Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

“Okay, eight-thirty . . . behind the Smithsonian. There’s a Park-Rite. Leave the car there. Somebody’ll meet you. He’ll listen to his watch, put it to his ear when he gets out of his car, okay?”

“That’s fine.”

“Say, do you change at O’Hare? I could come out—”

“No. Change in Minneapolis.”

“Oh, Molly. Maybe I could come up there and get you when it’s over?”

“That would be very nice.”

Very nice.

“Do you have enough money?”

“The bank’s wiring me some.”

“What?”

“To Barclay’s at the airport. Don’t worry.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Me too, but that’ll be the same as now. Same distance by phone. Willy says hi.”

“Hi to Willy.”

“Be careful, darling.”

She had never called him darling before. He didn’t care for it. He didn’t care for new names; darling, Red Dragon.

The night-duty officer in Washington was glad to make the arrangements for Molly. Graham pressed his face to the cool window and watched sheets of rain whip over the muffled traffic below him, the street leaping from gray to sudden color in the lightning flashes. His face left a print of forehead, nose, lips, and chin on the glass.

Molly was gone.

The day was over and there was only the night to face, and the lipless voice accusing him.

Lounds’s woman held what was left of his hand until it was over.

“Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now . . .”

“I’m sorry too,” Graham said.

Graham filled his glass again and sat at the table by the window, staring at the empty chair across from him. He stared until the space in the opposite chair assumed a man-shape filled with dark and swarming motes, a presence like a shadow on suspended dust. He tried to make the image coalesce, to see a face. It would not move, had no countenance but, faceless, faced him with palpable attention.

“I know it’s tough,” Graham said. He was intensely drunk. “You’ve got to try to stop, just hold off until we find you. If you’ve got to do something, fuck, come after me. I don’t give a shit. It’ll be better after that. They’ve got some things now to help you make it stop. To help you stop wanting to so bad. Help me. Help me a little. Molly’s gone, old Freddy’s dead. It’s you and me now, sport.” He leaned across the table, his hand extended to touch, and the presence was gone.

Graham put his head down on the table, his cheek on his arm. He could see the print of his forehead, nose, mouth, and chin on the window as the lightning flashed behind it; a face with drops crawling through it down the glass. Eyeless. A face full of rain.

Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon.

At times, in the breathing silence of the victims’ houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak.

Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details of their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did.

Graham tried hard to know him. He tried to see him past the blinding glint of slides and vials, beneath the lines of police reports, tried to see his face through the louvers of print. He tried as hard as he knew how.

But to begin to understand the Dragon, to hear the cold drips in his darkness, to watch the world through his red haze, Graham would have had to see things he could never see, and he would have had to fly through time. . . .