"I marked in overlay some of the differences from the modern score as the first movement went along," Dr Lecter said. "It might amuse you to follow along in the second. Please, take it. I can always retrieve it from Signor Pazzi is that permissible, Commendatore?"

The doctor looking deeply, deeply as Pazzi replied.

"If it would please you, Laura," Pazzi said. A beat of thought. "Will you be addressing the Studiolo, Doctor?"

"Yes, Friday night in fact. Soglioto can't wait to see me discredited."

"I have to be in the old city," Pazzi said. "I'll return the score then. Laura, Dr Fell has to sing for his supper before the dragons at the Studiolo."

"I'm sure you'll sing very well, Doctor," she said, giving him her great dark eyes – within the bounds of propriety, but just.

Dr Lecter smiled, with his small white teeth. "Madame, if I manufactured Fleur du Ciel, I would offer you the Cape Diamond to wear it. Until Friday night, Commendatore."

Pazzi made sure the doctor returned to his box, and did not look at him again until they waved good night at a distance on the theater steps.

"I gave you that Fleur du Ciel for your birthday," Pazzi said.

"Yes, and I love it, Rinaldo," Signora Pazzi said. "You have the most marvelous taste."

IMPRUNETA is an ancient Tuscan town where the roof tiles of the Duomo were made. Its cemetery is visible at night from the hilltop villas for miles around because of the lamps forever burning at the graves. The ambient light is low, but enough for visitors to make their way among the dead, though a flashlight is needed to read the epitaphs.

Rinaldo Pazzi arrived at five minutes to nine with a small bouquet of flowers he planned to place on a grave at random. He walked slowly along a gravel path between the tombs.

He felt Carlo's presence, though he did not see him.

Carlo spoke from the other side of a mausoleum more than head high. "Do you know a good florist in the town?".The man sounded like a Sard. Good, maybe he knew what he was doing.

"Florists are all thieves," Pazzi replied.

Carlo came briskly around the marble structure without peeking.

He looked feral to Pazzi, short and round and powerful, nimble in his extremities. His vest was leather and he had a boar bristle in his hat. Pazzi guessed he had three inches reach advantage on Carlo and four inches of height. They weighed about the same, he guessed. Carlo was missing a thumb. Pazzi figured he could find him in the Questura's records with about five minutes' work. Both men were lit from beneath by the grave lamps.

"His house has good alarms," Pazzi said.

"I looked at it. You have to point him out to me."

"He has to speak at a meeting tomorrow night, Friday night. Can you do it that soon?"

"It's good."

Carlo wanted to bully the policeman a little, establish his control. "Will you walk with him, or are you afraid of him? You'll do what you're paid to do. You'll point him out to me."

"Watch your mouth. I'll do what I'm paid to do and so will you. Or you can pass your retirement as a fuckboy at Volterra, suit yourself."

Carlo at work was as impervious to insult as he was to cries of pain. He saw that he had misjudged the policeman. He spread his hands. "Tell me what I need to know."

Carlo moved to stand beside Pazzi as though they mourned together at the small mausoleum. A couple passed on the path holding hands. Carlo removed his hat and the two men stood with bowed heads. Pazzi put his flowers at the door of the tomb. A smell came from Carlo's warm hat, a rank smell, like sausage from an animal improperly gelded.

Pazzi raised his face from the odor. "He's fast with his knife. Goes low with it."

"Has he got a gun?"

"I don't know. He's never used one, that I know of.

"I don't want to have to take him out of a car. I want him on the open street with not many people around."

"How will you take him down?"

"That's my business."

Carlo put a stag's tooth in his mouth and chewed at the gristle, protruding the tooth between his lips from time to time.

"It's my business too," Pazzi said. "How will you do it?"

"Stun him with a beanbag gun, net him, then I can give him a shot. I need to check his teeth fast in case he's got poison under a tooth cap."."He has to lecture at a meeting. It starts at seven in the Palazzo Vecchio. If he works in the Capponi Chapel at Santa Croce on Friday, he'll walk from there to the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you know Florence?"

"I know it well. Can you get me a vehicle pass for the old city?"

"Yes."

"I won't take him out of the church," Carlo said.

Pazzi nodded. "Better he shows up for the meeting, then he probably won't be missed for two weeks. I have a reason to walk with him to the Palazzo Capponi after the meeting-"

"I don't want to take him in his house. That's his ground. He knows it and I don't. He'll be alert, he'll look around him at the door. I want him on the open sidewalk."

"Listen to me then – we'll come out the front entrance of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Via dei Leoni side will be closed. We'll go along the Via Neri and come across the river on the Ponte alle Grazie. There are trees in front of the Museo Bardini on the other side that block the streetlights. It's quiet at that hour when school is out."

"We'll say in front of the Museo Bardini then, but I may do it sooner if I see a chance, closer to the palazzo, or earlier in the day if he spooks and tries to run. We may be in an ambulance. Stay with him until the beanbag hits him and then get away from him fast."

"I want him out of Tuscany before anything happens to him."

"Believe me, he'll be gone from the face of the earth, feet first," Carlo said, smiling at his private joke, sticking the stag's tooth out through the smile.

FRIDAY MORNING. A small room in the attic of the Palazzo Capponi. Three of the whitewashed walls are bare. On the fourth wall hangs a large thirteenth century Madonna of the Cimabue school, enormous in the little room, her head bent at the signature angle like that of a curious bird, and her almond eyes regarding a small figure asleep beneath the painting.

Dr Hannibal Lecter, veteran of prison and asylum cots, lies still on this narrow bed, his hands on his chest.

His eyes open and he is suddenly, completely awake, his dream of his sister Mischa, long dead and digested, running seamlessly into this present waking: danger then, danger now.

Knowing he is in danger did not disturb his sleep any more than killing the pickpocket did.

Dressed for his day now, lean and perfectly groomed in his dark silk suit, he turns off the motion sensors at the top of the servants' stairs and comes down into the great spaces of the palazzo.

Now he is free to move through the vast silence of the palace's many rooms, always a heady freedom to him after so many years of confinement in a basement.cell.

Just as the frescoed walls of Santa Croce or the Palazzo Vecchio are suffused with mind, so the air of the Capponi Library thrums with presence for Dr Lecter as he works at the great wall of pigeonholed manuscripts. He selects rolled parchments, blows dust away, the motes of dust swarming in a ray of sun as though the dead, who now are dust, vie to tell him their fate and his. He works efficiently, but without undue haste, putting a few things in his own portfolio, gathering books and illustrations for his lecture tonight to the Studiolo. There are so many things he would have liked to read.

Dr Lecter opens his laptop computer and, dialing through the University of Milan 's criminology department, checks the FBI's home page on the World Wide Web at www.fbi.gov, as any private citizen can do. The Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Clarice Starling's abortive drug raid has not been scheduled, he learns. He does not have the access codes he would need to look into his own case file at the FBI. On the Most Wanted page, his own former countenance looks at him, flanked by a bomber and an arsonist.