Inferno (51 page)

“No, grazie,”
Sienna replied, instructing him in rapid-fire Italian to get them to St. Mark’s Square as fast as he possibly could.

“Ma certo!”
Maurizio winked again. “My boat, she is the fastest in all of Venezia …”

As Langdon and the others settled into plush seats in the open-air stern, Maurizio reversed the boat’s Volvo Penta motor, expertly backing away from the bank. Then he spun the wheel to the right and gunned
the engines forward, maneuvering his large craft through a throng of gondolas, leaving a number of stripe-shirted
gondolieri
shaking their fists as their sleek black crafts bobbed up and down in his wake.

“Scusate!”
Maurizio called apologetically. “VIPs!”

Within seconds, Maurizio had pulled away from the congestion at Santa Lucia Station and was skimming eastward along the Grand Canal. As they accelerated beneath the graceful expanse of the Ponte degli Scalzi, Langdon smelled the distinctively sweet aroma of the local delicacy
seppie al nero
—squid in its own ink—which was wafting out of the canopied restaurants along the bank nearby. As they rounded a bend in the canal, the massive, domed Church of San Geremia came into view.

“Saint Lucia,” Langdon whispered, reading the saint’s name from the inscription on the side of the church. “The bones of the blind.”

“I’m sorry?” Sienna glanced over, looking hopeful that Langdon might have figured out something more about the mysterious poem.

“Nothing,” Langdon said. “Strange thought. Probably nothing.” He pointed to the church. “See the inscription? Saint Lucia is buried there. I sometimes lecture on hagiographic art—art depicting Christian saints—and it just occurred to me that Saint Lucia is the patron saint of the blind.”

“Sì, santa Lucia!”
Maurizio chimed in, eager to be of service. “Saint for the blind! You know the story, no?” Their driver looked back at them and shouted over the sound of the engines. “Lucia was so beautiful that all men have lust for her. So, Lucia, for to be pure to God and keep virginity, she cut out her own eyes.”

Sienna groaned. “There’s commitment.”

“As reward for her sacrifice,” Maurizio added, “God gave Lucia an even more beautiful set of eyes!”

Sienna looked at Langdon. “He
does
know that makes no sense, right?”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Langdon observed, picturing the twenty or so famous Old Master paintings depicting Saint Lucia carrying her own eyeballs on a platter.

While there were numerous versions of the Saint Lucia tale, they all involved Lucia cutting out her lust-inducing eyes and placing them on a platter for her ardent suitor and defiantly declaring: “Here hast thou, what thou so much desired … and, for the rest, I beseech thee, leave me now in peace!” Eerily, it had been Holy Scripture that had inspired Lucia’s self-mutilation, forever linking her to Christ’s famous admonition “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.”

Pluck
, Langdon thought, realizing the same word was used in the poem.
Seek the treacherous doge of Venice who … plucked up the bones of the blind
.

Puzzled by the coincidence, he wondered if perhaps this was a cryptic indication that Saint Lucia was the blind person being referenced in the poem.

“Maurizio,” Langdon shouted, pointing to the Church of San Geremia. “The bones of Saint Lucia are in that church, no?”

“A few, yes,” Maurizio said, driving skillfully with one hand and looking back at his passengers, ignoring the boat traffic ahead. “But mostly no. Saint Lucia is so beloved, her body has spread in churches all over the world. Venetians love Saint Lucia the most, of course, and so we celebrate—”

“Maurizio!” Ferris shouted. “Saint Lucia is blind, not you. Eyes front!”

Maurizio laughed good-naturedly and turned forward just in time to handily avoid colliding with an oncoming boat.

Sienna was studying Langdon. “What are you getting at? The treacherous doge who plucked up the bones of the blind?”

Langdon pursed his lips. “I’m not sure.”

He quickly told Sienna and Ferris the history of Saint Lucia’s relics—her bones—which was among the strangest in all of hagiography. Allegedly, when the beautiful Lucia refused the advances of an influential suitor, the man denounced her and had her burned at the stake, where, according to legend, her body refused to burn. Because her flesh had been resistant to fire, her relics were believed to have special powers, and whoever possessed them would enjoy an unusually long life.

“Magic bones?” Sienna said.

