He pantomimed shooting.

"Darts," Margot said.

"Darts, maybe too much narcotico. She's maybe dead."

"Get in," Margot said. "We've got to go see."

Margot drove into the double side doors, where Starling had entered the barn. Squeals and grunts and tossing bristled backs. Margot drove forward honking and drove the pigs back enough to see there were three human remains, none recognizable anymore…They drove into the tack room and closed the doors behind them.

Margot considered that Tommaso was the only one left alive who had ever seen her at the barn, not counting Cordell.

This may have occurred to Tommaso too. He stood a cautious distance from her, his dark intelligent eyes on her face. There were tears on his cheeks.

Think, Margot. You don't want any shit from the Sands. They know on their end that you handle the money. They'll dime you out in a second.

Tommaso's eyes followed her hand as it went into her pocket.

The cell phone. She punched up Sardinia, the Steuben banker at home at two- thirty in the morning. She spoke to him briefly and passed the telephone to Tommaso. He nodded, replied, nodded again and gave her back the phone. The money was his. He scrambled to the loft and got his satchel, along with Dr Lecter's overcoat and hat. While he was getting his things, Margot picked up the cattle prod, tested the current and slid it up her sleeve. She took the farrier's hammer too.

Chapter 88

TOMMASO, DRIVING Cordell's car, dropped Margot off at the house. He would leave the Honda in long-term parking at Dulles International Airport. Margot promised him she would bury what was left of Piero and Carlo as well as she could.

There was something he felt he should say to her and he gathered himself and got his English together. "Signorina, the pigs, you must know, the pigs help the Dottore. They stand back from him, circle him. They kill my brother, kill Carlo, but they stand back from Dr Lecter. I think they worship him."

Tommaso crossed himself. "You should not chase him anymore."

And throughout his long life in Sardinia, Tommaso would tell it that way. By the time Tommaso was in his sixties, he was saying that Dr Lecter, carrying the woman, had left the barn borne on a drift of pigs.

After the car was gone down the fire road, Margot stood for minutes looking up at Mason's lighted windows. She saw the shadow of Cordell moving on the walls as he fussed around Mason, replacing the monitors on her brother's breath and pulse.

She slipped the handle of the farrier's hammer down the back of her pants and settled the tail of her jacket over the head.

Cordell was coming out of Mason's room with some pillows when Margot got off the elevator.

"Cordell, fix him a martini."

"I don't know-"

"I know. Fix him a martini."

Cordell put the pillows on the love seat and knelt in front of the bar refrigerator…"Is there any juice in there?" said Margot, coming close behind him. She swung the farrier's hammer hard against the base of his skull and heard a popping sound. His head smashed into the refrigerator, rebounded, and he fell over backward off his haunches looking at the ceiling with his eyes open, one pupil dilating, the other not. She turned his head sideways against the floor and came down with the hammer, depressing his temple an inch, and thick blood came out his ears.

She did not feel anything.

Mason heard the door of his room open and he rolled his goggled eye. He had been asleep for a few moments, the lights soft. The eel was also asleep beneath its rock.

Margot's great frame filled the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

"Hi, Mason."

"What happened down there? What took you so fucking long?"

"They're all dead down there, Mason."

Margot came to his bedside and unclipped the telephone line from Mason's phone and dropped it on the floor.

"Piero and Carlo and Johnny Mogli are all dead. Dr Lecter got away and he carried the Starling woman with him."

Froth appeared between Mason's teeth as he cursed.

"I sent Tommaso home with his money."

"You what???? You fucking idiot bitch, now listen, we're going to clean this up and start over. We've got the weekend. We don't have to worry about what Starling saw. If Lecter's got her, she's good as dead."

Margot shrugged. "She never saw me."

"Get on the horn to Washington and get four of those bastards up here. Send the helicopter. Show them the backhoe-show them – Cordell! Get inhere."

Mason whistled into his panpipes. Margot pushed the pipes aside and leaned over him, so that she could see his face.

"Cordell's not coming, Mason. Cordell's dead."

"What?"

"I killed him in the playroom. Now. Mason, you're going to give me what you owe me."

She put up the side rails on his bed and, lifting the great coil of his plaited hair, she stripped the cover off his body. His little legs were no bigger around than rolls of cookie dough. His hand, the only extremity he could move, fluttered at the phone. His hard-shell respirator puffed up and down in its regular rhythm.

From her pocket Margot took a non-spermicidal condom and held it up for him to see. From her sleeve she took the cattle prod…"Remember, Mason, how you used to spit on your cock for lubrication? Think you could work up some spit? No? Maybe I can."

Mason bellowed when his breath permitted, a series of donkey-like brays, but it was over in half a minute, and very successfully too.

"You're dead, Margot."

It sounded more like "Nargot."

"Oh, Mason, we all are. Didn't you know? But these aren't," she said, securing her blouse over her warm container. "They're wiggling. I'll show you how. I'll show you how they wiggle-show-and-tell."

Margot picked up the spiky fish-handling gloves beside the aquarium.

"I could adopt Judy," Mason said. "She could be my heir, and we could do a trust."

"We certainly could," Margot said, lifting a carp out of the holding tank. She brought a chair from the seating area, and standing on it, took the lid off the big aquarium. "But we won't."

She bent over the aquarium with her great arms down in the water. She held the carp by the tail down close to the grotto and when the eel came out she grabbed it behind the head with her powerful hand and lifted it clear out of the water, over her head. The mighty eel thrashing, as long as Margot and thick, its festive skin flashing. She gripped the eel with the other hand too and when it flexed it was all she could, do to hold on with the spiky gloves imbedded in its hide.

Careful down off the chair and she came to Mason carrying the flexing eel, its head shaped like a bolt cutter, teeth clicking together with a sound like a telegraph key, the back-curved teeth no fish ever escaped. She flopped the eel on top of his chest, on the respirator and holding it with one hand, she lashed his pigtail around and around and around it.

"Wiggle, wiggle, Mason," she said.

She held the eel behind the head with one hand and with the other she forced down Mason's jaw, forced it down, putting her weight on his chin, him straining with what strength he had, and with a creaking, cracking sound his mouth opened.

"You should have taken the chocolate," Margot said, and stuffed the eel's maw into Mason's mouth, it seizing his tongue with its razor-sharp teeth as it would a fish and not letting go, never letting go, its body thrashing tangled in Mason's pigtail. Blood blew out Mason's nose hole and he was drowning.

Margot left them together, Mason and the eel, the carp circling alone in the aquarium. She composed herself at Cordell's desk and watched the monitors until Mason flat-lined.

The eel was still moving when she went back into Mason's room. The respirator went up and down, inflating the eel's air bladder as it pumped bloody froth out of Mason's lungs. Margot rinsed the cattle prod in the aquarium and put it in her pocket.