He took the torch and moved slowly toward the hole. Cautiously, he advanced to the rim and pointed the flame down into the hole, lighting the side wall. As he directed the light, his eyes traced the outline of the wall downward. The crypt was circular and about twenty feet across. Thirty feet down, the glow found the floor. The ground was dark and mottled. Earthy. Then Langdon saw the body.
His instinct was to recoil. "He's here," Langdon said, forcing himself not to turn away. The figure was a pallid outline against the earthen floor. "I think he's been stripped naked." Langdon flashed on the nude corpse of Leonardo Vetra.
"Is it one of the cardinals?"
Langdon had no idea, but he couldn't imagine who the hell else it would be. He stared down at the pale blob. Unmoving. Lifeless. And yet... Langdon hesitated. There was something very strange about the way the figure was positioned. He seemed to be...
Langdon called out. "Hello?"
"You think he's alive?"
There was no response from below.
"He's not moving," Langdon said. "But he looks..." No, impossible.
"He looks what?" Vittoria was peering over the edge now too.
Langdon squinted into the darkness. "He looks like he's standing up."
Vittoria held her breath and lowered her face over the edge for a better look. After a moment, she pulled back. "You're right. He's standing up! Maybe he's alive and needs help!" She called into the hole. "Hello?! Mi puo sentire?"
There was no echo off the mossy interior. Only silence.
Vittoria headed for the rickety ladder. "I'm going down."
Langdon caught her arm. "No. It's dangerous. I'll go."
This time Vittoria didn't argue.
66
Chinita Macri was mad. She sat in the passenger's seat of the BBC van as it idled at a corner on Via Tomacelli. Gunther Glick was checking his map of Rome, apparently lost. As she had feared, his mystery caller had phoned back, this time with information.
"Piazza del Popolo," Glick insisted. "That's what we're looking for. There's a church there. And inside is proof."
"Proof." Chinita stopped polishing the lens in her hand and turned to him. "Proof that a cardinal has been murdered?"
"That's what he said."
"You believe everything you hear?" Chinita wished, as she often did, that she was the one in charge. Videographers, however, were at the whim of the crazy reporters for whom they shot footage. If Gunther Glick wanted to follow a feeble phone tip, Macri was his dog on a leash.
She looked at him, sitting there in the driver's seat, his jaw set intently. The man's parents, she decided, must have been frustrated comedians to have given him a name like Gunther Glick. No wonder the guy felt like he had something to prove. Nonetheless, despite his unfortunate appellative and annoying eagerness to make a mark, Glick was sweet... charming in a pasty, Briddish, unstrung sort of way. Like Hugh Grant on lithium.
"Shouldn't we be back at St. Peter's?" Macri said as patiently as possible. "We can check this mystery church out later. Conclave started an hour ago. What if the cardinals come to a decision while we're gone?"
Glick did not seem to hear. "I think we go to the right, here." He tilted the map and studied it again. "Yes, if I take a right... and then an immediate left." He began to pull out onto the narrow street before them.
"Look out!" Macri yelled. She was a video technician, and her eyes were sharp. Fortunately, Glick was pretty fast too. He slammed on the brakes and avoided entering the intersection just as a line of four Alpha Romeos appeared out of nowhere and tore by in a blur. Once past, the cars skidded, decelerating, and cut sharply left one block ahead, taking the exact route Glick had intended to take.
"Maniacs!" Macri shouted.
Glick looked shaken. "Did you see that?"
"Yeah, I saw that! They almost killed us!"
"No, I mean the cars," Glick said, his voice suddenly excited. "They were all the same."
"So they were maniacs with no imagination."
"The cars were also full."
"So what?"
"Four identical cars, all with four passengers?"
"You ever heard of carpooling?"
"In Italy?" Glick checked the intersection. "They haven't even heard of unleaded gas." He hit the accelerator and peeled out after the cars.
Macri was thrown back in her seat. "What the hell are you doing?"
Glick accelerated down the street and hung a left after the Alpha Romeos. "Something tells me you and I are not the only ones going to church right now."
67
The descent was slow.
Langdon dropped rung by rung down the creaking ladder... deeper and deeper beneath the floor of the Chigi Chapel. Into the Demon's hole, he thought. He was facing the side wall, his back to the chamber, and he wondered how many more dark, cramped spaces one day could provide. The ladder groaned with every step, and the pungent smell of rotting flesh and dampness was almost asphyxiating. Langdon wondered where the hell Olivetti was.
Vittoria's outline was still visible above, holding the blowtorch inside the hole, lighting Langdon's way. As he lowered himself deeper into the darkness, the bluish glow from above got fainter. The only thing that got stronger was the stench.
Twelve rungs down, it happened. Langdon's foot hit a spot that was slippery with decay, and he faltered. Lunging forward, he caught the ladder with his forearms to avoid plummeting to the bottom. Cursing the bruises now throbbing on his arms, he dragged his body back onto the ladder and began his descent again.
Three rungs deeper, he almost fell again, but this time it was not a rung that caused the mishap. It was a bolt of fear. He had descended past a hollowed niche in the wall before him and suddenly found himself face to face with a collection of skulls. As he caught his breath and looked around him, he realized the wall at this level was honeycombed with shelflike openings - burial niches - all filled with skeletons. In the phosphorescent light, it made for an eerie collage of empty sockets and decaying rib cages flickering around him.
Skeletons by firelight, he grimaced wryly, realizing he had quite coincidentally endured a similar evening just last month. An evening of bones and flames. The New York Museum of Archeology's candlelight benefit dinner - salmon flambe in the shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton. He had attended at the invitation of Rebecca Strauss - one-time fashion model now art critic from the Times, a whirlwind of black velvet, cigarettes, and not-so-subtly enhanced breasts. She'd called him twice since. Langdon had not returned her calls. Most ungentlemanly, he chided, wondering how long Rebecca Strauss would last in a stink-pit like this.
Langdon was relieved to feel the final rung give way to the spongy earth at the bottom. The ground beneath his shoes felt damp. Assuring himself the walls were not going to close in on him, he turned into the crypt. It was circular, about twenty feet across. Breathing through his sleeve again, Langdon turned his eyes to the body. In the gloom, the image was hazy. A white, fleshy outline. Facing the other direction. Motionless. Silent.
Advancing through the murkiness of the crypt, Langdon tried to make sense of what he was looking at. The man had his back to Langdon, and Langdon could not see his face, but he did indeed seem to be standing.
"Hello?" Langdon choked through his sleeve. Nothing. As he drew nearer, he realized the man was very short. Too short...
"What's happening?" Vittoria called from above, shifting the light.