Chapter Text
Hannibal is not accustomed to bodies in quantities larger than three these days.
This is not from a lack of motivation, but merely practicality - there has not been much need for it since his early education and apprenticeship in France, before he later committed to surgical schooling in Florence. It had been interesting in his youth, pulling trays out, beholding the unseemly ends of the rest of humanity. Having witnessed plenty of unseemly ends even at the tender age of 16 when he first dons and doffs his latex gloves and rubber apron, they do not disturb him. They are commonplace. Death is rife amongst the sheep.
There’s a simple elegance in the cabinetry of a mortician’s room, everything carefully put away like a spice rack. Hannibal thinks it again now, where four such doors are swung wide and trays drawn out. On them, unlike Hannibal who is now many years older since the apprenticeship, youth lies timeless. Four women of no great similarity in coloring or height or body type.
They are all very lovely - but bruised and tired, is the first thing Hannibal thinks when he looks at the steel tables of the Clark County morgue. The crime scene pictures in little laminate sleeves to the right of each show streaked but painted eyes, care with their faces before someone crudely reshapes them. Contusions and bruises in abundance all over. Played with too hard, ill dressed, put away improperly. None are older than 34 years of age.
How nice of the mortician to wash their faces, to make them clean once again. Only one, the youngest at 19, has been requested to be returned to her parents for burial. Two are Jane Does, and the third estranged from family. “Put her in a pine box and do what you want,” an aunt is recorded as saying on the phone, when asked for considerations for the woman’s burial. “She knew better.”
( Nobody knows better, when push comes to shove. You do a lot of shoving these days, to those who push. )
“A room of battered muses,” says Hannibal, and Alana nods while he continues to stare a moment longer at the pale faces in the blue-light of the morgue. “Though we are yet shy five of them for a full set.”
Alana, also blue and pale but not a mark to be seen on her, looks like she could belong. “Unfortunately, only four to go,” she says with a sigh. “Five is who we’re here to see.”
---
Five is a variation on a theme that Hannibal sees in the morgue. He absently taps out a line of Rachmaninoff against the linen of his pants, the latex on his hands catching the fibers.
It is searingly hot on the asphalt of McCarran International Airport, where the macromolecules of one Corinne Kwon are actively in decay, sitting lax on a brown metal folding chair. She is fresh enough to not be swollen, where a Claddagh ring is sealed to the inner joints of an index finger but still flexible. ( Her mother will later confirm it’s hers and shake her head - a disappointment from a promising child. You appreciate her lack of hysterics in interviews, even as you find her wounding silence curious. ) She is seared enough by the summer sun to smell of charnel. Despite her ribs and intestines spilling from the front of her silvered-iridescent white dress and the scent, she looks quite precious and petite.
A man, and that is undoubtedly the psychology of their perpetrator, for all that it is embarrassingly obvious and a misfortune to be associated with, is dressing prostitutes in their finest ( read as: cheap, sweatshop made ) club outfits, and setting them up to hold court in the parking lots of Las Vegas, Nevada. Pretty things with tired skin from too much alcohol and not enough water and sleep, delicate little spindly fingers of young ladies who hold a cigarette more readily than an ink pen.
Corinne has almond-shaped eyes and a round face, the fractious teenager of a veteran and his expatriated wife who becomes a fractious woman following a drop-out from the local university. Drugs, boys, lack of motivation-talent-intellect after years of assumed excellence - nobody is quite sure how to pin her switch from academic and athletic promising girl to one of the oldest professions in the world, a cocktail waitress by night, and a hostess of another kind in the darker parts of it.
( And honestly, you think, not so terrible of a profession if it wasn’t insistently shoved into dark alleys and recruiting from the desperate and naive. A global mismanagement, that. There’s so many other things to be ashamed of, and you haven’t found a one that sticks to you. )
Hannibal, looking ponderously into the blown-white cornea of Corinne, thinks it is both a waste, and exceedingly pedestrian. The person, the unseen perpetrator, the display.
