“Anything to say, Dr. Lecter?” came Mason’s deep voice.
The .45 boomed in the enclosure of the barn and Starling’s voice:
“Hands up and freeze. Turn off the motor.”
Piero seemed not to understand.
“Fermate il motore
,” Dr. Lecter said helpfully.
Only the impatient squealing of the pigs now.
She could see one gun, on the hip of the white-haired man wearing the star. Holster with a thumb break.
Put the men on the ground first
.
Cordell slid behind the wheel fast, the van moving, Mason yelling at him. Starling swung with the van, caught the white-haired man’s movement in the corner of her eye, swung back to him as he pulled his gun to kill her, him yelling
“Police
,” and she shot him twice in the chest, a fast double tap.
His .357 shot two feet of fire toward the ground, he went back a half step and to his knees, looking down at himself, his badge tuliped by the fat .45 slug that had passed through it and tumbled sideways through his heart.
Mogli went over backward and lay still.
In the tack room, Tommaso heard the shots. He grabbed the air rifle and climbed to the hayloft, dropped to his knees in the loose hay and crawled toward the side of the hayloft that overlooked the barn.
“Next,” Starling said in a voice she did not know. Do this fast while Mogli’s death still had them. “On the ground,
you
head toward the wall.
You
on the ground, head this way.
This way
.”
“Girati dall’ altra parte
,” Dr. Lecter explained from the forklift.
Carlo looked up at Starling, saw that she would kill
him, and lay still. She cuffed them fast with one hand, their heads in opposite directions, Carlo’s wrist to Piero’s ankle and Piero’s ankle to Carlo’s wrist. All the time the cocked .45 behind one of their ears.
She pulled her boot knife and went around the forklift to the doctor.
“Good evening, Clarice,” he said when he could see her.
“Can you walk, are your legs working?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see all right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to cut you loose. With all due respect, Doctor, if you fuck with me I’ll shoot you dead, here and now. Do you understand that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Do right and you’ll live through this.”
“Spoken like a Protestant.”
She was working all the time. The boot knife was sharp. She found the serrated edge worked fastest on the slick new rope.
His right arm was free.
“I can do the rest if you give me the knife.”
She hesitated. Backed to the length of his arm and gave him the short dagger. “My car’s a couple of hundred yards down the fire road.” She had to watch him and the men on the ground.
He had a leg free. He was working on the other, having to cut each coil separately. Dr. Lecter could not see behind him where Carlo and Piero were lying facedown.
“When you’re loose, don’t try to run. You’ll never make the door. I’ll give you two pairs of cuffs,” Starling said. “There’s two guys cuffed on the ground behind you.
Make ’em crawl to the forklift and cuff them to it so they can’t get a phone. Then cuff yourself.”
“Two?”
he said.
“Watch it, there ought to be three.”
As he spoke the dart from Tommaso’s rifle flew, a silver streak under the floodlights, and quivered in the center of Starling’s back. She spun, instantly dizzy, vision going dark, trying to spot a target, saw the barrel at the edge of the loft and fired, fired, fired, fired. Tommaso rolling back from the edge, splinters stinging him, blue gun smoke rolling up into the lights. She fired once more as her vision failed, reached behind her hip for a magazine even as her knees gave way.
The noise seemed to further animate the pigs and seeing the men in their inviting position on the ground, they squealed and grunted, pressing against the barrier.
Starling pitched forward on her face, the empty pistol bouncing away the breech locked open. Carlo and Piero raised their heads to look and they were scrambling, crawling awkwardly together as a bat crawls, toward Mogli’s body and his pistol and handcuff keys. Sound of Tommaso pumping the tranquilizer rifle in the loft. He had a dart left. He rose now and came to the edge, looking over the barrel, seeking Dr. Lecter on the other side of the forklift.
Here came Tommaso walking along the edge of the loft, there would be no place to hide.
Dr. Lecter lifted Starling in his arms and backed fast toward the Dutch gate, trying to keep the forklift between him and Tommaso, advancing carefully, watching his footing at the edge of the loft. Tommaso fired and the dart, aimed at Lecter’s chest, hit bone in Starling’s shin. Dr. Lecter pulled the bolts on the Dutch gate.
