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“Wait, where are you going?”
“You can’t talk to the police half naked. I’m going to find you some clothes. My neighbor is about your size. He’s away, and I’m feeding his cat. He owes me.”
With that, Sienna was gone.
Robert Langdon turned back to the tiny mirror over the sink and barely recognized the person staring back at him. Someone wants me dead. In his mind, he again heard the recording of his own delirious mumblings.
Very sorry. Very sorry.
He probed his memory for some recollection … anything at all. He saw only emptiness. All Langdon knew was that he was in Florence, having suffered a bullet wound to the head.
As Langdon stared into his own weary eyes, he half wondered if he might at any moment wake up in his reading chair at home, clutching an empty martini glass and a copy of Dead Souls, only to remind himself that Bombay Sapphire and Gogol should never be mixed.
CHAPTER 7
LANGDON SHED HIS bloody hospital gown and wrapped a towel around his waist. After splashing water on his face, he gingerly touched the stitches on the back of his head. The skin was sore, but when he smoothed his matted hair down over the spot, the injury all but disappeared. The caffeine pills were kicking in, and he finally felt the fog beginning to lift.
Think, Robert. Try to remember.
The windowless bathroom was suddenly feeling claustrophobic, and Langdon stepped into the hall, moving instinctively toward a shaft of natural light that spilled through a partially open door across the corridor. The room was a makeshift study of sorts, with a cheap desk, a worn swivel chair, assorted books on the floor, and, thankfully … a window.
Langdon moved toward daylight.
In the distance, the rising Tuscan sun was just beginning to kiss the highest spires of the waking city—the campanile, the Badia, the Bargello. Langdon pressed his forehead to the cool glass. The March air was crisp and cold, amplifying the full spectrum of sunlight that now peeked up over the hillsides.
Painter’s light, they called it.
At the heart of the skyline, a mountainous dome of red tiles rose up, its zenith adorned with a gilt copper ball that glinted like a beacon. Il Duomo. Brunelleschi had made architectural history by engineering the basilica’s massive dome, and now, more than five hundred years later, the 375-foot-tall structure still stood its ground, an immovable giant on Piazza del Duomo.
Why would I be in Florence?
For Langdon, a lifelong aficionado of Italian art, Florence had become one of his favorite destinations in all of Europe. This was the city on whose streets Michelangelo played as a child, and in whose studios the Italian Renaissance had ignited. This was Florence, whose galleries lured millions of travelers to admire Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo’s Annunciation, and the city’s pride and joy—Il Davide.
Langdon had been mesmerized by Michelangelo’s David when he first saw it as a teenager … entering the Accademia delle Belle Arti … moving slowly through the somber phalanx of Michelangelo’s crude Prigioni … and then feeling his gaze dragged upward, inexorably, to the seventeen-foot-tall masterpiece. The David’s sheer enormity and defined musculature startled most first-time visitors, and yet for Langdon, it had been the genius of David’s pose that he found most captivating. Michelangelo had employed the classical tradition of contrapposto to create the illusion that David was leaning to his right, his left leg bearing almost no weight, when, in fact, his left leg was supporting tons of marble.
The David had sparked in Langdon his first true appreciation for the power of great sculpture. Now Langdon wondered if he had visited the masterpiece during the last several days, but the only memory he could conjure was that of awakening in the hospital and watching an innocent doctor murdered before his eyes. Very sorry. Very sorry.
The guilt he felt was almost nauseating. What have I done?
As he stood at the window, his peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a laptop computer sitting on the desk beside him. Whatever had happened to Langdon last night, he suddenly realized, might be in the news.
If I can access the Internet, I might find answers.
Langdon turned toward the doorway and called out: “Sienna?!”
Silence. She was still at the neighbor’s apartment looking for clothes.
Having no doubt Sienna would understand the intrusion, Langdon opened the laptop and powered it up.
Sienna’s home screen flickered to life—a standard Windows “blue cloud” background. Langdon immediately went to the Google Italia search page and typed in Robert Langdon.
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