When her body is discovered by an unfortunate TSA security guard that sees her at the gates of a plane hangar, he stares for some minutes before he stutteringly calls 911. Everyone can’t quite look away from the gleaming sharpness of the xiphoid process of her sternum, the caged red-white wetness of the costochondral joints keeping her ribcage intact. She is messier than the other four. An escalation, then. Jack Crawford, veteran of a thousand such scenes, also watches from ten steps away, the flashing of his eyes almost startling against the squinting dark of his face. He tells people to leave, to show some respect, speaking into a voice recorder and taking his own notes while his forensic team gathers samples and polaroids of the remains.
( Not a person, just what’s left. Leftovers, you would laugh, but you don’t think this particular girl deserves the ridicule. )
Alana Bloom looks nervous and sad from Crawford’s side, speaking in doleful tones. She’s a strange parallel of their enthroned corpse-woman-child, wearing a blush-pink blouse tucked into black trousers. She has left her white and black-ribbon trimmed blazer in the trunk of a rental car in Terminal 1’s short term parking that was too warm to wear. She’s unhappy with the violence against the victim. She’s unhappy to feel underdressed. She’s unhappy that the two coincide as though equal, and battles shame over it.
Hannibal is crouched now in front of Corinne, looking at the interlocked seam of her dress where the perpetrator wasn’t able to tear it any further to expose her abdomen, sweating unrepentantly in a three piece suit of light blue, and is only unhappy that there’s so little of interest here for him, other than the fact that this is the fifth time this has happened this year, and that Crawford needs the extra help to make certain this isn’t cartel, or a higher level talent of destruction.
( Grisly, cruel, repeating, says him. Laughable, says you. )
People stare anyway, despite Jack Crawford’s walking about wielding the victim’s shame like a cudgel - it’s hard to look away from other people’s disasters. Hannibal has built a portfolio of his own on the surety of that. He hopes Jack Crawford wields a similar irritation and offense for those works too. Corinne can be an object of someone’s attention a little bit longer this way, though it certainly doesn’t help anymore than everything else she tried before now. The silhouette of the Las Vegas Strip against the heat of the tarmac is a jigsaw of fantastical towers beyond, as good a resting place as any.
---
The parents are not helpful.
“No one’s surprised by this,” says Sunny Kwon, an aging father and chronically grey in the fluorescent lights of the county coroner’s office. Next to him, his wife Nari Kwon has steadfastly clasped her hands on the top of the table. She doesn’t speak, mostly nods. Angry, Hannibal suspects.
“I’m sorry Mr. Kwon, but do you mean not surprised by her getting into trouble, or the circumstances of her death?” Alana asks gently. “Is there someone that would have done this to her that you know of?”
( Disembowelment on an airport tarmac would be quite the thing to have foreknowledge of, but you see the spark of grief in the heavy lids of dark brown eyes, the most severe of disappointments in a difficult life, and know with the surety you incise people’s traumas that this isn’t one Sunny Kwon would have thought to expect. )
Mr. Kwon shakes his head, pinched with his own frustration to be here in the interview room, with two psychologists, FBI officials, and the local detectives for the case looking at him and his wife with a critical eye. Much ado about nothing, thinks Hannibal, even as he suppresses his own irritation that Alana wasn’t allowed to conduct this quietly away from curious eyes.
“Corinne’s been wild for years now,” he sighs. “She doesn’t come home, she doesn’t call. We told her this could happen,” he adds. “The real miracle is that it’s taken as long as it has.”
Incidentally, Hannibal agrees. Risk is rewarded, but also punished. Their girl has caught the eyes of someone either rewarding himself, or punishing her - it doesn’t really amount to much for the Kwons. The final answer to the equation yields the same numbers. The room, however, is insistent on hidden purpose, darker schemes, more of a thesis and less of the scribble on the warehouse wall that this murder is. Everyone’s falling into entropy around them, and Sunny and Nari Kwon have had the time to resolve themselves to this end for their self-destructive wild child.
