III

TO THE NEW WORLD

Chapter 41

A CAREFUL SILENCE surrounded Mason Verger. His staff treated him as though he had lost a baby. Asked how he was feeling, he said, "I feel like I just paid a lot of money for a dead dago."

After a sleep of several hours, Mason wanted children brought into the playroom outside his chamber, and to have a talk with one or two of the most troubled ones, but there were no troubled children to be had immediately, and no time for his supplier in the Baltimore slums to trouble some for him.

That failing, he had his attendant Cordell cripple ornamental carp and drop them to the eel until the eel could eat no more and retreated into its rock, the water clouded pink and gray and full of iridescent golden shreds.

He tried to torment his sister Margot, but she retired to the workout room and for hours ignored his pages. She was the only person at Muskrat Farm who dared to ignore Mason.

A short, much-edited piece of tourist's videotape showing the death of Rinaldo Pazzi was on the television evening news Saturday night, before Dr Lecter was.identified as the killer. Blurred areas of the image spared viewers the anatomical details.

Mason's secretary was on the telephone immediately to get the unedited tape. It arrived by helicopter four hours later.

The videotape had a curious provenance: Of the two tourists who were videotaping the Palazzo Vecchio at the moment of Rinaldo Pazzi's death, one panicked and the camera swung away at the moment of the fall. The other tourist was Swiss and held steady through the entire episode, even panning back up the jerking, swinging cord.

The amateur cameraman, a patent clerk named Viggert, was fearful that the police would seize the videotape and the RAI Italian television would get it free. He called his lawyer in Lausanne at once, made arrangements to copyright the images and sold the rights on a per-broadcast basis to ABC television news after a bidding war. First North American serial rights for print went to the New York Post, followed by the National Tattler.

The tape instantly took its place among the classic horrific spectacles – Zapruder, the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald and the suicide of Edgar Bolger – but Viggert would bitterly regret selling so soon, before Dr Lecter was accused of the crime.

This copy of the Viggerts' vacation videotape was complete. We see Swiss family Viggert dutifully orbiting the balls of the David at the Accademia hours before the events at Palazzo Vecchio.

Mason, watching the video with his single goggled eye, had little interest in the expensive piece of meat twitching at the end of the electrical cord. The little history lesson La Nazione and Corriere della Sera provided on the two Pazzis hanged from the same window five hundred twenty years apart did not interest him either. What held him, what he ran over and over and over, was the pan up the jerking cord to the balcony where a slender figure stood in fuzzy silhouette against the dim light within, waving. Waving to Mason. Dr Lecter waved to Mason from the wrist the way you would wave bye-bye to a child.

"Bye-bye," Mason replied from his darkness. "Bye-bye," the deep radio voice shaking with rage.

Chapter 42

THE IDENTIFICATION Of Dr Hannibal Lecter as the murderer of Rinaldo Pazzi gave Clarice Starling something serious to do, thank God. She became the de facto low-level liaison between the FBI and the Italian authorities. It was good to make a sustained effort at one task: Starling's world had changed since the drug raid shoot-out. She and the other survivors of the Feliciana Fish Market were kept in a kind of administrative purgatory pending a Department of justice report to a minor House Judiciary Subcommittee.

After finding the Lecter X-ray, Starling had marked time as a highly qualified temporary, filling in at the National Police Academy, Quantico, for instructors who were ill or on vacation Through the fall and winter, Washington was obsessed with a scandal in the White House. The frothing reformers used more saliva than did the sad little sin, and the President of the United States publicly ate more than his portion of ordure trying to avoid impeachment.

In this circus, the small matter of the Feliciana Fish Market Massacre was.pushed aside.

Each day, inside Starling a grim knowledge grew: The federal service would never be the same for her again. She was marked. Her coworkers had caution in their faces when they dealt with her, as though she had something contagious. Starling was young enough for this behavior to surprise and disappoint her.

It was good to be busy – requests from the Italians for information about Hannibal Lecter were pouring into Behavioral Science, usually in duplicate – one copy being forwarded by the State Department. And Starling replied with a will, stoking the fax lines and E-mailing Lecter files. She was surprised at how much the peripheral material had scattered over the seven years since the doctor's escape.

Her small cubicle in the basement at Behavioral Science was overflowing with paper, inky faxes from Italy, copies of the Italian papers.

What could she send the Italians that would be of value? The item they seized on was the single Questura computer query to the Lecter VICAP file at Quantico a few days before Pazzi's death. The Italian press resurrected Pazzi's reputation with it, claiming he was working in secret to capture Dr Lecter and reclaim his honor.

On the other hand, Starling wondered, what information from the Pazzi crime could be useful here, in case the doctor returned to the United States? Jack Crawford was not in the office much to advise her. He was in court a lot, and as his retirement approached he was deposed in a lot of open cases.

He took more and more sick days, and when he was in the office he seemed increasingly distant.

The thought of not having his counsel gave Starling flashes of panic.

In her years at the FBI, Starling had seen a great deal. She knew that if Dr Lecter killed again in the United States, the trumpets of flatulence would sound in Congress, an enormous roar of second-guessing would go up from Justice, and the Catch-Me-Fuck-Me would begin in earnest. Customs and Border Patrol would catch it first for letting him in.

The local jurisdiction where the crime occurred would demand everything relating to Lecter and the FBI effort would center around the local line bureau. Then, when the doctor did it again someplace else, everything would move.

If he were caught, the authorities would fight for credit like bears around a bloody seal.

Starling's business was to prepare for the eventuality of his coming, whether he ever came or not, putting aside all the weary knowledge of what would happen around the investigation.

She asked herself a simple question that would have sounded corny to the career climbers inside the Beltway: How could she do exactly what she was sworn to do? How could she protect the citizens and catch him if he came? Dr Lecter obviously had good papers and money. He was brilliant at concealing himself. Take the elegant simplicity of his first hideout after his escape from Memphis – he checked into a four-star hotel next door to a great plastic surgery facility in St Louis. Half the guests had their faces bandaged. He bandaged his own face and lived high on a dead man's money…Among her hundreds of scraps of paper, she had his room service receipts from St Louis. Astronomical. A bottle of Batard-Montrachet one hundred twenty-five dollars. How good it must have tasted after all those years of jail food.

She had asked for copies of everything from Florence and the Italians obliged. From the quality of the print, she thought they must copy with some kind of soot blower.

There was no order anywhere. Here were Dr Lecter's personal papers from the Palazzo Capponi. A few notes on Dante in his familiar handwriting, a note to the cleaning lady, a receipt from the Florentine fine grocer Vera dal 1926 for two bottles of Batard-Montrachet and some tartufi bianchi. Same wine again, and what was the other thing? Starling's Bantam New College Italian amp; English Dictionary told her tartufi bianchi were white truffles. She called the chef at a good Washington Italian restaurant and asked him about them. She had to beg off the phone after five minutes as he raved about their taste.

Taste. The wine, the truffles. Taste in all things was a constant between Dr Lecter's lives in America and Europe, between his life as a successful medical practitioner and fugitive monster. His face may have changed but his tastes did not, and he was not a man who denied himself.

Taste was a sensitive area to Starling, because it was in the area of taste that Dr Lecter first touched her in the quick, complimenting her on her pocketbook and making fun of her cheap shoes. What had he called her? A well- scrubbed hustling rube with a little taste.

It was taste that itched at her in the daily round of her institutional life with its purely functional equipment in utilitarian settings.

At the same time her faith in technique was dying and leaving room for something else.

Starling was weary of technique. Faith in technique is the religion of the dangerous trades. To go up against an armed felon in a gunfight or to fight him in the dirt you have to believe perfect technique, hard training, will guarantee that you are invincible. This is not true, particularly in firefights. You can stack the odds in your favor, but if you get into enough gunfights, you will be killed in one.

Starling had seen it.

Having come to doubt the religion of technique, where could Starling turn? In her tribulation, in the gnawing sameness of her days, she began to look at the shapes of things. She began to credit her own visceral reactions to things, without quantifying them or restricting them to words. At about this time she noticed a change in her reading habits. Before, she would have read a caption before she looked at a picture. Not now. Sometimes she did not read captions at all.

For years she had read couture publications on the sly, guiltily as though they were pornography. Now she began to admit to herself that there was something in those pictures that made her hungry. Within the framework of her mind, galvanized by the Lutherans against corrupting rust, she felt as though she were giving in to a delicious perversion.

She would have arrived at her tactic anyway, in time, but she was aided by the sea change inside her: It sped her toward the idea that Dr Lecter's taste for rarified things, things in a small market, might be the monster's dorsal fin, cutting the surface and making him visible…Using and comparing computerized customer lists, Starling might be able to crack one of his alternate identities. To do this, she had to know his preferences. She needed to know him better than anyone in the world knew him.

What are the things I know he likes? He likes music, wine, books, food. And he likes me.

The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to credit your own opinion. In the areas of food and wine and music, Starling would have to follow the doctor's precedents, looking at what he used in the past, but in one area she was at least his equal. Automobiles. Starling was a car buff, as anyone who saw her car could tell.

Dr Lecter had owned a supercharged Bentley before his disgrace. Supercharged, not turbocharged. Custom supercharged with a Rootes-type positive displacement blower, so it had no turbo lag. She quickly realized that the custom Bentley market is so small, he would entail some risk going back to it.

What would he buy now? She understood the feeling he liked. A blown, big displacement V8, with power down low, and not peaky. What would she buy in the current market? No question, an XJR Jaguar supercharged sedan.

Thomas Harris She faxed the East and West Coast Jaguar distributors asking for weekly sales reports.

What else did Dr Lecter have a taste for, that Starling knew a lot about? He likes me, she thought.

How quickly he had responded to her plight. Even considering the delay from using a re-mailing service to write to her. Too bad the postage meter lead fizzled out – the meter was in such a public place any thief could use it.

How quickly did the National Tattler get to Italy? That's one place he saw Starling's trouble, a copy was found in the Palazzo Capponi. Did the scandal sheet have a Web site? Also, if he had a computer in Italy, he might have read a summary of the gunfight on the FBI's public Web site. What might be learned from Dr Lecter's computer? No computer was listed among the personal effects at Palazzo Capponi.

Still, she had seen something. She got out the photos of the library at the Palazzo Capponi. Here was a picture of the beautiful desk where he wrote to her. Here on the desk was a computer. A Phillips laptop. In subsequent pictures it was gone.

With her dictionary, Starling painfully composed a fax to the Questura in Florence:

Fra le cose personali del dottor Lecter, c'e un computer portable?

And so, with small steps, Clarice Starling began to pursue Dr Lecter down the corridors of his taste, with more confidence in her footing than was entirely justified.

Chapter 43

MASON VERGER'S assistant Cordell, with an example posted in a frame on his desk, recognized the distinctive handwriting at once. The stationery was from the Excelsior Hotel in Florence, Italy…Like an increasing number of wealthy people in the era of the Unabomber, Mason had his own mail fluoroscope, similar to the one at the U.S. Post Office.

Cordell pulled on some gloves and checked the letter. The fluoroscope showed no wires or batteries. In accordance with Mason's strict instructions, he copied the letter and the envelope on the copying machine, handling it with tweezers, and changed gloves before picking up the copy and delivering it to Mason.

In Dr Lecter's familiar copperplate:

Dear Mason, Thank you for posting such a huge bounty on me. I wish you would increase it. As an early-warning system, the bounty is better than radar. It inclines authorities everywhere to forsake their duty and scramble after me privately, with the results you see.

Actually, I'm writing to refresh your memory on the subject of your former nose. In your inspirational antidrug interview the other day in the Ladies' Home journal you claim that you fed your nose, along with the rest of your face, to the pooches, Skippy and Spot, all waggy at your feet. Not so: You ate it yourself, for refreshment. From the crunchy sound when you chewed it up, I would say it had a consistency similar to that of a chicken gizzard – "Tastes just like chicken!" was your comment at the time. I was reminded of the sound in a bistro when a French person tucks into a gesier salad.

You don't remember that, Mason? Speaking of chicken, you told me in therapy that, while you were subverting the underprivileged children at your summer camp, you learned that chocolate irritates your urethra. You don't remember that either, do you? Don't you think it likely you told me all sorts of things you don't remember now? There is an inescapable parallel between you and jezebel, Mason. Keen Bible student that you are, you will recall the dogs ate jezebel's face, along with the rest of her, after the eunuchs threw her out the window.

Your people might have assassinated me in the street. But you wanted me alive, didn't you? From the aroma of your henchmen, it's obvious how you planned to entertain me. Mason, Mason. Since you want to see me so badly, let me give you some words of comfort, and you know I never lie.

Before you die you will see my face.

Sincerely, Hannibal Lecter, MD

P.S. I worry, though, that you won't live that long, Mason. You must avoid the new strains of pneumonia. You're very susceptible, prone as you are (and will remain). I would recommend vaccination immediately, along with immunization shots for hepatitis A and B. Don't want to lose you prematurely.

Mason seemed somewhat out of breath when he finished reading. He waited, waited and in his own good time said something to Cordell, which Cordell could not hear.

Cordell leaned close and was rewarded with a spray of spit when Mason spoke again: "Get me Paul Krendler on the phone. And get me the Pigmaster."

Chapter 44

THE SAME helicopter that brought the foreign newspapers daily to Mason Verger also brought Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler to Muskrat Farm…Mason's malign presence and his darkened chamber with its hissing and sighing machinery and its ever-moving eel would have made Krendler uneasy enough, but he also had to sit through the video of Pazzi's death again and again.

Seven times Krendler watched the Viggerts orbit the David, saw Pazzi plunge and his bowels fall out. By the seventh time, Krendler expected David's bowels to fall out too.

Finally the bright overhead lights came on in the seating area of Mason's room, hot on top of Krendler's head and shining off his scalp through the thinning brush cut.

The Vergers have an unparalleled understanding of piggishness, so Mason began with what Krendler wanted for himself. Mason spoke out of the dark, his sentences measured by the stroke of his respirator.

"I don't need to hear… your whole platform… how much money will it take?"

Krendler wanted to talk privately with Mason, but they were not alone in the room. A broad-shouldered figure, terrifically muscled, loomed in black outline against the glowing aquarium. The idea of a bodyguard hearing them made Krendler nervous.

"I'd rather it was just us talking, do you mind asking him to leave?"

"This is my sister, Margot," Mason said. "She can stay."

Margot came out of the darkness, her bicycle pants whistling.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Krendler said, half-rising from his chair.

"Hello," she said, but instead of taking Krendler's outstretched hand, Margot picked up two walnuts from the bowl on the table and, squeezing them together in her fist until they cracked loudly, returned to the gloom in front of the aquarium where presumably she ate them. Krendler could hear the hulls dropping to the floor.

"Oookay, let's hear it," Mason said.

"For me to unseat Lowenstein in the twenty-seventh district, ten million dollars minimum."

Krendler crossed his legs and looked off somewhere into the dark. He didn't know if Mason could see him. "I'd need that much just for media. But I guarantee you he's vulnerable. I'm in a position to know."

"What's his thing?"

"We'll just say his conduct has-"

"Well, is it money or snatch?"

Krendler didn't feel comfortable saying "snatch" in front of Margot, though it didn't seem to bother Mason. "He's married and he's had a longtime affair with a state court of appeals judge. The judge has ruled in favor of some of his contributors. The rulings are probably coincidence, but when TV convicts him that's all I'll need."

"The judge a woman?".Margot asked.

Krendler nodded. Not sure Mason could see him, he added, "Yes. A woman."

"Too bad," Mason said. "It would be better if he was a queer, wouldn't it, Margot? Still, you can't sling that crap yourself, Krendler. It can't come from you."

"We've put together a plan that offers the voters…"

"You can't sling the crap yourself," Mason said again.

"I'll just make sure the Judicial Review Board knows where to look, so it'll stick to Lowenstein when it hits him. Are you saying you can help me?"

"I can help you with half of it."

"Five?"

"Let's not just toss it off like `five.' Let's say it with the respect it deserves – five million dollars. The Lord has blessed me with this money. And with it I will do His will: You get it only if Hannibal Lecter falls cleanly into my hands."

Mason breathed for a few beats. "If that happens, you'll be Mr. Congressman Krendler of the twenty-seventh district, free and clear, and all I'll ever ask you to do is oppose the Humane Slaughter Act. If the FBI gets Lecter, the cops grab him someplace and he gets off with lethal injection, it's been nice to know you."

"I can't help it if a local jurisdiction gets him. Or Crawford's outfit lucks up and catches him, I can't control that."

"How many states with death penalties could Dr Lecter be charged in?"

Margot asked. Her voice was scratchy but deep like Mason's from the hormones she had taken.

"Three states, multiple Murder One in each."

"If he's arrested I want him prosecuted at the state level," Mason said. "No kidnapping rap, no civil rights violations, no interstate. I want him to get off with life, I want him in a state prison, not a maximum federal pen."

"Do I have to ask why?"

"Not unless you want me to tell you. It doesn't fall under the Humane Slaughter Act," Mason said, and giggled. Talking had exhausted him. He gestured to Margot.

She carried a clipboard into the light and read from her notes. "We want everything you get and we want it before Behavioral Science sees it, we want Behavioral Science reports as soon as they're filed and we want the VICAP and National Crime Information Center access codes."

"You'd have to use a public phone every time you access VICAP," Krendler said, still talking out into the dark as though the woman wasn't there. "How can you do that?"."I can do it," Margot said.

"She can do it," Mason whispered from the dark.

"She writes workout programs for exercise machines in gyms. It's her little business so she doesn't have to live off of Brother."

"The FBI has a closed system and some of it's encrypted. You'll have to sign on from a guest location exactly as I tell you and download to a laptop programmed at the justice Department," Krendler said. "Then if VICAP hides a tracer cookie on you, it will just come back to Justice. Buy a fast laptop with a fast modem for cash over-the-counter at a volume dealer and don't mail any warranties. Get a zip drive too. Stay off the Net with it. I'll need it overnight and I want it back when you're through. You'll hear from me. Okay, that's it."

Krendler stood and gathered his papers.

"That's not quite it, Mr. Krendler…"

Mason said. "Lecter doesn't have to come out. He's got the money to hide forever."

"How does he have money?"

Margot said.

"He had some very rich old people in his psychiatric practice," Krendler said. "He got them to sign over a lot of money and stocks to him and he hid it good. The IRS hasn't been able to find it. They exhumed the bodies of a couple of his benefactors to see if he'd killed them, but they couldn't find anything. Toxin scans negative."

"So he won't get caught in a stickup, he has cash," Mason said. "We've got to lure him out. Be thinking of ways."

"He'll know where the hit came from in Florence," Krendler said.

"Sure he will."

"So he'll want you."

"I don't know," Mason said. "He likes me like I am. Be thinking, Krendler."

Mason began to hum.

