Hannibal (51 page)

Absorbed in their talk, Starling and Lecter were no more disturbed than they would have been by the singing of happy birthday at another table in a restaurant, but when Krendler’s volume became intrusive, Dr. Lecter retrieved his crossbow from a corner.

“I want you to listen to the sound of this stringed instrument, Clarice.”

He waited for a moment of silence from Krendler and shot a bolt across the table through the tall flowers.

“That particular frequency of the crossbow string, should you hear it again in any context, means only your complete freedom and peace and self-sufficiency,” Dr. Lecter said.

The feathers and part of the shaft remained on the visible side of the flower arrangement and moved at more or less the pace of a baton directing a heart. Krendler’s voice stopped at once and in a few beats the baton stopped too.

“It’s about a D below middle C?” Starling said.

“Exactly.”

A moment later Krendler made a gargling sound behind the flowers. It was only a spasm in his voice box caused by the increasing acidity of his blood, he being newly dead.

“Let’s have our next course,” the doctor said, “a little sorbet to refresh our palates before the quail. No, no, don’t get up. Mr. Krendler will help me clear, if you’ll excuse him.”

It was all quickly done. Behind the screen of the flowers, Dr. Lecter simply scraped the plates into Krendler’s skull and stacked them in his lap. He replaced the top of Krendler’s head and, picking up the rope attached to a dolly beneath his chair, towed him away to the kitchen.

There Dr. Lecter rewound his crossbow. Conveniently it used the same battery pack as his autopsy saw.

The quails’ skins were crisp and they were stuffed with foie gras. Dr. Lecter talked about Henry VIII as composer and Starling told him about computer-aided design in engine sounds, the replication of pleasing frequencies.

Dessert would be in the drawing room, Dr. Lecter announced.

A
SOUFFLÉ
and glasses of Château d’Yquem before the fire in the drawing room, coffee ready on a side table at Starling’s elbow.

Fire dancing in the golden wine, its perfume over the deep tones of the burning log.

They talked about teacups and time, and the rule of disorder.

“And so I came to believe,” Dr. Lecter was saying, “that there had to be a place in the world for Mischa, a prime place vacated for her, and I came to think, Clarice, that the best place in the world was yours.”

The firelight did not plumb the depths of her bodice as satisfactorily as the candlelight had done, but it was wonderful playing on the bones of her face.

She considered a moment. “Let me ask you this, Dr. Lecter. If a prime place in the world is required for Mischa, and I’m not saying it isn’t, what’s the matter with
your
place? It’s well occupied and I know you would never
deny her. She and I could be like sisters. And if, as you say, there’s room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?”

Dr. Lecter seemed pleased, whether with the idea, or with Starling’s resource is impossible to say. Perhaps he felt a vague concern that he had built better than he knew.

When she replaced her glass on the table beside her, she pushed off her coffee cup and it shattered on the hearth. She did not look down at it.

Dr. Lecter watched the shards, and they were still.

“I don’t think you have to make up your mind right this minute,” Starling said. Her eyes and the cabochons shone in the firelight. A sigh from the fire, the warmth of the fire through her gown, and there came to Starling a passing memory—
Dr. Lecter, so long ago, asking Senator Martin if she breast-fed her daughter
. A jeweled movement turning in Starling’s unnatural calm: For an instant many windows in her mind aligned and she saw far across her own experience. She said, “Hannibal Lecter, did your mother feed you at her breast?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever feel that you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa? Did you ever feel you were required to give it up for her?”

A beat. “I don’t recall that, Clarice. If I gave it up, I did it gladly.”

Clarice Starling reached her cupped hand into the deep neckline of her gown and freed her breast, quickly peaky in the open air. “You don’t have to give up this one,” she said. Looking always into his eyes, with her trigger finger she took warm Château d’Yquem from her
mouth and a thick sweet drop suspended from her nipple like a golden cabochon and trembled with her breathing.

He came swiftly from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, and bent to her coral and cream in the firelight his dark sleek head.

B
UENOS
A
IRES
, Argentina, three years later:

Barney and Lillian Hersh walked near the Obelisk on the Avenida 9 de Julio in the early evening. Ms. Hersh is a lecturer at London University, on sabbatical. She and Barney met in the anthropology museum in Mexico City. They like each other and have been traveling together two weeks, trying it a day at a time, and it is getting to be more and more fun. They are not getting tired of one another.

