Crawford spoke from his own age and isolation when he said, “Have you ever thought that he might like you, Starling?”
“I think I amuse him. Things either amuse him or they don’t. If they don’t …”
“Ever
felt
that he liked you?” Crawford insisted on the distinction between thought and feeling like a Baptist insists on total immersion.
“On really short acquaintance he told me some things
about myself that were true. I think it’s easy to mistake understanding for empathy—we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It’s hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you. When you see understanding just used as a predator’s tool, that’s the worst. I … I have no idea how Dr. Lecter feels about me.”
“What sort of things did he tell you, if you don’t mind.”
“He said I was an ambitious, hustling little rube and my eyes shined like cheap birthstones. He told me I wore cheap shoes, but I had some taste, a little taste.”
“That struck you as true?”
“Yep. Maybe it still is. I’ve improved my shoes.”
“Do you think, Starling, he might have been interested to see if you’d rat him out when he sent you a letter of encouragement?”
“He knew I’d rat him out, he’d better know it.”
“He killed six after the court committed him,” Crawford said. “He killed Miggs in the asylum for throwing semen in your face, and five in his escape. In the present political climate, if the doctor’s caught he’ll get the needle.” Crawford smiled at the thought. He had pioneered the study of serial murder. Now he was facing mandatory retirement and the monster who had tried him the most remained free. The prospect of death for Dr. Lecter pleased him mightily.
Starling knew Crawford mentioned Miggs’s act to goose her attention, to put her back in those terrible days when she was trying to interrogate Hannibal the Cannibal in the dungeon at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Lecter toyed with her while a
girl crouched in Jame Gumb’s pit, waiting to die. Usually Crawford heightened your attention when he was coming to the point, as he did now.
“Did you know, Starling, that one of Dr. Lecter’s early victims is still alive?”
“The rich one. The family offered a reward.”
“Yes, Mason Verger. He’s on a respirator in Maryland. His father died this year and left him the meatpacking fortune. Old Verger also left Mason a U.S. congressman and a member of the House Judiciary Oversight Committee who just couldn’t make ends meet without him. Mason says he’s got something that might help us find the doctor. He wants to speak with you.”
“With
me
.”
“You. That’s what Mason wants and suddenly everyone agrees it’s a really good idea.”
“That’s what Mason wants after you suggested it to him?”
“They were going to throw you away, Starling, clean up with you like you were a rag. You would have been wasted just like John Brigham. Just to save some bureaucrats at BATF. Fear. Pressure. That’s all they understand anymore. I had somebody drop a dime to Mason and tell him how much it would hurt the hunt for Lecter if you got canned. Whatever else happened, who Mason might have called after that, I don’t want to know, probably Representative Vellmore.”
A year ago, Crawford would not have played this way. Starling searched his face for any of the short-timer craziness that sometimes comes over imminent retirees. She didn’t see any, but he did look weary.
“Mason’s not pretty, Starling, and I don’t just mean his
face. Find out what he’s got. Bring it here, we’ll work with it. At last.”
Starling knew that for years, ever since she graduated from the FBI Academy, Crawford had tried to get her assigned to Behavioral Science.
Now that she was a veteran of the Bureau, veteran of many lateral assignments, she could see that her early triumph in catching the serial murderer Jame Gumb was part of her undoing in the Bureau. She was a rising star that stuck on the way up. In the process of catching Gumb, she had made at least one powerful enemy and excited the jealousy of a number of her male contemporaries. That, and a certain cross-grainedness, had led to years of jump-out squads, and reactive squads rolling on bank robberies and years of serving warrants, seeing Newark over a shotgun barrel. Finally, deemed too irascible to work with groups, she was a tech agent, bugging the telephones and cars of gangsters and child pornographers, keeping lonesome vigils over Title Three wiretaps. And she was forever on loan, when a sister agency needed a reliable hand in a raid. She had wiry strength and she was fast and careful with the gun.
Crawford saw this as a chance for her. He assumed she had always wanted to chase Lecter. The truth was more complicated than that.