All Deputy Assistant Inspector General Krendler heard was humming as he went out the door. Mason often hummed hymns while he was scheming: You've got the prime bait, Krendler, but we'll discuss it after you've made an incriminating bank deposit – when you belong to me.

Chapter 45

ONLY FAMILY remains in Mason's room, brother and sister.

Soft light and music. North African music, an oud and drums. Margot sits on the couch, head down, elbows on her knees. She might have been a hammer thrower resting, or a weight lifter resting in a gym after a workout. She breathes a little faster than Mason's respirator…The song ends and she rises, goes to his bedside. The eel pokes his head out of the hole in the artificial rock to see if his wavy silver sky might rain carp again tonight. Margot's raspy voice at its softest. "Are you awake?"

In a moment Mason was present behind his ever-open eye. "Is it time to talk about – a hiss of breath – what Margot wants? Sit here on Santa's knee."

"You know what I want."

"Tell me."

"Judy and I want to have a baby. We want to have a Verger baby, our own baby."

"Why don't you buy a Chinese baby? They're cheaper than shoats."

"It's a good thing to do. We might do that too."

"What does Papa's will say… To an heir, confirmed as my descendent in the Cellmark Laboratory or its equivalent by DNA testing, my estate entire upon the passing of my beloved son, Mason. Beloved son, Mason, that's me. In the absence of an heir, the sole beneficiary shall be the Southern Baptist Convention with specific clauses concerning Baylor University at Waco, Texas. You really pissed Papa off with that muff-diving, Margot."

"You may not believe this, Mason, but it's not the money – well, it is a little bit, but don't you want an heir? It would be your heir too, Mason."

"Why don't you find a nice fellow and give him a little nooky, Margot? It's not like you don't know how."

The Moroccan music is building again, the obsessive repetitions of the oud in her ear like anger.

"I've messed myself up, Mason. I shriveled my ovaries with all the stuff I took. And I want Judy to be part of it. She wants to be the birth mother. Mason, you said if I helped you – you promised me some sperm.

Mason's spidery fingers gestured. "Help yourself. If it's still there."

"Mason, there's every chance that you still have viable sperm, and we could arrange to harvest it painlessly-"

"Harvesting my viable sperm? Sounds like you've been talking to somebody."

"Just the fertility clinic, it's confidential."

Margot's face softened, even in the cold light of the aquarium.

"We could be really good to a child, Mason, we've been to parenting classes, Judy comes from a big, tolerant family and there's a support group of women parents."

"You used to be able to make me come when we were kids, Margot, Made me shoot like a belt-fed mortar. And pretty damn fast too."

"You hurt me when I was little, Mason. You hurt me and you dislocated my elbow making me do the other – I still can't curl more than eighty pounds with my left arm."

"Well, you wouldn't take the chocolate. I said we'll talk about it, Little.Sister, when this job is done."

"Let's just test you now," Margot said. "The doctor can take a painless sample-" "What painless, I can't feel anything down there anyway. You could suck it till you're blue in the face, and it wouldn't be like it was the first time. But I've made people do that already and nothing happens."

"The doctor can take a painless sample, just to see if you've got motile sperm. Judy's taking Clomid already. We're getting her cycle charted, there's a lot of stuff to do."

"I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Judy in all this time. Cordell says she's bowlegged. How long have you two been an item, Margot?"

"Five years."

"Why don't you bring her by? We might… work something out, so to speak."

The North African drums end with a final slap and leave a ringing silence in Margot's ear.

"Why don't you manage your little hookup with the Justice Department by yourself?" she said close to his war hole. "Why don't you try to get in a phone booth with your fucking laptop. Why don't you pay some more licking guineas to catch the guy that made dog food out 'your face? You said you'd help me, Mason."

"I will. I just have to think about the timing."

Margot crushed two walnuts together and let the reps fall on Mason's sheet. "Don't think too goddamned long, Smiley."

Her cycle pants whistled like building steam as she walked out of the room.

Chapter 46

ARDELIA MAPP cooked when she felt like it, and when she cooked the result was extremely good. Her heritage was a combination of Jamaican and Gullah, and at the moment she was making jerk chicken, seeding a Scotch bonnet pepper she held carefully by the stem. She refused to pay the premium for cut-up chickens and had Starling busy with the cleaver and the cutting board.

"If you leave the pieces whole, Starling, they won't take the seasoning like they will if you cut them up," she explained, not for the first time. "Here," she said, taking the cleaver and splitting a back with such force bone splinters stuck to her apron. "Like that. What are you doing throwing those necks out? Put that handsome thing back in there."

And a minute later, "I was at the post office today. Mailing the shoes to my mom," Mapp said.

"I was in the post office too, I could have taken them."

"Did you hear anything at the post office?"

"Nope. " Mapp nodded, not surprised. "The drum says they're covering your mail."

"Who is?"."Confidential directive from the Postal Inspector. You didn't know that, did you?"

"No."

"So discover it some other way, we need to cover my post office buddy."

"Okay."

Starling put down her cleaver for a moment. "Jesus, Ardelia."

Starling had stood at the post office counter and bought her stamps, reading nothing in the closed faces of the busy postal clerks, most of them African- American, and several of whom she knew. Clearly someone wanted to help her, but it was a big chance to take with criminal penalties and your pension on the line. Clearly that someone trusted Ardelia more than Starling. Along with her anxiety, Starling felt a happy flash at having a favor from the African- American hot line: Maybe it expressed a tacit judgment of self-defense in the shooting of Evelda Drumgo.

"Now, take those green onions and mash them with the knife handle and give them here. Mash the green and all," Ardelia said.

When she had finished the prep work, Starling washed her hands and went into the absolute order of Ardelia's living room and sat down. Ardelia came in in a minute, drying her hands on a dish towel.

"Hell kind of bullshit is this?" Ardelia said.

It was their practice to curse heartily before taking up anything truly ominous, a late-century form of whistling in the dark.

"Be God Dam if I know," Starling said. "Who's the sumbitch looking at my mail, that's the thing."

"PI's office is as far back as my folks can go."

"It's not the shooting, it's not Evelda," Starling said. "If they're looking at my mail, it's got to be about Dr Lecter. " "You turned in every damn thing he ever sent you. You down with Crawford on that."

"Damn straight. If it's the Bureau OPR checking up on me I can find that out, I think. If it's Justice OPR, I don't know."

The Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI, have separate Offices of Professional Responsibility, which theoretically cooperate and sometimes collide. Such conflicts are known in-house as pissing contests, and agents caught in the middle sometimes get drowned. In addition, the Inspector General at justice, a political appointee, can jump in anytime and take over a sensitive case.

"If they know something Hannibal Lecter's up to, if they think he's close, they got to let you know it to protect yourself. Starling, do you ever… feel him around you?"

Starling shook her head. "I don't worry about him much. Not that way. I used to go a long time and not even think about it. You know that lead feeling, that heavy gray feeling when you dread something? I don't ever have that. I just think I'd know if I had a problem."."What would you do, Starling? What would you do if you saw him in front of you? All of a sudden? Have you got it set in your mind? Would you throw down on him?"

"Fast as I could grab it out of my britches, I'd throw down on his ass."

Ardelia laughed. "And then what?"

Starling's smile went away. "That would be up to him."

"Could you shoot him?"

"To keep my own chitterlings in place, are you kidding me? My God, I hope that never happens, Ardelia. I'd be glad if he got back in custody without anybody else getting hurt – including him. I'll tell you though, sometimes I think, if he's ever cornered, I'd want to take the point going in for him."

"Don't even say that."

"With me he'd have a better chance to come out alive. I wouldn't shoot him because I'm scared of him. He's not the wolf man. It would just be up to him."

"Are you scared of him? You better be scared enough."

"You know what's scary, Ardelia? It's scary when somebody tells you the truth. I'd like to see him beat the needle. If he can do that, and he's put in an institution, there's enough academic interest in him to keep his treatment pretty good. And he won't have any problem with roommates. If he was in the slams I'd thank him for his note. Can't waste a man that's crazy enough to tell the truth."

"There's a reason somebody's monitoring your mail. They got a court order and it's someplace under seal. We're not staked out yet we'd have spotted it," Ardelia said. "I wouldn't put it past those sons of bitches to know he's coming and not tell you. You watch out tomorrow."

"Mr. Crawford would have told us. They can't mount much against Lecter without bringing Mr. Crawford in on it."

"Jack Crawford is history, Starling. You've got a blind spot there. What if they mount something against you? For having a wise mouth, for not letting Krendler get in your pants? What if somebody wants to trash you? Hey, I'm serious about covering my source now."

"Is there something we can do for your post office buddy? Do we need to do something?"

"Who do you think is coming to dinner?"

"All right Ardelia!… Wait a minute, I thought I was coming to dinner."

"You can take some home with you."

"I 'preciate it."

"No trouble, girl. My pleasure, in fact."

Chapter 47

WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the.wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.

The most ramshackle family dwelling of her early childhood had had a warm kitchen where she could share an orange with her father. But death knows where the little houses are, where people live who do dangerous work for not much money. Her father rode away from this house in his old pickup truck on the night patrol that killed him.

Starling rode away from her foster home on a slaughter horse while they were killing the lambs, and she found a kind of refuge in the Lutheran Orphanage. Institutional structures, big and solid, made her feel safe ever since. The Lutherans might have been short on warmth and oranges and long on Jesus, but the rules were the rules and if you understood them you were okay.

As long as impersonal competitive testing was the challenge, or doing the job on the street, she knew she could make her place secure. But Starling had no gift for institutional politics.

Now, as she got out of her old Mustang at the beginning of the day, the high facades of Quantico were no more the great brick bosom of her refuge. Through the crazed air over the parking lot, the very entrances looked crooked.

She wanted to see Jack Crawford, but there was no time. Filming at Hogan's Alley began as soon as the sun was well up.

The investigation of the Feliciana Fish Market Massacre required filmed reenactments made on the Hogan's Alley shooting range at Quantico, with every shot, every trajectory, accounted for.

Starling had to perform her part. The undercover van they used was the original one with body putty, unpainted, plugging the latest bullet holes. Again and again they piled out of the old van, over and over the agent playing John Brigham went down on his face and the one playing Burke writhed on the ground. The process, using noisy blank ammunition, left her wrung out.

They finished in mid-afternoon.

Starling hung up her SWAT gear and found Jack Crawford in his office.

She was back to addressing him as Mr. Crawford now, and he seemed increasingly vague and distant from everyone.

"Want an Alka-Seltzer, Starling?" he said when he saw her in his office door. Crawford took a number of patent medicines in the course of the day. He was also taking Ginkgo Biloba, Saw Palmetto, St John's Wort Viand baby aspirin. He took them in a certain order from his palm, his head going back as though he were taking a shot of liquor.

In recent weeks, he had started hanging up his suit coat in the office and putting on a sweater his late wife Bella, had knitted for him. He looked much older now than any memory she had of her own father.

"Mr. Crawford, some of my mail is being opened.

"I know. They're not very good at it. Looks like they're steaming the glue with a teapot."

"You've had mail surveillance since Lecter wrote to you."

"They just fluoroscoped packages. That was fine, but I can read my own.personal mail. Nobody's said anything to me."

"It's not our OPR doing it."

"It's not Deputy Dawg either, Mr. Crawford – it's somebody big enough to get a Title Three intercept warrant under seal."

"But it looks like amateurs doing the opening?"

She was quiet long enough for him to add, "Better if you noticed it that way, is it, Starling?"

"Yes, sir."

He pursed his lips and nodded. "I'll look into it."

He arranged his patent medicine bottles in the top drawer of his desk. "I'll speak to Carl Schirmer at justice, we'll straighten that out."

Schirmer was a lame duck. The grapevine said he'd be retiring at the end of the year – all Crawford's cronies were retiring.

"Thank you, sir."

"Anybody in your cop classes show much promise? Anybody recruiting ought to talk to?"

"In the forensics, I can't tell yet – they're shy with me in sex crimes. There's a couple of pretty good shooters."

"We've got all we need of those."

He looked at her quickly. "I didn't mean you."

At the end of this day of playing out his death, she went to John Brigham's grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Starling put her hand on his stone, still gritty from the chisel. Suddenly she had on her lips the distinct sensation of kissing his forehead, cold as marble and gritty with powder, when she came to his bier the last time and put in his hand, beneath the white glove, her own last medal as Open Combat Pistol Champion.

Now leaves were falling in Arlington, strewing the crowded ground. Starling, with her hand on John Brigham's stone, looking over the acres of graves, wondered how many like him had been wasted by stupidity and selfishness and the bargaining of tired old men.

Whether you believe in God or not, if you are a warrior Arlington is a sacred place, and the tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

She felt a bond with Brigham that was no less strong because they were never lovers. On one knee beside his stone she remembered: He asked her something gently and she said no, and then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.

Kneeling in Arlington, she thought about her father's grave far away. She had not visited it since she graduated first in her college class and went to his grave to tell him. She wondered if it was time to go back…The sunset through Arlington 's black branches was as orange as the orange she shared with her father; the distant bugle shivered her, the tombstone cold beneath her hand.

Chapter 48

WE CAN see it through the vapor of our breath – in the clear night over Newfoundland a brilliant point of light hanging in Orion, then passing slowly overhead, a Boeing 747 bucking a hundred-mile-per-hour head wind westward.

Back in steerage where the package tours go, the fifty-two members of Old World Fantasy, a tour of eleven countries in seventeen days, are returning to Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Shoulder room is twenty inches. Hip room between armrests is twenty inches. This is two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.

The passengers are being slopped with freezing-cold sandwiches of slippery meat and processed cheese food, and are re-breathing the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation on the ditch-liquor principle established by cattle and pig merchants in the 1950s.

Dr Hannibal Lecter is in the center of the middle row in steerage with children on both sides of him and a woman holding an infant at the end of the row. After so many years in cells and restraints, Dr Lecter does not like to be confined. A computer game in the lap of the small boy beside him beeps incessantly.

Like many others scattered throughout the cheapest seats, Dr Lecter wears a bright yellow smiley-face badge with CAN-AM TOURS on it in big red letters, and like the tourists he wears faux athletic warm-ups. His warm-ups bear the insignia of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a hockey team. Beneath his clothing, a considerable amount of cash is strapped to his body.

Dr Lecter has been with the tour three days, having bought his place from a Paris broker of last-minute illness cancellations. The man who should have been in this seat went home to Canada in a box after his heart gave out climbing the dome of St Peter's.

When he reaches Detroit, Dr Lecter must face passport control and customs. He can be sure security and immigration officers at every major airport in the western world have been alerted to watch for him. Where his picture is not taped to the wall of passport control, it is waiting under the hot button of every customs and immigration computer.

In all of this, he thinks that he may enjoy one piece of luck: The pictures the authorities are using could be of his old face. The false passport he used to enter Italy has no corresponding home-country file to provide a current likeness: In Italy, Rinaldo Pazzi had tried to simplify his own life and satisfy Mason Verger by taking the Carabinieri's file, including the photograph and negative used on "Dr Fells" permesso di soggiorno and work permit. Dr Lecter found them in Pazzi's briefcase and destroyed them.

Unless Pazzi took photos of "Dr Fell" from hiding, there is a good chance that no current likeness of Dr Lecter's new face exists in the world. It is not so different from his old face -a little collagen added around the nose and cheeks, changed hair, spectacles but it is different enough if attention is not called to him. For the scar on the back of his hand, he has found a durable cosmetic and a tanning agent.

He expects that at Detroit Metropolitan Airport the Immigration Service will.divide the arrivees into two lines, U.S. Passports and Other. He has chosen a border city so the Other line will be full. This airplane is loaded with Canadians. Dr Lecter thinks he can be swept through with the herd, as long as the herd accepts him. He has toured some historic sites and galleries with these tourists, he has flown in the stews of the airplane with them, but there are limits: He cannot eat this airline swill with them.

Tired and footsore, weary of their clothes and their companions, the tourists root in their supper bags, and from their sandwiches remove the lettuce, black I with cold.

Dr Lecter, not wishing to call attention to himself, waits until the other passengers have picked through this sorry fare, waits until they have gone to the bathroom and most have fallen asleep. Far at the front, a stale movie plays. Still he waits with the patience of a python. Beside him the small boy has fallen asleep over his computer game. Up and down the broad airplane, the reading lights wink out.

Then and only then, with a furtive glance around, Dr Lecter takes from beneath the seat in front of him, his own lunch in an elegant yellow box trimmed with brown from Fauchon, the Paris caterer. It is tied with two ribbons of silk gauze in complementary colors. Dr Lecter has provisioned himself with wonderfully aromatic truffled pate de foie gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems. He has a half-bottle of a St Estephe he favors. The silk bow yields with a whisper.

Dr Lecter is about to savor a fig, holds it before his lips, his nostrils flared to its aroma, deciding whether to take all the fig in one glorious bite or just half, when the computer game beside him beeps. It beeps again. Without turning his head, the doctor palms the fig and looks down at the child beside him. The scents of truffle, foie gras and cognac climb from the open box. The small boy sniffs the air. His narrow eyes, shiny as those of a rodent, slide sideways to Dr Lecter's lunch. He speaks with the piercing voice of a competitive sibling: "Hey, Mister. Hey, Mister."

He's not going to stop.

"What is it?"

"Is that one of those special meals?"

"It is not."

"What've you got in there then?"

The child turned his face up to Dr Lecter in a full wheedle. "Gimme a bite?"

"I'd very much like to," Dr Lecter replied, noting that beneath the child's big head, his neck was only as big around as a pork tenderloin, "but you wouldn't like it. It's liver."

"Liverwurst! Awesome! Mom won't care, Mooaaaahm!"

Unnatural child, who loves liverwurst and either whines or screams.

The woman holding the baby at the end of the row started awake.

Travelers in the row ahead, their chairs cranked back until Dr Lecter can smell their hair, look back through the crack between seats. "We're trying to sleep up here."."Mooooaaaahm, can I have some of his samwich?"

The baby in Mother's lap awoke and began to cry. Mother dipped a finger into the back of its diaper, came up negative, and gave the baby a pacifier.

"What is it you're trying to give him, sir?"

"It's liver, Madame," Dr Lecter said as quietly as possible. "I haven't given-" "Liverwurst, my favorite, I want it, he said I could have some of it…"

The child stretched the last word into a piercing whine.

"Sir, if you're giving something to my child, could I see it?"

The stewardess, her face puffed from an interrupted nap, stopped by the woman's seat as the baby howled. "Everything all right here? Could I bring you something? Warm a bottle?"

The woman took out a capped baby bottle and gave it to the stewardess. She turned on her reading light, and while she searched for a nipple, she called to Dr Lecter. "Would you pass it down to me? If you're offering it to my child, I want to see it. No offense, but he's got a tricky tummy."

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children. In times like these, a genuine monster has to watch it, even a monster as indifferent to children as Dr Lecter.

