Inferno (Page 114)

“Told you,” Sienna whispered, her pretty face faintly illuminated by the hint of muted natural light. She pointed to several small, arched transoms, high on the wall.

Light wells, Langdon realized, having forgotten they were here. The wells—designed to bring light and fresh air into this cramped crypt—opened into deep shafts that dropped down from St. Mark’s Square above. The window glass was reinforced with a tight ironwork pattern of fifteen interlocking circles, and although Langdon suspected that they could be opened from inside, they were shoulder height and would be a tight fit. Even if they somehow managed to get through the window into the shaft, climbing out of the shafts would be impossible, since they were ten feet deep and covered by heavy security grates at the top.

In the dim light that filtered through the wells, St. Mark’s crypt resembled a moonlit forest—a dense grove of trunklike pillars that cast long and heavy-looking shadows across the ground. Langdon turned his gaze to the center of the crypt, where a lone light burned at St. Mark’s tomb. The basilica’s namesake rested in a stone sarcophagus behind an altar, before which there were lines of pews for those lucky few invited to worship here at the heart of Venetian Christendom.

A tiny light suddenly flickered to life beside him and Langdon turned to see Sienna holding the illuminated screen of Ferris’s phone.

Langdon did a double take. “I thought Ferris said his battery was dead!”

“He lied,” Sienna said, still typing. “About a lot of things.” She frowned at the phone and shook her head. “No signal. I thought maybe I could find the location of Enrico Dandolo’s tomb.” She hurried over to the light well and held the phone high overhead near the glass, trying to get a signal.

Enrico Dandolo, Langdon thought, having barely had a chance to consider the doge before having to flee the area. Despite their current predicament, their visit to St. Mark’s had indeed served its purpose—revealing the identity of the treacherous doge who severed the heads from horses … and plucked up the bones of the blind.

Unfortunately, Langdon had no idea where Enrico Dandolo’s tomb was located, and apparently neither did Ettore Vio. He knows every inch of this basilica … probably of the Doge’s Palace, too. The fact that Ettore hadn’t immediately located Dandolo’s tomb suggested to Langdon that the tomb was probably nowhere near St. Mark’s or the Doge’s Palace.

So where is it?

Langdon glanced over at Sienna, who was now standing on a pew that she had moved under one of the light wells. She unlatched the window, swung it open, and held Ferris’s phone out into the open air of the shaft itself.

The outdoor sounds of St. Mark’s Square filtered down from above, and Langdon suddenly wondered if maybe there was some way out of here after all. There was a line of folding chairs behind the pews, and Langdon sensed that he might be able to hoist one up into the light well. Maybe the upper grates unlatch from inside as well?

Langdon hurried through the darkness toward Sienna. He had taken only a few steps when a powerful blow to his forehead knocked him backward. Crumpling to his knees, he thought for an instant that he had been attacked. He had not, he quickly realized, cursing himself for not anticipating that his six-foot frame far exceeded the height of vaults built for the average human height of more than a thousand years ago.

As he knelt there on the hard stone and let the stars clear, he found himself gazing at an inscription on the floor.

Sanctus Marcus.

He stared at it a long moment. It was not St. Mark’s name in the inscription that struck him but rather the language in which it was written.

Latin.

After his daylong immersion in modern Italian, Langdon found himself vaguely disoriented to see St. Mark’s name written in Latin, a quick reminder that the dead language was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire at the time of St. Mark’s death.

Then a second thought hit Langdon.

During the early thirteenth century—the time of Enrico Dandolo and the Fourth Crusade—the language of power was still very much Latin. A Venetian doge who had brought great glory to the Roman Empire by recapturing Constantinople would never have been buried under the name of Enrico Dandolo … instead his Latin name would have been used.

Henricus Dandolo.

And with that, a long-forgotten image struck him like a jolt of electricity. Although the revelation had come while he was kneeling in a chapel, he knew it was not divinely inspired. More likely, it was nothing more than a visual cue that sparked his mind to make a sudden connection. The image that leaped suddenly from the depths of Langdon’s memory was that of Dandolo’s Latin name … engraved in a worn marble slab, embedded in an ornate tile floor.

Henricus Dandolo.

Langdon could barely breathe as he pictured the doge’s simple tomb marker. I’ve been there. Precisely as the poem had promised, Enrico Dandolo was indeed buried in a gilded museum—a mouseion of holy wisdom—but it was not St. Mark’s Basilica.

As the truth settled in, Langdon clambered slowly to his feet.

“I can’t get a signal,” Sienna said, climbing down from the light well and coming toward him.

“You don’t need one,” Langdon managed. “The gilded mouseion of holy wisdom …” He took a deep breath. “I … made a mistake.”

Sienna went pale. “Don’t tell me we’re in the wrong museum.”

“Sienna,” Langdon whispered, feeling ill. “We’re in the wrong country.”

CHAPTER 76

Out in St. Mark’s Square, the Gypsy woman selling Venetian masks was taking a break, leaning against the outer wall of the basilica to rest. As always, she had claimed her favorite spot—a small niche between two metal grates in the pavement—an ideal spot to set down her heavy wares and watch the setting sun.