Angels & Demons (39 page)

As Sylvie continued down the hall, she finally found a lounge where the mood was subdued . . . almost melancholy. Here the scientists watching the report were some of CERN’s oldest and most respected. They did not even look up as Sylvie slipped in and took a seat.

On the other side of CERN, in Leonardo Vetra’s frigid apartment, Maximilian Kohler had finished reading the leather-bound journal he’d taken from Vetra’s bedside table. Now he was watching the television reports. After a few minutes, he replaced Vetra’s journal, turned off the television, and left the apartment.

Far away, in Vatican City, Cardinal Mortati carried another tray of ballots to the Sistine Chapel chimney. He burned them, and the smoke was black.

Two ballotings. No Pope.

83

F lashlights were no match for the voluminous blackness of St. Peter’s Basilica. The void overhead pressed down like a starless night, and Vittoria felt the emptiness spread out around her like a desolate ocean. She stayed close as the Swiss Guards and the camerlegno pushed on. High above, a dove cooed and fluttered away.

As if sensing her discomfort, the camerlegno dropped back and lay a hand on her shoulder. A tangible strength transferred in the touch, as if the man were magically infusing her with the calm she needed to do what they were about to do.

What are we about to do?
she thought.
This is madness!

And yet, Vittoria knew, for all its impiety and inevitable horror, the task at hand was inescapable. The grave decisions facing the camerlegno required information . . . information entombed in a sarcophagus in the Vatican Grottoes. She wondered what they would find.
Did the Illuminati murder the Pope? Did their
power really reach so far? Am I really about to perform the first papal autopsy?

Vittoria found it ironic that she felt more apprehensive in this unlit church than she would swimming at night with barracuda. Nature was her refuge. She understood nature. But it was matters of man and spirit that left her mystified. Killer fish gathering in the dark conjured images of the press gathering outside. TV

footage of branded bodies reminded her of her father’s corpse . . . and the killer’s harsh laugh. The killer was out there somewhere. Vittoria felt the anger drowning her fear.

As they circled past a pillar—thicker in girth than any redwood she could imagine—Vittoria saw an orange glow up ahead. The light seemed to emanate from beneath the floor in the center of the basilica. As they came closer, she realized what she was seeing. It was the famous sunken sanctuary beneath the main altar—the sumptuous underground chamber that held the Vatican’s most sacred relics. As they drew even with the gate surrounding the hollow, Vittoria gazed down at the golden coffer surrounded by scores of glowing oil lamps.

“St. Peter’s bones?” she asked, knowing full well that they were. Everyone who came to St. Peter’s knew what was in the golden casket.

“Actually, no,” the camerlegno said. “A common misconception. That’s not a reliquary. The box holds
palliums
—woven sashes that the Pope gives to newly elected cardinals.”

“But I thought—”

“As does everyone. The guidebooks label this as St. Peter’s tomb, but his true grave is two stories beneath us, buried in the earth. The Vatican excavated it in the forties. Nobody is allowed down there.”

Vittoria was shocked. As they moved away from the glowing recession into the darkness again, she thought of the stories she’d heard of pilgrims traveling thousands of miles to look at that golden box, thinking they were in the presence of St. Peter. “Shouldn’t the Vatican tell people?”

“We all benefit from a sense of contact with divinity . . . even if it is only imagined.”

Vittoria, as a scientist, could not argue the logic. She had read countless studies of the placebo effect—aspirins curing cancer in people who
believed
they were using a miracle drug. What was
faith
, after all?

“Change,” the camerlegno said, “is not something we do well within Vatican City. Admitting our past faults, modernization, are things we historically eschew. His Holiness was trying to change that.” He paused. “Reaching to the modern world. Searching for new paths to God.”

Vittoria nodded in the dark. “Like science?”

“To be honest, science seems irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?” Vittoria could think of a lot of words to describe science, but in the modern world

“irrelevant” did not seem like one of them.