He passed his Fauchon box down to Mother.

"Hey, nice bread," she said, poking it with her diaper finger.

"Madame, you may have it."

"I don't want the liquor," she said, and looked around for a laugh. "I didn't know they'd let you bring your own. Is this whiskey? Do they allow you to drink this on the plane? I think I'll keep this ribbon if you don't want it."

"Sir, you can't open this alcoholic beverage on the aircraft," the stewardess said. "I'll hold it for you, you can claim it at the gate."

"Of course. Thank you so much," Dr Lecter said.

Dr Lecter could overcome his surroundings. He could make it all go away. The beeping of the computer game, the snores and farts, were nothing compared to the hellish screaming he'd known in the violent wards. The seat was no tighter than restraints. As he had done in his cell so many times, Dr Lecter put his head back, closed his eyes and retired for relief into the quiet of his memory palace, a place that is quite beautiful for the most part.

For this little time, the metal cylinder howling eastward against the wind contains a palace of a thousand rooms.

As once we visited Dr Lecter in the Palazzo of the Capponi, so we will go with him now into the palace of his mind…

The foyer is the Norman Chapel in Palermo, severe and beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality in the skull graven in the floor. Unless.he is in a great hurry to retrieve information from the palace, Dr Lecter often pauses here as he does now, to admire the chapel. Beyond it, far and complex, light and dark, is the vast structure of Dr Lecter's making.

The memory palace was a mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while Vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there. He has passed years among its exquisite collections, while his body lay bound on a violent ward with screams buzzing the steel bars like hell's own harp.

Hannibal Lecter's palace is vast, even by medieval standards. Translated to the tangible world it would rival the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul for size and complexity.

We catch up to him as the swift slippers of his mind pass from the foyer into the Great Hall of the Seasons. The palace is built according to the rules discovered by Simonides of Ceos and elaborated by Cicero four hundred years later; it is airy, high-ceilinged, furnished with objects and tableaux that are vivid, striking, sometimes shocking and absurd, and often beautiful. The displays are well spaced and well lighted like those of a great museum. But the walls are not the neutral colors of museum walls. Like Giotto, Dr Lecter has frescoed the walls of his mind.

He has decided to pick up Clarice Starling's home address while he is in the palace, but he is in no hurry for it, so he stops at the foot of a great staircase where the Riace bronzes stand. These great bronze warriors attributed to Phidias, raised from the seafloor in our own time, are the centerpiece of a frescoed space that could unspool all of Homer and Sophocles.

Dr Lecter could have the bronze faces speak Meleager if he wished, but today he only wants to look at them.

A thousand rooms, miles of corridors, hundreds of facts attached to each object furnishing each room, a pleasant respite awaiting Dr Lecter whenever he chooses to retire there.

But this we share with the doctor: In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor-the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases- things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior…

Fearfully and wonderfully made, we follow as he moves with a swift light stride along the corridor of his own making, through a scent of gardenias, the presence of great sculpture pressing on us, and the light of pictures.

His way leads around to the right past a bust of Pliny and up the staircase to the Hall of Addresses, a room lined with statuary and paintings in a fixed order, spaced wide apart and well lit, as Cicero recommends.

Ah… The third alcove from the door on the right is dominated by a painting of St Francis feeding a moth to a starling. On the floor before the painting is this tableau, life-sized in painted marble: A parade in Arlington National Cemetery led by Jesus, thirty-three, driving a '27 Model-T Ford.truck, a "tin lizzie," with J. Edgar Hoover standing in the truck bed wearing a tutu and waving to an unseen crowd. Marching behind him is Clarice Starling carrying a.308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms.

Dr Lecter appears pleased to see Starling. Long ago he obtained Starling's home address from the University of Virginia Alumni Association. He stores the address in this tableau, and now, for his own pleasure, he summons the numbers and the name of the street where Starling lives: 3327 Tindal Arlington, VA 22308 Dr Lecter can move down the vast halls of his memory palace with unnatural speed. With his reflexes and strength, apprehension and speed of mind, Dr Lecter is well armed against the physical world. But there are places within himself that he may not safely go, where Cicero 's rules of logic, of ordered space and light do not apply…

He has decided to visit his collection of ancient textiles. For a letter he is writing to Mason Verger, he wants to review a text of Ovid on the subject of flavored facial oils which is attached to the weavings.

He proceeds down an interesting flat-weave kilim runner toward the hall of looms and textiles.

In the world of the 747, Dr Lecter's head is pressed back against the seat, his eyes are closed. His head bobs gently as turbulence bumps the airplane.

At the end of the row, the baby has finished its bottle and is not yet asleep. Its face reddens. Mother feels the little body tense within the blanket, then relax. There is no question what has happened. She does not need to dip her finger in the diaper. In the row ahead someone says "Jeeeezus."

To the stale gymnasium reek of the airplane is added another layer of smell. The small boy, seated beside Dr Lecter, inured to the baby's habits, continues to eat the lunch from Fauchon.

Beneath the memory palace, the traps fly up, the oubliettes yawn their ghastly stench…

A few animals had managed to survive the artillery and machine-gun fire in the fighting that left Hannibal Lecter's parents dead and the vast forest on their estate scarred and blasted.

The mixed bag of deserters who used the remote hunting lodge ate what they could find. Once they found a miserable little deer, scrawny, with an arrow in it, that had managed to forage beneath the snow and survive. They led it back into the camp to keep from carrying it.

Hannibal Lecter, six, watched through a crack in the barn as they brought it in, pulling and twisting its head against the plowline twisted around its neck. They did not wish to fire a shot and managed to knock it off its spindly legs and hack at its throat with an axe, cursing at one another in several languages to bring a bowl before the blood was wasted.

There was not much meat on the runty deer and in two days, perhaps three, in their long overcoats, their breaths stinking and steaming, the deserters came through the snow from the hunting lodge to unlock the barn and choose again from among the children huddled in the straw. None had frozen, so they took a live one.

They felt Hannibal Lecter's thigh and his upper arm and chest, and instead of him, they chose his sister, Mischa, and led her away. To play, they said. No one who was led away to play ever returned…Hannibal held on to Mischa so hard, held to Mischa with his wiry grip until they slammed the heavy barn door on him, stunning him and cracking the bone in his upper arm.

They led her away through snow still stained bloody from the deer.

He prayed so hard that he would see Mischa again, the prayer consumed his six- year-old mind, but it did not drown out the sound of the axe. His prayer to see her again did not go entirely unanswered – he did see a few of Mischa's milk teeth in the reeking stool pit his captors used between the lodge where they slept and the barn where they kept the captive children who were their sustenance in 1944 after the Eastern Front collapsed.

Since this partial answer to his prayer, Hannibal Lecter had not been bothered by any considerations of deity, other than to recognize how his own modest predations paled beside those of God, who is in irony matchless, and in Wanton malice beyond measure.

In this hurtling aircraft, his head bouncing gently against the head-rest, Dr Lecter is suspended between his last view of Mischa crossing the bloody snow and the sound of the axe. He is held there and he cannot stand it. In the world of the airplane comes a short scream from his sweating face, thin and high, piercing.

Passengers ahead of him turn, some wake from sleep. Some in the row ahead of him are snarling. "Kid, Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you? My God!"

Dr Lecter's eyes open, they look straight ahead, a Hand is on him. It is the small boy's hand.

"You had a bad dream, huh?"

The child is not frightened, nor does he care about the complaints from the forward rows.

"Yes."

"I have bad dreams a lots of times too. I'm not laughing at you."

Dr Lecter took several breaths, his head pressed back against the seat. Then his composure returned as though calm rolled down from his hairline to cover his face. He bent his head to the child and said in a confidential tone, "You're right not to eat this swill, you know. Don't ever eat it."

Airlines no longer provide stationery. Dr Lecter, in perfect command of himself, took some hotel stationery from his breast pocket and began a letter to Clarice Starling. First, he sketched her face. The sketch is now in a private holding at the University of Chicago and available to scholars. In it Starling looks like a child and her hair, like Mischa's, is stuck to her cheek with tears..

We can see the airplane through the vapor of our breath, a brilliant point of light in the clear night sky. See it cross the Pole star, well past the point of no return, committed now to a great arc down to tomorrow in the New World.

Chapter 49

THE STACKS of paper and files and diskettes in Starling's cubicle reached critical mass. Her request for more space went unanswered. Enough. With the.recklessness of the damned she commandeered a spacious room in the basement at Quantico. The room was supposed to become Behavioral Science's private darkroom as soon as Congress appropriated some money. It had no windows, but plenty of shelves and, being built for a darkroom, it had double blackout curtains instead of a door.

Some anonymous office neighbor printed a sign in Gothic letters that read HANNIBAL 'S HOUSE and pinned it on her curtained entrance. Fearful of losing the room, Starling moved the sign inside.

Almost at once she found a trove of useful personal material at the Columbia College of Criminal Justice Library, where they maintained a Hannibal Lecter Room. The college had original papers from his medical and psychiatric practices and transcripts of his trial and the civil actions against him. On her first visit to the library Starling waited forty-five minutes while custodians hunted for the keys to the Lecter room without success. On the second occasion, she found an indifferent graduate student in charge, and the material un-catalogued.

Starling's patience was not improving in her fourth decade. With Section Chief Jack Crawford backing her at the U.S. Attorney's office, she got a court order to move the entire college collection to her basement room at Quantico. Federal marshals accomplished the move in a single van.

The court order created waves, as she feared it would. Eventually, the waves brought Krendler…

At the end of along two weeks, Starling had most of the library material organized in her makeshift Lecter center. Late on a Friday afternoon she washed her face and hands of the bookdust and grime, turned down the lights and sat on the floor in the corner, looking at the many shelf-feet of books and papers. It is possible that she nodded off for a moment…

A smell awakened her, and she was aware that she was not alone. It was the smell of shoe polish.

The room was semi-dark, and Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler moved along the shelves slowly, peering at the books and pictures. He hadn't bothered to knock – there was no place to knock on the curtains and Krendler was not inclined to knocking anyway, especially at subordinate agencies. Here, in this basement at Quantico, he was definitely slumming.

One wall of the room was devoted to Dr Lecter in Italy, with a large photograph posted of Rinaldo Pazzi hanging with his bowels out from the window at Palazzo Vecchio. The opposite wall was concerned with crimes in the United States and was dominated by a police photograph of the bow hunter Dr Lecter had killed years ago. The body was hanging on a peg board and bore all the wounds of the medieval Wound Man illustrations. Many case files were stacked on the shelves along with civil records of wrongful death lawsuits filed against Dr Lecter by families of the victims.

Dr Lecter's personal books from his medical practice were here in an order identical to their arrangement in his old psychiatric office. Starling had arranged them by examining police photos of the office with a magnifying glass. Much of the light in the dim room came through an X-ray of the doctor's head and neck which glowed on a light box on the wall. The other light came from a. computer workstation at a corner desk. The screen theme was "Dangerous Creatures."

Now and then the computer growled…Piled beside the machine were the results of Starling's gleaning. The painfully gathered scraps of paper receipts, itemized bills that revealed how Dr Lecter had lived his private life in Italy, and in America before he was sent to the asylum. It was a makeshift catalog of his tastes.

Using a flatbed scanner for a table, Starling had laid I a single place setting that survived from his home in Baltimore-china, silver, crystal, napery radiant white, a candlestick-four square feet of elegance against the grotesque hangings of the room.

Krendler picked up the large wineglass and pinged it with his fingernail.

Krendler had never felt the flesh of a criminal, never fought one on the ground, and he thought of Dr Lecter as a sort of media bogeyman and an opportunity. He could see his own photograph in association with a display like this in the FBI museum once Lecter was dead. He could see its enormous campaign value. Krendler had his nose close to the X-ray profile of the doctor's capacious skull, and when Starling spoke to him, he jumped enough to smudge the X-ray with nose grease.

"Can I help you, Mr. Krendler?"

"Why're you sitting there in the dark?"

"I'm thinking, Mr. Krendler."

"People on the Hill want to know what we're doing about Lecter. "

"This is what we're doing."

"Brief me, Starling. Bring me up to speed."

"Wouldn't you prefer Mr. Crawford-"

"Where is Crawford?"

"Mr. Crawford's in court."

"I think he's losing it, do you ever feel that way?"

"No, sir, I don't."

"What are you doing here? We got a beef from the college when you seized all this stuff out of their library. It could have been handled better."

"We've gathered everything we can find regarding Dr Lecter here in this place, both objects and records. His weapons are in Firearms and Toolmarks, but we have duplicates. We have what's left of his personal papers."

"What's the point? You catching a crook, or writing a book?" Krendler paused to store this catchy rhyme in his verbal magazine. "If, say, a ranking Republican on judiciary Oversight should ask me what you, Special Agent Starling, are doing to catch Hannibal Lecter, what could I tell him?"

Starling turned on all the lights. She could see that Krendler was still buying expensive suits while saving money on his shirts and ties. The knobs of his hairy wrists poked out of his cuffs.

Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever.and composed herself. She made herself see Krendler as a police academy class.

"We know Dr Lecter has very good ID," she began.

"He must have at least one extra solid identity, maybe more. He's careful that way. He won't make a dumb mistake."

"Get to it."

"He's a man of very cultivated tastes, some of them exotic tastes, in food, in wine, music. If he comes here he'll want those things. He'll have to get them. He won't deny himself.

"Mr. Crawford and I went over the receipts and papers left from Dr Lecter's life in Baltimore before he was first arrested, and what receipts the Italian police were able to furnish, lawsuits from creditors after his arrest. We made a list of some things he likes.

You can see here: In the month that Dr Lecter served the flautist Benjamin Raspail's sweetbreads to other members of the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra board, he bought two cases of Chateau Petrus Bordeaux at thirty-six hundred dollars a case. He bought five cases of Batard-Montrachet at eleven hundred dollars a case, and a variety of lesser wines.

"He ordered the same wine from room service in St Louis after he escaped, and he ordered it from Vera dal 1926 in Florence. This stuff is pretty rarified. We're checking importers and dealers for case sales.

"From the Iron Gate in New York, he ordered Grade A foie gras at two hundred dollars a kilo, and through the Grand Central Oyster Bar he got green oysters from the Gironde. The meal for the Philharmonic board began with these oysters, followed by sweet-breads, a sorbet, and then, you can read here in Town amp; Country what they had" – she read aloud quickly – "a notable dark and glossy ragout, the constituents never determined, on saffron rice. Its taste was darkly thrilling with great bass tones that only the vast and careful reduction of the fond can give. No victim's ever been identified as being in the ragout. Da da, it goes on – here it describes his distinctive tableware and stuff in detail. We're cross-checking credit card purchases at the china and crystal suppliers."

Krendler snorted through his nose.

"See, here in this civil suit, he still owes for a Steuben chandelier, and Galeazzo Motor Company of Baltimore sued to get back his Bentley. We're tracking sales of Bentleys, new and used. There aren't that many. And the sales of supercharged Jaguars. We've faxed the restaurant game suppliers asking about purchases of wild boar and we'll do a bulletin the week before the redlegged partridges come in from Scotland."

She pecked at her keyboard and consulted a list, then stepped away from the machine when she felt Krendler's breath too close behind her.

"I've put in for funds to buy cooperation from some of the premier scalpers of cultural tickets, the culture vultures, in New York and San Francisco – there are a – couple of orchestras and string quartets he particularly likes, he favors the six or seventh row and always sits on the aisle. I've distributed the best likenesses we have to Lincoln Center and Kennedy Center, and most of the philharmonic halls. Maybe you could help us with that out of the DOJ budget, Mr. Krendler.".When he didn't reply, she went on. "We're cross-checking new subscriptions to some cultural journals he's subscribed to in the past-anthropology, linguistics, Physical Review, mathematics, music."

"Does he hire S and M whores, that kind of thing? Male prostitutes?"

Starling could feel Krendler's relish in the question. "Not to our knowledge, Mr. Krendler. He was seen at concerts in Baltimore years ago with several attractive women, a couple of them were prominent in Baltimore charity work and stuff. We have their birthdays flagged for gift purchases. None of them was ever harmed to our knowledge, and none has ever agreed to speak about him. We don't know anything about his sexual preferences."

"I've always figured he was a homosexual."

"Why would you say that, Mr. Krendler?"

"All this artsy-fartsy stuff. Chamber music and tea-party food. I don't mean anything personal, if you've got a lot of sympathy for those people, or friends like that. The main thing, what I'm impressing on you, Starling: I better see cooperation here. There are no little fiefdoms. I want to be copied on every 302, I want every time card, I want every lead. Do you understand me, Starling?"

"Yes, sir."

At the door he said, "Be sure you do. You might have a chance to improve your situation here. Your so-called career could use all the help it can get."

The future darkroom was already equipped with vent fans. Looking him in the face, Starling flipped them on, sucking out the smell of his aftershave and his shoe polish. Krendler pushed through the blackout curtains without saying good-bye.

The air danced in front of Starling like heat shimmer on the gunnery range.

In the hall Krendler heard Starling's voice behind him.

"I'll walk outside with you, Mr. Krendler."

Krendler had a car and driver waiting. He was still at the level of executive transport where he made do with a Mercury Grand Marquis sedan.

Before he could get to his car, out in the clear air, she said, "Hold it, Mr. Krendler."

Krendler turned to her, wondering. Might be a glimmer of something here. Angry surrender? His antenna went up.

"We're here in the great out-of-doors," Starling said. "No listening devices around, unless you're wearing one."

An urge hit her that she could not resist. To work with the dusty books she was wearing a loose denim shirt over a snug tank top.

Shouldn't do this. Fuck it.

She popped the snaps on her shirt and pulled it open. "See, I'm not wearing a wire.".She wasn't wearing a bra either. "This is maybe the only time we'll ever talk in private, and I want to ask you. For years I've been doing the job and every time you could you've stuck the knife in me. What is it with you, Mr. Krendler?"

"You're welcome to come talk about it… I'll make time for you, if you want to review…"

"We're talking about it now."

"You figure it out, Starling."

"Is it because I wouldn't see you on the side? Was it when I told you to go home to your wife?"

He looked at her again. She really wasn't wearing a wire.

"Don't flatter yourself, Starling… this town is full of cornpone country pussy."

He got in beside his driver and tapped on the dash, and the big car moved away. His lips moved, as he wished he had framed it: "Cornpone cunts like you."

There was a lot of political speaking in Krendler's future, he believed, and he wanted to sharpen his `verbal karate, and get the knack of the sound bite.

Chapter 50

"IT COULD work, I'm telling you," Krendler said into the wheezing dark where Mason lay. "Ten years ago, you couldn't have done it, but she can move customer lists through that computer like shit through a goose."

He shifted on the couch under the bright lights of the seating area.

