فصل 48

Chapter 48

WE CAN see it through the vapor of our breath - in the clear night over Newfoundland a brilliant point of light hanging in Orion, then passing slowly overhead, a Boeing 747 bucking a hundred-mile-per-hour head wind westward.

Back in steerage where the package tours go, the fifty-two members of Old World Fantasy, a tour of eleven countries in seventeen days, are returning to Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Shoulder room is twenty inches. Hip room between armrests is twenty inches. This is two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.

The passengers are being slopped with freezing-cold sandwiches of slippery meat and processed cheese food, and are re-breathing the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation on the ditch-liquor principle established by cattle and pig merchants in the 1950s.

Dr Hannibal Lecter is in the center of the middle row in steerage with children on both sides of him and a woman holding an infant at the end of the row. After so many years in cells and restraints, Dr Lecter does not like to be confined. A computer game in the lap of the small boy beside him beeps incessantly.

Like many others scattered throughout the cheapest seats, Dr Lecter wears a bright yellow smiley-face badge with CAN-AM TOURS on it in big red letters, and like the tourists he wears faux athletic warm-ups. His warm-ups bear the insignia of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a hockey team. Beneath his clothing, a considerable amount of cash is strapped to his body.

Dr Lecter has been with the tour three days, having bought his place from a Paris broker of last-minute illness cancellations. The man who should have been in this seat went home to Canada in a box after his heart gave out climbing the dome of St Peter’s.

When he reaches Detroit, Dr Lecter must face passport control and customs. He can be sure security and immigration officers at every major airport in the western world have been alerted to watch for him. Where his picture is not taped to the wall of passport control, it is waiting under the hot button of every customs and immigration computer.

In all of this, he thinks that he may enjoy one piece of luck: The pictures the authorities are using could be of his old face. The false passport he used to enter Italy has no corresponding home-country file to provide a current likeness. In Italy, Rinaldo Pazzi had tried to simplify his own life and satisfy Mason Verger by taking the Carabinieri’s file, including the photograph and negative used on “Dr Fells” permesso di soggiorno and work permit. Dr Lecter found them in Pazzi’s briefcase and destroyed them.

Unless Pazzi took photos of “Dr Fell” from hiding, there is a good chance that no current likeness of Dr Lecter’s new face exists in the world. It is not so different from his old face -a little collagen added around the nose and cheeks, changed hair, spectacles but it is different enough if attention is not called to him. For the scar on the back of his hand, he has found a durable cosmetic and a tanning agent.

He expects that at Detroit Metropolitan Airport the Immigration Service will divide the arrivees into two lines, U.S. Passports and Other. He has chosen a border city so the Other line will be full. This airplane is loaded with Canadians. Dr Lecter thinks he can be swept through with the herd, as long as the herd accepts him. He has toured some historic sites and galleries with these tourists, he has flown in the stews of the airplane with them, but there are limits. He cannot eat this airline swill with them.

Tired and footsore, weary of their clothes and their companions, the tourists root in their supper bags, and from their sandwiches remove the lettuce, black I with cold.

Dr Lecter, not wishing to call attention to himself, waits until the other passengers have picked through this sorry fare, waits until they have gone to the bathroom and most have fallen asleep. Far at the front, a stale movie plays. Still he waits with the patience of a python. Beside him the small boy has fallen asleep over his computer game. Up and down the broad airplane, the reading lights wink out.

Then and only then, with a furtive glance around, Dr Lecter takes from beneath the seat in front of him, his own lunch in an elegant yellow box trimmed with brown from Fauchon, the Paris caterer. It is tied with two ribbons of silk gauze in complementary colors. Dr Lecter has provisioned himself with wonderfully aromatic truffled pate de foie gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems.

He has a half-bottle of a St Estephe he favors. The silk bow yields with a whisper.

Dr Lecter is about to savor a fig, holds it before his lips, his nostrils flared to its aroma, deciding whether to take all the fig in one glorious bite or just half, when the computer game beside him beeps. It beeps again. Without turning his head, the doctor palms the fig and looks down at the child beside him. The scents of truffle, foie gras and cognac climb from the open box. The small boy sniffs the air. His narrow eyes, shiny as those of a rodent, slide sideways to Dr Lecter’s lunch. He speaks with the piercing voice of a competitive sibling: “Hey, Mister. Hey, Mister.”

He’s not going to stop.

“What is it?”

“Is that one of those special meals?”

“It is not.”

“What’ve you got in there then?”

The child turned his face up to Dr Lecter in a full wheedle. “Gimme a bite?”

“I’d very much like to,” Dr Lecter replied, noting that beneath the child’s big head, his neck was only as big around as a pork tenderloin, “but you wouldn’t like it. It’s liver.”

“Liverwurst! Awesome! Mom won’t care, Mooaaaahm!”

Unnatural child, who loves liverwurst and either whines or screams.

