Hannibal (24 page)

With sirens approaching, flashing lights filling the Piazza Signoria, Dr. Hannibal Lecter shot his cuffs and strolled up to
a gelateria
in the nearby Piazza de Giudici. Motorcycles and
motorinos
were lined up at the curb.

He approached a young man in racing leathers starting a big Ducati.

“Young man, I am desperate,” he said with a rueful smile. “If I am not at the Piazza Bellosguardo in ten minutes, my wife will kill me,” he said, showing the young man a fifty-thousand-lire note. “This is what my life is worth to me.”

“That’s all you want? A ride?” the young man said.

Dr. Lecter showed him his open hands. “A ride.”

The fast motorcycle split the lines of traffic on the Lungarno, Dr. Lecter hunched behind the young rider, a spare helmet that smelled like hairspray and perfume on his head. The rider knew where he was going, peeling off the Via de’ Serragli toward the Piazza Tasso, and out the Via Villani, hitting the tiny gap beside the Church of San Francesco di Paola that leads into the winding road up to Bellosguardo, the fine residential district on the hill overlooking Florence from the south. The big Ducati engine echoed off the stone walls lining the road with a sound like ripping canvas, pleasing to Dr. Lecter as he leaned into the curves and coped with the smell of hairspray and inexpensive perfume in his helmet. He had the young man drop him off at the entrance to the Piazza Bellosguardo, not far from the home of Count Montauto, where Nathaniel Hawthorne had lived. The rider tucked his wages in the breast pocket of his leathers and the taillight
of the motorcycle receded fast down the winding road.

Dr. Lecter, exhilarated by his ride, walked another forty meters to the black Jaguar, retrieved the keys from behind the bumper and started the engine. He had a slight fabric burn on the heel of his hand where his glove had ridden up as he flung the canvas drop cloth over Matteo and leaped down on him from the first-floor Palazzo window. He put a dab of the Italian antibacterial unguent Cicatrine on it and it felt better at once.

Dr. Lecter searched among his music tapes as the engine warmed. He decided on Scarlatti.

T
HE TURBOPROP
air ambulance lifted over the red tile roofs and banked southwest toward Sardinia, the Leaning Tower of Pisa poking above the wing in a turn steeper than the pilot would have made if he carried a living patient.

The stretcher intended for Dr. Hannibal Lecter held instead the cooling body of Matteo Deogracias. Older brother Carlo sat beside the corpse, his clothing stiff with blood.

Carlo Deogracias made the medical attendant put on earphones and turn up the music while he spoke on his cell phone to Las Vegas, where a blind encryption repeater relayed his call to the Maryland shore….

For Mason Verger, night and day are much the same. He happened to be sleeping. Even the aquarium lights were off. Mason’s head was turned on the pillow, his single eye ever open like the eyes of the great eel, which was
sleeping too. The only sounds were the regular hiss and sigh of the respirator, the soft bubbling of the aerator in the aquarium.

Above these constant noises came another sound, soft and urgent. The buzzing of Mason’s most private telephone. His pale hand walked on its fingers like a crab to push the telephone button. The speaker was under his pillow, the microphone near the ruin of his face.

First Mason heard the airplane in the background and then a cloying tune, “
Gli Innamorati.”

“I’m here. Tell me.”

“It’s a bloody
casino
,” Carlo said.

“Tell me.”

“My brother Matteo is dead. I have my hand on him now. Pazzi’s dead too. Dr. Fell killed them and got away.”

Mason did not reply at once.

“You owe two hundred thousand dollars for Matteo,” Carlo said. “For his family.” Sardinian contracts always call for death benefits.

“I understand that.”

“The shit will fly about Pazzi.”

“Better to get it out that Pazzi was dirty,” Mason said. “They’ll take it better if he’s dirty. Was he dirty?”

“Except for this, I don’t know. What if they trace from Pazzi back to you?”

“I can take care of that.”

“I have to take care of
myself
,” Carlo said. “This is too much. A chief inspector of the Questura dead, I can’t buy out of that.”

“You didn’t do anything, did you?”