Krendler could see Margot silhouetted against the aquarium. He was used to cursing in front of her now, and rather enjoyed it. He bet Margot wished she had a dick. He felt like saying dick in front of Margot, and thought of a way: "It's how she's got the fields set up, and paired Lecter's preferences. She could probably tell you which way he carries his dick."

"On that note, Margot, bring in Dr Doemling," Mason said.

Dr Doemling had been waiting out in the playroom among the giant stuffed animals. Mason could see him on video examining the plush scrotum of the big giraffe, much as the Viggerts had orbited the David. On the screen he looked much smaller than the toys, as though he had compressed himself, the better to worm his way into some childhood other than his own.

Seen under the lights of Mason's seating area, the psychologist was a dry person, extremely clean but flaking, with a dry combover on his spotted scalp and a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. He sat down on the opposite side of the coffee table from Krendler and seemed familiar with the room.

There was a worm hole in the apple on his side of the 4 bowl of fruits and nuts. Dr Doemling turned the hole to face the other way. Behind his glasses, his eyes followed Margot with a degree of wonderment bordering on the oafish as she got another pair of walnuts and returned to her place by the aquarium.

"Dr Doemling's head of the psychology department at Baylor University. He.holds the Verger Chair," Mason told Krendler. "I've asked him what kind of bond there might be between Dr Lecter and the FBI agent Clarice Starling. Doctor…

Doemling faced forward in his seat as though it were a witness stand and turned his head to Mason as he would to a jury. Krendler could see in him the practiced manner, the careful partisanship of the two-thousand-dollar-a-day expert witness.

"Mr. Verger obviously knows my qualifications, would you like to hear them?" Doemling asked.

"No," Krendler said.

"I've reviewed the Starling woman's notes on her interviews with Hannibal Lecter, his letters to her, and the material you provided me on their backgrounds," Doemling began.

Krendler winced at this, and Mason said, "Dr Doemling has signed a confidentiality agreement."

"Cordell will put your slides up on the elmo when you want them, Doctor," Margot said.

"A little background first."

Doemling consulted his notes. "We knooowww Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania. His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his mother high-born Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of the servants. The children disappeared after that. There were two of them, Hannibal and his sister. We don't know what happened to the sister. The point is, Lecter was an orphan, like Clarice Starling."

"Which I told you," Mason said impatiently.

"But what did you conclude from it?"

Dr Doemling asked. "I'm not proposing a kind of sympathy between two orphans, Mr. Verger. This is not about sympathy. Sympathy does not enter here. And mercy is left bleeding in the dust. Listen to me. What a common experience of being an orphan gives Dr Lecter is simply a better ability to understand her, and ultimately control her. This is all about control.

"The Starling woman spent her childhood in institutions, and from what you tell me she does not evidence any stable personal relationship with a man. She lives with a former classmate, a young African-American woman."

"That's very likely a sex thing," Krendler said.

The psychiatrist did not even spare Krendler a look. Krendler was automatically overruled. "You can never say to a certainty why someone lives with someone else."

"It is one of the things that is hid, as the Bible says," Mason said.

"Starling looks pretty tasty, if you like whole wheat," Margot offered.

"I think the attraction's from Lecter's end, not hers," Krendler said. "You've.seen her – she's a pretty cold fish."

"Is she a cold fish, Mr. Krendler?" Margot sounded amused.

"You think she's queer, Margot?" Mason asked.

"How the hell would I know? Whatever she is, she treats it as her own damn business – that was my impression. I think she's tough, and she had on her game face, but I wouldn't say she's a cold fish. We didn't talk much, but that's what I took from it. That 'was before you needed me to help you, Mason- you ran me out, remember? I'm not going to say she's a cold fish. Girl who looks like Starling has to keep a certain distance in her face because assholes are hitting on her all the time."

Here Krendler felt that Margot looked at him a beat too long, though he could only see her in outline.

How curious, the voices in this room. Krendler's careful bureauese, Doemling's pedantic bray, Mason's deep and resonant tones with his badly pruned plosives and leaking sibilants and Margot, her voice rough and low, tough-mouthed as a livery pony and resentful of the bit. Under it all, the gasping machinery that finds Mason breath.

"I have an idea about her private life, regarding her apparent father fixation," Doemling went on. "I'll get into it shortly. Now, we have three documents of Dr Lecter's concerning Clarice Starling. Two letters and a drawing. The drawing is of the Crucifixion Clock he designed while he was in the asylum."

Dr Doemling looked up at the screen. "The slide, please."

From somewhere outside the room, Cordell put up the extraordinary sketch on the elevated monitor. The original is charcoal on butcher paper. Mason's copy was made on a blueprint copier and the lines are the blue of a bruise.

"He tried to patent this," Dr Doemling said. "As you can see, here is Christ crucified on a clock face and His arms revolve to tell the time, just like the Mickey Mouse watches. It's interesting because the face, the head hanging forward, is that of Clarice Starling. He drew it at the time of their interviews. Here's a photograph of the woman, you can see. Cordell, is it? Cordell, put up the photo please."

There was no question, the Jesus head was Starling.

"Another anomaly is that the figure is nailed to the cross through the wrists rather than the palms."

"That's accurate," Mason said. "You've got to nail them through the wrists and use big wooden washers, otherwise they get loose and start flapping. Idi Amin and I found that out the hard way when we reenacted the whole thing in Uganda at Easter. Our Saviour was actually nailed through the wrists. All the Crucifixion paintings are wrong. It's a mistranslation between the Hebrew and Latin Bibles."

"Thank you," Dr Doemling said without sincerity. "The Crucifixion clearly represents a destroyed object of veneration. Note that the arm that forms the minute hand is at six, modestly covering the pudenda. The hour hand is at nine, or slightly past. Nine is a clear reference to the traditional hour when Jesus was crucified."."And when you put six and nine together, note that you get sixty-nine, a figure popular in social intercourse," Margot could not help saying. In response to Doemling's sharp glance, she cracked her walnuts and shells rattled to the floor.

"Now let's take up Dr Lecter's letters to Clarice Starling.

Cordell, if you'd put them up."

Dr Doemling took a laser pointer from his pocket. "You can see `that the writing, a fluent copperplate executed with a square-nibbed fountain pen, is machinelike in its regularity. You see that sort of handwriting in medieval papal bulls. It's quite beautiful, but freakishly regular. There is nothing spontaneous here. He's planning. He wrote this first one soon after he had escaped, killing five people in the process. Let's read from the text:

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 Doemling pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and cleared his throat. "This is a classic example of what I have termed in my published work avunculism – it's beginning to be referred to broadly in the professional literature as Doemling's avunculism. Possibly it will be included in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It may be defined for laymen as the act of posturing as a wise and caring patron to further a private agenda.

"I gather from the case notes that the question about the lambs screaming refers to a childhood experience of Clarice Starling's, the slaughter of the lambs on the ranch in Montana, her foster home," Dr Doemling went on in his dry voice.

"She was trading information with Lecter," Krendler said. "He knew something about the serial killer Buffalo Bill."

"The second letter, seven years later, is on the face of it a letter of condolence and support," Doemling said. "He taunts her with references to her parents, whom she apparently venerates. He calls her father `the dead night watchman' and her mother `the chambermaid.' And then he invests them with excellent qualities she can imagine that they had, and further enlists these qualities to excuse her own failings in her career. This is about ingratiation, this is about control.

"I think the woman Starling may have a lasting attachment to her father, an imago, that prevents her from easily forming sexual relationships and may incline her to Dr Lecter in some kind of transference, which in his perversity he would seize on at once. In this second letter he again encourages her to.contact him with a n personal ad, and he provides a code name."

My Christ, the man went on! Restlessness and boredom were torture for Mason because he couldn't fidget "Right, fine, good, Doctor," Mason interrupted. "Margot, open the window a little, I've got a new source on Lecter, Dr Doemling. Someone who knows both Starling and Lecter and saw then together, and he's been around Lecter more than anyone. I want you to talk to him."

Krendler squirmed on the couch, his bowels beginning to stir as he saw where this was going.

Chapter 51

MASON SPOKE into his intercom and a tall figure came into the room. He was as muscular as Margot and dressed in whites.

"This is Barney," Mason said. "He was in charge of the violent ward at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for six years when Lecter was there. Now he works for me."

Barney preferred to stand in front of the aquarium with Margot, but Dr Doemling wanted him in the light. He took a place beside Krendler.

"Barney is it? Now, Barney, what is your professional training?"

"I have an LPN."

"You're a licensed practical nurse? Good for you. Is that all?"

"I have a bachelor's degree in the humanities from the United States Correspondence College," Barney said, expressionless. "And a certificate of attendance from the Cummins School of Mortuary Science. I'm qualified as a diener. I did that at night during nursing school."

"You worked your way through LPN school as a morgue attendant?"

"Yes, removing bodies from crime scenes and assisting at autopsies."

"Before that."

"Marine Corps."

"I see. And while you were working at the state hospital you saw Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter interacting – what I mean is, you saw them talking together?"

"It seemed to me they-"

"Let's start with just exactly what you saw, not what you thought about what you saw, can we do that?"

Mason interrupted. "He's smart enough to give his opinion. Barney, you know Clarice Starling."

"Yes."

"You knew Hannibal Lecter for six years."

"Yes."."What was it between them?"

At first Krendler had trouble understanding Barney's high, rough voice, but it was Krendler who asked the pertinent question. "Did Lecter act differently in the Starling interviews, Barney?"

"Yes. Most of the time he didn't respond at all to visitors," Barney said. "Sometimes he would open his eyes long enough to insult some academic who was trying to pick his brain. He made one visiting professor cry. He was tough with Starling, but he answered her more than most. He was interested in her. She intrigued him."

"How?"

Barney shrugged. "He hardly ever got to see women. She's really good- looking-"

"I don't need your opinion on that," Krendler said. "Is that all you know?"

Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler's brain were two dogs stuck together.

Margot cracked another walnut.

"Go on, Barney," Mason said.

"They were frank with one another. He's disarming that way. You have the feeling that he wouldn't deign to lie."

"Wouldn't do what to lie?"

Krendler said.

"Deign," Barney said.

"D-E-I-G-N," Margot Verger said out of the dark. "To condescend. Or to stoop, Mr. Krendler."

Barney went on. "Dr Lecter told her some unpleasant things about herself, and then some pleasant ones. She could face the bad things, and then enjoy the good more, knowing it wasn't bullshit. He thought she was charming and amusing."

"You can judge what Hannibal Lecter found `amusing'?"

Dr Doemling said. "Just how do you go about that, Nurse Barney?"

"By listening to him laugh, Dr Doemling. They taught us that in LPN school, a lecture called `Healing and the Cheerful Outlook."

Either Margot snorted or the aquarium behind her made the noise.

"Cool it, Barney. Tell us the rest," Mason said.

"Yes, sir. Sometimes Dr Lecter and I would talk late at night, when it got quiet enough. We talked about courses I was taking, and other things. He-"

"Were you taking some kind of mail-order course in e psychology, by any chance?" Doemling had to say…"No, sir, I don't consider psychology a science. Neither did Dr Lecter."

Barney went on quickly before Mason's respirator permitted him to utter a rebuke. "I can just repeat what he told me – he could see what she was becoming, she was charming the way a cub is charming, a small cub that will grow up to be like one of the big cats. One you can't play with later. She had the cublike earnestness, he said. She had all the weapons, in miniature and growing, and all she, knew so far was how to wrestle with other cubs. That amused him.

"The way it began between them will tell you something. At the beginning he was courteous but he pretty much dismissed her – then as she was leaving another inmate threw some semen in her face. That disturbed Dr Lecter, embarrassed him. It was the only time I ever saw him upset. She saw it too and tried to use it on him. He admired her moxie, I think."

"What was his attitude toward the other inmate who threw the semen? Did they have any kind of relationship?"

"Not exactly," Barney said. "Dr Lecter just killed him that night."

"They were in separate cells?"

Doemling asked. "How did he do it?"

"Three cells apart on opposite sides of the corridor," Barney said. "In the middle of the night Dr Lecter talked to him awhile and then told him to swallow his tongue. "

"So Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter became………friendly?" Mason said.

"Inside a kind of formal structure," Barney said. "They exchanged information. Dr Lecter gave her insight on the serial killer she was hunting, and she paid for it with personal information. Dr Lecter told me he thought Starling might have too much nerve for her own good, an `excess of zeal,' he called it. He thought she might work too close to the edge if she thought her assignment required it. And he said once that she was `cursed with taste.' I don't know what that means."

"Dr Doemling, does he want to fuck her or kill her, or eat her, or what?" Mason asked, exhausting the possibilities he could see.

"Probably all three," Dr Doemling said. "I wouldn't want to predict the order in which he wants to perform those acts. That's the burden of what I can tell you. No matter how the tabloids and tabloid mentalities might want to romanticize it, and try to make it Beauty arid the Beast, his object is her degradation, her suffering, and her death. He has responded to her twice: when she was insulted with the semen in her face and when she was torn apart in the newspapers after she shot those people. He comes in the guise of a mentor, but it's the distress that excites him. When the history of Hannibal Lecter is written, and it will be, this will be recorded as a case of Doemling's avunculism. To draw him she needs to be distressed."

A furrow has appeared in the broad rubbery space between Barney's eyes. "May I put something in here, Mr. Verger, since you asked me?" He did not wait for permission. "In the asylum, Dr Lecter responded to her when she held on to herself, stood there wiping come off her face and did her job. In the letters he calls her a warrior, and points out that she saved that child in the shoot- out. He admires and respects her courage and her discipline. He says himself.he's got no plans to come around. One thing he does not do is lie."

"That's exactly the kind of tabloid thinking I was talking about," Doemling said. "Hannibal Lecter does not have emotions like admiration or respect. He feels no warmth or affection. That's a romantic delusion, and it shows the dangers of a little education."

"Dr Doemling, you don't remember me, do you?"

Barney said. "I was in charge of the ward when you tried to talk to Dr Lecter, a lot of people tried it, but you're the one who left crying as I recall. Then he reviewed your book in the American journal of Psychiatry. I couldn't blame you if the review made you cry."

"That'll do, Barney," Mason said. "See about my lunch."

"A half-baked autodidact, there's nothing worse," Doemling said when Barney was out of the room.

"You didn't tell me you'd interviewed Lecter, Doctor," Mason said.

"He was catatonic at the time, there was nothing to get."

"And that made you cry?"

"That's not true."

"And you discount what Barney says."

"He's as deceived as the girl."

"Barney's probably hot for Starling himself," Krendler said.

Margot laughed to herself, but loudly enough for Krendler to hear.

"If you want to make Clarice Starling attractive to…"

Dr Lecter, let him see her distressed," Doemling said. "Let the damage he sees suggest the damage he could do. Seeing her wounded in any symbolic way will incite him like seeing her play with herself. When the fox hears a rabbit scream, he comes running, but not to help."

Chapter 52

"I CAN'T deliver Clarice Starling," Krendler said when Doemling was gone. "I can pretty much tell you where she is and what she's doing, but I can't control Bureau assignments. And if the Bureau puts her out there for bait, they'll cover her, believe me."

Krendler pointed his finger into Mason's darkness to make his point. "You can't move in on that action. You couldn't get outside that coverage and intercept Lecter. The stakeout would spot your people in no time. Second, the Bureau won't initiate proactive unless he contacts her again or there's evidence he's close he wrote to her before and he never came around. It would take twelve people minimum to stake her out, it's expensive. You'd be better off if you hadn't gotten her off the hot seat in the shooting. It'll be messy, reversing your field and trying to hang her with that again."

"Shoulda, woulda, coulda," Mason said, doing a fair job with the s, all things considered. "Margot, look in the Milan paper, Corriere Della Sera, for.Saturday, the day after Pazzi was killed, check the first item in the agony column. Read it to us."

Margot held the dense print up to the light. "It's in English, addressed to A. A. Aaron. Says: Turn yourself in to the nearest authorities, enemies are close. Hannah. Who's Hannah?"

"That's the name of the horse Starling had as a kid," Mason said. "It's a warning to Lecter from Starling. He told her in his letter how to contact him."

Krendler was on his feet. "Goddammit. She couldn't have known about Florence. If she knows about that, she must know I've been showing you the stuff."

Mason sighed and wondered if Krendler was smart enough to be a useful politician. "She didn't know anything. I placed the ad, in La Nazione and Corriere Della Sera and in the International Herald-Tribune, to run the day after we moved on Lecter. That way if we missed, he'd think Starling tried to help him. We'd still have a tie to him through Starling."

"Nobody picked it up."

"No. Except maybe Hannibal Lecter. He may thank her for it – by mail, in person, who knows? Now, listen to me: You've still got her mail covered?"

Krendler nodded. "Absolutely. If he sends her anything, you'll see it before she does."

"Listen carefully to this, Krendler: The way this ad was ordered and paid for, Clarice Starling can never prove she didn't place it on her own, and that's a felony. That's crossing the bright line. You can break her with it, Krendler. You know how much the FBI gives a shit about you when you're out. You could be dog meat. She won't even be able to get a concealed weapon permit. Nobody will watch her but me. And Lecter will know she's out there by herself. We'll try some other things first."

Mason paused to breathe and then went on. "If they don't work, we'll do like Doemling says and `distress' her with this ad – distress her, hell, you can break her in two with it. Save the half with the pussy, is my advice. The other end is too goddamned earnest. Ouch – I didn't mean to blaspheme."

Chapter 53

CLARICE STARLING running through falling leaves in a Virginia state park an hour from her house, a favorite place, no sign of any other person in the park on this fall weekday, a much-needed day off. She ran a familiar path in the forested hills beside the Shenandoah River. The air was warmed by the early sun on the hilltops, and in the hollows suddenly cool, sometimes the air was warm on her face and cool on her legs at the same time.

The earth these days was not quite still beneath Starling as she walked; it seemed steadier when she ran.

Starling running through the bright day, bright and dancing flares of light through the leaves, the path dappled and in other places striped with the shadows of tree trunks in the low early sun. Ahead of her three deer started, two does and a spike buck clearing the path in a single heart-lifting bound, their raised white flags shining in the gloom of the deep forest as they bounded away. Gladdened, Starling leaped herself…Still as a figure in a medieval tapestry, Hannibal Lecter sat among the fallen leaves on the hillside above the river. He could see one hundred fifty yards of the running path, his field glasses proofed against reflection by a homemade cardboard shroud. First he saw the deer start, and bound past him up the hill and then, for the first time in seven years, he saw Clarice Starling whole.

Below the glasses his face did not change expression, but his nostrils flared with a deep intake of breath as though he could catch her scent at this distance.

The breath brought him the smell of dry leaves with a hint of cinnamon in them, the molding leaves beneath, and the gently decaying forest mast, a whiff of rabbit pellets from yards away, the deep wild musk of a shredded squirrel skin beneath the leaves, but not the scent of Starling, which he could have identified anywhere. He saw the deer start ahead of her, saw them bounding long after they had left her sight.

