Carlo was not pleased with Mason’s elaborate arrangements. He was experienced in this field and had actually fed a man to the pigs in Tuscany twenty years before—a retired Nazi and bogus count who imposed sexual relations on Tuscan village children, girls and boys alike. Carlo was engaged for the job and took the man out of his own garden within three miles of the Badia di Passignano and fed him to five large domestic swine on a farm below the Poggio alle Corti, though he had to withhold rations from the pigs for three days, the Nazi struggling against his bonds, pleading and sweating with his feet in the pen, and still the swine were shy about starting on his writhing toes until Carlo, with a guilty twinge at violating the letter of his agreement, fed the Nazi a tasty salad of the pigs’ favorite greens and then cut his throat to accommodate them.
Carlo was cheerful and energetic in nature, but the presence of the filmmaker annoyed him—Carlo had taken the mirror from a brothel he owned in Cagliari, on Mason Verger’s orders, just to accommodate this pornographer, Oreste Pini.
The mirror was a boon to Oreste, who had used mirrors as a favorite device in his pornographic films and in the single genuine snuff movie he made in Mauritania. Inspired by the admonition printed on his auto mirror, he pioneered the use of warped reflections to make some objects seem larger than they appear to the unaided eye.
Oreste must use a two-camera 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.
R
OUND-TRIP
to Geneva in a day, to see the money.
The commuter plane to Milan, a whistling Aerospatiale prop jet, climbed out of Florence in the early morning, swinging over the vineyards with their rows wide apart like a developer’s coarse model of Tuscany Something was wrong in the colors of the landscape— the new swimming pools beside the villas of the wealthy foreigners were the wrong blue. To Pazzi, looking out the window of the airplane, the pools were the milky blue of an aged English eye, a blue out of place among the dark cypresses and the silver olive trees.
Rinaldo Pazzi’s spirits climbed with the airplane, knowing in his heart that he would not grow old here, dependent on the whim of his police superiors, trying to last in order to get his pension.
He had been terribly afraid that Dr. Lecter would disappear after killing Gnocco. When Pazzi spotted Lecter’s work lamp again in Santa Croce, he felt something like salvation; the doctor believed that he was safe.
The death of the Gypsy caused no ripple at all in the calm of the Questura and was believed drug-related— fortunately there were discarded syringes on the ground around him, a common sight in Florence, where syringes were available for free.
Going to see the money Pazzi had insisted on it.
The visual Rinaldo Pazzi remembered sights completely: the first time he ever saw his penis erect, the first time he saw his own blood, the first woman he ever saw naked, the blur of the first fist coming to strike him. He remembered wandering casually into a side chapel of a Sienese church and looking into the face of St. Catherine of Siena unexpectedly, her mummified head in its immaculate white wimple resting in a reliquary shaped like a church.
Seeing three million U.S. dollars had the same impact on him.
Three hundred banded blocks of hundred-dollar bills in nonsequential serial numbers.
In a severe little room, like a chapel, in the Geneva Crédit Suisse, Mason Verger’s lawyer showed Rinaldo Pazzi the money. It was wheeled in from the vault in four deep lock boxes with brass number plates. The Crédit Suisse also provided a counting machine, a scale and a clerk to operate them. Pazzi dismissed the clerk. He put his hands on top of the money once.
Rinaldo Pazzi was a very competent investigator. He had spotted and arrested scam artists for twenty years. Standing in the presence of this money, listening to the arrangements, he detected no false note; if he gave them Hannibal Lecter, Mason would give him the money.
In a hot sweet rush Pazzi realized that these people were not fooling around—Mason Verger would actually pay
him. And he had no illusions about Lecter’s fate. He was selling the man into torture and death. To Pazzi’s credit, he acknowledged to himself what he was doing.
Our freedom is worth more than the monster’s life. Our happiness is more important than his suffering
, he thought with the cold egoism of the damned. Whether the “our” was magisterial or stood for Rinaldo and his wife is a difficult question, and there may not be a single answer.
In this room, scrubbed and Swiss, neat as a wimple, Pazzi took the final vow. He turned from the money and nodded to the lawyer, Mr. Konie. From the first box, the lawyer counted out one hundred thousand dollars and handed it to Pazzi.
Mr. Konie spoke briefly into a telephone and handed the receiver to Pazzi. “This is a land line, encrypted,” he said.
The American voice Pazzi heard had a peculiar rhythm, words rushed into a single breath with a pause between, and the plosives were lost. The sound of it made Pazzi slightly dizzy, as though he were straining for breath along with the speaker.
Without preamble, the question: “Where is Dr. Lecter?”
