Dr. Lecter raised the tail of his surgical blouse and tucked the sap behind the gardener’s apron he wore beneath.
Up and down the shelves fast, reading labels at lightning speed;
Ambien, amobarbital, Amytal, chloral hydrate, Dalmane, flurazepam, Halcion
, and raking dozens of vials into his pockets. Then he was in the refrigerator, reading
and raking,
midazolam, Noctec, scopolamine, Pentothal, quazepam, solzidem
. In less than forty seconds, Dr. Lecter was back in the hall, closing the dispensary door behind him.
He passed back through the scrub room and checked himself for lumps in the mirrors. Without haste, back through the swinging doors, his ID tag deliberately twisted upside down, mask on and the glasses down over his eyes, binocular lenses raised, pulse seventy-two, exchanging gruff greetings with other doctors. Down in the elevator, down and down, mask still on, looking at a clipboard he had picked up at random.
Visitors coming in might have thought it odd that he wore his surgical mask until he was well down the steps and away from the security cameras. Idlers on the street might have wondered why a doctor would drive such a ratty old truck.
Back in the surgical suite an anesthesiologist, after pecking impatiently on the door of the dispensary, found the pharmacist still unconscious and it was another fifteen minutes before the drugs were missed.
When Dr. Silverman came to, he had slumped to the floor beside the toilet with his pants down. He had no memory of coming into the room and had no idea where he was. He thought he might have had a cerebral event, possibly a strokelet occasioned by the strain of a bowel movement. He was very leery of moving for fear of dislodging a clot. He eased himself along the floor until he could put his hand out into the hall. Examination revealed a mild concussion.
Dr. Lecter made two more stops before he went home. He paused at a mail drop in suburban Baltimore long enough to pick up a package he had ordered on the
Internet from a funeral supply company. It was a tuxedo with the shirt and tie already installed, and the whole split up the back.
All he needed now was the wine, something truly, truly festive. For that he had to go to Annapolis. It would have been nice to have had the Jaguar for the drive.
K
RENDLER WAS
dressed for jogging in the cold and had to unzip his running suit to keep from overheating when Eric Pickford called him at his Georgetown home.
“Eric, go to the cafeteria and call me on a pay phone.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Krendler?”
“Just do what I tell you.”
Krendler pulled off his headband and gloves and dropped them on the piano in his living room. With one finger he pecked out the theme from
Dragnet
until the conversation resumed: “Starling was a techie, Eric. We don’t know how she might have rigged her phones. We’ll keep the government’s business secure.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Starling called me, Mr. Krendler. She wanted her plant and stuff—that stupid weather bird that drinks out of the glass. But she told me something that worked. She said to discount the last digit on the zip codes for the suspect magazine subscriptions if the difference is three or
less. She said Dr. Lecter might use several mail drops that were conveniently close to each other.”
“And?”
“I got a hit that way.
The Journal of Neurophysiology’s
going to one zip code and
Physica Scripta
and
ICARUS
are going to another. They’re about ten miles apart. The subscriptions are in different names, paid with money orders.”
“What’s
ICARUS?”
“It’s the international journal of solar system studies. He was a charter subscriber twenty years ago. The mail drops are in Baltimore. They usually deliver the journals about the tenth of the month. Got one more thing, a minute ago, a sale on a bottle of Château, what is it,
Yuckum
?”
“Yeah, it’s pronounced like EEE-Kim. What about it?”
“High-end wine store in Annapolis. I entered the purchase and it hit on the sensitive dates list Starling put in. The program hit on Starling’s birth year. That’s the year they made this wine, her birth year. Subject paid three hundred twenty-five dollars cash for it and—”
“This was before or after you talked with Starling?”
“Just after, just a minute ago—”
“So she doesn’t know it.”
“No. I should call—”
“Are you saying the merchant called you on a single-bottle purchase?”
“Yes, sir. She’s got notes here, there are only three bottles like that on the East Coast. She’d notified all three. You’ve got to admire it.”
“Who bought it—what did he look like?”
“White male, medium height with a beard. He was bundled up.”
“Has the wine store got a security camera?”
