Pazzi got the bracelet off Gnocco

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.