NIGHT AGAIN and Dr Fell in the vast stone room of the Atrocious Torture
Instruments show at Forte di Belvedere, the doctor leaning at ease against the
wall beneath the hanging cages of the damned.
He is registering aspects of damnation from the avid faces of the voyeurs as
they press around the torture instruments and press against each other in
steamy, goggle-eyed frottage, hair rising on their forearms, breath hot on one
another's neck and cheeks. Sometimes the doctor presses a scented handkerchief
to his face against an overdose of cologne and rut.
Those who pursue the doctor wait outside.
Hours pass. Dr Fell, who has never paid more than passing attention to the
exhibits themselves, cannot seem to get enough of the crowd. A few feel his
attention, and become uncomfortable. Often women in the crowd look at him with
particular interest before the shuffling movement of the line through the
exhibit forces them to move on. A pittance paid to the two taxidermists
operating the show enables the doctor to lounge at his ease, untouchable
behind the ropes, very still against the stone.
Outside the exit, waiting on the parapet in a steady drizzle, Rinaldo Pazzi
kept his vigil. He was used to waiting.
Pazzi knew the doctor would not be walking home. Down the hill behind the
fort, in a small piazza, Dr Fells automobile awaited him. It was a black
Jaguar Saloon, an elegant thirty-year-old Mark II glistening in the drizzle,
the best one that Pazzi had ever seen, and it carried Swiss plates. Clearly Dr
Fell did not need to work for a salary. Pazzi noted the plate numbers, but
could not risk running them through Interpol.
On the steep cobbled Via San Leonardo between the Forte di Belvedere and the
car, Gnocco waited. The ill-lit street was bounded on both sides by high stone
walls protecting the villas behind them. Gnocco had found a dark niche in
front of a barred gateway where he could stand out of the stream of tourists
coming down from the fort. Every ten minutes the cell phone in his pocket
vibrated against his thigh and he had to affirm he was in position.
Some of the tourists held maps and programs over their heads against the fine
rain as they came by, the narrow sidewalk full, and people spilling over into
the street, slowing the few taxis coming down from the fort.
In the vaulted chamber of torture instruments, Dr Fell at last stood away from
the wall where he had leaned, rolled his eyes up at the skeleton in the
starvation cage above him as though they shared a secret and made his way
through the crowd toward the exit.
Pazzi saw him framed in the doorway, and again under a floodlight on the
grounds. He followed at a distance. When he was sure the doctor was walking
down to his car, he flipped open his cell phone and alerted Gnocco.
The Gypsy's head came up out of his collar like that of a tortoise, eyes
sunken, showing, as a tortoise shows, the skull beneath the skin. He rolled
his sleeve above the elbow and spit on the bracelet, wiping it dry with a rag.
Now that the silver was polished with spit and holy water, he held his arm
behind him under his coat to keep it dry as he peered up the hill. A column of
bobbing heads was coming. Gnocco pushed through the stream of people out into
the street, where he could go against the current and could see better. With
no assistant, he would have to do both the bump and the dip himself-not a
problem since he wanted to fail at making the dip. There the slight man camenear the curb, thank God. Pazzi was thirty meters behind the doctor, coming
down.
Gnocco made a nifty move from the middle of the street. Taking advantage of a
coming taxi, skipping as though to get out of the traffic, he looked back to
curse the driver and bumped bellies with Dr Fell, his fingers scrambling
inside the doctor's coat, and felt his arm seized in a terrific grip, felt a
blow, and twisted away, free of the mark, Dr Fell hardly pausing in his stride
and gone in the stream of tourists, Gnocco free and away.
Pazzi was with him almost instantly, beside him in the niche before the iron
gate, Gnocco bent over briefly, straightening up, breathing hard.
"I got it. He grabbed me right. Cornuto tried to hit me in the balls, but he
missed," Gnocco said.
Pazzi on one knee carefully working the bracelet off Gnocco's arm, when Gnocco
felt hot and wet down his leg and, as he shifted his body, a hot stream of
arterial blood shot out of a rent in the front of his trousers, onto Pazzi's
face and hands as he tried to remove the bracelet holding it only by the
edges. Blood spraying everywhere, into Gnocco's own face as he bent to look at
himself, his legs caving in. He collapsed against the gate, clung to it with
one hand and jammed his rag against the juncture of his leg and body trying to
stop the gouting blood from his split femoral artery.
Pazzi, with the freezing feeling he always had in action, got his arm around
Gnocco and kept him turned away from the crowd, kept him spraying through the
bars of the gate, eased him to the ground on his side.
Pazzi took his cell phone from his pocket and spoke into it as though calling
an ambulance, but did not turn the telephone on. He unbuttoned his coat and
spread it like a hawk mantling its prey. The crowd was moving, incurious
behind him. Pazzi got the bracelet off Gnocco and slipped it into the small
box he carried. He put Gnocco's cell phone in his pocket.
Gnocco's lips moved. "Madonna, the freddo."
With an effort of will, Pazzi moved Gnocco's failing hand from the wound, held
it as though to comfort him, and let him bleed out. When he was sure Gnocco
was dead, Pazzi left him lying beside the gate, his head resting on his arm as
though he slept, and stepped into the moving crowd.
In the piazza, Pazzi stared at the empty parking place, the rain just
beginning to wet the cobbles where Dr Lecter's Jaguar had stood.
Dr Lecter-Pazzi no longer thought of him as Dr Fell. He was Dr Hannibal
Lecter.
Proof enough for Mason could be in the pocket of Pazzi's raincoat. Proof
enough for Pazzi dripped off his raincoat onto his shoes.