Add to that the fact that the skin is not perfectly elastic, even in the young. If you stretch it, it never regains its original proportions. Stitch something perfectly smooth, then pull it too hard over a tailor’s ham, and it bulges and puckers. Sitting at the machine and crying your eyes out won’t remove one pucker. Then there are the cleavage lines, and you’d better know where they are. Skin doesn’t stretch the same amount in all directions before the collagen bundles deform and the fibers tear; pull the wrong way, and you get a stretch mark.
Green material is simply impossible to work with. Much experimentation went into this, along with much heartbreak, before Mr. Gumb got it right.
In the end he found the old ways were best. His procedures were these: First he soaked his items in the aquariums, in vegetable extracts developed by the Native Americans—all-natural substances that contain no mineral salts whatsoever. Then he used the method that produced the matchless butter-soft buckskin of the New World—classic brain tanning. The Native Americans believed that each animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Mr. Gumb knew that this was not true and long ago had quit trying it, even with the largest-brained primate. He had a freezer full of beef brains now, so he never ran short.
The problems of processing the material he could manage; practice had made him near perfect.
Difficult structural problems remained, but he was especially well qualified to solve them, too.
The workroom opened into a basement corridor leading to a disused bath where Mr. Gumb stored his hoisting tackle and his timepiece, and on to the studio and the vast black warren beyond.
He opened his studio door to brilliant light—floodlights and incandescent tubes, color-corrected to daylight, were fastened to ceiling beams. Mannequins posed on a raised floor of pickled oak. All were partly clad, some in leather and some in muslin patterns for leather garments. Eight mannequins were doubled in the two mirrored walls—good plate mirror too, not tiles. A makeup table held cosmetics, several wig forms, and wigs. This was the brightest of studios, all white and blond oak.
The mannequins wore commercial work in progress, dramatic Armani knockoffs mostly, in fine black cabretta leather, all roll-pleats and pointed shoulders and breastplates.
The third wall was taken up by a large worktable, two commercial sewing machines, two dressmaker’s forms, and a tailor’s form cast from the very torso of Jame Gumb.
Against the fourth wall, dominating this bright room, was a great black armoire in Chinese lacquer that rose almost to the eight-foot ceiling. It was old and the designs on it had faded; a few gold scales remained where a dragon was, his white eye still clear and staring, and here was the red tongue of another dragon whose body has faded away. The lacquer beneath them remained intact, though it was crackled.
The armoire, immense and deep, had nothing to do with commercial work. It contained on forms and hangers the Special Things, and its doors were closed.
The little dog lapped from her water bowl in the corner and lay down between the feet of a mannequin, her eyes on Mr. Gumb.
He had been working on a leather jacket. He needed to finish it—he’d meant to get everything out of the way, but he was in a creative fever now and his own muslin fitting garment didn’t satisfy him yet.
Mr. Gumb had progressed in tailoring far beyond what the California Department of Corrections had taught him in his youth, but this was a true challenge. Even working delicate cabretta leather does not prepare you for really fine work.
Here he had two muslin fitting garments, like white waistcoats, one his exact size and one he had made from measurements he took while Catherine Baker Martin was still unconscious. When he put the smaller one on his tailor’s form, the problems were apparent. She was a big girl, and wonderfully proportioned, but she wasn’t as big as Mr. Gumb, and not nearly so broad across the back.
His ideal was a seamless garment. This was not possible. He was determined, though, that the bodice front be absolutely seamless and without blemish. This meant all figure corrections had to be made on the back. Very difficult. He’d already discarded one fitting muslin and started over. With judicious stretching, he could get by with two underarm darts—not French darts, but vertical inset darts, apexes down. Two waist darts also in the back, just inside his kidneys. He was used to working with only a tiny seam allowance.
His considerations went beyond the visual aspects to the tactile; it was not inconceivable that an attractive person might be hugged.
Mr. Gumb sprinkled talc lightly on his hands and embraced the tailor’s form of his body in a natural, comfortable hug.
