Inferno: A Novel (38 page)

He had just reached the bronze doors through which Robert Langdon and his blond companion had cleverly disappeared; even from outside, he had heard the heavy thud of the doors being barred from within.

No entry this way
.

Slowly, the ambience in the piazza was returning to normal. The tourists who had been staring upward in anticipation were now losing interest.
No jumper
. Everyone moved on.

The man was itchy again, his rash getting worse. Now his fingertips were swollen and cracking as well. He slid his hands into his pockets to keep himself from scratching. His chest continued to throb as he began circling the octagon in search of another entrance.

He had barely made it around the corner when he felt a sharp pain on his Adam’s apple and realized he was scratching again.

Legend proclaims that it is physically impossible, upon entering the Baptistry of San Giovanni, not to look up. Langdon, despite having been in this room many times, now felt the mystical pull of the space, and let his gaze climb skyward to the ceiling.

High, high overhead, the surface of the baptistry’s octagonal vault spanned more than eighty feet from side to side. It glistened and shimmered as if it were made of smoldering coals. Its burnished amber-gold surface reflected the ambient light unevenly from more than a million
smalti
tiles—tiny ungrouted mosaic pieces hand-cut from a glassy silica glaze—which were arranged in six concentric rings in which scenes from the Bible were depicted.

Adding stark drama to the lustrous upper portion of the room, natural light pierced the dark space through a central oculus—much like the one in Rome’s Pantheon—assisted by a series of high, small, deeply recessed windows that threw shafts of illumination that were so focused and tight that they seemed almost solid, like structural beams propped at ever-changing angles.

As Langdon walked with Sienna deeper into the room, he took in the legendary ceiling mosaic—a multitiered representation of heaven and hell, very much like the depiction in
The Divine Comedy
.

Dante Alighieri saw this as a child
, Langdon thought.
Inspiration from above
.

Langdon fixed his gaze now on the centerpiece of the mosaic. Hovering directly above the main altar rose a twenty-seven-foot-tall Jesus Christ, seated in judgment over the saved and the damned.

At Jesus’ right hand, the righteous received the reward of everlasting life.

On His left hand, however, the sinful were stoned, roasted on spikes, and eaten by all manner of creatures.

Overseeing the torture was a colossal mosaic of Satan portrayed as an infernal, man-eating beast. Langdon always flinched when he saw this
figure, which more than seven hundred years ago had stared down at the young Dante Alighieri, terrifying him and eventually inspiring his vivid portrayal of what lurked in the final ring of hell.

The frightening mosaic overhead depicted a horned devil that was in the process of consuming a human being headfirst. The victim’s legs dangled from Satan’s mouth in a way that resembled the flailing legs of the half-buried sinners in Dante’s Malebolge.

Lo ’mperador del doloroso regno
, Langdon thought, recalling Dante’s text.
The emperor of the despondent kingdom
.

Slithering from the ears of Satan were two massive, writhing snakes, also in the process of consuming sinners, giving the impression that Satan had three heads, exactly as Dante described him in the final canto of his
Inferno
. Langdon searched his memory and recalled fragments of Dante’s imagery.

On his head he had three faces … his three chins gushing a bloody froth … his three mouths used as grinders … gnashing sinners three at once
.

That Satan’s evil was threefold, Langdon knew, was fraught with symbolic meaning: it placed him in perfect balance with the threefold glory of the Holy Trinity.

As Langdon stared up at the horrific sight, he tried to imagine the effect the mosaic had on the youthful Dante, who had attended services at this church year after year, and seen Satan staring down at him each time he prayed. This morning, however, Langdon had the uneasy feeling that the devil was staring directly at
him
.

He quickly lowered his gaze to the baptistry’s second-story balcony and standing gallery—the lone area from which women were permitted to view baptisms—and then down to the suspended tomb of Antipope John XXIII, his body lying in repose high on the wall like a cave dweller or a subject in a magician’s levitation trick.

