Inferno (Page 103)

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.

CHAPTER 69

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 Nowadays, the tower has been replaced by a massive golden globe and a weather vane depicting the goddess of fortune, whose shifting directions on the breeze serve as a reminder to ocean-bound sailors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.

In a city where high-rises were nonexistent as a result of their tendency to sink, the towering Campanile di San Marco served as a navigational beacon to all who ventured into Venice’s maze of canals and passageways; a lost traveler, with a single glance skyward, would see the way back to St. Mark’s Square. Langdon still found it hard to believe that this massive tower had collapsed in 1902, leaving an enormous pile of rubble on St. Mark’s Square. Remarkably, the lone casualty in the disaster had been a cat.