“Give me a kiss,” he said playfully to the empty air where the head should be. “Not you, silly,” he told the little dog, when she raised her ears.
Gumb caressed the back of the form at the natural reach of his arms. Then he walked behind it to consider the powder marks. Nobody wanted to feel a seam. In an embrace, though, the hands lap over the center of the back. Also, he reasoned, we are accustomed to the center line of a spine. It is not as jarring as an asymmetry in our bodies. Shoulder seams were definitely out, then. A center dart at the top was the answer, apex a little above the center of the shoulder blades. He could use the same seam to anchor the stout yoke built into the lining to provide support. Lycra panels beneath plackets on both sides—he must remember to get the Lycra—and a Velcro closure beneath the placket on the right. He thought about those marvelous Charles James gowns where the seams were staggered to lie perfectly flat.
The dart in back would be covered by his hair, or rather the hair he would have soon.
Mr. Gumb slipped the muslin off the dressmaker’s form and started to work.
The sewing machine was old and finely made, an ornate foot-treadle machine that had been converted to electricity perhaps forty years ago. On the arm of the machine was painted in gold-leaf scroll “I Never Tire, I Serve.” The foot treadle remained operative, and Gumb started the machine with it for each series of stitches. For fine stitching, he preferred to work barefoot, rocking the treadle delicately with his meaty foot, gripping the front edge of it with his painted toes to prevent overruns. For a while there were only the sounds of the machine, and the little dog snoring, and the hiss of the steam pipes in the warm basement.
When he had finished inserting the darts in the muslin pattern garment, he tried it on in front of the mirrors. The little dog watched from the corner, her head cocked.
He needed to ease it a little under the arm holes. There were a few remaining problems with facings and interfacings. Otherwise it was so nice. It was supple, pliant, bouncy. He could see himself just running up the ladder of a water slide as fast as you please.
Mr. Gumb played with the lights and his wigs for some dramatic effects, and he tried a wonderful choker necklace of shells over the collar line. It would be stunning when he wore a décolleté gown or hostess pajamas over his new thorax.
It was so tempting to just go on with it now, to really get busy, but his eyes were tired. He wanted his hands to be absolutely steady, too, and he just wasn’t up for the noise. Patiently he picked out the stitches and laid out the pieces. A perfect pattern to cut by.
“Tomorrow, Precious,” he told the little dog as he set the beef brains out to thaw. “We’ll do it first thing tomooooooorooow. Mommy’s gonna be so beautiful!”
CHAPTER 47
Starling slept hard for five hours and woke in the pit of the night, driven awake by fear of the dream. She bit the corner of the sheet and pressed her palms over her ears, waiting to find out if she was truly awake and away from it. Silence and no lambs screaming. When she knew she was awake her heart slowed, but her feet would not stay still beneath the covers. In a moment her mind would race, she knew it.
It was a relief when a flush of hot anger rather than fear shot through her.
“Nuts,” she said, and put a foot out in the air.
In all the long day, when she had been disrupted by Chilton, insulted by Senator Martin,
abandoned and rebuked by Krendler, taunted by Dr. Lecter and sickened by his bloody escape, and put off the job by Jack Crawford, there was one thing that stung the worst: being called a thief.
Senator Martin was a mother under extreme duress, and she was sick of policemen pawing her daughter’s things. She hadn’t meant it.
Still, the accusation stuck in Starling like a hot needle.
As a small child, Starling had been taught that thieving is the cheapest, most despicable act short of rape and murder for money. Some kinds of manslaughter were preferable to theft.
As a child in institutions where there were few prizes and many hungers, she had learned to hate a thief.
Lying in the dark, she faced another reason Senator Martin’s implication bothered her so.
Starling knew what the malicious Dr. Lecter would say, and it was true: she was afraid there was something tacky that Senator Martin saw in her, something cheap, something thief-like that Senator Martin reacted to. That Vanderbilt bitch.