Finally, his gaze reached the ornately tiled floor, which many believed contained references to medieval astronomy. He let his eyes move across the intricate black-and-white patterns until they reached the very center of the room.

And there it is
, he thought, knowing he was staring at the exact spot where Dante Alighieri had been baptized in the latter half of the thirteenth century. “ ‘I shall return as poet … at my baptismal font,’ ” Langdon declared, his voice echoing through the empty space. “This is it.”

Sienna looked troubled as she eyed the center of the floor, where Langdon was now pointing. “But … there’s nothing here.”

“Not anymore,” Langdon replied.

All that remained was a large reddish-brown octagon of pavement. This unusually plain, eight-sided area clearly interrupted the pattern of the more ornately designed floor and resembled nothing so much as a large, patched-up hole, which, in fact, was precisely what it was.

Langdon quickly explained that the baptistry’s original baptismal font had been a large octagonal pool located at the very center of this room. While modern fonts were usually raised basins, earlier fonts were more akin to the literal meaning of the word
font
—“springs” or “fountains”—in this case a deep pool of water into which participants could be more deeply immersed. Langdon wondered what this stone chamber had sounded like as children screamed in fear while being literally submerged in the large pool of icy water that once stood in the middle of the floor.

“Baptisms here were cold and scary,” Langdon said. “True rites of passage. Dangerous even. Allegedly Dante once jumped into the font to save a drowning child. In any case, the original font was covered over at some point in the sixteenth century.”

Sienna’s eyes now began darting around the building with obvious concern. “But if Dante’s baptismal font is gone … where did Ignazio hide the mask?!”

Langdon understood her alarm. There was no shortage of hiding places in this massive chamber—behind columns, statues, tombs, inside niches, at the altar, even upstairs.

Nonetheless, Langdon felt remarkably confident as he turned and faced the door through which they’d just entered. “We should start over there,” he said, pointing to an area against the wall just to the right of the
Gates of Paradise
.

On a raised platform, behind a decorative gate, there sat a tall hexagonal plinth of carved marble, which resembled a small altar or service table. The exterior was so intricately carved that it resembled a mother-of-pearl cameo. Atop the marble base sat a polished wooden top with a diameter of about three feet.

Sienna looked uncertain as she followed Langdon over to it. As they ascended the steps and moved inside the protective gate, Sienna looked more closely and drew a startled breath, realizing what she was looking at.

Langdon smiled.
Exactly, it’s not an altar or table
. The polished wooden top was in fact a lid—a covering for the hollow structure.

“A baptismal font?” she asked.

Langdon nodded. “If Dante were baptized today, it would be in this basin right here.” Wasting no time, he took a deep, purposeful breath
and placed his palms on the wooden cover, feeling a tingle of anticipation as he prepared to remove it.

Langdon tightly gripped the edges of the cover and heaved it to one side, carefully sliding the top off the marble base and placing it on the floor beside the font. Then he peered down into the two-foot-wide, dark, hollow space within.

The eerie sight made Langdon swallow hard.

From out of the shadows, the dead face of Dante Alighieri was looking back at him.

Seek and ye shall find
.

Langdon stood at the rim of the baptismal font and stared down at the pale yellow death mask, whose wrinkled countenance gazed blankly upward. The hooked nose and protruding chin were unmistakable.

Dante Alighieri
.

The lifeless face was disturbing enough, and yet something about its position in the font seemed almost supernatural. For a moment Langdon was unsure what he was seeing.

Is the mask … hovering?

Langdon crouched lower, peering more closely at the scene before him. The font was several feet deep—more of a vertical well than a shallow basin—its steep walls dropping down to a hexagonal repository that was filled with water. Strangely, the mask seemed to be suspended partway down the font … perched just above the surface of the water as if by magic.

It took a moment for Langdon to realize what was causing the illusion. The font had a vertical central spindle that rose halfway up and flattened into a kind of small metal platter just above the water. The platter appeared to be a decorative fountainhead and perhaps a place to rest a baby’s bottom, but it was currently serving as a pedestal on which the mask of Dante rested, elevated safely above the water.

