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the hand truck and from the kitchen at the Palazzo Capponi. With plenty of artists available, a sketch of Dr Fell was prepared in minutes.
By Sunday morning, Italian time, a fingerprint examiner in Florence had laboriously, point by point, determined that the same fingerprints were on the podium, the noose, and Dr Fells kitchen utensils at the Palazzo Capponi.
The thumbprint of Hannibal Lecter, on the poster hanging in Questura headquarters, was not examined.
The fingerprints from the crime scene went to Interpol on Sunday night, and arrived as a matter of course at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., along with seven thousand other sets of crime scene prints. Submitted to the automated fingerprint classification system, the fingerprints from Florence registered a hit of such magnitude that an audible alarm sounded in the office of the assistant director in charge of the Identification section. The night duty officer watched the face and fingers of Hannibal Lecter crawl out of the printer, and called the assistant director at home, who called the director first, and then Krendler at justice.
Mason's telephone rang at 1:30 A. M. He acted surprised and interested.
Jack Crawford's telephone rang at 1:35. He grunted several times and rolled over to the empty, haunted side of his marriage bed where his late wife, Bella, used to be. It was cool there and he seemed to think better...Clarice Starling was the last to know that Dr Lecter had killed again. After she hung up the phone, she lay still for many minutes in the dark and her eyes stung for some reason she did not understand, but she did not cry. From her pillow looking up, she could see his face on the swarming dark. It was Dr Lecter's old face, of course.
Chapter 40
THE PILOT Of the air ambulance would not go into the short, uncontrolled airfield at Arbatax in darkness. They landed at Cagliari, refueled and waited until daylight, and flew up the coast in a spectacular sunrise that gave a false pink cast to Matteo's dead face.
A truck with a coffin was waiting at the Arbatax airstrip. The pilot argued about money and Tommaso stepped in before Carlo slapped his face.
Three hours into the mountains and they were home.
Carlo wandered alone to the rough timber shed he had built with Matteo. All was ready there, the cameras in place to film Lecter's death. Carlo stood beneath the work of Matteo's hands and looked at himself in the great rococo mirror above the animal pen. He looked around at the timbers they had sawn together, he thought of Matteo's great square hands on the saw and a great cry escaped him, a cry from his anguished heart loud enough to ring off the trees. Tusked faces appeared from the brush of the mountain pasture.
Piero and Tommaso, brothers themselves, left him alone.
Birds sang in the mountain pasture.
Came Oreste Pini from the house buttoning his fly with one hand and waving his cell phone with the other. "So you missed Lecter. Bad luck."
Carlo appeared not to hear him.
"Listen, everything is not lost. This can still work out," Oreste Pini said. "I have Mason here. He'll take a simulado. Something he can show Lecter when he does catch him. Since we're all set up. We've got a body. Mason says it was just a thug you hired. Mason says we could just, ah, just jerk it around under the fence when the pigs come and just play the canned sound. Here, talk to Mason."
Carlo turned and looked at Oreste as though he had arrived from the moon. Finally he took the cell phone. As he spoke with Mason, his face cleared and a certain peace seemed to settle on him.
Carlo snapped the cell phone shut. "Get ready," he said.
Carlo spoke with Piero and Tommaso, and with the cameraman's help they carried the coffin to the shed.
"You don't want that close enough to get in the frame," Oreste said. "Let's get some footage of the animals milling and then we'll go from there."
Seeing the activity in the shed, the first pigs broke cover.
"Giriamo!" Oreste called.
They came running, the wild swine, brown and silver, tall, hip-high to a man,.deep in the chest, long-bristled, moving with the speed of a wolf on their little hooves, intelligent little eyes in their hellish faces, massive neck muscles beneath the ridge of standing bristles on their backs capable of lifting a man on their great ripping tusks.
"Pronti!" the cameraman called.
They had not eaten in three days, others coming now in