“Science can heal, or science can kill. It depends on the soul of the man using the science. It is the soul that interests me.”

“When did you hear your call?”

“Before I was born.”

Vittoria looked at him.

“I’m sorry, that always seems like a strange question. What I mean is that I’ve always known I would serve God. From the moment I could first think. It wasn’t until I was a young man, though, in the military, that I truly understood my purpose.”

Vittoria was surprised. “You were in the military?”

“Two years. I refused to fire a weapon, so they made me fly instead. Medevac helicopters. In fact, I still fly from time to time.”

Vittoria tried to picture the young priest flying a helicopter. Oddly, she could see him perfectly behind the controls. Camerlegno Ventresca possessed a grit that seemed to accentuate his conviction rather than cloud it. “Did you ever fly the Pope?”

“Heavens no. We left that precious cargo to the professionals. His Holiness let me take the helicopter to our retreat in Gandolfo sometimes.” He paused, looking at her. “Ms. Vetra, thank you for your help here today. I am very sorry about your father. Truly.”

“Thank you.”

“I never knew my father. He died before I was born. I lost my mother when I was ten.”

Vittoria looked up. “You were orphaned?” She felt a sudden kinship.

“I survived an accident. An accident that took my mother.”

“Who took care of you?”

“God,” the camerlegno said. “He quite literally sent me another father. A bishop from Palermo appeared at my hospital bed and took me in. At the time I was not surprised. I had sensed God’s watchful hand over me even as a boy. The bishop’s appearance simply confirmed what I had already suspected, that God had somehow chosen me to serve him.”

“You believed God chose you?”

“I did. And I do.” There was no trace of conceit in the camerlegno’s voice, only gratitude. “I worked under the bishop’s tutelage for many years. He eventually became a cardinal. Still, he never forgot me. He is the father I remember.” A beam of a flashlight caught the camerlegno’s face, and Vittoria sensed a loneliness in his eyes.

The group arrived beneath a towering pillar, and their lights converged on an opening in the floor. Vittoria looked down at the staircase descending into the void and suddenly wanted to turn back. The guards were already helping the camerlegno onto the stairs. They helped her next.

“What became of him?” she asked, descending, trying to keep her voice steady. “The cardinal who took you in?”

“He left the College of Cardinals for another position.”

Vittoria was surprised.

“And then, I’m sorry to say, he passed on.”

“Le mie condoglianze,”
Vittoria said. “Recently?”

The camerlegno turned, shadows accentuating the pain on his face. “Exactly fifteen days ago. We are going to see him right now.”

84

T he dark lights glowed hot inside the archival vault. This vault was much smaller than the previous one Langdon had been in.
Less air. Less time
. He wished he’d asked Olivetti to turn on the recirculating fans. Langdon quickly located the section of assets containing the ledgers cataloging
Belle Arti
. The section was impossible to miss. It occupied almost eight full stacks. The Catholic church owned millions of individual pieces worldwide.

Langdon scanned the shelves searching for Gianlorenzo Bernini. He began his search about midway down the first stack, at about the spot he thought the
B
’s would begin. After a moment of panic fearing the ledger was missing, he realized, to his greater dismay, that the ledgers were not arranged alphabetically.
Why am I not surprised?

It was not until Langdon circled back to the beginning of the collection and climbed a rolling ladder to the top shelf that he understood the vault’s organization. Perched precariously on the upper stacks he found the fattest ledgers of all—those belonging to the masters of the Renaissance—Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci, Botticelli. Langdon now realized, appropriate to a vault called “Vatican Assets,” the ledgers were arranged by the overall monetary
value
of each artist’s collection. Sandwiched between Raphael and Michelangelo, Langdon found the ledger marked Bernini. It was over five inches thick. Already short of breath and struggling with the cumbersome volume, Langdon descended the ladder. Then, like a kid with a comic book, he spread himself out on the floor and opened the cover. The book was cloth-bound and very solid. The ledger was handwritten in Italian. Each page cataloged a single work, including a short description, date, location, cost of materials, and sometimes a rough sketch of the piece. Langdon fanned through the pages . . . over eight hundred in all. Bernini had been a busy man.