Pazzi, the money in one hand and the phone in the other, did not hesitate. “He is the one who studies the Palazzo Capponi in Florence. He is the … curator.”
“Would you please show your identification to Mr. Konie and hand him the telephone. He won’t say your name into the telephone.”
Mr. Konie consulted a list from his pocket and said some prearranged code words to Mason, then he handed the phone back to Pazzi.
“You get the rest of the money when he is alive in our hands,” Mason said. “You don’t have to seize the doctor yourself, but you’ve got to identify him to us and put him in our hands. I want your documentation as well, everything you’ve got on him. You’ll be back in Florence tonight? You’ll get instructions tonight for a meeting near Florence. The meeting will be no later than tomorrow night. There you’ll get instructions from the man who will take Dr. Lecter. He’ll ask you if you know a florist. Tell him all florists are thieves. Do you understand me? I want you to cooperate with him.”
“I don’t want Dr. Lecter in my … I don’t want him near Florence when …”
“I understand your concern. Don’t worry, he won’t be.”
The line went dead.
In a few minutes’ paperwork, two million dollars was placed in escrow. Mason Verger could not get it back, but he could release it for Pazzi to claim. A Crédit Suisse official summoned to the meeting room informed Pazzi the bank would charge him a negative interest to facilitate a deposit there if he converted to Swiss francs, and pay three percent compound interest only on the first hundred thousand francs. The official presented Pazzi with a copy of Article 47 of the
Bundesgesetz über Banken und Sparkassen
governing bank secrecy and agreed to perform a wire transfer to the Royal Bank of Nova Scotia or to the Cayman Islands immediately after the release of the funds, if that was Pazzi’s wish.
With a notary present, Pazzi granted alternate signature power over the account to his wife in the event of his death. The business concluded, only the Swiss bank
official offered to shake hands. Pazzi and Mr. Konie did not look at each other directly, though Mr. Konie offered a good-bye from the door.
The last leg home, the commuter plane from Milan dodging through a thunderstorm, the propeller on Pazzi’s side of the aircraft a dark circle against the dark gray sky. Lightning and thunder as they swung over the old city, the campanile and dome of the cathedral beneath them now, lights coming on in the early dusk, a flash and boom like the ones Pazzi remembered from his childhood when the Germans blew up the bridges over the Arno, sparing only the Ponte Vecchio. And for a flash as short as lightning he remembered seeing as a little boy a captured sniper chained to the Madonna of Chains to pray before he was shot.
Descending through the ozone smell of lightning, feeling the booms of thunder in the fabric of the plane, Pazzi of the ancient Pazzi returned to his ancient city with his aims as old as time.
R
INALDO PAZZI
would have preferred to maintain constant surveillance on his prize in the Palazzo Capponi, but he could not.
Instead Pazzi, still rapt from the sight of the money, had to leap into his dinner clothes and meet his wife at a long-anticipated concert of the Florence Chamber Orchestra.
The Teatro Piccolomini, a nineteenth-century half-scale copy of Venice’s glorious Teatro La Fenice, is a baroque jewel box of gilt and plush, with cherubs flouting the laws of aerodynamics across its splendid ceiling.
A good thing, too, that the theater is beautiful because the performers often need all the help they can get.
It is unfair but inevitable that music in Florence should be judged by the hopelessly high standards of the city’s art. The Florentines are a large and knowledgeable group of music lovers, typical of Italy, but they are sometimes starved for musical artists.
Pazzi slipped into the seat beside his wife in the applause following the overture.
She gave him her fragrant cheek. He felt his heart grow big inside him looking at her in her evening gown, sufficiently décolleté to emit a warm fragrance from her cleavage, her musical score in the chic Gucci cover Pazzi had given her.
“They sound a hundred percent better with the new viola player,” she breathed into Pazzi’s ear. This excellent
viola da gamba
player had been brought in to replace an infuriatingly inept one, a cousin of Sogliato’s, who had gone oddly missing some weeks before.
Dr. Hannibal Lecter looked down from a high box, alone, immaculate in white tie, his face and shirtfront seeming to float in the dark box framed by gilt baroque carving.
Pazzi spotted him when the lights went up briefly after the first movement, and in the moment before Pazzi could look away, the doctor’s head came round like that of an owl and their eyes met. Pazzi involuntarily squeezed his wife’s hand hard enough for her to look round at him. After that Pazzi kept his eyes resolutely on the stage, the back of his hand warm against his wife’s thigh as she held his hand in hers.
At intermission, when Pazzi turned from the bar to hand her a drink, Dr. Lecter was standing beside her.