The Silence of the Lambs - Страница 56

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He had the wonderful freedom of the basement. Room to work and play. At first it was only games-- hunting young women through the black warren, creating amusing tableaux in remote rooms and sealing them up, opening the doors again only to throw in a little lime.

Fredrica Bimmel began to help Mrs. Lippman in the last year of the old lady's life. Fredrica was picking up sewing at Mrs. Lippman's when she met Jame Gumb. Fredrica Bimmel was not the first young woman he killed, but she was the first one he killed for her skin.

Fredrica Bimmel's letters to Gumb were found among his things.

Starling could hardly read the letters, because of the hope in them, because of the dreadful need in them, because of the endearments from Gumb that were implied in her responses: "Dearest Secret Friend in my Breast, I love you!-- I didn't ever think I'd get to say that, and it is best of all to get to say it back."

When did he reveal himself? Had she discovered the basement? How did her face look when he changed, how long did he keep her alive?

Worst, Fredrica and Gumb truly were friends to the last; she wrote him a note from the pit.

The tabloids changed Gumb's nickname to Mr. Hide and, sick because they hadn't thought of the name themselves, virtually started over with the story.

Safe in the heart of Quantico, Starling did not have to deal with the press, but the tabloid press dealt with her.

From Dr. Frederick Chilton, the National Tattler bought the tapes of Starling's interview with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Tattler expanded on their conversations for their "Bride of Dracula" series and implied that Starling had made frank sexual revelations to Lecter in exchange for information, spurring an offer to Starling from Velvet Talks: The Journal of Telephone Sex.

People magazine did a short, pleasant item on Starling, using yearbook pictures from the University of Virginia and from the Lutheran Home at Bozeman. The best picture was of the horse, Hannah, in her later years, drawing a cart full of children.

Starling cut out the picture of Hannah and put it in her wallet. It was the only thing she saved.

She was healing.

CHAPTER 60

Ardelia Mapp was a great tutor-- she could spot a test question in a lecture farther than a leopard can see a limp-- but she was not much of a runner. She told Starling it was because she was so weighted with facts.

She had fallen behind Starling on the jogging trail and caught up at the old DC-6 the FBI uses for hijack simulations. It was Sunday morning. They had been on the books for two days, and the pale sun felt good.

"So what did Pilcher say on the phone?" Mapp said, leaning against the landing gear.

"He and his sister have this place on the Chesapeake."

"Yeah, and?"

"His sister's there with her kids and dogs and maybe her husband."

"So?"

"They're in one end of the house-- it's a big old dump on the water they inherited from his grandmother."

"Cut to the chase."

"Pilch has the other end of the house. Next weekend, he wants us to go. Lots of rooms, he says. 'As many rooms as anybody might need,' I believe is the way he put it. His sister would call and invite me, he said."

"No kidding. I didn't know people did that anymore."

"He did this nice scenario-- no hassles, bundle up and walk on the beach, come in and there's a fire going, dogs jump all over you with their big sandy paws."

"Idyllic, umm-humm, big sandy paws, go on."

"It's kind of much, considering we've never had a date, even. He claims it's best to sleep with two or three big dogs when it gets really cold. He says they've got, enough dogs for everybody to have a couple."

"Pilcher's setting you up for the old dog-suit trick, you snapped to that didn't you?"

"He claims to be a good cook. His sister say he is."

"Oh, she called already."

"Yep."

"How'd she sound?"

"Okay. Sounded like she was in the other end of the house."

"What did you tell her?"

"I said, 'Yes, thank you very much,' is what I said."

"Good," Mapp said. "That's very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher, and smooch him on his face, go wild."

CHAPTER 61

Down the deep carpet in the corridor of the Marcus Hotel, a room-service waiter trundled a cart.

At the door of suite 91, he stopped and rapped softly on the door with his gloved knuckle. He cocked his head and rapped again to be heard above the music from within-- Bach, Two- and Three-Part Inventions, Glenn Gould at the piano.

"Come."

The gentleman with the bandage across his nose was in a dressing gown, writing at the desk.

"Put it by the windows. May I see the wine?"

The waiter brought it. The gentleman held it under the light of his desk lamp, touched the neck to his cheek.

"Open it, but leave it off the ice," he said, and wrote a generous tip across the bottom of the bill. "I won't taste it now."

He did not want the waiter handing him wine to taste-- he found the smell of the man's watchband objectionable.

Dr. Lecter was in an excellent humor. His week had gone well. His appearance was coming right along, and as soon as a few small discolorations cleared, he could take off his bandages and pose for passport photos.

The actual work he was doing himself-- minor injections of silicone in his nose. The silicone gel was not a prescription item, but the hypodermics and the Novocaine were. He got around this difficulty by pinching a prescription off the counter of a busy pharmacy near the hospital. He blanked out the chicken scratches of the legitimate physician with typist's correction fluid and photocopied the blank prescription form. The first prescription he wrote was a copy of the one he stole, and he returned it to the pharmacy, so nothing was missing.

The palooka effect in his fine features was not pleasing, and he knew the silicone would move araund if he wasn't careful, but the job would do until he got to Rio.

When his hobbies began to absorb Him-- long before his first arrest-- Dr. Letter had made provisions for a time when he might be a fugitive. In the wall of a vacation cottage on the banks of the Susquehanna River were money and the credentials of another identity, including a passport and the cosmetic aids he'd worn in the passport photos. The passport would have expired by now, but it could be renewed very quickly.

Preferring to be herded through customs with a big tour badge on his chest, he'd already signed up for a ghastly sounding tour called "South American Splendor" that would take him as far as Rio.

He reminded himself to write a check on the late Lloyd Wyman for the hotel bill and get the extra five days' lead while the check plodded through the bank, rather than sending an Amex charge into the computer.

This evening he was catching up on his correspondence, which he would have to send through a remailing service in London.

First, he sent to Barney a generous tip and a thank-you note for his many courtesies at the asylum.

Next, he dropped a note to Dr. Frederick Chilton in federal protective custody, suggesting that he would be paying Dr. Chilton a visit in the near future. After this visit, he wrote, it would make sense for the hospital to tattoo feeding instructions on Chilton's forehead to save paperwork.

Last, he poured himself a glass of the excellent Batard-Montrachet and addressed Clarice Starling:


Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that's what I'd like.

An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.

I won't be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.


Dr. Lecter touched his pen to his lips. He looked out at the night sky and smiled.


I have windows.

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be again before the year 2000. (I have no intention of telling you the time and how high it is.) But I expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same. Clarice.


Hannibal Lecter


Far to the east, on the Chesapeake shore, Orion stood high in the clear night, above a big old house, and a room where a fire is banked for the night, its light pulsing gently with the wind above the chimneys. On a large bed there are many quilts and on the quilts and under them are several large dogs. Additional mounds beneath the covers may or may not be Noble Pilcher,it is impossible to determine in the ambient light. But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.


***

In his note of condolence to Jack Crawford, Dr. Lecter quotes from "A Fever" without troubling to credit John Donne.

Clarice Starling's memory alters lines from T. S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" to suit her.


T.H.


***

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