“And you believe he’s treatable?”
“Particularly now, when he’s coming out of a stuporous phase. How his cheeks shine!”
“Dr. Lecter, why do you say Buffalo Bill’s not a sadist?”
“Because the newspapers have reported the bodies had ligature marks on the wrists, but not the ankles. Did you see any on the person’s ankles in West Virginia?”
“No.”
“Clarice, recreational flayings are always conducted with the victim inverted, so that blood pressure is maintained longer in the head and chest and the subject remains conscious. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.”
“When you’re back in Washington, go to the National Gallery and look at Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas before they send it back to Czechoslovakia. Wonderful for details, Titian—look at helpful Pan, bringing the bucket of water.”
“Dr. Lecter, we have some extraordinary circumstances here and some unusual opportunities.”
“For whom?”
“For you, if we save this one. Did you see Senator Martin on television?”
“Yes, I saw the news.”
“What did you think of the statement?”
“Misguided but harmless. She’s badly advised.”
“She’s very powerful, Senator Martin. And determined.”
“Let’s have it.”
“I think you have extraordinary insight. Senator Martin has indicated that if you help us get Catherine Baker Martin back alive and unharmed, she’ll help you get transferred to a federal institution, and if there’s a view available, you’ll get it. You may also be asked to review written psychiatric evaluations of incoming patients—a job, in other words. No relaxing of security restrictions.”
“I don’t believe that, Clarice.”
“You should.”
“Oh, I believe you. But there are more things you don’t know about human behavior than how a proper flaying is conducted. Would you say that for a United States Senator, you’re an odd choice of messenger?”
“I was your choice, Dr. Lecter. You chose to speak to me. Would you prefer someone else now? Or maybe you don’t think you could help.”
“That is both impudent and untrue, Clarice. I don’t believe Jack Crawford would allow any compensation ever to reach me.… Possibly I’ll tell you one thing you can tell the Senator, but I operate strictly COD. Maybe I’ll trade for a piece of information about you. Yes or no?”
“Let’s hear the question.”
“Yes or no? Catherine’s waiting, isn’t she? Listening to the whetstone? What do you think she’d ask you to do?”
“Let’s hear the question.”
“What’s your worst memory of childhood?”
Starling took a deep breath.
“Quicker than that,” Dr. Lecter said. “I’m not interested in your worst invention.”
“The death of my father,” Starling said.
“Tell me.”
“He was a town marshal. One night he surprised two burglars, addicts, coming out of the back of the drugstore. As he was getting out of his pickup he short-shucked a pump shotgun and they shot him.”
“Short-shucked?”
“He didn’t work the slide fully. It was an old pump gun, a Remington 870, and the shell hung up in the shell carrier. When it happens the gun won’t shoot and you have to take it down to clear it. I think he must have hit the slide on the door getting out.”
“Was he killed outright?”
“No. He was strong. He lasted a month.”
“Did you see him in the hospital?”
“Dr. Lecter—yes.”
“Tell me a detail you remember from the hospital.”
Starling closed her eyes. “A neighbor came, an older woman, a single lady, and she recited the end of “Thanatopsis” to him. I guess that was all she knew to say. That’s it. We’ve traded.”
“Yes we have. You’ve been very frank, Clarice. I always know. I think it would be quite something to know you in private life.”
“Quid pro quo.”
“In life, was the girl in West Virginia very attractive physically, do you think?”
“She was well-groomed.”
“Don’t waste my time with loyalty.”
“She was heavy.”
“Large?”
“Yes.”
“Shot in the chest.”
“Yes.”
“Flat-chested, I expect.”
“For her size, yes.”
“But big through the hips. Roomy.”
“She was, yes.”
“What else?”
“She had an insect deliberately inserted in her throat—that hasn’t been made public.”
“Was it a butterfly?”
Her breath stopped for a moment. She hoped he didn’t hear it. “It was a moth,” she said. “Please tell me how you anticipated that.”
“Clarice, I’m going to tell you what Buffalo Bill wants Catherine Baker Martin for, and then good night. This is my last word under the current terms. You can tell the Senator what he wants with Catherine and she can come up with a more interesting offer for me … or she can wait until Catherine bobs to the surface and see that I was right.”
“What does he want her for, Dr. Lecter?”
“He wants a vest with tits on it,” Dr. Lecter said.
CHAPTER 23
Catherine Baker Martin lay seventeen feet below the cellar floor. The darkness was loud with her breathing, loud with her heart. Sometimes the fear stood on her chest the way a trapper kills a fox. Sometimes she could think: she knew she was kidnapped, but she didn’t know by whom. She knew she wasn’t dreaming; in the absolute dark she could hear the tiny clicks her eyes made when she blinked.
She was better now than when she first regained consciousness. Much of the awful vertigo was gone, and she knew there was enough air. She could tell down from up and she had some sense of her body’s position.
