Chapter 18: Do you want to find out if this gun has bullets?
"What about Will?" Margot asked after a long length of silence.
"What about him?" Alana gently scraped her nails against Margot's scalp. The women were on a chaise lounge with Margot lying down on her side with her head in Alana's lap who was running her fingers methodically through her hair. The doctor had coaxed her into the position when she could not take anymore of Margot's pacing. They'd been holed up in their rooms since returning from the dining room with Alana sullen and pensive as a statue in front of a mausoleum while Margot was agitated and frenetic with energy like an over-stoked train engine.
"How do you feel letting my brother skin him alive?" She asked frankly. Alana had told her about the short, dark conversation she'd had with Will when they were alone together. Margot would categorize his tone as condescending, acerbic and entirely hypocritical given everything he'd done under the influence of Hannibal and out of it.
The doctor sighed, shaking her head. "Will and I may not be on the best of terms but I don't want to let Mason do that to him."
"Would you save him if you could?" She turned to look up at the other woman.
Alana thought a moment before answering, her fingers absentmindedly tracing her hairline. "I don't think I could be the one to save him."
"Would Hannibal save him?"
"I don't know… But it would feel right, leaving Will to Hannibal… Let the monsters destroy each other…"
It was a sentiment Alana had said before but this time it wasn't a fleeting notion in the middle of the night brought on by a nightmare; she said it with quiet finality that resonated in Margot's mind. The look in Alana's eyes seemed to collapse in as she receded into thought, her red lips pursued into a resolute line, and a slight crease settled between her brows. Margot left her to her thoughts, watching and waiting for her to finish formulating whatever brewed inside her. Until suddenly the clock in the hall chimed for 6 o'clock as if to herald in evening and signifying their time was up. Alana's blue eyes sparked back into focus. Margot reached up to cup the other woman's cheek. "What are you thinking darling?"
"I think we need to go have a talk to Hannibal." Alana brought her hand up to rest against Margot's hand on her cheek for a brief moment then moved to stand, forcing Margot to sit up. The doctor walked around to the desk and opened the top drawer producing a gleaming pistol. Margot knew the gun because she'd been the one to procure it; the Colt Python with mother of pearl grip looked very pretty with Alana's red manicure, as she knew it would. The brunette checked the cylinder for bullets and snapped it shut with a flourish. "It's his turn for a heart to heart."
The pig barns where Hannibal was being housed weren't with the grand, showy horse stables that abutted along the west side of the mansion. Instead they were situated a little over a quarter of a mile away from the house to the east. A little red door led out of the kitchens to a snow-covered trail lined with spindly pine trees that swayed and moaned in the wind. It was the path the women were on currently in long coats with the collars turned up and hands buried in their pockets, like two slender shadows gliding soundlessly in the night. Their breath plumed in ghostly gray clouds as they walked. Though the sun had completely set, the landscape was strangely illuminated with deep, twinkling stars and a three-quarter moon reflecting against the white expanse of the snow, giving everything a hard outline. In this moment, everything was serenely beautiful, not like death was poised to swoop across the night.
Alana struggled with her breathing and leaned more heavily on her cane by the time they reached their destination. Margot's eyes flickered over her worryingly but the doctor waves her off, "I just need a minute. Go see Hannibal, it seems like he had business to discuss with you."
With a nod, Margot resisted her impulse to fuss over the woman and slid open the barn door enough for her slip into dark crevice. The layout was strange for a livestock barn; the long alleyway of usual pens led to a closed circle of stables rather than another door that would be standard on the other end to allow for the space to be aired out in the stifling heat of the summer. The air was cool in the barn now and smelled of clean hay with the common stock having been sent to slaughter earlier in the week, which made in strangely quiet. The only pigs that remained were Mason's specially bred, particularly carnivorous pigs displayed in the ring of enclosures with Hannibal in the center stall. A man, one of Mason's Tuscan thugs with olive skin and ebony features not one of the paramilitary types he'd hired for his personal security, sat at the opening to keep guard of the prisoner. His dark gaze regards her cautiously but he makes no moves to stop her from approaching.
She greets him indifferently. "Buona sera."
"Buona sera, Signorina Verger." He returns, seeming to settle down as he decides she isn't a threat. The heiress walks to stand right in front of Hannibal who is completely nude, forced to his knees with arms tied up to the slats on either side of him but his head forced down with a leather cuff around his neck and two ropes secured to rings screwed into the floor. Heat lamps light the wall behind him creating a foreboding red glow.
"Thank you for coming, Margot." His voice betrays some of the strain that his body feels from the position. "Hasn't been that long since I treated you. Have you started taking the chocolate, as Mason likes to say, after you fought him for so long?"
"Are we in therapy now?" She jokes weakly.
"You tell me."
"Mason promised to give something back to me, something that he stole." Margot lowers herself to be eye level with the man who lifts his head the best he can to look at her as she tries to explain how she became complicit with her brother at present. "There was a surrogate all along. It's a Verger baby. It's my baby."
