By some accounts, Will Graham is not much to look at. Objectively, he could be judged attractive. But his mannerisms-his refusal to make eye contact, his speech marred by bowed head and stumbling tongue-sap any charisma. Will projects himself as the leavings of a human being, consumed within and showing only ashes.
Despite the uneasy trainees who make quiet and half-ashamed jokes behind his back after class, Will is not repellent to everyone. Those who have the time and tools to dig past the crumbling excrescence and into the live coals below find themselves marked by him.
Alana Bloom, for instance.
Hannibal Lecter, though he likes to think he has a special appreciation for the piece of condemned property that is Will Graham.
Even Jack Crawford.
In fact, the BAU chief has told Hannibal as much, over dinner one night (a ragoût with the sherry-braised sweetbreads of a hardware-store sales assistant who also had an unsettling habit of exposing himself to children in parks).
Crawford said, through the cool smile and hooded eyes that Hannibal has come to know means he is indulging in self-satisfaction, that looking at Will is like looking at the work of Paul Klee. "He doesn't so much make up a person as represent one in public," Jack continues.
Hannibal gives an indulgent smile even at Crawford's mispronunciation of the artist's name. An intriguing but somewhat puerile comparison, Klee. Blocks of unknowing color, suggesting a form more melancholy than its component parts.
Trite, trite, trite.
Hannibal raises his glass toward his guest, conveying tacit praise for his insight.
Crawford might just as well have referenced Claude Monet, which Hannibal finds just as banal. He prefers figurative work, precise cuts across canvas compared with the oozing emotionality of the abstract.
Hannibal makes a polite sound that might be assent, or just acknowledgement that the other man is speaking.
And he looks upon the composite inside his mind evoked by the name "Will Graham." Because he does not see like other men.
For all his appreciation of the old masters, a man is not a painting. Hannibal sees a mind in multidimensional renderings, on all planes at once. Each attribute is both partitioned, hard and sharp like stained glass, and at the same time collapsing in on itself, falling through every hue imaginable and some unimagined. Eye-like tunnels ringed with shades of themselves in an annular drift toward black singularity.
It is riotous, exultant, and would no doubt kill a man without the resources to take it in and process it. Kill him, or run him mad.
Both of these things Hannibal would like to watch. Perhaps it will happen to Crawford before Hannibal himself must kill the man. An observer is a knowing catalyst, or so said Heisenberg. At least on the quantum level.
And thus, as much as Will Graham is pale and retiring before others, or a mosaic before Jack Crawford, he is prismatic in Hannibal's view. A seething garden to rival all the temptations set before Saint Anthony by the hosts of Hell. It smells of sweet decay; Will is sick with it. And it takes as little as the effortless slide of a fingernail below the surface of his tenuous calm to set the corruption blooming on his skin.
Mesmerizing. All the more so because he is intent on teaching Will to want it. Or, rather, showing him that he already does.
It will be an entertainment-symphonic in scope-not like the little baroque fillips of pleasure he draws from pretending to help the FBI with its little puzzles.
Though he does not know it yet, the composition of this particular work begins in his office, where he allows Will close to free rein to explore his demesne. The marble columns are polished to a high shine by swift, quiet cleaning teams in starched whites. The paintings and prints are museum-mounted, set behind spotless plexiglas. Spectral lines-himself and his patients-skim the curves of the sterling silver tea service. All is reflective, but distorts in some way. This is not accidental.
Hannibal sips at a snifter of Le Diciotto Lune Stravecchia Grappa, watches as Will stops pacing next to a rosewood pedestal holding a glass-topped case.
"That looks wicked," says Will.
Hannibal holds off only a moment, savoring the anticipation, before going to join him, to watch the planes of his sunken face move over the dagger nestled in velvet.
"That," he tells Will, "is a misericorde. It was used to dispatch wounded and suffering knights on the field of battle. The blade had to be thin and strong enough to slip between the plates of armor, but long enough to pierce the heart through. Medieval euthanasia."
"Misery as in 'putting them out of?'" Will asks.
"It is a false cognate. Misericorde from the Latin, 'misericordia.' Meaning 'mercy.'"
Will favors the box with a rare smile, but it is the reflection that Hannibal sees, and smiles just out of the sight of its glass eye.
"Would you like more wine?" Hannibal asks. It is a superfluous question; the liquid in the glass is at the same level it was half an hour ago.
Will shakes his head and moves away.
Hannibal knows Will does not like to be physically close to others, for the most part. But he has begun to tolerate Hannibal's presence in his personal space for limited periods of time, now. Proximity is knowledge to Hannibal, to smell is to know, to couple a full picture with that provided by his preternatural sight. So he has insinuated himself within that sphere, extending deliberate comfort, like reaching out to a stray.
No.
He thinks of Will's dogs, the primal, trusting things. The stench. An ugly comparison, in retrospect. That Will Graham surrounds himself with the unendurable makes the prize that he is shine more brightly by comparison.
Will's phone rings from the depths of his cardigan pocket. Wine or no wine, the point is now moot, as he answers it.
Hannibal lets his breath out in a measured, soundless stream.
"Jack," Will says when he ends the call. "He's out near Norfolk."
"I will assume he wants you to join him."
"He does."
"I will let you take your leave, then." Hannibal holds out his hand for the wine. Will slides the stem of the glass between Hannibal's third and fourth fingers, a bloody lily perched on his outstretched palm. Both he and Will watch the liquid shudder in the glass, a very deliberate tremor.
"Cold today," Will says, apropos of nothing.
Hannibal lowers the glass. In the other hand he still holds the snifter of grappa. The ridges on Will's wide-wale corduroys ripple, magnified though one glass, then the other. Will won't be looking at Hannibal's face, so he won't notice he's being observed.
"I'll get going, then" Will says, running a hand through his hair, forcing a laugh. One knuckle catches in a tangle, then is released.
"We'll take my car down, yes?" Hannibal says.