Jame Gumb took three TV dinners from his microwave oven. There were two Hungry Man dinners for himself and one Lean Cuisine for the poodle.
The poodle greedily ate her entrée and the dessert, leaving the vegetable. Jame Gumb left only the bones on his two trays.
He let the little dog out the back door and, clutching his robe closed against the chill, he watched her squat in the narrow strip of light from the doorway.
“You haven’t done Number Two-ooo. All right, I won’t watch.” But he took a sly peek between his fingers. “Oh, super, you little baggage, aren’t you a perfect lady? Come on, let’s go to bed.”
Mr. Gumb liked to go to bed. He did it several times a night. He liked to get up too, and sit in one or another of his many rooms without turning on the light, or work for a little while in the night, when he was hot with something creative.
He started to turn out the kitchen light, but paused, his lips in a judicious spout as he considered the litter of supper. He gathered up the three TV trays and wiped off the table.
A switch at the head of the stairs turned on the lights in the basement. Jame Gumb started down, carrying the trays. The little dog cried in the kitchen and nosed open the door behind him.
“All right, Silly Billy.” He scooped up the poodle and carried her down. She wriggled and nosed at the trays in his other hand. “No you don’t, you’ve had enough.” He put her down and she followed close beside him through the rambling, multilevel basement.
In a basement room directly beneath the kitchen was a well, long dry. Its stone rim, reinforced with modern well rings and cement, rose two feet above the sandy floor. The original wooden safety cover, too heavy for a child to lift, was still in place. There was a trap in the lid big enough to lower a bucket through. The trap was open and Jame Gumb scraped his trays and the dog’s tray into it.
The bones and bits of vegetable winked out of sight into the absolute blackness of the well. The little dog sat up and begged.
“No, no, all gone,” Gumb said. “You’re too fat as it is.”
He climbed the basement stairs, whispering “Fatty Bread, Fatty Bread” to his little dog. He gave no sign if he heard the cry, still fairly strong and sane, that echoed up from the black hole:
“PLEEASE.”
CHAPTER 21
Clarice Starling entered the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at a little after 10:00 P.M. She was alone. Starling had hoped Dr. Frederick Chilton wouldn’t be there, but he was waiting for her in his office.
Chilton wore an English-cut sportcoat in windowpane check. The double vent and skirts gave it a peplum effect, Starling thought. She hoped to God he hadn’t dressed for her.
The room was bare in front of his desk, except for a straight chair screwed to the floor. Starling stood beside it while her greeting hung in the air. She could smell the cold, rank pipes in the rack beside Chilton’s humidor.
Dr. Chilton finished examining his collection of Franklin Mint locomotives and turned to her.
“Would you like a cup of decaf?”
“No, thanks. I’m sorry to interrupt your evening.”
“You’re still trying to find out something about that head business,” Dr. Chilton said.
“Yes. The Baltimore district attorney’s office told me they’d made the arrangements with you, Doctor.”
“Oh yes. I work very closely with the authorities here, Miss Starling. Are you doing an article or a thesis, by the way?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been published in any of the professional journals?”
“No, I never have. This is just an errand the U.S. Attorney’s office asked me to do for Baltimore County Homicide. We left them with an open case and we’re just helping them tidy up the loose ends.” Starling found her distaste for Chilton made the lying easier.
“Are you wired, Miss Starling?”
“Am I—”
“Are you wearing a microphone device to record what Dr. Lecter says? The police term is ‘wired,’ I’m sure you’ve heard it.”
“No.”
Dr. Chilton took a small Pearlcorder from his desk and popped a cassette into it. “Then put this in your purse. I’ll have it transcribed and forward you a copy. You can use it to augment your notes.”
“No, I can’t do that, Dr. Chilton.”
“Why on earth not? The Baltimore authorities have asked me all along for my analysis of anything Lecter says about this Klaus business.”
