Hannibal (11 page)

Starling climbed back into the light, to continue her circle in the world.

I
F THERE
are depots on the way to Hell, they must resemble the ambulance entrance to Maryland-Misericordia General Hospital. Over the sirens’ dying wail, wails of the dying, clatter of the dripping gurneys, cries and screams, the columns of manhole steam, dyed red by a great neon
EMERGENCY
sign, rise like Moses’ own pillar of fire in the darkness and change to cloud in the day

Barney came out of the steam, shrugging his powerful shoulders into his jacket, his cropped round head bent forward as he covered the broken pavement in long strides east toward the morning.

He was twenty-five minutes late getting off work— the police had brought in a stoned pimp with a gunshot wound who liked to fight women, and the head nurse had asked him to stay. They always asked Barney to stay when they took in a violent patient.

Clarice Starling peered out at Barney from the deep hood of her jacket and let him get a half-block lead on the other side of the street before she hitched her tote
bag on her shoulder and followed. When he passed both the parking lot and the bus stop, she was relieved. Barney would be easier to follow on foot. She wasn’t sure where he lived and she needed to know before he saw her.

The neighborhood behind the hospital was quiet, blue-collar and mixed racially. A neighborhood where you put a Chapman lock on your car but you don’t have to take the battery in with you at night, and the kids can play outside.

After three blocks, Barney waited for a van to clear the crosswalk and turned north onto a street of narrow houses, some with marble steps and neat front gardens. The few empty storefronts were intact with the windows soaped. Stores were beginning to open and a few people were out. Trucks parked overnight on both sides of the street blocked Starling’s view for half a minute and she walked up on Barney before she realized that he had stopped. She was directly across the street when she saw him. Maybe he saw her too, she wasn’t sure.

He was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, head forward, looking from under his brows at something moving in the center of the street. A dead dove lay in the road, one wing flapped by the breeze of passing cars. The dead bird’s mate paced around and around the body, cocking an eye at it, small head jerking with each step of its pink feet. Round and round, muttering the soft dove mutter. Several cars and a van passed, the surviving bird barely dodging the traffic with short last-minute flights.

Maybe Barney glanced up at her, Starling couldn’t be positive. She had to keep going or be spotted. When she looked over her shoulder, Barney was squatting in the middle of the road, arm raised to the traffic.

She turned the corner out of sight, pulled off her
hooded jacket, took a sweater, a baseball cap and a gym bag out of her tote bag, and changed quickly, stuffing her jacket and the tote into the gym bag, and her hair into the cap. She fell in with some homeward-bound cleaning women and turned the corner back onto Barney’s street.

He had the dead dove in his cupped hands. Its mate flew with whistling wings up to the overhead wires and watched him. Barney laid the dead bird in the grass of a lawn and smoothed down its feathers. He turned his broad face up to the bird on the wire and said something. When he continued on his way, the survivor of the pair dropped down to the grass and continued circling the body, pacing through the grass. Barney didn’t look back. When he climbed the steps of an apartment house a hundred yards farther on and reached for keys, Starling sprinted a half-block to catch up before he opened the door.

“Barney. Hi.”

He turned on the stairs in no great haste and looked down at her. Starling had forgotten that Barney’s eyes were unnaturally far apart. She saw the intelligence in them and felt the little electronic pop of connection.

She took her cap off and let her hair fall. “I’m Clarice Starling. Remember me? I’m—”

“The G,” Barney said, expressionless.

Starling put her palms together and nodded. “Well, yes, I
am
the G. Barney, I need to talk with you. It’s just informal, I need to ask you some stuff.”

Barney came down the steps. When he was standing on the sidewalk in front of Starling, she still had to look up at his face. She was not threatened by his size, as a man would be.

“Would you agree for the record, Officer Starling, that I have not been read my rights?” His voice was high and rough like the voice of Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan.

“Absolutely I have not Mirandized you. I acknowledge that.”

“How about saying it into your bag?”

Starling opened her bag and spoke down into it in a loud voice as though it contained a troll. “I have not Mirandized Barney, he is unaware of his rights.”