“Believed to be, yes, which is the reason her relics have been spread all over the world. For two millennia, powerful leaders have tried to thwart aging and death by possessing the bones of Saint Lucia. Her skeleton has been stolen, restolen, relocated, and divided up more times than that of any other saint in history. Her bones have passed through the hands of at least a dozen of history’s most powerful people.”

“Including,” Sienna inquired, “a treacherous doge?”

Seek the treacherous doge of Venice who severed the heads from horses … and plucked up the bones of the blind
.

“Quite possibly,” Langdon said, now realizing that Dante’s
Inferno
mentioned Saint Lucia very prominently. Lucia was one of the three blessed women—
le “tre donne benedette”
—who helped summon Virgil to help Dante escape the underworld. As the other two women were the
Virgin Mary and Dante’s beloved Beatrice, Dante had placed Saint Lucia in the highest of all company.

“If you’re right about this,” Sienna said, excitement in her voice, “then the same treacherous doge who severed the heads from horses …”

“… also stole the bones of Saint Lucia,” Langdon concluded.

Sienna nodded. “Which should narrow our list considerably.” She glanced over at Ferris. “Are you sure your phone’s not working? We might be able to search online for—”

“Stone dead,” Ferris said. “I just checked. Sorry.”

“We’ll be there soon,” Langdon said. “I have no doubt we’ll be able to find some answers at St. Mark’s Basilica.”

St. Mark’s was the only piece of the puzzle that felt rock solid to Langdon.
The mouseion of holy wisdom
. Langdon was counting on the basilica to reveal the identity of their mysterious doge … and from there, with luck, the specific palace that Zobrist had chosen to release his plague.
For here, in the darkness, the chthonic monster waits
.

Langdon tried to push from his mind any images of the plague, but it was no use. He had often wondered what this incredible city had been like in its heyday … before the plague weakened it enough for it to be conquered by the Ottomans, and then by Napoleon … back when Venice reigned gloriously as the commercial center of Europe. By all accounts, there was no more beautiful city in the world, the wealth and culture of its population unparalleled.

Ironically, it was the population’s taste for foreign luxuries that brought about its demise—the deadly plague traveling from China to Venice on the backs of rats stowed away on trading vessels. The same plague that destroyed an unfathomable
two-thirds
of China’s population arrived in Europe and very quickly killed one in three—young and old, rich and poor alike.

Langdon had read descriptions of life in Venice during the plague outbreaks. With little or no dry land in which to bury the dead, bloated bodies floated in the canals, with some areas so densely packed with corpses that workers had to labor like log rollers and prod the bodies out to sea. It seemed no amount of praying could diminish the plague’s wrath. By the time city officials realized it was the rats that were causing the disease, it was too late, but Venice still enforced a decree by which all incoming vessels had to anchor offshore for a full forty days before they would be permitted to unload. To this day, the number forty
—quaranta
in Italian—served as a grim reminder of the origins of the word
quarantine
.

As their boat sped onward around another bend in the canal, a festive
red awning luffed in the breeze, pulling Langdon’s attention away from his grim thoughts of death toward an elegant, three-tiered structure on his left.

CASINÒ DI VENEZIA: AN INFINITE EMOTION
.

While Langdon had never quite understood the words on the casino’s banner, the spectacular Renaissance-style palace had been part of the Venetian landscape since the sixteenth century. Once a private mansion, it was now a black-tie gaming hall that was famous for being the site at which, in 1883, composer Richard Wagner had collapsed dead of a heart attack shortly after composing his opera
Parsifal
.

Beyond the casino on the right, a Baroque, rusticated facade bore an even larger banner, this one deep blue, announcing the
CA’ PESARO: GALLERIA INTERNAZIONALE D’ARTE MODERNA
. Years ago, Langdon had been inside and seen Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece
The Kiss
while it was on loan from Vienna. Klimt’s dazzling gold-leaf rendering of intertwined lovers had sparked in him a passion for the artist’s work, and to this day, Langdon credited Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro with arousing his lifelong gusto for modern art.

Maurizio drove on, powering faster now in the wide canal.

Ahead, the famous Rialto Bridge loomed—the halfway point to St. Mark’s Square. As they neared the bridge, preparing to pass beneath it, Langdon looked up and saw a lone figure standing motionless at the railing, peering down at them with a somber visage.