( You wonder if your parents wouldn’t feel the same, 40 years in the future, watching if your own dangerous behaviors ever come to light. You were always going to become something - they would have been just as dull and weathered by the inevitability of it, in the way that the same flavor of disappointment still overcomes wealth and privilege. “My son who picks minor lies apart for the certainty there’s a bigger lie somewhere? My son who loves his horse, but readily pulls back rabbit skin to see the muscle twitch beneath?” says Simonetta, with her shock of white hair in her bangs, kohl-lined eyes, neat pin curls. “Yes, of course this was coming.” )
“Maybe it’s him,” suggests Agent Brian Zeller, disturbed when they head to their cars. “Abuse at home manifests in destructive behavior. Seemed kind of dismissive of the entire thing, like we didn’t just bag and tag his only child like she was dressed for prom.”
“They’re in shock,” Alana interjects.
Agent Beverly Katz shakes her head. “Doesn’t account for the four others that got dropped before Corinne Kwon either. He alibi’d out for all of them - got him on camera working night shifts as a guard for a gated community.”
“They all tread the same path, these unfortunate women,” says Hannibal, straightening the front of his blazer. “I do not think we’ll find much in their histories, other than the typical stories of descent into sex work. Their professions and convenience make them the target, not the circumstances that led them to it.”
Alana sighs. “And they sure have a distinct path.”
From across the room, Agent Jimmy Price shrugs. He has resolutely remained in a collared shirt with a jaunty bowtie from tarmac to hot rental car to police station, putting on and doffing nitrile gloves casually between evidence swabs like he isn’t sweating himself into a miserable slouching mess.
Hannibal admires it - style over comfort. He likes the idea of Jimmy Price taking samples of hair from his own creations with the same resolute sense of dress code, smiles with his eyes at the idea of it being traces of Jimmy’s own Scottish Fold cat he had waxed poetic for on the flight over, the only member of the team who opted to fly business class to Las Vegas with Hannibal in the row next to him. ( An easter egg in tall grass, just for Mr. Price. )
“Unsub is either a local or a frequent flyer,” says Jimmy, rubbing at a chafed neck from where the sweat and the strap of his camera have irritated the skin. “But a first time offender. There’s been skin scrapings from under the nails and some fluids that link it to the same guy, but they’re not in the system here. It all comes out in the wash eventually when we find likely suspects, but it does make this kind of a needle in a haystack moment.”
Indeed, thinks Hannibal.
Poor family lives and disappointments, crass displays, uninspired men meddling with the soft lamb’s meat of young women. All easily rinsed away, all easily explained, but nevertheless a time commitment for them. But he’s accepted the responsibility of the week’s investigation, and Hannibal has never let a life experience slip by without torturing it into meaning something, even in barren soils.
---
Paradise, the area around the Strip is called, unincorporated from the city proper despite all the meticulous advertising and mystique of the name Las Vegas. He’s never dug into it before, a European at heart with time in Monaco and Mallorca to fill this particular niche for gambling and extravagance. Now that he’s heard the name, he finds it gauche, but comedically appropriate.
The commonality between the girls that show up in their finest and foulest in the Vegas summer sun is not just that they are prostitutes, but that they are hostesses, and that all of them are known to work the casinos and the clubs. This doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, though that the FBI has been called speaks to the poor quality of the human trafficking and sex crimes investigations in the local area. But then again, nobody works for the same place, nobody works the same shift. It’s entirely possible that being a hostess is secondary to being willing to take money in exchange for their company.
Logic that follows is simple - the investigative team should stay in the casinos and work the floor and staff for observations. The death of a few night-walking women hardly ends the calls for others like them, and here is where they may be found. Agent Crawford, quite pleased with himself before their travel and just after Hannibal has agreed to consult, offers Hannibal middling-quality lodgings on the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard, surely a splurge for an out-of-state investigation on a stretched government dime.
( Alas, Jack has never quite learned how to play the game in DC, and uses vinegar rather than honey to communicate with adjacent agencies, supervisors, directors - there will always be a set budget for him, while his colleagues ride unchecked on American taxpayer funds. No loss for you, who’s own accumulated wealth likely accrues more in yearly interest unaltered than Jack’s department does with active grant requests and deliberate attempts to spend rare surpluses. )
Hannibal smiles, and declines promptly, waving a hand at the gruff token protest from Jack.