She was in his view for less than a minute, running easily, not fighting the ground. A minimal day pack high on her shoulders with a bottle of water. Backlit, the early light behind her blurring her outline as though she had been dusted with pollen on her skin. Tracking with her, Dr Lecter's binoculars picked up a sun flare off the water beyond her that left him seeing spots for minutes. She disappeared as the path sloped down and away, the back of her head the last thing he saw, the ponytail bouncing like the flag of a white- tail deer.

Dr Lecter remained still, made no attempt to follow her. He had her image running clearly in his head. She would run in his mind for as long as he chose for her to. His first real sight of her in seven years, not counting tabloid pictures, not counting distant glimpses of a head in a car. He lay back in the leaves with his hands behind his head, watching the thinning foliage of a maple above him quiver against the sky, so dark the sky that it was almost purple. Purple, purple, the bunch of wild muscadines he had picked climbing to this spot were purple, beginning to shrivel from the full, dusty grape, and he ate several, and squeezed some in his palm and licked the juice as a child will lick its hand spread wide. Purple, purple.

Purple the eggplant in the garden.

There was no hot water at the high hunting lodge during the middle of the day and Mischa's nurse carried the beaten copper tub into the kitchen garden for the sun to warm the two-year-olds bathwater. Mischa sat in the gleaming tub among the vegetables in the warm sun, white cabbage butterflies around her. The water was only deep enough to cover her chubby legs, but her solemn brother Hannibal and the big dog were strictly set to watch her while the nurse went inside to get a receiving blanket.

Hannibal Lecter was to some of the servants a frightening child, frighteningly intense, preternaturally knowing, but he did not frighten the old nurse, who knew her business, and he did not frighten Mischa, who put her star-shaped baby hands flat on his cheeks and laughed into his face. Mischa reached past him and held out her arms to the eggplant, which she loved to stare at in the sun. Her eyes were not maroon like her brother Hannibal's, but blue, and as she stared at the eggplant, her eyes seemed to draw color from it, to darken with it. Hannibal Lecter knew that the color was her passion. After she was carried back inside and the cook's helper came grumbling to dump the tub in the garden, Hannibal knelt beside the row of eggplants, the skin of the bath- soap bubbles swarming with reflections, purple and green, until they burst on the tilled soil. He took out his little penknife and cut the stem of an.eggplant, polished it with his handkerchief,. the vegetable warm from the sun in his arms as he carried it, warm like an animal, to Mischa's nursery and put it where she could see it. Mischa loved dark purple, loved the color aubergine, as long as she lived.

Hannibal Lecter closed his eyes to see again the deer bounding ahead of Starling, to see her come bounding down the path, limned golden with the sun behind her, but this was the wrong deer, it was the little deer with the arrow in it pulling, pulling against the rope around its neck as they led it to the axe, the little deer they ate before they ate Mischa, and he could not be still anymore and he got up, his hands and mouth stained with the purple muscadines, his mouth turned down like a Greek mask. He looked after Starling down the path. He took a deep breath through his nose, and took in the cleansing scent of the forest. He stared at the spot where Starling disappeared. Her path seemed lighter than the surrounding woods, as though she had left a bright place behind her.

He climbed quickly to the ridge and headed downhill on the other side toward the parking area of a nearby campsite where he had left his truck. He wanted to be out of the park before Starling returned to her automobile, parked two miles away in the main lot near the ranger booth, now closed for the season.

It would be at least fifteen minutes before she could run back to her car.

Dr Lecter parked beside the Mustang and left his motor running. He had had several opportunities to examine her car in the parking lot of a grocery near her house. It was the State Park's annual discount admittance sticker on the window of Starling's old Mustang that first alerted Hannibal Lecter to this place, and he had bought maps of the park at once and explored it at his leisure.

The car was locked, hunkered down over its wide wheels as though it were asleep. Her car amused him. It was at once whimsical and terribly efficient. On the chrome door handle, even bending close, he could smell nothing. He unfolded his flat steel slim Jim and slid it down into the door above the lock. Alarm? Yes? No? Click. No.

Dr Lecter got into the car, into air that was intensely Clarice Starling. The steering wheel was thick and covered with leather. It had the word MOMO on the hub. He looked at the word with his head tilted like that of a parrot and his lips formed the words "MO MO."

He sat back in the seat, his eyes closed, breathing, his eyebrows raised, as though he were listening to a concert.

Then, as though it had-a mind of its own, the pointed pink tip of his tongue appeared, like a small snake finding its way out of his face. Never altering expression, as though he were unaware of his movements, he leaned forward, found the leather steering wheel by scent, and put around it his curled tongue, cupping with his tongue the finger indentations on the underside of the wheel. He tasted with his mouth the polished two o'clock spot on the wheel where her palm would rest. Then he leaned back in the seat, his tongue back where it lived, and his closed mouth moved as though he savored wine. He took a deep breath and held it while he got out and locked Clarice Starling's Mustang. He did not exhale, he held her in his mouth and lungs until his old truck was out of the park.

Chapter 54

IT is an axiom of behavioral science that vampires are territorial, while.cannibals range widely across the country.

The nomadic existence held little appeal for Dr Lecter. His success in avoiding the authorities owed much to the quality of his long-term false identities and the care he took to maintain them, and his ready access to money. Random and frequent movement had nothing to do with it.

With two alternate identities long established, each with excellent credit, plus a third for the management of vehicles, he had no trouble feathering for himself a comfortable nest in the United States within a week of his arrival.

He had chosen Maryland, about an hour's drive south from Mason Verger's Muskrat Farm, and reasonably convenient to the music and theater in Washington and New York.

Nothing about Dr Lecter's visible business attracted attention, and either of his principal identities would have had a good chance of surviving a standard audit. After visiting one of his lockboxes in Miami, he rented from a German lobbyist for one year a pleasant, isolated house on the Chesapeake shore.

With distinct-ring call forwarding from two telephones in a cheap apartment in Philadelphia, he was able to provide himself with glowing references whenever they were required without leaving the comfort of his new home.

Always paying cash, he quickly obtained from scalpers premium tickets for the symphony, and those ballet and opera performances that interested him.

Among his new home's desirable features was a generous double garage with a workshop, and good overhead doors. There Dr Lecter parked his two vehicles, a six-year-old Chevrolet pickup truck with a pipe frame over the bed and a vise attached, which he bought from a plumber and a housepainter, and a supercharged Jaguar sedan leased through a holding company in Delaware. His truck offered a different appearance from day to day. The equipment he could put into the back or onto the pipe frame included a housepainter's ladder, pipe, PVC, a barbecue kettle, and a butane tank.

With his domestic arrangements well in hand, he treated himself to a week of music and museums in New York, and sent catalogs of the most interesting art shows to his cousin, the great painter Balthus, in France.

At Sotheby's in New York, he purchased two excellent musical instruments, rare finds both of them. The first was a late eighteenth-century Flemish harpsichord nearly identical to the Smithsonian's 1745 Dulkin, with an upper manual to accommodate Bach – the instrument was a worthy successor to the gravicembalo he had in Florence. His other purchase was an early electronic instrument, a theremin, built in the 1930s by Professor Theremin himself. The theremin had long fascinated Dr Lecter. He had built one as a child. It is played with gestures of the empty hands in an electronic field. By gesture you evoke its voice.

Now he was all settled in and he could entertain himself..

Dr Lecter drove home to this pleasant refuge on the Maryland shore after his morning in the woods. The sight of Clarice Starling running through the falling leaves on the forest path was well established now in the memory palace of his mind. It is a source of pleasure to him, reachable in less than a second starting from the foyer. He sees Starling run and, such is the quality of his visual memory, he can search the scene for new details, he can hear the big, healthy whitetails bounding past him up the slope, see the calluses on their elbows, a grass burr on the belly fur of the nearest. He has.stored this memory in a sunny palace room as far as possible from the little wounded deer…

Home again, home again, the garage door dropping with a quiet hum behind his pickup truck.

When the door rose again at noon the black Jaguar came out, bearing the doctor dressed for the city.

Dr Lecter very much liked to shop. He drove directly to Hammacher Schlemmer, the purveyor of fine home and sporting accessories and culinary equipment, and there he took his time. Still in his woodsy mood, with a pocket tape measure he checked the dimensions of three major picnic hampers, all of them lacquered wicker with sewn leather straps and solid brass fittings. Finally, he settled on the medium-sized hamper, as it only had to accommodate a place setting for one.

The wicker case had in it a thermos, serviceable tumblers, sturdy china, and stainless-steel cutlery. The case came only with the accessories. You were obliged to buy them.

In successive stops at Tiffany and Christofle, the doctor was able to replace the heavy picnic plates with Gien French china in one of the chasse patterns of leaves and upland birds. At Christofle he obtained a place setting of the nineteenth-century silverware he preferred, in a Cardinal pattern, the maker's mark stamped in the bowl of the spoons, the Paris rat tail on the underside of the handles. The forks were deeply curved, the tines widely spaced, and the knives had a pleasing heft far back in the palm. The pieces hang in the hand like a good dueling pistol. In crystal, the doctor was torn between sizes in his aperitif glasses, and chose a chimney ballon for brandy, but in wineglasses there was no question. The doctor chose Riedel, which he bought in two sizes with plenty of room for the nose within the rim.

At Christofle he also found place mats in creamy white linen, and some beautiful damask napkins with a tiny damask rose, like a drop of blood, embroidered in the corner. Dr Lecter thought the play on damask droll and bought six napkins, so that he would always be equipped, allowing for laundry turnaround time.

He bought two good 35,000 BTU portable gas burners, of the kind restaurants use to cook at tableside, and an exquisite copper sauté pan and a copper fait- tout to make sauces, both made for Dehillerin in Paris, and two whisks. He was not able to find carbon-steel kitchen knives, which he much preferred to stainless steel, nor could he find some of the special-purpose knives he had been forced to leave in Italy.

His last stop was a medical supply company not far from Mercy General Hospital, where he found a bargain in a nearly brand-new Stryker autopsy saw, which strapped down neatly in his picnic hamper where the thermos used to go. It was still under warranty, and came with general-purpose and cranial blades, as well as a skull key, to nearly complete his batterie de cuisine.

Dr Lecter's French doors are open to the crisp evening air. The bay lies soot- and-silver under the moon and moving shadows of the clouds. He has poured himself a glass of wine in his new crystal and set it on a candle stand beside the harpsichord. The wine's bouquet mixes with the salt air and Dr Lecter can enjoy it without ever taking his hands from the keyboard.

He has in his time owned clavichords, virginals, and other early keyboard instruments. He prefers the sound and feel of the harpsichord; because it is.not possible to control the volume of the quill-plucked strings, the music arrives like experience, sudden and entire.

Dr Lecter looks at the instrument, opening and closing his hands. He approaches his newly acquired harpsichord as he might approach an attractive stranger via an interesting light remark – he plays an air written by Henry VIII, "Green Grows the Holly."

Encouraged, he essays upon Mozart's "Sonata in B Flat Major."

He and the harpsichord are not yet intimate, but its responses to his hands tell him they will come together soon. The breeze rises and the candles flare, but Dr Lecter's eyes are closed to the light, his face is lifted and he is playing.

Bubbles fly from Mischa's star-shaped hands as she waves them in the breeze above the tub and, as he attacks the third movement, through the forest lightly flying, Clarice Starling is running, running, rustle of the leaves beneath her feet, rustle of the wind high in the turning trees, and the deer start ahead of her, a spike buck and two does, leaping across the path like the heart leaps. The ground is suddenly colder and the ragged men lead the little deer out of the woods, an arrow in it, the deer pulling against the rope twisted around its neck, men pulling it wounded so they will not have to carry it to the axe, and the music clangs to a stop above the bloody snow, Dr Lecter clutching the edges of the piano stool. He breathes deep, breaths deep, puts his hands on the keyboard, forces a phrase, then two that clang to silence.

We hear from him a thin and rising scream that stops as abruptly as the music. He sits for a long time with his head bent above the keyboard. He rises without sound and leaves the room. It is not possible to tell where he is in the dark house. The wind off the Chesapeake gains strength, whips the candle flames until they gutter out, sings through the strings of the harpsichord in the dark-now an accidental tune, now a thin scream from long ago.

Chapter 55

THE MID-ATLANTIC Regional Gun and Knife Show in War Memorial Auditorium. Acres of tables, a plain of guns, mostly pistols and assault-style shotguns. The red beams of laser sights flicker on the ceiling.

Few genuine outdoorsmen come to gun shows, as a matter of taste. Guns are black now, and gun shows are bleak, colorless, as joyless as the inner landscape of many who attend them.

Look at this crowd: scruffy, squinty, angry, eggbound, truly of the resinous heart. They are the main danger to the right of a private citizen to own a firearm.

The guns they fancy are assault weapons designed for mass production, cheaply made of stampings to provide high firepower to ignorant and untrained troops.

Among the beer bellies, the flab and pasty white of the indoor gunmen moved Dr Hannibal Lecter, imperially slim. The guns did not interest him. He went directly to the display of the foremost knife merchant of the show circuit.

The merchant's name is Buck and he weighs three hundred twenty-five pounds. Buck has a lot of fantasy swords, and copies of medieval and barbarian items, but he has the best real knives and blackjacks too, and Dr Lecter quickly spotted most of the items on his list, things he'd had to leave in Italy…"Can I hep you?"

Buck has friendly cheeks and a friendly mouth, and baleful eyes.

"Yes. I'll have that Harpy, please, and a straight, serrated Spyderco with a four-inch blade, and that drop-point skinner at the back."

Buck gathered the items.

"I want the good game saw. Not that one, the good one. Let me feel that flat leather sap, the black one…"

Dr Lecter considered the spring in the handle. "I'll take it."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. I'd like a Spyderco Civilian, I don't see it."

"Not a whole lot of folks know about that. I never stock but one."

"I only require one."

"It's regular two hundred and twenty dollars, I could let you have it for one ninety with the case."

"Fine. Do you have carbon-steel kitchen knives?"

Buck shook his massive head. "You'll have to find old ones at a flea market. That's where I get mine at. You can put an edge on one with the bottom of a saucer."

"Make a parcel and I'll be back for it in a few minutes."

Buck had not often been told to make a parcel, and he did it with his eyebrows raised.

Typically, this gun show was not a show at all, it was a bazaar. There were a few tables of dusty World War Two memorabilia, beginning to look ancient. You could buy M-1 rifles, gas masks with the glass crazing in the goggles, canteens. There were the usual Nazi memorabilia booths. You could buy an actual Zyklon B gas canister, if that is to your taste.

There was almost nothing from the Korean or Vietnam wars and nothing at all from Desert Storm.

Many of the shoppers wore camouflage as if they were only briefly back from the front lines to attend the gun show, and more camouflage clothing was for sale, including the complete ghillie suit for total concealment of a sniper or a bow hunter – a major subdivision of the show was archery equipment for bow hunting.

Dr Lecter was examining the ghillie suit when he became aware of uniforms close beside him. He picked up an archery glove. Turning to hold the maker's mark to the light, he could see that the two officers beside him were from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, which maintained a conservation booth at the show.

"Donnie Barber," said the older of the two wardens, pointing with his chin. "If you ever git him in court, let me know. I'd love to git that son of a.bitch out of the woods for good."

They were watching a man of about thirty at the other end of the archery exhibit. He was facing them, watching a video. Donnie Barber wore camouflage, his blouse tied around his waist by the sleeves. He had on a khaki-colored sleeveless T-shirt to show off his tattoos and a baseball cap reversed on his head.

Dr Lecter moved slowly away from the officers, looking at various items as he went. He paused at a display of laser pistol sights an aisle away and, through a trellis hung with holsters, the doctor watched the flickering video that held Donnie Barber's attention.

It was a video about hunting mule deer with bow and arrow.

Apparently someone off camera was hazing a deer along a fence through a wooded lot, while the hunter drew his bow. The hunter was wired for sound. His breathing grew faster. He whispered into the microphone, "It don't git any better than this."

The deer humped when the arrow hit it and ran into the fence twice before leaping the wire and running away.

Watching, Donnie Barber jerked and grunted at the arrow strike.

Now the video huntsman was about to field – dress the deer. He began at what he called the ANN-us.

Donnie Barber stopped the video and ran it back to the arrow strike again and again, until the concessionaire spoke to him.

"Fuck yourself, asshole," Donnie Barber said. "I wouldn't buy shit from you."

At the next booth, he bought some yellow arrows, broad-heads with a razor fin crosswise in the head. There was a box for a prize drawing and, with his purchase, bonnie Barber received an entry slip. The prize was a two-day deer lease.

Donnie Barber filled out his entry and dropped it through the slot, and kept the merchant's pen as he disappeared with his long parcel into the crowd of young men in camouflage.

As a frog's eyes pick up movement, so the merchant's eyes noted any pause in the passing crowd. The man before him now was utterly still.

"Is that your best crossbow?"

Dr Lecter asked the merchant.

"No."

The man took a case from under the counter. "This is the best one. I like the recurve better than the compound if you got to tote it. It's got the windlass you can drive off a 'lectric drill or use it manual. You know you can't use a crossbow on deer in Virginia unless you're handicapped?" the man said.

"My brother's lost one arm and he's anxious to kill something with the other one," Dr Lecter said.

"Oh I Gotcha.".In the course of five minutes, the doctor purchased an excellent crossbow and two dozen quarrels, the short, thick arrows used with a crossbow.

"Tie up a parcel," Dr Lecter said.

"Fill out this slip and you might win you a deer hunt. Two days on a good lease," the merchant said.

Dr Lecter filled out his slip for the drawing and dropped it through the slot in the box.

As soon as the merchant was engaged with another customer, Dr Lecter turned back to him.

"Bother!" he said. "I forgot to put my telephone number on my drawing slip. May I?"

"Sure, go ahead."

Dr Lecter took the top off the box and took out the top two slips. He added to the false information on his own, and took a long look at the slip beneath, blinking once, like a camera clicking.

Chapter 56

THE GYM at Muskrat Farm is high-tech black and chrome, with the complete Nautilus cycle of machines, tree weights, aerobic equipment and a juice bar.

Barney was nearly through with his workout, cooling down on a bike, when he realized he was not alone in the room. Margot Verger was taking off her warm- ups in the corner. She wore elastic shorts and a tank top over a sports bra and now she added a weight-lifting belt. Barney heard weights clank in the corner. He heard her breathing as she did a warm-up set.

Barney was pedaling the bicycle against no resistance, toweling his head, when she came over to him between sets.

She looked at his arms, looked at hers. They were about the same. "How much can you bench-press?" she said.

"I don't know."

"I expect you know, all right."

"Maybe three eighty-five, like that."

"Three eighty-five? I don't think so, big boy. I don't think you can press three eighty-five."