“Yes, sir, that’s the first thing I asked. I said we’d send somebody for the tape. I haven’t done it yet. The wine store clerk hadn’t read the bulletin, but he told the owner because it was such an unusual purchase. Owner ran outside in time to see the subject—he thinks it was the subject—driving away in an old pickup truck. Gray with a vise on the back. If it’s Lecter, you think he’ll try to deliver it to Starling? We better alert her.”
“No,” Krendler said. “Don’t tell her.”
“Can I post the VICAP bulletin board and the Lecter file?”
“No
,” Krendler said, thinking fast. “Have you got a reply from the Questura about Lecter’s computer?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you can’t post VICAP until we can be sure Lecter’s not reading it himself. He could have Pazzi’s access code. Or Starling could be reading it and tipping him some way like she did in Florence.”
“Oh,
right
, I see. Annapolis FO can get the tape.”
“Leave it all strictly to me.”
Pickford dictated the address of the wine store.
“Keep going on the subscriptions,” Krendler instructed. “You can tell Crawford about the subscriptions when he comes back to work. He’ll organize coverage on the mail drops after the tenth.”
Krendler called Mason’s number, and started out running from his Georgetown town house, trotting easily toward Rock Creek Park.
In the gathering gloom only his white Nike headband and his white Nike shoes and the white stripe down the side of his dark Nike running suit were visible, as though there were no man at all among the trademarks.
It was a brisk half-hour run. He heard the blat of helicopter blades just as he came in sight of the landing pad near the zoo. He was able to duck under the turning propeller blades and reach the step without ever breaking stride. The lift of the jet helicopter thrilled him, the city, the lighted monuments falling away as the aircraft took him to the heights he deserved, to Annapolis for the tape and to Mason.
“W
ILL YOU
focus the fucking thing, Cordell?” In Mason’s deep radio voice, with its lipless consonants, “focus” and “fucking” sounded more like “hocus” and “hucking.”
Krendler stood beside Mason in the dark part of the room, the better to see the elevated monitor. In the heat of Mason’s room he had his yuppie running suit pulled down to his waist and the sleeves tied around him, exposing his Princeton T-shirt. His headband and shoes gleamed in the light from the aquarium.
In Margot’s opinion Krendler had the shoulders of a chicken. They had barely acknowledged one another when he arrived.
There was no tape or time counter on the liquor store security camera and Christmas business was brisk. Cordell was pushing fast-forward from customer to customer through a lot of purchases. Mason passed the time by being unpleasant.
“What did you say when you went in the liquor store
in your running suit and flashed the tin, Krendler? You say you were in the Special Olympics?” Mason was much less respectful since Krendler had been depositing the checks.
Krendler could not be insulted when his interests were at stake. “I said I was undercover. What kind of coverage have you got on Starling now?”
“Margot, tell him.” Mason seemed to want to save his own scarce breath for insults.
“We brought in twelve men from our security in Chicago. They’re in Washington. Three teams, one member of each is deputized in the state of Illinois. If the police catch them grabbing Dr. Lecter, they say they recognized him and it’s a citizen’s arrest and blah blah. The team that catches turns him over to Carlo. They go back to Chicago and that’s all they know.”
The tape was running.
“Wait a minute—Cordell, back it up thirty seconds,” Mason said. “Look at this.”
The liquor store camera covered the area from the front door to the cash register.
In the silent videotape’s fuzzy image, a man came in wearing a billed cap, a lumber jacket and mittens. He had full whiskers and wore sunglasses. He turned his back to the camera and carefully closed the door behind him.
It took a moment for the shopper to explain to the clerk what he wanted and he followed the man out of sight into the wine racks.
Three minutes dragged by. At last they came back into camera range. The clerk wiped dust off the bottle and wrapped padding around it before he put it into a bag. The customer pulled off only his right mitten and paid in
cash. The clerk’s mouth moved as he said “thank you” to the man’s back as he was leaving.
A pause of a few seconds, and the clerk called to someone off camera. A heavyset man came into the picture and hurried out the door.
“That’s the owner, guy who saw the truck,” Krendler said.
