“Come to think of it, I’m not always home.”
“Here’s some free advice. Use Senator Martin. Let her tell you how grateful she is, let her hand you the markers. Do it soon. Gratitude has a short half-life. You’ll need her one of these days, the way you act.”
“That’s what Ardelia says.”
“Your roomie, Mapp? The Superintendent told me Mapp’s set to cram you for your makeup exams on Monday. She just pulled a point and a half ahead of her archrival, Stringfellow, he tells me.”
“For valedictorian?”
“He’s tough, though, Stringfellow—he’s saying she can’t hold him off.”
“He best bring his lunch.”
In the clutter on Crawford’s desk was the origami chicken Dr. Lecter had folded. Crawford worked the tail up and down. The chicken pecked.
“Lecter’s gone platinum—he’s at the top of everybody’s Most Wanted list,” he said. “Still, he could be out for a while. Off the post, you need some good habits.”
She nodded.
“He’s busy now,” Crawford said, “but when he’s not busy, he’ll entertain himself. We need to be clear on this: You know he’d do it to you, just like he’d do anybody else.”
“I don’t think he’d ever bushwhack me—it’s rude, and he wouldn’t get to ask any questions that way. Sure he’d do it as soon as I bored him.”
“Maintain good habits is all I’m saying. When you go off the post, flag your three-card—no phone queries on your whereabouts without positive ID. I want to put a trace-alert on your telephone, if you don’t mind. It’ll be private unless you push the button.”
“I don’t look for him to come after me, Mr. Crawford.”
“But you heard what I said.”
“I did. I did hear.”
“Take these depositions and look ’em over. Add if you want to. We’ll witness your signatures here when you’re ready. Starling, I’m proud of you. So is Brigham, so is the Director.” It sounded stiff, not like he wanted it to sound.
He went to his office door. She was going away from him, down the deserted hall. He managed to hail her from his berg of grief: “Starling, your father sees you.”
CHAPTER 59
Jame Gumb was news for weeks after he was lowered into his final hole.
Reporters pieced together his history, beginning with the records of Sacramento County:
His mother had been carrying him a month when she failed to place in the Miss Sacramento Contest in 1948. The “Jame” on his birth certificate apparently was a clerical error that no one bothered to correct.
When her acting career failed to materialize, his mother went into an alcoholic decline; Gumb was two when Los Angeles County placed him in a foster home.
At least two scholarly journals explained that this unhappy childhood was the reason he killed women in his basement for their skins. The words crazy and evil do not appear in either article.
The film of the beauty contest that Jame Gumb watched as an adult was real footage of his mother, but the woman in the swimming pool film was not his mother, comparative measurements revealed.
Gumb’s grandparents retrieved him from an unsatisfactory foster home when he was ten, and he killed them two years later.
Tulare Vocational Rehabilitation taught Gumb to be a tailor during his years at the psychiatric hospital. He demonstrated definite aptitude for the work.
Gumb’s employment record is broken and incomplete. Reporters found at least two restaurants where he worked off the books, and he worked sporadically in the clothing business. It has not been proven that he killed during this period, but Benjamin Raspail said he did.
He was working at the curio store where the butterfly ornaments were made when he met Raspail, and he lived off the musician for some time. It was then that Gumb became obsessed with moths and butterflies and the changes they go through.
After Raspail left him, Gumb killed Raspail’s next lover, Klaus, beheaded and partially flayed him.
Later he dropped in on Raspail in the East. Raspail, ever thrilled by bad boys, introduced him to Dr. Lecter.
This was proven in the week after Gumb’s death when the FBI seized from Raspail’s next of kin the tapes of Raspail’s therapy sessions with Dr. Lecter.
Years ago, when Dr. Lecter was declared insane, the therapy-session tapes had been turned over to the families of the victims to be destroyed. But Raspail’s wrangling relatives kept the tapes, hoping to use them to attack Raspail’s will. They had lost interest listening to the early tapes, which are only Raspail’s boring reminiscences of school life. After the news coverage of Jame Gumb, the Raspail family listened to the rest. When the relatives called the lawyer Everett Yow and threatened to use the tapes in a renewed assault on Raspail’s will, Yow called Clarice Starling.
The tapes include the final session, when Lecter killed Raspail. More important, they reveal how much Raspail told Lecter about Jame Gumb:
Raspail told Dr. Lecter that Gumb was obsessed with moths, that he had flayed people in the past, that he had killed Klaus, that he had a job with the Mr. Hide leather-goods company in Calumet City, but was taking money from an old lady in Belvedere, Ohio, who had made linings for Mr. Hide, Inc. One day Gumb would take everything the old lady had, Raspail predicted.
