Hannibal - Thomas Harris [49]
Cross to the music. We are dimly aware of passing large groups of draped.furniture, vague shapes not quite still in the candlelight, like a sleeping herd. Above us the height of the room disappears into darkness.
The light glows redly on an ornate clavier and on the man known to Renaissance scholars as Dr Fell, the doctor elegant, straightbacked as he leans into the music, the light reflecting off his hair and the back of his quilted silk dressing gown with a sheen like pelt.
The raised cover of the clavier is decorated with an intricate scene of banquetry, and the little figures seem to swarm in the candlelight above the strings. He plays with his eyes closed. He has no need of the sheet music. Before him on the lyreshaped music rack of the clavier is a copy of the American trash tabloid the National Tattler. It is folded to show only the face on the front page, the face of Clarice Starling.
Our musician smiles, ends the piece, repeats the saraband once for his own pleasure and as the last quillplucked string vibrates to silence in the great room, he opens his eyes, each pupil centered with a red pinpoint of light. He tilts his head to the side and looks at the paper before him.
He rises without sound and carries the American tabloid into the tiny, ornate chapel, built before the discovery of America. As he holds it up to the light of the candles and unfolds it, the religious icons above the altar seem to read the tabloid over his shoulder, as they would in a grocery line. The type is seventytwopoint Railroad Gothic. It says
“DEATH ANGEL: CLARICE STARLING, THE FBI's KILLING MACHINE.”
Faces painted in agony and beatitude around the altar fade as he snuffs the candles. Crossing the great hall he has no need of light. A puff of air as Dr Hannibal Lecter passes us. The great door creaks, closes with a thud we can feel in the floor. Silence.
Footsteps entering another room. In the resonances of this place, the walls feel closer, the ceiling still highsharp sounds echo late from above and the still air holds the smell of vellum and parchment and extinguished candlewicks.
The rustle of paper in the dark, the squeak and scrape of a chair. Dr Lecter sits in a great armchair in the fabled Capponi Library. His eyes reflect light redly, but they do not glow red in the dark, as some of his keepers have sworn they do. The darkness is complete. He is considering . . .
It is true that Dr Lecter created the vacancy at the Palazzo Capponi by removing the former curator - a simple process requiring a few seconds' work on the old man and a modest outlay for two bags of cement but once the way was clear he won the job fairly, demonstrating to the Belle Arti Committee an extraordinary linguistic capability, sighttranslating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic blackletter manuscripts.
He has found a peace here that he would preserve, he has killed hardly anybody, except his predecessor, during his residence in Florence.
His appointment as translator and curator of the Capponi Library is a considerable prize to him for several reasons: The spaces, the height of the palace rooms, are important to Dr Lecter after his years of cramped confinement. More important, he feels a resonance with the palace; it is the only private building he has ever seen that approaches in dimension and detail the memory palace he has maintained since youth..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 twelfthcentury 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 egorelated. Dr Lecter does not require