Hannibal (15 page)

Rinaldo Pazzi scanned the room and did not see anyone he recognized as Dr. Fell, even though he had examined a photograph of the man not an hour before. He did not see Dr. Fell because the doctor was not seated with the others. Pazzi heard his voice first, then located him.

Dr. Fell stood very still beside the great bronze statue of Judith and Holofernes, giving his back to the speaker and the crowd. He spoke without turning around and it was hard to know which figure the voice came from— Judith, her sword forever raised to strike the drunken king, or Holofernes, gripped by the hair, or Dr. Fell, slender and still beside Donatello’s bronze figures. His voice cut through the din like a laser through smoke and the squabbling men fell silent.

“Cavalcanti replied publicly to Dante’s first sonnet in
La Vita Nuova
, where Dante describes his strange dream of Beatrice Portinari,” Dr. Fell said. “Perhaps Cavalcanti
commented privately as well. If he wrote to a Capponi, it would be to Andrea, he was more literary than his brothers.” Dr. Fell turned to face the group in his own time, after an interval uncomfortable to everyone but him. “Do you know Dante’s first sonnet, Professor Sogliato?
Do
you? It fascinated Cavalcanti and it’s worth your time. In part it says:

“Listen to the way he makes an instrument of the Italian vernacular, what he called the
vulgari eloquentia
of the people:

Even the most contentious Florentines could not resist the verse of Dante ringing off these frescoed walls in Dr. Fell’s clear Tuscan. First applause, and then by wet-eyed
acclamation, the memberships affirmed Dr. Fell as master of the Palazzo Capponi, leaving Sogliato to fume. If the victory pleased the doctor, Pazzi could not tell, for he turned his back again. But Sogliato was not quite through.

“If he is such an expert on Dante, let him lecture on Dante,
to the Studiolo.”
Sogliato hissed the name as though it were the Inquisition. “Let him face them
extempore
, next Friday if he can.” The Studiolo, named for an ornate private study, was a small, fierce group of scholars who had ruined a number of academic reputations and met often in the Palazzo Vecchio. Preparing for them was regarded as a considerable chore, appearing before them a peril. Sogliato’s uncle seconded his motion and Sogliato’s brother-in-law called for a vote, which his sister recorded in the minutes. It passed. The appointment stood, but Dr. Fell must satisfy the Studiolo to keep it.

The committees had a new curator for the Palazzo Capponi, they did not miss the old curator, and they gave the disgraced Pazzi’s questions about the missing man short shrift. Pazzi held up admirably.

Like any good investigator, he had sifted the circumstances for profit. Who would benefit from the old curator’s disappearance? The missing curator was a bachelor, a well-respected quiet scholar with an orderly life. He had some savings, nothing much. All he had was his job and with it the privilege of living in the attic of the Palazzo Capponi.

Here was the new appointee, confirmed by the board after close questioning on Florentine history and archaic Italian. Pazzi had examined Dr. Fell’s application forms and his National Health affidavits.

Pazzi approached him as the board members were packing their briefcases to go home.

“Dr. Fell.”

“Yes,
Commendatore
?”

The new curator was small and sleek. His glasses were smoked in the top half of the lenses and his dark clothing beautifully cut, even for Italy.

“I was wondering if you ever met your predecessor?” An experienced policeman’s antennae are tuned to the bandwidth of fear. Watching Dr. Fell carefully, Pazzi registered absolute calm.

“I never met him. I read several of his monographs in the
Nuova Antologia
.” The doctor’s conversational Tuscan was as clear as his recitation. If there was a trace of an accent, Pazzi could not place it.

“I know that the officers who first investigated checked the Palazzo Capponi for any sort of note, a farewell note, a suicide note, and found nothing. If you come upon anything in the papers, anything personal, even if it’s trivial, would you call me?”

“Of course,
Commendator Pazzi
.”

“Are his personal effects still at the Palazzo?”

“Packed in two suitcases, with an inventory.”

“I’ll send—I’ll come by and pick them up.”

“Would you call me first,
Commendatore?
I can disarm the security system before you arrive, and save you time.”

The man is too calm. Properly, he should fear me a little. He asks me to call him before coming by
.

The committee had ruffled Pazzi’s feathers. He could do nothing about that. Now he was piqued by this man’s presumption. He piqued back.

“Dr. Fell, may I ask you a personal question?”

“If your duty requires it,
Commendatore.”

“You have a relatively new scar on the back of your left hand.”

“And you have a new wedding ring on yours:
La Vita Nuova
?” Dr. Fell smiled. He has small teeth, very white. In Pazzi’s instant of surprise, before he could decide to be offended, Dr. Fell held up his scarred hand and went on: “Carpal tunnel syndrome,
Commendatore
. History is a hazardous profession.”

“Why didn’t you declare carpal tunnel syndrome on your National Health forms when you came to work here?”

“My impression was,
Commendatore
, that injuries are relevant only if one is receiving disability payments; I am not. Nor am I disabled.”

“The surgery was in Brazil, then, your country of origin.”

“It was not in Italy, I received nothing from the Italian government,” Dr. Fell said, as though he believed he had answered completely.

They were the last to leave the council room. Pazzi had reached the door when Dr. Fell called to him.

“
Commendator
Pazzi?”

Dr. Fell was a black silhouette against the tall windows. Behind him in the distance rose the Duomo.

“Yes?”

“I think you are a Pazzi of the Pazzi, am I correct?”

“Yes. How did you know that?” Pazzi would consider a reference to recent newspaper coverage rude in the extreme.

