The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris

  Today it looked like a medieval stronghold surrounded by police.

  A mix of law-enforcement cruisers—highway patrol, Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Corrections—crowded the parking lot. There was a police post to pass before Starling even could get in to park her rented car.

  Dr. Lecter presented an additional security problem from outside. Threatening calls had been coming in ever since the midmorning newscasts reported his whereabouts; his victims had many friends and relatives who would love to see him dead.

  Starling hoped the resident FBI agent, Copley, wasn’t here. She didn’t want to get him in trouble.

  She saw the back of Chilton’s head in a knot of reporters on the grass beside the main steps. There were two television minicams in the crowd. Starling wished her head were covered. She turned her face away as she approached the entrance to the tower.

  A state trooper stationed in front of the door examined her ID card before she could go into the foyer. The foyer of the tower looked like a guardroom now. A city policeman was stationed at the single tower elevator, and another at the stairs. State troopers, the relief for the patrol units stationed around the building, read the Commercial Appeal on the couches where the public could not see them.

  A sergeant manned the desk opposite the elevator. His name tag said TATE, C.L.

  “No press,” Sergeant Tate said when he saw Starling.

  “No,” she said.

  “You with the Attorney General’s people?” he said when he looked at her card.

  “Deputy Assistant Attorney General Krendler,” she said. “I just left him.”

  He nodded. “We’ve had every kind of cop in West Tennessee in here wanting to look at Dr. Lecter. Don’t see something like that very often, thank God. You’ll need to talk to Dr. Chilton before you go up.”

  “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.”

  “Half an arch won’t stand. Speaking of arches, will they still let you pound a beat, Clarice? Did they take your badge?”

  “No.”

  “What’s that under your jacket, a watchman’s clock just like Dad’s?”

  “No, that’s a speedloader.”

  “So you go around armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should let your jacket out. Do you sew at all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you make that costume?”

  “No. Dr. Lecter, you find out everything. You couldn’t have talked intimately with this ‘Billy Rubin’ and come out knowing so little about him.”

  “You think not?”

  “If you met him, you know everything. But today you happened to remember just one detail. He’d had elephant ivory anthrax. You should have seen them jump when Atlanta said it’s a disease of knifemakers. They ate it up, just like you knew they would. You should have gotten a suite at the Peabody for that. Dr. Lecter, if you met him you know about him. I think maybe you didn�
�t meet him and Raspail told you about him. Secondhand stuff wouldn’t sell as well to Senator Martin, would it?”

  Starling took a quick look over her shoulder. One of the officers was showing the other something in Guns & Ammo magazine. “You had more to tell me in Baltimore, Dr. Lecter. I believe that stuff was valid. Tell me the rest.”

  “I’ve read the cases, Clarice, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there, if you’re paying attention. Even Inspector Emeritus Crawford should have figured it out. Incidentally, did you read Crawford’s stupefying speech last year to the National Police Academy? Spouting Marcus Aurelius on duty and honor and fortitude—we’ll see what kind of a Stoic Crawford is when Bella bites the big one. He copies his philosophy out of Bartlett’s Familiar, I think. If he understood Marcus Aurelius, he might solve his case.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice. The Emperor counsels simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “What does he do, the man you want?”

  “He kills—”

  “Ah—” he said sharply, averting his face for a moment from her wrongheadedness. “That’s incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?”

  “Anger, social resentment, sexual frus—”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It’s his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer.”

  “No. We just—”

  “No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over you every day, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don’t your eyes move over things?”

  “All right, then tell me how—”

  “It’s your turn to tell me, Clarice. You don’t have any beach vacations at the Hoof and Mouth Disease Station to offer me anymore. It’s strictly quid pro quo from here on out. I have to be careful doing business with you. Tell me, Clarice.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “The two things you owe me from before. What happened to you and the horse, and what you do with your anger.”

  “Dr. Lecter, when there’s time I’ll—”

  “We don’t reckon time the same way, Clarice. This is all the time you’ll ever have.”

  “Later, listen, I’ll—”

  “I’ll listen now. Two years after your father’s death, your mother sent you to live with her cousin and her husband on a ranch in Montana. You were ten years old. You discovered they fed out slaughter horses. You ran away with a horse that couldn’t see very well. And?”

  “—It was summer and we could sleep out. We got as far as Bozeman by a back road.”

  “Did the horse have a name?”

  “Probably, but they don’t—you don’t find that out when you’re feeding out slaughter horses. I called her Hannah, that seemed like a good name.”

  “Were you leading her or riding?”

  “Some of both. I had to lead her up beside a fence to climb on.”

  “You rode and walked to Bozeman.”