He leans into the visitor’s chair, hands neatly crossed at the knee. “It’s my first time, Jack, and likely my last. I’ll take care of my sleeping arrangements.”
Hannibal considers for a moment, widening his smile further and shrugging mildly. “If you feel strongly about it, just add a lodging line to my consulting costs - it’s nice to have something to gamble with.”
---
The fun of the Las Vegas Strip is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. As a person inclined to the same philosophy as long as it’s in good faith, this suits Hannibal just fine.
When he initially looks for a hotel the night before leaving, he is half convinced he will stay in Caesars Palace for the perversity of how entirely inaccurate it is. His next consideration goes to The Venetian for the spectacle of chlorinated, shallow canals with mid-western vacationers being paraded through them by entertainment industry employees that do, indeed, need a day job. There’s a whole array of other ludicrous themed accommodations to entice, all with bright entrances, the floral displays, the promise of some kind of manufactured excitement.
“I figured you’d hate this whole thing,” Alana had joked with a half-smile, her rolling travel bag at her feet as they queue up for their car at McCarran.
“The theatre of it is delightful,” he answered honestly. “I don’t go to productions of ‘ The King and I’ expecting real elephants and an authentic Thai castle, and so too do I not expect a real Roman villa in the Nevada desert when I am merely here for the spectacle.”
“Behold the whore of Babylon?” asks Alana, but she winces at her own words seconds later, striking too close to home.
In the end, Hannibal settles on nostalgia, and how one captures its particular flavor in glittering slot machines and cigarette smoke. He has always enjoyed visits to Lake Como, and the Bellagio’s fountains and pretense to the Italian countryside in this arid place is a testament to man’s ingenuity and arrogance. When Alana drops him off at the concierge with an envious laugh and a promise to catch up with him later, he has to congratulate them - he is dazzled by the absurdity of it.
“Welcome Doctor Lecter,” greets a lovely girl in brown velvet blazer, surrounded by tiled murals, rainbow art glass, potted plants and trees. The travertine of the floors is polished smooth, the lobby delicately scented, and a crush of people try to hurry past this all to get to the less attractive core beneath the veneer. It is just bordering on too much.
She smiles with her mouth, and not her eyes, and Hannibal relates with a strange kind of pride in this random woman. He thinks he likes it here. Perhaps people who don’t have misunderstood the prompt.
---
Dinner is a solo affair tonight - with the travel, the crime scene and forensics, and the interviews, even Jack Crawford is not able to wrangle all of the team for a group huddle and some greasy burgers and fries in his hotel room at Luxor. ( When asked about his choice of lodgings, Jack gives a cheery smile - “It’s close to where I need to be, and money not spent on somewhere to probably not sleep is money spent on a good dinner at the end of this trip.” It affirms your decision to keep to your own choices. You would prefer to sleep well and eat well. ) He has been promised by several brochures and a very obliging concierge clerk that food is often what draws those whose excesses don’t extend to the card tables, the women, and the overpriced drinks.
When in Rome, he raises a glass and nods to the ridiculous sign of Caesars, plaster coated chicken-wire chariot and all.
The fountains of the casino thunder just after the entree, dappling the windows of his restaurant for the night with mist and bright lights. Paganini thunders outside from the stereo, chased by Frank Sinatra and it is all very surreal, watching crowds gather at the edges of the lake and the central road of the Strip beyond it. Hannibal eats cheeses, and honeycomb, and candied nuts, and marvels at the imitation of casual al fresco from behind the wide bowl of his wine glass.
Still, it is rather lonely with the sparse businessmen and mid-week holiday guests. He looks forward to the weekend, when he can brush off the dust of their sad prostitutes and the unseen aspiring John that would consecrate them after his damage is done, and watch people pretend at having fun in the thick of herds.
( Truly there is no more deluded a beast than man. )
But not all fun need be in the company of others, only near them, Hannibal supposes. The card tables don’t sleep, work night or not. If anything, the work is beginning only now that night has fallen, and the Bellagio is the foremost on the Strip for good players and high stakes. Hannibal will see if they can test his mettle.