“We did nothing, but if the Questura put my name in this—
dirty Madonna!
They’ll watch me for the rest of my life. Nobody will take fees from me, I won’t be able to
break wind on the street. What about Oreste? Did he know who he was supposed to film?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The Questura will have Dr. Fell identified by tomorrow or the next day. Oreste will put it together as soon as he sees the news, just from the timing.”

“Oreste is well paid. Oreste is harmless to us.”

“Maybe to you, but Oreste is facing a judge in a pornography case in Rome next month. Now he has a thing to trade. If you don’t know that already you should kick some ass. You got to have Oreste?”

“I’ll talk with Oreste,” Mason said carefully, the rich tones of a radio announcer coming from his ravaged face. “Carlo, are you still game? You
want
to find Dr. Fell now, don’t you? You
have
to find him for Matteo.”

“Yes, but at your expense.”

“Then keep the farm going. Get certified swine flu and cholera inoculations for the pigs. Get shipping crates for them. You have a good passport?”

“Yes.”

“I mean a
good
one, Carlo, not some upstairs Trastevere crap.”

“I have a good one.”

“You’ll hear from me.”

Ending his connection in the droning airplane, Carlo inadvertently pushed the auto dial on his cell phone. Matteo’s telephone beeped loudly in his dead hand, still held in the steely grip of cadaveric spasm. For an instant Carlo thought his brother would raise the telephone to his ear. Dully, seeing that Matteo could not answer, Carlo pushed his hang-up button. His face contorted and the medical attendant could not look at him.

T
HE
D
EVIL’S
Armor with its horned helmet is a splendid suit of fifteenth-century Italian armor that has hung high on the wall in the village church of Santa Reparata south of Florence since 1501. In addition to the graceful horns, shaped like those of the chamois, the pointed gauntlet cuffs are stuck where shoes should be, at the ends of the greaves, suggesting the cloven hooves of Satan.

According to the local legend, a young man wearing the armor took the name of the Virgin in vain as he passed the church, and found that afterward he could not take his armor off until he beseeched the Virgin for forgiveness. He gave the armor to the church as a gift of thanksgiving. It is an impressive presence and it honored its proof marks when an artillery shell burst in the church in 1942.

The armor, its upper surfaces covered with a feltlike coating of dust, looks down on the small sanctuary now as Mass is being completed. Incense rises, passes through the empty visor.

Only three people are in attendance, two elderly women, both dressed in black, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter. All three take Communion, though Dr. Lecter touches his lips to the cup with some reluctance.

The priest completes the benediction and withdraws. The women depart. Dr. Lecter continues his devotions until he is alone in the sanctuary.

From the organ loft, Dr. Lecter can just reach over the railing and, leaning between the horns, raise the dusty visor on the helmet of the Devil’s Armor. Inside, a fishhook over the lip of the gorget suspends a string and a package hanging inside the cuirass where the heart would be. Carefully, Dr. Lecter draws it out.

A package: passports of the best Brazilian manufacture, identification, cash, bankbooks, keys. He puts it under his arm beneath his coat.

Dr. Lecter does not indulge much in regret, but he was sorry to be leaving Italy. There were things in the Palazzo Capponi that he would have liked to find and read. He would have liked to play the clavier and perhaps compose; he might have cooked for the Widow Pazzi, when she overcame her grief.

W
HILE BLOOD
still fell from the hanging body of Rinaldo Pazzi to fry and smoke on the hot floodlights beneath Palazzo Vecchio, the police summoned the fire department to get him down.

The
pompieri
used an extension on their ladder truck. Ever practical, and certain the hanged man was dead, they took their time retrieving Pazzi. It was a delicate process requiring them to boost the dangling viscera up to the body and wrap netting around the whole mass, before attaching a line to lower him to the ground.

As the body reached the upstretched arms of those on the ground,
La Nazione
got an excellent picture that reminded many readers of the great Deposition paintings.

The police left the noose in place until it could be fingerprinted, and then cut the stout electrical cord in the center of the noose to preserve the integrity of the knot.