“You resemble a figure from the Della Robbia rondels in your family’s chapel at Santa Croce.”

“Ah, that was Andrea de’ Pazzi depicted as John the
Baptist,” Pazzi said, a small slick of pleasure on his acid heart.

When Rinaldo Pazzi left the slender figure standing in the council room, his lasting impression was of Dr. Fell’s extraordinary stillness.

He would add to that impression very soon.

N
OW THAT
ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?

In Florence it was the exposition called Atrocious Torture Instruments, and it was here that Rinaldo Pazzi next encountered Dr. Fell.

The exhibit, featuring more than twenty classic instruments of torture with extensive documentation, was mounted in the forbidding Forte di Belvedere, a sixteenth-century Medici stronghold that guards the city’s south wall. The expo opened to enormous, unexpected crowds; excitement leaped like a trout in the public trousers.

The scheduled run was a month; Atrocious Torture Instruments ran for six months, equaling the draw of the Uffizi Museum and outdrawing the Pitti Palace Museum.

The promoters, two failed taxidermists who formerly
got along by eating offal from the trophies they mounted, became millionaires and made a triumphal tour of Europe with their show, wearing their new tuxedos.

The visitors came in couples, mostly, from all over Europe, taking advantage of the extended hours to file among the engines of pain, and read carefully in any of four languages the provenance of the devices and how to use them. Illustrations by Dürer and others, along with contemporary diaries, enlightened the crowds on matters such as the finer points of wheeling.

The English from one placard:

The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.

In the semidarkness of this great stone room, beneath the lit, hanging cages of the damned, stood Dr. Fell, connoisseur of facial cheeses, holding his spectacles in his
scarred hand, the tip of an earpiece against his lips, his face rapt as he watched the people file through.

Rinaldo Pazzi saw him there.

Pazzi was on his second menial errand of the day. Instead of having dinner with his wife, he was pushing through the crowd to post new warnings to couples about the Monster of Florence, whom he had failed to catch. Such a warning poster was prominent over his own desk, placed there by his new superiors, along with other wanted posters from around the world.

The taxidermists, watching the box office together, were happy to add a bit of contemporary horror to their show, but asked Pazzi to put up the poster himself, as neither seemed willing to leave the other alone with the cash. A few locals recognized Pazzi and hissed him from the anonymity of the crowd.

Pazzi pushed pins through the corners of the blue poster, with its single staring eye, on a bulletin board near the exit where it would attract the most attention, and turned on a picture light above it. Watching the couples leaving, Pazzi could see that many were in estrus, rubbing against each other in the crowd at the exit. He did not want to see another tableau, no more blood and flowers.

Pazzi did want to speak to Dr. Fell—it would be convenient to pick up the missing curator’s effects while he was this near the Palazzo Capponi. But when Pazzi turned from the bulletin board, the doctor was gone. He was not in the crowd at the exit. There was only the stone wall where he had stood, beneath the hanging starvation cage with its skeleton in a fetal curve still pleading to be fed.

Pazzi was annoyed. He pushed through the crowd until he was outside, but did not find the doctor.

The guard at the exit recognized Pazzi and said nothing when he stepped over the rope and walked off the path, onto the dark grounds of the Forte di Belvedere. He went to the parapet, looking north across the Arno. Old Florence was at his feet, the great hump of the Duomo, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rising in light.

Pazzi was a very old soul, writhing on a spike of ridiculous circumstance. His city mocked him.

The American FBI had given the knife a final twist in Pazzi’s back, saying in the press that the FBI profile of
Il Mostró
had been nothing like the man Pazzi arrested.
La Nazione
added that Pazzi had “railroaded Tocca off to prison.”

The last time Pazzi had put up the blue
Il Mostró
poster was in America; it was a proud trophy he hung on the wall of Behavioral Science, and he had signed it at the request of the American FBI agents. They knew all about him, admired him, invited him. He and his wife had been guests on the Maryland shore.

Standing at the dark parapet, looking over his ancient city, he smelled the salt air off the Chesapeake, saw his wife on the shore in her new white sneakers.

There was a picture of Florence in Behavioral Science at Quantico, shown him as a curiosity. It was the same view he was seeing now, old Florence from the Belvedere, the best view there is. But not in color. No, a pencil drawing, shaded with charcoal. The drawing was in a photograph, in the background of a photograph. It was a photograph of the American serial murderer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal the Cannibal. Lecter had drawn Florence from memory and the drawing was hanging in his cell in the asylum, a place as grim as this.

When did it fall on Pazzi, the ripening idea? Two images,
the real Florence lying before him, and the drawing he recalled. Placing the poster of
Il Mostro
minutes ago. Mason Verger’s poster of Hannibal Lecter on his own office wall with its huge reward and its advisories:

DR. LECTER WILL HAVE TO CONCEAL HIS LEFT HAND AND MAY ATTEMPT TO HAVE IT SURGICALLY ALTERED, AS HIS TYPE OF POLYDACTYLY, THE APPEARANCE OF PERFECT EXTRA FINGERS, IS EXTREMELY RARE AND INSTANTLY IDENTIFIABLE
.

Dr. Fell holding his glasses to his lips with his scarred hand.

A detailed sketch of this view on the wall of Hannibal Lecter’s cell.

Did the idea come to Pazzi while he was looking at the city of Florence beneath him, or out of the swarming dark above the lights? And why was its harbinger a scent of the salt breeze off the Chesapeake?

Oddly for a visual man, the connection arrived with a sound, the sound a drop would make as it lands in a thickening pool.