“But Ardenti disappeared. I hope the others don’t.”
“They haven’t yet, though I almost wish they would. However, satisfy my curiosity, Inspector. I imagine in your job people disappear, or worse, every day. Do you devote so much time to all of them?”
He looked at me with amusement. “What makes you think I’m still devoting time to Colonel Ardenti?”
All right, he was gambling, had raised the ante, and it was up to me now to call his bluff if I had the courage, make him show his cards. What was there to lose? “Come, Inspector,” I said, “you know everything about Garamond and Manutius, and you were looking for a book on Agarttha….”
“You mean Ardenti spoke to you about Agarttha?”
Touché again. Yes, Ardenti had spoken to us about Agarttha, too, as far as I could remember. But I parried: “No, only about the Templars.”
“I see,” he said. Then he added: “You mustn’t think we follow a case until it’s solved. That only happens on television. Being a cop is like being a dentist: a patient comes in, you give him a little of the old drill, prescribe something, he comes back in two weeks, and in the meantime you deal with a hundred other patients. A case like the colonel’s can remain in the active file maybe for ten years, and then, while you’re in the middle of a different case, taking some confession, there’s a hint, a clue, and, wham!, a short circuit in the brain, you get an idea—or else you don’t, and that’s it.”
“And what did you find recently that brought on a short circuit?”
“An indiscreet question, don’t you think? But there are no mysteries, believe me. The colonel came up again by chance. We were keeping an eye on a character, for quite different reasons, and found he was spending time at the Picatrix Club. You’ve heard of it?…”
“I know the magazine, not the club. What goes on there?”
“Nothing, nothing at all. People a bit loony, maybe, but well behaved. Then I remembered that Ardenti used to go there—a cop’s talent consists entirely of remembering things, a name, a face, even after ten years have gone by. And so I began wondering what was happening at Garamond. That’s all.”
“What does the Picatrix Club have to do with your political squad?”
“Perhaps it’s the impertinence of a clear conscience, but you seem tremendously curious.”
“You’re the one who invited me for coffee.”
“True, and both of us are off duty. See here: if you look at the world in a certain way, everything is connected to everything else.” A nice hermetic philosopheme, I thought. He immediately added: “I’m not saying that those people are connected with politics, but … There was a time when we went looking for the Red Brigades in squats and the Black Brigades in martial arts clubs; nowadays the opposite could be true. We live in a strange world. My job, I assure you, was easier ten years ago. Today, even among ideologies, there’s no consistency. There are times when I think of switching to narcotics. There, at least you can rely on a heroin pusher to push heroin.”
There was a pause—he was hesitating, I think. Then, from his pocket, he produced a notebook the size of a missal. “Look, Casaubon, you see some strange people as part of your job. You go to the library and look up even stranger books. Help me. What do you know about synarchy?”
“Now you’re embarrassing me. Almost nothing. I heard it mentioned in connection with Saint-Yves; that’s all.”
“What are they saying about it, around?”
“If they’re saying anything, I haven’t heard. To be frank, it sounds like fascism to me.”
“Actually, many of its theses were picked up by Action Française. If that were the whole story, I’d be okay. I find a group that talks about synarchy and I can give it a political color. But in my reading, I’ve learned that in 1929 a certain Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded a group called Polaris, which was inspired by the myth of the King of the World. They proposed a synarchic project: social service opposed to capitalist profit, the elimination of the class struggle through cooperatives…. It sounds like a kind of Fabian socialism, a libertarian and communitarian movement.
Note that both Polaris and the Irish Fabians were accused of being involved in a synarchic plot led by the Jews. And who accused them? The Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes, which talks about a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot. Many of its contributors belonged to a secret right-wing organization called La Sapinière. And they say that all these revolutionary groups are only the front for a diabolical plot hatched by an occultist cénacle. Now you’ll say: All right, Saint-Yves ended up inspiring reformist groups, but these days the right lumps everything together and sees it all as a demo-pluto-social-Judaic conspiracy. Mussolini did the same thing.
But why accuse them of being controlled by an occultist cénacle? According to the little I know—take Picatrix, for example—those occultism people couldn’t care less about the workers’ movement.”
“So it seems also to me, O Socrates. So?”
“Thanks for the Socrates. But now we’re coming to the good part. The more I read on the subject, the more I get confused. In the forties various self-styled synarchic groups sprang up; they talked about a new European order led by a government of wise men, above party lines. And where did these groups meet? In Vichy collaborationist circles. Then, you say, we got it wrong; synarchy is right-wing. But hold on! Having read this far, I begin to see that there is one theme that finds them all in agreement: synarchy exists and secretly rules the world. But here comes the ‘but’…”
“But?”
“But on January 24, 1937, Dmitri Navachine, Mason and Martinist (I don’t know what Martinist means, but I think it’s one of those sects), economic adviser of the Front Populaire, after having been director of a Moscow bank, was assassinated by the Organisation secrète d’action révolutionnaire et nationale, better known as La Cagoule, financed by Mussolini. It was said then that La Cagoule was guided by a secret synarchy and that Navachine was killed because he had discovered its mysteries.
A document originating from left-wing circles during the Occupation denounced a synarchic Pact of the Empire, which was responsible for the French defeat, a pact that was a manifestation of Portuguese-style fascism. But then it turned out that the pact was drawn up by Du Mas and Canudo and contained ideas they had published and publicized everywhere. Nothing secret about it. But these ideas were revealed as secret, extremely secret, in 1946 by one Husson, who denounced a revolutionary synarchic pact of the left, as he wrote in his Synarchie, panorama de 25 années d’activité occulte, which he signed … wait, let me find it … Geoffroy de Charnay.”
“Fine!” I said. “Charnay was a companion of Molay, the grand master of the Templars. They died together at the stake. Here we have a neo-Templar attacking synarchy from the right. But synarchy is born at Agarttha, which is the refuge of the Templars!”
“What did I tell you? You see, you’ve given me an additional clue. Unfortunately, it only increases the confusion. So, on the right, a synarchic pact of the left is denounced as socialist and secret, though it’s not really secret; it’s the same synarchic pact, as you saw, that was denounced by the left. And now we come to new revelations: synarchy is a Jesuit plot to undermine the Third Republic.
A thesis expounded by Roger Mennevée, leftist. To allow me to sleep nights, my reading then tells me that in 1943 in certain Vichy military circles—Pétainist, yes, but anti-German—documents circulated that prove synarchy was a Nazi plot: Hitler was a Rosicrucian influenced by the Masons, who now have moved from hatching a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to making an imperial German one.”
“So everything is settled.”
“If only that were all. Yet another revelation: Synarchy is a plot of the international technocrats. This was asserted in 1960 by one Villemarest, Le 14e complot du 13 mai. The techno-synarchic plot wants to destabilize governments and, to do it, provokes wars, backs coups d’etat, foments schisms in political parties, promotes internecine hatreds…. Do you recognize these synarchists?”
“My God, it’s the IMS, the Imperalist Multinational State—what the Red Brigades were talking about a few years ago!”
“The answer is correct. And now what does Inspector De Angelis do if he finds a reference to synarchy somewhere? He asks the advice of Dr. Casaubon, the Templar expert.”
“My answer: There exists a secret society with branches throughout the world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists.”
“You’re joking, but I—”
“I’m not joking. Come and read the manuscripts that turn up at Manutius. But if you want a more down-to-earth explanation, it’s like the story of the man with a bad stammer who complains that the radio station wouldn’t hire him as an announcer because he didn’t carry a party card. We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
“And if, on a train, I find a bomb wrapped in a flier that talks about synarchy, is it enough for me to say that
