Hannibal (23 page)

“And finally, here, from a fifteenth-century edition of the
Inferno
, is Pier della Vigna’s body hanging from a bleeding tree. I will not belabor the obvious parallel with Judas Iscariot.

“But Dante needed no drawn illustration: It is the genius of Dante Alighieri to make Pier della Vigna, now in Hell, speak in strained hisses and coughing sibilants as though he is hanging still. Listen to him as he tells of dragging, with the other damned, his own dead body to hang upon a thorn tree:

Dr. Lecter’s normally white face flushes as he creates for the Studiolo the gargling, choking words of the agonal Pier della Vigna, and as he thumbs his remote control, the images of della Vigna and Judas with his bowels out alternate on the large field of the hanging drop cloth.

“So Dante recalls, in sound, the death of Judas in the death of Pier della Vigna for the same crimes of avarice and treachery.

“Ahithophel, Judas, your own Pier della Vigna. Avarice, hanging, self-destruction, with avarice counting as self-destruction as much as hanging. And what does the anonymous Florentine suicide say in his torment at the end of the canto?

“And I—I made my own house be my gallows.

“On the next occasion you might like to discuss Dante’s son Pietro. Incredibly, he was the only one of the early writers on the thirteenth canto who links Pier della Vigna and Judas. I think, too, it would be interesting to take up the matter of chewing in Dante. Count Ugolino chewing on the back of the archbishop’s head, Satan with his three faces chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius, all betrayers like Pier della Vigna.

“Thank you for your kind attention.”

The scholars applauded him enthusiastically, in their soft and dusty way, and Dr. Lecter left the lights down as he said good-bye to them, each by name, holding books in his arms so he would not have to shake their hands. Going out of the soft light of the Salon of Lilies, they seemed to carry the spell of the lecture with them.

Dr. Lecter and Rinaldo Pazzi, alone now in the great chamber, could hear wrangling over the lecture break out among the scholars as they descended the stairs.

“Would you say that I saved my job,
Commendatore
?”

“I’m not a scholar, Dr. Fell, but anyone can see that you impressed them. Doctor, if it’s convenient for you, I’ll walk home with you and collect your predecessor’s effects.”

“They fill two suitcases,
Commendatore
, and you already have your briefcase. Do you want to carry them?”

“I’ll have a patrol car come for me at the Palazzo Capponi.” Pazzi would insist if necessary.

“Fine,” Dr. Lecter said. “I’ll be a minute, putting things away.”

Pazzi nodded and went to the tall windows with his cell phone, never taking his eyes off Lecter.

Pazzi could see that the doctor was perfectly calm. From the floors below came the sounds of power tools.

Pazzi dialed a number and when Carlo Deogracias answered, Pazzi said, “Laura,
amore
, I’ll be home very shortly.”

Dr. Lecter took his books off the podium and packed them in a bag. He turned to the projector, its fan still humming, dust swimming in its beam.

“I should have shown them this one, I can’t imagine how I missed it.” Dr. Lecter projected another drawing, a man naked hanging beneath the battlements of the palace. “This one will interest you,
Commendator
Pazzi, let me see if I can improve the focus.”

Dr. Lecter fiddled with the machine, and then he approached the image on the wall, his silhouette black on the cloth the same size as the hanged man.

“Can you make this out? It won’t enlarge any more. Here’s where the archbishop bit him. And beneath him is written his name.”

Pazzi did not get close to Dr. Lecter, but as he approached the wall he smelled a chemical, and thought for an instant it was something the restorers used.

“Can you make out the characters? It says ‘Pazzi’ along with a rude poem. This is your ancestor, Francesco, hanging outside the Palazzo Vecchio, beneath these windows,” Dr. Lecter said. He held Pazzi’s eyes across the beam of light between them.

“On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I’m giving serious thought to eating your wife.”

Dr. Lecter flipped the big drop cloth down over Pazzi, Pazzi flailing at the canvas, trying to uncover his head as
his heart flailed in his chest, and Dr. Lecter behind him fast, seizing him around the neck with terrible strength and clapping an ether-soaked sponge over the canvas covering Pazzi’s face.

