Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

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.