Hannibal (10 page)

The door to the director’s office was open. Starling stood in the doorway. It was here she came on her first
FBI assignment, when she was still a trainee, still believed everything, still thought that if you could do the job, if you could cut it, you would be accepted, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin or whether or not you were a good old boy Of all this, there remained to her one article of faith. She believed that she could cut it.

Here Hospital Director Chilton had offered his greasy hand, and come on to her. Here he had traded secrets and eavesdropped and, believing he was as smart as Hannibal Lecter, had made the decisions that allowed Lecter to escape with so much bloodshed.

Chilton’s desk remained in the office, but there was no chair, it being small enough to steal. The drawers were empty except for a crushed Alka-Seltzer. Two filing cabinets remained in the office. They had simple locks and former technical agent Starling had them open in less than a minute. A desiccated sandwich in a paper bag and some office forms for the methadone clinic were in a bottom drawer, along with breath freshener and a tube of hair tonic, a comb and some condoms.

Starling thought about the dungeonlike basement level of the asylum where Dr. Lecter had lived for eight years. She didn’t want to go down there. She could use her cell phone and ask for a city police unit to go down there with her. She could ask the Baltimore field office to send another FBI agent with her. It was late on the gray afternoon and there was no way, even now, she could avoid the rush-hour traffic in Washington. If she waited, it would be worse.

She leaned on Chilton’s desk in spite of the dust and tried to decide. Did she really think there might be files in the basement, or was she drawn back to the first place she ever saw Hannibal Lecter?

If Starling’s career in law enforcement had taught her anything about herself, it was this: She was not a thrill seeker, and she would be happy never to feel fear again. But there
might
be files in the basement. She could find out in five minutes.

She could remember the clang of the high-security doors behind her when she went down there years ago. In case one should close behind her this time, she called the Baltimore field office and told them where she was and made an arrangement to call back in an hour to say she was out.

The lights worked in the inside staircase, where Chilton had walked her to the basement level years ago. Here he had explained the safety procedures used in dealing with Hannibal Lecter, and here he had stopped, beneath this light, to show her his wallet photograph of the nurse whose tongue Dr. Lecter had eaten during an attempted physical examination. If Dr. Lecter’s shoulder had been dislocated as he was subdued, surely there must be an X ray.

A draft of air on the stairs touched her neck, as though there were a window open somewhere.

A McDonald’s hamburger box was on the landing, and scattered napkins. A stained cup that had held beans. Dumpster food. Some ropey turds and napkins in the corner. The light ended at the bottom floor landing, before the great steel door to the violent ward, now standing open and hooked back against the wall. Starling’s flashlight held five D-cells and cast a good wide beam.

She shined it down the long corridor of the former maximum security unit. There was something bulky at the far end. Eerie to see the cell doors standing open. The floor was littered with bread wrappers and cups. A soda
can, blackened from use as a crack pipe, lay on the former orderly’s desk.

Starling flipped the light switches behind the orderly station. Nothing. She took out her cell phone. The red light seemed very bright in the gloom. The phone was useless underground, but she spoke into it loudly. “Barry, back the truck up to the side entrance. Bring a floodlight. You’ll need some dollies to move this stuff up the stairs… yeah, come on down.”

Then Starling called into the dark, “Attention in there. I’m a federal officer. If you are living here illegally, you are free to leave. I will not arrest you. I am not interested in you. If you return after I complete my business, it’s of no interest to me. You can come out now. If you attempt to interfere with me you will suffer severe personal injury when I bust a cap in your ass. Thank you.”

Her voice echoed down the corridor where so many had ranted their voices down to croaks and gummed the bars when their teeth were gone.

Starling remembered the reassuring presence of the big orderly, Barney, when she had come to interview Dr. Lecter. The curious courtesy with which Barney and Dr. Lecter treated each other. No Barney now. Something from school bumped at her mind and, as a discipline, she made herself recall it:

Rose Garden, right. This was damn sure not the rose garden.

