Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [243]
102
Leaving this place, we came to a settlement known as Milestre....where it is said that one known as the Old Man of the Mountain dwelled...And he built, over high mountains surrounding a valley, a very thick and high wall, in a circuit of thirty miles, and it was entered by two doors, and they were hidden, cut into the mountain.
—Odorico da Pordenone, De rebus incognitis, Impressus Esauri, 1513, xxi, p. 15
One day, at the end of January, as I was walking along Via Marchese Gualdi, where I had parked my car, I saw Salon coming out of Manutius. “A little chat with my friend Aglie,” he said to me.
Friend? As I seemed to recall from the Piedmont party, Aglie was not fond of him. Was Salon snooping around Manutius, or was Aglie using him for some contact or other?
Salon didn’t give me time to ponder this; he suggested a drink, and we ended up at Pilade’s. I had never seen Salon in this part of town, but he greeted old Pilade as if they had known each other for years. We sat down. He asked me how my history of magic was progressing. So he knew about that, too. I prodded him about the hollow-earth theory and about Sebottendorf, the man Belbo had mentioned.
He laughed. “You people certainly draw your share of madmen. I’m not familiar with this business of the earth being hollow. As for Sebottendorf, now there was a character...He gave Himmler and company some ideas that were suicidal for the German people.”
“What ideas?”
“Oriental fancies. That man, wary of the Jews, ended up worshiping the Arabs and the Turks. Did you know that on Himm-ler’s desk, along with Mein Kampf, there was always the Koran? Sebottendorf, fascinated in his youth by an occult Turkish sect, began studying Islamic gnosis. He said Fiihrer but thought Old Man of the Mountain. When they all got together and founded the SS, they had in mind an organization like the Assassins...Ask yourself why Germany and Turkey, in the First World War, were allies.”
“How do you know these things?”
“I told you, I think, that my poor father worked for the Okh-rana. Well, I remember in those days how the tsarist police were concerned about the Assassins. Rachkovsky got wind of it first...But they gave up that trail, because if the Assassins were involved, then the Jews couldn’t be, and the Jews were the danger. As always. The Jews went back to Palestine and made those others leave their caves. But the whole thing is complicated, confused. Let’s leave it at that.”
He seemed to regret having said so much, and hastily took his leave. Then another thing happened. I’m now sure I didn’t dream it, but that day I thought it was a hallucination: as I watched Salon walk away from the bar, I saw him meet a man at the corner, an Oriental.
In any case, Salon had said enough to start my imagination working again. The Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins were no strangers to me: I had mentioned them in my thesis. The Templars were accused of being in collusion with them. How could we have overlooked this?
So I began exercising my mind again, and my fingertips, going through old card files, and an idea came to me, an idea so spectacular that I couldn’t restrain myself.
The next morning I burst into Belbo’s office. “They got it all wrong. We got it all wrong.”
“Take it easy, Casaubon. What are you talking about? Oh, my God, the Plan.” Then he hesitated. “You probably don’t know. There’s bad news about Diotallevi. He won’t speak. I called the hospital, but they refuse to give me the particulars because I’m not a relative. The man doesn’t have any relatives, so who is there to act on his behalf? I don’t like this reticence. A benign growth, they say, but the therapy wasn’t enough. He should .go back into the hospital for a month or so, and minor surgery may be indicated...In other words, those people aren’t telling me the whole story, and I like this situation