Piero snatched Mogli’s key chain, frantic, Carlo scrambling
for the gun, and in came the pigs in a rush to the meal that was struggling to get up. Carlo managed to fire the .357 once, and a pig collapsed, the others climbing over the dead pig and onto Carlo and Piero, and the body of Mogli. More rushed on through the barn and into the night.
Dr. Lecter, holding Starling, was behind the gate when the pigs rushed through.
Tommaso from the loft could see his brother’s face down in the pack and then it was only a bloody dish. He dropped the rifle in the hay. Dr. Lecter, erect as a dancer and carrying Starling in his arms, came out from behind the gate, walked barefoot out of the barn, through the pigs. Dr. Lecter walked through the sea of tossing backs and blood spray in the barn. A couple of the great swine, one of them the pregnant sow, squared their feet to him, lowered their heads to charge.
When he faced them and they smelled no fear, they trotted back to the easy pickings on the ground.
Dr. Lecter saw no reinforcements coming from the house. Once under the trees of the fire road, he stopped to pull the darts out of Starling and suck the wounds. The needle in her shin had bent on the bone.
Pigs crashed through the brush nearby.
He pulled off Starling’s boots and put them on his own bare feet. They were a little tight. He left the .45 on her ankle so that, carrying her, he could reach it.
Ten minutes later, the guard at the main gatehouse looked up from his newspaper toward a distant sound, a ripping noise like a piston-engined fighter on a strafing run. It was a 5.0-liter Mustang turning 5800 rpm across the interstate overpass.
M
ASON WHINING
and crying to get back in his room, crying as he had when some of the smaller boys and girls fought him at camp and managed to get in a few licks before he could crush them under his weight.
Margot and Cordell took him up in the elevator on his wing and secured him in his bed, hooked up to his permanent sources of power.
Mason was as angry as Margot had ever seen him, the blood vessels pulsing over the exposed bones of his face.
“I better give him something,” Cordell said when they were out in the playroom.
“Not yet. He’s got to think for a little while. Give me the keys to your Honda.”
“Why?”
“Somebody’s got to go down there and see if anybody’s alive. Do you want to go?”
“No, but—”
“I can drive your car into the tack room, the van won’t go through the door, now give me the fucking keys.”
Downstairs now, out in the drive. Tommaso coming across the field from the woods, trotting, looking behind him.
Think, Margot
. She looked at her watch. 8:20.
At midnight, Cordell’s relief would come. There was time to bring men from Washington in the helicopter to clean up
. She drove to Tommaso across the grass.
“I try to catch up them, a pig knock me. He”—Tommaso pantomimed Dr. Lecter carrying Starling—“the woman. They go in the loud car. She have
due”
— he held up two fingers —
“freccette
.” He pointed to his back and leg.
Freccette. Dardi
. Stick ’em. Bam.
“Due freccette
” He pantomimed shooting.
“Darts,” Margot said.
“Darts, maybe too much
narcotico
. She’s maybe dead.”
“Get in,” Margot said. “We’ve got to go see.”
Margot drove into the double side doors, where Starling had entered the barn. Squeals and grunts and tossing bristled backs. Margot drove forward honking and drove the pigs back enough to see there were three human remains, none recognizable anymore.
They drove into the tack room and closed the doors behind them.
Margot considered that Tommaso was the only one left alive who had ever seen her at the barn, not counting Cordell.
This may have occurred to Tommaso too. He stood a cautious distance from her, his dark intelligent eyes on her face. There were tears on his cheeks.
Think, Margot. You don’t want any shit from the Sards. They know on their end that you handle the money. They’ll dime you out in a second
.
Tommaso’s eyes followed her hand as it went into her pocket.
The cell phone. She punched up Sardinia, the Steuben banker at home at two-thirty in the morning. She spoke to him briefly and passed the telephone to Tommaso. He nodded, replied, nodded again and gave her back the phone. The money was his. He scrambled to the loft and got his satchel, along with Dr. Lecter’s overcoat and hat. While he was getting his things, Margot picked up the cattle prod, tested the current and slid it up her sleeve. She took the farrier’s hammer too.
