“I’ll tell you he’s undergone plastic surgery on his face and had an operation on his left hand. He can still play the Goldberg Variations. He has Brazilian papers.”
A pause. Then, “Why haven’t you called the police? I’m required to encourage you to do that.”
“Is the reward in effect in all circumstances?”
“The reward is for information leading to the arrest and conviction.”
“Would the reward be payable in … special circumstances?”
“Do you mean a bounty on Dr. Lecter? Say, in the case of someone who might not ordinarily be eligible to accept a reward?”
“Yes.”
“We are both working toward the same goal. So stay on the telephone please, while I make a suggestion. It is against international convention and U.S. law to offer a bounty for someone’s death, sir. Stay on the telephone please. May I ask if you’re calling from Europe?”
“Yes, I am, and that’s all I’m telling you.”
“Good, hear me out—I suggest you contact an attorney to discuss legality of bounties and not to undertake any illegal action against Dr. Lecter. May I recommend an attorney? There’s one in Geneva who is excellent in these matters. May I give you the toll-free number? I encourage you strongly to call him and to be frank with him.”
Pazzi bought a prepaid telephone card and made his next call from a booth in the Bon Marché department store. He spoke to a person with a dry Swiss voice. It took less than five minutes.
Mason would pay one million United States dollars for Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s head and hands. He would pay the same amount for information leading to arrest and conviction. He would privately pay three million dollars for the doctor alive, no questions asked, discretion guaranteed. The terms included one hundred thousand dollars in advance. To qualify for the advance, Pazzi would have to provide a positively identifiable fingerprint from Dr. Lecter, the print in situ on an object. If he did that, he could see the rest of the cash in an escrowed safe deposit locker in Switzerland at his convenience.
Before he left Bon Marché for the airport, Pazzi bought a peignoir for his wife in peach silk moiré.
CHAPTER
23
HOW DO you behave when you know the conventional honors are dross? When you have come to believe with Marcus Aurelius that the opinion of future generations will be worth no more than the opinion of the current one? Is it possible to behave well then? Desirable to behave well then?
Now Rinaldo Pazzi, a Pazzi of the Pazzi, chief inspector of the Florentine Questura, had to decide what his honor was worth, or if there is a wisdom longer than considerations of honor.
He returned from Paris by dinnertime, and slept a little while. He wanted to ask his wife, but he could not, though he did take comfort in her. He lay awake for a long time afterward, after her breathing was quiet. Late in the night he gave up on sleep and went out to walk and think.
Avarice is not unknown in Italy, and Rinaldo Pazzi had imbibed plenty with his native air. But his natural acquisitiveness and ambition had been whetted in America, where every influence is felt more quickly, including the death of Jehovah and the incumbency of Mammon.
When Pazzi came out of the shadows of the Loggia and stood in the spot where Savonarola was burned in the Piazza Signoria, when he looked up at the window in the floodlit Palazzo Vecchio where his ancestor died, he believed that he was deliberating. He was not. He had already decided piecemeal.
We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.
Pazzi had decided when he got on the plane to Paris. And he had decided an hour ago, after his wife in her new peignoir had been only dutifully receptive. And minutes later when, lying in the dark, he reached over to cup her cheek and give her a tender good night kiss, and he felt a tear beneath his palm. Then, unaware, she ate his heart.
Honors again? Another chance to endure the archbishop’s breath while the holy flints were struck to the rocket in the cloth dove’s ass? More praise from the politicians whose private lives he knew too well? What was it worth to be known as the policeman who caught Dr. Hannibal Lecter? For a policeman, credit has a short half-life. Better to SELL HIM.
The thought pierced and pounded Rinaldo, left him pale and determined, and when the visual Rinaldo cast his lot he had two scents mixed in his mind, his wife and the Chesapeake shore.
SELL HIM. SELL HIM. SELL HIM. SELL HIM. SELL HIM. SELL HIM.
Francesco de’ Pazzi did not stab harder in 1478 when he had Giuliano on the cathedral floor, when in his frenzy he stabbed himself through the thigh.
CHAPTER
24
DR. HANNIBAL Lecter’s fingerprint card is a curiosity and something of a cult object. The original is framed on the wall of the FBI’s Identification Section. Following the FBI custom in printing people with more than five fingers, it has the thumb and four adjacent fingers on the front side of the card, and the sixth finger on the reverse.
Copies of the fingerprint card went around the earth when the doctor first escaped, and his thumbprint appears enlarged on Mason Verger’s Wanted poster with enough points marked on it for a minimally trained examiner to make a hit.