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By Root 674 0

for coffee. I went, as if he had caught me doing something wrong, which in a sense he had. At the cafe he asked me what I was doing there and why I had tried to approach the girl. This irritated me. We aren’t living in a dictatorship, I said. I can approach anyone I choose. He apologized and explained that, although the Ar-denti investigation had no priority, they had tried to reconstruct the two days he had spent in Milan before his meeting at Garamond and with the mysterious Rakosky. A year after Ardenti’s disappearance, the police had found out, by sheer luck, that someone had seen him leaving the Picatrix offices in the company of the psychic girl, who, incidentally, was of interest to De Angelis because she lived with an individual not unknown to the narcotics squad.

I told him I was there by chance, and I had been struck by the fact that the girl had spoken a phrase about six seals, which I had heard from the colonel. He remarked how strange it was that I could remember so clearly what the colonel said two years ago, yet, at the time, I had spoken only of some vague talk about the treasure of the Templars. I replied that the colonel had indeed said that the treasure was protected by six seals of some kind, but I hadn’t considered this an important detail because all treasures are protected by seals, usually seven, and by gold bugs. He observed that if all treasures were protected by gold bugs, he couldn’t see why I should have been struck ty what the girl had said. I asked him to stop treating me like a suspect, and he laughed and changed his tone. He said he didn’t find it strange that the girl had said what she did, because Ardenti must have talked to her about his fantasies, perhaps trying to use her to establish some astral contact, as they say in those circles. A psychic, he went on, was like a sponge, a photographic plate with an unconscious that must look like an amusement park. The Picatrix bunch probably give her a brainwashing all year round, so it was not unlikely that once in a trance—because the girl was in earnest, wasn’t faking, and there was something wrong with her head-she would see images that had been impressed on her long ago.

But two days later De Angelis dropped in at the office to say that, curiously enough, when he went to see the girl the day after the ceremony, she was gone. The neighbors said nobody had seen her since the afternoon before the evening of the ceremony. His suspicions were aroused, so he entered the apartment and found it torn to pieces: sheets on the floor, pillows in one corner, trampled newspapers, emptied drawers. No sign of her. Or of her boyfriend, or roommate or whatever you wanted to call him.

He told me that if I knew anything more, I’d be wise to talk, because it was strange how the girl had disappeared into thin air, and he could think of only two reasons: either somebody realized that De Angelis had her under surveillance, or it was noticed that one Jacopo Belbo had tried to talk to her. The things she had said in the trance might therefore have concerned something serious, some unfinished business.

They—whoever they were—hadn’t realized she knew so much.

“Now suppose some colleague of mine gets it into his head that you killed her,” De Angelis added with a beautiful smile.

“You can see we have every interest in working together.” I almost lost my temper, and God knows I don’t do that often. I asked him why a person who’s not home is assumed to have been murdered, and he asked if I remembered what happened to the colonel. Then I told him that if she had been killed, or kidnapped, it must have happened that evening, when I was with him. He asked how I could be so sure of that, since we had said good-bye around midnight and he had no way of knowing what had happened after that. I asked him if he was serious, and he said what, hadn’t I ever read a detective story? Didn’t I know that the prime suspect was always the one who didn’t have an alibi as radiant as Hiroshima? He said he would donate his head to an organ bank if I had an alibi for the time between one