Above the constant droning note of dread in Starling’s mind, a warning went off. She felt the skin on her belly quiver as though she had dripped something cold down her front.
Starling took the envelope by the corners and carried it into the kitchen. From her purse, she took the ever-present white evidence-handling gloves. She pressed the envelope on the hard surface of the kitchen table and felt it carefully all over. Though the paper stock was heavy, she would have detected the lump of a watch battery ready to fire a sheet of C-4. She knew she should take it to a fluoroscope. If she opened it she might get in trouble. Trouble. Right. Balls.
She slit the envelope with a kitchen knife and took out the single, silky sheet of paper. She knew at once, before she glanced at the signature, who had written to her.
Dear Clarice
,
I have followed with enthusiasm the course of your disgrace and public shaming. My own never bothered me, except for the inconvenience of being incarcerated, but you may lack perspective
.
In our discussions down in the dungeon, it was apparent to me that your father, the dead night watchman, figures large in your value system. I think your success in
putting an end to Jame Gumb’s career as a couturier pleased you most because you could imagine your father doing it
.
Now you are in bad odour with the FBI. Have you always imagined your father ahead of you there, have you imagined him a section chief or
—
better even than Jack Crawford
—
a DEPUTY DIRECTOR, watching your progress with pride? And now do you see him shamed and crushed by your disgrace? Your failure? The sorry, petty end of a promising career? Do you see yourself doing the menial tasks your mother was reduced to, after the addicts busted a cap on your DADDY? Hmmmm? Will your failure reflect on them, will people forever wrongly believe that your parents were trailer camp tornado bait white trash? Tell me truly, Special Agent Starling
.
Give it a moment before we proceed
.
Now I will show you a quality you have that will help you: You are not blinded by tears, you have the onions to read on
.
Here’s an exercise you might find useful. I want you physically to do this with me:
Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can’t imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights
.
Mapp had inherited her grandmother’s skillet and used it often. It had a glassy black surface that no soap ever touched. Starling put it in front of her on the table.
Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother’s skillet, and it well may be, it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges,
the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love
.
Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is well cured, it’s a black pool, isn’t it? It’s like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not in the bottom, but you loom there, don’t you? The light behind you, there you are in blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire
.
We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It’s all still there. Listen. How did they really sound, and live
—
your struggling parents. The concrete memories, not the imagi that swell your heart
.
Why was your father not a deputy sheriff, in tight with the courthouse crowd? Why did your mother clean motels to keep you, even if she failed to keep you all together until you were grown?
What is your most vivid memory of the kitchen? Not the hospital, the kitchen
.
My mother washing the blood out of my father’s hat.
What is your best memory in the kitchen?
My father peeling oranges with his old pocketknife with the tip broken off, and passing the sections to us.
Your father, Clarice, was a night watchman. Your mother was a chambermaid
.
Was a big federal career your hope or theirs? How much would your father bend to get along in a stale bureaucracy? How many buttocks would he kiss? Did you ever in your life see him toady or fawn?
Have your supervisors demonstrated any values, Clarice? How about your parents, did they demonstrate any? If so, are those values the same?
Look into the honest iron and tell me. Have you failed your dead family? Would they want you to suck up? What was their view on fortitude? You can be as strong as you wish to be
.
You are a warrior, Clarice. The enemy is dead, the baby safe. You are a warrior
.
The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver
.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you
.
Hannibal Lecter
P.S. You still owe me some information, you know. Tell me if you still wake up hearing the lambs. On any Sunday place an ad in the agony column of the national edition of the
Times,
the
International Herald-Tribune,
and the
China Mail.
Address it to A. A. Aaron so it will be first, and sign it Hannah
.
Reading, Starling heard the words in the same voice that had mocked her and pierced her, probed her life and enlightened her in the maximum security ward of the insane asylum, when she had to trade the quick of her life to Hannibal Lecter in exchange for his vital knowledge of Buffalo Bill. The metallic rasp of that seldom-used voice still sounded in her dreams.
There was a new spiderweb in the corner of the kitchen ceiling. Starling stared at it while her thoughts
tumbled. Glad and sorry, sorry and glad. Glad of the help, glad she saw a way to heal. Glad and sorry that Dr. Lecter’s remailing service in Los Angeles must be hiring cheap help—they had used a postal meter this time. Jack Crawford would be delighted with the letter, and so would the postal authorities and the lab.
T
HE CHAMBER
where Mason spends his life is quiet, but it has its own soft pulse, the hiss and sigh of the respirator that finds him breath. It is dark except for the glow of the big aquarium where an exotic eel turns and turns in an endless figure eight, its cast shadow moving like a ribbon over the room.
Mason’s plaited hair lies in a thick coil on the respirator shell covering his chest on the elevated bed. A device of tubes, like panpipes, is suspended before him.
Mason’s long tongue slides out from between his teeth. He scrolls his tongue around the end pipe and puffs with the next pulse of the respirator.
Instantly a voice responds from a speaker on the wall. “Yes, sir.”
“The
Tattler
.” The initial
t
’s are lost, but the voice is deep and resonant, a radio voice.
“Page one has—”
“Don’t read to me. Put it up on the elmo.” The
d
and
m
and the
p
are lost from Mason’s speech.
The large screen of an elevated monitor crackles. Its blue-green glow goes pink as the red masthead of the
Tattler
appears.
“DEATH ANGEL: CLARICE STARLING, THE FBI’S KILLING MACHINE,”
Mason reads, through three slow breaths of his respirator. He can zoom on the pictures.
