The Da Vinci Code Read Free Page B

did that to himself?
Langdon turned and looked out the window, forcing the picture from his mind.
    Outside, the city was just now winding down—street vendors wheeling carts of candied
amandes,
waiters carrying bags of garbage to the curb, a pair of late night lovers cuddling to stay warm in a breeze scented with jasmine blossom. The Citroën navigated the chaos with authority, its dissonant two-tone siren parting the traffic like a knife.
    “
Le capitaine
was pleased to discover you were still in Paris tonight,” the agent said, speaking for the first time since they'd left the hotel. “A fortunate coincidence.”
    Langdon was feeling anything but fortunate, and coincidence was a concept he did not entirely trust. As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events.
The connections may be invisible,
he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard,
but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.
    “I assume,” Langdon said, “that the American University of Paris told you where I was staying?”
    The driver shook his head. “Interpol.”
    Interpol,
Langdon thought.
Of course
. He had forgotten that the seemingly innocuous request of all European hotels to see a passport at check-in was more than a quaint formality—it was the law. On any given night, all across Europe, Interpol officials could pinpoint exactly who was sleeping where. Finding Langdon at the Ritz had probably taken all of five seconds.
    As the Citroën accelerated southward across the city, the illuminated profile of the Eiffel Tower appeared, shooting skyward in the distance to the right. Seeing it, Langdon thought of Vittoria, recalling their playful promise a year ago that every six months they would meet again at a different romantic spot on the globe. The Eiffel Tower, Langdon suspected, would have made their list. Sadly, he last kissed Vittoria in a noisy airport in Rome more than a year ago.
    “Did you mount her?” the agent asked, looking over.
    Langdon glanced up, certain he had misunderstood. “I beg your pardon?”
    “She is lovely, no?” The agent motioned through the windshield toward the Eiffel Tower. “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 Citroën 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 Citroën swerved left now, angling west down