Our musician smiles.

THE CHRISTIAN martyr San Misstate picked up his severed head from the sand of

the Roman amphitheater in Florence and carried it beneath his arm to the

mountainside across the river where he lies in his splendid church, tradition

says.

Certainly San Misstate's body, erect or not, passed en route along the ancient

street where we now stand, the Via de' Battle. The evening gathers now and the

street is empty, the fan pattern of the cobbles shining in a winter drizzle

not cold enough to kill the smell of cats. We are among the palaces built six

hundred years ago by the merchant princes, the kingmakers and connivers of

Renaissance Florence. Within bow-shot across the Arno River are the cruel

spikes of the Signoria, where the monk Savonarola was hanged and burned, and

that great meat house of hanging Christs, the Uffizi museum.

These family palaces, pressed together in an ancient street, frozen in the

modern Italian bureaucracy, are prison architecture on the outside, but they

contain great and graceful spaces, high silent halls no one ever sees, draped

with rotting, rain-streaked silk where lesser works of the great Renaissance

masters hang in the dark for years, and are illuminated by the lightning after

the draperies collapse.

Here beside you is the palazzo of the Capponi, a family distinguished for a

thousand years, who tore up a French king's ultimatum in his face and produced

a pope.

The windows of the Palazzo Capponi are dark now, behind their iron grates. The

torch rings are empty. In that pane of crazed old glass is a bullet hole from

the 1940's. Go closer. Rest your head against the cold iron as the policeman

did and listen. Faintly you can hear a clavier. Bach's Goldberg Variations

played, not perfectly, but exceedingly well, with an engaging understanding of

the music. Played not perfectly, but exceedingly well; there is perhaps a

slight stiffness in the left hand.

If you believe you are beyond harm, will you go inside? Will you enter this

palace so prominent in blood and glory, follow your face through the webspanned dark, toward the exquisite chiming of the clavier? The alarms cannot

see us. The wet policeman lurking in the doorway cannot see us. Come . . .

Inside the foyer the darkness is almost absolute. A long stone staircase, the

stair rail cold beneath our sliding hand, the steps scooped by the hundreds of

years of footfalls, uneven beneath our feet as we climb toward the music.

The tall double doors of the main salon would squeak and howl if we had to

open them. For you, they are open. The music comes from the far, far corner,

and from the corner comes the only light, light of many candles pouring

reddish through the small door of a chapel off the corner of the room.

Cross to the music. We are dimly aware of passing large groups of draped

furniture, vague shapes not quite still in the candlelight, like a sleeping

herd. Above us the height of the room disappears into darkness.

The light glows redly on an ornate clavier and on the man known to Renaissance

scholars as Dr Fell, the doctor elegant, straight-backed as he leans into the

music, the light reflecting off his hair and the back of his quilted silk

dressing gown with a sheen like pelt.

The raised cover of the clavier is decorated with an intricate scene of

banquetry, and the little figures seem to swarm in the candlelight above the

strings. He plays with his eyes closed. He has no need of the sheet music.

Before him on the lyre-shaped music rack of the clavier is a copy of the

American trash tabloid the National Tattler. It is folded to show only the

face on the front page, the face of Clarice Starling.

Our musician smiles, ends the piece, repeats the saraband once for his own

pleasure and as the last quill-plucked string vibrates to silence in the great

room, he opens his eyes, each pupil centered with a red pinpoint of light. He

tilts his head to the side and looks at the paper before him.

He rises without sound and carries the American tabloid into the tiny, ornate

chapel, built before the discovery of America. As he holds it up to the light

of the candles and unfolds it, the religious icons above the altar seem to

read the tabloid over his shoulder, as they would in a grocery line. The type

is seventy-two-point Railroad Gothic. It says

"DEATH ANGEL: CLARICE STARLING, THE FBI's KILLING MACHINE."

Faces painted in agony and beatitude around the altar fade as he snuffs the

candles. Crossing the great hall he has no need of light. A puff of air as Dr

Hannibal Lecter passes us. The great door creaks, closes with a thud we can

feel in the floor. Silence.

Footsteps entering another room. In the resonances of this place, the walls

feel closer, the ceiling still high-sharp sounds echo late from above and the

still air holds the smell of vellum and parchment and extinguished

candlewicks.

The rustle of paper in the dark, the squeak and scrape of a chair. Dr Lecter

sits in a great armchair in the fabled Capponi Library. His eyes reflect light

redly, but they do not glow red in the dark, as some of his keepers have sworn

they do. The darkness is complete. He is considering . . .

It is true that Dr Lecter created the vacancy at the Palazzo Capponi by

removing the former curator - a simple process requiring a few seconds' work

on the old man and a modest outlay for two bags of cement but once the way was

clear he won the job fairly, demonstrating to the Belle Arti Committee an

extraordinary linguistic capability, sight-translating medieval Italian and

Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter manuscripts.

He has found a peace here that he would preserve, he has killed hardly

anybody, except his predecessor, during his residence in Florence.

His appointment as translator and curator of the Capponi Library is a

considerable prize to him for several reasons: The spaces, the height of the

palace rooms, are important to Dr Lecter after his years of cramped

confinement. More important, he feels a resonance with the palace; it is the

only private building he has ever seen that approaches in dimension and detail

the memory palace he has maintained since youth.

In the library, this unique collection of manuscripts and correspondence going

back to the early thirteenth century, he can indulge a certain curiosity about

himself.

Dr Lecter believed, from fragmentary family records, that he was descended

from a certain Giuliano Bevisangue, a fearsome twelfth-century figure in

Tuscany, and from the Machiavelli as well as the Visconti. This was the ideal

place for research. While he had a certain abstract curiosity about the

matter, it was not ego-related. Dr Lecter does not require conventional

reinforcement. His ego, like his intelligence quota, and the degree of his

rationality, is not measurable by conventional means.

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 sixteenth-century refectory table in the

Capponi Library. Behind him is a wall of pigeonholed manuscripts and great

canvas-covered ledgers going back eight hundred years. A fourteenth-century

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 on-line 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.