Seated now and Barney safely away.
“Dr. Lecter, the Senator has a remarkable offer.”
“I’ll decide that. You spoke to her so soon?”
“Yes. She’s not holding anything back. This is all she’s got, so it’s not a matter for bargaining. This is it, everything, one offer.” She glanced up from her briefcase.
Dr. Lecter, murderer of nine, had his fingers steepled beneath his nose and he was watching her. Behind his eyes was endless night.
“If you help us find Buffalo Bill in time to save Catherine Martin unharmed, you get the following: transfer to the Veteran’s Administration hospital at Oneida Park, New York, to a cell with a view of the woods around the hospital. Maximum security measures still apply. You’ll be asked to help evaluate written psychological tests on some federal inmates, though not necessarily those sharing your own institution. You’ll do the evaluations blind. No identities. You’ll have reasonable access to books.” She glanced up.
Silence can mock.
“The best thing, the remarkable thing: one week a year, you will leave the hospital and go here.” She put a map in the food carrier. Dr. Lecter did not pull it through.
“Plum Island,” she continued. “Every afternoon of that week you can walk on the beach or swim in the ocean with no surveillance closer than seventy-five yards, but it’ll be SWAT surveillance. That’s it.”
“If I decline?”
“Maybe you could hang some café curtains in there. It might help. We don’t have anything to threaten you with, Dr. Lecter. What I’ve got is a way for you to see the daylight.”
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to match stares now. This was not a confrontation.
“Will Catherine Martin come and talk to me—only about her captor—if I decide to publish? Talk exclusively to me?”
“Yes. You can take that as a given.”
“How do you know? Given by whom?”
“I’ll bring her myself.”
“If she’ll come.”
“We’ll have to ask her first, won’t we?”
He pulled the carrier through. “Plum Island.”
“Look off the tip of Long Island, the north finger there.”
“Plum Island. ‘The Plum Island Animal Disease Center. (Federal, hoof and mouth disease research),’ it says. Sounds charming.”
“That’s just part of the island. It has a nice beach and good quarters. The terns nest there in the spring.”
“Terns.” Dr. Lecter sighed. He cocked his head slightly and touched the center of his red lip with his red tongue. “If we talk about this, Clarice, I have to have something on account. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, and you tell me.”
“Go,” Starling said.
She had to wait a full minute before he said, “A caterpillar becomes a pupa in a chrysalis. Then it emerges, comes out of its secret changing room as the beautiful imago. Do you know what an imago is, Clarice?”
“An adult winged insect.”
“But what else?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of the parent buried in the unconscious from infancy and bound with infantile affect. The word comes from the wax portrait busts of their ancestors the ancient Romans carried in funeral processions.… Even the phlegmatic Crawford must see some significance in the insect chrysalis.”
“Nothing to jump on except checking the entomology journals’ subscription lists against known sex offenders in the descriptor index.”
“First, let’s drop Buffalo Bill. It’s a misleading term and has nothing to do with the person you want. For convenience we’ll call him Billy. I’ll give you a precis of what I think. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. He’s making himself a girl suit out of real girls. Hence the large victims—he has to have things that fit. The number of victims suggests he may see it as a series of molts. He’s doing this in a two-story house, did you find out why two stories?”
“For a while he was hanging them on the stairs.”
“Correct.”
“Dr. Lecter, there’s no correlation that I ever saw between transsexualism and violence—transsexuals are passive types, usually.”
“That’s true, Clarice. Sometimes you see a tendency to surgical addiction—cosmetically, transsexuals are hard to satisfy—but that’s about all. Billy’s not a real transsexual. You’re very close, Clarice, to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?”
“No, Dr. Lecter.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind telling me what happened to you after your father’s death.”
Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.
“I don’t imagine the answer’s in your papers, Clarice.”
“My mother kept us together for more than two years.”
“Doing what?”
“Working as a motel maid in the daytime, cooking at a café at night.”
“And then?”
“I went to my mother’s cousin and her husband in Montana.”
“Just you?”
“I was the oldest.”
“The town did nothing for your family?”
“A check for five hundred dollars.”
“Curious there was no insurance. Clarice, you said your father hit the shotgun slide on the door of his pickup.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t have a patrol car?”
“No.”
“It happened at night.”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t he have a pistol?”
“No.”
“Clarice, he was working at night, in a pickup truck, armed only with a shotgun.… Tell me, did he wear a time clock on his belt by any chance? One of those things where they have keys screwed to posts all over town and you have to drive to them and stick them in your clock? So the town fathers know you weren’t asleep. Tell me if he wore one, Clarice.”
“Yes.”
“He was a night watchman, wasn’t he, Clarice, he wasn’t a marshal at all. I’ll know if you lie.”
“The job description said night marshal.”
“What happened to it?”
“What happened to what?”
“The time clock. What happened to it after your father was shot?”
“I don’t remember.”
