Dantes' Inferno Read Free

breathing softened; he seemed almost asleep.
    Detective Church remained standing, shifting nervously on the balls of his feet. He murmured, “It’s scratched to all hell—but maybe something’s there.” His watchful stare landed on two ATF agents examining numbered evidence ten feet away. Would Sweetheart’s attendance be challenged? Fortunately, the professor’s presence was a badge of sorts.
    Church squatted down beside the bigger man and said, “The bomb came in a pretty package, but our perp—or perps—packed the casing with nails, scraps, made sure there was plenty of effective shrapnel, enough to rip the head off—”
    With horror, Church registered his own words, but he glanced swiftly at Sweetheart and saw no reaction. That blank face was worse than any display of rage, the detective thought, swallowing hard.
    After a moment, Church continued: “Until we reconstruct the device, this could be the work of a hundred different scumbags. The closest witnesses were kids—they’re totally freaked out. No usable descriptions, but the Bureau’s psychologist is going to keep working with them.”
    Sweetheart knew Church was talking; he paid scant attention. Instead he studied the rough lines on the cap, fairly certain now that they predated the explosion. Heallowed their arrangement to guide his thoughts, noting the associations triggered by familiar configurations that dissolved immediately into un familiarity; it was like gazing at the clouds overhead as they created form and identity, then evanesced, all in a matter of seconds. The complexity of communication was on his mind; almost daily he studied symbols as arranged to build language—from morphology to lexicon to syntax, the process of word formation, meaning, and structure in a larger context.
    Deftly, Sweetheart pulled a pencil and a small pad of paper from his jacket pocket. With his large body still perfectly balanced on the soles of his feet, he executed lines very slowly on the page. He reminded Church of a man playing a solitary game of hangman. Marks appeared in a pattern that seemed simultaneously random and ordered.
    Why the hell couldn’t he get it? Church wondered, looking closely at the end cap, studying the scratches until they did coalesce into a rough language, albeit one he didn’t comprehend.
    â€œC—a—n—t—o—l—l,” Sweetheart said deliberately.
    â€œWho the hell is Cantoll?”
    â€œTry what .”
    â€œI’ll bite.” Church nodded restlessly. “ What the hell is Cantoll?”
    â€œA letter, or a numeral, is missing, here at the end—where the metal was particularly twisted,” Sweetheart said, closing his eyes. “If we take canto , then we . . .” He ran his index finger through air, marking three strikes.
    Church shook his head, expelling frustration with a harsh whisper. “You lost me.”
    â€œIt’s famous poetry, Detective. The third canto,” Sweetheart said deliberately, as if speaking to a thick-skulled schoolboy. “‘Through me you enter into the woeful city, through me the way into eternal pain . . . ’ A workoriginally composed in fourteenth-century Italian, and posthumously retitled the Divine Comedy . In Commedia , the inscription over the gates to hell.”
    Sweetheart’s jet black hair was pulled back from his face; he fingered the knot with unadorned hands. As he waited, impatient for the obvious connection to be made, he turned to canvass the architecture of the building, in particular the graceful arched gate fronting the damaged terrace. His gaze moved with the linear curves, and the final line of the stanza returned to memory.
    â€œThrough me the way to the population of loss.”
    His mind—always running, mining data, sorting—made connections: a pipe bomb as antipersonnel signature device; a pattern of secondary