The woman holding the baby at the end of the row started awake.

Travelers in the row ahead, their chairs cranked back until Dr Lecter can smell their hair, look back through the crack between seats. “We’re trying to sleep up here.”

“Mooooaaaahm, can I have some of his samwich?”

The baby in Mother’s lap awoke and began to cry. Mother dipped a finger into the back of its diaper, came up negative, and gave the baby a pacifier.

“What is it you’re trying to give him, sir?”

“It’s liver, Madame,” Dr Lecter said as quietly as possible. “I haven’t given-“

“Liverwurst, my favorite, I want it, he said I could have some of it .”

The child stretched the last word into a piercing whine.

“Sir, if you’re giving something to my child, could I see it?”

The stewardess, her face puffed from an interrupted nap, stopped by the woman’s seat as the baby howled. “Everything all right here? Could I bring you something?

Warm a bottle?”

The woman took out a capped baby bottle and gave it to the stewardess. She turned on her reading light, and while she searched for a nipple, she called to Dr Lecter. “Would you pass it down to me? If you’re offering it to my child, I want to see it. No offense, but he’s got a tricky tummy.”

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children. In times like these, a genuine monster has to watch it, even a monster as indifferent to children as Dr Lecter.

He passed his Fauchon box down to Mother.

“Hey, nice bread,” she said, poking it with her diaper finger.

“Madame, you may have it.”

“I don’t want the liquor,” she said, and looked around for a laugh. “I didn’t know they’d let you bring your own. Is this whiskey? Do they allow you to drink this on the plane? I think I’ll keep this ribbon if you don’t want it.”

“Sir, you can’t open this alcoholic beverage on the aircraft,” the stewardess said.

“I’ll hold it for you, you can claim it at the gate.”

“Of course. Thank you so much,” Dr Lecter said.

Dr Lecter could overcome his surroundings. He could make it all go away. The beeping of the computer game, the snores and farts, were nothing compared to the hellish screaming he’d known in the violent wards. The seat was no tighter than restraints. As he had done in his cell so many times, Dr Lecter put his head back, closed his eyes and retired for relief into the quiet of his memory palace, a place that is quite beautiful for the most part.

For this little time, the metal cylinder howling eastward against the wind contains a palace of a thousand rooms.

As once we visited Dr Lecter in the Palazzo of the Capponi, so we will go with him now into the palace of his mind .

The foyer is the Norman Chapel in Palermo, severe and beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality in the skull graven in the floor. Unless he is in a great hurry to retrieve information from the palace, Dr Lecter often pauses here as he does now, to admire the chapel. Beyond it, far and complex, light and dark, is the vast structure of Dr Lecter’s making.

The memory palace was a mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while Vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there. He has passed years among its exquisite collections, while his body lay bound on a violent ward with screams buzzing the steel bars like hell’s own harp.

Hannibal Lecter’s palace is vast, even by medieval standards. Translated to the tangible world it would rival the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul for size and complexity.

We catch up to him as the swift slippers of his mind pass from the foyer into the Great Hall of the Seasons. The palace is built according to the rules discovered by Simonides of Ceos and elaborated by Cicero four hundred years later; it is airy, high-ceilinged, furnished with objects and tableaux that are vivid, striking, sometimes shocking and absurd, and often beautiful. The displays are well spaced and well lighted like those of a great museum. But the walls are not the neutral colors of museum walls. Like Giotto, Dr Lecter has frescoed the walls of his mind.

He has decided to pick up Clarice Starling’s home address while he is in the palace, but he is in no hurry for it, so he stops at the foot of a great staircase where the Riace bronzes stand. These great bronze warriors attributed to Phidias, raised from the seafloor in our own time, are the centerpiece of a frescoed space that could unspool all of Homer and Sophocles.

Dr Lecter could have the bronze faces speak Meleager if he wished, but today he only wants to look at them.

A thousand rooms, miles of corridors, hundreds of facts attached to each object furnishing each room, a pleasant respite awaiting Dr Lecter whenever he chooses to retire there.

But this we share with the doctor: In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor-the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases-things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior .

Fearfully and wonderfully made, we follow as he moves with a swift light stride along the corridor of his own making, through a scent of gardenias, the presence of great sculpture pressing on us, and the light of pictures.

His way leads around to the right past a bust of Pliny and up the staircase to the Hall of Addresses, a room lined with statuary and paintings in a fixed order, spaced wide apart and well lit, as Cicero recommends.

Ah . The third alcove from the door on the right is dominated by a painting of St Francis feeding a moth to a starling. On the floor before the painting is this tableau, life-sized in painted marble: A parade in Arlington National Cemetery led by Jesus, thirty-three, driving a ‘27 Model-T Ford truck, a “tin lizzie,” with J. Edgar Hoover standing in the truck bed wearing a tutu and waving to an unseen crowd. Marching behind him is Clarice Starling carrying a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms.