Neither Langdon nor Sienna said a word as they stood side by side gazing down at the craggy face of Dante Alighieri, still sealed in his Ziploc bag, as if he’d been suffocated. For a moment the image of a face staring up out of a water-filled basin conjured for Langdon his own terrifying experience as a child, stuck at the bottom of a well, staring skyward in desperation.

Pushing the thought from his mind, he carefully reached down and gripped the mask on either side, where Dante’s ears would have been. Although the face was small by modern standards, the ancient plaster
was heavier than he’d expected. He slowly lifted the mask out of the font and held it up so that he and Sienna could examine it more closely.

Even viewed through the plastic bag, the mask was remarkably lifelike. Every wrinkle and blemish of the old poet’s face had been captured by the wet plaster. With the exception of an old crack down the center of the mask, it was in perfect condition.

“Turn it over,” Sienna whispered. “Let’s see the back.”

Langdon was already doing just that. The security video from the Palazzo Vecchio had clearly shown Langdon and Ignazio discovering something on the reverse side of the mask—something of such startling interest that the two men had essentially walked out of the palace with the artifact.

Taking exceptional care not to drop the fragile plaster, Langdon flipped the mask over and laid it facedown in his right palm so they could examine the back. Unlike the weathered, textured face of Dante, the inside of the mask was smooth and bare. Because the mask was never meant to be worn, its back side had been filled in with plaster to give some solidity to the delicate piece, resulting in a featureless, concave surface, like a shallow soup bowl.

Langdon didn’t know what he had expected to find on the back of the mask, but it most certainly was not this.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Just a smooth, empty surface.

Sienna seemed equally confused. “It’s blank plaster,” she whispered. “If there’s nothing here, what did you and Ignazio see?”

I have no idea
, Langdon thought, pulling the plastic bag taut across the plaster for a clearer view.
There’s nothing here!
With mounting distress, Langdon raised the mask into a shaft of light and studied it closely. As he tipped the object over for a better view, he thought for an instant that he might have glimpsed a faint discoloration near the top—a line of markings running horizontally across the inside of Dante’s forehead.

A natural blemish? Or maybe … something else
. Langdon immediately spun and pointed to a hinged panel of marble on the wall behind them. “Look in there,” he told Sienna. “See if there are towels.”

Sienna looked skeptical, but obeyed, opening the discreetly hidden cupboard, which contained three items—a valve for controlling the water level in the font, a light switch for controlling the spotlight above the font, and … a stack of linen towels.

Sienna gave Langdon a surprised look, but Langdon had toured enough churches worldwide to know that baptismal fonts almost always afforded their priests easy access to emergency
swaddling cloths
—the unpredictability of infants’ bladders a universal risk of christenings.

“Good,” he said, eyeing the towels. “Hold the mask a second?” He gently transferred the mask to Sienna’s hands and then set to work.

First, Langdon retrieved the hexagonal lid and heaved it back up onto the font to restore the small, altarlike table they had first seen. Then he grabbed several of the linen towels from the cupboard and spread them out like a tablecloth. Finally, he flipped the font’s light switch, and the spotlight directly overhead sprang to life, illuminating the baptismal area and shining brightly down on the covered surface.

Sienna gently laid the mask on the font while Langdon retrieved more towels, which he used like oven mitts to slide the mask from the Ziploc bag, careful not to touch it with his bare hands. Moments later, Dante’s death mask lay unsheathed and naked, faceup beneath the bright light, like the head of an anesthetized patient on an operating table.

The mask’s dramatic texturing appeared even more unsettling in the light, the creases and wrinkles of old age accentuated by the discolored plaster. Langdon wasted no time using his makeshift mitts to flip the mask over and lay it facedown.

The back side of the mask looked markedly less aged than the front—clean and white rather than dingy and yellow.

Sienna cocked her head, looking puzzled. “Does this side look
newer
to you?”