Rinaldo Pazzi strong and thrashing, feet and arms tangled in the canvas, feet tangled in the cloth, he was still able to get his hand on his pistol as they fell to the floor together, tried to point the Beretta behind him under the smothering canvas, pulled the trigger and shot himself through the thigh as he sank into spinning black….

The little .380 going off beneath the canvas did not make much more noise than the banging and grinding on the floors below. No one came up the staircase. Dr. Lecter swung the great doors to the Salon of Lilies closed and bolted them….

A certain amount of nausea and gagging as Pazzi came back to consciousness, the taste of ether in his throat and a heaviness in his chest.

He found that he was still in the Salon of Lilies and discovered that he could not move. Rinaldo Pazzi was bound upright with the drop cloth canvas and rope, stiff as a grandfather clock, strapped to the tall hand truck the workers had used to move the podium. His mouth was taped. A pressure bandage stopped the bleeding of the gunshot wound in his thigh.

Watching him, leaning against the pulpit, Dr. Lecter was reminded of himself, similarly bound when they moved him around the asylum on a hand truck.

“Can you hear me, Signore Pazzi? Take some deep breaths while you can, and clear your head.”

Dr. Lecter’s hands were busy as he talked. He had
rolled a big floor polisher into the room and he was working with its thick orange power cord, tying a hangman’s noose in the plug end of the cord. The rubber-covered cord squeaked as he made the traditional thirteen wraps.

He completed the hangman’s noose with a tug and put it down on the pulpit. The plug protruded from the coils at the noose end.

Pazzi’s gun, his plastic handcuff strips, the contents of his pockets and briefcase were on top of the podium.

Dr. Lecter poked among the papers. He slipped into his shirtfront the Carabinieri’s file containing his
permesso di soggiorno
, his work permit, the photos and negatives of his new face.

And here was the musical score Dr. Lecter loaned Signora Pazzi. He picked up the score now and tapped his teeth with it. His nostrils flared and he breathed in deeply, his face close to Pazzi’s. “Laura, if I may call her Laura, must use a wonderful hand cream at night, Signore. Slick. Cold at first and then warm,” he said. “The scent of orange blossoms. Laura,
l’orange
. Ummmm. I haven’t had a bite all day. Actually, the liver and kidneys would be suitable for dinner right away—tonight—but the rest of the meat should hang a week in the current cool conditions. I did not see the forecast, did you? I gather that means ‘no.’

“If you tell me what I need to know,
Commendatore
, it would be convenient for me to leave without my meal; Signora Pazzi will remain unscathed. I’ll ask you the questions and then we’ll see. You can trust me, you know, though I expect you find trust difficult, knowing yourself.

“I saw at the theater that you had identified me,
Commendatore
.
Did you wet yourself when I bent over the Signora’s hand? When the police didn’t come, it was clear that you had sold me. Was it Mason Verger you sold me to? Blink twice for yes.

“Thank you, I thought so. I called the number on his ubiquitous poster once, far from here, just for fun. Are his men waiting outside? Umm hmmm. And one of them smells like tainted boar sausage? I see. Have you told anyone in the Questura about me? Was that a single blink? I thought so. Now, I want you to think a minute, and tell me your access code for the VICAP computer at Quantico.”

Dr. Lecter opened his Harpy knife. “I’m going to take your tape off and you can tell me.” Dr. Lecter held up his knife. “Don’t try to scream. Do you think you can keep from screaming?”

Pazzi was hoarse from the ether. “I swear to God I don’t know the code. I can’t think of the whole thing. We can go to my car, I have papers—”

Dr. Lecter wheeled Pazzi around to face the screen and flipped back and forth between his images of Pier della Vigna hanging, and Judas hanging with his bowels out.

“Which do you think,
Commendatore?
Bowels in or out?”

“The code’s in my notebook.”

Dr. Lecter held the book in front of Pazzi’s face until he found the notation, listed among telephone numbers.

“And you can log on remotely, as a guest?”

“Yes,” Pazzi croaked.

“Thank you,
Commendatore.”
Dr. Lecter tilted back the hand truck and rolled Pazzi to the great windows.

“Listen to me!
I have
money
, man! You’ll have to have
money
to run. Mason Verger will never quit. He’ll never quit. You can’t go home for
money
, they’re watching your house.”

Dr. Lecter put two boards from the scaffolding as a ramp over the low windowsill and rolled Pazzi on the hand truck out onto the balcony outside.