  “There was a livery stable, dude ranch, riding academy sort of thing just outside of town. I tried to see about them keeping her. It was twenty dollars a week in the corral. More for a stall. They could tell right off she couldn’t see. I said okay, I’ll lead her around. Little kids can sit on her and I’ll lead her around while their parents are, you know, regular riding. I can stay right here and muck out stalls. One of them, the man, agreed to everything I said while his wife called the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff was a policeman, like your father.”

  “That didn’t keep me from being scared of him, at first. He had a big red face. The sheriff finally put up twenty dollars for a week’s board while he ‘straightened things out.’ He said there was no use going for the stall in warm weather. The papers picked it up. There was a flap. My mother’s cousin agreed to let me go. I wound up going to the Lutheran Home in Bozeman.”

  “It’s an orphanage?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Hannah?”

  “She went too. A big Lutheran rancher put up the hay. They already had a barn at the orphanage. We plowed the garden with her. You had to watch where she was going, though. She’d walk through the butterbean trellises and step on any kind of plant that was too short for her to feel it against her legs. And we led her around pulling kids in a cart.”

  “She died though.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “It was last year, they wrote me at school. They think she was about twenty-two. Pulled a cart full of kids the last day she lived, and died in her sleep.”

  Dr. Lecter seemed disappointed. “How heartwarming,” he said. “Did your foster father in Montana fuck you, Clarice?”

  “No.”

  “Did he try?”

  “No.”

  “What made you run away with the horse?”

  “They were going to kill her.”

  “Did you know when?”

  “Not exactly. I worried about it all the time. She was getting pretty fat.”

  “What triggered you then? What set you off on that particular day?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “I had worried about it all the time.”

  “What set you off, Clarice? You started what time?”

  “Early. Still dark.”

  “Then something woke you. What woke you up? Did you dream? What was it?”

  “I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were screaming.”

  “They were slaughtering the spring lambs?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I couldn’t do anything for them. I was just a—”

  “What did you do with the horse?”

  “I got dressed without turning on the light and went outside. She was scared. All the horses in the pen were scared and milling around. I blew in her nose and she knew it was me. Finally she’d put her nose in my hand. The lights were on in the barn and in the shed by the sheep pen. Bare bulbs, big shadows. The refrigerator truck had come and it was idling, roaring. I led her away.”

  “Did you saddle her?”

  “No. I didn’t take their saddle. Just a rope hackamore was all.”

  “As you went off in the dark, could you hear the lambs back where the lights were?”

  “Not long. There weren’t but twelve.”

  “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the iron dark with the lambs screaming?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming? Clarice?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Thank you, Clarice.” Dr. Lecter seemed oddly at peace.

  “Tell me his name, Dr. Lecter,” Starling said.

  “Dr. Chilton,” Lecter said, “I believe you know each other.”

  For an instant, Starling didn’t realize Chilton was behind her. Then he took her elbow.

  She took it back. Officer Pembry and his big partner were with Chilton.

  “In the elevator,” Chilton said. His face was mottled red.

  “Did you know Dr. Chilton has no medical degree?” Dr. Lecter said. “Please bear that in mind later on.”

  “Let’s go,” Chilton said.

  “You’re not in charge here, Dr. Chilton,” Starling said.

  Officer Pembry came around Chilton. “No, ma’
am, but I am. He called my boss and your boss both. I’m sorry, but I’ve got orders to see you out. Come on with me, now.”

  “Good-bye, Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?”

  “Yes.”

  Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not finish the arch? Take your case file with you, Clarice, I won’t need it anymore.” He held it at arm’s length through the bars, his forefinger along the spine. She reached across the barrier and took it. For an instant the tip of her forefinger touched Dr. Lecter’s. The touch crackled in his eyes.

  “Thank you, Clarice.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

  And that is how he remained in Starling’s mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. Standing in his white cell, arched like a dancer, his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly to the side.

  She went over a speed bump at the airport fast enough to bang her head on the roof of the car, and had to run for the airplane Krendler had ordered her to catch.

  CHAPTER 36

  Officers Pembry and Boyle were experienced men brought especially from Brushy Mountain State Prison to be Dr. Lecter’s warders. They were calm and careful and did not feel they needed their job explained to them by Dr. Chilton.

  They had arrived in Memphis ahead of Lecter and examined the cell minutely. When Dr. Lecter was brought to the old courthouse, they examined him as well. He was subjected to an internal body search by a male nurse while he was still in restraints. His clothing was searched thoroughly and a metal detector run over the seams.

  Boyle and Pembry came to an understanding with him, speaking in low, civil tones close to his ears as he was examined.

  “Dr. Lecter, we can get along just fine. We’ll treat you just as good as you treat us. Act like a gentleman and you get the Eskimo Pie. But we’re not pussyfooting around with you, buddy. Try to bite, and we’ll leave you smooth-mouthed. Looks like you got something good going here. You don’t want to fuck it up, do you?”