---
Scouting a table is easy enough - a Wednesday night hardly necessitates all of them to be at the ready, dealers standing as horses at the gate before each green felted expanse. Something light to start, good for conversation and for give and take; blackjack. With the cut of a crisp handful of hundred dollar bills, he opts for the club tables, where it’s likely a challenge can be found. He has low expectations for much else. It’s not very likely an American casino will provide the kind of wine that fits his standards.
Only $300 minimum to play, he thinks with a smile. Perhaps the company in Vegas is expensive after all.
There are only two tables open this evening in the club room, one with a sly looking woman with bright, red ringlets of hair - at her table, three gentlemen in their suits and a fourth put-upon looking woman laugh and clink glasses. Well to do salesmen perhaps. A housewife called in to decorate their party. The dealer moves cards easily, never talking loud, always toothy in her grins. A fox, that one, focusing on feel-good moments instead of actual conversation. He imagines she’ll have a good take at the end of the night, Wednesday or not.
The other table is hosted by a man, leaning easily forward with loose cuffed sleeves where two men play as well - the number of chips between them is greater, black-purple-yellow stacks looking like king’s cakes scattered on the green of the felt. While no one is particularly formal in their dress and bearing, even the dealer, there’s a seriousness to their faces that suggests an acuity for the game. So the competitive table, not the money burner.
An actual contest of skill is preferable. He sits with the men at the table, and hands over two thousand dollars.
The dealer, a slender but sturdy figure with his rakish brown curls and slightly askew glasses, offers him a skittish glance and stretches against the wood of the table. The black shirt and double breasted vest of his uniform look misplaced on him, sleeves billowing with a poor fit. “Starting out confident?” he says quietly, but whisks up the bills easily enough, handing over ten black and two purple chips, and makes a tally somewhere behind him.
“Starting out with the cost of a work week in Vegas, sans the salary” Hannibal replies, and creates tidy stacks of five. The two purple chips sit between his fingers, clay heavy and polished. Three black go forward as his wager. “Perhaps I shall have the cost of two work weeks, if all goes well.”
“It typically doesn’t,” the man to his left says, sighing and pushing his own bids forward. “Will doesn’t play nice, though he plays fair.”
“Gotta practice somewhere, Jake,” says the dealer, Will. He has a sly look hiding under an abundance of sparse beard. “Though if you keep coming to cut your teeth on me and Freddie, security’s gonna think we’re too friendly.”
“God forbid anyone here be friendly,” says Hannibal, and is gratified to see both men smile.
“Just keep it professional,” he drawls, mouth a twist of amusement. Hannibal thinks of orange peels in cocktails, and the effervescence of citrus. ( Bitters, too, and the burn of distillate - potentially complex, if approached correctly. So infrequently is, more the shame .) Will in his theatrical shirt and vest begins to deal, cards put down in orderly, symmetrical piles.
His nametag, a simple silver with the Bellagio’s swooping monogram, also reads Will . Nothing more complex, with no given last name. He’s from New Orleans, Louisiana , and Hannibal, to his surprise, picks up absolutely nothing of the Southern articulation he’d expect. He has a flawless Atlantic accent that lingers on syllables intimately, drawing words to him tenderly.
Will neatly cleans out everyone in the first round, as well as a second, and Hannibal taking a third. The aforenamed Jake, to his right, just sighs, and takes his chips off the table. The man at the far end of the table pulls his own chips back as well, and nods.
“That’ll do it for you, boys,” Will teases, and waves them off before turning to Hannibal with a considering glance.
“They’ve been here for a while,” Will shrugs. “I apologize - I’ll need to do a reset and shuffle, but let me have the bar bring something over for your time, and you can surprise me again with another table sweep. They don’t happen to me often, all odds considered.”
“And you are quite skilled with measuring your odds,” Hannibal says with a tilt of his head.
