T
HE
M
ID-
A
TLANTIC
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, egg-bound, 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-l 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, Donnie 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.
T
HE GYM
at Muskrat Farm is high-tech black and chrome, with the complete Nautilus cycle of machines, free 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
have
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.
I
N
H
ANNIBAL’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
gi
rl’
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. Lecter’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.”