Ale used a bomb suitcase to frame Bellbo

Aglie’s bomb-suitcase frame-up turns an apparent favor into a trap: he has Belbo carry a case under a false explanation, then leaves him exposed as the suspected terrorist when the case is reported to contain a timed explosive. The scheme gives Belbo’s enemies leverage over him, implicates him in a danger he did not knowingly create, and directs him toward a meeting in Paris under threat of police exposure.

The Favor and Its Instructions

The arrangement begins the day after Belbo’s encounter with Aglie, from which Belbo had emerged feeling victorious: his astral narrative seemed to have triumphed over the shame and wretchedness of ordinary life. Aglie calls with an ostensibly practical problem. He says he is due to receive a dozen valuable eighteenth-century bound volumes from Paris and must get them to a correspondent in Florence the next day, but another engagement prevents him from carrying them himself. Since Belbo is going to Bologna, Aglie proposes that he take a small suitcase, leave it on the luggage rack when he gets off, and allow the Florentine contact to collect it from the train. The explanation is made plausible by its detail. Aglie has reserved Belbo a seat, number 45 in car 8, as far as Rome, ensuring that nobody will occupy it in Bologna or Florence. He presents the reservation as compensation for the inconvenience, while carefully saying that he did not buy Belbo’s ticket because he did not want to discharge his debt so indelicately. Belbo reads this as the behavior of a gentleman and imagines Aglie will send him rare wine in thanks. Though he remembers having wanted to send Aglie to the bowels of the earth the day before, he feels he can hardly refuse the request. On Wednesday morning Belbo buys his own ticket to Bologna and finds Aglie beside car 8 with the suitcase. It is fairly heavy, though not bulky. The distinction matters: the case is manageable enough to carry without attracting attention, while its contents remain unknown to Belbo. Nothing in his actions suggests that he has inspected it or understands what it will come to represent.

The Train and the Public Story

During the journey Belbo speaks with a bearded passenger. When asked about his reading, Belbo says he works for a publishing firm specializing in books on Arab metaphysics, hoping to frighten his interlocutor. The man appears frightened. After the conductor questions why Belbo has a ticket to Bologna but a reservation to Rome, Belbo says he changed his mind at the last moment. The bearded man remarks on his apparent freedom to make such a decision without counting pennies; Belbo smiles and looks away, thinking that the passengers may now take him for a spendthrift or a bank robber. At Bologna, as Belbo gets ready to leave, the bearded man reminds him not to forget the suitcase. Belbo answers that a friend will collect it in Florence and asks the man to keep an eye on it. The passenger agrees. Belbo then returns to Milan and, that evening, shuts himself in his apartment with canned meat and crackers and watches television. The report about the train comes near the end of the news, almost like a footnote, but it transforms the ordinary errand into a public emergency. The broadcast says that a passenger got off at Bologna and left a suitcase behind, and that a bearded gentleman on the Intercity between Bologna and Florence became suspicious. The passenger’s claim that someone would collect the case seemed to him like the sort of explanation a terrorist might give; the Rome reservation, despite the passenger’s departure in Bologna, deepened his doubts. Faced with the tension in the compartment, the man alerted the chief conductor. The train was stopped in the mountains, passengers waited anxiously along the tracks, and the bomb squad opened the suitcase. It contained a timer and explosive set to go off upon arrival in Florence, powerful enough to kill dozens of people.

Belbo Identified as the Suspect

The police cannot find the bearded passenger, who may have changed cars and got off in Florence to avoid publicity. They appeal for him to contact them. Other passengers, however, remember the man who left the case with striking precision: he wore a blue English jacket without gold buttons and a maroon tie, was taciturn, and seemed eager not to attract notice. Their accounts of his work are confused—variously involving a paper, a publisher, physics, methane, or metempsychosis—but agree that Arabs were involved. As police stations and carabiniere headquarters receive alerts, anonymous calls arrive and investigators detain two Libyan citizens in Bologna. A police artist’s sketch fills the television screen. It does not resemble Belbo, yet Belbo recognizes the danger in the resemblance: the man in the picture is not him, but he matches it. The crucial fact is that the suitcase Aglie gave him had contained books, not the bomb described in the report. Aglie has disappeared from reach; Belbo calls him, but gets no answer. Belbo is afraid to leave his apartment that night and takes a pill to sleep. The next morning he goes out for the newspapers, hoping the story and sketch are not on the front page. The funeral still occupies it, but he suspects the train story is inside. He hurries home with his collar turned up, only then realizing he is still wearing the blazer that matches the witnesses’ account. At least, he notices, he is not wearing the maroon tie. The clothes that had seemed incidental on the journey have become evidence in a case constructed around his identity.

Coercion and the Paris Appointment

While Belbo is still trying to understand what happened, a caller with a strange foreign voice and a slightly Balkan accent presents himself as a disinterested well-wisher. He says Belbo should never have agreed to carry a package without checking its contents and points out how damaging it would be if someone told the police that Belbo was the unidentified passenger in seat 45. The threat depends on the precise details Aglie had arranged: the reserved seat, the journey, and the suitcase left behind all make a damaging story that can be attached to Belbo, regardless of what he knew about the case. The caller offers to prevent that outcome in return for Belbo’s cooperation. He demands to know where the Templars’ map is and argues that Milan has become unsafe because people know the Intercity terrorist boarded there. Belbo is told to go to neutral territory and meet at Librairie Sloane, 3 rue de la Manticore, in Paris. The caller sets the appointment for noon on Wednesday, June 20, and says Belbo will find the same bearded gentleman with whom he had spoken on the train. That man, in turn, will direct him to other associates, with the expectation that Belbo will eventually tell them what he knows in time for the summer solstice. The projected conclusion is presented as gradual and without trauma, but the terms are coercive: Belbo is to travel before the police identify him, submit to the caller’s network, and reveal the map’s location. Aglie’s false errand has thus become both a frame-up and a means of recruitment by threat. The suitcase’s contents are the first deception; the more consequential trap is the way its public story makes Belbo’s innocence difficult to separate from the evidence against him.