Hannibal - Thomas Harris [42]
Even as he worked the important museum bomb case, Il Mostro's created images stayed in Pazzi's mind. He saw the Monster's tableaux peripherally, as we look beside an object to see it in the dark. Particularly he dwelt on the couple found slain in the bed of a pickup truck in Impruneta, the bodies carefully arranged by the Monster, strewn and garlanded with flowers, the woman's left breast exposed.
Pazzi had left the Uffizi museum one early afternoon and was crossing the nearby Piazza Signoria, when an image jumped at him from the display of a postcard vendor.
Not sure where the image came from, he stopped just at the spot where Savonarola was burned. He turned and looked around him. Tourists were thronging the piazza. Pazzi felt cold up his back. Maybe it was all in his head, the image, the pluck at his attention. He retraced his steps and came again.
There it was a small, flyspecked, rainwarped poster of Botticelli's painting “Primavera.”
The original painting was behind him in the Uffizi museum.
“Primavera.” The garlanded nymph on the right, her left breast exposed, flowers streaming from her mouth as the pale Zephyrus reached for her from the forest. There. The image of the couple dead in the bed of the pickup, garlanded with flowers, flowers in the girl's mouth. Match. Match.
Here, where his ancestor spun choking against the wall, came the idea, the master image Pazzi sought, and it was an image created five hundred years ago by Sandro Botticelli - the same artist who had for forty florins painted the hanged Francesco de' Pazzi's image on the wall of the Bargello prison, noose and all. How could Pazzi resist this inspiration, with its origin so delicious? He had to sit down. All the benches were full. He was reduced to showing his badge and commandeering a place on a bench from an old man whose crutches he honestly did not see until the old veteran was up on his single.foot and very loud and rude about it too.
Pazzi was excited for two reasons. To find the image Il Mostro used was a triumph, but much more important, Pazzi had seen a copy of “Primavera” in his rounds of the criminal suspects.
He knew better than to flog his memory; he leaned and loafed and invited it. He returned to the Uffizi and stood before the original “Primavera,” but not too long. He walked to the straw market and touched the snout of the bronze boar “II Porcellino,” drove out to the Ippocampo and, leaning against the hood of his dusty car, the smell of hot oil in his nose, watched the children playing soccer . . .
He saw the staircase first in his mind, and the landing above, the top of the “Primavera” poster appearing first as he climbed the stairs; he could go back and see the entrance doorframe for a second, but nothing of the street, and no faces.
Wise in the ways of interrogation, he questioned himself, going to the secondary senses: When you saw the poster, what did you hear? . . . Pots rattling in a groundfloor kitchen. When you went up on the landing and stood before the poster, what did you hear? The television. A television in a sitting room. Robert Stack playing Eliot Ness in Gli intoccabili. Did you smell cooking? Yes, cooking. Did you smell anything else? I saw the poster - NO, not what you saw. Did you smell anything else? I could still smell the Alfa, hot inside, it was still in my nose, hot oil smell, hot from . . . the Raccordo, going fast on the Raccordo Autostrada to where? San Casciano. I heard a dog barking too, in San Casciano, a burglar and rapist named Girolamo something.
In that moment when the connection is made, in that synaptic spasm of completion when the thought drives through the red fuse, is our keenest pleasure. Rinaldo Pazzi had had the best moment of his life.
In an hour and a half, Pazzi had Girolamo Tocca in custody. Tocca's wife threw rocks after the little convoy that took her husband away.
Hannibal
Chapter 18
Tocca was a dream suspect. As a young man, he had served nine years in prison for the murder of a man he caught embracing his fiancé in a lovers' lane. He had