“I saw him outside,” Starling said. “We were working on this in Baltimore earlier today. Is this where I log in, Sergeant Tate?”

The sergeant briefly checked a molar with his tongue. “Right there,” he said. “Detention rules, miss. Visitors check weapons, cops or not.”

Starling nodded. She dumped the cartridges from her revolver, the sergeant glad to watch her hands move on the gun. She gave it to him butt first, and he locked it in his drawer.

“Vernon, take her up.” He dialed three digits and spoke her name into the phone.

The elevator, an addition from the 1920s, creaked up to the top floor. It opened onto a stair landing and a short corridor.

“Right straight across, ma’am,” the trooper said.

Painted on the frosted glass of the door was SHELBY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

Almost all the top floor of the tower was one octagonal room painted white, with a floor and moldings of polished oak. It smelled of wax and library paste. With its few furnishings, the room had a spare, Congregational feeling. It looked better now than it ever had as a bailiff’s office.

Two men in the uniform of the Tennessee Department of Corrections were on duty. The small one stood up at his desk when Starling came in. The bigger one sat in a folding chair at the far end of the room, facing the door of a cell. He was the suicide watch.

“You’re authorized to talk with the prisoner, ma’am?” the officer at the desk said. His nameplate read PEMBRY, T.W. and his desk set included a telephone, two riot batons, and Chemical Mace. A long pinion stood in the corner behind him.

“Yes, I am,” Starling said. “I’ve questioned him before.”

“You know the rules? Don’t pass the barrier.”

“Absolutely.”

The only color in the room was the police traffic barrier, a brightly striped sawhorse in orange and yellow mounted with round yellow flashers, now turned off. It stood on the polished floor five feet in front of the cell door. On a coat tree nearby hung the doctor’s things—the hockey mask and something Starling had never seen before, a Kansas gallows vest. Made of heavy leather, with double-locking wrist shackles at the waist and buckles in the back, it may be the most infallible restraint garment in the world. The mask and the black vest suspended by its nape from the coat tree made a disturbing composition against the white wall.

Starling could see Dr. Lecter as she approached the cell. He was reading at a small table bolted to the floor. His back was to the door. He had a number of books and the copy of the running file on Buffalo Bill she had given him in Baltimore. A small cassette player was chained to the table leg. How strange to see him outside the asylum.

Starling had seen cells like this before, as a child. They were prefabricated by a St. Louis company around the turn of the century, and no one has ever built them better—a tempered steel modular cage that turns any room into a cell. The floor was sheet steel laid over bars, and the walls and ceiling of cold-forged bars completely lined the room. There was no window. The cell was spotlessly white and brightly lit. A flimsy paper screen stood in front of the toilet.

These white bars ribbed the walls. Dr. Lecter had a sleek dark head.

He’s a cemetery mink. He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.

She blinked it away.

“Good morning, Clarice,” he said without turning around. He finished his page, marked his place and spun in his chair to face her, his forearms on the chair back, his chin resting on them. “Dumas tells us that the addition of a crow to bouillon in the fall, when the crow has fattened on juniper berries, greatly improves the color and flavor of stock. How do you like it in the soup, Clarice?”

“I thought you might want your drawings, the stuff from your cell, just until you get your view.”

“How thoughtful. Dr. Chilton’s euphoric about you and Jack Crawford being put off the case. Or did they send you in for one last wheedle?”

The officer on suicide watch had strolled back to talk to Officer Pembry at the desk. Starling hoped they couldn’t hear.

“They didn’t send me. I just came.”

“People will say we’re in love. Don’t you want to ask about Billy Rubin, Clarice?”

“Dr. Lecter, without in any way … impugning what you’ve told Senator Martin, would you advise me to go on with your idea about—”

“Impugning—I love it. I wouldn’t advise you at all. You tried to fool me, Clarice. Do you think I’m playing with these people?”

“I think you were telling me the truth.”

“Pity you tried to fool me, isn’t it?” Dr. Lecter’s face sank behind his arms until only his eyes were visible. “Pity Catherine Martin won’t ever see the sun again. The sun’s a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.”

“Pity you have to pander now and lick a few tears when you can,” Starling said. “It’s a pity we didn’t get to finish what we were talking about. Your idea of the imago, the structure of it, had a kind of … elegance that’s hard to get away from. Now it’s like a ruin, half an arch standing there.”

Tags: Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter Horror
Source: readsnovelonline.net