Ardenti’s disappearance

Ardenti’s disappearance is the unresolved aftermath of the colonel’s visit to Garamond Press: a hotel clerk reports finding him apparently dead, but by the time help arrives there is no body. The room has been searched, his whereabouts are unknown, and neither the witnesses nor the physical clues establish whether he was killed, fled, or was ever found dead at all. The episode turns Ardenti’s supposed Templar secret from a dubious publishing pitch into a police investigation whose central fact is the absence of certainty.

The report and the hotel account

The case first reaches Jacopo Belbo by telephone. A caller asks about Ardenti’s visit to Garamond Press the previous afternoon. Belbo initially describes the proposed book as a largely fabricated account of a supposed Templar treasure, then learns from the caller that the colonel may have been murdered. The caller is Inspector De Angelis, who asks Belbo and Casaubon to come with him. Belbo’s abrupt change from discussing an implausible manuscript to answering police questions gives the disappearance its first sharp reversal: what had seemed an eccentric publishing proposal is now connected to a possible crime.

De Angelis reconstructs the hotel events from the desk clerk and an elderly porter. Ardenti had checked in four days earlier. At about ten the previous night, the clerk saw him return with two men described as having foreign accents. Half an hour later, Ardenti asked the porter to bring whiskey, mineral water, and three glasses to room 27. Around one or one-thirty, the porter heard irregular ringing from the room. He went upstairs, received no answer, and entered with his passkey. According to his account, he found the room disturbed and Ardenti lying on the bed with wire around his neck.

The porter and clerk did not remain in the room or immediately bring the police upstairs. They went separately to seek help: the clerk used a street pay phone, while the porter went to a doctor’s house. They were away for about twenty minutes. When the doctor and police arrived, the room no longer contained a body. De Angelis reports that the doctor went home and the police found only the scene and the witnesses’ account. The gap between the porter’s claimed discovery and the police arrival leaves the supposed death without a body or a direct official confirmation.

Conflicting accounts and missing evidence

The witnesses do not settle what happened during the interval. The two visitors could have left between eleven and one, while the hotel’s staff might not have noticed them. The porter had spent time alone in room 27 but, De Angelis points out, stayed only briefly and did not inspect the kitchen or bathroom. The visitors might have remained there, departed before the alarm, or left while the clerk and porter were away. De Angelis considers it possible that they took a body with them, but this remains conjecture rather than an established fact.

Even the porter’s account is uncertain. The clerk says the elderly man sometimes sees things that are not there, and De Angelis recounts an earlier episode in which the porter claimed to see a guest hanging in a room, only for her to return later. The episode casts doubt on the reliability of the current report, but does not prove it false. De Angelis therefore entertains another possibility: Ardenti may have left with the visitors around midnight, and the porter may have imagined the discovery. What the police can establish, as De Angelis puts it, is that the room has been searched and Ardenti is missing.

A slip of paper in the room records two appointments: one with Rakosky at the Hotel Principe e Savoia at two o’clock, and one with Dr. Belbo at Garamond at four. Belbo confirms that Ardenti came to see him. De Angelis also draws attention to the missing briefcase. Casaubon and Belbo differ over whether it was red or brown, but neither can account for it. The disagreement over its color underscores how little even the surviving witnesses can confidently recall; its disappearance, rather than its appearance, becomes the useful clue.

De Angelis’s hypotheses

De Angelis doubts that Ardenti’s purpose was simply to secure a publishing contract. He proposes that the colonel may have possessed something with which to blackmail Rakosky, and that talk of a book could have served as pressure. This is the inspector’s theory, not a proven motive. It links the appointment slip, the meeting with Rakosky, and the missing briefcase, but the evidence does not reveal what the briefcase contained or whether any blackmail attempt occurred.

The inspector offers more than one possible sequence. The visitors may have threatened Ardenti, after which he fled with the briefcase and left the room in disarray; De Angelis finds the suggestion that Ardenti first made the porter believe he was dead difficult to reconcile with the state of the room. Alternatively, the visitors may have killed him and taken both the briefcase and the body. De Angelis immediately notes the problem with that account: it does not explain why they would remove the corpse as well. Each hypothesis connects some clues while leaving others unexplained, and none is presented as the solution.

An unresolved disappearance

Ardenti’s disappearance remains a state of competing possibilities rather than a confirmed death. There is a report of a body, but no body for the police to examine; there are two visitors, but no reliable account of when they left; there is a missing briefcase and a scheduled meeting with Rakosky, but no evidence in this episode that establishes their meaning. The scene preserves a gap between testimony and fact, and De Angelis’s investigation makes that gap explicit instead of closing it.

The uncertainty also changes the status of Ardenti’s earlier story. Belbo had treated the Templar material as an old tale believed by a man he considered deluded. Once the police announce a possible murder, the same material appears in a different light: not as proof of a secret history, but as part of a situation involving unexplained appointments, visitors, and missing property. Ardenti’s claims remain unverified, and his fate remains unknown. The disappearance is consequential precisely because it provides no decisive answer—only a room, a slip of paper, a missing briefcase, and several accounts that cannot be made to agree.