In the library, this unique collection of manuscripts and correspondence going back to the early thirteenth century, he can indulge a certain curiosity about himself.
Dr. Lecter believed, from fragmentary family records, that he was descended from a certain Giuliano Bevisangue, a fearsome twelfth-century figure in Tuscany, and from the Machiavelli as well as the Visconti. This was the ideal place for research. While he had a certain abstract curiosity about the matter, it was not ego-related. Dr. Lecter does not require conventional reinforcement. His ego, like his intelligence quota, and the degree of his rationality, is not measurable by conventional means.
In fact, there is no consensus in the psychiatric community that Dr. Lecter should be termed a man. He has long been regarded by his professional peers in psychiatry, many of whom fear his acid pen in the professional journals, as something entirely Other. For convenience they term him “monster.”
The monster sits in the black library, his mind painting colors on the dark and a medieval air running in his head. He is considering the policeman.
Click of a switch and a low lamp comes on.
Now we can see Dr. Lecter seated at a sixteenth-century refectory table in the Capponi Library. Behind him is a wall of pigeonholed manuscripts and great canvas-covered ledgers going back eight hundred years. A fourteenth-century correspondence with a minister of the Republic of Venice is stacked before him, weighted with a small casting Michelangelo did as a study for his horned Moses, and in front of the inkstand, a laptop computer with on-line research capability through the University of Milan.
Bright red and bl
ue among the dun and yellow piles of parchment and vellum is a copy of the National Tattler. And beside it, the Florence edition of La Nazione.
Dr. Lecter selects the Italian newspaper and reads its latest attack on Rinaldo Pazzi, prompted by an FBI disclaimer in the case of Il Mostro. “Our profile never matched Tocca,” an FBI spokesman said.
La Nazione cited Pazzi’s background and training in America, at the famous Quantico academy, and said he should have known better.
The case of Il Mostro did not interest Dr. Lecter at all, but Pazzi’s background did. How unfortunate that he should encounter a policeman trained at Quantico, where Hannibal Lecter was a textbook case.
When Dr. Lecter looked into Rinaldo Pazzi’s face at the Palazzo Vecchio, and stood close enough to smell him, he knew for certain that Pazzi suspected nothing, even though he had asked about the scar on Dr. Lecter’s hand. Pazzi did not even have any serious interest in him regarding the curator’s disappearance.
The policeman saw him at the exposition of torture instruments. Better to have encountered him at an orchid show.
Dr. Lecter was well aware that all the elements of epiphany were present in the policeman’s head, bouncing at random with the million other things he knew.
Should Rinaldo Pazzi join the late curator of the Palazzo Vecchio down in the damp? Should Pazzi’s body be found after an apparent suicide? La Nazione would be pleased to have hounded him to death.
Not now, the monster reflected, and turned to his great rolls of vellum and parchment manuscripts.
Dr. Lecter does not worry. He delighted in the writing style of Neri Capponi, banker and emissary to Venice in the fifteenth century, and read his letters, aloud from time to time, for his own pleasure late into the night.
CHAPTER
22
BEFORE DAYLIGHT Pazzi had in his hands the photographs taken for Dr. Fell’s state work permit, attached with the negatives to his permesso di soggiorno in the files of the Carabinieri. Pazzi also had the excellent mug shots reproduced on Mason Verger’s poster. The faces were similar in shape, but if Dr. Fell was Dr. Hannibal Lecter, some work had been done on the nose and cheeks, maybe collagen injections.
The ears looked promising. Like Alphonse Bertillon a hundred years before, Pazzi pored over the ears with his magnifying glass. They seemed to be the same.
On the Questura’s outdated computer, he punched in his Interpol access code to the American FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and called up the voluminous Lecter file. He cursed his slow modem and tried to read the fuzzy text off the screen until the letters jumped in his vision. He knew most of the case. Two things made him catch his breath. One old and one new. The most recent update cited an X ray indicating Lecter probably had had surgery on his hand. The old item, a scan of a hand-printed Tennessee police report, noted that while he killed his guards in Memphis, Hannibal Lecter played a tape of the Goldberg Variations.
The poster circulated by the rich American victim, Mason Verger, dutifully encouraged an informant to call the FBI number provided. It gave the standard warning about Dr. Lecter being armed and dangerous. A private telephone number was provided as well—-just below the paragraph about the huge reward.
Airfare from Florence to Paris is ridiculously expensive and Pazzi had to pay it out of his own pocket. He did not trust the French police to give him a phone patch without meddling, and he knew no other way to get one. From an American Express phone cabin near the Opera, he telephoned the private number on Mason’s poster. He assumed the call would be traced. Pazzi spoke English well enough, but he knew his accent would betray him as Italian.
The voice was male, American, very calm.
“Would you state your business please?”
“I may have information about Hannibal Lecter.”
“Yes, well, thank you for calling. Do you know where he is now?”
“I believe so. Is the reward in effect?”
“Yes, it is. What hard evidence do you have that it’s him? You have to understand we get a lot of crank calls.”