"Maybe you're right."

"I got a hundred dollars that says you can't bench press three eighty-five."

"Against?"

"Against a hundred dollars, the hell you think? And I'll spot you."

Barney looked at her and wrinkled his rubbery forehead. "Okay.".They loaded on the plates. Margot counted the ones on the end of the bar Barney had loaded as though he might cheat her. He responded by counting with elaborate care the ones on Margot's end.

Flat on the bench now, Margot standing above him at his head in her spandex shorts. The juncture of her thighs and abdomen was knurled like a baroque frame and her massive torso seemed to reach almost to the ceiling.

Barney settled himself, feeling the bench against his back. Margot's legs smelled like cool liniment. Her hands were lightly on the bar, nails painted coral, shapely hands to be so strong.

"Ready?"

"Yes."

He pushed the weight up toward her face, bent over him.

It wasn't much trouble for Barney. He set the weight back on its bracket ahead of Margot's spot. She got the money from her gym bag.

"Thank you," Barney said.

"I do more squats than you" is all she said.

"I know."

"How do you know that?"

"I can pee standing up."

Her massive neck flushed. "So can I."

"Hundred bucks?" Barney said.

"Make me a smoothie," she said.

There was a bowl of fruit and nuts on the juice bar. While Barney made fruit smoothies in the blender, Margot took two walnuts in her fist and cracked them.

"Can you do just one nut, with nothing to squeeze it against?"

Barney said. He cracked two eggs on the rim of the blender and dropped them in.

"Can you?" Margot said, and handed him a walnut.

The nut lay in Barney's open palm. "I don't know."

He cleared the space in front of him on the bar and an orange rolled off on Margot's side. "Oops, sorry," Barney said.

She picked it up from the floor and put it back in the bowl.

Barney's big fist clenched. Margot's eyes went from his fist to his face, then back and forth as his neck corded with strain, his face flushed. He began to tremble, from his fist a faint cracking sound, Margot's face falling, he moved his trembling fist over the blender and the cracking came louder. An egg yolk and white plopped into the blender. Barney turned the machine on and licked.the tips of his fingers. Margot laughed in spite of herself.

Barney poured the smoothies into glasses. From across the room they might have been wrestlers or power lifters in two weight divisions.

"You feel like you haze to do everything guys do?" he said.

"Not some of the dumb stuff."

"You want to try male bonding?"

Margot's smile went away. "Don't set me up for a dick joke, Barney."

He shook his massive head. "Try me," he said.

Chapter 57

IN HANNIBAL 'S House the gleanings grew as day by day Clarice Starling felt her way along the corridors of Dr Lecter's taste: Rachel DuBerry had been somewhat older than Dr Lecter when she was an active patron of the Baltimore Symphony and she was very beautiful, as Starling could see in the Vogue pictures from the time. That was two rich husbands ago. She was now Mrs. Franz Rosencranz of the textile Rosencranzes. Her social secretary put her on the line: "Now I just send the orchestra money, dear. We're away far too much for me to be actively involved," Mrs. Rosencranz nee DuBerry told Starling. "If it's some sort of tax question, I can give you the number of our accountants."

"Mrs. Rosencranz, when you were active on the boards of the Philharmonic and the Westover School you knew Dr Hannibal Lecter."

A considerable silence.

"Mrs. Rosencranz?"

"I think I'd better take your number and call you back through the FBI switchboard."

"Certainly."

When the conversation resumed: "Yes, I knew Hannibal Lecter socially years ago and the press has camped on my doorstep ever since about it. He was an extraordinarily charming man, absolutely singular. Sort of made a girl's fur crackle, if you know what I mean. It took me years to believe the other side of him."

"Did he ever give you any gifts, Mrs. Rosencranz?"

"I received a note from him on my birthdays usually, even after he was in custody. Sometimes a gift, before he was committed. He gives the most exquisite gifts."

"And Dr Lecter gave the famous birthday dinner for you. With the wine vintages keyed to your birth date."

"Yes," she said. "Suzy called it the most remarkable party since Capote's Black and White Ball."

"Mrs. Rosencranz, if you should hear from him, would you please call the FBI at the number I'll give you? Another thing I'd like to ask you if I may, do you have any special anniversaries with Dr Lecter? And Mrs. Rosencranz, I need.to ask you your birth date."

A distinct chill on the phone. "I would think that information was easily available to you."

"Yes, ma'am, but there are some inconsistencies among the dates on your social security, your birth certificate and your driver's license. In fact, none of them are the same. I apologize, but we're keying custom orders on high-end items to the birthdays of Dr Letter's known acquaintances."

"`Known acquaintances.' I'm a known acquaintance now, what an awful term." Mrs. Rosencranz chuckled. She was of a cocktail and cigarette generation and her voice was deep. "Agent Starling, how old are you?"

"I'm thirty-two, Mrs. Rosencranz. I'll be thirty-three two days before Christmas."

"I'll just say, in all kindness, I hope you'll have a couple of `known acquaintances' in your life. They do help pass the time."

"Yes, ma'am, and your birth date?"

Mrs. Rosencranz at last parted with the correct information, characterizing it as "the date Dr Lecter is familiar with."

"If I may ask, ma'am, I can understand changing the birth year, but why the month and day?"

"I wanted to be a Virgo, it matches better with Mr. Rosencranz, we were dating then."

The people Dr Lecter had met while he was living in a cage viewed him somewhat differently: Starling rescued former U.S. Senator Ruth Martin's daughter, Catherine, from the hellish basement of the serial killer Jame Gumb and, had Senator Martin not been defeated in the next election, she might have done Starling much good. She was warm to Starling on the telephone, gave her news of Catherine, and wanted her news.

"You never asked me for anything, Starling. If you ever want a job-"

"Thank you, Senator Martin."

"About that goddamned Lecter, no, I'd have notified the Bureau of course if I heard from him, and I'll put your number here by the phone. Charlsie knows how to handle mail. I don't expect to hear from him. The last thing that prick said to me in Memphis was `Love your suit.' He did the single cruelest thing anybody's ever done to me, do you know what it was?"

"I know he taunted you."

"When Catherine was missing, when we were desperate and he said he had information on Jame Gumb, and I was pleading with him, he asked me, he looked into my face with those snake eyes and asked me if I had nursed Catherine. He wanted to know if I breast-fed her. I told him yes. And then he said, `Thirsty work isn't it?' It just brought it all back suddenly, holding her as a baby, thirsty, waiting for her to get full, it pierced me like nothing I ever felt, and he just sucked down my pain."

"What kind was it, Senator Martin?"."What kind-I'm sorry?"

"What kind of suit did you have on, that Dr Lecter liked."

"Let me think – a navy Givenchy, very tailored," Senator Martin said, a little piqued at Starling's priorities. "When you've got him back in the slammer, come see me, Starling, we'll ride some horses."

"Thank you, Senator, I'll remember that."

Two phone calls, one on each side of Dr Lecter, one showed his charm, the other his scales. Starling wrote down: – Vintage keyed to birthdays, which was already covered in her little program. She made a note to add Givenchy to her list of high-end goods. As an afterthought she wrote down breast fed, for no reason she could say, and there was no time to think about it because her red phone was ringing.

"This is Behavioral Science? I'm trying to get through to Jack Crawford, this is Sheriff Dumas in Clarendon Country, Virginia."

"Sheriff, I'm Jack Crawford's assistant. He's in court today. I can help you. I'm Special Agent Starling."

"I needed to speak to Jack Crawford. We got a fella in the morgue that's been trimmed up for meat, have I got the right department?"

"Yes sir, this is the mea – yes, sir, you certainly do. If you'll tell me exactly where you are, I'm on the way, and I'll alert Mr. Crawford as soon as he's through testifying."

Starling's Mustang got enough second-gear rubber out of Quantico to make the Marine guard frown at her, and wag his finger, and keep himself from smiling.

Chapter 58

THE CLARENDON County Morgue in northern Virginia is attached to the county hospital by a short air lock with an exhaust fan in the ceiling and wide double doors at each end to facilitate access by the dead. A sheriffs deputy stood before these doors to keep out the five reporters and cameramen who crowded around him.

From behind the reporters, Starling stood on her tiptoes and held her badge high. When the deputy spotted it and nodded, she plunged through. Strobe lights flashed and a sun gun flared behind her.

Quiet in the autopsy room, only the clink of instruments put down in a metal tray.

The county morgue has four stainless-steel autopsy tables, each with its scales and sink. Two of the tables were draped, the sheets oddly tented by the remains they covered. A routine hospital postmortem was in progress at the table nearest the windows. The pathologist and his assistant were doing something delicate and did not look up when Starling came in.

The thin shriek of an electric saw filled the room, and in a moment the pathologist carefully set aside the cap of a skull and lifted in his cupped hands a brain, which he placed on the scales. He whispered the weight into the microphone he wore, examined the organ in the scale pan, poked it with a gloved finger. When he spotted Starling over the shoulder of his assistant, he dumped the brain into the open chest cavity of the corpse, shot his rubber.gloves into a bin like a boy shooting rubber bands and came around the table to her.

Starling found shaking his hand a bit crawly.

"Clarice Starling, Special Agent, FBI."

"I'm Dr Hollingsworth – medical examiner, hospital pathologist, chief cook and bottle washer."

Hollingsworth has bright blue eyes, shiny as well-peeled eggs. He spoke to his assistant without looking away from Starling. "Marlene, page the sheriff in cardiac ICU, and undrape those remains, please, ma'am."

In Starling's experience medical examiners were usually intelligent but often silly and incautious in casual conversation, and they liked to show off. Hollingsworth followed Starling's eyes. "You're wondering about that brain?"

She nodded and showed him her open hands.

"We're not careless here, Special Agent Starling. It's a favor I do the undertaker, not putting the brain back in the skull. In this case they'll have an open coffin and a lengthy wake, and you can't prevent brain material leaking onto the pillow, so we stuff the skull with Huggies or whatever we have and close it back up, and I put a notch in the skull cap over both ears, so it won't slide. Family gets the whole body back, everybody's happy."

"I understand."

"Tell me if you understand that," he said. Behind Starling, Dr Hollingsworth's assistant had removed the covering sheets from the autopsy tables.

Starling turned and saw it all in a single image that would last as long as she lived. Side by side on their stainless-steel tables lay a deer and a man. From the deer projected a yellow arrow. The arrow shaft and the antlers had held up the covering sheet like tent poles.

The man had a shorter, thicker yellow arrow through his head transversely at the tips of his ears. He still wore one garment, a reversed baseball cap, pinned to his head by the arrow.

Looking at him, Starling suffered an absurd burp of laughter, suppressed so fast it might have sounded like dismay. The similar positions of the two bodies, on their sides instead of in the anatomical position, revealed that they had been butchered almost identically, the sirloin and loin removed with neatness and economy along with the small filets that lie beneath the spine.

A deer's fur on stainless steel. Its head elevated by the antlers on the metal pillow block, the head turned and the eye white as though it tried to look back at the bright shaft that killed it-the creature, lying on its side in its own reflection in this place of obsessive order, seemed wilder, more alien to man than a deer ever seemed in the woods.

The man's eyes were open, some blood came from his lachrymal ducts like tears.

"Odd to see them together," Dr Hollingsworth said. "Their hearts weighed exactly the same."

He looked at Starling and saw that she was all right. "One difference on the man, you can see here where the short ribs were separated from the spine and.the lungs pulled out the back. They almost look like wings, don't they?"

"Bloody Eagle," Starling muttered, after a moment's thought.

"I never saw it before."

"Me either," Starling said.

"There's a term for that? What did you call it?"

"The Bloody Eagle. The literature at Quantico has it. It's a Norse sacrificial custom. Chop through the short ribs and pull the lungs out the back, flatten them out like that to make wings. There was a neo-Viking doing it in Minnesota in the thirties."

"You see a lot of this, I don't mean this, but this kind of stuff."

"Sometimes I do, yes."

"It's out of my line a little. We get mostly straightforward murders – people shot and knifed, but do you want to know what I think?"

"I'd like very much to know, Doctor."

"I think the man, his ID says Donnie Barber, killed the deer illegally yesterday, the day before the season started – I know that's when it died. That arrow's consistent with the rest of his archery equipment. He was butchering it in a hurry. I haven't done the antigens on that blood on his hands, but it's deer blood. He was just going to take what deer hunters call the backstrap, and he started a sloppy job, this short ragged cut here. Then he got a big surprise, like this arrow through his head. Same color, but a different kind of arrow. No notch in the butt. Do you recognize it?"

"It looks like a crossbow quarrel," Starling said.

"A second person, maybe the one with the crossbow, finished dressing the deer, doing a much better job, and then, by God, he did the man too. Look how precisely the hide is reflected here, how decisive the incisions are. Nothing spoiled or wasted. Michael DeBakey couldn't do it better. There's no sign of any kind of sexual interference with either of them. They were simply butchered for meat."

Starling touched her lips with her knuckle. For a second the pathologist thought she was kissing an amulet.

"Dr Hollingsworth, were the livers missing?"

A beat of time before he replied, peering at her over his glasses. "The deer's liver is missing. Mr. Barber's liver apparently wasn't up to standard. It was partly excised and examined, there's an incision just along the portal vein. His liver is cirrhotic and discolored. It remains in the body, would you like to see?"

"No, thank you. What about the thymus?"

"The sweetbreads, yes, missing in both cases. Agent Starling, nobody's said the name yet, have they?"

"No," Starling said. "Not yet.".A puff from the air lock and a lean, weathered man in a tweed sports jacket and khaki pants stood in the doorway.

"Sheriff, how's Carleton?"

Hollingsworth said. "Agent Starling, this is Sheriff Dumas. The sheriff's brother is upstairs in cardiac ICU."

"He's holding his own. They say he's stable, he's `guarded,' whatever that means," the sheriff said. He called outside, "Come on in here, Wilburn."

The sheriff shook Starling's hand and introduced the other man. "This is Officer Wilburn Moody, he's a game warden."

"Sheriff. If you want to stay close to your brother we could go back upstairs," Starling said.

Sheriff Dumas shook his head. "They won't let me in to see him again for another hour and a half. No offense, Miss, but I called for Jack Crawford. Is he coming?"

"He's stuck in court-he was on the stand when your call came. I expect we'll hear from him very shortly. We really appreciate you calling us so fast."

"Old Crawford taught my National Police Academy Class at Quantico umpteen years ago. Damndest fellow. If he sent you, you must know what you're doing – want to go ahead?"

"Please, Sheriff."

The sheriff took a notebook out of his coat pocket. "The individual here with the arrow through his head is Donnie Leo Barber, WM thirty-two, resides in a trailer at Trail's End Park at Cameron. No employment I can find. General discharge with prejudice from the Air Force four years ago. He's got an air frame and power plant ticket from the FAA. Sometime airplane mechanic. Paid a misdemeanor fine for discharging a firearm in the city limits, paid a fine for criminal trespass last hunting season. Pled guilty to poaching deer in Summit County, when was that, Wilburn?"

"Two seasons ago, he just got his license back. He's known to the department. He don't bother to track nothing after he shoots it. If it don't fall, just wait on another'n… one time-"

"Tell what you found today, Wilburn."

"Well, I was coming along on county road forty-seven, about a mile west of the bridge there around seven o'clock this morning when Old Man Peckman flagged me down. He was breathing hard and holding his chest. All he could do was open and shut his mouth and point off in the woods there. I went maybe, oh, not more than a hundred and fifty yards in the thick woods and there was this Barber here sprawled up against a tree with an arrow through his head and that deer there with an arrow in it. They was stiff from yesterday at least."

"Yesterday morning early, I'd say, cool as it was," Dr Hollingsworth said.

"Now the season just opened this morning," the game warden said. "This Donnie Barber had a climbing tree stand with him that he hadn't set up yet. Looked like he went out there yesterday to get ready for today, or else he went to poach. I don't know why else he'd take his bow, if he was just setting up the stand. Here come this nice deer and he just couldn't help himself. I've saw.people do this a lots. This kinds behavior's got common as pig tracks. And then this other 'un come up on him while he was butchering. I couldn't tell nothing from the tracks, a rain come down out there so hard, the bottom just fell out right then-"

"That's why we took a couple of pictures and pulled out the bodies," Sheriff Dumas said. "Old Man Peckman owns the woods. This Donnie had on him a legitimate two-day lease to hunt starting today, with Peckman's signature on it. Peckman always sold one lease a year, and he advertised it and had it farmed out with some brokers. Donnie also had a letter in his back pocket saying Congratulations you have won a deer lease. The papers are wet, Miss Starling. Nothing against our fellows, but I'm wondering if you ought to do the fingerprinting at your lab. The arrows too, the whole thing was wet when we got there. We tried not to touch them."

"You want to take these arrows with you, Agent Starling? How would you like me to take 'em out?" Dr Hollingsworth asked.

"If you'd hold them with retractors and saw them in two at the skin line on the feather side and push the rest through, I'll wire them to my board with some twist ties," Starling said, opening her case.

"I don't think he was in a fight, but do you want fingernail scrapings?"

"I'd rather clip them to do DNA. I don't need them ID'd by finger, but separate them hand from hand, if you would, Doctor."

"Can you run PCR-STR?"

"They can in the main lab. We'll have something for you, Sheriff, in three to four days."

"Can you do that deer blood yourself?" Warden Moody asked.

"No, we can just tell it's animal blood," Starling said.

"What if you was to just find the deer meat in somebody's Frigidaire," Warden Moody offered. "You'd want to know whether it come out of that deer, wouldn't you? Sometimes we have to be able to tell deer from deer by blood to make a poaching case. Every individual deer is different. You wouldn't think that, would you? We have to send blood off to Portland, Oregon, to the Oregon Game and Fish, they can tell you if you wait long enough. They come back with `This is Deer No. One,' they'll say, or just call it `Deer A,' with a long case number since, you know, a deer don't have any name. That we know of."

Starling liked Moody's old weather-beaten face. "We'll call this one `John Doe,' Warden Moody. That's useful to know about Oregon, we might have to do some business with them, thank you," she said and smiled at him until he blushed and fumbled with his cap.

As she bent her head to rummage in her bag, Dr Hollingsworth considered her for the pleasure it gave him. Her face had lit up for a moment, talking with old Moody. That beauty spot in her cheek looked very much like burnt gunpowder. He wanted to ask, but thought better of it.

"What did you put the papers in, not plastic?" she asked the sheriff.

"Brown paper sacks. A brown paper sack never hurt much of anything."

The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, and looked up at.Starling. "You know why I called your outfit, why I wanted Jack Crawford over here. I'm glad you came, now that I recollect who you are. Nobody's said `cannibal' outside this room because the press will tromp the woods flat as soon as it's out. All they know is it could be a hunting accident. They heard maybe a body was mutilated. They don't know Donnie Barber was cut for meat. There's not that many cannibals, Agent Starling."

