Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

Some of the tourists held maps and programs over their heads against the fine rain as they came by, the narrow sidewalk full, and people spilling over into the street, slowing the few taxis coming down from the fort.

In the vaulted chamber of torture instruments, Dr. Fell at last stood away from the wall where he had leaned, rolled his eyes up at the skeleton in the starvation cage above him as though they shared a secret and made his way through the crowd towa

rd the exit.

Pazzi saw him framed in the doorway, and again under a floodlight on the grounds. He followed at a distance. When he was sure the doctor was walking down to his car, he flipped open his cell phone and alerted Gnocco.

The Gypsy’s head came up out of his collar like that of a tortoise, eyes sunken, showing, as a tortoise shows, the skull beneath the skin. He rolled his sleeve above the elbow and spit on the bracelet, wiping it dry with a rag. Now that the silver was polished with spit and holy water, he held his arm behind him under his coat to keep it dry as he peered up the hill. A column of bobbing heads was coming. Gnocco pushed through the stream of people out into the street, where he could go against the current and could see better. With no assistant, he would have to do both the bump and the dip himself—not a problem since he wanted to fail at making the dip. There the slight man came—near the curb, thank God. Pazzi was thirty meters behind the doctor, coming down.

Gnocco made a nifty move from the middle of the street. Taking advantage of a coming taxi, skipping as though to get out of the traffic, he looked back to curse the driver and bumped bellies with Dr. Fell, his fingers scrambling inside the doctor’s coat, and felt his arm seized in a terrific grip, felt a blow, and twisted away, free of the mark, Dr. Fell hardly pausing in his stride and gone in the stream of tourists, Gnocco free and away.

Pazzi was with him almost instantly, beside him in the niche before the iron gate, Gnocco bent over briefly, straightening up, breathing hard.

“I got it. He grabbed me all right. Cornuto tried to hit me in the balls, but he missed,” Gnocco said.

Pazzi on one knee carefully working the bracelet off Gnocco’s arm, when Gnocco felt hot and wet down his leg and, as he shifted his body, a hot stream of arterial blood shot out of a rent in the front of his trousers, onto Pazzi’s face and hands as he tried to remove the bracelet holding it only by the edges. Blood spraying everywhere, into Gnocco’s own face as he bent to look at himself, his legs caving in. He collapsed against the gate, clung to it with one hand and jammed his rag against the juncture of his leg and body trying to stop the gouting blood from his split femoral artery.

Pazzi, with the freezing feeling he always had in action, got his arm around Gnocco and kept him turned away from the crowd, kept him spraying through the bars of the gate, eased him to the ground on his side.

Pazzi took his cell phone from his pocket and spoke into it as though calling an ambulance, but did not turn the telephone on. He unbuttoned his coat and spread it like a hawk mantling its prey. The crowd was moving, incurious behind him. Pazzi got the bracelet off Gnocco and slipped it into the small box he carried. He put Gnocco’s cell phone in his pocket.

Gnocco’s lips moved. “Madonna, che freddo.”

With an effort of will, Pazzi moved Gnocco’s failing hand from the wound, held it as though to comfort him, and let him bleed out. When he was sure Gnocco was dead, Pazzi left him lying beside the gate, his head resting on his arm as though he slept, and stepped into the moving crowd.

In the piazza, Pazzi stared at the empty parking place, the rain just beginning to wet the cobbles where Dr. Lecter’s Jaguar had stood.

Dr. Lecter—Pazzi no longer thought of him as Dr. Fell. He was Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Proof enough for Mason could be in the pocket of Pazzi’s raincoat. Proof enough for Pazzi dripped off his raincoat onto his shoes.

CHAPTER

29

THE MORNING star over Genoa was dimmed by the lightening east when Rinaldo Pazzi’s old Alfa purred down to the dock. A chilly wind riffled the harbor. On a freighter at an outer mooring someone was welding, orange sparks showering into the black water.

Romula stayed in the car out of the wind with the baby in her lap. Esmeralda was scrunched in the small backseat of the berlinetta coupe with her legs sideways. She had not spoken again since she refused to touch Shaitan.

They had thick black coffee in paper cups and pasticcini.

Rinaldo Pazzi went into the shipping office. By the time he came out again the sun was well risen, glowing orange on the rust-streaked hull of the freighter Astra Philogenes, completing its loading at dockside. He beckoned to the women in the car.

The Astra Philogenes, twenty-seven thousand tons, Greek registry, could legally carry twelve passengers without a ship’s doctor on its route to Rio. There, Pazzi explained to Romula, they would transship to Sydney, Australia, the transshipment supervised by the Astra purser. Passage was fully paid and emphatically nonrefundable. In Italy, Australia is considered an attractive alternative where jobs can be found, and it has a large Gypsy population.

Pazzi had promised Romula two million lire, about twelve hundred and fifty dollars at the current rate of exchange, and he gave it to her in a fat envelope.

The Gypsies’ baggage amounted to very little, a small valise and Romula’s wooden arm packed in a French horn case.

The Gypsies would be at sea and incommunicado for most of the next month.

Gnocco is coming, Pazzi told Romula for the tenth time, but he could not come today. Gnocco would leave word for them with general delivery at the Sydney main post office. “I’ll keep my promise to him, just as I did to you,” he told them as they stood together at the foot of the gangway, the early sun sending their long shadows down the rough surface of the dock.

At the moment of parting, with Romula and the baby already climbing the gangway, the old woman spoke for the second and last time in Pazzi’s experience.

With eyes as black as Kalamata olives she looked into his face. “You gave Gnocco to Shaitan,” she said quietly. “Gnocco is dead.” Bending stiffly, as she would bend to a chicken on the block, Esmeralda spit carefully on Pazzi’s shadow, and hurried up the gangway after Romula and the child.

CHAPTER