Hannibal - Thomas Harris [152]
After the car was gone down the fire road, Margot stood for minutes looking up at Mason's lighted windows. She saw the shadow of Cordell moving on the walls as he fussed around Mason, replacing the monitors on her brother's breath and pulse.
She slipped the handle of the farrier's hammer down the back of her pants and settled the tail of her jacket over the head.
Cordell was coming out of Mason's room with some pillows when Margot got off the elevator.
“Cordell, fix him a martini.”
“I don't know-”
“I know. Fix him a martini.”
Cordell put the pillows on the love seat and knelt in front of the bar refrigerator..“Is there any juice in there?” said Margot, coming close behind him. She swung the farrier's hammer hard against the base of his skull and heard a popping sound. His head smashed into the refrigerator, rebounded, and he fell over backward off his haunches looking at the ceiling with his eyes open, one pupil dilating, the other not. She turned his head sideways against the floor and came down with the hammer, depressing his temple an inch, and thick blood came out his ears.
She did not feel anything.
Mason heard the door of his room open and he rolled his goggled eye. He had been asleep for a few moments, the lights soft. The eel was also asleep beneath its rock.
Margot's great frame filled the doorway. She closed the door behind her.
“Hi, Mason.”
“What happened down there? What took you so fucking long?”
“They're all dead down there, Mason.”
Margot came to his bedside and unclipped the telephone line from Mason's phone and dropped it on the floor.
“Piero and Carlo and Johnny Mogli are all dead. Dr Lecter got away and he carried the Starling woman with him.”
Froth appeared between Mason's teeth as he cursed.
“I sent Tommaso home with his money.”
“You what???? You fucking idiot bitch, now listen, we're going to clean this up and start over. We've got the weekend. We don't have to worry about what Starling saw. If Lecter's got her, she's good as dead.”
Margot shrugged. “She never saw me.”
“Get on the horn to Washington and get four of those bastards up here. Send the helicopter. Show them the backhoeshow them - Cordell! Get inhere.”
Mason whistled into his panpipes. Margot pushed the pipes aside and leaned over him, so that she could see his face.
“Cordell's not coming, Mason. Cordell's dead.”
“What?”
“I killed him in the playroom. Now. Mason, you're going to give me what you owe me.”
She put up the side rails on his bed and, lifting the great coil of his plaited hair, she stripped the cover off his body. His little legs were no bigger around than rolls of cookie dough. His hand, the only extremity he could move, fluttered at the phone. His hardshell respirator puffed up and down in its regular rhythm.
From her pocket Margot took a nonspermicidal condom and held it up for him to see. From her sleeve she took the cattle prod..“Remember, Mason, how you used to spit on your cock for lubrication? Think you could work up some spit? No? Maybe I can.”
Mason bellowed when his breath permitted, a series of donkeylike brays, but it was over in half a minute, and very successfully too.
“You're dead, Margot.”
It sounded more like “Nargot.”
“Oh, Mason, we all are. Didn't you know? But these aren't,” she said, securing her blouse over her warm container. “They're wiggling. I'll show you how. I'll show you how they wiggleshowandtell.”
Margot picked up the spiky fishhandling gloves beside the aquarium.
“I could adopt Judy,” Mason said. “She could be my heir, and we could do a trust.”
“We certainly could,” Margot said, lifting a carp out of the holding tank. She brought a chair from the seating area, and standing on it, took the lid off the big aquarium. “But we won't.”
She bent over the aquarium with her great arms down in the water. She held the carp by the tail down close to the grotto and when the eel came out she grabbed