CHAPTER 68
Venice’s Santa Lucia Train Station is an elegant, low-slung structure made of gray stone and concrete. It was designed in a modern, minimalist style, with a facade that is gracefully devoid of all signage except for one symbol—the winged letters FS—the icon of the state railway system, the Ferrovie dello Stato.
Because the station is located at the westernmost end of the Grand Canal, passengers arriving in Venice need take only a single step out of the station to find themselves fully immersed in the distinctive sights, smells, and sounds of Venice.
For Langdon, it was always the salty air that struck him first—a clean ocean breeze spiced by the aroma of the white pizza sold by the street vendors outside the station. Today, the wind was from the east, and the air also carried the tang of diesel fuel from the long line of water taxis idling nearby on the turgid waters of the Grand Canal. Dozens of boat captains waved their arms and shouted to tourists, hoping to lure a new fare onto their taxis, gondolas, vaporetti, and private speedboats.
Chaos on the water, Langdon mused, eyeing the floating traffic jam. Somehow, the congestion that would be maddening in Boston felt quaint in Venice.
A stone’s throw across the canal, the iconic verdigris cupola of San Simeone Piccolo rose into the afternoon sky. The church was one of the most architecturally eclectic in all of Europe. Its unusually steep dome and circular sanctuary were Byzantine in style, while its columned marble pronaos was clearly modeled on the classical Greek entryway to Rome’s Pantheon. The main entrance was topped by a spectacular pediment of intricate marble relief portraying a host of martyred saints.
Venice is an outdoor museum, Langdon thought, his gaze dropping to the canal water that lapped at the church’s stairs. A slowly sinking museum. Even so, the potential of flooding seemed inconsequential compared to the threat that Langdon feared was now lurking beneath the city.
And nobody has any idea …
The poem on the back of Dante’s death mask still played in Langdon’s mind, and he wondered where the verses would lead them. He had the transcription of the poem in his pocket, but the plaster mask itself—at Sienna’s suggestion—Langdon had wrapped in newspaper and discreetly sealed inside a self-serve locker in the train station. Although an egregiously inadequate resting place for such a precious artifact, the locker was certainly far safer than carrying the priceless plaster mask around a water-filled city.
“Robert?” Sienna was up ahead with Ferris, motioning toward the water taxis. “We don’t have much time.”
Langdon hurried toward them, although as an architecture enthusiast, he found it almost unthinkable to rush a trip along the Grand Canal. Few Venetian experiences were more pleasurable than boarding vaporetto no. 1—the city’s primary open-air water bus—preferably at night, and sitting up front in the open air as the floodlit cathedrals and palaces drifted past.
No vaporetto today, Langdon thought. The vaporetti water buses were notoriously slow, and water taxi would be a faster option. Unfortunately, the taxi queue outside the train station looked interminable at the moment.
Ferris, in no apparent mood to wait, quickly took matters into his own hands. With a generous stack of bills, he quickly summoned over a water limousine—a highly polished Veneziano Convertible made of South African mahogany. While the elegant craft was certainly overkill, the journey would be both private and swift—a mere fifteen minutes along the Grand Canal to St. Mark’s Square.
Their driver was a strikingly handsome man in a tailored Armani suit. He looked more like a movie star than a skipper, but this was, after all, Venice, the land of Italian elegance.
“Maurizio Pimponi,” the man said, winking at Sienna as he welcomed them all aboard. “Prosecco? Limoncello? Champagne?”
“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.