Will waves over a hostess and security guard, a dour looking bearded man with salt-and-pepper hair and a distrustful look. Between them, the chips are counted in full, though Will seems cold to the guard - perhaps some inherent dislike between them. The club room’s hostess, however, he greets like an old friend, and she turns to Hannibal, long brown hair disappearing into the whorls of the little brown velvet vest, and a sleek black skirt making more of a woman of her than she actually is - she offers Hannibal a wine list, attractive parquet serving platter tucked into her white fingers. Hannibal thinks of four tables in the morgue, the fifth waiting, a sixth expected.
( Even you can see the trap this place sets for those naive of stronger hungers, gobbles up children even as you laugh from a high seat faraway at the theatre of lights and dullards walking up and down the boulevard. )
“You’ll want the Albarino,” says Will, not even taking a glance at the list, though considering Hannibal, eyes flicking to the young lady and back. He signs off on his chip deposit, and seems relieved when the guard departs.
“Is that so?” says Hannibal, not giving the list more than a sightless idle flip of his own.
Will gives that twisting half-smile to him again, a hooked thing that turns his face from serious to boyish. Hannibal admires the pointedness of his cupid’s bow lip, made elegant instead of severe by his amusement. “She’ll have to actually open the Albarino.”
It actually sounds nice, a fine Spanish white. Clever, clever. Hannibal smiles as well, a scythe of white teeth.
“What makes you think I’d know the difference?” he asks.
The dealer smiles fully, moving between his hand of cards with a single-handed skill that Hannibal watches, cards shuffling between fingers in a dance. Several years of skill, several years of calluses on the joints of the ring finger, holding his favorites in the deck. He has stormy eyes, something green but grey, the clouded water of a city harbor. He likes to hide things in them, and Hannibal is arrested by a brief flash of iris, pupil, and freckled copper ephelis from beneath the acrylic of glasses.
“I’m here to make money,” Will says bluntly. “And the high dollar table is usually quick work. Confident, wealthy guests are the ones least bothered by ending on a loss as long as they felt good for a while.” He pauses. “More to the point, the accent. Suggests European, something East Bloc, which suggests casual familiarity with viniculture. Double vent suit, so bespoke probably with the plaid. You didn’t ask for a drink because you didn’t think you’d like one.”
Will slides his fingers under his cards and flips. Queen and a ten for Will, ace and a nine for Hannibal. Draw - dealer wins by default. Hannibal doesn’t frown, but he puzzles a bit at the frankness of this.
“Astute,” he drawls, adding a chip to his bid, marvelling at his own hand hovering over his remaining cache. “Then how do you see the other two gentlemen?”
Will hums a laugh. “I see them as what you get when Freddie’s on shift. Only thing that matters when handling card players is that they keep putting chips down. Tonight I’m just here to bust some of the regulars so she can do what she does best.”
“Charm?” Hannibal asks wryly.
“Swindle with a smile,” Will says, and cracks his neck. “I can too. Money’s cheap when you have a lot of it - I don’t have a lot, but you do, so whatever makes you sit here the longest is my best play. Get you a glass of non-shitty wine that you appreciate, say the right things, make you feel special, and lose this hand, but win three or four down the way with more chips on the table, and my boss lets me leave,” he says. “Same rules every night.”
Hannibal is refreshed by his honesty, even as he chafes at the assumption of his losses. “And what would you say the rules are, Will from New Orleans?”
“There are only two truths around here. Any man can be king for a night, main floor or high limits alike,” the younger man says with a wry grin and long drawl, sliding cards from the card shoe into tidy rows in front of himself and Hannibal. Hannibal appreciates the cleanness of it. “But by the morning, the house always wins.”
When Hannibal flips his play, it’s a clean 21 Blackjack.
“Looks like you’re king for the moment,” Will winks, and gifts him his pot of $400 in chips total.
Hannibal is charmed, as a snake rising from a basket must feel.