“There’s some pretty good coffee down the street,” Barney said. “How many hats have you got in that bag?” he asked as they walked.

“Three,” she said.

When the van with handicap plates passed by, Starling was aware that the occupants were looking at her, but the afflicted are often horny, as they have every right to be. The young male occupants of a car at the next crossing looked at her too, but said nothing because of Barney. Anything extended from the windows would have caught Starling’s instant attention—she was wary of Crip revenge—but silent ogling is to be endured.

When she and Barney entered the coffee shop, the van backed into an alley to turn around and went back the way it came.

They had to wait for a booth in the crowded ham and egg place while the waiter yelled in Hindi to the cook, who handled meat with long tongs and a guilty expression.

“Let’s eat,” Starling said when they were seated. “It’s on Uncle Sam. How’s it going, Barney?”

“The job’s okay.”

“What is it?”

“Orderly, LPN.”

“I figured you for an RN by now, or maybe medical school.”

Barney shrugged and reached for the creamer. He looked up at Starling. “They jam you up for shooting Evelda?”

“We’ll have to see. Did you know her?”

“I saw her once, when they brought in her husband, Dijon. He was dead, he bled out on them before they ever got him in the ambulance. He was leaking clear IV when he got to us. She wouldn’t let him go and tried to fight the nurses. I had to … you know … Handsome woman, strong too. They didn’t bring her in after—”

“No, she was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“I would think so.”

“Barney, after you turned over Dr. Lecter to the Tennessee people—”

“They weren’t civil to him.”

“After you—”

“And they’re all dead now.”

“Yes. His keepers managed to stay alive for three days. You lasted eight years keeping Dr. Lecter.”

“It was six years—he was there before I came.”

“How’d you do it, Barney? If you don’t mind my asking, how’d you manage to last with him? It wasn’t just being civil.”

Barney looked at his reflection in his spoon, first convex and then concave, and thought a moment. “Dr. Lecter had perfect manners, not stiff, but easy and elegant. I was working on some correspondence courses and he shared his mind with me. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t
kill
me any second if he got the chance—one quality in a person doesn’t rule out any other quality.
They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better. In maximum lockdown you can’t afford to forget that, ever. If you keep it in mind, you’re all right. Dr. Lecter may have been sorry he showed me Socrates.” To Barney, lacking the disadvantage of formal schooling, Socrates was a fresh experience, with the quality of an encounter.

“Security was separate from conversation, a whole other thing,” he said. “Security was never personal, even when I had to shut off his mail or put him in restraints.”

“Did you talk with Dr. Lecter a lot?”

“Sometimes he went months without saying anything, and sometimes we’d talk, late at night when the crying died down. In fact—I was taking these courses by mail and I knew diddly—and he showed me a whole world, literally, of stuff—Suetonius, Gibbon, all that.” Barney picked up his cup. He had a streak of orange Betadine on a fresh scratch across the back of his hand.

“Did you ever think when he escaped that he might come after you?”

Barney shook his huge head. “He told me once that, whenever it was ‘feasible,’ he preferred to eat the rude. ‘Free-range rude,’ he called them.” Barney laughed, a rare sight. He has little baby teeth and his amusement seems a touch maniacal, like a baby’s glee when he blows his pabulum in a goo-goo uncle’s face.

Starling wondered if he had stayed underground with the loonies too long.

“What about you, did you ever feel … creepy after he got away? Did you think he might come after you?” Barney asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“He said he wouldn’t.”

This answer seemed oddly satisfactory to them both.

The eggs arrived. Barney and Starling were hungry and they ate steadily for a few minutes. Then …

“Barney, when Dr. Lecter was transferred to Memphis, I asked you for his drawings out of his cell and you brought them to me. What happened to the rest of the stuff—books, papers? The hospital doesn’t even have his medical records.”