As a young student of art, Langdon had wondered how single artists could create so
much
work in their lifetimes. Later he learned, much to his disappointment, that famous artists actually created very little of their own work. They ran studios where they trained young artists to carry out their designs. Sculptors like Bernini created miniatures in clay and hired others to enlarge them into marble. Langdon knew that if Bernini had been required to
personally
complete all of his commissions, he would still be working today.

“Index,” he said aloud, trying to ward off the mental cobwebs. He flipped to the back of the book, intending to look under the letter
F
for titles containing the word
fuòco
—fire—but the
F
’s were not together. Langdon swore under his breath.
What the hell do these people have against alphabetizing?

The entries had apparently been logged chronologically, one by one, as Bernini created each new work. Everything was listed by date. No help at all.

As Langdon stared at the list, another disheartening thought occurred to him. The title of the sculpture he was looking for might not even contain the word
Fire
. The previous two works—
Habakkuk and the Angel
and
West Ponente
—had not contained specific references to
Earth
or
Air
. He spent a minute or two flipping randomly through the ledger in hopes that an illustration might jump out at him. Nothing did. He saw dozens of obscure works he had never heard of, but he also saw plenty he recognized . . .
Daniel and the Lion, Apollo and Daphne
, as well as a half dozen fountains. When he saw the fountains, his thoughts skipped momentarily ahead. Water. He wondered if the fourth altar of science was a fountain. A fountain seemed a perfect tribute to water. Langdon hoped they could catch the killer before he had to consider
Water
—Bernini had carved dozens of fountains in Rome, most of them in front of churches.

Langdon turned back to the matter at hand.
Fire
. As he looked through the book, Vittoria’s words encouraged him.
You were familiar with the first two sculptures
. . .
you probably know this one too
. As he turned to the index again, he scanned for titles he knew. Some were familiar, but none jumped out. Langdon now realized he would never complete his search before passing out, so he decided, against his better judgment, that he would have to take the book outside the vault.
It’s only a ledger
, he told himself.
It’s not like I’m removing an original Galilean folio
. Langdon recalled the folio in his breast pocket and reminded himself to return it before leaving.

Hurrying now, he reached down to lift the volume, but as he did, he saw something that gave him pause. Although there were numerous notations throughout the index, the one that had just caught his eye seemed odd.

The note indicated that the famous Bernini sculpture,
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa
, shortly after its unveiling, had been moved from its original location inside the Vatican. This in itself was not what had caught Langdon’s eye. He was already familiar with the sculpture’s checkered past. Though some thought it a masterpiece, Pope Urban VIII had rejected
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa
as too sexually explicit for the Vatican. He had banished it to some obscure chapel across town. What had caught Langdon’s eye was that the work had apparently been placed in one of the five churches on his list. What was more, the note indicated it had been moved there
per suggerimento del artista
.

By suggestion of the artist?
Langdon was confused. It made no sense that Bernini had suggested his masterpiece be hidden in some obscure location. All artists wanted their work displayed prominently, not in some remote—

Langdon hesitated.
Unless
. . .

He was fearful even to entertain the notion. Was it possible? Had Bernini intentionally created a work so explicit that it forced the Vatican to hide it in some out-of-the-way spot? A location perhaps that Bernini himself could suggest? Maybe a remote church on a direct line with
West Ponente
’s breath?

As Langdon’s excitement mounted, his vague familiarity with the statue intervened, insisting the work had nothing to do with
fire
. The sculpture, as anyone who had seen it could attest, was anything but scientific—
pornographic
maybe, but certainly not scientific. An English critic had once condemned
The
Ecstasy of St. Teresa
as “the most unfit ornament ever to be placed in a Christian Church.” Langdon certainly understood the controversy. Though brilliantly rendered, the statue depicted St. Teresa on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm. Hardly Vatican fare.