Her shoulder, hip, and knee hurt from being pressed against the cement floor where she lay. That side was down. Up was the rough futon she had crawled beneath during the last interval of blazing, blinding light. The throbbing in her head had subsided now and her only real pain was in the fingers of her left hand. The ring finger was broken, she knew.
She wore a quilted jumpsuit that was strange to her. It was clean and smelled of fabric softener. The floor was clean too, except for the chicken bones and bits of vegetable her captor had raked into the hole. The only other objects with her were the futon and a plastic sanitation bucket with a thin string tied to the handle. It felt like cotton kitchen string and it led up into the darkness as far as she could reach.
Catherine Martin was free to move around, but there was no place to go. The floor she lay on was oval, about eight by ten feet, with a small drain in the center. It was the bottom of a deep covered pit. The smooth cement walls sloped gently inward as they rose.
Sounds from above now or was it her heart? Sounds from above. Sounds came clearly to her from overhead. The oubliette that held her was in the part of the basement directly beneath the kitchen. Footsteps now across the kitchen floor, and running water. The scratching of dog claws on linoleum. Nothing then until a weak disc of yellow light through the open trap above as the basement lights came on. Then blazing light in the pit, and this time she sat up into the light, the futon across her legs, determined to look around, trying to peer through her fingers as her eyes adjusted, her shadow swaying around her as a flood-lamp lowered into the pit swung on its cord high above.
She flinched as her toilet bucket moved, lifted, swayed upward on its flimsy string, twisting slowly as it rose toward the light. She tried to swallow down her fear, got too much air with it, but managed to speak.
“My family will pay,” she said. “Cash. My mother will pay it now, no questions asked. This is her private—oh!” a flapping shadow down on her, only a towel. “This is her private number. It’s 202—”
“Wash yourself.”
&
nbsp; It was the same unearthly voice she’d heard talking to the dog.
Another bucket coming down on a thin cord. She smelled hot, soapy water.
“Take it off and wash yourself all over, or you’ll get the hose.” And an aside to the dog as the voice faded, “Yes it will get the hose, won’t it, Darlingheart, yes it will!”
Catherine Martin heard the footsteps and the claws on the floor above the basement. The double vision she’d had the first time the lights went on was gone now. She could see. How high was the top, was the floodlight on a strong cord? Could she snag it with the jumpsuit, catch something with the towel. Do something hell. The walls were so smooth, a smooth tube upward.
A crack in the cement a foot above her reach, the only blemish she could see. She rolled the futon as tightly as she could and tied the roll with the towel. Standing on it, wobbly, reaching for the crack, she got her fingernails in it for balance and peered up into the light. Squinting into the glare. It’s a floodlight with a shade, hanging just a foot down into the pit, almost ten feet above her upstretched hand, it might as well be the moon, and he was coming, the futon was wobbling, she scrabbling at the crack in the wall for balance, hopping down, something, a flake falling past her face.
Something coming down past the light, a hose. A single spatter of icy water, a threat.
“Wash yourself. All over.”
There was a washcloth in the bucket and floating in the water was a plastic bottle of an expensive foreign skin emollient.
She did it, goosebumps on her arms and thighs, nipples sore and shriveled in the cool air, she squatted beside the bucket of warm water as close to the wall as she could get and washed.
“Now dry off and rub the cream all over. Rub it all over.”
The cream was warm from the bath water. Its moisture made the jumpsuit stick to her skin.
“Now pick up your litter and wash the floor.”
She did that too, gathering the chicken bones and picking up the English peas. She put them in the bucket, and dabbed the little spots of grease on the cement. Something else here, near the wall. The flake that had fluttered down from the crack above. It was a human fingernail, covered with glitter polish and torn off far back in the quick.
The bucket was pulled aloft.
“My mother will pay,” Catherine Martin said. “No questions asked. She’ll pay enough for you all to be rich. If it’s a cause, Iran or Palestine, or Black Liberation, she’ll give the money for that. All you have to do—”
The lights went out. Sudden and total darkness.
She flinched and went “Uhhhhhh!” when her sanitation bucket settled beside her on its string. She sat on the futon, her mind racing. She believed now that her captor was alone, that he was a white American. She’d tried to give the impression she had no idea what he was, what color or how many, that her memory of the parking lot was wiped out by the blows on her head. She hoped that he believed he could safely let her go. Her mind was working, working, and at last it worked too well:
The fingernail, someone else was here. A woman, a girl was here. Where was she now? What did he do to her?
Except for shock and disorientation, it would not have been so long in coming to her. As it was, the skin emollient did it. Skin. She knew who had her then. The knowledge fell on her like every scalding awful thing on earth and she was screaming, screaming, under the futon, up and climbing, clawing at the wall, screaming until she was coughing something warm and salty in her mouth, hands to her face, drying sticky on the backs of her hands and she lay rigid on the futon, arching off the floor from head to heels, her hands clenched in her hair.