Get around Chilton if you can, Crawford told her. We can step on him in a minute with a court order, but Lecter will smell it. He can see through Chilton like a CAT scan.
“The U.S. Attorney thought we’d try an informal approach first. If I recorded Dr. Lecter without his knowledge, and he found out, it would really, it would be the end of any kind of working atmosphere we had. I’m sure you’d agree with that.”
“How would he find out?”
He’d read it in the newspaper with everything else you know, you fucking jerk. She didn’t answer. “If this should go anywhere and he has to depose, you’d be the first one to see the material and I’m sure you’d be invited to serve as expert witness. We’re just trying to get a lead out of him now.”
“Do you know why he talks to you, Miss Starling?”
“No, Dr. Chilton.”
He looked at each item in the claque of certificates and diplomas on the walls behind his desk as though he were conducting a poll. Now a slow turn to Starling. “Do you really feel you know what you’re doing?”
“Sure I do.” Lot of “do’s” there. Starling’s legs were shaky from too much exercise. She didn’t want to fight with Chilton. She had to have something left when she got to Lecter.
“What you’re doing is coming into my hospital to conduct an interview and refusing to share information with me.”
“I’m acting on my instructions, Dr. Chilton. I have the U.S. Attorney’s night number here. Now please, either discuss it with him or let me do my job.”
“I’m not a turnkey here, Miss Starling. I don’t come running down here at night just to let people in and out. I had a ticket to Holiday on Ice.”
He realized he’d said a ticket. In that instant Starling saw his life, and he knew it.
She saw his bleak refrigerator, the crumbs on the TV tray where he ate alone, the still piles his things stayed in for months until he moved them—she felt the ache of his whole yellow-smiling Sen-Sen lonesome life—and switchblade-quick she knew not to spare him, not to talk on or look away. She stared into his face, and with the smallest tilt of her head, she gave him her good looks and bored her knowledge in, speared him with it, knowing he couldn’t stand for the conversation to go on.
He sent her with an orderly named Alonzo.
CHAPTER 22
Descending through the asylum with Alonzo toward the final keep, Starling managed to shut out much of the slammings and the screaming, though she felt them shiver the air against her skin. Pressure built on her as though she sank through water, down and down.
The proximity of madmen—the thought of Catherine Martin bound and alone, with one of them snuffling her, patting his pockets for his tools—braced Starling for her job. But she needed more than resolution. She needed to be calm, to be still, to be the keenest instrument. She had to use patience in the face of the awful need to hurry. If Dr. Lecter knew the answer, she’d have to find it down among the tendrils of his thought.
Starling found she thought of Catherine Baker Martin as the child she’d seen in the film on the news, the little girl in the sailboat.
Alonzo pushed the buzzer at the last heavy door.
“Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to be still.”
“Pardon me?” Alonzo said, and Starling realized she had spoken aloud.
He left her with the big orderly who opened the door. As Alonzo turned away, she saw him cross himself.
“Welcome back,” the orderly said, and shot the bolts home behind her.
“Hello, Barney.”
A paperback book was wrapped around Barney’s massive index finger as he held his place. It was Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Starling was set to notice everything.
“How do you want the lights?” he said.
The corridor between the cells was dim. Near the far end she could see bright light from the last cell shining on the corridor floor.
“Dr. Lecter’s awake.”
“At night, always—even when his lights are off.”
“Let’s leave them like they are.”
“Stay in the middle going down, don’t touch the bars, right?”
“I want to shut that TV off.” The television had been moved. It was at the far end, facing up the center of the corridor. Some inmates could see it by leaning their heads against the bars.
“Sure, turn the sound off, but leave the picture if you don’t mind. Some of ’em like to look at it. The chair’s right there if you want it.”
Starling went down the dim corridor alone. She did not look into the cells on either side. Her footfalls seemed loud to her. The only other sounds were wet snoring from one cell, maybe two, and a low chuckle from another.
