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This morning, several hundred yards short of the gateway, Sienna had screeched to a stop and was now pointing in alarm. On the back of the Trike, Langdon looked ahead and immediately shared her apprehension. In front of them, a long line of cars idled at a full stop. Traffic in the rotary had been halted by a police barricade, and more police cars were now arriving. Armed officers were walking from car to car, asking questions.
That can’t be for us, Langdon thought. Can it?
A sweaty cyclist came pedaling toward them up the Viale Machiavelli away from the traffic. He was on a recumbent bike, his bare legs pumping out in front of him.
Sienna shouted out to him. “Cos’ è successo?”
“E chi lo sa!” he shouted back, looking concerned. “Carabinieri.” He hurried past, looking eager to clear the area.
Sienna turned to Langdon, her expression grim. “Roadblock. Military police.”
Sirens wailed in the distance behind them, and Sienna spun in her seat, staring back up the Viale Machiavelli, her face now masked with fear.
We’re trapped in the middle, Langdon thought, scanning the area for any exit at all—an intersecting road, a park, a driveway—but all he saw were private residences on their left and a high stone wall to their right.
The sirens grew louder.
“Up there,” Langdon urged, pointing thirty yards ahead to a deserted construction site where a portable cement mixer offered at least a little bit of cover.
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?”
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