Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

“Do you remember any X rays in it? Were X rays filed with the medical reports or separate?”

“With. Filed with. They were bigger than the files and that made it clumsy. We had an X ray but no full-time radiologist to keep a separate file. I honestly don’t remember if there was one with his or not. There was an electrocardiogram tape Fred used to show to people, Dr. Lecter—I don’t even want to call him a doctor—was all wired up to the electrocardiograph when he got the poor nurse. See, it was freakish—his pulse rate didn’t even go up much when he attacked her. He got a separated shoulder when all the orderlies, you know, grabbed aholt of him and pulled him off of her. They’d of had to X-ray him for that. They’d have give him plenty more than a separated shoulder if I’d had something to say about it.”

“If anything occurs to you, any place the file might be, would you call me?”

“We’ll do what we call a global search?” Ms. Corey said, savoring the term, “but I don’t think we’ll find anything. A lot of stuff just got abandoned, not by us, but by the methadone people.”

The coffee mugs had the thick rims that dribble down the sides. Starling watched Inelle Corey walk heavily away like hell’s own option and drank half a cup with her napkin tucked under her chin.

Starling was coming back to herself a little. She knew she was weary of something. Maybe it was tackiness, worse than tackiness, stylelessness maybe. An indifference to things that please the eye. Maybe she was hungry for some style. Even snuff-queen style was better than nothing, it was a statement, whether you wanted to hear it or not.

Starling examined herself for snobbism and decided she had damn little to be snobbish about. Then, thinking of style, she thought of Evelda Drumgo, who had plenty of it. With the thought, Starling wanted badly to get outside herself again.

CHAPTER

11

AND SO, Starling returned to the place where it all began for her, the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, now defunct. The old brown building, house of pain, is chained and barred, marked with graffiti and awaiting the wrecking ball.

It had been going downhill for years before the disappearance on vacation of its director, Dr. Frederick Chilton. Subsequent revelations of waste and mismanagement and the decrepitude of the building itself soon caused the legislature to choke off its funds. Some patients were moved to other state institutions, some were dead and a few wandered the streets of Baltimore as Thorazine zombies in an ill-conceived outpatient program that got more than one of them frozen to death.

Waiting in front of the old building, Clarice Starling realized she had exhausted the other possibilities first because she did not want to go in this place again.

The caretaker was forty-five minutes late. He was a stocky older man with a built-up shoe that clopped, and an eastern European haircut that may have been done at home. He wheezed as he led her to a side door, a few steps down from the sidewalk. The lock had been punched out by scavengers and the door secured with a chain and two padlocks. There were fuzzy webs in the links of the chain. Grass growing in the cracks of the steps tickled Starling’s ankles as the caretaker fumbled with his keys. The late afternoon was overcast, the light grainy and without shadows.

“I am not knowing this building well, I just check the fire alarums,” the man said.

“Do you know if any papers are stored here? Any filing cabinets, any records?”

He shrugged. “After the hospital, they had the methadone clinic here, a few months. They put everything in the basement, some bads, some linens, I don’t know what it was. It’s bed in there for my asthma, the mold, very bed mold. The mattresses on the bads were moldy, bed mold on the bads. I kint breed in dere. The stairs are hal on my leck. I would show you, but—?”

Starling would have been glad of some company, even his, but he would slow her down. “No, go on. Where’s your office?”

“Down the block there where the driver’s license bureau was before.”

“If I’m not back in an hour—”

He looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to be off in a half hour.”

That’s just about E goddamned nuff. “What you’re going to do for me, sir, is wait for your keys in your office. If I’m not back in an hour, call this number here on the card and show them where I went. If you aren’t there when I come out—if you have closed up and gone home, I will personally go to see your supervisor in the morning to report you. In addition—in addition you will be audited by the Internal Revenue Service and your situation reviewed by the Bureau of Immigration and … and Naturalization. Do you understand? I’d appreciate a reply, sir.”

“I would have waited for you, of course. You don’t have to say these things.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Starling said.

The caretaker put his big hands on the railing to pull himself up to sidewalk level and Starling heard his uneven gait trail off to silence. She pushed open the door and went in to a landing on the fire stairs. High, barred windows in the stairwell admitted the gray light. She debated whether to lock the door behind her and settled on tying the chain in a knot inside the door so she could open it if she lost the key.

On Starling’s previous trips to the asylum, to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, she came through the front entrance and now it took her a moment to orient herself.

She climbed the fire stairs to the main floor. The frosted windows further cut the failing daylight and the room was in semidarkness. With her heavy flashlight, Starling found a switch and turned on the overhead light, three bulbs still burning in a broken fixture. The raw ends of the telephone wires lay on top of the receptionist’s desk.

Vandals with spray cans of paint had been in the building. An eight-foot phallus and testicles decorated the reception room wall, along with the inscription FARON MAMA JERK ME OF.

The door to the director’s office was open. Starling stood in the doorway. It was here she came on her first FBI assignment, when she was still a trainee, still believed everything, still thought that if you could do the job, if you could cut it, you would be accepted, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin or whether or not you were a good old boy Of all this, there remained to her one article of faith. She believed that she could cut it.

Here Hospital Director Chilton had offered his greasy hand, and come on to her. Here he had traded secrets and eavesdropped and, believing he was as smart as Hannibal Lecter, had made the decisions that allowed Lecter to escape with so much bloodshed.

Chilton’s desk remained in the office, but there was no chair, it being small enough to steal. The drawers were empty except for a crushed Alka-Seltzer. Two filing cabinets remained in the office. They had simple locks and former technical agent Starling had them open in less than a minute. A desiccated sandwich in a paper bag and some office forms for the methadone clinic were in a bottom drawer, along with breath freshener and a tube of hair tonic, a comb and some condoms.