"Mason will deny you. He will always deny you." Hannibal expelled his breath heavily. "You know you'll have to kill him."
"Are you saying you'll do it for me?" Margot feels her stomach sinking even as she asks him the question hopefully. She remembered what Alana had said; whatever Mason has in store isn't good. We can't trust him. And now Hannibal, he will always deny you. The belief that her stolen baby would be returned to her rapidly diminished. And what would be returned to her? What discontented changeling would Mason present in pale imitation of her child? She didn't want to know and yet her mind obsessed over it, over the possibilities of what ifs. She retrained her thoughts to Hannibal. "I could never trust you."
"No, of course not. But you could trust me never to deny that I did it. It would actually be more therapeutic for you to kill him yourself. You'll remember I recommended that in our sessions."
"Wait until I could get away with it, you said." Realization dawning on her at what he was suggesting.
"What difference would one more murder charge make to me? I'm the only other suspect you've got. You can do it when it suits you. And I can write a letter gloating about how much I enjoyed killing him myself." Despite his even tone, Margot can feel the edge of desperation to him, the words spilling out of his lips a little too quickly, telling her exactly what she would want to hear. This was the reason Hannibal had wanted to see her; he wanted to strike a bargain with her. And while it was an enticing deal with the devil, it was not one she was willing to make quite yet. The sound of heels clicking against the concrete floor drew her attention, raising herself up to her full height once again. She turned in time to see Alana make her appearance.
"Buona sera." The doctor said to the guard though her eyes are squarely on Margot. Then before the Italian could respond Alana grabbed the tranquilizer gun he'd carelessly left on a small table next to him. A quiet pop and hiss of the gun accents the room and the man collapsed to the ground with a fading groan as the fast-acting sedatives took hold.
"He has a pocketknife." Hannibal states and Alana kneels to rummage through the slumbering man's pockets to disarm him on the off chance he awakened. She comes to momentarily stand next to Margot, handing over the tranquilizer gun to her. Margot didn't realize she had been trembling until Alana leaned up to press her steady lips to Margot's in a comforting manner. The heft of the gun felt good in her hand, and threading her fingers through Alana's hair to pull her in for a stronger kiss felt better. When they parted, blue eyes scanned her carefully but she tips her head down solemnly to indicate she's all right and Alana slowly turns from her to Hannibal. His head seems to sink in disappoint as she approaches him, the comprehension that he'd underestimated the depth of their relationship pressing down upon him like an unseen weight.
Alana remembered when she first met Hannibal Lecter. In an airless lecture hall at Harvard, the professor had finished his lesson for the afternoon. The topic had been tedious and there was that sleepy, dusty lull of being caught in between day and night. But when Hannibal stepped in the room, the air suddenly felt ionized as all eyes in the room were drawn to him. He wore his hair longer in those days, kept tidily in a bun on the back of his head, casually rebellious to the clean-cut status quo of academia. And he wasn't as inclined toward waistcoats yet, instead wearing sports jacket over a knit sweater that stretched pleasingly against his broad chest. Trim, handsome, and a little exotic with the European lilt to his voice, he was the opposite of the stodgy faculty with their loose jowls and looser guts.
Though he was obviously attractive, Alana never considered sleeping with him in those days; she hadn't batted her eyelashes or flipped her hair flirtatiously for him the way other girls, and boys for that matter, did and she had more opportunities than most. Hannibal seemed to have selected her as the best and brightest, helping cultivate her education so she began far exceeding her peers. She had been an earnest student and took his tutelage seriously; jeopardizing that for a trivial affair was never an option. But then years later they met, not as student and mentor but both as colleagues working side by side for the FBI; both as shepherds for the wayward Will Graham. She'd thought it had been a bit of serendipity that they would find each other again later in life. It was a strange time to recall all of this with the man on his knees before her, tied up in a manner designed to humiliate.
"Do you remember when we first met, Hannibal?" Alana asked as she swung open the gate to Hannibal's stall.
"Of course, you were the top of your class, so eager to learn. And you never threw yourself at me. I always appreciated that about you." He offers her hollow compliments.
"You know what I always appreciated about you? Or thought I did." Alana revised before continuing, "Your honesty. I think we need to have a really honest chat now, don't you?"
Hannibal shifted awkwardly in his restraints. "What's on your mind, Alana?"
"You made me a promise, Hannibal, you remember." She took out the pistol from her coat pocket and pressed the barrel to the crown of his head. "I want a new promise."
"I remember. I also remember that night you pulled a gun on me as well. That didn't work out so well for you."
"We can agree that the circumstances have drastically changed since that night. For example, do you want to find out if this gun has bullets?" She retracted the gun to dangle it tauntingly in his face.
When Hannibal hesitated, Alana went on, "Make no mistake, this ends one of two ways: with your explicit promise to let me live or your brains on the floor. It's your choice."
