De Angelis Detective

Inspector De Angelis is a police investigator who reopens questions surrounding Colonel Ardenti’s disappearance after noticing a connection between Ardenti and the Picatrix Club. His meeting with Casaubon begins as an incidental encounter in a library, but develops into an exchange about synarchy and the shadowy organization called Tres. De Angelis’s practical, provisional method stands against the researchers’ expanding conspiracy narrative: he follows clues where they lead, while they make almost any clue confirm a preexisting design.

The Library Encounter

Casaubon goes to the library to consult Saint-Yves’s La Mission de I’lnde en Europe, prompted by his recollection that Salon had seemed alarmed by the idea of Agarttha. When the clerk says the book has already been checked out, De Angelis appears behind him and says, “Actually, it is available. I just returned it.” The chance meeting unsettles Casaubon, who wonders whether the inspector has been watching him since his return to Italy. De Angelis recognizes him despite changes in his appearance since the earlier Ardenti inquiry, but the scene does not establish that he had been surveilling him.

De Angelis explains that police cases do not receive continuous attention until they are solved. An old case can remain active for years, then resurface when a clue encountered during unrelated work triggers a new connection. Ardenti’s case has come back into view because officers were watching someone for different reasons and found that person spending time at the Picatrix Club. De Angelis remembers that Ardenti used to go there. The club itself, he says, is populated by eccentric but well-behaved people; what matters to the inquiry is the association that memory brings back into circulation.

Synarchy and the Limits of the Inquiry

Over coffee, De Angelis asks Casaubon for help understanding synarchy. He has encountered conflicting accounts: one presents it as a spiritual hierarchy associated with Saint-Yves, while another describes an international technocratic plot to destabilize governments and provoke political conflict. Casaubon connects the latter account to the Imperialist Multinational State discussed by the Red Brigades. De Angelis confirms that this is the kind of claim he has been trying to assess, and identifies Casaubon as someone whose research into the Templars and related material may help him interpret it.

Casaubon offers a sardonic possibility: perhaps a secret society exists chiefly to spread the rumor that a universal conspiracy exists. De Angelis does not simply dismiss the problem as nonsense. He says that texts written by people he calls “lunatics” may help explain the thinking of those who commit political violence, and that he wants to understand what such writers believe. His question is not proof that the claims are true; it shows why he treats fringe literature as potentially relevant evidence about political motives.

De Angelis also describes a world in which ideological labels no longer reliably predict political behavior. Groups once associated with opposing causes might, in his view, appear in unexpected settings, making the work of classifying them harder than it had been a decade earlier. His remark that everything may be connected is immediately qualified by his uncertainty about the people he is investigating. The exchange places a familiar hermetic idea inside a policeman’s working problem: connections may matter, but resemblance alone does not settle what those connections mean.

The Question of the Tres

Before leaving, De Angelis asks whether Casaubon has found any reference to the Tres in the manuscripts he studies. He cannot say whether it is an organization or whether it exists at all; he has merely heard the name and wonders whether it belongs with the eccentric groups and writings under discussion. The question broadens the inquiry beyond Ardenti and the Picatrix Club, but supplies no answer about the Tres’s identity or reality.

De Angelis tells Casaubon to greet Belbo and stresses that he is not keeping tabs on either man. He presents his interest instead as part of a job he enjoys despite its unpleasantness. His approach remains open-ended: he seeks information, admits what he does not know, and leaves the possibility of a connection unresolved. Casaubon, for his part, says he will keep De Angelis in mind if useful material turns up.

The Protocols Enter the Plan

De Angelis does not appear in the later account of how the researchers construct their history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but that episode sharpens the contrast with his method. In their imagined explanation, the Protocols become the work of the Paulicians, a supposed branch of a larger secret tradition. Belbo and Diotallevi treat the text’s contradictions not as reasons to question the conspiracy but as evidence to be absorbed into it.

The narrative describes the Protocols as twenty-four declarations whose claims combine political opposites: they condemn liberalism while advocating the use of liberal ideas to foster disorder, propose controlled regimes and political upheaval, and present the exploitation of conflict as deliberate strategy. The researchers’ discussion also traces the text’s historical construction through earlier writings. They recount how Jesuit polemicists redirected accusations from a conspiracy associated with secret societies toward Jews, and how the Times identified Maurice Joly’s dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli as a source for the Protocols. Their own added claim—that Joly had copied an earlier document attributed to Sue—extends this chain of supposed transmission rather than breaking it.

The account then assigns a political mechanism to the forgery. In the researchers’ version, Rachkovsky adapts material taken from a pamphlet connected to Elie de Cyon, substitutes Jews for Witte, and circulates the text in a form designed to make a fabricated accusation appear corroborated. Glinka is then cast as an agent who passes the document toward the Russian court. These claims belong to the novel’s constructed conspiracy narrative, not to De Angelis’s findings. Their accumulating certainty shows how readily a story can transform historical details and textual borrowings into evidence for an all-encompassing plot.

Contrast with the Researchers’ Certainty

The difference between De Angelis and Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi is a difference in how they handle uncertainty. De Angelis follows a remembered name from Ardenti to the Picatrix Club, asks for help, and openly concedes that he does not know whether the Tres exists. The researchers, by contrast, repeatedly turn disputed texts, contradictory claims, and political events into links within the Plan. Their later interpretation of the Holocaust pushes that logic to its most appalling conclusion, treating the atrocity as a search for a hidden clue needed to locate the Mystic Pole.

De Angelis’s brief appearance therefore frames an important danger in the novel without resolving the police inquiry. He recognizes that extremist writing can matter because it may illuminate the outlook of real political actors, but he does not equate the existence of such writing with the truth of its allegations. Against the researchers’ appetite for total connection, his questions preserve distinctions between a lead, an interpretation, and proof. The book’s widening conspiracy narrative makes those distinctions increasingly difficult to maintain.