Hannibal - Thomas Harris [62]
Oreste must use a twocamera setup with good sound, as Mason dictated, and he must get it right the first time. Mason wanted a running, uninterrupted close- up of the face, aside from everything else.
To Carlo, he seemed to fiddle endlessly.
“You can stand there jabbering at me like a woman, or you can watch the practice and ask me whatever you can't understand,” Carlo told him.
“I want to film the practice.”
“Va bene. Get your shit set up and let's get on with it.”
While Oreste placed his cameras, Carlo and the three silent Sardinians with him made their preparations.
Oreste, who loved money, was ever amazed at what money will buy.
At a long trestle table at one side of the shed, Carlo's brother, Matteo, unpacked a bundle of used clothing. He selected from the pile a shirt and trousers, while the other two Sardinians, the brothers Piero and Tommaso Falcione, rolled an ambulance gurney into the shed, pushing it slowly over the grass. The gurney was stained and battered.
Matteo had ready several buckets of ground meat, a number of dead chickens still in their feathers and some spoiled fruit, already attracting flies, and a bucket of beef tripe and intestines.
Matteo laid out a pair of worn khaki trousers on the gurney and began to stuff them with a couple of chickens and some meat and fruit. Then he took a pair of cotton gloves and filled them with ground meat and acorns, stuffing each finger carefully, and placed them at the ends of the trouser legs. He selected a shirt for his ensemble and spread it on the gurney, filling it with tripe and intestines, and improving the contours with bread, before he buttoned the shirt and tucked the tail neatly into the trousers. A pair of stuffed gloves went at the ends of the sleeves. The melon he used for a head was covered with a hairnet, stuffed with ground meat where the face would be along with two.boiled eggs for eyes. When he had finished, the result looked like a lumpy mannequin, looked better on the gurney than some jumpers look when they are rolled away. As a final touch, Matteo sprayed some extremely expensive aftershave on the front of the melon and on the gloves at the ends of the sleeves.
Carlo pointed with his chin at Oreste's slender assistant leaning over the fence, extending the boom mike over the pen, measuring its reach.
“Tell your fuckboy, if he falls in, I'm not going in after him.”
At last all was ready. Piero and Tommaso dropped the gurney to its low position with the legs folded and rolled it to the gate of the pen.
Carlo brought a tape recorder from the house and a separate amplifier. He had a number of tapes, some of which he had made himself while cutting the ears off kidnap victims to mail to the relatives. Carlo always played the tapes for the animals while they ate. He would not need the tapes when he had an actual victim to provide the screams.
Two weathered outdoor speakers were nailed to the posts beneath the shed. The sun was bright on the pleasant meadow sloping down to the woods. The sturdy fence around the meadow continued into the forest. In the midday hush Oreste could hear a carpenter bee buzzing under the shed roof.
“Are you ready?” Carlo said.
Oreste turned on the fixed camera himself. “Giriamo,” he called to his cameraman.
“Pronti!” came the reply.
“Motore!” The cameras were rolling.
“Partito!” Sound was rolling with the film.
“Azione!” Oreste poked Carlo.
The Sard pushed the play button on his tape machine and a hellish screaming started, sobbing, pleading. The cameraman jerked at the sound, then steadied himself. The screaming was awful to hear, but a fitting overture for the faces that came out of the woods, drawn to the screams announcing dinner.
Hannibal
Chapter 32
ROUNDTRIP to Geneva in a day, to see the money.
The commuter plane to Milan, a whistling Aerospatiale prop jet, climbed