“There was this big upheaval.” Barney paused, tapping the salt shaker against his palm. “There was a big upheaval, you know at the hospital. I got laid off, a lot of people got laid off, and stuff just got scattered. There’s no telling—”

“Excuse
me?” Starling said, “I couldn’t hear what you said for the racket in here. I found out last night that Dr. Lecter’s annotated and signed copy of Alexandre Dumas’
Dictionary of Cuisine
came up at a private auction in New York two years ago. It went to a private collector for sixteen thousand dollars. The seller’s affidavit of ownership was signed ‘Cary Phlox.’ You know ‘Cary Phlox,’ Barney? I hope you do because he did the handwriting on your employment application at the hospital where you’re working but he signed it ‘Barney.’ Made out your tax return too. Sorry I missed what you were saying before. Want to start over? What did you get for the book, Barney?”

“Around ten,” Barney said, looking straight at her.

Starling nodded. “The receipt says ten-five. What did you get for that interview with the
Tattler
after Dr. Lecter escaped?”

“Fifteen G’s.”

“Cool. Good for you. You made up all that bull you told those people.”

“I knew Dr. Lecter wouldn’t mind. He’d be disappointed if I didn’t jerk them around.”

“He attacked the nurse before you got to Baltimore State?”

“Yes.”

“His shoulder was dislocated.”

“That’s what I understand.”

“Was there an X ray taken?”

“Most likely.”

“I want the X ray.”

“Ummmm.”

“I found out Lecter autographs are divided into two groups, the ones written in ink, or preincarceration, and crayon or felt-tip writing from the asylum. Crayon’s worth more, but I expect you know that. Barney, I think you have all that stuff and you figure on parceling it out over the years to the autograph trade.”

Barney shrugged and said nothing.

“I think you’re waiting for him to be a hot topic again. What do you
want
, Barney?”

“I want to see every Vermeer in the world before I die.”

“Do I need to ask who got you started on Vermeer?”

“We talked about a lot of things in the middle of the night.”

“Did you talk about what he’d like to do if he was free?”

“No. Dr. Lecter has no interest in hypothesis. He doesn’t believe in syllogism, or synthesis, or any absolute.”

“What does he believe in?”

“Chaos. And you don’t even have to believe in it. It’s self-evident.”

Starling wanted to indulge Barney for the moment.

“You say that like you believe it,” she said, “but your whole job at Baltimore State was maintaining order. You were the chief
orderly
. You and I are both in the order business. Dr. Lecter never got away from you.”

“I explained that to you.”

“Because you never let your guard down. Even though in a sense you fraternized—”

“I did not
fraternize
,” Barney said. “He’s nobody’s brother. We discussed matters of mutual interest. At least the stuff was interesting to me when I found out about it.”

“Did Dr. Lecter ever make fun of you for not knowing something?”

“No. Did he make fun of you?”

“No,” she said to save Barney’s feelings, as she recognized for the first time the compliment implied in the monster’s ridicule. “He could have made fun of me if he’d wanted to. Do you know where the stuff is, Barney?”

“Is there a reward for finding it?”

Starling folded her paper napkin and put it under the edge of her plate. “The reward is my not charging you with obstruction of justice. I gave you a walk before when you bugged my desk at the hospital.”

“That bug belonged to the late Dr. Chilton.”

“Late?
How do you know he’s the
late
Dr. Chilton?”

“Well, he’s seven years late anyway,” Barney said. “I’m not expecting him anytime soon. Let me ask you, what would satisfy
you
, Special Agent Starling?”

“I want to see the X ray. I want the X ray. If there are books of Dr. Lecter’s, I want to see them.”

“Say we came upon the stuff, what would happen to it afterward?”

“Well, the truth is I can’t be sure. The U.S. Attorney might seize all the material as evidence in the investigation of the escape. Then it’ll molder in his Bulky Evidence Room. If I examine the stuff and find nothing useful in the books, and I say so, you could claim that Dr. Lecter gave them to you. He’s been
in absentia
seven years, so you might exercise a civil claim. He has no known relatives. I would recommend that any innocuous material be handed over to you. You should know my recommendation is at the low end of the totem pole. You wouldn’t ever get the X ray back probably or the medical report, since they weren’t his to give.”

“And if I explain to you that I don’t have the stuff?”