They had arrived in Buenos Aires too late in the afternoon to go to the Museo Nacional, where a Vermeer was on loan. Barney’s mission to see every Vermeer in the world amused Lillian Hersh and it did not get in the way of a good time. He had seen a quarter of the Vermeers already, and there were plenty to go.

They were looking for a pleasant café where they could eat outside.

Limousines were backed up at the Teatro Colón,
Buenos Aires’ spectacular opera house. They stopped to watch the opera lovers go in.

Tamerlane
was playing with an excellent cast, and a Buenos Aires opening night crowd is worth seeing.

“Barney, you up for the opera? I think you’d like it. I’ll spring.”

It amused him when she used American slang. “If you’ll walk me through it,
I’ll
spring,” Barney said. “You think they’ll let us in?”

At that moment a Mercedes Maybach, deep blue and silver, whispered up to the curb. A doorman hurried to open the car.

A man, slender and elegant in white tie, got out and handed out a woman. The sight of her raised an admiring murmur in the crowd around the entrance. Her hair was a shapely platinum helmet and she wore a soft sheath of coral frosted with an overlayer of tulle. Emeralds flashed green at her throat. Barney saw her only briefly, through the heads of the crowd, and she and her gentleman were swept inside.

Barney saw the man better. His head was sleek as an otter and his nose had an imperious arch like that of Perón. His carriage made him seem taller than he was.

“Barney? Oh, Barney,” Lillian was saying, “when you come back to yourself, if you ever do, tell me if you’d like to go to the opera. If they’ll let us in
in mufti
. There, I said it, even if it’s not precisely apt—I’ve always wanted to say I was
in mufti.”

When Barney did not ask what
mufti
was, she glanced at him sidelong. He always asked everything.

“Yes,” Barney said absently.
“I’ll
spring.” Barney had plenty of money. He was careful with it, but not cheap.
Still, the only tickets available were in the rafters among the students.

Anticipating the altitude of his seats, he rented field glasses in the lobby.

The enormous theater is a mix of Italian Renaissance, Greek and French styles, lavish with brass and gilt and red plush. Jewels winked in the crowd like flashbulbs at a ball game.

Lillian explained the plot before the overture began, talking in his ear quietly.

Just before the houselights went down, sweeping the house from the cheap seats, Barney found them, the platinum blond lady and her escort. They had just come through the gold curtains into their ornate box beside the stage. The emeralds at her throat glittered in the brilliant houselights as she took her seat.

Barney had only glimpsed her right profile as she entered the opera. He could see the left one now.

The students around them, veterans of the high-altitude seats, had brought all manner of viewing aids. One student had a powerful spotting scope so long that it disturbed the hair of the person in front of him. Barney traded glasses with him to look at the distant box. It was hard to find the box again in the long tube’s limited field of vision, but when he found it, the couple was startlingly close.

The woman’s cheek had a beauty spot on it, in the position the French call “Courage.” Her eyes swept over the house, swept over his section and moved on. She seemed animated and in expert control of her coral mouth. She leaned to her escort and said something, and they laughed together. She put her hand on his hand and held his thumb.

“
Starling
,” Barney said under his breath.

“What?” Lillian whispered.

Barney had a lot of trouble following the first act of the opera. As soon as the lights came up for the first intermission, he raised his glass to the box again. The gentleman took a champagne flute from a waiter’s tray and handed it to the lady, and took a glass himself. Barney zoomed in on his profile, the shape of his ears.

He traced the length of the woman’s exposed arms. They were bare and unmarked and had muscle tone, in his experienced eye.

As Barney watched, the gentleman’s head turned as though to catch a distant sound, turned in Barney’s direction. The gentleman raised opera glasses to his eyes. Barney could have sworn the glasses were aimed at him. He held his program in front of his face and hunkered down in his seat to try to be about average height.

“Lillian,” he said. “I want you to do me a great big favor.”

“Um,” she said. “If it’s like some of the others, I’d better hear it first.”

“We’re leaving when the lights go down. Fly with me to Rio tonight. No questions asked.”

The Vermeer in Buenos Aires is the only one Barney never saw.

F
OLLOW THIS
handsome couple from the opera? All right, but very carefully …

At the millennium, Buenos Aires is possessed by the tango and the night has a pulse. The Mercedes, windows down to let in the music from the dance clubs, purrs through the Recoleta district to the Avenida Alvear and disappears into the courtyard of an exquisite Beaux Arts building near the French Embassy

The air is soft and a late supper is laid on the terrace of the top floor, but the servants are gone.

