Jacopo Belbo's flight to Paris and apparent capture

Jacopo Belbo's flight to Paris and apparent capture begins with an urgent telephone call to Casaubon and ends with the line abruptly cut off amid signs that someone has reached Belbo. Belbo says he is in danger, believes the Plan is real, and fears that people pursuing him will kill him; his instructions to Casaubon turn the call into both a warning and a last attempt to pass on what he knows. The episode leaves Belbo’s fate unresolved while shifting the Plan from a shared invention toward a threat that seems to control the people who made it.

The Call from Paris

Casaubon is woken by the telephone and initially treats the call as an occasion for joking. Belbo says he is in Paris, a reversal that surprises Casaubon, who thought he was the one supposed to go to the Conservatoire. When Casaubon jokes about Belbo running out of change, Belbo insists that money is not the problem: he is in trouble. He speaks rapidly, apparently trying to convey what has happened before he loses the chance to talk.

Belbo’s account is disjointed but specific. He tells Casaubon that the Plan is real and that its pursuers are after him. He believes they have tricked him into coming to Paris because they think he has the map. They want him at the Conservatoire at midnight on Saturday, Saint John’s Eve. Belbo says he does not want to go and is on the run, but he cannot explain the situation in a way Casaubon can follow. His certainty and his inability to make the danger intelligible arrive together, leaving Casaubon to hear an urgent claim without being able to verify it.

Instructions and an Interrupted Warning

Belbo asks Casaubon to read the floppy disks using Abulafia, where he says he has recorded everything that happened during the past month. He explains that Casaubon had not been around and that, not knowing whom else to tell, he wrote for three days and three nights. The files therefore become the promised account of events that Casaubon has not witnessed, as well as Belbo’s attempt to make his experience legible before the call is lost.

Belbo also directs Casaubon to the office desk drawer, where an envelope contains two keys. He distinguishes them carefully: the large key is for his house in the country and is unnecessary, while the small key opens his Milan apartment, where Casaubon should go and read everything. Belbo proposes that Casaubon decide for himself after reading the material, or that they might speak again. He says he is changing hotels every night and asks Casaubon to wait at his place the following morning, promising to call if he can. These instructions connect the immediate Paris crisis to the records and rooms that hold Belbo’s account elsewhere.

As Belbo begins to mention the password, Casaubon hears noises and his voice moving nearer and farther away, as though someone is wrestling the receiver from him. Casaubon asks what is happening. Belbo manages to say that they have found him and starts to give the word, but a sharp report, a scuffle, and the sound of the receiver being hung up interrupt him. Casaubon concludes that Belbo did not end the call himself. The sequence supplies evidence of an apparent seizure, but it does not establish who took Belbo or what happened to him afterward.

The Plan and the Uncertainty of Belbo’s Fate

The call overturns the earlier status of the Plan. Casaubon knows that he, Belbo, and Diotallevi invented it together, and initially finds Belbo’s claim that it is real absurd. Yet the abrupt ending makes the claim difficult simply to dismiss: Belbo appears to be in immediate trouble, while the people he names remain unclear. His statement that his pursuers believe he has the map ties the danger to the Plan’s supposed evidence, but the call does not confirm whether such a map exists or whether his interpretation is accurate.

Casaubon considers several possible groups, including the Rosicrucians, the Comte de Saint-Germain, the Okhrana, the Knights of the Temple, and the Assassins. The list expresses the breadth of the Plan’s accumulated associations, not a confirmed identification of Belbo’s pursuers. Casaubon also wonders whether Belbo has gone off the deep end. He connects the change in his friend to Belbo’s recent tension, possibly related to Lorenza Pellegrini or to his growing fascination with the Plan. Although Casaubon recognizes that the Plan is the creation of all three men, he sees Belbo as the one who has become absorbed in it beyond the limits of their game.

The scene closes without resolving whether Belbo has been captured, who was present at the other end of the call, or what the password was. Its immediate consequence is practical: Casaubon goes to the office, where Gudrun remarks that she has had to keep the business running alone, finds the envelope and keys, and rushes to Belbo’s apartment. The unfinished warning thus propels him toward the material Belbo left behind, while the gap between their invented conspiracy and Belbo’s apparent danger remains open.