But slaughterhouses are at base a people business and nobody understood that better than Molson Verger. He managed to cow the leadership of the unions when they tried to encroach on his profits with wage and safety demands. In this area his solid relationships with organized crime served him well for thirty years.
Mason bore a strong resemblance to his father then, with dark shiny eyebrows above pale blue butcher’s eyes, and a low hairline that slanted across his forehead, descending from his right to his left. Often, affectionately, Molson Verger liked to take his son’s head in his hands and just feel it, as though he were confirming the son’s paternity through physiognomy, just as he could feel the face of a pig and tell by the bone structure its genetic makeup.
Mason learned well and, even after his injuries confined him to his bed, he was able to make sound business decisions to be implemented by his minions. It was Son Mason’s idea to have the U.S. government and the United Nations slaughter all the native pigs in Haiti, citing the danger from them of African swine flu. He was then able to sell the government great white American pigs to replace the native swine. The great sleek swine, when faced with Haitian conditions, died as soon as possible and had to be replaced again and again from Mason’s stock until the Haitians replaced their own pigs with hardy little rooters from the Dominican Republic.
Now, with a lifetime of knowledge and experience, Mason felt like Stradivarius approaching the worktable as he built the engines of his revenge.
What a wealth of information and resources Mason had in his faceless skull! Lying in his bed, composing in his mind like the deaf Beethoven, he remembered walking the swine fairs with his father, checking out the competition, Molson’s little silver knife ever ready to slip out of his waistcoat and into a pig’s back to check the depth of back fat, walking away from the outraged squeal, too dignified to be challenged, his hand back in his pocket, thumb marking the place on the blade.
Mason would have smiled if he had lips, remembering his father sticking a 4-H contestant pig who thought everyone was his friend, the child who owned it crying. The child’s father coming over furious, and Molson’s thugs taking him outside the tent. Oh, there were some good, funny times.
At the swine fairs Mason had seen exotic pigs from all over the world. For his new purpose, he brought together the best of all that he had seen.
Mason began his breeding program immediately after his Christmas Epiphany and centered it in a small pig-breeding facility the Vergers owned in Sardinia, off the coast of Italy He chose the place for its remoteness and its convenience to Europe.
Mason believed—correctly—that Dr. Lecter’s first stop outside the United States after his escape was in South America. But he had ever been convinced that Europe was where a man of Dr. Lecter’s tastes would settle—and he had watchers yearly at the Salzburg Music Festival and other cultural events.
This is what Mason sent to his breeders in Sardinia to prepare the theater of Dr. Lecter’s death:
The giant forest pig, Hylochoerus meinertzhageni, six teats and thirty-eight chromosomes, a resourceful feeder, an opportunistic omnivore, like man. Two meters in length in the highland families, it weighs about two hundred seventy-five kilograms. The giant forest pig is Mason’s ground note.
The classic European wild boar, S. scrofa scrofa, thirty-six chromosomes in its purest form, no facial warts, all bristles and great ripping tusks, a big fast and fierce animal that will kill a viper with its sharp hooves and eat the snake like it was a Slim Jim. When aroused or rutting, or protecting its piglets, it will charge anything that threatens. Sows have twelve teats and are good mothers. In S. scrofa scrofa, Mason found his theme and the facial appearance appropriate to provide Dr. Lecter a last, hellish vision of himself consumed. (See Harris on the Pig, 1881.)
He bought the Ossabaw Island pig for its aggressiveness, and the Jiaxing Black for high estradiol levels.
A false note when he introduced a Babirusa, Babyrousa babyrussa, from Eastern Indonesia, known as the hog-deer for the exaggerated length of its tusks. It was a slow breeder with only two teats, and at one hundred kilograms it cost him too much in size. No time was lost, as there were other, parallel litters that did not include the Babirusa.
In dentition, Mason had little variety to choose from. Almost every species had teeth adequate to the task, three pairs of sharp incisors, one pair of elongated canines, four pairs of premolars, and three crushing pairs of molars, upper and lower, for a total of forty-four teeth.
Any pig will eat a dead man, but to get him to eat a live one some education is required. Mason’s Sardinians were up to the task.
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Now, after an effort of seven years and many litters, the results were … remarkable.
CHAPTER
16
WITH ALL the actors except Dr. Lecter in place in the Gennargentu Mountains of Sardinia, Mason turned his attention toward recording the doctor’s death for posterity and his own viewing pleasure. His arrangements had long been made, but now the alert must be given.
He conducted this sensitive business on the telephone through his legitimate sports book switchboard near the Castaways in Las Vegas. His calls were tiny lost threads in the great volume of weekend action there.
Mason’s radio quality voice, minus plosives and fricatives, bounced from the National Forest near the Chesapeake shore to the desert and back across the Atlantic, first to Rome:
In an apartment on the seventh floor of a building on the Via Archimede, behind the hotel of the same name, the telephone is ringing, the hoarse double-rumpf of a telephone ringing in Italian. In the darkness, sleepy voices.
“Còsa? Còsa c’é?”
“Accendi la luce, idiòta.”
The bedside lamp comes on. Three people are in the bed. The young man nearest the phone picks up the receiver and hands it to a portly older man in the middle. On the other side is a blond girl in her twenties. She raises a sleepy face to the light, then subsides again.
“Pronto, chi? Chi parla?”
“Oreste, my friend. It’s Mason.”
The heavy man gets himself together, signals to the younger man for a glass of mineral water.