Starling closed her eyes. “A neighbor came, an older woman, a single lady, and she recited the end of “Thanatopsis” to him. I guess that was all she knew to say. That’s it. We’ve traded.”
“Yes we have. You’ve been very frank, Clarice. I always know. I think it would be quite something to know you in private life.”
“Quid pro quo.”
“In life, was the girl in West Virginia very attractive physically, do you think?”
“She was well-groomed.”
“Don’t waste my time with loyalty.”
“She was heavy.”
“Large?”
“Yes.”
“Shot in the chest.”
“Yes.”
“Flat-chested, I expect.”
“For her size, yes.”
“But big through the hips. Roomy.”
“She was, yes.”
“What else?”
“She had an insect deliberately inserted in her throat—that hasn’t been made public.”
“Was it a butterfly?”
Her breath stopped for a moment. She hoped he didn’t hear it. “It was a moth,” she said. “Please tell me how you anticipated that.”
“Clarice, I’m going to tell you what Buffalo Bill wants Catherine Baker Martin for, and then good night. This is my last word under the current terms. You can tell the Senator what he wants with Catherine and she can come up with a more interesting offer for me … or she can wait until Catherine bobs to the surface and see that I was right.”
“What does he want her for, Dr. Lecter?”
“He wants a vest with tits on it,” Dr. Lecter said.
CHAPTER 23
Catherine Baker Martin lay seventeen feet below the cellar floor. The darkness was loud with her breathing, loud with her heart. Sometimes the fear stood on her chest the way a trapper kills a fox. Sometimes she could think: she knew she was kidnapped, but she didn’t know by whom. She knew she wasn’t dreaming; in the absolute dark she could hear the tiny clicks her eyes made when she blinked.
She was better now than when she first regained consciousness. Much of the awful vertigo was gone, and she knew there was enough air. She could tell down from up and she had some sense of her body’s position.
Her shoulder, hip, and knee hurt from being pressed against the cement floor where she lay. That side was down. Up was the rough futon she had crawled beneath during the last interval of blazing, blinding light. The throbbing in her head had subsided now and her only real pain was in the fingers of her left hand. The ring finger was broken, she knew.
She wore a quilted jumpsuit that was strange to her. It was clean and smelled of fabric softener. The floor was clean too, except for the chicken bones and bits of vegetable her captor had raked into the hole. The only other objects with her were the futon and a plastic sanitation bucket with a thin string tied to the handle. It felt like cotton kitchen string and it led up into the darkness as far as she could reach.
Catherine Martin was free to move around, but there was no place to go. The floor she lay on was oval, about eight by ten feet, with a small drain in the center. It was the bottom of a deep covered pit. The smooth cement walls sloped gently inward as they rose.
Sounds from above now or was it her heart? Sounds from above. Sounds came clearly to her from overhead. The oubliette that held her was in the part of the basement directly beneath the kitchen. Footsteps now across the kitchen floor, and running water. The scratching of dog claws on linoleum. Nothing then until a weak disc of yellow light through the open trap above as the basement lights came on. Then blazing light in the pit, and this time she sat up into the light, the futon across her legs, determined to look around, trying to peer through her fingers as her eyes adjusted, her shadow swaying around her as a flood-lamp lowered into the pit swung on its cord high above.
She flinched as her toilet bucket moved, lifted, swayed upward on its flimsy string, twisting slowly as it rose toward the light. She tried to swallow down her fear, got too much air with it, but managed to speak.