Crawford was studying her now. “You never got that gunpowder out of your cheek.”
Grains of burnt powder from the revolver of the late Jame Gumb marked her cheekbone with a black spot.
“Never had time,” Starling said.
“Do you know what the French call a beauty spot, a
mouche
like that, high on the cheek? Do you know what
it stands for?” Crawford owned a sizeable library on tattoos, body symbology, ritual mutilation.
Starling shook her head.
“They call that one ’courage,’” Crawford said. “You can wear that one. I’d keep it if I were you.”
T
HERE IS
a witchy beauty about Muskrat Farm, the Verger family’s mansion near the Susquehanna River in northern Maryland. The Verger meatpacking dynasty bought it in the 1930s when they moved east from Chicago to be closer to Washington, and they could well afford it. Business and political acumen has enabled the Vergers to batten on U.S. Army meat contracts since the Civil War.
The “embalmed beef” scandal in the Spanish-American War hardly touched the Vergers. When Upton Sinclair and the muckrakers investigated dangerous packing-plant conditions in Chicago, they found that several Verger employees had been rendered into lard inadvertently, canned and sold as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, a favorite of bakers. The blame did not stick to the Vergers. The matter cost them not a single government contract.
The Vergers avoided these potential embarrassments and many others by giving money to politicians—their
single setback being passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
Today the Vergers slaughter 86,000 cattle a day, and approximately 36,000 pigs, a number that varies slightly with the season.
The new-mown lawns of Muskrat Farm, the riot of its lilacs in the wind, smell nothing at all like the stockyard. The only animals are ponies for the visiting children and amusing flocks of geese grazing on the lawns, their behinds wagging, heads low to the grass. There are no dogs. The house and barn and grounds are near the center of six square miles of national forest, and will remain there in perpetuity under a special exemption granted by the Department of the Interior.
Like many enclaves of the very rich, Muskrat Farm is not easy to find the first time you go. Clarice Starling went one exit too far on the expressway. Coming back along the service road, she first encountered the trade entrance, a big gate secured with chain and padlock in the high fence enclosing the forest. Beyond the gate, a fire road disappeared into the overarching trees. There was no call box. Two miles farther along she found the gatehouse, set back a hundred yards along a handsome drive. The uniformed guard had her name on his clipboard.
An additional two miles of manicured roadway brought her to the farm.
Starling stopped her rumbling Mustang to let a flock of geese cross the drive. She could see a file of children on fat Shetlands leaving a handsome barn a quarter-mile from the house. The main building before her was a Stanford White–designed mansion handsomely set among low hills. The place looked solid and fecund, the province of pleasant dreams. It tugged at Starling.
The Vergers had had sense enough to leave the house as it was, with the exception of a single addition, which Starling could not yet see, a modern wing that sticks out from the eastern elevation like an extra limb attached in a grotesque medical experiment.
Starling parked beneath the central portico. When the engine was off she could hear her own breathing. In the mirror she saw someone coming on a horse. Now hooves clopped on the pavement beside the car as Starling got out.
A broad-shouldered person with short blond hair swung down from the saddle, handed the reins to a valet without looking at him. “Walk him back,” the rider said in a deep scratchy voice. “I’m Margot Verger.” At close inspection she was a woman, holding out her hand, arm extended straight from the shoulder. Clearly Margot Verger was a bodybuilder. Beneath her corded neck, her massive shoulders and arms stretched the mesh of her tennis shirt. Her eyes had a dry glitter and looked irritated, as though she suffered from a shortage of tears. She wore twill riding breeches and boots with no spurs.
“What’s that you’re driving?” she said. “An old Mustang?”
“It’s an ’88.”
“Five-liter? It sort of hunkers down over its wheels.”
“Yes. It’s a Roush Mustang.”
“You like it?”
“A lot.”
“What’ll it do?”
“I don’t know. Enough, I think.”
“Scared of it?”
“Respectful of it. I’d say I use it respectfully,” Starling said.
