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Margot shrugged. “She never saw me.”

“Get on the horn to Washington and get four of those bastards up here. Send the helicopter. Show them the backhoe—show them—Cordell! Get in here.” Mason whistled into his panpipes. Margot pushed the pipes aside and leaned over him, so that she could see his face.

“Cordell’s not coming, Mason. Cordell’s dead.”

“What?”

“I killed him in the playroom. Now. Mason, you’re going to give me what you owe me.” She put up the side rails on his bed and, lifting the great coil of his plaited hair, she stripped the cover off his body. His little legs were no bigger around than rolls of cookie dough. His hand, the only extremity he could move, fluttered at the phone. His hard-shell respirator puffed up and down in its regular rhythm.

From her pocket Margot took a nonspermicidal condom and held it up for him to see. From her sleeve she took the cattle prod.

“Remember, Mason, how you used to spit on your cock for lubrication? Think you could work up some spit? No? Maybe I can.”

Mason bellowed when his breath permitted, a series of donkey like brays, but it was over in half a minute, and very successfully too.

“You’re dead, Margot.” It sounded more like “Nargot.”

“Oh, Mason, we all are. Didn’t you know? But these aren’t,” she said, securing her blouse over her warm container. “They’re wiggling. I’ll show you how. I’ll show you how they wiggle—show-and-tell.”

Margot picked up the spiky fish-handling gloves beside the aquarium.

“I could adopt Judy,” Mason said. “She could be my heir, and we could do a trust.”

“We certainly could,” Margot said, lifting a carp out of the holding tank. She brought a chair from the seating area, and standing on it, took the lid off the big aquarium. “But we won’t.”

She bent over the aquarium with her great arms down in the water. She held the carp by the tail down close to the grotto and when the eel came out she grabbed it behind the head with her powerful hand and lifted it clear out of the water, over her head. The mighty eel thrashing, as long as Margot and thick, its festive skin flashing. She gripped the eel with the other hand too and when it flexed it was all she could do to hold on with the spiky gloves imbedded in its hide.

Careful down off the chair and she came to Mason carrying the flexing eel, its head shaped like a bolt cutter, teeth clicking together with a sound like a telegraph key, the back-curved teeth no fish ever escaped. She flopped the eel on top of his chest, on the respirator, and holding it with one hand, she lashed his pigtail around and around and around it.

“Wiggle, wiggle, Mason,” she said.

She held the eel behind the head with one hand and with the other she forced down Mason’s jaw, forced it down, putting her weight on his chin, him straining with what strength he had, and with a creaking, cracking sound his mouth opened.

“You should have taken the chocolate,” Margot said, and stuffed the eel’s maw into Mason’s mouth, it seizing his tongue with its razor-sharp teeth as it would a fish and not letting go, never letting go, its body thrashing tangled in Mason’s pigtail. Blood blew out Mason’s nose hole and he was drowning.

Margot left them together, Mason and the eel, the carp circling alone in the aquarium. She composed herself at Cordell’s desk and watched the monitors until Mason flat-lined.

The eel was still moving when she went back into Mason’s room. The respirator went up and down, inflating the eel’s air bladder as it pumped bloody froth out of Mason’s lungs. Margot rinsed the cattle prod in the aquarium and put it in her pocket.

Margot took from a baggie in her pocket the bit of Dr. Lecter’s scalp and the lock of his hair. She scraped blood from the scalp with Mason’s fingernails, unsteady work with the eel still moving, and entwined the hair in his fingers. Last, she stuffed a single hair into one of the fish gloves.

Margot walked out without looking at the dead Cordell and went home to Judy with her warm prize, tucked where it would stay warm.

VI

A LONG SPOON

Therfore bihoveth hire a ful long spoon

That shal ete with a feend.

—Geoffrey Chaucer,

FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES,

“THE MERCHANT’S TALE”

CHAPTER