Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [9]
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Read the floppy disks, use Abulafia. I put everything there these last few days, including all that happened this month. You weren’t around, I didn’t know who to tell it to, I wrote for three days and three nights...Listen, go to the office; in my desk drawer there’s an envelope with two keys in it. The large one you don’t need: it’s the key to my house in the country. But the small one’s for the Milan apartment. Go there and read everything, then decide for yourself, or maybe we’ll talk. My God, I don’t know what to do...”
“All right. But where can I find you?”
“I don’t know. I change hotels here every night. Do it today and wait at my place tomorrow morning. I’ll call if I can. My God, the password—”
I heard noises. Belbo’s voice came closer, moved away, as if someone was wresting the receiver from him.
“Belbo! What’s going on?”
“They found me. The word—”
A sharp report, like a shot. It must have been the receiver falling, slamming against the wall or onto that little shelf they have under telephones. A scuffle. Then the click of the receiver being hung up. Certainly not by Belbo.
I took a quick shower to clear my head. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The Plan real? Absurd. We had invented it ourselves. But who had captured Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana? The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? Anything was possible, if the impossible was true. But Belbo might have gone off the deep end. He had been very tense lately, whether because of Lorenza Pelle-grini or because he was becoming more and more fascinated by his creature...The Plan, actually, was our creature, his, mine, Diotallevi’s, but Belbo was the one who seemed obsessed by it now, beyond the confines of the game. It was useless to speculate further.
I went to the office. Gudrun welcomed me with the acid remark that she had to keep the business going all on her own. I found the envelope, the keys, and rushed to Belbo’s apartment.
The stale, rancid smell of cigarette butts, the ashtrays all brimming. The kitchen sink piled nigh with dirty dishes, the garbage bin full of disemboweled cans. On a shelf in the study, three empty bottles of whiskey, and a little left—two fingers—in a fourth bottle. This was the apartment of a man who had worked nonstop for days without budging, eating only when he had to, working furiously, like an addict.
There were two rooms in all, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under their weight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. A few pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directly opposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed, an allegory I hadn’t noticed last month, when I came up to have a beer before going off on my vacation.
On the table, a photograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny, almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes were unsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctive delicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, not reading the inscription.
There were folders. I looked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishing cost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found the printout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been one of Belbo’s first experiments with the word processor. It was titled “Abu.” I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in the office, Belbo’s infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun’s muttering, Diotallevi’s sarcasm.
Abu had been Belbo’s private reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but it said a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used the machine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the books of others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo