Angel Capelli
A Dot to Dot Story
“...we are all stories and whatever stories we make up about ourselves, others will tell a different one. I needed to tell my own story while I could before someone abruptly finished it for me with the sort of painful end I would rather not think about. A dead end."
Angel, a mafia informant on the run and undergoing therapy while in hiding, is advised to join the dots to write his story as a form of treatment and to avoid going dotty. The story he has to tell is an extraordinary one weaving together many different strands which appear completely unconnected.
The mummy of an Egyptian priest is stolen from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Then the embalmed body of Saint Mark, which has been interred in the great basilica of San Marco in Venice for over a thousand years, vanishes and a priest is murdered in the confessional. The Pope appoints the famous mafia hunter Inspector Panettone to recover the apostle urgently. Are the two events linked?
In Oxford, after an amazing archeological find, Tom, a junior lecturer, is entrusted with setting up a new faculty to solve mysteries from the distant past. His diverse team start work on the location of Atlantis and the lost tomb of Alexander the Great among unsolved puzzles.
Meanwhile Cassie, a member of a clandestine activist group seeking to repatriate ancient treasures to their lands of origin, has her sights set on the Elgin Marbles.
How do all these threads intertwine and are any seeming connections just coincidences?
About Angel
Angel is not just a very private person but in hiding and on the run, so details of his life are difficult to come by. The following information has been scraped together primarily from Inspector Panettone who interviewed him (Chapter 21) and Dr Bacon his therapist (Prologue) with whom he held regular sessions.
Angel is far from angelic. He has spent most of his life involved in the criminal underworld and has always been known to his colleagues as Angelo. It seems he was recruited from the streets of Naples into a criminal gang at the age of around 7, an experience so similar to the circumstances Inspector Panettone describes in his encounter with a street urchin in Rome (Chapter 5) that certain aspects of the two events may have become confused.
His date of birth is unknown but he is believed to be roughly middle aged. No photos of him are publicly available and in any case he is a master of disguise, a talent that was extremely useful as a criminal. Since he became an informant this is what has kept him alive despite numerous attempts to assassinate him (one of which is described in Chapter 13).
Inspector Panettone describes Angel as of medium height, average build with no distinguishing features, an unremarkable face and eyes of a nondescript colour somewhere between blue, brown and green depending on the light. Although Angel frequently uses a wig and often presents himself as Angelo or Angela, the Inspector guesses that his natural hair may be very fine, blond and untidy as Capelli d’Angelo means angels hair, hence the pasta of the same name which looks like a birds nest of thin twigs.
Doctor Bacon says that Angel is very sensitive for someone who has had a lengthy criminal career and is not at all suited to coping with violence either mentally or physically. He admitted to the Doctor that he feints at the sight of blood, which is a bit of a disadvantage in a criminal gang. He is however clever, particularly with figures, and this is why he became the bookkeeper for many fraudulent mafia projects. As a result he acquired extensive knowledge of underworld operations so it is no wonder that his former colleagues have been so keen to rub him out.
It was these traumatic experiences that unhinged Angel’s mind so that he could no longer tell what was real or unreal. As he explained to Dr Bacon, his life seemed to be a whirl of senseless fragments that he could no longer make into a picture.
While in hiding in London he attended therapy sessions with the Doctor and wrote Losing our Marbles? as a form of treatment prescribed by the Doctor to ‘join the dots’ again. The book is only a partial and highly unreliable autobiography and being a character inside his own story has not been easy for Angel. Even in this context he has instinctively taken a low profile. Writing his story has however helped Angel to regain some perspective and he is now looking forward to pursuing his new career as a writer. Whether he will really continue to develop it to help himself get a grip of reality or as yet another form of escapism to add to those at which he has become so adept remains to be seen.
Angel is known to enjoy running, another skill he has developed for self preservation as he has spent a lot of time running away. He is interested in almost everything from cosmology to cooking and particularly anything to do with his beloved Italy which he still secretly visits when he can, incognito of course.
