Now THAT ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is
instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy
flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention? In
Florence it was the exposition called Atrocious Torture Instruments, and it
was here that Rinaldo Pazzi next encountered Dr Fell.
The exhibit, featuring more than twenty classic instruments of torture with
extensive documentation, was mounted in the forbidding Forte di Belvedere, a
sixteenth-century Medici stronghold that guards the city's south wall. The
expo opened to enormous, unexpected crowds; excitement leaped like a trout in
the public trousers.
The scheduled run was a month; Atrocious Torture Instruments ran for six
months, equaling the draw of the Uffizi Gallery and outdrawing the Pitti
Palace Museum.
The promoters, two failed taxidermists who formerly got along by eating offal
from the trophies they mounted, became millionaires and made a triumphal tour
of Europe with their show, wearing their new tuxedos.
The visitors came in couples, mostly, from all over Europe, taking advantage
of the extended hours to file among the engines of pain, and read carefully in
any of four languages the provenance of the devices and how to use them.
Illustrations by Durer and others, along with contemporary diaries,
enlightened the crowds on matters such as the finer points of wheeling.
The English from one placard:
The Italian princes preferred to have their victims broken on the ground with
the use of the iron-tired wheel as the striking agent and blocks beneath the
limbs as shown, while in northern Europe the popular method was to lash the
victim to the wheel, break him or her with an iron bar, and then lace the
limbs through the spokes around the periphery of the wheel, compound fractures
providing the requisite flexibility, with the still-noisy head and trunk in
the center. The latter method was a more satisfactory spectacle, but the
recreation might be cut short if a piece of marrow went to the heart.
The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a
connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true
asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted
edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.
In the semidarkness of this great stone room, beneath the lit, hanging cages
of the damned, stood Dr Fell, connoisseur of facial cheeses, holding his
spectacles in his scarred hand, the tip of an ear-piece against his lips, his
face rapt as he watched the people file through.
Rinaldo Pazzi saw him there.
Pazzi was on his second menial errand of the day. Instead of having dinner
with his wife, he was pushing through the crowd to post new warnings to
couples about the Monster of Florence, whom he had failed to catch. Such a
warning poster was prominent over his own desk, placed there by his new
superiors, along with other wanted posters from around the world.
The taxidermists, watching the box office together, were happy to add a bit of
contemporary horror to their show, but asked Pazzi to put up the poster
himself, as neither seemed willing to leave the other alone with the cash. A
few locals recognized Pazzi and hissed him from the anonymity of the crowd.
Pazzi pushed pins through the corners of the blue poster, with its single
staring eye, on a bulletin board near the exit where it would attract the most
attention, and turned on a picture light above it. Watching the couples
leaving, Pazzi could see that many were in estrus, rubbing against each other
in the crowd at the exit. He did not want to see another tableau, no more
blood and flowers.
Pazzi did want to speak to Dr Fell - it would be convenient to pick up the
missing curator's effects while he was this near the Palazzo Capponi. But when
Pazzi turned from the bulletin board, the doctor was gone. He was not in the
crowd at the exit. There was only the stone wall where he had stood, beneath
the hanging starvation cage with its skeleton in a fetal curve still pleading
to be fed.
Pazzi was annoyed. He pushed through the crowd until he was outside, but did
not find the doctor.
The guard at the exit recognized Pazzi and said nothing when he stepped over
the rope and walked off the path, onto the dark grounds of the Forte di
Belvedere. He went to the parapet, looking north across the Arno. Old Florence
was at his feet, the great hump of the Duomo, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio
rising in light.
Pazzi was a very old soul, writhing on a spike of ridiculous circumstance. His
city mocked him.
The American FBI had given the knife a final twist in Pazzi's back, saying in
the press that the FBI profile of Il Mostro had been nothing like the man
Pazzi arrested. La Nazione added that Pazzi had "rail-roaded" Tocca off to
prison.
The last time Pazzi had put up the blue Il Mostro poster was in America; it
was a proud trophy he hung on the wall of Behavioral Science, and he had
signed it at the request of the American FBI agents. They knew all about him,
admired him, invited him. He and his wife had been guests on the Maryland
shore.
Standing at the dark parapet, looking over his ancient city, he smelled the
salt air off the Chesapeake, saw his wife on the shore in her new white
sneakers.
There was a picture of Florence in Behavioral Science at Quantico, shown him
as a curiosity. It was the same view he was seeing now, old Florence from the
Belvedere, the best view there is. But not in color. No, a pencil drawing,
shaded with charcoal. The drawing was in a photograph, in the background of a
photograph. It was a photograph of the American serial murderer, Dr Hannibal
Lecter. Hannibal the Cannibal. Lecter had drawn Florence from memory and the
drawing was hanging in his cell in the asylum, a place as grim as this.
When did it fall on Pazzi, the ripening idea? Two images, the real Florence
lying before him, and the drawing he recalled. Placing the poster of Il Mostro
minutes ago. Mason Verger's poster of Hannibal Lecter on his own office wall
with its huge reward and its advisories:
DR LECTER WILL HAVE TO CONCEAL HIS LEFT HAND AND MAY ATTEMPT TO HAVE IT
SURGICALLY ALTERED, AS HIS TYPE OF POLYDACTYLY, THE APPEARANCE OF PERFECT
EXTRA FINGERS, IS EXTREMELY RARE AND INSTANTLY IDENTIFIABLE.
Dr Fell holding his glasses to his lips with his scarred hand.
A detailed sketch of this view on the wall of Hannibal Lecter's cell.
Did the idea come to Pazzi while he was looking at the city of Florence
beneath him, or out of the swarming dark above the lights? And why was its
harbinger a scent of the salt breeze off the Chesapeake? Oddly for a visual
man, the connection arrived with a sound, the sound a drop would make as it
lands in a thickening pool.
Hannibal Lecter had fled to Florence. Plop. Hannibal Lecter was Dr Fell.
Rinaldo Pazzi's inner voice told him he might have gone mad in the cage of his
plight; his frenzied mind might be breaking its teeth on the bars like the
skeleton in the starvation cage.
With no memory of moving, he found himself at the Renaissance gate leading
from the Belvedere into the steep Costa di San Giorgio, a narrow street that
winds and plunges down to the heart of Old Florence in less than half a mile.
His steps seemed to carry him down the steep cobbles without his volition, he
was going faster than he wished, looking always ahead for the man called Dr
Fell, for this was the way home for him halfway down Pazzi turned in to the
Costa Scarpuccia, always descending until he came out on the Via de' Bardi,
near the river. Near the Palazzo Capponi, home of Dr Fell.
Pazzi, puffing from his descent, found a place shadowed from the streetlight,
an apartment entrance across from the palazzo. If someone came along he could
turn and pretend to press a bell.
The palazzo was dark. Pazzi could make out above the great double doors the
red light of a surveillance camera. He could not be sure if it worked fulltime, or served only when someone rang the bell. It was well within the
covered entrance.
It could see along the facade.
He waited a half-hour, listening to his own breath, and the doctor did not
come. Perhaps he was inside with no lights on.
The street was empty. Pazzi crossed quickly and stood close against the wall.
Pazzi did not think Faintly, faintly a thin sound from within. Pazzi leaned
his head against the cold window bars to listen. A clavier, Bach's Goldberg
Variations well played.
Pazzi must wait, and lurk and think. This was too soon to flush his quarry. He
must decide what to do. He did not want to be a fool again. As he backed into
the shadow across the street, his nose was last to disappear.