He was crazy, people said. But what if he wasn’t crazy? You follow me?” His forehead was bathed in sweat, and his mustache 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 Signor Garamond. 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.
—Wolfram 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—well, 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—imagine—he 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 Signor 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—not one of the best—in 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—two 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 Ardenti. 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—”
“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—or Colonel Ardenti—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 corner, 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.