“Do you know about it, or did you just buy it?”
“I knew enough about it to buy it at a dope auction when I saw what it was. I learned more later.”
“You think it would beat my Porsche?”
“Depends on which Porsche. Ms. Verger, I need to speak with your brother.”
“They’ll have him cleaned up in about five minutes. We can start up there.” The twill riding breeches whistled on Margot Verger’s big thighs as she climbed the stairs. Her cornsilk hair had receded enough to make Starling wonder if she took steroids and had to tape her clitoris down.
To Starling, who spent most of her childhood in a Lutheran orphanage, the house felt like a museum, with its vast spaces and painted beams above her, and walls hung with portraits of important-looking dead people. Chinese cloisonné stood on the landings and long Moroccan runners lined the halls.
There is an abrupt shear in style at the new wing of the Verger mansion. The modern functional structure is reached through frosted glass double doors, incongruous in the vaulted hall.
Margot Verger paused outside the doors. She looked at Starling with her glittery, irritated gaze.
“Some people have trouble talking with Mason,” she said. “If it bothers you, or you can’t take it, I can fill you in later on whatever you forget to ask him.”
There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt. Starling saw it in Margot Verger’s face. All Starling said was “Thank you.”
To Starling’s surprise, the first room in the wing was a large and well-equipped playroom. Two African-American
children played among oversized stuffed animals, one riding a Big Wheel and the other pushing a truck along the floor. A variety of tricycles and wagons were parked in the corners and in the center was a large jungle gym with the floor heavily padded beneath it.
In a corner of the playroom, a tall man in a nurse’s uniform sat on a love seat reading
Vogue
. A number of video cameras were mounted on the walls, some high, others at eye level. One camera high in the corner tracked Starling and Margot Verger, its lens rotating to focus.
Starling was past the point where the sight of a brown child pierced her, but she was keenly aware of these children. Their cheerful industry with the toys was pleasant to see as she and Margot Verger passed through the room.
“Mason likes to watch the kids,” Margot Verger said. “It scares them to see him, all but the littlest ones, so he does it this way. They ride ponies after. They’re day-care kids out of child welfare in Baltimore.”
Mason Verger’s chamber is approached only through his bathroom, a facility worthy of a spa that takes up the entire width of the wing. It is institutional-looking, all steel and chrome and industrial carpet, with wide-doored showers, stainless-steel tubs with lifting devices over them, coiled orange hoses, steam rooms and vast glass cabinets of unguents from the Farmacia di Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The air in the bathroom was still steamy from recent use and the scents of balsam and wintergreen hung in the air.
Starling could see light under the door to Mason Verger’s chamber. It went out as his sister touched the doorknob.
A seating area in the corner of Mason Verger’s chamberwas
severely lit from above. A passable print of William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” hung above the couch—God measuring with his calipers. The picture was draped with black to commemorate the recent passing of the Verger patriarch. The rest of the room was dark.
From the darkness came the sound of a machine working rhythmically, sighing at each stroke.
“Good afternoon, Agent Starling.” A resonant voice mechanically amplified, the fricative
f
lost out of
afternoon
.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Verger,” Starling said into the darkness, the overhead light hot on the top of her head. Afternoon was someplace else. Afternoon did not enter here.
“Have a seat.”
Going to have to do this. Now is good. Now is called for
.
“Mr. Verger, the discussion we’ll have is in the nature of a deposition and I’ll need to tape-record it. Is that all right with you?”
“Sure.” The voice came between the sighs of the machine, the sibilant
s
lost from the word. “Margot, I think you can leave us now.”
Without a look at Starling, Margot Verger left in a whistle of riding pants.
“Mr. Verger, I’d like to attach this microphone to your—clothing or your pillow if you’re comfortable with that, or I’ll call a nurse to do it if you prefer.”
“By all means,” he said, minus the
b
and the
m
. He waited for power from the next mechanical exhalation. “You can do it yourself, Agent Starling. I’m right over here.”