---
True to his promise, Will takes his chips in increments over an explanation of the origins of Basque and Txakoli wines, as Hannibal drinks sharp sips of the Albarino. ( “Minerality with a touch of herbs,” you say with complete sincerity, and Will’s smile is amused. ) Will seems to take Hannibal’s lecture to heart and asks intelligent questions, but always, step by step, leads Hannibal to spending his full budget for the evening. He’s never very obvious about it - it’s always an option to leave. No jokes, no jabs at Hannibal’s skill or losses, rather more akin to bleeding him in a thousand cuts. Hannibal contemplates properly counting as they play, but at most attempts to start it, Will turns the conversation elsewhere, and sets his card shoe aside to be shuffled like he’s read it in Hannibal’s face.
It’s not much of a loss for him truly, and the man makes for good company. It’s how he wanted to spend his night after all.
Hannibal would hoard the younger man’s attention all night if it made sense to, but per Will’s comment, he’s here to make money, and Hannibal is unwilling to deliberately lose. Will holds his cards well against him as an opponent, and no matter the sparkling insight, Hannibal’s not in the mood to completely have the wool drawn over his eyes. Let Will take some other Wednesday night unfortunate’s cash.
They play a few rounds more while Hannibal talks lightly of the Catambrian mountains and trekking the granite of them as a university student, when an opportunity arises for Hannibal to detach.
Two elderly gentlemen smelling of old cigars and glasses of whiskey take a seat at the table and slap down their purple and pink chips with a casual arrogance that Will receives with a benign smile. They show off their watches, and it is vulgar. They aren’t quite rude per se, but they are certainly not the company Hannibal wishes to keep, and Jack Crawford will expect him in the morning.
Ah well, the fleeting nature of liminal spaces and people, and so on. Hannibal shrugs, and gives Will a smile, holding his own this turn and declining the next deal.
“Not big on sharing seats?” asks Will, changing out chips with a gentling smile.
“I shan't distract you,” Hannibal says with a coy look of his own, delicately handling his returned chips between his fingers, favoring the textured clay edge as one favors a knife’s edge for sharpness. “These gentlemen seem prepared to beat themselves against your palisades for a time.”
“He’ll need more than just his full attention to beat me,” says one of the other men, smug, very drunk. “Tore up the tables on the floor, figured I may as well double my money in here,” he adds. Hannibal sincerely doubts it. His compatriot, snorting, appears to as well. Will is still and serene and unfailingly deferring to them.
( That’s what he does, reading what they want, as sure as he reads what you wanted like you had drawn a picture of a challenging conversation and a good glass of something sharp and acidic. These men want superiority, obedience, and while Will can provide, you yourself will offer none .)
Hannibal watches from a distance in a lounge chair as Will robs them of their earnings on the main floor. It seems fitting. When they give in, another person takes their place, a flashy woman with bleached hair and high heels, and the smile of someone deep in their cups.
He overhears the woman introduce herself as Christine from Orange County looks at him like he’s the most darling man she’s met. She has a flashy wedding ring, cheek implants, and an almost pathetic need for his attention. Lonely, business trip with her husband perhaps. Neglected.
Will, professional but kind, calls her Christy, and never lets a loss end without a “Sorry sweetheart, you need a better bandit’s mask to rob the bank. Let’s try again?” He has a kind face, where for Hannibal as a player he was all blank spaces and the calculating amusement of a Cheshire cat, sliding between spaces, but patient.
And she plays and plays, like he’s her lover, or her dearest son. He asks her about her trip, where she lives, what she likes to do. She drinks Dr. Pepper and whiskey from little highball glasses brought by waitresses, and tips with red chips without a thought. Will takes the rest of her chips by the time Hannibal picks himself up from his seat in the lounge, no longer able to justify the late hour.
Will calls her a cab, double checks that she has her purse, and she leaves with a grateful smile. He switches his shift with another dealer, and disappears into the quiet casino floor.
It is 2:37 am when Hannibal returns to his hotel room, thankfully alone and able to remove the stench of cigars and air fresheners and travel from himself. The fountains are off for the night in the rondelle below the windows, and the lights chase each other in the quiet of a weeknight. Hannibal wonders at what people will sit with Will from New Orleans tomorrow, and if he will read them half as well or better still than Christine from Orange County, or Hannibal himself from an East Bloc country with his double vent suits.
