Dr. Lecter found the shine of butter sauce on her lip intensely moving.
Krendler sang behind the greens, mostly day-care songs, and he invited requests.
Oblivious to him, Dr. Lecter and Starling discussed Mischa. Starling knew of the doctor’s sister’s fate from their conversations about loss, but now the doctor spoke in a hopeful way about her possible return. It did not seem unreasonable to Starling on this evening that Mischa might return.
She expressed the hope that she might meet Mischa.
“You could never answer the phone in my office. You sound like a cornbread country cunt,” Krendler yelled through the flowers.
“See if I sound like Oliver Twist when I ask for MORE,” Starling replied, releasing in Dr. Lecter glee he could scarcely contain.
A second helping consumed most of the frontal lobe, back nearly to the premotor cortex. Krendler was reduced to irrelevant observations about things in his immediate vision and the tuneless recitation behind the flowers of a lengthy lewd verse called “Shine.”
Absorbed in their talk, Starling and Lecter were no more disturbed than they would have been by the singing of happy birthday at another table in a restaurant, but when Krendler’s volume became intrusive, Dr. Lecter retrieved his crossbow from a corner.
“I want you to listen to the sound of this stringed instrument, Clarice.”
He waited for a moment of silence from Krendler and shot a bolt across the table through the tall flowers.
“That particular frequency of the crossbow string, should you hear it again in any context, means only your complete freedom and peace and self-sufficiency,” Dr. Lecter said.
The feathers and part of the shaft remained on the visible side of the flower arrangement and moved at more or less the pace of a baton directing a heart. Krendler’s voice stopped at once and in a few beats the baton stopped too.
“It’s about a D below middle C?” Starling said.
“Exactly.”
A moment later Krendler made a gargling sound behind the flowers. It was only a spasm in his voice box caused by the increasing acidity of his blood, he being newly dead.
“Let’s have our next course,” the doctor said, “a little sorbet to refresh our palates before the quail. No, no,
don’t get up. Mr. Krendler will help me clear, if you’ll excuse him.”
It was all quickly done. Behind the screen of the flowers, Dr. Lecter simply scraped the plates into Krendler’s skull and stacked them in his lap. He replaced the top of Krendler’s head and, picking up the rope attached to a dolly beneath his chair, towed him away to the kitchen.
There Dr. Lecter rewound his crossbow. Conveniently it used the same battery pack as his autopsy saw.
The quails’ skins were crisp and they were stuffed with foie gras. Dr. Lecter talked about Henry VIII as composer and Starling told him about computer-aided design in engine sounds, the replication of pleasing frequencies.
Dessert would be in the drawing room, Dr. Lecter announced.
CHAPTER
101
A SOUFFLÉ and glasses of Château d’Yquem before the fire in the drawing room, coffee ready on a side table at Starling’s elbow.
Fire dancing in the golden wine, its perfume over the deep tones of the burning log.
They talked about teacups and time, and the rule of disorder.
“And so I came to believe,” Dr. Lecter was saying, “that there had to be a place in the world for Mischa, a prime place vacated for her, and I came to think, Clarice, that the best place in the world was yours.”
The firelight did not plumb the depths of her bodice as satisfactorily as the candlelight had done, but it was wonderful playing on the bones of her face.
She considered a moment. “Let me ask you this, Dr. Lecter. If a prime place in the world is required for Mischa, and I’m not saying it isn’t, what’s the matter with your place? It’s well occupied and I know you would never deny her. She and I could be like sisters. And if, as you say, there’s room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?”
Dr. Lecter seemed pleased, whether with the idea, or with Starling’s resource is impossible to say. Perhaps he felt a vague concern that he had built better than he knew.