"I'll admit you have me in quite a bind." He chuckled ruefully. "Tell me though, you need to dispense of Mason. Who will take the blame if I'm not here?"
"You'll make just as good a scapegoat dead as alive. We'll say you murdered Mason and then escaped once again. In reality the pigs will be having a midnight snack. All traces of you on this earth will vanish." Alana said with a cool drawl.
"Jack Crawford will be suspicious."
"He can have his suspicions but he'll never be able to prove anything."
"And Cordell, the guards, how far are you willing to go, Alana?" Hannibal continued to question her, prodding at her resolve and trying to needle in at any weak point in her plan.
She remained unprovoked, replying with certain clarity, feeling the same austere hardness she felt when talking to Will. "I'm willing to go as far as it takes."
"Have you developed a taste for killing, Alana?" He asked cocking his head to the side, ever intrigued by her human condition even in his dire position.
"Taste?" Alana considered her answer. She thought about what it would feel like to have Hannibal deny her and the simplicity of squeezing the trigger and creating the kinetic explosion of red from Hannibal's skull, the inky blood dripping from his face and pooling around her Manolo Blahnik's and the singing satisfaction of victory it would bring. Then she imagined it was someone else hunched and prostrate before her, arbitrarily choosing Jack or her neighbor with the little dog that always barked at Applesauce. She replayed the scene with her different victim, trigger, blood, dripping, and found it lacked the fulfillment, and only left an inconvenient mess. She answered assuredly, "No, not a taste per se. But there is certainly pragmatism to it. You know the statistics, Hannibal. Women serial killers are rare. When women kill it's generally for profit or power. Or love."
"So what's your reason? Power or profit? Or is it love?" He said 'love' with some dubiousness.
"Why not a little bit of everything?" Her eyes wandered back to Margot who stood tall and elegant behind her, though her expression was twisted and eyes glittered with worry belying her calm poise. Looking at the woman, Alana could feel her body physiologically responding to the other woman without her permission; pupils dilating, heart ticking up in tempo, and that swirling feeling in her stomach that insisted she draw closer to Margot. She knew that if there were murder beyond Hannibal and Mason it would be with her hand in Margot's.
Alana turned back to Hannibal, ready for the deliberation to be over. She lowered herself to look him square in his flat, black eyes, using her cane for support, positioning her gun at him. She spoke deliberately. "Maybe this will help your consideration. I think Alana Bloom did die that night. I'm not that person anymore, and I will never be again. You may not have changed my face like you did with Mason, but you've still left me very reconfigured, Hannibal… So what will it be?"
A near-maniacal grin split across his face and he finally nodded with consent. "I'm inclined to agree with you. I believe the world will be a far more interesting place with you in it, Alana. I only ask that you extend me the same courtesy."
"You'll never be impeded by me."
"And if I were need to ever need to call on you as a friend?"
"You can count on me. Within reason of course."
"Then I believe we've reached an accord then." He concluded happily.
She pulled back the hammer on her pistol with a sinister click. "I'd like to hear the words if you don't mind."
He laughed heartily now. "I like the new Alana. I'm terribly interested in seeing who she becomes."
"I think Alana Verger has a nice ring to it." Margot's raspy voice interjected and the swirl in her stomach spun up once again.
Alana pushed herself up with her cane and looked at her with bemused surprise, raising her brow questioningly, "Are you proposing while I hold a gun on someone?"
"Bad timing?" The corners of her lips ticked up in a faint smile and feigned chagrin
"Not necessarily." Her own smile grew as she took the couple of steps to close the space between them. It was bad timing but then again it wasn't. Now could be the only time they had. With a myriad of hideous things hovering on the horizon, if there was something they wanted then this was their chance to seize it. Alana gripped the collar of Margot's fur coat and peered into calm green eyes that regarded her steadily, lovingly. She leaned in and brushed her lips against Margot's, the kiss simple and unhurried and grounding them to this moment in time where nothing could touch them if only for a few fleeting seconds. When she pulled away, both of them were grinning like mad, like laughter could be bubbling up from them at any instant.
"As touching as this is, I believe we have pressing matters to attend to ladies." Hannibal interrupted them, his point accentuated with some grunts of discomfort as he pulls against his restraints.
"What are the magic words?" Alana shook off the hazed that surrounded her and Margot, asking her question cloyingly.
"As long as our terms are met, Alana I promise not to kill you." He added with a touch of ominous warning, "And I always keep my promises."
"Then let's begin." She announced and the unholy pact had been struck.
"Just free one of my hands. I'll take care of the rest." Hannibal instructed eagerly.
Using the knife she'd taken from the unconscious Italian, Alana sawed at the tight rope around his wrist until the tension slackened, the cords releasing their captive. With the ripper cut loose, Alana felt the last thread of her former self cut too, unfurling away from her into the distance.
