"It's also divisible by four hundred," Hannibal said. "But it is divisible by one hundred," Mr. Jakov was pleased, but his response was just another question: "Will the year 2000 be a leap year?" "I think those are separate questions," Hannibal said. "Then does the calendar adjust perfectly, or do we live by gross corrections?" "But the year is more than 365 days long." "Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?" "It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty," Hannibal said. "It's the day the sun reaches Uncle Elgar's window." "Do you know what today is?" Hannibal asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. By our efforts we may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world. Robert Lecter’s letters, recently unearthed, may help us establish the vital statistics of Hannibal, who altered dates freely to confound the authorities and his chroniclers. We will add to them what we have learned elsewhere, in war records and police records, from interviews and forensics and the mute postures of the dead. Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither left nor right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most fragmentary. Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch. In his years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained him for long periods while warders denied him his books. The palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal’s student life. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi Museum.Įverywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression. Hannibal Lecter's memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone.
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