Dr Lecter appears pleased to see Starling. Long ago he obtained Starling’s home address from the University of Virginia Alumni Association. He stores the address in this tableau, and now, for his own pleasure, he summons the numbers and the name of the street where Starling lives: 3327 Tindal Arlington, VA 22308 Dr Lecter can move down the vast halls of his memory palace with unnatural speed. With his reflexes and strength, apprehension and speed of mind, Dr Lecter is well armed against the physical world. But there are places within himself that he may not safely go, where Cicero’s rules of logic, of ordered space and light do not apply .

He has decided to visit his collection of ancient textiles. For a letter he is writing to Mason Verger, he wants to review a text of Ovid on the subject of flavored facial oils which is attached to the weavings.

He proceeds down an interesting flat-weave kilim runner toward the hall of looms and textiles.

In the world of the 747, Dr Lecter’s head is pressed back against the seat, his eyes are closed. His head bobs gently as turbulence bumps the airplane.

At the end of the row, the baby has finished its bottle and is not yet asleep. Its face reddens. Mother feels the little body tense within the blanket, then relax. There is no question what has happened. She does not need to dip her finger in the diaper.

In the row ahead someone says “Jeeeezus.”

To the stale gymnasium reek of the airplane is added another layer of smell. The small boy, seated beside Dr Lecter, inured to the baby’s habits, continues to eat the lunch from Fauchon.

Beneath the memory palace, the traps fly up, the oubliettes yawn their ghastly stench .

A few animals had managed to survive the artillery and machine-gun fire in the fighting that left Hannibal Lecter’s parents dead and the vast forest on their estate scarred and blasted.

The mixed bag of deserters who used the remote hunting lodge ate what they could find. Once they found a miserable little deer, scrawny, with an arrow in it, that had managed to forage beneath the snow and survive. They led it back into the camp to keep from carrying it.

Hannibal Lecter, six, watched through a crack in the barn as they brought it in, pulling and twisting its head against the plowline twisted around its neck. They did not wish to fire a shot and managed to knock it off its spindly legs and hack at its throat with an axe, cursing at one another in several languages to bring a bowl before the blood was wasted.

There was not much meat on the runty deer and in two days, perhaps three, in their long overcoats, their breaths stinking and steaming, the deserters came through the snow from the hunting lodge to unlock the barn and choose again from among the children huddled in the straw. None had frozen, so they took a live one.

They felt Hannibal Lecter’s thigh and his upper arm and chest, and instead of him, they chose his sister, Mischa, and led her away. To play, they said. No one who was led away to play ever returned.

Hannibal held on to Mischa so hard, held to Mischa with his wiry grip until they slammed the heavy barn door on him, stunning him and cracking the bone in his upper arm.

They led her away through snow still stained bloody from the deer.

He prayed so hard that he would see Mischa again, the prayer consumed his six-year-old mind, but it did not drown out the sound of the axe. His prayer to see her again did not go entirely unanswered - he did see a few of Mischa’s milk teeth in the reeking stool pit his captors used between the lodge where they slept and the barn where they kept the captive children who were their sustenance in 1944 after the Eastern Front collapsed.

Since this partial answer to his prayer, Hannibal Lecter had not been bothered by any considerations of deity, other than to recognize how his own modest predations paled beside those of God, who is in irony matchless, and in Wanton malice beyond measure.

In this hurtling aircraft, his head bouncing gently against the head-rest, Dr Lecter is suspended between his last view of Mischa crossing the bloody snow and the sound of the axe. He is held there and he cannot stand it. In the world of the airplane comes a short scream from his sweating face, thin and high, piercing.

Passengers ahead of him turn, some wake from sleep. Some in the row ahead of him are snarling. “Kid, Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you? My God!”

Dr Lecter’s eyes open, they look straight ahead, a hand is on him. It is the small boy’s hand.

“You had a bad dream, huh?”

The child is not frightened, nor does he care about the complaints from the forward rows.

“Yes.”

“I have bad dreams a lots of times too. I’m not laughing at you.”

Dr Lecter took several breaths, his head pressed back against the seat. Then his composure returned as though calm rolled down from his hairline to cover his face.

He bent his head to the child and said in a confidential tone, “You’re right not to eat this swill, you know. Don’t ever eat it.”

Airlines no longer provide stationery. Dr Lecter, in perfect command of himself, took some hotel stationery from his breast pocket and began a letter to Clarice Starling. First, he sketched her face. The sketch is now in a private holding at the University of Chicago and available to scholars. In it Starling looks like a child and her hair, like Mischa’s, is stuck to her cheek with tears..

We can see the airplane through the vapor of our breath, a brilliant point of light in the clear night sky. See it cross the Pole star, well past the point of no return, committed now to a great arc down to tomorrow in the New World.