“If you do remember, will you tell me?”
“Yes. Wait—the mayor came to the hospital and asked my mother for the clock and the badge.” She hadn’t known she knew that. The mayor in his leisure suit and Navy surplus shoes. The cocksucker. “Quid pro quo, Dr. Lecter.”
“Did you think for a second you’d made that up? No, if you’d made it up, it wouldn’t sting. We were talking about transsexuals. You said violence and destructive aberrant behavior are not statistical correlatives of transsexualism. True. Do you remember what we said about anger expressed as lust, and lupus presenting as hives? Billy’s not a transsexual, Clarice, but he thinks he is, he tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.”
“You said that was close to the way we’d catch him.”
“There are three major centers for transsexual surgery: Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and Columbus Medical Center. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s applied for sex reassignment at one or all of them and been denied.”
“On what basis would they reject him, what would show up?”
“You’re very quick, Clarice. The first reason would be criminal record. That disqualifies an applicant, unless the crime is relatively harmless and related to the gender-identity problem. Cross-dressing in public, something like that. If he lied successfully about a serious criminal record, then the personality inventories would get him.”
“How?”
“You have to know how in order to sieve them, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why d
on’t you ask Dr. Bloom?”
“I’d rather ask you.”
“What will you get out of this, Clarice, a promotion and a raise? What are you, a G-9? What do little G-9’s get nowadays?”
“A key to the front door, for one thing. How would he show up on the diagnostics?”
“How did you like Montana, Clarice?”
“Montana’s fine.”
“How did you like your mother’s cousin’s husband?”
“We were different.”
“How were they?”
“Worn out from work.”
“Were there other children?”
“No.”
“Where did you live?”
“On a ranch.”
“A sheep ranch?”
“Sheep and horses.”
“How long were you there?”
“Seven months.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“Where did you go from there?”
“The Lutheran Home in Bozeman.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“You’re hopping around the truth. If you’re tired, we could talk toward the end of the week. I’m rather bored myself. Or had you rather talk now?”
“Now, Dr. Lecter.”
“All right. A child is sent away from her mother to a ranch in Montana. A sheep and horse ranch. Missing the mother, excited by the animals…” Dr. Lecter invited Starling with his open hands.
“It was great. I had my own room with an Indian rug on the floor. They let me ride a horse—they led me around on this horse—she couldn’t see very well. There was something wrong with all the horses. Lame or sick. Some of them had been raised with children and they would, you know, nicker at me in the mornings when I went out to the school bus.”
“But then?”
“I found something strange in the barn. They had a little tack room out there. I thought this thing was some kind of old helmet. When I got it down, it was stamped “W. W. Greener’s Humane Horse Killer.” It was sort of a bell-shaped metal cap and it had a place in the top to chamber a cartridge. Looked like about a .32.”
“Did they feed out slaughter horses on this ranch, Clarice?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Did they kill them at the ranch?”
“The glue and fertilizer ones they did. You can stack six in a truck if they’re dead. The ones for dog food they hauled away alive.”
“The one you rode around the yard?”
“We ran away together.”
“How far did you get?”
“I got about as far as I’m going until you break down the diagnostics for me.”
“Do you know the procedure for testing male applicants for transsexual surgery?”
“No.”
“It may help if you bring me a copy of the regimen from any of the centers, but to begin: the battery of tests usually includes Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, House-Tree-Person, Rorschach, Drawing of Self-Concept, Thematic Apperception, MMPI of course, and a couple of others—the Jenkins, I think, that NYU developed. You need something you can see quickly, don’t you? Don’t you, Clarice?”
“That would be the best, something quick.”
“Let’s see … our hypothesis is we’re looking for a male who will test differently from the way a true transsexual would test. All right—on House-Tree-Person, look for someone who didn’t draw the female figure first. Male transsexuals almost always draw the female first and, typically, they pay a lot of attention to adornments on the females they draw. Their male figures are simple stereotypes—there are some notable exceptions where they draw Mr. America—but not much in between.
“Look for a house drawing without the rosy-future embellishments—no baby carriage outside, no curtains, no flowers in the yard.
“You get two kinds of trees with real transsexuals—flowing, copious willows and castration themes. The trees that are cut off by the edge of the drawing or the edge of the paper, the castration images, are full of life in the drawings of true transsexuals. Flowering and fruitful stumps. That’s an important distinction. They’re very unlike the frightened, dead, mutilated trees you see in drawings by people with mental disturbances. That’s a good one—Billy’s tree will be frightful. Am I going too fast?”
“No, Dr. Lecter.”
“On his drawing of himself, a transsexual will almost never draw himself naked. Don’t be misled by a certain amount of paranoid ideation in the TAT cards—that’s fairly common among transsexual subjects who cross-dress a lot; oftentimes they’ve had bad experiences with the authorities. Shall I summarize?”
“Yes, I’d like a summary.”