The breeze was cold on Pazzi’s wet face. Talking quickly now, “You’ll never get away from this building alive. I have
money
. I have
one hundred and sixty million lire
in cash, U.S. dollars
one hundred thousand!
Let me telephone my wife. I’ll tell her to get the money and put it in my car, and leave the car right in front of the Palazzo.”

Dr. Lecter retrieved his noose from the pulpit and carried it outside, trailing the orange cord behind him. The other end was tight in a series of hitches around the heavy floor polisher.

Pazzi was still talking. “She’ll call me on the cell phone when she’s outside, and then she’ll leave it for you. I have the police pass, she can drive right across the piazza to the entrance. She’ll do what I tell her. The car
smokes
, man, you can look down and see it’s running, the keys will be in it.”

Dr. Lecter tilted Pazzi forward against the balcony railing. The railing came to his thighs.

Pazzi could look down at the piazza and make out through the floodlights the spot where Savonarola was burned, where he had sworn to sell Dr. Lecter to Mason Verger. He looked up at the clouds scudding low, colored by the floodlights, and hoped, so much, that God could see.

Down is the awful direction and he could not help staring there, toward death, hoping against reason that the beams of the floodlights gave some substance to the air,
that they would somehow press on him, that he might snag on the light beams.

The orange rubber cover of the wire noose cold around his neck, Dr. Lecter standing so close to him.

“Arrivederci, Commendatore.”

Flash of the Harpy up Pazzi’s front, another swipe severed his attachment to the dolly and he was tilting, tipped over the railing trailing the orange cord, ground coming up in a rush, mouth free to scream, and inside the salon, the floor polisher rushed across the floor and slammed to a stop against the railing, Pazzi jerked head-up, his neck broke and his bowels fell out.

Pazzi and his appendage swinging and spinning before the rough wall of the floodlit palace, jerking in posthumous spasms but not choking, dead, his shadow thrown huge on the wall by the floodlights, swinging with his bowels swinging below him in a shorter, quicker arc, his manhood pointing out of his rent trousers in a death erection.

Carlo charging out of a doorway, Matteo beside him, across the piazza toward the entrance to the Palazzo, knocking tourists aside, two of whom had video cameras trained on the castle.

“It’s a trick,” someone said in English as he ran by.

“Matteo, cover the back door. If he comes out just kill him and cut him,” Carlo said, fumbling with his cell phone as he ran. Into the palazzo now, up the stairs to the first level, then the second.

The great doors of the salon stood ajar. Inside, Carlo swung his gun on the projected figure on the wall, ran out onto the balcony, searched Machiavelli’s office in seconds.

With his cell phone he reached Piero and Tommaso,
waiting with the van in front of the museum. “Get to his house, cover it front and back. Just kill him and cut him.”

Carlo dialed again. “Matteo?”

Matteo’s phone buzzed in his breast pocket as he stood, breathing hard, in front of the locked rear exit of the Palazzo. He had scanned the roof, and the dark windows, tested the door, his hand under his coat, on the pistol in his waistband.

He flipped open the phone.
“Pronto!”

“What do you see.”

“Door’s locked.”

“The roof?”

Matteo looked up again, but not in time to see the shutters open on the window above him.

Carlo heard a rustle and a cry in his telephone, and Carlo was running, down the stairs, falling on a landing, up again and running, past the guard before the palace entrance, who now stood outside, past the statues flanking the entrance, around the corner and pounding now toward the rear of the palace, scattering a few couples. Dark back here now, running, the cell phone squeaking like a small creature in his hand as he ran. A figure ran across the street in front of him shrouded in white, ran blindly in the path of a
motorino
, and the scooter knocked it down, the figure up again and crashing into the front of a shop across the narrow street of the palace, ran into the plate glass, turned and ran blindly, an apparition in white, screaming, “Carlo! Carlo,” great stains spreading on the ripped canvas covering him, and Carlo caught his brother in his arms, cut the plastic handcuff strip around his neck binding the canvas tight over his head, the canvas a mask of blood. Uncovered Matteo and found him ripped badly, across the face, across the abdomen, deeply enough
across the chest for the wound to suck. Carlo left him long enough to run to the corner and look both ways, then he came back to his brother.