Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Read Online Free Page B

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¡X"
    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¡X"
    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¡Xtwo fingers¡Xin 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