Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

Carlo threw his head back and took a deep breath. “Piero, andiamo! Tu, Tommaso, rimani.”

Tommaso took his seat in the cane chair beside the door.

“I’ve got it under control, Mason,” Margot said to the camera.

“I’ll want to bring his nose with me back to the house. Tell Carlo,” Mason said. The screen went dark. Moving out of his room was a major effort for Mason and the people around him, requiring reconnection of his tubes to containers on his traveling gurney and switching over his hard-shell respirator to an AC power pack.

Margot looked into Dr. Lecter’s face.

His injured eye was swollen shut between the black burn marks the electrodes had left at each end of his eyebrow.

Dr. Lecter opened his good eye. He was able to keep the cool feeling of Venus’ marble flank on his face.

“I like the smell of that liniment, it smells cool and lemony,” Dr. Lecter said. “Thank you for coming, Margot.”

“That’s exactly what you said to me when the matron brought me into your office the first day. When they were doing presentencing on Mason the first time.”

“Is that what I said?” Having just returned from the memory palace where he read over his interviews with Margot, he knew it to be so.

“Yes. I was crying, dreading to tell you about Mason and me. I was dreading having to sit down too. But you never asked me to sit—you knew I had stitches, didn’t you? We walked in the garden. Do you remember what you told me?”

“You were no more at fault for what happened to you—”

“‘;—than if I had been bitten on the behind by a mad dog’ was what you said. You made it easy for me then, and the other visits too, and I appreciated it for a while.”

“What else did I tell you?”

“You said you were much weirder than I would ever be,” she said. “You said it was all right to be weird.”

“If you try, you can remember everything we ever said. Remember—”

“Please don’t beg me now.” It jumped out of her, she didn’t mean to say it that way.

Dr. Lecter shifted slightly and the ropes creaked.

Tommaso got up and came to check his bonds. “Attenzione alia bocea, Signorina. Be careful of the mouth.”

She didn’t know if Tommaso meant Dr. Lecter’s mouth or his words.

“Margot, it’s been a long time since I treated you, but I want to talk to you about your medical history, just for a moment, privately.” He cut his good eye toward Tommaso.

Margot thought for a moment. “Tommaso, could you leave us for a moment.”

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“No, I’m sorry, Signorina, but I stand outside with the door open.” Tommaso went with the rifle out into the barn and watched Dr. Lecter from a distance.

“I’d never make you uncomfortable by begging, Margot. I would be interested to know why you’re doing this. Would you tell me that? Have you started taking the chocolate, as Mason likes to say, after you fought him so long? We don’t need to pretend you’re revenging Mason’s face.”

She did tell him. About Judy, about wanting the baby. It took her less than three minutes; she was surprised at how easily her troubles summarized.

A distant noise, a screech and half a scream. Outside in the barn, against the fence he had erected across the open end of the barn, Carlo was fiddling with his tape recorder, preparing to summon the pigs from the wooded pasture with recorded cries of anguish from victims long dead or ransomed.

If Dr. Lecter heard, he did not show it. “Margot, do you think Mason will just give you what he promised? You’re begging Mason. Did begging help you when he tore you? It’s the same thing as taking his chocolate and letting him have his way. But he’ll make Judy eat the cheese. And she’s not used to it.”

She did not answer, but her jaw set.

“Do you know what would happen if, instead of crawling to Mason, you just stimulated his prostate gland with Carlo’s cattle prod? See it there by the workbench?”