Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [261]
109
Saint-Germain... very polished and witty... said he possessed every kind of secret....He often employed, for his apparitions, that famous magic mirror of his...and through its catoptric effects summoned up the usual, well-known shades. His contact with the other world was unquestioned.
—Le Coulteux de Canteleu, Les sectes et les societes secretes, Paris, Didier, 1863, pp. 170-171
Belbo was devastated. Everything was clear. Aglie believed his story, he wanted the map, he had set a trap for him, and now Belbo was in the man’s power. Either Belbo went to Paris, to reveal what he didn’t know (but he was the only one who knew he didn’t know it, since I had gone off without leaving an address, and Diotallevi was dying), or all the police forces of Italy would be after him.
But was it really possible that Aglie had stooped to such a sordid trick? Belbo should take that old lunatic by the collar and drag him to the police station; that was the only way to get out of this mess.
He hailed a taxi and went to the little house near Piazza Piola. Windows closed; on the gate, a real estate agency’s sign, FOR RENT. This was insane. Aglie was living here just last week; Belbo had telephoned him. He rang the bell of the house next door. “Oh, that gentleman? He moved out yesterday. I have no idea where he’s gone, I knew him only by sight, he was such a reserved person. Always traveling, I suppose.”
The only thing left was to inquire at the agency. They had never heard of Aglie. The house had been rented by a French firm. The rent was paid regularly through a bank. The lease was canceled overnight; the firm forfeited the deposit. All their communications, by letter, had been with a certain M. Ragotgky. That was all they knew.
It was impossible. Rakosky or Ragotgky, the colonel’s mysterious visitor, wanted by De Angelis and by Interpol, and here he was going around renting houses. In our story, Ardenti’s Rakosky was a reincarnation of Rachkovsky of the Okhrana, in other words, the inevitable Saint-Germain. What did he have to do with Aglie?
Belbo went to the office, sneaking upstairs like a thief, and locked himself in his room. He had to try to think things through.
It was enough to drive a man crazy, and Belbo suspected he had finally gone mad. There was no one he could confide in. While he was wiping the sweat from his face, and mechanically—without thinking—leafing through some manuscripts that had come in the day before, at the top of a page he suddenly saw Aglie’s name.
He looked at the title. A little work by some run-of-the-mill Diabolical, The True Story of the Comte de Saint-Germain. He read the page again. Quoting Charcornac’s biography, it said that Claude-Louis de Saint-Germain had gone variously by the names of Monsieur de Surmont, Count Soltikoff, Mr. Welldone, Marchese di Belmar, Rackoczi or Ragozki, and so on, but the real family names were Saint-Martin and Marquis of Aglie, the latter from an ancestral estate in Piedmont.
Good. Belbo could rest easy. Not only was he wanted for terrorism, not only was the Plan true, not only had Aglie disappeared in the space of two days, but, into the bargain, the count was no mythomane but the true and immortal Saint-Germain. And he had never done anything to conceal that fact. But no, the only true thing, in this growing whirlwind of falsehoods, was his name. No, even his name was false. Aglie wasn’t Aglie. But it didn’t matter who he really was, because he was acting, had been acting for years, like a character in the story we were to invent only later.
There was nothing Belbo could do. With the disappearance of Aglie, he couldn’t prove to the police that Aglie had given him the suitcase. And even if the police believed him, it would