Sienna gunned the bike up onto the sidewalk and raced into the work area. They parked behind the cement mixer, quickly realizing that it offered barely enough concealment for the Trike alone.
“Follow me,” Sienna said, rushing toward a small portable toolshed nestled in the bushes against the stone wall.
That’s not a toolshed, Langdon realized, his nose crinkling as they got closer. That’s a Porta-Potty.
As Langdon and Sienna arrived outside the construction workers’ chemical toilet, they could hear police cars approaching from behind them. Sienna yanked the door handle, but it didn’t budge. A heavy chain and padlock secured it. Langdon grabbed Sienna’s arm and pulled her around behind the structure, forcing her into the narrow space between the toilet and the stone wall. The two of them barely fit, and the air smelled putrid and heavy.
Langdon slid in behind her just as a jet-black Subaru Forester came into view with the word CARABINIERI emblazoned on its side. The vehicle rolled slowly past their location.
The Italian military police, Langdon thought, incredulous. He wondered if these officers also had orders to shoot on sight.
“Someone is dead serious about finding us,” Sienna whispered. “And somehow they did.”
“GPS?” Langdon wondered aloud. “Maybe the projector has a tracking device in it?”
Sienna shook her head. “Believe me, if that thing were traceable, the police would be right on top of us.”
Langdon shifted his tall frame, trying to get comfortable in the cramped surroundings. He found himself face-to-face with a collage of elegantly styled graffiti scrawled on the back of the Porta-Potty.
Leave it to the Italians.
Most American Porta-Potties were covered with sophomoric cartoons that vaguely resembled huge breasts or penises. The graffiti on this one, however, looked more like an art student’s sketchbook—a human eye, a well-rendered hand, a man in profile, and a fantastical dragon.
“Destruction of property doesn’t look like this everywhere in Italy,” Sienna said, apparently reading his mind. “The Florence Art Institute is on the other side of this stone wall.”
As if to confirm Sienna’s statement, a group of students appeared in the distance, ambling toward them with art portfolios under their arms. They were chatting, lighting cigarettes, and puzzling over the roadblock in front of them at the Porta Romana.
Langdon and Sienna crouched lower to stay out of sight of the students, and as they did so, Langdon was struck, most unexpectedly, by a curious thought.
The half-buried sinners with their legs in the air.
Perhaps it was on account of the smell of human waste, or possibly the recumbent bicyclist with bare legs flailing in front of him, but whatever the stimulus, Langdon had flashed on the putrid world of the Malebolge and the naked legs protruding upside down from the earth.
He turned suddenly to his companion. “Sienna, in our version of La Mappa, the upside-down legs were in the tenth ditch, right? The lowest level of the Malebolge?”
Sienna gave him an odd look, as if this were hardly the time. “Yes, at the bottom.”
For a split second Langdon was back in Vienna giving his lecture. He was standing onstage, only moments from his grand finale, having just shown the audience Doré’s engraving of Geryon—the winged monster with a poisonous stinging tail that lived just above the Malebolge.
“Before we meet Satan,” Langdon declared, his deep voice resonating over the loudspeakers, “we must pass through the ten ditches of the Malebolge, in which are punished the fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate evil.”
Langdon advanced slides to show a detail of the Malebolge and then took the audience down through the ditches one by one. “From top to bottom we have: the seducers whipped by demons … the flatterers adrift in human excrement … the clerical profiteers half buried upside down with their legs in the air … the sorcerers with their heads twisted backward … the corrupt politicians in boiling pitch … the hypocrites wearing heavy leaden cloaks … the thieves bitten by snakes … the fraudulent counselors consumed by fire … the sowers of discord hacked apart by demons … and finally, the liars, who are diseased beyond recognition.” Langdon turned back to the audience. “Dante most likely reserved this final ditch for the liars because a series of lies told about him led to his exile from his beloved Florence.”
“Robert?” The voice was Sienna’s.
Langdon snapped back to the present.
Sienna was staring at him quizzically. “What is it?”
“Our version of La Mappa,” he said excitedly. “The art has been changed!” He fished the projector out of his jacket pocket