"No, Sheriff. Not that many."

"It's awful neat work."

"Yessir, it is."

"I may be thinking about him because he's been in the paper so much – does this look like that Hannibal Lecter to you?"

Starling watched a daddy longlegs hide in the drain of the vacant autopsy table. "Dr Lecter's sixth victim was a bow hunter," Starling said.

"Did he eat him?"

"That one, no. He left him hanging from a peg board wall with all sorts of wounds in him. He left him looking like a medieval medical illustration called Wound Man. He's interested in medieval things."

The pathologist pointed to the lungs spread across Donnie Barber's back. "You were saying this was an old ritual."

"I think so," Starling said. "I don't know if Dr Lecter did this. If he did it, the mutilation's not a fetish – this arrangement's not a compulsive thing with him."

"What is it then?"

"It's whimsy," she said, looking to see if she put them off with the exact word. "It's whimsy, and it's what got him caught last time."

Chapter 59

THE DNA lab was new, smelled new, and the personnel were younger than Starling. It was something she'd have to get used to, she thought with a twinge – she'd be a year older very soon.

A young woman with A. BENNING on her name tag signed for the two arrows Starling brought.

A. Benning had had some bad experiences receiving evidence, judging from her evident relief when she saw the two missiles wired carefully to Starling's evidence board with twist ties.

"You don't want to know what I see sometimes when I open these things," A. Benning said. "You have to understand that I can't tell you anything, like in five minutes-"

"No," Starling said. "There's no reference RFLP on Dr Lecter, he escaped too long ago and the artifacts have been polluted, handled by a hundred people."

"Lab time is too valuable to run every sample, like fourteen hairs say from a motel room. If you bring me-"."Listen to me," Starling said, "then you talk. I've asked the Questura in Italy to send me the toothbrush they think belonged to Dr Lecter. You can get some epithelial cheek cells off it. Do both RFLP and short tandem repeats on them. This crossbow quarrel has been in the rain, I doubt you'll get much off it, but look here-"

"I'm sorry, I didn't think you'd understand-"

Starling managed a smile. "Don't worry, A. Benning, we'll get along fine. See, the arrows are both yellow. The crossbow quarrel is yellow because it's been painted by hand, not a bad job, but a little streaky. Look here, what does that look like under the paint?"

"Maybe a hair off the brush?"

"Maybe. But look how it's curved toward one end and has a little bulb at the end. What if it's an eyelash?"

"If it's got the follicle-"

"Right."

"Look, I can run PCR-STR – three colors at once in the same line in the gel and get you three DNA sites at a time. It'll take thirteen sites for court, but a couple of days will be enough to know pretty well if it's him."

"A. Benning, I knew you could help me."

"You're Starling. I mean Special Agent Starling. I didn't mean to get off on the wrong foot – I see a lot of real bad evidence the cops send in – it has nothing to do with you."

"I know."

"I thought you'd be older. All the girls – the women know about you, I mean everybody does, but you're kind of" – A. Benning looked away – "kind of special to us."

A. Benning held up her chubby little thumb. "Good luck with the Other. If you don't mind my saying so.

Chapter 60

MASON VERGER'S majordomo, Cordell, was a large man with exaggerated features who might have been handsome with more animation in his face. He was thirty- seven years old and he could never work in the health industry in Switzerland again, or have any employment there that put him in close contact with children.

Mason paid him a large salary to be in charge of his wing, with responsibility for his care and feeding. He had found Cordell to be absolutely reliable and capable of anything. Cordell had witnessed acts of cruelty on video as Mason interviewed little children that would have moved anyone else to rage or tears.

Today Cordell was a little concerned about the only matter holy to him, money.

He gave his familiar double knock on the door and went into Mason's room. It was completely dark except for the glowing aquarium. The eel knew he was there and rose from his hole, hoping…"Mr. Verger?"

A moment while Mason came awake.

"I need to mention something to you, I have to make an extra payment in Baltimore this week to the same person we spoke about before. It's not any kind of emergency basis, but it would be prudent. That Negro child Franklin ate some rat poison and was in critical condition earlier this week. He's telling his foster mother it was your suggestion he should poison his cat to keep the police from torturing it. So, he gave the cat to a neighbor and took the rat poison himself."

"That's absurd," Mason said. "I had nothing to do with it."

"Of course it's absurd, Mr. Verger."

"Who's complaining, the woman you get the kids from?"

"She's the one that has to be paid at once."

"Cordell, you didn't interfere with the little bastard? They didn't find anything in him at the hospital, did they? I'll find out, you know."

"No, sir. In your home? Never, I swear it. You know I'm not a fool. I love my job."

"Where is Franklin?"

"Maryland – Misericordia Hospital. When he gets out he'll go to a group home. You know the woman he lived with got kicked off the foster home list for smoking marijuana. She's the one complaining about you. We may have to deal with her."

"Coon doper, shouldn't be much problem."

"She doesn't know anybody to go to with it. I think she needs some careful handling. Kit gloves. The welfare worker wants her to shut up."

"I'll think about that. Go ahead and pay the welfare clerk."

"A thousand dollars?"

"Just make sure she knows that's all she gets."

Lying on Mason's couch in the dark, her cheeks stiff with dried tears, Margot Verger listened to Cordell and Mason talking. She had been trying to reason with Mason when he fell asleep. Obviously Mason thought she had left. She opened her mouth to breathe quietly, trying to time her breaths to the hiss of his respirator. A pulse of gray light in the room as Cordell left. Margot lay flat on the couch. She waited almost twenty minutes, until the pump settled into Mason's sleep rhythm, before she left the room. The eel saw her go, but Mason did not.

Chapter 61

MARGOT VERGER and Barney had been hanging out together. They did not talk a great deal, but they watched football in the recreation room, and The Simpsons, and concerts sometimes on educational TV, and together they followed I, Claudius. When Barney's shift made him miss some episodes, they ordered the.tape.

Margot liked Barney, she liked the way she was one of the guys with him. He was the only person she'd known who was cool like that. Barney was very smart, and there was something a little other-worldly about him. She liked that too.

Margot had a good liberal arts education as well as her computer science. Barney, self-taught, had opinions that ranged from childish to penetrating. She could provide context for him. Margot's education was a broad and open plain defined by reason. But the plain rested on top of her mentality like the Flat Earther's world rests on a turtle.

Margot Verger made Barney pay for his joke about squatting to pee. She believed that her legs were stronger than his, and time proved her right. By feigning difficulty at lower weights she lured him into a bet on leg presses and won back her hundred dollars. In addition, using the advantage of her lighter weight, she beat him in one-armed pull-ups, but she would only bet on the right arm, her left being weaker from a childhood injury sustained in a struggle with Mason.

Sometimes at night, after Barney's shift with Mason was over, they worked out together, spotting one another on the bench. It was a serious workout, largely silent except for their breathing. Sometimes they only said good night as she packed her gym bag and disappeared toward the family quarters, off-limits to the staff.

This night she came into the black and chrome gymnasium directly from Mason's room with tears in her eyes.

"Hey, hey," Barney said. "You all right?"

"Just family crap, what can I tell you? I'm all right," Margot said.

She worked out like a fiend, too much weight, too many reps.

Once Barney came and took a barbell from her and shook his head. "You're gonna tear something," he said.

She was still grinding on an exercise bike when he called it quits, and stood under the gym's steaming shower, letting the hot water take the long day down the drain. It was a communal gym shower with four overhead nozzles and some extra nozzles at waist and thigh level. Barney liked to turn on two showers and converge their streams on his big body.

Soon Barney was enveloped in a thick fog that shut out everything but the pounding of the water on his, head. Barney liked to reflect in the shower: Clouds of steam. The Clouds. Aristophanes. Dr Lecter explaining about the lizard pissing on Socrates. It occurred to him, that, before he was peened under the relentless hammer of Dr Lecter's logic, somebody like Doemling could have pushed him around.

When he heard another shower go on, he paid little attention and continued scrubbing himself. Other personnel used the gym, but mostly in the early morning and late afternoon. It is male etiquette to pay little attention to other bathers in a communal athletic shower, but Barney wondered who it was. He hoped it wasn't Cordell, who gave him the creeps. It was rare for anyone, else to use this facility at night. Who in the hell was that? Barney turned to let the water pound on the back of his neck. Clouds of steam, fragments of the person next to him appear between the billows like fragments of fresco on a plastered wall. Here a massive shoulder, there a leg. A shapely hand scrubbing.a muscular neck and shoulder, coral fingernails, that was Margot's hand. Those were painted toes. That was Margot's leg.

Barney put his head back against the pulsing shower stream and took a deep breath. Next door the figure turning, scrubbing in a businesslike way. Washing her hair now. That was Margot's flat ribbed belly, her small breasts standing up on her big pecs, nipples raised to the jetting water, that was Margot's groin, knurled at the juncture of body and thigh, and that's got to be Margot's pussy, framed in a blond trimmed mohawk. Barney took as deep a breath as he could and held it… he could feel himself developing a problem. She was shining like a horse, pumped to the limit from the hard workout. As Barney's interest grew more apparent, he turned his back to her. Maybe he could just ignore her until she left.

The water went off next door. But now her voice came. "Hey, Barney, what's the spread on the Patriots?"

"With… with my guy, you can get Miami and five and a half."

He looked over his shoulder.

She was drying herself just beyond the range of Barney's spray. Her hair was plastered down. Her face looked fresh now and the tears were gone. Margot had excellent skin.

"So you gonna take the points?" she said. "The pick 'em pool at Judy's office has got…"

Barney couldn't pay attention to the rest. Margot's Mohawk, jeweled with droplets, framed pink. Barney's face felt hot and he had a major cockstand. He was puzzled and disturbed. That freezing feeling came over him. He had never felt any attraction to men. But Margot for all her muscles was clearly not a man, and he liked her.

What is this shit of coming in the shower with him anyway? He turned off his water and faced her wet. Without thinking about it, he put his big hand on her cheek. "For God's sake, Margot," he said, his breath thick in his throat.

She looked down at him. "Goddammit, Barney. Don't…"

Barney stretched his neck and leaned forward, trying to kiss her gently anywhere on her face without touching her with his member, but touched her anyway, she pulling away, looked down at the catenary strand of crystal fluid that stretched between him and her flat stomach, and she caught him across his broad chest with a forearm worthy of a middle guard, his feet went out from under him and he sat hard on the shower floor.

"You fucking bastard," she hissed, "I might have known it. Faggot! Take that thing and stick it up…"

Barney rolled to his feet and was out of the shower, pulling on his clothes wet, and he left the gym without a word.

Barney's quarters were in a building separate from d the house, slate-roofed former stables that were garages now with apartments in the gables. Late at night he sat, pecking on his laptop, working on a correspondence course on the Internet. He felt the floor tremble as someone solid came up the stairs.

A light knock at the door. When he opened it, Margot stood there, muffled in heavy sweats and a stocking cap…"Can I come in a minute?"

Barney looked at his feet for a few seconds before he stood back from the door.

"Barney. Hey, I'm sorry about in there," she said.

"I kind of panicked. I mean, I screwed up and then I panicked. I liked being friends."

"Me too."

"I thought we could be like, you know, regular buddies."

"Margot, come on. I said we'd be friends but I'm not a damn eunuch. You came in the fucking shower with me. You looked good to me, I can't help that. You come in the shower naked and I see two things together I really like."

"Me and a pussy," Margot said.

They were surprised to laugh together.

She came and grabbed him in a hug that might have injured a less powerful man. "Listen, if it was gonna be a guy it would have to be you. But that's not my thing. It really is not. Not now, never will be."

Barney nodded. "I know that. It just got away from me.

They stood quiet a minute with their arms around each other.

"You want to try to be friends?" she said.

He thought about it a minute. "Yeah. But you've got to help me a little bit. Here's the deal: I'm going to make this major effort to forget what I saw in the shower, and you don't show it to me anymore. And don't show me any boobs either, while you're at it. How's that?"

"I can be a good friend, Barney. Come to the house tomorrow. Judy cooks, I cook."

"Yeah, but you may not cook any better than I do."

"Try me," Margot said.

Chapter 62

DR LECTER held a bottle of Chateau Petrus up to the light. He had raised it to the upright position and set it on its bottom a day ago, in case it might have sediment: He looked at his watch and decided it was time to open the wine.

This was what Dr Lecter considered a serious risk, more of a chance than he liked to take. He did not want to be rash. He wanted to enjoy the wine's color in a crystal decanter. What if, after drawing the cork too early, he decided there was none of its holy breath to be lost in decanting? The light revealed a bit of sediment.

He removed the cork as carefully as he might trepan a skull, and placed the wine in his pouring device, which was driven by a crank and screw to tilt the bottle by minute increments. Let the salt air do a bit of work and then he.would decide.

He lit a fire of shaggy chunk charcoal and made himself a drink, Lillet and a slice of orange over ice, while he considered the fond he had been working on for days. Dr Lecter followed the inspired lead of Alexandre Dumas in fashioning his stock. Only three days ago, upon his return from the deer-lease woods, he had added to the stockpot a fat crow which had been stuffing itself with juniper berries. Small black feathers swam on the calm waters of the bay. The primary feathers he saved to make plectra for his harpsichord.

Now Dr Lecter crushed juniper berries of his own and began to sweat shallots in a copper saucepan. With a neat surgical knot, he tied a piece of cotton string around a fresh bouquet garni and ladled stock over it in the saucepan.

The tenderloin Dr Lecter lifted from his ceramic crock was dark from the marinade, dripping. He patted it dry and turned the pointed end back on itself and tied it to make the diameter constant for the length of the meat.

In time the fire was right, banked with one very hot area and a step in the coals. The tenderloin hissed on the iron and blue smoke whirled across the garden, moving as though to the music on Dr Lecter's speakers. He was playing Henry VIII's moving composition "If True Love Reigned."

Late in the night, his lips stained by the red Chateau Petrus, a small crystal glass of honey-colored Chateau d'Yquem on his candle stand, Dr Lecter plays Bach. In his mind Starling runs through the leaves. The deer start ahead of her, and run up the slope past Dr Lecter, sitting still on the hillside. Running, running, he is into "Variation Two" of the Goldberg Variations, the candlelight playing on his moving hands-a stitch in the music, a flash of bloody snow and dirty teeth, this time no more than a flash that disappears with a distinct sound, a solid thock, a crossbow bolt driving through a skull – and we have the pleasant woods again, and flowing music and Starling, limned in polleny light runs out of sight, her ponytail bobbing like the flag of a deer, and without further interruption, he plays the movement through to the end and the sweet silence after was as rich as Chateau d'Yquem.

Dr Lecter held his glass up to the candle. The candle flared behind it as the sun flared on water, and the wine itself was the color of the winter sun on Clarice Starling's skin. Her birthday was coming soon, the doctor reflected. He wondered if there was extant a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem from her birth year. Perhaps a present was in order for Clarice Starling, who in three weeks would have lived as long as Christ.

Chapter 63

AT THE moment Dr Lecter raised his wine to the candle, A. Benning, staying late at the DNA lab, raised her latest gel to the light and looked at the electrophoresis lines dotted with red, blue, and yellow. The sample was epithelial cells from the toothbrush brought over from the Palazzo Capponi in the Italian diplomatic pouch.

"Ummmm umm umm umm," she said and called Starling's number at Quantico.

Eric Pickford answered.

"Hi, may I speak to Clarice Starling please?"

"She's gone for the day and I'm in charge, how can I help you?"

"Do you have a beeper number for her?"."She's on the other phone. What have you got?"

"Would you please tell her it's Benning from the DNA lab. Please tell her the toothbrush and the eyelash off the arrow are a match. It's Dr Lecter. And ask her to call me."

"Give me your extension number. Sure, I'll tell her right now. Thanks."

Starling was not on the other line. Pickford called Paul Krendler at home.

When Starling did not call A. Benning at the lab, the technician was a little disappointed. A. Benning had put in a lot of extra time. She went home long before Pickford ever called Starling at home.

Mason knew an hour before Starling.

He talked briefly to Paul Krendler, taking his tine, letting the breaths come. His mind was very clear.

"It's time to get Starling out, before they start thinking proactive and put her out for bait. It's Friday, you've got the weekend. Get things started, Krendler. Tip the Wops about the ad and get her out of there, it's time for her to go. And Krendler?"

"I wish we could just-"

"Just do it, and when you get that next picture postcard from the Caymans, it'll have a whole new number written under the stamp."

"All right, I'll-"

Krendler said, and heard the dial tone.

The short talk was uncommonly tiring for Mason.

Last, before sinking into a broken sleep, he summoned Cordell and said to him, "Send for the pigs."

Chapter 64

IT is more trouble physically to move a semi-wild pig against its will than to kidnap a man. Pigs are harder to get hold of than men and big ones are stronger than a man and they cannot be intimidated with a gun. There are the tusks to consider if you want to maintain the integrity of your abdomen and legs.

Tusked pigs instinctively disembowel when fighting the upright species, men and bears. They do not naturally hamstring, but can quickly learn the behavior.

If you need to maintain the animal alive, you cannot haze it with electrical shock, as pigs are prone to fatal coronary fibrillation.

Carlo Deogracias, master of the pigs, had the patience of a crocodile. He had experimented with animal sedation, using the same acepromazine he planned to use on Dr Lecter. Now he knew exactly how much was required to quiet a hundred-kilo wild boar and the intervals of dosage that would keep him quiet for as long as fourteen hours without any lasting aftereffects…Since the Verger firm was a large-scale importer and exporter of animals and an established partner of the Department of Agriculture in experimental breeding programs, the way was made smooth for Mason's pigs. The Veterinary Service Form 17-129 was faxed to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at Riverdale, Maryland, as required, along with veterinary affidavits from Sardinia and a $39.50 user's fee for fifty straws of frozen semen Carlo wanted to bring.

The permits for swine and semen came by return fax, along with a waiver of the usual Key West quarantine for swine, and a confirmation that an on-board inspector would clear the animals at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Carlo and his helpers, the brothers Piero and Tommaso Falcione, put the crates together. They were excellent crates with sliding doors at each end, sanded inside and padded. At the last minute, they remembered to crate the bordello mirror too. Something about its rococo frame around reflected pigs delighted Mason in photographs.

Carefully, Carlo doped sixteen swine – five boars raised in the same pen and eleven sows, one of them pregnant, none in estrus. When they were unconscious he gave them a close physical examination. He tested their sharp teeth and the tips of their great tusks with his fingers. He held their terrible faces in his hands, looked into the tiny glazed eyes and listened to make sure their airways were clear, and he hobbled their elegant little ankles. Then he dragged them on canvas into the crates and slid the end doors in place.

