Belbo’s failed attempts to seek help

Belbo’s failed attempts to seek help mark the point at which the institutions and relationships he turns to become part of the trap. He reaches out first to the police inspector De Angelis, then to Signor Garamond, hoping for protection; instead, De Angelis is silenced by threats to his family, while Garamond steers Belbo toward Paris and Count Aglie. A private call overheard after the meeting confirms that Garamond, too, belongs to the hidden order. Belbo’s search for help thus exposes the reach of the network and leaves him more alone than before.

The police door closes

Belbo calls De Angelis after the voice identifying itself as the Tres has challenged him. At police headquarters, staff initially make difficulties, saying that the inspector no longer works there. Belbo insists, and they eventually connect him to an office. De Angelis answers with sarcasm and says he is packing his suitcases, a hint that he is already preparing to leave.

De Angelis refuses to hear Belbo’s explanation. He says he has kept something from Belbo in the past, but that the conversation is being listened to and he wants the listener to hear his refusal. The threat is not abstract: the previous morning, a small charge blew the hood off the car when his wife started it. De Angelis says he was warned that his children could also be harmed. He has gone to his chief, asked for a transfer, and made a public show of calling himself a coward. He is willing to risk his own life, he says, but not those of his wife and children; he expects to go to Sardinia.

The exchange turns Belbo’s urgent appeal into a confrontation with the cost of resistance. De Angelis describes having done his duty, even going beyond it, yet concludes that he cannot ask his family to bear the consequences. When Belbo says he is in trouble, De Angelis answers that he was already in trouble when Belbo previously sought his help and that neither Belbo nor Casaubon helped him then. Now, he says, Belbo has come too late: the police are not a refuge, and he should call De Angelis’s successor. Belbo hangs up, recognizing that those who might have believed him have been prevented from helping.

Garamond’s reassurance

Belbo next turns to Signor Garamond, whose connections among prefects, police chiefs, and senior officials seem to offer another route to assistance. Garamond listens affably, breaking in with polite expressions of surprise. He then casts himself as a fatherly or older-brother figure and frames Belbo’s account as the product of exhaustion: Belbo is overexcited, at the end of his tether, and in need of rest. He acknowledges Belbo’s devotion to the Press but recommends a vacation rather than intervention.

Garamond’s practical advice is to go to Paris. He presents the journey as a way to clear things up and urges Belbo to be frank with Count Aglie, while discouraging him from dwelling on the similarity of names that troubles him. He treats the conflict as an ordinary misunderstanding between gentlemen and the disputed object as an obscure map, paper, message, atlas, or chart. If Aglie needs it for scholarly reasons, Garamond suggests, Belbo should give it to him and shake hands. The appeal to straightforwardness and cultural service makes the advice sound conciliatory, but it directs Belbo toward the very man with whom he is in conflict.

The encounter is marked by a sharp split between Garamond’s soothing manner and the substance of his counsel. He tells Belbo not to worry, says he is always available, and presses the intercom to summon Signora Grazia, then complains that she is never there when needed. The scene gives Belbo no concrete protection; instead, it converts his fear into a private problem to be settled by compliance with Aglie’s request.

The overheard confirmation

As Belbo leaves, Signora Grazia is absent from her office, but the red light on Garamond’s personal line is on. Belbo picks up the receiver and listens. Garamond tells someone that he believes he has convinced Belbo to come to Paris, adding that it is only his duty because they belong to the same spiritual knighthood.

This overheard call overturns the reassuring appearance of the meeting. Garamond was not merely offering a conventional, if misguided, solution: he was helping direct Belbo into the secret network’s reach. Belbo understands that Garamond is part of the secret, but the narration immediately complicates the discovery: it is a secret only Belbo can reveal, and one that does not exist. That contradiction binds the episode to the novel’s central uncertainty. Belbo’s predicament is real, while the supposed secret at its center remains both powerful and empty.

Isolation and the next appeal

The failed calls leave Belbo without a reliable authority to turn to. De Angelis has chosen his family’s safety over continued involvement, and Garamond has used the language of concern to encourage Belbo’s journey to Paris. Even the evidence of Garamond’s allegiance comes from a private line Belbo happens to overhear, not from an institution willing to acknowledge the danger openly.

By evening, Belbo goes to Pilade’s, exchanges a few words with someone, and drinks too much. The next morning he seeks out the only friend he believes he has left, Diotallevi, who is dying. Their final conversation is reported feverishly on Abulafia, as a summary whose words cannot be cleanly divided between the two men. The episode therefore ends not with rescue but with Belbo turning from failed public and professional help toward a last, intimate conversation with a dying friend.