Dan Brown - Inferno

Brüder looked around but saw no secret window. He marched over and read the placard himself.

Apparently this space had once been the private study of Duchess Bianca Cappello and included a secret window— una finestra segrata —through which Bianca could covertly watch her husband deliver speeches down below in the Hall of the Five Hundred.

Brüder’s eyes searched the room again, now locating a small lattice-covered opening discreetly hidden in the sidewall. Did they escape through there?

He stalked over and examined the opening, which appeared to be too small for someone of Langdon’s size to get through. Brüder pressed his face to the grid and peered through, confirming for certain that nobody had escaped this way; on the other side of the lattice was a sheer drop, straight down several stories, to the floor of the Hall of the Five Hundred.

So where the hell did they go?!

As Brüder turned back in to the tiny stone chamber, he felt all of the day’s frustration mounting within him. In a rare moment of unrestrained emotion, Agent Brüder threw back his head and let out a bellow of rage.

The noise was deafening in the tiny space.

Far below, in the Hall of the Five Hundred, tourists and police officers all spun and stared up at the latticed opening high on the wall. From the sounds of things, the duchess’s secret study was now being used to cage a wild animal.

Sienna Brooks and Robert Langdon stood in total darkness.

Minutes earlier, Sienna had watched Langdon cleverly use the chain to seal the rotating map of Armenia, then turn and flee.

To her surprise, however, instead of heading down the corridor, Langdon had gone up the steep staircase that had been marked USCITA VIETATA.

“Robert!” she whispered in confusion. “The sign said ‘No Exit’! And besides, I thought we wanted to go down !”

“We do,” Langdon said, glancing over his shoulder. “But sometimes you need to go up … to go down.” He gave her an encouraging wink. “Remember Satan’s navel?”

What is he talking about? Sienna bounded after him, feeling lost.

“Did you ever read Inferno ?” Langdon asked.

Yes … but I think I was seven.

An instant later, it dawned on her. “Oh, Satan’s navel!” she said. “Now I remember.”

It had taken a moment, but Sienna now realized that Langdon was referring to the finale of Dante’s Inferno . In these cantos, in order to escape hell, Dante has to climb down the hairy stomach of the massive Satan, and when he reaches Satan’s navel — the alleged center of the earth — the earth’s gravity suddenly switches directions, and Dante, in order to continue climbing down to purgatory … suddenly has to start climbing up .

Sienna remembered little of the Inferno other than her disappointment in witnessing the absurd actions of gravity at the center of the earth; apparently Dante’s genius did not include a grasp of the physics of vector forces.

They reached the top of the stairs, and Langdon opened the lone door they found there; on it was written: SALA DEI MODELLI DI ARCHITETTURA.

Langdon ushered her inside, closing and bolting the door behind them.

The room was small and plain, containing a series of cases that displayed wooden models of Vasari’s architectural designs for the interior of the palazzo. Sienna barely noticed the models. She did, however, notice that the room had no doors, no windows, and, as advertised … no exit.

“In the mid-1300s,” Langdon whispered, “the Duke of Athens assumed power in the palace and built this secret escape route in case he was attacked. It’s called the Duke of Athens Stairway, and it descends to a tiny escape hatch on a side street. If we can get there, nobody will see us exit.” He pointed to one of the models. “Look. See it there on the side?”

He brought me up here to show me models?

Sienna shot an anxious glance at the miniature and saw the secret staircase descending all the way from the top of the palace down to street level, stealthily hidden between the inner and outer walls of the building.

“I can see the stairs, Robert,” Sienna said testily, “but they are on the complete opposite side of the palace. We’ll never get over there!”

“A little faith,” he said with a lopsided grin.

A sudden crash emanating from downstairs told them that the map of Armenia had just been breached. They stood stone-still as they listened to the footfalls of soldiers departing down the corridor, none of them ever thinking that their quarry would climb higher still … especially up a tiny staircase marked NO EXIT.

When the sounds below had subsided, Langdon strode with confidence across the exhibit room, snaking through the displays, heading directly for what looked like a large cupboard in the far wall. The cupboard was about one yard square and positioned three feet off the floor. Without hesitation, Langdon grabbed the handle and heaved open the door.

Sienna recoiled with surprise.

The space within appeared to be a cavernous void … as if the cupboard door were a portal into another world. Beyond was only blackness.

“Follow me,” Langdon said.

He grabbed a lone flashlight that was hanging on the wall beside the opening. Then, with surprising agility and strength, the professor hoisted himself up through the opening and disappeared into the rabbit hole.

La Soffitta , langdon thought. The most dramatic attic on earth.

The air inside the void smelled musty and ancient, as if centuries of plaster dust had now become so fine and light that it refused to settle and instead hung suspended in the atmosphere. The vast space creaked and groaned, giving Langdon the sense that he had just climbed into the belly of a living beast.

Once he had found solid footing on a broad horizontal truss chord, he raised his flashlight, letting the beam pierce the darkness.

Spreading out before him was a seemingly endless tunnel, crisscrossed by a wooden web of triangles and rectangles formed by the intersections of posts, beams, chords, and other structural elements that made up the invisible skeleton of the Hall of the Five Hundred.

This enormous attic space was one Langdon had viewed during his Nebbiolo-fogged secret passages tour a few years ago. The cupboardlike viewing window had been cut in the wall of the architectural-model room so visitors could inspect the models of the truss work and then peer through the opening with a flashlight and see the real thing.

Now that Langdon was actually inside the garret, he was surprised by how much the truss architecture resembled that of an old New England barn — traditional king post-and-strut assembly with “Jupiter’s arrow point” connections.

Sienna had also climbed through the opening and now steadied herself on the beam beside him, looking disoriented. Langdon swung the flashlight back and forth to show her the unusual landscape.

From this end, the view down the length of the garret was like peering through a long line of isosceles triangles that telescoped into the distance, extending out toward some distant vanishing point. Beneath their feet, the garret had no floorboards, and its horizontal supporting beams were entirely exposed, resembling a series of massive railroad ties.

Langdon pointed straight down the long shaft, speaking in hushed tones. “This space is directly over the Hall of the Five Hundred. If we can get to the other end, I know how to reach the Duke of Athens Stairway.”

Sienna cast a skeptical eye into the labyrinth of beams and supports that stretched before them. The only apparent way to advance through the garret would be to jump between the struts like kids on a train track. The struts were large — each consisting of numerous beams strapped together with wide iron clasps into a single powerful sheaf — plenty large enough to balance on. The challenge, however, was that the separation between the struts was much too far to leap across safely.