Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

When she replaced her glass on the table beside her, she pushed off her coffee cup and it shattered on the hearth. She did not look down at it.

Dr. Lecter watched the shards, and they were still.

“I don’t think you have to make up your mind right this minute,” Starling said. Her eyes and the cabochons shone in the firelight. A sigh from the fire, the warmth of the fire through her gown, and there came to Starling a passing memory—Dr. Lecter, so long ago, asking Senator Martin if she breast-fed her daughter. A jeweled movement turning in Starling’s unnatural calm: For an instant many windows in her mind aligned and she saw far across her own experience. She said, “Hannibal Lecter, did your mother feed you at her breast?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever feel that you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa? Did you ever feel you were required to give it up for her?”

A beat. “I don’t recall that, Clarice. If I gave it up, I did it gladly.”

Clarice Starling reached her cupped hand into the deep neckline of her gown and freed her breast, quickly peaky in the open air. “You don’t have to give up this one,” she said. Looking always into his eyes, with her trigger finger she took warm Château d’Yquem from her mouth and a thick sweet drop suspended from her nipple like a golden cabochon and trembled with her breathing.

He came swiftly from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, and bent to her coral and cream in the firelight his dark sleek head.

CHAPTER

102

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, three years later:

Barney and Lillian Hersh walked near the Obelisk on the Avenida 9 de Julio in the early evening. Ms. Hersh is a lecturer at London University, on sabbatical. She and Barney met in the anthropology museum in Mexico City. They like each other and have been traveling together two weeks, trying it a day at a time, and it is getting to be more and more fun. They are not getting tired of one another.

They had arrived in Buenos Aires too late in the afternoon to go to the Museo Nacional, where a Vermeer was on loan. Barney’s mission to see every Vermeer in the world amused Lillian Hersh and it did not get in the way of a good time. He had seen a quarter of the Vermeers already, and there were plenty to go.

They were looking for a pleasant café where they could eat outside.

Limousines were backed up at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires’ spectacular opera house. They stopped to watch the opera lovers go in.

Tamerlane was playing with an excellent cast, and a Buenos Aires opening night crowd is worth seeing.

“Barney, you up for the opera? I think you’d like it. I’ll spring.”

It amused him when she used American slang. “If you’ll walk me through it, I’ll spring,” Barney said. “You think they’ll let us in?”

At that moment a Mercedes Maybach, deep blue and silver, whispered up to the curb. A doorman hurried to open the car.

A man, slender and elegant in white tie, got out and handed out a woman. The sight of her raised an admiring murmur in the crowd around the entrance. Her hair was a shapely platinum helmet and she wore a soft sheath of coral frosted with an overlayer of tulle. Emeralds flashed green at her throat. Barney saw her only briefly, through the heads of the crowd, and she and her gentleman were swept inside.

Barney saw the man better. His head was sleek as an otter and his nose had an imperious arch like that of Perón. His carriage made him seem taller than he was.

“Barney? Oh, Barney,” Lillian was saying, “when you come back to yourself, if you ever do, tell me if you’d like to go to the opera. If they’ll let us in in mufti. There, I said it, even if it’s not precisely apt—I’ve always wanted to say I was in mufti.”

When Barney did not ask what mufti was, she glanced at him sidelong. He always asked everything.

“Yes,” Barney said absently. “I’ll spring.” Barney had plenty of money. He was careful with it, but not cheap. Still, the only tickets available were in the rafters among the students.

Anticipating the altitude of his seats, he rented field glasses in the lobby.

The enormous theater is a mix of Italian Renaissance, Greek and French styles, lavish with brass and gilt and red plush. Jewels winked in the crowd like flashbulbs at a ball game.

Lillian explained the plot before the overture began, talking in his ear quietly.

Just before the houselights went down, sweeping the house from the cheap seats, Barney found them, the platinum blond lady and her escort. They had just come through the gold curtains into their ornate box beside the stage. The emeralds at her throat glittered in the brilliant houselights as she took her seat.

Barney had only glimpsed her right profile as she entered the opera. He could see the left one now.

The students around them, veterans of the high-altitude seats, had brought all manner of viewing aids. One student had a powerful spotting scope so long that it disturbed the hair of the person in front of him. Barney traded glasses with him to look at the distant box. It was hard to find the box again in the long tube’s limited field of vision, but when he found it, the couple was startlingly close.