Hannibal - Thomas Harris [50]
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 sixteenthcentury refectory table in the Capponi Library. Behind him is a wall of pigeonholed manuscripts and great canvascovered ledgers going back eight hundred years. A fourteenthcentury 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 online research capability through the University of Milan.
Bright red and blue 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.
Hannibal
Chapter 22
BEFORE DAYLIGHT Pazzi had in his hands the photographs taken for Dr Fells 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 Xray indicating Lecter probably had had surgery on his hand. The old item, a scan of a handprinted Tennessee police report, noted that while he killed his guards