Dr. Lecter would relish pointing out that class resentment, the buried anger that comes with mother’s milk, was a factor too. Starling gave away nothing to any Martin in education, intelligence, drive, and certainly physical appearance, but still it was there and she knew it.
Starling was an isolated member of a fierce tribe with no formal genealogy but the honors list and the penal register. Dispossessed in Scotland, starved out of Ireland, a lot of them were inclined to the dangerous trades. Many generic Starlings had been used up this way, had thumped on the bottom of narrow holes or slid off planks with a shot at their feet, or were commended to glory with a cracked “Taps” in the cold when everyone wanted to go home. A few may have been recalled tearily by the officers on regimental mess nights, the way a man in drink remembers a good bird dog. Faded names in a Bible.
None of them had been very smart, as far as Starling could tell, except for a great-aunt who wrote wonderfully in her diary until she got “brain fever.”
They didn’t steal, though.
School was the thing in America, don’t you know, and the Starlings caught on to that. One of Starling’s uncles had his junior college degree cut on his tombstone.
Starling had lived by schools, her weapon the competitive exam, for all the years when there was no place else for her to go.
She knew she could pull out of this. She could be what she had always been, ever since she’d learned how it works: she could be near the top of her class, approved, included, chosen, and not sent away.
It was a matter of working hard and being careful. Her grades would be good. The Korean couldn’t kill her in PE. Her name would be engraved on the big plaque in the lobby, the “Possible Board,” for extraordinary performance on the range.
In four weeks she would be a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Would she have to watch out for that fucking Krendler for the rest of her life?
In the presence of the Senator, he had wanted to wash his hands of her. Every time Starling thought about it, it stung. He wasn’t positive that he would find evidence in the envelope. That was shocking. Picturing Krendler now in her mind, she saw him wearing Navy oxfords on his feet like the mayor, her father’s boss, coming to collect the watchman’s clock.
Worse, Jack Crawford in her mind seemed diminished. The man was under more strain than anyone should have to bear. He had sent her in to check out Raspail’s car with no support or evidence of authority. Okay, she had asked to go under those terms—the trouble was a fluke. But Crawford had to know there’d be trouble when Senator Martin saw her in Memphis; there would have been trouble even if she hadn’t found the fuck pictures.
Catherine Baker Martin lay in this same darkness that held her now. Starling had forgotten it for a moment while she thought about her own best interests.
Pictures of the past few days punished Starling for the lapse, flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.
It was Kimberly that haunted her now. Fat dead Kimberly who had her ears pierced trying to look pretty and saved to have her legs waxed. Kimberly with her hair gone. Kimberly her sister. Starling did not think Catherine Baker Martin would have much time for Kimberly. Now they were sisters under the skin. Kimberly lying in a funeral home full of state trooper buckaroos.
Starling couldn’t look at it anymore. She tried to turn her face away as a swimmer turns to breathe.
All of Buffalo Bill’s victims were women, his obsession was women, he lived to hunt women. Not one woman was hunting him full time. Not one woman investigator had looked at every one of his crimes.
Starling wondered if Crawford would have the nerve to use her as a technician when he had to go look at Catherine Martin. Bill would “do her tomorrow,” Crawford predicted. Do her. Do her Do her.
“Fuck this,” Starling said aloud and put her feet on the floor.
“You’re over there corrupting a moron, aren’t you, Starling?” Ardelia Mapp said. “Sneaked him in here while I was asleep and now you’re giving him instructions—don’t think I don’t hear you.”
“Sorry, Ardelia, I didn’t—”
“You’ve got to be a lot more specific with ’em than that, Starling. You can’t just say what you said. Corrupting morons is just like journalism, you’ve got to tell ’em What, When, Where, and How. I think Why gets self-explanatory as you go along.”
“Have you got any laundry?”
“I thought you said did I have any laundry.”
“Yep, I think I’ll run a load. Whatcha got?”