The face was both familiar … and terrifying.

Langdon recoiled on instinct.

Grayish and elongated, the face had cold dead eyes and a long beaked nose.

The boat slipped beneath the ominous figure just as Langdon realized it was nothing more than a tourist showing off a recent purchase—one of the hundreds of plague masks sold every day in the nearby Rialto Market.

Today, however, the costume seemed anything but charming.

St. Mark’s Square lies at the southernmost tip of Venice’s Grand Canal, where the sheltered waterway merges with the open sea. Overlooking this perilous intersection is the austere triangular fortress of Dogana da Mar—the Maritime Customs Office—whose watch-tower once guarded Venice against foreign invasion. Nowadays, the tower has been replaced by a massive golden globe and a weather vane depicting the goddess of fortune, whose shifting directions on the breeze serve as a reminder to ocean-bound sailors of the unpredictability of fate.

As Maurizio steered the sleek boat toward the end of the canal, the choppy sea opened ominously before them. Robert Langdon had traveled this route many times before, although always in a much larger vaporetto, and he felt uneasy as their limo lurched on the growing swells.

To reach the docks at St. Mark’s Square, their boat would need to cross an expanse of open lagoon whose waters were congested with hundreds of craft—everything from luxury yachts, to tankers, to private sailboats, to massive cruise liners. It felt as if they were leaving a country road and merging onto an eight-lane superhighway.

Sienna seemed equally uncertain as she eyed the towering ten-story cruise liner that was now passing in front of them, only three hundred yards off. The ship’s decks were crawling with passengers, all packed against the railings, taking photos of St. Mark’s Square from the water. In the churning wake of this ship, three others were lined up, awaiting their chance to drive past Venice’s best-known landmark. Langdon had heard that in recent years, the number of ships had multiplied so quickly that an endless line of cruises passed all day and all night.

At the helm, Maurizio studied the line of oncoming cruise liners and then glanced to his left at a canopied dock not far away. “I park at Harry’s Bar?” He motioned to the restaurant famous for having invented the Bellini. “St. Mark’s Square is very short walking.”

“No, take us all the way,” Ferris commanded, pointing across the lagoon toward the docks at St. Mark’s Square.

Maurizio shrugged good-naturedly. “Your choice. Hold on!”

The engines revved and the limo began cutting through the heavy chop, falling into one of the travel lanes marked by buoys. The passing cruise liners looked like floating apartment buildings, their wakes tossing the other boats like corks.

To Langdon’s surprise, dozens of gondolas were making this same crossing. Their slender hulls—at nearly forty feet in length and almost fourteen hundred pounds—appeared remarkably stable in the rough waters. Each vessel was piloted by a sure-footed gondolier who stood on a platform on the left side of the stern in his traditional black-and-white-striped shirt and rowed a single oar attached to the right-hand gunwale. Even in the rough water, it was evident that every gondola listed mysteriously to the left, an oddity that Langdon had learned was caused by the boat’s asymmetrical construction; every gondola’s hull was curved to the right, away from the gondolier, to resist the boat’s tendency to turn left from the right-sided rowing.

Maurizio pointed proudly to one of the gondolas as they powered past it. “You see the metal design on the front?” he called over his shoulder, motioning to the elegant ornament protruding from the bow. “It’s the only metal on a gondola—called
ferro di prua
—the iron of the prow. It is a picture of Venice!”

Maurizio explained that the scythelike decoration that protruded from the bow of every gondola in Venice had a symbolic meaning. The
ferro
’s curved shape represented the Grand Canal, its six teeth reflected the six
sestieri
or districts of Venice, and its oblong blade was the stylized headpiece of the Venetian doge.

The doge
, Langdon thought, his thoughts returning to the task ahead.
Seek the treacherous doge of Venice who severed the heads from horses … and plucked up the bones of the blind
.

Langdon raised his gaze to the shoreline ahead, where a small wooded park met the water’s edge. Above the trees, silhouetted against a cloudless sky, rose the redbrick spire of St. Mark’s bell tower, atop which a golden Archangel Gabriel peered down from a dizzying three hundred feet.