“When Lecter read that the first victim was from Belvedere and she was flayed, he knew who was doing it,” Crawford told Starling as they listened together to the tape. “He’d have given you Gumb and looked like a genius if Chilton had stayed out of it.”
“He hinted to me by writing in the file that the sites were too random,” Starling said. “And in Memphis he asked me if I sew. What did he want to happen?”
“He wanted to amuse himself,” Crawford said. “He’s been amusing himself for a long, long time.”
No tape of Jame Gumb was ever found, and his activities in the years after Raspail’s death were established piecemeal through business correspondence, gas receipts, interviews with boutique owners.
When Mrs. Lippman died on a trip to Florida with Gumb, he inherited everything—the old building with its living quarters and empty storefront and vast basement, and a comfortable amount of money. He stopped working for Mr. Hide, but maintained an apartment in Calumet City for a while, and used the business address to receive packages in the John Grant name. He kept favored customers, and continued to travel to boutiques around the country, as he had for Mr. Hide, measuring for custom garments he made in Belvedere. He used his trips to scout for victims and to dump them when they were used up—the brown van droning for hours on the Interstate with finished leather garments swaying on racks in the back above the rubberized body bag on the floor.
He had the wonderful freedom of the basement. Room to work and play. At first it was only games—hunting young women through the black warren, creating amusing tableaux in remote rooms and sealing them up, opening the doors again only to throw in a little lime.
Fredrica Bimmel began to help Mrs. Lippman in the last year of the old lady’s life. Fredrica was picking up sewing at Mrs. Lippman’s when she met Jame Gumb. Fredrica Bimmel was not the first young woman he killed, but she was the first one he killed for her skin.
Fredrica Bimmel’s letters to Gumb were found among his things.
Starling could hardly read the letters, because of the hope in them, because of the dreadful need in them, because of the endearments from Gumb that were implied in her responses: “Dearest Secret Friend in my Breast, I love you!—I didn’t ever think I’d get to say that, and it is best of all to get to say it back.”
When did he reveal himself? Had she discovered the basement? How did her face look when he changed, how long did he keep her alive?
Worst, Fredrica and Gumb truly were friends to the last; she wrote him a note from the pit.
The tabloids changed Gumb’s nickname to Mr. Hide and, sick because they hadn’t thought of the name themselves, virtually started over with the story.
Safe in t
he heart of Quantico, Starling did not have to deal with the press, but the tabloid press dealt with her.
From Dr. Frederick Chilton, the National Tattler bought the tapes of Starling’s interview with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Tattler expanded on their conversations for their “Bride of Dracula” series and implied that Starling had made frank sexual revelations to Lecter in exchange for information, spurring an offer to Starling from Velvet Talks: The Journal of Telephone Sex.
People magazine did a short, pleasant item on Starling, using yearbook pictures from the University of Virginia and from the Lutheran Home at Bozeman. The best picture was of the horse, Hannah, in her later years, drawing a cart full of children.
Starling cut out the picture of Hannah and put it in her wallet. It was the only thing she saved.
She was healing.
CHAPTER 60
Ardelia Mapp was a great tutor—she could spot a test question in a lecture farther than a leopard can see a limp—but she was not much of a runner. She told Starling it was because she was so weighted with facts.
She had fallen behind Starling on the jogging trail and caught up at the old DC-6 the FBI uses for hijack simulations. It was Sunday morning. They had been on the books for two days, and the pale sun felt good.
“So what did Pilcher say on the phone?” Mapp said, leaning against the landing gear.
“He and his sister have this place on the Chesapeake.”
“Yeah, and?”
“His sister’s there with her kids and dogs and maybe her husband.”
“So?”
“They’re in one end of the house—it’s a big old dump on the water they inherited from his grandmother.”
“Cut to the chase.”
“Pilch has the other end of the house. Next weekend, he wants us to go. Lots of rooms, he says. ‘As many rooms as anybody might need,’ I believe is the way he put it. His sister would call and invite me, he said.”
“No kidding. I didn’t know people did that anymore.”
“He did this nice scenario—no hassles, bundle up and walk on the beach, come in and there’s a fire going, dogs jump all over you with their big sandy paws.”
“Idyllic, umm-humm, big sandy paws, go on.”
“It’s kind of much, considering we’ve never had a date, even. He claims it’s best to sleep with two or three big dogs when it gets really cold. He says they’ve got enough dogs for everybody to have a couple.”
“Pilcher’s setting you up for the old dog-suit trick, you snapped to that didn’t you?”
“He claims to be a good cook. His sister says he is.”
“Oh, she called already.”
“Yep.”
“How’d she sound?”
“Okay. Sounded like she was in the other end of the house.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said, ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ is what I said.”