The late Miggs’ cell had a new occupant. She could see long legs outstretched on the floor, the top of a head resting against the bars. She looked as she passed. A man sat on the cell floor in a litter of shredded construction paper. His face was vacant. The television was reflected in his eyes and a shiny thread of spit connected the corner of his mouth and his shoulder.
She didn’t want to look into Dr. Lecter’s cell until she was sure he had seen her. She passed it, feeling itchy between the shoulders, went to the television and turned off the sound.
Dr. Lecter wore the white asylum pajamas in his white cell. The only colors in the cell were his hair and eyes and his red mouth, in a face so long out of the sun it leached into the surrounding whiteness; his features seemed suspended above the collar of his shirt. He sat at his table behind the nylon net that kept him back from the bars. He was sketching on butcher paper, using his hand for a model. As she watched, he turned his hand over and, flexing his fingers to great tension, drew the inside of the forearm. He used his little finger as a shading stump to modify a charcoal line.
She came a little closer to the bars, and he looked up. For Starling every shadow in the cell flew into his eyes and widow’s peak.
“Good evening, Dr. Lecter.”
The tip of his tongue appeared, with his lips equally red. It touched his upper lip in the exact center and went back in again.
“Clarice.”
She heard the slight metallic rasp beneath his voice and wondered how long it had been since last he spoke. Beats of silence …
“You’re up late for a school night,” he said.
“This is night school,” she said, wishing her voice were stronger. “Yesterday I was in West Virginia—”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, I—”
“You have on a fresh Band-Aid, Clarice.”
Then she remembered. “I got a scrape on the side of the pool, swimming today.” The Band-Aid was out of sight, on her calf beneath her trousers. He must smell it. “I was in West Virginia yesterday. They found a body over there, Buffalo Bill’s latest.”
“Not quite his latest, Clarice.”
“His next-to-latest.”
“Yes.”
“She was scalped. Just as you said she would be.”
“Do you mind if I go on sketching while we talk?”
“No, please.”
“You viewed the remains?”
“Yes.”
“Had you seen his earlier efforts?”
“No. Only pictures.”
“How did you feel?”
“Apprehensive. Then I was busy.”
“And after?”
“Shaken.”
“Could you function all right?” Dr. Lecter rubbed his charcoal on the edge of his butcher paper to refine the point.
“Very well. I functioned very well.”
“For Jack Crawford? Or does he still make house calls?”
“He was there.”
“Indulge me a moment, Clarice. Would you let your head hang forward, just let it hang forward as though you were asleep. A second more. Thank you, I’ve got it now. Have a seat, if you like. You had told Jack Crawford what I said before they found her?”
“Yes. He pretty much pooh-poohed it.”
“And after he saw the body in West Virginia?
“He talked to his main authority, from the University of—”
“Alan Bloom.”
“That’s right. Dr. Bloom said Buffalo Bill was fulfilling a persona the newspapers created, the Buffalo Bill scalp-taking business the tabloids were playing with. Dr. Bloom said anybody could see that was coming.”
“Dr. Bloom saw that coming?”
“He said he did.”
“He saw it coming, but he kept it to himself. I see. What do you think, Clarice?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You have some psychology, some forensics. Where the two flow together you fish, don’t you? Catching anything, Clarice?”
“It’s pretty slow so far.”
“What do your two disciplines tell you about Buffalo Bill?”
“By the book, he’s a sadist.”
“Life’s too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.” Dr. Lecter finished sketching his left hand with his right, switched the charcoal and began to sketch his right with his left, and just as well. “Do you mean Dr. Bloom’s book?”
“Yes.”
“You looked me up in it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How did he describe me?”
“A pure sociopath.”
“Would you say Dr. Bloom is always right?”
“I’m still waiting for the shallowness of affect.”
