Chapter 39: Pazzi was murdered.
WHILE BLOOD still fell from the hanging body of Rinaldo Pazzi to fry and smoke
on the hot floodlights beneath Palazzo Vecchio, the police summoned the fire
department to get him down.
The pompieri used an extension on their ladder truck. Ever practical, and
certain the hanged man was dead, they took their time retrieving Pazzi. It was
a delicate process requiring them to boost the dangling viscera up to the body
and wrap netting around the whole mass, before attaching a line to lower him
to the ground.
As the body reached the upstretched arms of those on the ground, La Nazione
got an excellent picture that reminded many readers of the great Deposition
paintings.
The police left the noose in place until it could be fingerprinted, and then
cut the stout electrical cord in the center of the noose to preserve the
integrity of the knot.
Many Florentines were determined that the death be a spectacular suicide,
deciding that Rinaldo Pazzi bound his own hands in the manner of a jail
suicide, and ignoring the fact that the feet were also bound. In the first
hour, local radio reported Pazzi had committed hara-kiri with a knife in
addition to hanging himself.
The police knew better at once the severed bonds on the balcony and the hand
truck, Pazzi's missing gun, eyewitness accounts of Carlo running into the
Palazzo and the bloody shrouded figure running blindly behind the Palazzo
Vecchio told them Pazzi was murdered.
Then the Italian public decided Il Mostro had killed Pazzi.
The Questura began with the wretched Girolamo Tocca, once convicted of being
Il Mostro. They seized him at home and drove away with his wife once again
howling in the road. His alibi was solid. He was drinking a Ramazzotti at a
cafe in sight of a priest at the time. Tocca was released in Florence and had
to return to San Casciano by bus, paying his own fare.
The staff at Palazzo Vecchio were questioned in the first hours and the
questioning spread through the membership of the Studiolo.
The police could not locate Dr Fell. By noon on Saturday close attention was
brought to bear on him. The Questura recalled that Pazzi had been assigned to
investigate the disappearance of Fells's predecessor.
A clerk at the Carabinieri reported Pazzi in recent days had examined a
permesso di soggiorno. Fells records, including his photographs, attached
negatives and fingerprints, were signed out to a false name in what appeared
to be Pazzi's handwriting. Italy has not yet computerized its records
nationwide and the permessos are still held at the local level.
Immigration records yielded Fells passport number, which rang the lemons in
Brazil.
Still, the police did not beep to Dr. Fells true identity. They took
fingerprints from the coils of the hangman's noose and fingerprints from the
podium, 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.
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