CHAPTER 24
Clarice Starling’s quarter bonged down through the telephone in the shabby orderlies’ lounge. She dialed the van.
“Crawford.”
“I’m at a pay phone outside the maximum security ward,” Starling said. “Dr. Lecter asked me if the insect in West Virginia was a butterfly. He wouldn’t elaborate. He said Buffalo Bill needs Catherine Martin because, I’m quoting, ‘He wants a vest with tits on it.’ Dr. Lecter wants to trade. He wants a ‘more interesting’ offer from the Senator.”
“Did he break it off?”
“Yes.”
“How soon do you think he’ll talk again?”
“I think he’d like to do this over the next few days, but I’d rather hit him again now, if I can have some kind of urgent offer from the Senator.”
“Urgent is right. We got an ID on the girl in West Virginia, Starling. A missing-person fingerprint card from Detroit rang the cherries in ID section about a half hour ago. Kimberly Jane Emberg, twenty-two, missing from Detroit since February seventh. We’re canvassing her neighborhood for witnesses. The Charlottesville medical examiner says she died not later than February eleventh, and possibly the day before, the tenth.”
“He only kept her alive three days,” Starling said.
“His period’s getting shorter. I don’t think anybody’s surprised.” Crawford’s voice was even. “He’s had Catherine Martin about twenty-six hours. I think if Lecter can deliver, he’d better do it in your next conversation. I’m set up in the Baltimore field office, the van patched you through. I have a room for you in the HoJo two blocks from the hospital if you need a catnap later on.”
“He’s leery, Mr. Crawford, he’s not sure you’d let him have anything good. What he said about Buffalo Bill, he traded for personal information about me. I don’t think there’s any textual correlation between his questions and the case.… Do you want to know the questions?”
“No.”
“That’s why you didn’t make me wear a wire, isn’t it? You thought it’d be easier for me, I’d be more likely to tell him stuff and please him if nobody else could hear.”
“Here’s another possibility for you: What if I trusted your judgment, Starling? What if I thought you were my best shot, and I wanted to keep a lot of second-guessers off your back? Would I have you wear a wire then?”
“No sir.” You’re famous for handling agents, aren’t you, Mr. Crawfish? “What can we offer Dr. Lecter?”
“A couple of things I’m sending over. It’ll be there in five minutes, unless you want to rest a little first.”
“I’d rather do it now,” Starling said. “Tell them to ask for Alonzo. Tell Alonzo I’ll meet him in the corridor outside Section 8.”
“Five minutes,” Crawford said.
Starling walked up and down the linoleum of the shabby lounge far underground. She was the only brightness in the room.
We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom. Starling was old enough to know that; she didn’t let the room affect her.
Starling walked up and down. She gestured to the air. “Hold on, girl,” she said aloud. She said it to Catherine Martin and she said it to herself. “We’re better than this room. We’re better than this fucking place,” she said aloud. “We’re better than wherever he’s got you. Help me. Help me. Help me.” She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now—just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications—the way we always ask it. The answer was no, they would not be ashamed of her.
She washed her face and went out into the hall.
The orderly Alonzo was in the corridor with a sealed package from Crawford. It contained a map and instructions. She read them quickly by the corridor light and pushed the button for Barney to let her in.
CHAPTER 25
Dr. Lecter was at his table, examining his correspondence. Starling found it easier to approach the cage when he wasn’t looking at her.
“Doctor.”
He held up a finger for silence. Wh
en he had finished reading his letter, he sat musing, the thumb of his six-fingered hand beneath his chin, his index finger beside his nose. “What do you make of this?” he said, putting the document in to the food carrier.
It was a letter from the U.S. Patent Office.
“This is about my crucifixion watch,” Dr. Lecter said. “They won’t give me a patent, but they advise me to copyright the face. Look here.” He put a drawing the size of a dinner napkin in the carrier and Starling pulled it through. “You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time, just like the arms on the popular Disney watches. The feet remain at six and at the top a small second hand revolves in the halo. What do you think?”
The quality of the anatomical sketching was very good. The head was hers.
“You’ll lose a lot of detail when it’s reduced to watch size,” Starling said.
“True, unfortunately, but think of the clocks. Do you think this is safe without a patent?”
“You’d be buying quartz watch movements—wouldn’t you?—and they’re already under patent. I’m not sure, but I think patents only apply to unique mechanical devices and copyright applies to design.”
“But you’re not a lawyer, are you? They don’t require that in the FBI anymore.”
“I have a proposal for you,” Starling said, opening her briefcase.
Barney was coming. She closed the briefcase again. She envied Barney’s enormous calm. His eyes read negative for dope and there was considerable intelligence behind them.
“Excuse me,” Barney said. “If you’ve got a lot of papers to wrestle, there’s a one-armed desk, a school desk, in the closet here that the shrinks use. Want it?”
School image. Yes or no?
“May we talk now, Dr. Lecter?”
The doctor held up an open palm.
“Yes, Barney. Thank you.”