Morale is high among the servants in this house, but there is an iron discipline among them. They are forbidden to enter the top floor of the mansion before noon. Or after service of the first course at dinner.

Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling often talk at dinner in languages other than Starling’s native English. She had college French and Spanish to build on, and she has found she has a good ear. They speak Italian a lot at meal-times;
she finds a curious freedom in the visual nuances of the language.

Sometimes our couple dances at dinnertime. Sometimes they do not finish dinner.

Their relationship has a great deal to do with the penetration of Clarice Starling, which she avidly welcomes and encourages. It has much to do with the envelopment of Hannibal Lecter, far beyond the bounds of his experience. It is possible that Clarice Starling could frighten him. Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day.

Clarice Starling’s memory palace is building as well. It shares some rooms with Dr. Lecter’s own memory palace—he has discovered her in there several times—but her own palace grows on its own. It is full of new things. She can visit her father there. Hannah is at pasture there. Jack Crawford is there, when she chooses to see him bent over his desk—after Crawford was home for a month from the hospital, the chest pains came again in the night. Instead of calling an ambulance and going through it all again, he chose simply to roll over to the solace of his late wife’s side of the bed.

Starling learned of Crawford’s death during one of Dr. Lecter’s regular visits to the FBI public Web site to admire his likeness among the Ten Most Wanted. The picture the Bureau is using of Dr. Lecter remains a comfortable two faces behind.

After Starling read Jack Crawford’s obituary, she walked by herself for most of a day, and she was glad to come home at evening.

A year ago she had one of her own emeralds set in a ring. It is engraved inside with
AM-CS.
Ardelia Mapp received it in an untraceable wrapper with a note.
Dear
Ardelia, I’m fine and better than fine. Don’t look for me. I love you. I’m sorry I scared you. Burn this. Starling
.

Mapp took the ring to the Shenandoah River where Starling used to run. She walked a long way with it clutched in her hand, angry, hot-eyed, ready to throw the ring into the water, imagining it flashing in the air and the small plop. In the end she put it on her finger and shoved her fist in her pocket. Mapp doesn’t cry much. She walked a long way, until she could be quiet. It was dark when she got back to her car.

It is hard to know what Starling remembers of the old life, what she chooses to keep. The drugs that held her in the first days have had no part in their lives for a long time. Nor the long talks with a single light source in the room.

Occasionally, on purpose, Dr. Lecter drops a teacup to shatter on the floor. He is satisfied when it does not gather itself together. For many months now, he has not seen Mischa in his dreams.

Someday perhaps a cup will come together. Or somewhere Starling may hear a crossbow string and come to some unwilled awakening, if indeed she even sleeps.

We’ll withdraw now, while they are dancing on the terrace—the wise Barney has already left town and we must follow his example. For either of them to discover us would be fatal.

We can only learn so much and live.

In trying to understand the structure of Dr. Lecter’s memory palace, I was aided by Frances A. Yates’s remarkable book
The Art of Memory
, as well as Jonathan D. Spence’s
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
.

Robert Pinsky’s translation of
Dante’s Inferno
was a boon and a pleasure to use, as were the annotations of Nicole Pinsky The term “festive skin” is Pinsky’s translation of Dante.

Dr. Lecter’s lecture to the Studiolo owes much to Anthony K. Cassell’s distinguished work of scholarship,
Dante’s Fearful Art of Justice
.

“In the garden of the hurricane’s eye” is John Ciardi’s phrase and the title of one of his poems.

The first lines of poetry Clarice Starling recalls in the asylum are from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,”
Four Quartets
.

My thanks to Pace Barnes for her encouragement, support and wise counsel.

Carole Baron, my publisher, editor and friend, helped me make this a better book.

Athena Varounis and Bill Trible in the United States and Ruggero Perugini in Italy showed me the best and brightest in law enforcement. None of them is a character in this book, nor is any other living person. The wickedness herein I took from my own stock.

Vernon J. Geberth’s excellent textbook
Practical Homicide Investigation
contains the classic example of Mason Verger’s self-destructive behavior.

Niccolo Capponi shared with me his deep knowledge of Florence and its art and allowed Dr. Lecter to use his family palazzo. My thanks also to Robert Held for his scholarship and to Caroline Michahelles for much Florentine insight.

The staff of Carnegie Public Library in Coahoma County, Mississippi, looked up things for years. Thank you.

I owe a lot to Marguerite Schmitt: With one white truffle and the magic in her heart and hands, she introduced us to the wonders of Florence. It is too late to thank Marguerite; in this moment of completion I want to say her name.