The trucks groaned down from the Gennargentu Mountains into Cagliari. At the airport waited an airbus jet freighter operated by Count Fleet Airlines, specialists in transporting racehorses. This airplane usually carried American horses back and forth to race meets in Dubai. It carried one horse now, picked up in Rome. The horse would not be still when it scented the wild-smelling pigs, and whinnied and kicked in its close padded stall until the crew had to unload it and leave it behind, causing much expense later for Mason, who had to ship the horse home to its owner and pay compensation to avoid a lawsuit.

Carlo and his helpers rode with the hogs in the pressurized cargo hold. Every half-hour out over the heaving sea, Carlo visited each pig individually, put ` his hand on its bristled side and felt the thump of its wild heart.

Even if they were good and hungry, sixteen pigs could not be expected to consume Dr Lecter in his entirety at one seating. It had taken them a day to completely consume the filmmaker.

The first day, Mason wanted Dr Lecter to watch them eat his feet. Lecter would be sustained on a saline drip overnight, awaiting the next course.

Mason had promised Carlo an hour with him in the interval.

In the second course, the pigs could eat him all hollow and consume the ventral-side flesh and the face within an hour, as the first shift of the biggest pigs and the pregnant female fell back sated and the second wave came on. By then the fun would be over anyway.

Chapter 65

BARNEY HAD never been in the barn before. He came in a side door under the tiers of seats that surrounded an old show-ring on three sides. Empty and silent except for the muttering of the pigeons in the rafters, the show-ring still held an air of expectation. Behind the auctioneer's stand stretched the.open barn. Big double doors opened into the stable wing and the tack room.

Barney heard voices and called, "Hello."

"In the tack room, Barney, come on in."

Margot's deep voice.

The tack room was a cheerful place, hung with harnesses and the graceful shapes of saddlery. Smell of leather. Warm sunlight streaming in through dusty windows just beneath the eaves raised the smell of leather and hay. An open loft along one side opened into the hayloft of the barn.

Margot was putting up the currycombs and some hackamores. Her hair was paler than the hay, her eyes as blue as the inspection stamp on meat.

"Hi," Barney said from the door. He thought the room was a little stagy, set up for the sake of visiting children. In its height and the slant of light from the high windows it was like a church.

"Hi, Barney. Hang on and we'll eat in about twenty minutes Judy Ingram's voice came from the loft above.

"Barneeeeeey. Good morning. Wait till you see what we've got for lunch! Margot, you want to try to eat outside?"

Each Saturday it was Margot and Judy's habit to curry the motley assortment of fat Shetlands kept for the visiting children to ride. They always brought a picnic lunch. "Let's try on the south side of the barn, in the sun," Margot said.

Everyone seemed a little too chirpy. A person with Barney's hospital experience knows excessive chirpiness does not bode well for the chirpee.

The tack room was dominated by a horse's skull, mounted a little above head height on the wall, with its bridle and blinkers on, and draped with the racing colors of the Vergers.

"That's Fleet Shadow, won the Lodgepole Stakes in '52, the only winner my father ever had," Margot said. "He was too cheap to get him stuffed." She looked up the skull. "Bears a strong resemblance to Mason, doesn't it?"

There was a forced-draft furnace and bellows in the corner Margot had built a small coal fire there against re chill. On the fire was a pot of something that smelled to soup.

A complete set of farrier's tools was on a workbench.

She picked up a farrier's hammer, this one with a short handle and a heavy head. With her great arms and chest, Margot might have been a farrier herself, or a blacksmith with particularly pointed pectorals.

"You want to throw me the blankets?"

Judy called down.

Margot picked up a bundle of freshly washed saddle blankets and with one scooping move of her great arm, sent it arching up to the loft.

"Okay, I'm gonna wash up and get the stuff out of the jeep. We'll eat in.fifteen, okay?"

Judy said, coming down the ladder.

Barney, feeling Margot's scrutiny, did not check out Judy's behind. There were some bales of hay with horse blankets folded on them for seats. Margot and Barney sat.

"You missed the ponies. They're gone to the stable in Lester," Margot said.

"I heard the trucks this morning. How come?"

"Mason's business."

A little silence. They had always been easy with silence, but not this one. "Well, Barney. You get to a point where you can't talk anymore, unless you're going to do something. Is that where we are?"

"Like an affair or something," Barney said. The unhappy analogy hung in the air.

"Affair," Margot said, "I've got something for you a hell of a lot better than that. You know what we're talking about."

"Pretty much," Barney said.

"But if you decided you didn't want to do something, and later it happened anyway, do you understand you could never come back on me about it?"

She tapped her palm with the farrier's hammer, absently perhaps, watching him with her blue butcher's eyes.

Barney had seen some countenances in his time and stayed alive by reading them. He saw she was telling the truth.

"I know that."

"Same if we did something. I'll be extremely generous one time, and one time only. But it would be enough. You want to know how much?"

"Margot, nothings gonna happen on my watch. Not while I'm taking his money to take care of him."

"Why, Barney?"

Sitting on the bale, he shrugged his big shoulders. "Deal's a deal."

"You call that a deal? This is a deal," Margot said. "Five million dollars, Barney. The same five Krendler's, supposed to get for selling out the FBI, if you want to know."

"We're talking about getting enough semen from Mason to get Judy pregnant."

"We're talking about something else too. You know if you take Mason's jism from him and leave him alive, he'd get you, Barney. You couldn't run far enough. You'd go to the fucking pigs."

"I'd do what?"

"What is it, Barney, Semper Fi, like it says on your arm?"."When I took his money I said I'd take care of him. While I work for him, I won't do him any harm. " "You don't have to… do anything to him except the medical, after he's dead. I can't touch him there.

Not one more time. You might have to help me with Cordell. "

"You kill Mason, you only get one batch," Barney said.

"We get five cc's, even a low-normal sperm count, put extenders in it, we could try five times with insemination, we could do it in vitro Judy's family's real fertile."

"Did you think about buying Cordell?"

"No. He'd never keep the deal. His word would be crap. Sooner or later he'd come back on me. He'd have to go."

"You've thought about it a lot."

"Yes. Barney, you have to control the nurse station. There's tape backup on the monitors, there's a record of every second. There's live TV, but no videotape running. We – I put my hand down inside the shell of the respirator and immobilize his chest. Monitor shows the respirator still working. By the time his heart rate and blood pressure show a change, you rush in and he's unconscious, you can try to revive him all you want. The only thing is, you don't happen to notice me. I just press on his chest until he's dead. You've worked enough autopsies, Barney. What do they look for when they suspect smothering?"

"Hemorrhages behind the eyelids."

"Mason doesn't have any eyelids."

She had read up, and she was used to buying anything, anybody.

Barney looked her in the face but he fixed the hammer in his peripheral vision as he gave his answer: "No, Margot. "

"If I had let you fuck me would you do it?"

No.

"If I had fucked you would you do it?"

"No."

"If you didn't work here, if you didn't have any medical responsibility to him would you do it?"

"Probably not."

"Is it ethics or chickenshit?"

"I don't know."

"Let's find out. You're fired, Barney."

He nodded, not particularly surprised…"And, Barney?"

She raised a finger to her lips. "Shhhh. Give me your word? Do I have to say I could kill you with that prior in California? I don't need to say that do I?"

"You don't have to worry," Barney said. "I've got to worry. I don't know how Mason lets people go. Maybe they just disappear."

"You don't have to worry either, I'll tell Mason you've had hepatitis. You don't know a lot about his business except that he's trying to help the law – and he knows we got the prior on you, he'll let you go."

Barney wondered which Dr Lecter had found more interesting in therapy, Mason Verger or his sister.

Chapter 66

IT WAS night when the long silver transport pulled up to the barn at Muskrat Farm. They were late and tempers were short.

The arrangements at Baltimore-Washington International Airport had gone well at first, the on-board inspector from the Department of Agriculture rubberstamped the shipment of sixteen swine. The inspector had an expert's knowledge of swine and he had never seen anything like them.

Then Carlo Deogracias looked inside the truck. It was a livestock transporter and smelled like one, with traces in the cracks of many former occupants. Carlo would not let his pigs be unloaded. The airplane waited while the angry driver, Carlo and Piero Falcione found another livestock truck more suitable to moving crates, located a truck wash with a steam hose and steam-cleaned the cargo area.

Once at the main gate of Muskrat Farm, a last annoyance. The guard checked the tonnage of the truck and refused them entrance, citing a load limit on an ornamental bridge. He redirected them to the service road through the national forest. Tree branches scraped the tall truck as it crept the last two miles.

Carlo liked the big clean barn at Muskrat Farm. He liked the little forklift that gently carried the cages into the pony stalls.

When the driver of the livestock truck brought an electric cattle prod to the cages and offered to zap a pig to see how deeply drugged it was, Carlo snatched the instrument away from him and frightened him so badly he was afraid to ask for it back.

Carlo would let the great rough swine recover from their sedation in the semidarkness, not letting them out of the cages until they were on their feet and alert. He was afraid that those awakening first might take a bite out of a drugged sleeper. Any prone figure attracted them when the herd was not napping together.

Piero and Tommaso had to be doubly careful since the herd ate the filmmaker Oreste, and later his frozen assistant. The men could not be in the pen or the pasture with the pigs. The swine did not threaten, they did not gnash their teeth as wild pigs will, they simply kept watching the men with the terrible single-mindedness of a swine and sidled nearer until they were close enough to charge.

Carlo, equally single-minded, did not rest until he had walked by flashlight the fence enclosing Mason's wooded pasture which adjoined the great national.forest.

Carlo dug in the ground with his pocket-knife and examined the forest mast under the pasture trees and found acorns. He had heard jays in the last light driving in and thought it likely there would be acorns. Sure enough, white oaks grew here in the enclosed field, but not too many of them. He did not want the pigs to find their meals on the ground, as they could easily do in the great forest.

Mason had built across the open end of the barn a stout barrier with a Dutch gate in it, like Carlo's own gate in Sardinia.

From behind the safety of this barrier, Carlo could feed them, sailing clothing stuffed with dead chickens, legs of lamb and vegetables over the fence into their midst.

They were not tame, but they were not afraid of men or noise. Even Carlo could not go into the pen with them. A pig is not like other animals. There is a spark of intelligence and a terrible practicality in pigs. These were not at all hostile. They just liked to eat men. They were light of foot like a Miura bull and could cut like a sheep-dog, and their movements around their keepers had the sinister quality of premeditation. Piero had a near moment retrieving from a feeding a shirt that they thought they could use again.

There had never been such pigs before, bigger than the European wild boar and just as savage. Carlo felt he had created them. He knew that the thing they would do, the evil they would destroy, would be all the credit he would ever need in the hereafter.

By midnight, all were asleep in the barn: Carlo, Piero and Tommaso slept without dreaming in the tack room loft, the swine snored in their cages where their elegant little feet were beginning to trot in their dreams and one or two stirred on the clean canvas. The skull of the trotting horse, Fleet Shadow, faintly lit by the coal fire in the farrier's furnace, watched over all.

Chapter 67

To ATTACK an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with Mason's false evidence was a big leap for Krendler. It left him a little breathless. If the Attorney General caught him, she would crush him like a roach.

Except for his own personal risk, the matter of ruining Clarice Starling did not weigh with Krendler as would breaking a man. A man had a family to support Krendler supported his own family, as greedy and ungrateful as they were.

And Starling definitely had to go. Left alone, following the threads with the picky, petty homemaking skills of a woman, Clarice Starling would find Hannibal Lecter. If that happened, Mason Verger would not give Krendler anything.

The sooner she was stripped of her resources and put out there as bait, the better.

Krendler had broken careers before, in his own rise to power, first as a state prosecuting attorney active in politics, and later at Justice. He knew from experience that crippling a woman's career is easier than damaging a man. If a woman gets a promotion that women shouldn't have, the most efficient way is to say she won it on her back…It would be impossible to make that charge stick to Clarice Starling, Krendler thought. In fact, he couldn't think of anyone more in need of a grudge – fucking up the dirt road. He sometimes thought of that abrasive act as he twisted his finger in his nose.

Krendler could not have explained his animosity to Starling. It was visceral and it belonged to a place in himself where he could not go. A place with seat covers and a dome light, door handles and window cranks and a girl with Starling's coloring but not her sense and her pants around one ankle asking him what in the hell was the matter with him, and why didn't he come on and do it, was he some kind of queer? some kind of queer? some kind of queer? If you didn't know what a cunt Starling was, Krendler reflected, her performance in black and white was much better than her few promotions would indicate – he had to admit that. Her rewards had been satisfyingly few: By adding the odd drop of poison to her record over the years, Krendler had been able to influence the FBI career board enough to block a number of plum assignments she should have gotten, and her independent attitude and smart mouth had helped his cause.

Mason wouldn't wait for the disposition of Feliciana Fish Market. And there was no guarantee any shit would stick to Starling in a hearing. The shooting of Evelda Drumgo and the others was the result of a security failure, obviously. It was a miracle Starling was able to save that little bastard of a baby. One more for the public to have to feed. Tearing the scab off that ugly event would be easy, but it was an unwieldy way to get at Starling.

Better Mason's way. It would be quick and she would be out of there. The timing was propitious: One Washington axiom, proved more times than the Pythagorean theorem, states that in the presence of oxygen, one loud fart with an obvious culprit will cover many small emissions in the same room, provided they are nearly simultaneous.

Ergo, the impeachment trial was distracting the Justice Department enough for him to railroad Starling.

Mason wanted some press coverage for Dr Lecter to see. But Krendler must make the coverage seem an unhappy accident. Fortunately an occasion was coming that would serve him well: the very birthday of the FBI.

Krendler maintained a tame conscience with which to shrive himself.

It consoled him now: If Starling lost her job, at worst some goddamned dyke den where Starling lived would have to do without the big TV dish for sports. At worst he was giving a loose cannon a way to roll over the side and threaten nobody anymore.

A "loose cannon" over the side would "stop rocking the boat," he thought, pleased and comforted as though two naval metaphors made a logical equation. That the rocking boat moves the cannon bothered him not at all. Krendler had the most active fantasy life his imagination would permit. Now, for his pleasure, he pictured

Starling as old, tripping over those tits, those trim legs turned blue-veined and lumpy, trudging up and down the stairs carrying laundry, turning her face away from the stains on the sheets, working for her board at a bed-and- breakfast owned by a couple of goddamned hairy old dykes.

He imagined the next thing he would say to her, coming on the heels of his triumph with "cornpone country pussy.".Armed with Dr Doemling's insights, he wanted to stand close to her after she was disarmed and say without moving his mouth, "You're old to still be fucking your daddy, even for Southern white trash." He repeated the line in his mind, and considered putting it in his notebook.

Krendler had the tool and the time and the venom he needed to smash Starling's career, and as he set about it, he was vastly aided by chance and the Italian mail.

Chapter 68

THE BATTLE Creek Cemetery outside Hubbard, Texas, is a small scar on the lion- colored hide of central Texas in December. The wind is whistling there at this moment, and it will always whistle there. You cannot wait it out.

The new section of the cemetery has flat markers so it's easy to mow the grass. Today a silver heart balloon dances there over the grave of a birthday girl. In the older part of the cemetery they mow along the paths every time and get between the tombstones with a mower as often as they can. Bits of ribbon, the stalks of dried flowers, are mixed in the soil. At the very back of the cemetery is a compost heap where the old flowers go. Between the dancing heart balloon and the compost heap, a backhoe is idling, a young black man at the controls, another on the ground, cupping a match against the wind as he lights a cigarette…

"Mr. Closter, I wanted you to be here when we did this so you could see what we're up against. I'm sure you will discourage the loved ones from any viewing," said Mr. Greenlea, director of the Hubbard Funeral Home. "That casket – and I want to compliment you again on your taste – that casket will make a proud presentation, and that's as far as they need to see. I'm happy to give you the professional discount on it. My own father, who is dead at the present time, rests in one just like it."

He nodded to the backhoe operator and the machine's claw took a bite out of the weedy, sunken grave.

"You're positive about the stone, Mr. Closter?"

"Yes," Dr Lecter said. "The children are having one stone made for both the mother and the father."

They stood without talking, the wind snapping their trouser cuffs, until the backhoe stopped about two feet down.

"We'd better go with shovels from here," Mr. Greenlea said. The two workers dropped into the hole and started moving dirt with an easy, practiced swing.

"Careful," Mr. Greenlea said. "That wasn't much of a coffin to start with. Nothing like what he's getting now."

The cheap pressboard coffin had indeed collapsed on its occupant. Greenlea had his diggers clear the dirt around it and slide a canvas under the bottom of the box, which was still intact. The coffin was raised in this canvas sling and swung into the back of a truck.

On a trestle table in the Hubbard Funeral Home garage, the pieces of the sunken lid were lifted away to reveal a sizeable skeleton.

Dr Lecter examined it quickly. A bullet had notched the short rib over the liver and there was a depressed fracture and bullet hole high on the left.forehead. The skull, mossy and clogged and only partly exposed, had good, high cheekbones he had seen before.

"The ground don't leave much," Mr. Greenlea said.

The rotted remains of trousers and the rags of a cowboy shirt draped the bones. The pearl snaps from the shirt had fallen through the ribs. A cowboy hat, a triple-X beaver with a Fort Worth crease, rested over the chest. There was a notch in the brim and a hole in the crown.

"Did you know the deceased?" Dr Lecter asked.

"We just bought this mortuary and took over this cemetery as an addition to our group in 1989," Mr. Greenlea said. "I live locally now, but our firm's headquarters is in St Louis. Do you want to try to preserve the clothing? Or I could let you have a suit, but I don't think"

"No," Dr Lecter said. "Brush the bones, no clothing except the hat and the buckle and the boots, bag the small bones of the hands and feet, and bundle them in your best silk shroud with the skull and the long bones. You don't have to lay them out, just get them all. Will keeping the stone compensate you for reclosing?"

"Yes, if you'll just sign here, and I'll give you copies of those others," Mr. Greenlea said, vastly pleased at the coffin he had sold. Most funeral directors coming for a body would have shipped the bones in a carton and sold the family a coffin of his own.

Dr Lecter's disinterment papers were in perfect accord with the Texas Health and Safety Code Sec. 711.004 as he knew they would be, having made them himself, downloading the requirements and facsimile forms from the Texas Association of Counties Quick Reference Law Library.

The two workmen, grateful for the power tailgate on Dr Letter's rental truck, rolled the new coffin into place and lashed it down on its dolly beside the only other item in the truck, a cardboard hanging wardrobe.

"That's such a good idea, carrying your own closet. Saves wrinkling your ceremonial attire in a suitcase, doesn't it?" Mr. Greenlea said.

In Dallas, the doctor removed from the wardrobe a viola case and put in it his silk-bound bundle of bones, the hat fitting nicely into the lower section, the skull cushioned in it.

He shoved the coffin out the back at the Fish Trap Cemetery and turned in his rental at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, where he checked the viola case straight through to Philadelphia.

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