Starling, who had been encouraged in recent editorials to hate her gun as well as herself, found the touch of the weapon not at all hateful when she was uneasy. She held the .45 against her leg and started down the hall behind her flashlight. It is hard to watch both flanks at once, and imperative not to leave anyone behind you. Water dripped somewhere.

Bed frames disassembled and stacked in the cells. In others, mattresses. The water stood in the center of the corridor floor and Starling, ever mindful of her shoes, stepped from one side of the narrow puddle to the other as she proceeded. She remembered Barney’s advice from years ago when all the cells were occupied.
Stay in the middle as you go down
.

Filing cabinets, all right. In the center of the corridor all the way down, dull olive in her flashlight beam.

Here was the cell that had been occupied by Multiple Miggs, the one she had hated most to pass. Miggs, who whispered filth to her and threw body fluids. Miggs, whom Dr. Lecter killed by instructing him to swallow his vile tongue. And when Miggs was dead, Sammie lived in the cell. Sammie, whose poetry Dr. Lecter encouraged with startling effect on the poet. Even now she could hear Sammie howling his verse:

She still had the labored crayon text, somewhere.

The cell was stacked with mattresses now, and bales of bed linens tied up in sheets.

And at last, Dr. Lecter’s cell.

The sturdy table where he read was still bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. The boards were gone from the shelves that had held his books, but the brackets still stuck out of the walls.

Starling should turn to the cabinets, but she was fixed on the cell. Here she had had the most remarkable encounter of her life. Here she had been startled, shocked, surprised.

Here she had heard things about herself so terribly true her heart resounded like a great deep bell.

She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.

Starling shined her light around her, looked on the back side of the row of filing cabinets, swept her light through the nearby cells.

Curiosity carried her across the threshold. She stood in the middle of the cell where Dr. Hannibal Lecter had spent eight years. She occupied his space, where she had seen him standing, and expected to tingle, but she did not. Put her pistol and her flashlight on his table, careful that the flashlight didn’t roll, and put her hands flat on his table, and beneath her hands felt only crumbs.

Overall, the effect was disappointing. The cell was as empty of its former occupant as a snake’s shed skin. Starling thought then that she came to understand something: Death and danger do not have to come with trappings. They can come to you in the sweet breath of your beloved. Or on a sunny afternoon in a fish market with “Macarena” playing on a boom box.

To business. There were about eight feet of filing cabinets, four cabinets in all, chin-high. Each had five drawers,
secured by a single four-pin lock beside the top drawer. None of them was locked. All were full of files, some of them fat, all of them in folders. Old marbleized paper folders gone limp with time, and newer ones in manila folders. The files on the health of dead men, dating back to the hospital’s opening in 1932. They were roughly alphabetical, with some material piled flat behind the folders in the long drawers. Starling skipped quickly along, holding her heavy flashlight on her shoulder, walking the fingers of her free hand through the files, wishing she had brought a small light she could hold in her teeth. As soon as she had some sense of the files she could skip whole drawers, through the
J
’s, very few
K
’s, on to the
L
’s and bam: Lecter, Hannibal.

Starling pulled out the long manila folder, felt it at once for the stiffness of an X ray negative, laid the folder on top of the other files and opened it to find the health history of the late I. J. Miggs. Goddammit. Miggs was going to plague her from the grave. She put the file on top of the cabinet and raced ahead into the
M
’s. Miggs’s own manila folder was there, in alphabetical order. It was empty. Filing error? Did someone accidentally put Miggs’s records in Hannibal Lecter’s jacket? She went through all the
M
’s looking for a file without a jacket. She went back to the J’s. Aware of an increasing annoyance. The smell of the place was bothering her more. The caretaker was right, it was hard to breathe in this place. She was halfway through the
J
’s when she realized the stench was … increasing rapidly.