Dr. Lecter’s smile revealed his small white teeth. “We have experts at every hand, Clarice. Dr. Chilton says Sammie, behind you there, is a hebephrenic schizoid and irretrievably lost. He put Sammie in Miggs’ old cell, because he thinks Sammie’s said bye-bye. Do you know how hebephrenics usually go? Don’t worry, he won’t hear you.”
“They’re the hardest to treat,” she said. “Usually they go into terminal withdrawal and personality disintegration.”
Dr. Lecter took something from between his sheets of butcher paper and put it in the sliding food carrier. Starling pulled it through.
“Only yesterday Sammie sent that across with my supper,” he said.
It was a scrap of construction paper with writing in crayon.
Starling read:
I WAN TOO GO TO JESA
I WAN TOO GO WIV CRIEZ
I CAN GO WIV JESA
EF I AC RELL NIZE
SAMMIE
Starling looked back over her right shoulder. Sammie sat vacant-faced against the wall of his cell, his head leaning against the bars.
“Would you read it aloud? He won’t hear you.”
Starling began. “‘I want to go to Jesus, I want to go with Christ, I can go with Jesus if I act real nice.’”
“No, no. Get a more assertive ‘Pease porridge hot’ quality into it. The meter varies but the intensity is the same.” Lecter clapped time softly, “Pease porridge in the pot nine days old. Intensely, you see. Fervently. ‘I wan to go to Jesa, I wan to go wiv Criez.’”
“I see,” Starling said, putting the paper back in the carrier.
“No, you don’t see anything at all.” Dr. Lecter bounded to his feet, his lithe body suddenly grotesque, bent in a gnomish squat and he was bouncing, clapping time, his voice ringing like sonar, “I wan to go to Jesa—”
Sammie’s voice boomed behind her sudden as a leopard’s cough, louder than a howler monkey, Sammy up and mashing his face into the bars, livid and straining, the cords standing out in his neck:
“I WAN TOO GO TO JESA
I WAN TOO GO WIV CRIEZ
I CAN GO WIV JESA EF I AC RELL NIIIZE.”
Silence. Starling found that she was standing and her folding chair was over backwards. Her papers had spilled from her lap.
“Please,” Dr. Lecter said, erect and graceful as a dancer once again, inviting her to sit. He dropped easily into his seat and rested his chin on his hand. “You don’t see at all,” he said again. “Sammie is intensely religious. He’s simply disappointed because Jesus is so late. May I tell Clarice why you’re here, Sammie?”
Sammie grabbed the lower part of his face and halted its movement.
“Please?” Dr. Lecter said.
“Eaaah,” Sammie said between his fingers.
“Sammie put his mother’s head in the collection plate at the Highway Baptist Church in Trune. They were singing ‘Give of Your Best to the Master’ and it was the nicest thing he had.” Lecter spoke over her shoulder. “Thank you, Sammie. It’s perfectly all right. Watch television.”
The tall man subsided to the floor with his head against the bars, just as before, the images from the television worming on his pupils, three streaks of silver on his face now, spit and tears.
“Now. See if you can apply yourself to his problem and perhaps I’ll apply myself to yours. Quid pro quo. He’s not listening.”
Starling had to bear down hard. “The verse changes from ‘go to Jesus’ to ‘go with Christ,’” she said. “That’s a reasoned sequence: going to, arriving at, going with.”
“Yes. It’s a linear progression. I’m particularly pleased that he knows ‘Jesa’ and ‘Criez’ are the same. That’s progress. The idea of a single Godhead also being a Trinity is hard to reconcile, particularly for Sammie, who’s not positive how many people he is himself. Eldridge Cleaver gives us the parable of the 3-in-One Oil, and we find that useful.”
“He sees a causal relationship between his behavior and his aims, that’s structured thinking,” Starling said. “So is the management of a rhyme. He’s not blunted—he’s crying. You believe he’s a catatonic schizoid?”
“Yes. Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it’s the smell of schizophrenia.”
The Silence of the Lambs Page 13