“Good,” Mapp said. “That’s very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher and smooch him on his face, go wild.”
CHAPTER 61
Down the deep carpet in the corridor of the Marcus Hotel, a room-service waiter trundled a cart.
At the door of suite 91, he stopped and rapped softly on the door with his gloved knuckle. He cocked his head and rapped again to be heard above the music from within—Bach, Two- and Three-Part Inventions, Glenn Gould at the piano.
“Come.”
The gentleman with the bandage across his nose was in a dressing gown, writing at the desk.
“Put it by the windows. May I see the wine?”
The waiter brought it. The gentleman held it under the light of his desk lamp, touched the neck to his cheek.
“Open it, but leave it off the ice,” he said, and wrote a generous tip across the bottom of the bill. “I won’t taste it now.”
He did not want the waiter handing him wine to taste—he found the smell of the man’s watchband objectionable.
Dr. Lecter was in an excellent humor. His week had gone well. His appearance was coming right along, and as soon as a few small discolorations cleared, he could take off his bandages and pose for passport photos.
The actual work he was doing himself—minor injections of silicon in his nose. The silicon gel was not a prescription item, but the hypodermics and the Novocaine were. He got around this difficulty by pinching a prescription off the counter of a busy pharmacy near the hospital. He blanked out the chicken scratches of the legitimate physician with typist’s correction fluid and photocopied the blank prescription form. The first prescription he wrote was a copy of the one he stole, and he returned it to the pharmacy, so nothing was missing.
The palooka effect in his fine features was not pleasing, and he knew the silicon would move around if he wasn’t careful, but the job would do until he got to Rio.
When his hobbies began to absorb him—long before his first arrest—Dr. Lecter had made provisions for a time when he might be a fugitive. In the wall of a vacation cottage on the banks of the Susquehanna River were money and the credentials of another identity, including a passport and the cosmetic aids he’d worn in the passport photos. The passport would have expired by now, but it could be renewed very quickly.
Preferring to be herded through customs with a big tour badge on his chest, he’d already signed up for a ghastly sounding tour called “South American Splendor” that would take him as far as Rio.
He reminded himself to write a check on the late Lloyd Wyman for the hotel bill and get the extra five days’ lead while the check plodded through the bank, rather than sending an Amex charge into the computer.
This evening he was catching up on his correspondence, which he would have to send through a remailing service in London.
First, he sent to Barney a generous tip and a thank-you note for his many courtesies at the asylum.
Next, he dropped a note to Dr. Frederick Chilton in federal protective custody, suggesting that he would be paying Dr. Chilton a visit in the near future. After this visit, he wrote, it would make sense for the hospital to tattoo feeding instructions on Chilton’s forehead to save paperwork.
Last, he poured himself a glass of the excellent Batard-Montrachet and addressed Clarice Starling:
Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?
You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that’s what I’d like.
An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.
I won’t be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.
I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.
Dr. Lecter touched his pen to his lips. He looked out at the night sky and smiled.
I have windows.
Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be again before the year 2000. (I have no intention of telling you the time and how high it is.) But I expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.
Clarice.
Hannibal Lecter
Far to the east, on the Chesapeake shore, Orion stood high in the clear night, above a big old house, and a room where a fire is banked for the night, its light pulsing gently with the wind above the chimneys. On a large bed there are many quilts and on the quilts and under them are several large dogs. Additional mounds beneath the covers may or may not be Noble Pilcher, it is impossible to determine in the ambient light. But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.
In his note of condolence to Jack Crawford, Dr. Lecter quotes from “The Fever” w
ithout troubling to credit John Donne.
Clarice Starling’s memory alters lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” to suit her.
T.H.
ALSO BY THOMAS HARRIS
Black Sunday
Red Dragon
Hannibal
Hannibal Rising
Thomas Harris is the author of Black Sunday, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal Rising, all of which were national bestsellers.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Copyright © 1988 by Yazoo, Inc. Author’s Note © 2013 by Yazoo Fabrications, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
“Cash for Your Trash,” by Fats Waller, © 1942 Warner/Chapell Music, Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Stephen Foster
Cover photograph by Frank Morris
Design by Judith Stagnitto
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover print edition as follows:
Harris, Thomas.
The silence of the lambs / Thomas Harris—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-02282-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-5765-6 (e-book)
1. Lecter, Hannibal (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Fiction. 3. Serial murderers—Fiction. 4. Serial murders—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A6558 S5 1988
813'.54
88018203
e-ISBN 9781429957656
ISBN 978-1-250-04809-7 (trade paperback)
St. Martin’s Griffin books may be purchased for educational, business, or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or write [email protected].
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