A small splash behind her and she spun, flashlight cocked for a blow, hand fast beneath her blazer to the gun butt. A tall man in filthy rags stood in the beam of her light, one of his outsize swollen feet in the water. One of
his hands was spread from his side. The other hand held a piece of a broken plate. One of his legs and both of his feet were bound with strips of sheet.

“Hello,” he said, his tongue thick with thrush. From five feet Starling could smell his breath. Beneath her jacket, her hand moved from the pistol to the Mace.

“Hello,” Starling said. “Would you please stand over there against the bars?”

The man did not move. “Are you Jesa?” he asked.

“No,” Starling said. “I’m not Jesus.” The voice. Starling remembered the voice.

“Are you Jesa!” His face was working.

That voice. Come on, think
. “Hello, Sammie,” she said. “How are you? I was just thinking about you.”

What about Sammie? The information, served up fast, was not exactly in order.
Put his mother’s head in the collection plate while the congregation was singing “Give of Your Best to the Master.” Said it was the nicest thing he had. Highway Baptist Church somewhere. Angry, Dr. Lecter said, because Jesus is so late
.

“Are you Jesa?” he said, plaintive this time. He reached in his pocket and came out with a cigarette butt, a good one more than two inches long. He put it on his shard of plate and held it out in offering.

“Sammie, I’m sorry, I’m not. I’m—”

Sammie suddenly livid, furious that she is not Jesus, his voice booming in the wet corridor:

He raised the plate shard, its sharp edge like a hoe, and took a step toward Starling, both his feet in the water now
and his face contorted, his free hand clutching the air between them.

She felt the cabinets hard at her back.

“YOU CAN GO WITH JESUS … IF YOU ACT REAL NICE,” Starling recited, clear and loud as though she called to him in a far place.

“Uh huh,” Sammie said calmly and stopped.

Starling fished in her purse, found her candy bar. “Sammie, I have a Snickers. Do you like Snickers?”

He said nothing.

She put the Snickers on a manila folder and held it out to him as he had held out the plate.

He took the first bite before he removed the wrapper, spit out the paper and bit again, eating half the candy bar.

“Sammie, has anybody else been down here?”

He ignored her question, put the remainder of the candy bar on his plate and disappeared behind a pile of mattresses in his old cell.

“What the hell is this?” A woman’s voice. “Thank you, Sammie.”

“Who are you?” Starling called.

“None of your damn business.”

“Do you live here with Sammie?”

“Of course not. I’m here on a date. Do you think you could leave us alone?”

“Yes. Answer my question. How long have you been here?”

“Two weeks.”

“Has anybody else been here.”

“Some bums Sammie run out.”

“Sammie protects you?”

“Mess with me and find out. I can walk good. I get
stuff to eat, he’s got a safe place to eat it. Lot of people have deals like that.”

“Is either one of you in a program someplace? Do you want to be? I can help you there.”

“He done all that. You go out in the world and do all that shit and come back to what you know. What are you looking for? What do you want?”

“Some files.”

“If it ain’t here, somebody stole it, how smart do you have to be to figure that out?”

“Sammie?” Starling said. “Sammie?”

Sammie did not answer. “He’s asleep,” his friend said.

“If I leave some money out here, will you buy some food?” Starling said.

“No, I’ll buy liquor. You
can find
food. You can’t find liquor. Don’t let the doorknob catch you in the butt on the way out.”

“I’ll put the money on the desk,” Starling said. She felt like running, remembered leaving Dr. Lecter, remembered holding on to herself as she walked toward what was then the calm island of Barney’s orderly station.

In the light of the stairwell, Starling took a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet. She put the money on Barney’s scarred, abandoned desk, and weighted it with an empty wine bottle. She unfolded a plastic shopping bag and put in it the Lecter file jacket containing Miggs’s records and the empty Miggs jacket.

“Good-bye. ‘Bye, Sammie,” she called to the man who had circled in the world and come back to the hell he knew. She wanted to tell him she hoped Jesus would come soon, but it sounded too silly to say.