Inferno (Page 81)

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.

CHAPTER 56

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.