Return Of The Cannibal(Hannibal x Reader)(Book 2)

Chapter 36

Night came and the last tourists were shooed out of the Palazzo Vecchio. Many, feeling the loom of the medieval castle on their backs as they scattered across the piazza, had to turn and look up at a last time the jack-o'-lantern teeth of its parapets, high over them.

Floodlights came on, washing the sheer rough stone, sharpening the shadows under the high battlements. As the swallows went to their nests, the first bats appeared, disturbed in their hunting more by the high-frequency squeals of the restorers' power tools than by the light.

Inside the Palazzo the endless job of the conservation and maintenance would go on for another hour, except in the salon of Lilies, where Dr. Lecter conferred with the foreman of the maintenance crew.

The foreman, accustomed to the penury and sour demands of the Belle Arti Committee, found the Doctor both courteous and extremely generous.

In minutes his workers were stowing their equipment, moving the great floor polishers and compressors out of the way against the walls and rolling up their lines and electrical cords. Quickly they set up the folding chairs for the meeting of the Studiolo - only a dozen chairs were needed - and threw open the windows to clear out the smell of their paint and polish and gilding.

The Doctor insisted on a proper lectern, and one as big as a pulpit was found in the former office of Niccolo Machiavelli adjacent to the salon and brought on a tall hand truck, along with the Palazzo's over head projector.

The small screen that came with the projector did not suit Dr. Lecter and he sent it away. Instead he tried showing his images life-sized against one of the hanging canvas drop cloths protecting a refurbished wall. After he had adjusted its fastenings and smoothed out the folds, he found the cloth would serve him very well.

He marked his place in several of the weighty tomes piled on the lectern, and then stood at the window with his back to the room as the members of the Studiolo in their dusty dark suits arrived and seated themselves, the tacit skepticism of the scholars evident as they rearranged their chairs from a semicircle into more a jury-box configuration.

Looking out the tall windows, Dr. Lecter could see the Duomo and Giotto's campanile, black against the west, but not Dante's beloved Baptistry below them. The upturned floodlights prevented him from seeing down into the dark piazza where the assassins awaited him.

As these, the most renowned medieval and Renaissance scholars in the world, settled in their chairs, Dr. Lecter composed in his mind his lecture to them. it too him a little more than three minutes to organize the lecture. Its subject was Dante's Inferno and Judas Iscariot.

Much in accord with the Studiolo's taste for the pre-Renaissance, Dr. Lecter began with the case of Pier della Vigna, Logothete of the kingdom of Sicily, whose avarice earned him a place in Dante's Hell. For the first half-hour the Doctor fascinated them with the real-life medieval intrigues behind della Vigna's fall.

"Dell Vigna was disgraced and blinded for his betrayal of the emperor's trust through his avarice," Dr. Lecter said, approaching his principal topic. "Dame's pilgrim found him in the seventh level of the Inferno, reserved for suicides. Like Judas Iscariot, he died by hanging.

"Judas and Pier della Vigna and Ahithophel, the ambitious counselor of Absalom, are linked in the Dante by the avarice he saw in them and by their subsequent deaths by hanging."

"Avarice and hanging are linked in the ancient and the medieval mind: St Jerome writes that Judas' very surname, Iscariot, means 'money' or 'price,' while Father Origen says Iscariot is derived from the Hebrew 'from suffocation' and that his name means 'Judas the suffocated."'