“Just those sweats on the back of the door.”
“Okay. Shut your eyes, I’m gonna turn on the light for just a second.”
It was not the Fourth Amendment notes for her upcoming exam that she piled on top of the clothes basket and lugged down the hall to the laundry room.
She took the Buffalo Bill file, a four-inch-thick pile of hell and pain in a buff cover printed with ink the color of blood. With it was a hotline printout of her report on the Death’s-head Moth.
She’d have to give the file back tomorrow and, if she wanted this copy to be complete, sooner or later she had to insert her report. In the warm laundry room, in the washing machine’s comforting chug, she took off the rubber bands that held the file together. She laid out the papers on the clothes-folding shelf and tried to do the insert without seeing any of the pictures, without thinking of what pictures might be added soon. The map was on top, that was fine. But there was handwriting on the map.
Dr. Lecter’s elegant script ran across the Great Lakes, and it said:
Clarice, does this random scattering of sites seem overdone to you? Doesn’t it seem desperately random? Random past all possible convenience? Does it suggest to you the elaborations of a bad liar?
Ta,
Hannibal Lecter
P.S. Don’t bother to flip through, there isn’t anything else.
It took twenty minutes of page-turning to be sure there wasn’t anything else.
Starling called the hotline from the pay phone in the hall and read the message to Burroughs. She wondered when Burroughs slept.
“I have to tell you, Starling, the market in Lecter information is way down,” Burroughs said. “Did Jack call you about Billy Rubin?”
“No.”
She leaned against the wall with her eyes closed while he described Dr. Lecter’s joke.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Jack says they’ll go on with the sex-change clinics, but how hard? If you look at the information in the computer, the way the field entries are styled, you can see that all the Lecter information, yours and the stuff from Memphis, has special prefixes. All the Baltimore stuff or all the Memphis stuff or both can be knocked out of consideration with one button. I think Justice wants to push the button on all of it. I got a memo here suggesting the bug in Klaus’ throat was, let’s see, ‘flotsam.’”
“You’ll punch this
up for Mr. Crawford, though,” Starling said.
“Sure, I’ll put it on his screen, but we’re not calling him right now. You shouldn’t either. Bella died a little while ago.”
“Oh,” Starling said.
“Listen, on the bright side, our guys in Baltimore took a look at Lecter’s cell in the asylum. That orderly, Barney, helped out. They got brass grindings off a bolt head in Lecter’s cot where he made his handcuff key. Hang in there, kid. You’re gonna come out smelling like a rose.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burroughs. Good night.”
Smelling like a rose. Putting Vicks VapoRub under her nostrils.
Daylight coming on the last day of Catherine Martin’s life.
What could Dr. Lecter mean?
There was no knowing what Dr. Lecter knew. When she first gave him the file, she expected him to enjoy the pictures and use the file as a prop while he told her what he already knew about Buffalo Bill.
Maybe he was always lying to her, just as he lied to Senator Martin. Maybe he didn’t know or understand anything about Buffalo Bill.
He sees very clearly—he damn sure sees through me. It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling’s age it hadn’t happened to her much.
Desperately random, Dr. Lecter said.
Starling and Crawford and everyone else had stared at the map with its dots marking the abductions and body dumps. It had looked to Starling like a black constellation with a date beside each star, and she knew Behavioral Science had once tried imposing zodiac signs on the map without result.
If Dr. Lecter was reading for recreation, why would he fool with the map? She could see him flipping through the report, making fun of the prose style of some of the contributors.
There was no pattern in the abductions and body dumps, no relationships of convenience, no coordination in time with any known business conventions, any spate of burglaries or clothesline thefts or other fetish-oriented crimes.
Back in the laundry room, with the dryer spinning, Starling walked her fingers over the map. Here an abduction, there the dump. Here the second abduction, there the dump. Here the third and—. But are these dates backward or, no, the second body was discovered first.
The Silence of the Lambs Page 25
