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The chair groaned under Barney’s weight. “If the chair legs break don’t shoot me, I can’t help it,” he said.

“Do you know anything about Clarice Starling?”

“No.”

Mapp picked up the small-caliber gun. “I’m not fucking around with you, Barney. The second I think you’re lying, Nursey, I’m gonna darken your stool, do you believe me?”

“Yes.” Barney knew it was true.

“I’m going to ask you again. Do you know anything that would help me find Clarice Starling? The post office says you had your mail forwarded to Mason Verger’s place for a month. What the fuck, Barney?”

“I worked up there. I was taking care of Mason Verger, and he asked me all about Lecter. I didn’t like it up there and I quit. Mason was pretty much of a bastard.”

“Starling’s gone away.”

“I know.”

“Maybe Lecter took her, maybe the pigs got her. If he took her what would he do with her?”

“I’m being honest with you—I don’t know. I’d help Starling if I could. Why wouldn’t I? I kind of liked her and she was getting me expunged. Look in her reports or notes or—”

“I have. I want you to understand something, Barney. This is a one-time-only offer. If you know anything you better tell me now. If I ever find out, no matter how long from now, that you held out something that might have helped, I will come back here and this gun will be the last thing you ever see. I will kill your big ugly ass. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything?”

“No.” The longest silence he could ever remember.

“Just sit still there until I’m gone.”

_______

It took Barney an hour and a half to go to sleep. He lay in his bed looking at the ceiling, his brow, broad as a dolphin’s, now sweaty, now dry Barney thought about callers to come. Just before he turned out his light, he went into his bathroom and took from his DOP kit a stainless-steel shaving mirror, Marine Corps issue.

He padded into the kitchen, opened an electrical switch box in the wall and taped the mirror inside the switch box door.

It was all he could do. He twitched in his sleep like a dog.

After his next shift, he brought a rape kit home from the hospital.

CHAPTER

97

THERE WAS only so much Dr. Lecter could do to the German’s house while retaining the furnishings. Flowers and screens helped. Color was interesting to see against the massive furniture and high darkness; it was an ancient, compelling contrast, like a butterfly lit on an armored fist.

His absentee landlord apparently had a fixation on Leda and the Swan. The interspecies coupling was represented in no less than four bronzes of varying quality, the best a reproduction of Donatello, and eight paintings. One painting delighted Dr. Lecter, an Anne Shingleton with its genius anatomical articulation and some real heat in the fucking. The others he draped. The landlord’s ghastly collection of hunting bronzes was draped as well.

Early in the morning the doctor laid his table carefully for three, studying it from different angles with the tip of his finger beside his nose, changed candlesticks twice and went from his damask place mats to a gathered tablecloth to reduce to more manageable size the oval dining table.

The dark and forbidding sideboard looked less like an aircraft carrier when high service pieces and bright copper warmers stood on it. In fact, Dr. Lecter pulled out several of the drawers and put flowers in them, in a kind of hanging gardens effect.

He could see that he had too many flowers in the room, and must add more to make it come back right again. Too many was too many, but way too many was just right. He settled on two flower arrangements for the table: a low mound of peonies in a silver dish, white as SNO BALLS, and a large, high arrangement of massed Bells of Ireland, Dutch iris, orchids and parrot tulips that screened away much of the table’s expanse and created an intimate space.

A small ice storm of crystal stood before the service plates, but the flat silver was in a warmer to be laid at the last moment.

The first course would be prepared at table, and accordingly he organized his alcohol burners, with his copper fait-tout and sauté pan, his condiments and his autopsy saw.