Only one of his arms is out from under the covers of his bed. He has some movement in the hand. Like a pale spider crab the hand moves, more by the motion of the fingers than the power of his wasted arm. Since Mason cannot turn his head much to see, the index and middle fingers feel ahead like antennae as the thumb, ring and little fingers scuttle the hand along. It finds the remote, where he can zoom and turn the pages.
Mason reads slowly. The goggle over his single eye makes a tiny hiss twice a minute as it sprays moisture on his lidless eyeball, and often fogs the lens. It takes him twenty minutes to get through the main article and the sidebar.
“Put up the X ray,” he said when he had finished.
It took a moment. The large sheet of X ray film required a light table to show up well on the monitor. Here was a human hand, apparently damaged. Here was another exposure, showing the hand and the entire arm. A pointer pasted on the X ray showed an old fracture in the humerus about halfway between the elbow and the shoulder.
Mason looked at it through many breaths. “Put up the letter,” he said at last.
Fine copperplate appeared on the screen, the handwriting absurdly large in magnification.
Dear Clarice
, Mason read,
I have followed with enthusiasm
the course of your disgrace and public shaming…
. The very rhythm of the voice excited in him old thoughts that spun him, spun his bed, spun his room, tore the scabs off his unspeakable dreams, raced his heart ahead of his breath. The machine sensed his excitement and filled his lungs ever faster.
He read it all, at his painful rate, reading over the moving machine, like reading on horseback. Mason could not close his eye, but when he had finished reading, his mind went away from behind his eye for a while to think. The breathing machine slowed down. Then he puffed on his pipe.
“Yes, sir.”
“Punch up Congressman Vellmore. Bring me the headphone. Turn off the speakerphone.
“Clarice Starling,” he said to himself with the next breath the machine permitted him. The name has no plosive sounds and he managed it very well. None of the sounds was lost. While he waited for the telephone, he dozed a moment, the shadow of the eel crawling over his sheet and his face and his coiled hair.
B
UZZARD’S
P
OINT
, the FBI’s field office for Washington and the District of Columbia, is named for a gathering of vultures at a Civil War hospital on the site.
The gathering today is of middle-management officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI to discuss Clarice Starling’s fate.
Starling stood alone on the thick carpet of her boss’s office. She could hear her pulse thump beneath the bandage around her head. Over her pulse she heard the voices of the men, muffled by the frosted-glass door of an adjoining conference room.
The great seal of the FBI with its motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” is rendered handsomely in gold leaf on the glass.
The voices behind the seal rose and fell with some passion; Starling could hear her name when no other word was clear.
The office has a fine view across the yacht basin to
Fort McNair, where the accused Lincoln assassination conspirators were hanged.
Starling flashed on photos she had seen of Mary Surratt, walking past her own casket and mounting the gallows at Fort McNair, standing hooded on the trap, her skirts tied around her legs to prevent immodesty as she dropped through to the loud crunch and the dark
.
Next door, Starling heard the chairs scrape back as the men got to their feet. They were filing into this office now. Some of the faces she recognized. Jesus, there was Noonan, the A/DIC over the whole investigation division.
And there was her nemesis, Paul Krendler from Justice, with his long neck and his round ears set high on his head like the ears of a hyena. Krendler was a climber, the gray eminence at the shoulder of the Inspector General. Since she caught the serial killer Buffalo Bill ahead of him in a celebrated case seven years ago, he had dripped poison into her personnel file at every opportunity, and whispered close to the ears of the Career Board.
None of these men had ever been on the line with her, served a warrant with her, been shot at with her or combed the glass splinters out of their hair with her.
The men did not look at her until they all looked at once, the way a sidling pack turns its attention suddenly on the cripple in the herd.
“Have a chair, Agent Starling.” Her boss, Special Agent Clint Pearsall, rubbed his thick wrist as though his watch hurt him.
Without meeting her eyes, he gestured toward an armchair facing the windows. The chair in an interrogation is not the place of honor.
The seven men remained standing, their silhouettes black against the bright windows. Starling could not see
their faces now, but below the glare, she could see their legs and feet. Five were wearing the thick-soled tasseled loafers favored by country slicksters who have made it to Washington. A pair of Thom McAn wing tips with Corfam soles and some Florsheim wing tips rounded out the seven. A smell in the air of shoe polish warmed by hot feet.
“In case you don’t know everybody, Agent Starling, this is Assistant Director Noonan, I’m sure you know who
he
is; this is John Eldredge from DEA, Bob Sneed, BATF, Benny Holcomb is assistant to the mayor and Larkin Wainwright is an examiner from our Office of Professional Responsibility,” Pearsall said. “Paul Krendler—you know Paul—came over unofficially from the Inspector General’s Office at Justice. Paul’s here as a favor to us, he’s here and he’s not here, just to help us head off trouble, if you follow me.”
Starling knew what the saying was in the service: a federal examiner is someone who arrives at the battlefield after the battle is over and bayonets the wounded.
The heads of some of the silhouettes bobbed in greeting. The men craned their necks and considered the young woman they were gathered over. For a few beats, nobody spoke.
Bob Sneed broke the silence. Starling remembered him as the BATF spin doctor who tried to deodorize the Branch Davidian disaster at Waco. He was a crony of Krendler’s and considered a climber.
“Agent Starling, you’ve seen the coverage in the papers and on television, you’ve been widely identified as the shooter in the death of Evelda Drumgo. Unfortunately, you’ve been sort of demonized.”