As a result of the events described in his book Angel has become even more interested the quirky corners of history including mysteries such as those explored by Tom’s History Mystery Faculty at Oxford University and also the ancient treasures that Cassie is so keen to see repatriated to their original homelands. Angel writes about these things, his travels and anything else that grabs his attention from time to time (see Blog page and his latest short story in Explore).
He also keeps a list of Unjoined Dots which you can find in the endnotes of Losing our Marbles? This provides inspiration for future writing and possible additions to revised editions of Losing our Marbles? He adds new Unjoined Dots in his Blog. If you are aware of any suitably quirky and amusing details from history of a similar nature, Angel would welcome your contributions to this ongoing project.
Angel’s current whereabouts are unknown but some photos of places where there have been recent alleged sightings can be found in Gallery in Explore. They don’t include any photos of Angel as he is very adept at dodging out of frame.
You will understand from his story that Angel has endured hard times in his life and is still in hiding. Writing is a new solace for him and he needs all the encouragement he can get. If you have already read Losing our Marbles? Angel would wish to thank you, and hopes you enjoyed it. If not but you would like to do so you can find it on Amazon.
Like most new writers Angel is a sensitive soul, and Dr Bacon would say more fragile than most, but honest and constructive feedback would be very welcome by Amazon review or otherwise via the contact form.
Angel hopes to live to a ripe old age and return to some quiet village in Italy where he can drink wine and eat every different kind of pasta while enjoying the view. If however his blogs and writing cease abruptly you will know what has happened. After all no one can run away forever.
Joining Dots
It is difficult to know if Angel’s strange therapist, Dr Bacon, is also a little unhinged. He describes himself as a “Consultant in Psychiatric Engineering” and prescribes Angel a form of treatment based on joining the dots.
The Doctor defines dots as “nodes of consciousness and anchor points through which we organise what we think of as reality … they often crystallise around facts but include every aspect of our intellectual, sensory and spiritual perception” (Prologue). The aim is to put Angel’s mental world back together by connecting the dots in his mind so that he once more has a picture that makes sense of his experiences and how they fit in with everything around him. Angel is to achieve this by starting with a blank sheet of paper and writing his story one dot at a time in a form of dot to dot.
The Doctor explains, using the analogy of the star constellations, that we all see completely differently even when we are looking at exactly the same thing. For example, if you attend a drawing class where everyone tries to draw the same object, the variations are often striking. We see colours differently, even if we aren’t colour blind, and we all focus on different aspects of everything we experience. As the Doctor would describe it, we select different dots and we do this not just in every snapshot of our existence but continuously.
We have been told in the past that in chess everyone starts with the same 32 pieces and 64 squares yet there are more possible move permutations (the Shannon number) than there are atoms in the observable universe, so when it comes to dots the number of pictures we can draw becomes unimaginable. Even more so when, like the observable universe, what we can record and observe is expanding exponentially until we are in danger of being overwhelmed.
Angel’s storytelling tries to stitch together numerous different characters and threads of events that initially appear unconnected. Given his fragile state of mind it’s difficult to know what’s true and what he is making up, which connections are real and which are coincidences. It’s as if he is starting with a lot of pottery fragments and trying to glue them together into one pot even though they come from far flung archeological excavations and many pieces are missing altogether. Angel joins dots from everything that comes into his head, particularly if it reminds him of his native Italy, whether it’s food, films or Italian idioms, but many of them relate to his interest in the quirky corners of history.
Can he come up with a picture or will he “Lose his Marbles“? In fact one of the threads he is weaving into his narrative concerns marbles and echoes that anxiety. But Angel must write a story that is convincing to himself and others if he is to recover his peace of mind, even if he needs to introduce an element of fantasy. Humour is also an important healing antedote to the fears that still pursue him and from which he is still on the run.
Underneath it all Angel, like all of us, is trying to work out the meaning of life and his own significance within it, if any, while still unsure whether he wants to embrace it or run away from it.