“You should try to obtain a list of people rejected from all three gender-reassignment centers. Check first the ones rejected for criminal record—and among those look hard at the burglars. Among those who tried to conceal criminal records, look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence. Possibly internment in childhood. Then go to the tests. You’re looking for a white male, probably under thirty-five and sizable. He’s not a transsexual, Clarice. He just thinks he is, and he’s puzzled and angry because they won’t help him. That’s all I want to say, I think, until I’ve read the case. You will leave it with me.”
“Yes.”
“And the pictures.”
“They’re included.”
“Then you’d better run with what you have, Clarice, and we’ll see how you do.”
“I need to know how you—”
“No. Don’t be grabby or we’ll discuss it next week. Come back when you’ve made some progress. Or not. And Clarice?”
“Yes.”
“Next time you’ll tell me two things. What happened with the horse is one. The other thing I wonder is … how do you manage your rage?”
Alonzo came for her. She held her notes against her chest, walking head bent, trying to hold it all in her mind. Eager for the outside air, she didn’t even glance toward Chilton’s office as she hurried out of the hospital.
Dr. Chilton’s light was on. You could see it under the door.
CHAPTER 26
Far beneath the rusty Baltimore dawn, stirrings in the maximum security ward. Down where it is never dark the tormented sense beginning day as oysters in a barrel open to their lost tide. God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again and the ravers cleared their throats.
Dr. Hannibal Lecter stood stiffly upright at the end of the corridor, his face a foot from the wall. Heavy canvas webbing bound him tightly to a mover’s tall hand truck as though he were a grandfather clock. Beneath the webbing he wore a straitjacket and leg restraints. A hockey mask over his face precluded biting; it was as effective as a mouthpiece, and not so wet for the orderlies to handle.
Behind Dr. Lecter, a small, round-shouldered orderly mopped Lecter’s cage. Barney supervised the thrice-weekly cleaning and searched for contraband at the same time. Moppers tended to hurry, finding it spooky in Dr. Lecter’s quarters. Barney checked behind them. He checked everything and he neglected nothing.
Only Barney supervised the handling of Dr. Lecter, because Barney never forgot what he was dealing with. His two assistants watched taped hockey highlights on television.
Dr. Lecter amused himself—he has extensive internal resources and can entertain himself for years at a time. His thoughts were no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics. He was free in his head.
His inner world has intense colors and smells, and not much sound. In fact, he had to strain a bit to hear the voice of the late Benjamin Raspail. Dr. Lecter was musing on how he would give Jame Gumb to Clarice Starling, and it was useful to remember Raspail. Here was the fat flutist on the last day of his life, lying on Lecter’s therapy couch, telling him about Jame Gumb:
* * *
“Jame had the most atrocious room imaginable in this San Francisco flophouse, sort of aubergine walls with sme
ars of psychedelic Day-Glo here and there from the hippie years, terribly battered everything.
“Jame—you know, it’s actually spelled that way on his birth certificate, that’s where he got it and you have to pronounce it “Jame,’ like ‘name,’ or he gets livid, even though it was a mistake at the hospital—they were hiring cheap help even then that couldn’t even get a name right. It’s even worse today, it’s worth your life to go in a hospital. Anyway, here was Jame sitting on his bed with his head in his hands in that awful room, and he’d been fired from the curio store and he’d done the bad thing again.
“I’d told him I simply couldn’t put up with his behavior, and Klaus had just come into my life, of course. Jame is not really gay, you know, it’s just something he picked up in jail. He’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill, and so angry. You always felt the room was a little emptier when he came in. I mean he killed his grandparents when he was twelve, you’d think a person that volatile would have some presence, wouldn’t you?
“And here he was, no job, he’d done the bad thing again to some luckless bag person. I was gone. He’d gone by the post office and picked up his former employer’s mail, hoping there was something he could sell. And there was a package from Malaysia, or somewhere over there. He eagerly opened it up and it was a suitcase full of dead butterflies, just in there loose.
“His boss sent money to postmasters on all those islands and they sent him boxes and boxes of dead butterflies. He set them in Lucite and made the tackiest ornaments imaginable—and he had the gall to call them objets. The butterflies were useless to Jame and he dug his hands in them, thinking there might be jewelry underneath—sometimes they got bracelets from Bali—and he got butterfly powder on his fingers. Nothing. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands, butterfly colors on his hands and face and he was at the bottom, just as we’ve all been, and he was crying. He heard a little noise and it was a butterfly in the open suitcase. It was struggling out of a cocoon that had been thrown in with the butterflies and it climbed out. There was dust in the air from the butterflies and dust in the sun from the window—you know how terribly vivid it all is when somebody’s describing it to you stoned. He watched it pump up its wings. It was a big one, he said. Green. And he opened the window and it flew away and he felt so light, he said, and he knew what to do.
The Silence of the Lambs Page 15