The Silence of the Lambs - Страница 47

Mr. Gumb had learned from each of his previous efforts, sometimes painfully. He was determined to avoid some of the nightmares he'd gone through before. One cardinal principle: no matter how weak from hunger or faint with fright, they always fought you when they saw the apparatus.

He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into corners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. Always they became disoriented, lost their balance, ran into things. He could stand in absolute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee so they could still crawl.

That was childish and a waste. They were useless afterward and he had quit doing it altogether.

In his current project, he had offered showers upstairs to the first three, before he booted them down the staircase with a noose around their necks-- no problem. But the fourth had been a disaster. He'd had to use the pistol in the bathroom and it had taken an hour to clean up. He thought about the girl, wet, goosebumps on her, and how she shivered when he cocked the pistol. He liked to cock it, snick snick, one big bang and no more racket.

He liked his pistol,, and well he should, because it was a very handsome piece, a stainless steel Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. All Python actions are tuned at the Colt custom shop, and this one was a pleasure to feel. He cocked it now and squeezed it off, catching the hammer with his thumb. He loaded the Python and put it on the workroom counter.

Mr. Gumb wanted very much to offer this one a shampoo, because he wanted to watch it comb out the hair. He could learn much for his own grooming about how the hair lay on the head. But this one was tall and probably strong. This one was too rare to risk having to waste the whole thing with gunshot wounds.

No, he'd get his hoisting tackle from the bathroom, offer her a bath, and when she had put herself securely in the hoisting sling he'd bring her halfway up the shaft of the oubliette and shoot her several times low in the spine. When she lost consciousness he could do the rest with chloroform.

That's it. He'd go upstairs now and get out of his clothes. He'd wake up Precious and watch his video with her and then go to work, naked in the warm basement, naked as the day he was born.

He felt almost giddy going up the stairs. Quickly out of his clothes and into his robe. He plugged in his videocassette.

"Precious, come on Precious. Busybusy day. Come on, Sweetheart." He'd have to shut her up here in the upstairs bedroom while he got through with the noisy part in the basement-- she hated the noise and got terribly upset. To keep her occupied, he'd gotten her a whole box of Chew-eez while he was out shopping.

"Precious." When she didn't come, he called in the hall, "Precious!" and then in the kitchen, and in the basement, "Precious!" When he called at the door of the oubliette room, he got an answer:

"She's down here you son of a bitch," Catherine Martin said.

Mr. Gumb sickened all over in a plunge of fear for Precious. Then rage tightened him again and, fists against the sides of his head, he pressed his forehead into the doorframe and tried to get hold of himself. One sound between a retch and a groan escaped him and the little dog answered with a yip.

He went to the workroom and got his pistol.

The string to the sanitation bucket was broken. He still wasn't sure how she'd done it. Last time the string was broken, he'd assumed she'd broken it in an absurd attempt to climb. They had tried to climb it before-- they had done every fool thing imaginable.

He leaned over the opening, his voice carefully controlled.

"Precious, are you all right? Answer me."

Catherine pinched the dog's plump behind. It yipped and paid her back with a nip on the arm.

"How's that?" Catherine said.

It seemed very unnatural to Mr. Gumb to speak to Catherine in this way, but he overcame his distaste.

"I'll lower a basket. You'll put her in it."

"You'll lower a telephone or I'll have to break her neck. I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to hurt this little dog. Just give me the telephone."

Mr. Gumb brought the pistol up. Catherine saw the muzzle extending past the light. She crouched, holding the dog above her, weaving it between her and the gun. She heard him cock the pistol.

"You shoot motherfucker you better kill me quick or I'll break her fucking neck. I swear to God."

She put the dog under her arm, put her hand around its muzzle, raised its head. "Back off, you son of a bitch." The little dog whined. The gun withdrew.

Catherine brushed the hair back from her wet forehead with her free hand. "I didn't mean to insult you," she said. "Just lower me a phone. I want a live phone. You can go away, I don't care about you, I never saw you. I'll take good care of Precious."

"No."