Many Florentines were determined that the death be a spectacular suicide, deciding that Rinaldo Pazzi bound his own hands in the manner of a jail suicide, and ignoring
the fact that the feet were also bound. In the first hour, local radio reported Pazzi had committed hara-kiri with a knife in addition to hanging himself

The police knew better at once—the severed bonds on the balcony and the hand truck, Pazzi’s missing gun, eyewitness accounts of Carlo running into the Palazzo and the bloody shrouded figure running blindly behind the Palazzo Vecchio told them Pazzi was murdered.

Then the Italian public decided
I
I
Mostró
had killed Pazzi.

The Questura began with the wretched Girolamo Tocca, once convicted of being
I
I
Mostró
. They seized him at home and drove away with his wife once again howling in the road. His alibi was solid. He was drinking a Ramazzotti at a café in sight of a priest at the time. Tocca was released in Florence and had to return to San Casciano by bus, paying his own fare.

The staff at Palazzo Vecchio were questioned in the first hours, and the questioning spread through the membership of the Studiolo.

The police could not locate Dr. Fell. By noon on Saturday close attention was brought to bear on him. The Questura recalled that Pazzi had been assigned to investigate the disappearance of Fell’s predecessor.

A clerk at the Carabinieri reported Pazzi in recent days had examined a
permesso di soggiorno
. Fell’s records, including his photographs, attached negatives and fingerprints, were signed out to a false name in what appeared to be Pazzi’s handwriting. Italy has not yet computerized its records nationwide and the
permessos
are still held at the local level.

Immigration records yielded Fell’s passport number, which rang the lemons in Brazil.

Still, the police did not beep to Dr. Fell’s true identity. They took fingerprints from the coils of the hangman’s noose and fingerprints from the podium, the hand truck and from the kitchen at the Palazzo Capponi. With plenty of artists available, a sketch of Dr. Fell was prepared in minutes.

By Sunday morning, Italian time, a fingerprint examiner in Florence had laboriously, point by point, determined that the same fingerprints were on the podium, the noose, and Dr. Fell’s kitchen utensils at the Palazzo Capponi.

The thumbprint of Hannibal Lecter, on the poster hanging in Questura headquarters, was not examined.

The fingerprints from the crime scene went to Interpol on Sunday night, and arrived as a matter of course at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., along with seven thousand other sets of crime scene prints. Submitted to the automated fingerprint classification system, the fingerprints from Florence registered a hit of such magnitude that an audible alarm sounded in the office of the assistant director in charge of the Identification section. The night duty officer watched the face and fingers of Hannibal Lecter crawl out of the printer, and called the assistant director at home, who called the director first, and then Krendler at Justice.

Mason’s telephone rang at l:30
A.M.
He acted surprised and interested.

Jack Crawford’s telephone rang at l:35. He grunted several times and rolled over to the empty, haunted side of his marriage bed where his late wife, Bella, used to be. It was cool there and he seemed to think better.

Clarice Starling was the last to know that Dr. Lecter
had killed again. After she hung up the phone, she lay still for many minutes in the dark and her eyes stung for some reason she did not understand, but she did not cry From her pillow looking up, she could see his face on the swarming dark. It was Dr. Lecter’s old face, of course.

T
HE PILOT
of the air ambulance would not go into the short, uncontrolled airfield at Arbatax in darkness. They landed at Cagliari, refueled and waited until daylight, and flew up the coast in a spectacular sunrise that gave a false pink cast to Matteo’s dead face.

A truck with a coffin was waiting at the Arbatax airstrip. The pilot argued about money and Tommaso stepped in before Carlo slapped his face.

Three hours into the mountains and they were home.

Carlo wandered alone to the rough timber shed he had built with Matteo. All was ready there, the cameras in place to film Lecter’s death. Carlo stood beneath the work of Matteo’s hands and looked at himself in the great rococo mirror above the animal pen. He looked around at the timbers they had sawn together, he thought of Matteo’s great square hands on the saw and a great cry escaped him, a cry from his anguished heart loud enough to ring off the trees. Tusked faces appeared from the brush of the mountain pasture.

Piero and Tommaso, brothers themselves, left him alone.