“Cordell, can you copy off this tape and enlarge the customer’s head?”
“Take a second, Mr. Verger. It’ll be fuzzy.”
“Do it.”
“He kept the left mitten on,” Mason said. “I may have gotten screwed on that X ray I bought.”
“Pazzi said he got his hand fixed, didn’t he? Had the extra finger off,” Krendler said.
“Pazzi might have had his finger up his butt, I don’t know who to believe. You’ve seen him, Margot, what do you think? Was that Lecter?”
“It’s been eighteen years,” Margot said. “I just had three sessions with him and he always just stood up behind his desk when I came in, he didn’t walk around. He was really still. I remember his voice more than anything else.”
Cordell’s voice on the intercom. “Mr. Verger, Carlo is here.”
Carlo smelled of the pigs and more. He came into the room holding his hat over his chest and the rank boar-sausage smell of his head made Krendler blow air out his nose. As a mark of respect, the Sardinian kidnapper withdrew all the way into his mouth the stag’s tooth he was chewing
“Carlo, look at this. Cordell, roll it back and walk him in from the door again.”
“That’s the
¡tronzo
son of a bitch,” Carlo said before the subject on the screen had walked four paces. “The beard is new, but that’s the way he moves.”
“You saw his hands in
Firenze
, Carlo.”
“Sì.”
“Five fingers or six on the left?”
“…. Five.”
“You hesitated.”
“Only to think of
cinque
in English. It’s five, I’m sure.”
Mason parted his exposed teeth in all he had for a smile. “I love it. He’s wearing the mitten trying to keep the six fingers in his description,” he said.
Perhaps Carlo’s scent had entered the aquarium via the aeration pump. The eel came out to see, and remained out, turning, turning in his infinite Möbius eight, showing his teeth as he breathed.
“Carlo, I think we may finish this soon,” Mason said. “You and Piero and Tommaso are my first team. I’ve got confidence in you, even though he did beat you in Florence. I want you to keep Clarice Starling under surveillance for the day before her birthday, the day itself, and the day after. You’ll be relieved while she’s asleep in her house. I’ll give you a driver and the van.”
“Padrone
,” Carlo said.
“Yes.”
“I want some private time with the
dottore
, for the sake of my brother, Matteo. You said I could have it.” Carlo crossed himself as he mentioned the dead man’s name.
“I understand your feelings completely, Carlo. You have my deepest sympathy. Carlo, I want Dr. Lecter consumed in two sittings. The first evening, I want the pigs to gnaw off his feet, with him watching through the bars. I want him in good shape for that. You bring him
to me in good shape. No blows to the head, no broken bones, no eye damage. Then he can wait overnight without his feet, for the pigs to finish him the next day. I’ll talk to him for a while, and then you can have him for an hour before the final sitting. I’ll ask you to leave him an eye and leave him conscious so he can see them coming. I want him to see their faces when they eat his face. If you, say, should decide to unman him, it’s entirely up to you, but I want Cordell there to manage the bleeding. I want film.”
“What if he bleeds to death the first time in the pen?”
“He won’t. Nor will he die overnight. What he’ll do overnight is wait with his feet eaten off. Cordell will see to that and replace his body fluids, I expect he’ll be on an IV drip all night, maybe two drips.”
“Or four drips if we have to,” said Cordell’s disembodied voice on the speakers. “I can do cut-downs on his legs.”
“You can spit and piss in his IV at the last, before you roll him into the pen,” Mason told Carlo in his most sympathetic voice. “Or you can come in it if you like.”
Carlo’s face brightened at the thought, then he remembered the muscular
signorina
with a guilty sideways glance.
“Grazie milk, Padrone
. Can you come to see him die?”
“I don’t know, Carlo. The dust in the barn disturbs me. I may watch on video. Can you bring a pig to me? I want to put my hand on one.”
“To this room,
Padrone?”
“No, they can bring me downstairs briefly, on the power pack.”
“I would have to put one to sleep,
Padrone
,” Carlo said doubtfully.
“Do one of the sows. Bring her on the lawn outside the elevator. You can run the forklift over the grass.”