"I'll see she has everything. Think about her welfare; not just yourself. You shoot in here, she'll be deaf whatever happens. All I want's a live telephone. Get a long extension, get five or six and clip them together-- they come with the connections on the ends-- and lower it down here. I'd air-freight you the dog anywhere. My family has dogs. My mother loves dogs. You can run, I don't care what you do."

"You won't get any more water, you've had your last water.''

"She won't get any either, and I won't give her any from my water bottle. I'm sorry to tell you, I think her leg's broken." This was a lie-- the lithe dog, along with the baited bucket, had fallen onto Catherine and it was Catherine who suffered a scratched cheek from the dog's scrabbling claw. She couldn't put it down or he'd see it didn't limp. "She's in pain. Her leg's all crooked and she's trying to lick it. It just makes me sick," Catherine lied. "I've got to get her to a vet."

Mr. Gumb's groan of rage and anguish made the little dog cry. "You think she's in pain," Mr. Gumb said. "You don't know what pain is. You hurt her and I'll scald you."

When she heard him pounding up the stairs Catherine Martin sat down, shaken by gross jerks in her arms and legs. She couldn't hold the dog, she couldn't hold her water, she couldn't hold anything.

When the little dog climbed into her lap she hugged it, grateful far the warmth.

CHAPTER 50

Feathers rode on the thick brown water, curled feathers blown from the coops, carried on breaths of air that shivered the skin of the river.

The houses on Fell Street, Fredrica Bimmel's street, were termed waterfront on the weathered realtors' signs because their backyards ended at a slough, a backwater of the Licking River in Belvedere, Ohio, a Rust Belt town of 112,000, east of Columbus.

It was a shabby neighborhood of big, old houses. A few of them had been bought cheap by young couples and renovated with Sears Best enamel, making the rest of the houses look worse. The Bimmel house had not been renovated.

Clarice Starling stood for a moment in Fredrica's backyard looking at the feathers on the water, her hands deep in the pockets of her trenchcoat. There was some rotten snow in the reeds, blue beneath the blue sky on this mild winter day.

Behind her Starling could hear Fredrica's father hammering in the city, of pigeon-coops, the Orvieto of pigeon coops rising from the water's edge and reaching almost to the house. She hadn't seen Mr. Bimmel yet.

The neighbors said he was there. Their faces were closed when they said it.

Starling was having some trouble with herself. At that moment in the night when she knew she had to leave the Academy to hunt Buffalo Bill, a lot of extraneous noises had stopped. She felt a pure new silence in the center of her mind, and a calm there. In a different place, down the front of her, she felt in flashes that she was a truant and a fool.

The petty annoyances of the morning hadn't touched her-- not the gymnasium stink of the airplane to Columbus, not the confusion and ineptitude at the rental-car counter. She'd snapped at the car clerk to make him move, but she hadn't felt anything.

Starling had paid a high price for this time and she meant to use it as she thought best. Her time could be up at any moment, if Crawford was overruled and they pulled her credentials.

She should hurry, but to think about why, to dwell on Catherine's plight on this final day, would be to waste the day entirely. To think of her in real time, being processed at this moment as Kimberly Emberg and Fredrica Bimmel had been processed, would jam all other thought.

The breeze fell off, the water still as death. Near her feet a curled feather spun on the surface tension. Hang on, Catherine.

Starling caught her lip between her teeth. If he shot her, she hoped he'd do a competent job of it.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to be still.

She turned to the leaning stack of coops and followed a path of boards laid on the mud between them, toward the sound of hammering. The hundreds of pigeons were of all sizes and colors; there were tall knock-kneed ones and pouters with their chests stuck out. Eyes bright, heads jerking as they paced, the birds spread their wings in the pale sun and made pleasant sounds as she passed.

Fredrica's father, Gustav Bimmel, was a tall man, flat and wide-hipped with red-rimmed eyes of watery blue. A knit cap was pulled down to his eyebrows. He was building another coop on sawhorses in front of his work shed. Starling smelled vodka on his breath as he squinted at her identification.