"Have you mounted her?"
Langdon rolled his eyes. "No, I haven't climbed the tower."
"She is the symbol of France. I think she is perfect."
Langdon nodded absently. Symbologists often remarked that France— a country renowned
for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the
Short— could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus.
When they reached the intersection at Rue de Rivoli, the traffic light was red, but the
Citroen didn't slow. The agent gunned the sedan across the junction and sped onto a wooded
section of Rue Castiglione, which served as the northern entrance to the famed Tuileries
Gardens— Paris's own version of Central Park. Most tourists mistranslated Jardins des Tuileries
as relating to the thousands of tulips that bloomed here, but Tuileries was actually a literal
reference to something far less romantic. This park had once been an enormous, polluted
excavation pit from which Parisian contractors mined clay to manufacture the city's famous red
roofing tiles— or tuiles.
As they entered the deserted park, the agent reached under the dash and turned off the
blaring siren. Langdon exhaled, savoring the sudden quiet. Outside the car, the pale wash of
halogen headlights skimmed over the crushed gravel parkway, the rugged whir of the tires
intoning a hypnotic rhythm. Langdon had always considered the Tuileries to be sacred ground.
These were the gardens in which Claude Monet had experimented with form and color, and
literally inspired the birth of the Impressionist movement. Tonight, however, this place held a
strange aura of foreboding.
The Citroen swerved left now, angling west down the park's central boulevard. Curling
around a circular pond, the driver cut across a desolate avenue out into a wide quadrangle
beyond. Langdon could now see the end of the Tuileries Gardens, marked by a giant stone
archway.
Arc du Carrousel.
Despite the orgiastic rituals once held at the Arc du Carrousel, art aficionados revered this
place for another reason entirely. From the esplanade at the end of the Tuileries, four of the
finest art museums in the world could be seen... one at each point of the compass.
Out the right-hand window, south across the Seine and Quai Voltaire, Langdon could see
the dramatically lit facade of the old train station— now the esteemed Musée d'Orsay. Glancing
left, he could make out the top of the ultramodern Pompidou Center, which housed the Museum
of Modern Art. Behind him to the west, Langdon knew the ancient obelisk of Ramses rose above
the trees, marking the Musée du Jeu de Paume.
But it was straight ahead, to the east, through the archway, that Langdon could now see the
monolithic Renaissance palace that had become the most famous art museum in the world.
Musée du Louvre.
Langdon felt a familiar tinge of wonder as his eyes made a futile attempt to absorb the
entire mass of the edifice. Across a staggeringly expansive plaza, the imposing facade of the
Louvre rose like a citadel against the Paris sky. Shaped like an enormous horseshoe, the Louvre
was the longest building in Europe, stretching farther than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end.
Not even the million square feet of open plaza between the museum wings could challenge the
majesty of the facade's breadth. Langdon had once walked the Louvre's entire perimeter, an
astonishing three-mile journey.
Despite the estimated five days it would take a visitor to properly appreciate the 65,300
pieces of art in this building, most tourists chose an abbreviated experience Langdon referred to
as "Louvre Lite"— a full sprint through the museum to see the three most famous objects: the
Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. Art Buchwald had once boasted he'd seen all
three masterpieces in five minutes and fifty -six seconds.
The driver pulled out a handheld walkie-talkie and spoke in rapid -fire French. "Monsieur
Langdon est arriv é. Deux minutes."
An indecipherable confirmation came crackling back.
The agent stowed the device, turning now to Langdon. "You will meet the capitaine at the
main entrance."
The driver ignored the signs prohibiting auto traffic on the plaza, revved the engine, and
gunned the Citroen up over the curb. The Louvre's main entrance was visible now, rising boldly
in the distance, encircled by seven triangular pools from which spouted illuminated fountains.
La Pyramide.
The new entrance to the Paris Louvre had become almost as famous as the museum itself.
The controversial, neomodern glass pyramid designed by Chinese-born American architect I. M.
Pei still evoked scorn from traditionalists who felt it destroyed the dignity of the Renaissance
courtyard. Goethe had described architecture as frozen music, and Pei's critics described this
pyramid as fingernails on a chalkboard. Progressive admirers, though, hailed Pei's seventy-one-
foot-tall transparent pyramid as a dazzling synergy of ancient structure and modern method— a
symbolic link between the old and new— helping usher the Louvre into the next millennium.
"Do you like our pyramid?" the agent asked.
Langdon frowned. The French, it seemed, loved to ask Americans this. It was a loaded
question, of course. Admitting you liked the pyramid made you a tasteless American, and
expressing dislike was an insult to the French.
"Mitterrand was a bold man," Langdon replied, splitting the difference. The late French
president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from a "Pharaoh
complex." Singlehandedly responsible for filling Paris with Egyptian obelisks, art, and artifacts.
Francois Mitterrand had an affinity for Egyptian culture that was so all-consuming that the
French still referred to him as the Sphinx.
"What is the captain's name?" Langdon asked, changing topics.
"Bezu Fache," the driver said, approaching the pyramid's main entrance. "We call him le
Taureau."
Langdon glanced over at him, wondering if every Frenchman had a mysterious animal
epithet. "You call your captain the Bull?"
The man arched his eyebrows. "Your French is better than you admit, Monsieur Langdon."
My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good. Taurus was
always the bull. Astrology was a symbolic constant all over the world.
The agent pulled the car to a stop and pointed between two fountains to a large door in the
side of the pyramid. "There is the entrance. Good luck, monsieur."
"You're not coming?"
"My orders are to leave you here. I have other business to attend to."
Langdon heaved a sigh and climbed out. It's your circus.