T
OMMASO, DRIVING
Cordell’s car, dropped Margot off at the house. He would leave the Honda in long-term parking at Dulles International Airport. Margot promised him she would bury what was left of Piero and Carlo as well as she could.
There was something he felt he should say to her and he gathered himself and got his English together. “Signorina, the pigs, you must know, the pigs help the
Dottore
. They stand back from him, circle him. They kill my brother, kill Carlo, but they stand back from Dr. Lecter. I think they worship him.” Tommaso crossed himself. “You should not chase him anymore.”
And throughout his long life in Sardinia, Tommaso would tell it that way. By the time Tommaso was in his sixties, he was saying that Dr. Lecter, carrying the woman, had left the barn borne on a drift of pigs.
After the car was gone down the fire road, Margot stood for minutes looking up at Mason’s lighted windows. She saw the shadow of Cordell moving on the
walls as he fussed around Mason, replacing the monitors on her brother’s breath and pulse.
She slipped the handle of the farrier’s hammer down the back of her pants and settled the tail of her jacket over the head.
Cordell was coming out of Mason’s room with some pillows when Margot got off the elevator.
“Cordell, fix him a martini.”
“I don’t know—”
“
I
know. Fix him a martini.”
Cordell put the pillows on the love seat and knelt in front of the bar refrigerator.
“Is there any juice in there?” said Margot, coming close behind him. She swung the farrier’s hammer hard against the base of his skull and heard a popping sound. His head smashed into the refrigerator, rebounded, and he fell over backward off his haunches looking at the ceiling with his eyes open, one pupil dilating, the other not. She turned his head sideways against the floor and came down with the hammer, depressing his temple an inch, and thick blood came out his ears.
She did not feel anything.
Mason heard the door of his room open and he rolled his goggled eye. He had been asleep for a few moments, the lights soft. The eel was also asleep beneath its rock.
Margot’s great frame filled the doorway. She closed the door behind her.
“Hi, Mason.”
“What happened down there? What took you so fucking long?”
“They’re all dead down there, Mason.” Margot came
to his bedside and unclipped the telephone line from Mason’s phone and dropped it on the floor.
“Piero and Carlo and Johnny Mogli are all dead. Dr. Lecter got away and he carried the Starling woman with him.”
Froth appeared between Mason’s teeth as he cursed.
“I sent Tommaso home with his money.”
“You
what????
You fucking idiot bitch, now listen, we’re going to clean this up and start over. We’ve got the weekend. We don’t have to worry about what Starling saw. If Lecter’s got her, she’s good as dead.”
Margot shrugged. “She never saw
me
.”
“Get on the horn to Washington and get four of those bastards up here. Send the helicopter. Show them the backhoe—show them—Cordell! Get in here.” Mason whistled into his panpipes. Margot pushed the pipes aside and leaned over him, so that she could see his face.
“Cordell’s not coming, Mason. Cordell’s dead.”
“What?”
“I killed him in the playroom. Now. Mason, you’re going to give me what you owe me.” She put up the side rails on his bed and, lifting the great coil of his plaited hair, she stripped the cover off his body. His little legs were no bigger around than rolls of cookie dough. His hand, the only extremity he could move, fluttered at the phone. His hard-shell respirator puffed up and down in its regular rhythm.
From her pocket Margot took a nonspermicidal condom and held it up for him to see. From her sleeve she took the cattle prod.
“Remember, Mason, how you used to spit on your cock for lubrication? Think you could work up some spit? No? Maybe I can.”
Mason bellowed when his breath permitted, a series of donkey like brays, but it was over in half a minute, and very successfully too.
“You’re dead, Margot.” It sounded more like “Nargot.”
“Oh, Mason, we all are. Didn’t you know? But these aren’t,” she said, securing her blouse over her warm container. “They’re wiggling. I’ll show you how. I’ll show you how they wiggle—show-and-tell.”
Margot picked up the spiky fish-handling gloves beside the aquarium.
“I could adopt Judy,” Mason said. “She could be my heir, and we could do a trust.”
“We certainly could,” Margot said, lifting a carp out of the holding tank. She brought a chair from the seating area, and standing on it, took the lid off the big aquarium. “But we won’t.”