It sounds strange, but
apparently he doesn't. They found my name and yesterday's
appointment in a notebook. I believe we're the only clue. What can
I say? Let's go."

We called a taxi. During
the ride Belbo gripped my arm. "Listen, Casaubon, this may be just
a coincidence. Maybe my mind is warped. But where I come from
there's a saying: ¡¥Whatever you do, don't name names.' When I was
a boy, I used to

go see this Nativity
play performed in dialect. A pious farce, with shepherds who didn't
know whether they were in Bethlehem or on the banks of the Tanaro,
farther up the Po valley. The Magi arrive and ask a shepherd's boy
what his master's name is. The boy answers: Gelindo. When Gelindo
finds out, he beats the daylights out of the boy. ¡¥Never give away
a man's name,' he says. Anyway, if it's all right with you, the
colonel never mentioned Ingolf or the Provins message."

"We don't want to meet
Ingolf's mysterious end," I said, trying to smile.

"As I said,- it's all
nonsense. But there are some things it's better to keep out
of."

I promised I would go
along with him on this, but I was nervous. After all, I was a
student who participated in demonstrations. The police made me
uneasy. We arrived at the hotel¡X not one of the best¡Xin an
outlying neighborhood. They sent us right up to what they called
Colonel Ardenti's apartment. Police on the stairs. They let us into
number 27¡Xtwo plus seven is nine, I thought. A bedroom, vestibule
with a little table, closet-kitchen, bathroom with shower, no
curtain. Through the half-open door I couldn't see if there was a
bidet, though in a place like this it was probably the only
convenience the guests demanded. Drab furnishings, not many
personal effects, but what there was, in great disorder. Someone
had hastily gone through the closets and suitcases. Maybe the
police; there were about a dozen of them, including
plainclothesmen.

A fairly young man with
fairly long hair came over to us. "I'm De Angelis. Dr. Belbo? Dr.
Casaubon?"

"I'm not a doctor yet.
Still working toward my degree."

"Good for you. Keep at
it. Without a degree you won't be able to take the police exams,
and you don't know what you're missing." He seemed irritated.
"Excuse me, but let's get the preliminaries out of the way. This is
the passport that belonged to the man who rented this room. He
registered as Colonel Ar-denti. Recognize him?"

"That's Ardenti," Belbo
said. "But can you tell us what's going on here? From what you said
on the phone, I didn't quite understand if he's dead
or¡X"

"I'd be delighted if you
could tell me that," De Angelis said with a frown. "But all right,
you gentlemen are probably entitled to know a bit more. Signor
Ardenti¡Xor Colonel Ardenti¡X checked in four days ago. As you may
have noticed, this place isn't the Grand. The one desk clerk goes
to bed at eleven, because the guests have a key to the front door.
There are a couple of maids who come in every morning to do the
rooms, and an old alcoholic who acts as porter and takes liquor up
to the rooms if the customers ring. Not only alcoholic, but
arteriosclerotic, too. It was hell getting anything out of him. The
desk clerk says the old man sees spooks and sometimes scares the
guests. Last night the clerk saw Ardenti come in around ten and go
up to his room with two men. In this place they don't bat an eye if
somebody takes a whole troop of transvestites upstairs. The men
looked normal, though according to the clerk they had foreign
accents. At ten-thirty Ardenti called the old alcoholic and asked
him to bring up a bottle of whiskey, mineral water, and three
glasses. At about one or one-thirty the old man heard someone
ringing erratically from room 27. Judging by the way he looked this
morning, though, he must have put away quite a few glasses by then,
rotgut for sure. Anyway, the old man came up and knocked. No
answer. He opened the door with his passkey. Found everything all
messed up the way it is now. The colonel was lying on the bed with
a length of wire wound tight around his neck, his eyes staring. The
old man ran downstairs, woke the desk clerk, but neither of them
felt like coming back up. They tried to use the phone, but the line
seemed to be dead. It was working perfectly this morning, but we'll
take their word for it. The clerk ran out to call the police from
the pay phone on the comer, while the old man hobbled across the
square to a doctor's house. To make a long story short, they were
gone for twenty minutes. When they got back, they waited
downstairs, still frightened. Meanwhile, the doctor got dressed and
arrived almost at the same time as the squad car. They went up to
twenty-seven, and there was no one on the bed."

"What do you mean, no
one?" Belbo asked.

"No corpse. The doctor
went home, and the police found only what you see here. They
questioned the old alcoholic and the clerk, and got the story I
just told you. What of the two gentlemen who came in with Ardenti
at ten o'clock? They could have left anytime between eleven and
one, and nobody would have noticed. Were they still in the room
when the old man came in? Who knows? He stayed only a second,
didn't look into the kitchen or the bathroom. Could they have left
while the clerk and the alcoholic were out calling for help? Did
they take the body with them? Not impossible. There's an outside
staircase to the courtyard, and from the courtyard they could just
walk out the front door, which opens into a side street.

"More important, was
there really a body? Or did the colonel go out with the two men¡Xat
midnight, say¡Xand the old alcoholic dreamed the whole thing? The
clerk says it wouldn't be the first time the old man saw things
that weren't there. A few years ago he saw a naked female guest
hanged in her room, but half an hour later the woman came in, fresh
as a daisy, and on the old man's cot they found one of those S-M
magazines. Who knows? Maybe he was peeping through the keyhole and
saw a curtain stirring in the shadows. All we know for sure is that
this room has been searched and Ardenti is missing.

"But I've already talked
too much. Now it's your turn, Dr. Belbo. The only thing we found
was a slip of paper on the floor by that little table, ¡¥2 P.M.
Rakosky, Hotel Principe e Savoia; 4 P.M. Garamond, Dr. Belbo.' You
say he did come to see you. Tell me what happened."