The agent revved his engine and sped off.
As Langdon stood alone and watched the departing taillights, he realized he could easily
reconsider, exit the courtyard, grab a taxi, and head home to bed. Something told him it was
probably a lousy idea.
As he moved toward the mist of the fountains, Langdon had the uneasy sense he was
crossing an imaginary threshold into another world. The dreamlike quality of the evening was
settling around him again. Twenty minutes ago he had been asleep in his hotel room. Now he
was standing in front of a transparent pyramid built by the Sphinx, waiting for a policeman they
called the Bull.
I'm trapped in a Salvador Dali painting, he thought.
Langdon strode to the main entrance— an enormous revolving door. The foyer beyond was
dimly lit and deserted.
Do I knock?
Langdon wondered if any of Harvard's revered Egyptologists had ever knocked on the front
door of a pyramid and expected an answer. He raised his hand to bang on the glass, but out of
the darkness below, a figure appeared, striding up the curving staircase. The man was stocky and
dark, almost Neanderthal, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit that strained to cover his wide
shoulders. He advanced with unmistakable authority on squat, powerful legs. He was speaking
on his cell phone but finished the call as he arrived. He motioned for Langdon to enter.
"I am Bezu Fache," he announced as Langdon pushed through the revolving door. "Captain
of the Central Directorate Judicial Police." His tone was fitting— a guttural rumble... like a
gathering storm.
Langdon held out his hand to shake. "Robert Langdon."
Fache's enormous palm wrapped around Langdon's with crushing force.
"I saw the photo," Langdon said. "Your agent said Jacques Saunière himself did— "
"Mr. Langdon," Fache's ebony eyes locked on. "What you see in the photo is only the
beginning of what Saunière did."
CHAPTER 4
Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and
his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an
arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a
battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery
clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.
Langdon followed the captain down the famous marble staircase into the sunken atrium
beneath the glass pyramid. As they descended, they passed between two armed Judicial Police
guards with machine guns. The message was clear: Nobody goes in or out tonight without the
blessing of Captain Fache.
Descending below ground level, Langdon fought a rising trepidation. Fache's presence was
anything but welcoming, and the Louvre itself had an almost sepulchral aura at this hour. The
staircase, like the aisle of a dark movie theater, was illuminated by subtle tread-lighting
embedded in each step. Langdon could hear his own footsteps reverberating off the glass
overhead. As he glanced up, he could see the faint illuminated wisps of mist from the fountains
fading away outside the transparent roof.
"Do you approve?" Fache asked, nodding upward with his broad chin.
Langdon sighed, too tired to play games. "Yes, your pyramid is magnificent."
Fache grunted. "A scar on the face of Paris."
Strike one. Langdon sensed his host was a hard man to please. He wondered if Fache had
any idea that this pyramid, at President Mitterrand's explicit demand, had been constructed of
exactly 666 panes of glass— a bizarre request that had always been a hot topic among conspiracy
buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan.
Langdon decided not to bring it up.
As they dropped farther into the subterranean foyer, the yawning space slowly emerged
from the shadows. Built fifty-seven feet beneath ground level, the Louvre's newly constructed
70,000-square-foot lobby spread out like an endless grotto. Constructed in warm ocher marble to
be compatible with the honey-colored stone of the Louvre facade above, the subterranean hall
was usually vibrant with sunlight and tourists. Tonight, however, the lobby was barren and dark,
giving the entire space a cold and crypt-like atmosphere.
"And the museum's regular security staff?" Langdon asked.
"En quarantaine," Fache replied, sounding as if Langdon were questioning the integrity of
Fache's team. "Obviously, someone gained entry tonight who should not have. All Louvre night
wardens are in the Sully Wing being questioned. My own agents have taken over museum
security for the evening."
Langdon nodded, moving quickly to keep pace with Fache.
"How well did you know Jacques Saunière?" the captain asked.
"Actually, not at all. We'd never met."
Fache looked surprised. "Your first meeting was to be tonight?"
"Yes. We'd planned to meet at the American University reception following my lecture, but
he never showed up."
Fache scribbled some notes in a little book. As they walked, Langdon caught a glimpse of
the Louvre's lesser-known pyramid— La Pyramide Inversée— a huge inverted skylight that
hung from the ceiling like a stalactite in an adjoining section of the entresol. Fache guided
Langdon up a short set of stairs to the mouth of an arched tunnel, over which a sign read:
DENON. The Denon Wing was the most famous of the Louvre's three main sections.
"Who requested tonight's meeting?" Fache asked suddenly. "You or he?"
The question seemed odd. "Mr. Saunière did," Langdon replied as they entered the tunnel.
"His secretary contacted me a few weeks ago via e-mail. She said the curator had heard I would
be lecturing in Paris this month and wanted to discuss something with me while I was here."
"Discuss what?"
"I don't know. Art, I imagine. We share similar interests."
Fache looked skeptical. "You have no idea what your meeting was about?"
Langdon did not. He'd been curious at the time but had not felt comfortable demanding
specifics. The venerated Jacques Saunière had a renowned penchant for privacy and granted very
few meetings; Langdon was grateful simply for the opportunity to meet him.
"Mr. Langdon, can you at least guess what our murder victim might have wanted to discuss
with you on the night he was killed? It might be helpful."
The pointedness of the question made Langdon uncomfortable. "I really can't imagine. I
didn't ask. I felt honored to have been contacted at all. I'm an admirer of Mr. Saunière's work. I
use his texts often in my classes."
Fache made note of that fact in his book.
The two men were now halfway up the Denon Wing's entry tunnel, and Langdon could see
