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“Ah, Mason my friend, excuse me, I was asleep, what time is it there?”

“It’s late everywhere, Oreste. Do you remember what I said I would do for you and what you must do for me?”

“Well, of course.”

“The time has come, my friend. You know what I want. I want a two-camera setup, I want better quality sound than your sex films have, and you have to make your own electricity, so I want the generator a long way from the set. I want some nice nature footage too for when we edit, and birdcalls. I want you to check out the location tomorrow and set it up. You can leave the stuff there, I’ll provide security and you can come back to Rome until the shoot. But be ready to roll on two hours’ notice. Do you understand that, Oreste? A draft is waiting for you in Citibank at the EUR, got it?”

“Mason, in this moment, I am making—”

“Do you want to do this, Oreste? You said you were tired of making hump movies and snuff movies and historical crap for the RAI. Do you seriously want to make a feature, Oreste?”

“Yes, Mason.”

“Then go today. The cash is at Citibank. I want you to go.”

“Where, Mason?”

“Sardinia. Fly to Cagliari, you’ll be met.”

The next call went to Porto Torres on the east coast of Sardinia. The call was brief. There was not a lot to say because the machinery there was long established and as efficient as Mason’s portable guillotine. It was sounder too, ecologically, but not as quick.

II

FLORENCE

CHAPTER

17

NIGHT IN the heart of Florence, the old city artfully lighted.

The Palazzo Vecchio rising from the dark piazza, floodlit, intensely medieval with its arched windows and battlements like jack-o’-lantern teeth, bell tower soaring into the black sky

Bats will chase mosquitoes across the clock’s glowing face until dawn, when the swallows rise on air shivered by the bells.

Chief Investigator Rinaldo Pazzi of the Questura, raincoat black against the marble statues fixed in acts of rape and murder, came out of the shadows of the Loggia and crossed the piazza, his pale face turning like a sunflower to the palace light. He stood on the spot where the reformer Savonarola was burned and looked up at the windows where his own forebear came to grief.

There, from that high window, Francesco de’ Pazzi was thrown naked with a noose around his neck, to die writhing and spinning against the rough wall. The archbishop in all his holy vestments hanged beside Pazzi provided no spiritual comfort; eyes bulging, wild as he choked, the archbishop locked his teeth in Pazzi’s flesh.

The Pazzi family were all brought low on that Sunday, 26 April, 1478, for killing Giuliano de’ Medici and trying to kill Lorenzo the Magnificent in the cathedral at Mass.

Now Rinaldo Pazzi, a Pazzi of the Pazzi, hating the government as much as his ancestor ever did, disgraced and out of fortune, listening for the whisper of the axe, came to this place to decide how best to use a singular piece of luck:

Chief Investigator Pazzi believed that he had found Hannibal Lecter living in Florence. He had a chance to regain his reputation and enjoy the honors of his trade by capturing the fiend. Pazzi also had a chance to sell Hannibal Lecter to Mason Verger for more money than he could imagine—if the suspect was indeed Lecter. Of course, Pazzi would be selling his own ragged honor as well.

Pazzi did not head the Questura investigation division for nothing—he was gifted and in his time he had been driven by a wolfish hunger to succeed in his profession. He also carried the scars of a man who, in the haste and heat of his ambition, once seized his gift by the blade.

He chose this place to cast his lot because he once experienced a moment of epiphany here that made him famous and then ruined him.

The Italian sense of irony was strong in Pazzi: How fitting that his fateful revelation came beneath this window, where the furious spirit of his forebear might still spin against the wall. In this same place, he could forever change the Pazzi luck.

It was the hunt for another serial killer, Il Mostró, that made Pazzi famous and then let the crows peck at his heart. That experience made possible his new discovery. But ending of the Il Mostró case was bitter ashes in Pazzi’s mouth and inclined him now toward a dangerous game outside the law.

Il Mostró, the Monster of Florence, preyed on lovers in Tuscany for seventeen years in the l980s and 1990s. The Monster crept up on couples as they embraced in the many Tuscan lovers’ lanes. It was his custom to kill the lovers with a small-caliber pistol, arrange them in a careful tableau with flowers and expose the woman’s left breast. His tableaux had an odd familiarity about them, they left a sense of déjà vu.

The Monster also excised anatomical trophies, except in the single instance when he slew a long-haired German homosexual couple, apparently by mistake.

The public pressure on the Questura to catch Il Mostró was intense, and drove Rinaldo Pazzi’s predecessor out of office. When Pazzi took over as chief investigator, he was like a man fighting bees, with the press swarming through his office whenever they were allowed, and photographers lurking in the Via Zara behind Questura headquarters, where he had to drive out.