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“I was real proud of that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sugar, I got to take off. We’ll talk.”

“You can’t stay?”

He put his hand on her head. “We can’t never stay, Baby. Can’t nobody stay like they want to.”

He kissed her forehead and walked out of the room. She co

uld see the bullet hole in his hat as he waved to her, tall in the doorway.

CHAPTER

95

CLEARLY STARLING loved her father as much as we love anybody, and she would have fought in an instant over a slur on his memory. Yet, in conversation with Dr. Lecter, under the influence of a major hypnotic drug and deep hypnosis, this is what she said:

“I’m really mad at him, though. I mean, come on, how come he had to be behind a goddamned drugstore in the middle of the night going up against those two pissants that killed him? He short-shucked that old pump shotgun and they had him. They were nothing and they had him. He didn’t know what he was doing. He never learned anything.”

She would have slapped the face of anybody else saying that.

The monster settled back a micron in his chair. Ahh, at last we’ve come to it. These schoolgirl recollections were becoming tedious.

Starling tried to swing her legs beneath the chair like a child, but her legs were too long. “See, he had that job, he went and did what they told him, went around with that damned watchman’s clock and then he was dead. And Mama was washing the blood out of his hat to bury it with him. Who came home to us? Nobody. Damn few SNO BALLS after that, I can tell you. Mama and me, cleaning up motel rooms. People leaving wet Trojans on the nightstand. He got killed and left us because he was too goddamned stupid. He should have told those town jackasses to stuff the job.”

Things she would never have said, things banned from her higher brain.

From the beginning of their acquaintance, Dr. Lecter had needled her about her father, calling him a night watchman. Now he became Lecter the Protector of her father’s memory.

“Clarice, he never wished for anything but your happiness and well-being.”

“Wish in one hand and shit in the other one and see which one gets full the first,” said Starling. This adage of the orphans’ home should have been particularly distasteful coming from that attractive face, but Dr. Lecter seemed pleased, even encouraged.

“Clarice, I’m going to ask you to come with me to another room,” Dr. Lecter said. “Your father visited you, as best you could manage. You saw that, despite your intense wish to keep him with you, he couldn’t stay. He visited you. Now it’s time for you to visit him.”

Down a hall to a guest bedroom. The door was closed.

“Wait a moment, Clarice.” He went inside.

She stood in the hall with her hand on the knob and heard a match struck.

Dr. Lecter opened the door.

“Clarice, you know your father is dead. You know that better than anyone.”

“Yes.”

“Come in and see him.”

Her father’s bones were composed on a twin bed, the long bones and rib cage covered by a sheet. The remains were in low relief beneath the white cover, like a child’s snow angel.

Her father’s skull, cleaned by the tiny ocean scavengers off Dr. Lecter’s beach, dried and bleached, rested on the pillow.

“Where was his star, Clarice?”

“The village took it back. They said it cost seven dollars.”