Page 75

Krendler winced at this, and Mason said, “Dr. Doemling has signed a confidentiality agreement.”

“Cordell will put your slides up on the elmo when you want them, Doctor,” Margot said.

“A little background first.” Doemling consulted his notes. “We knooowww Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania. His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his mother high-born Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of the servants. The children disappeared after that. There were two of them, Hannibal and his sister. We don’t know what happened to the sister. The point is, Lecter was an orphan, like Clarice Starling.”

“Which I told you,” Mason said impatiently.

“But what did you conclude from it?” Dr. Doemling asked. “I’m not proposing a kind of sympathy between two orphans, Mr. Verger. This is not about sympathy. Sympathy does not enter here. And mercy is left bleeding in the dust. Listen to me. What a common experience of being an orphan gives Dr. Lecter is simply a better ability to understand her, and ultimately control her. This is all about control.

“The Starling woman spent her childhood in institutions, and from what you tell me she does not evidence any stable personal relationship with a man. She lives with a former classmate, a young African-American woman.”

“That’s very likely a sex thing,” Krendler said.

The psychiatrist did not even spare Krendler a look— Krendler was automatically overruled. “You can never say to a certainty why someone lives with someone else.”

“It is one of the things that is hid, as the Bible says,” Mason said.

“Starling looks pretty tasty, if you like whole wheat,” Margot offered.

“I think the attraction’s from Lecter’s end, not hers,” Krendler said. “You’ve seen her—she’s a pretty cold fish.”

“Is she a cold fish, Mr. Krendler?” Margot sounded amused.

“You think she’s queer, Margot?” Mason asked.

“How the hell would I know? Whatever she is, she treats it as her own damn business—that was my impression. I think she’s tough, and she had on her game face, but I wouldn’t say she’s a cold fish. We didn’t talk much, but that’s what I took from it. That was before you needed me to help you, Mason—you ran me out, remember? I’m not going to say she’s a cold fish. Girl who looks like Starling has to keep a certain distance in her face because assholes are hitting on her all the time.”

Here Krendler felt that Margot looked at him a beat too long, though he could only see her in outline.

How curious, the voices in this room. Krendler’s careful bureauese, Doemling’s pedantic bray, Mason’s deep and resonant tones with his badly pruned plosives and leaking sibilants and Margot, her voice rough and low, tough-mouthed as a livery pony and resentful of the bit. Under it all, the gasping machinery that finds Mason breath.

“I have an idea about her private life, regarding her apparent father fixation,” Doemling went on. “I’ll get into it shortly. Now, we have three documents of Dr. Lecter’s concerning Clarice Starling. Two letters and a drawing. The drawing is of the Crucifixion Clock he designed while he was in the asylum.” Dr. Doemling looked up at the screen. “The slide, please.”

From somewhere outside the room, Cordell put up the extraordinary sketch on the elevated monitor. The original is charcoal on butcher paper. Mason’s copy was made on a blueprint copier and the lines are the blue of a bruise.

“He tried to patent this,” Dr. Doemling said. “As you can see, here is Christ crucified on a clock face and His arms revolve to tell the time, just like the Mickey Mouse watches. It’s interesting because the face, the head hanging forward, is that of Clarice Starling. He drew it at the time of their interviews. Here’s a photograph of the woman, you can see. Cordell, is it? Cordell, put up the photo please.”

There was no question, the Jesus head was Starling.

“Another anomaly is that the figure is nailed to the cross through the wrists rather than the palms.”

“That’s accurate,” Mason said. “You’ve got to nail them through the wrists and use big wooden washers, otherwise they get loose and start flapping. Idi Amin and I found that out the hard way when we reenacted the whole thing in Uganda at Easter. Our Savior was actually nailed through the wrists. All the Crucifixion paintings are wrong. It’s a mistranslation between the Hebrew and Latin Bibles.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Doemling said without sincerity. “The Crucifixion clearly represents a destroyed object of veneration. Note that the arm that forms the minute hand is at six, modestly covering the pudenda. The hour hand is at nine, or slightly past. Nine is a clear reference to the traditional hour when Jesus was crucified.”

“And when you put six and nine together, note that you get sixty-nine, a figure popular in social intercourse,” Margot could not help saying. In response to Doemling’s sharp glance, she cracked her walnuts and shells rattled to the floor.

“Now let’s take up Dr. Lecter’s letters to Clarice Starling. Cordell, if you’d put them up.” Dr. Doemling took a laser pointer from his pocket. “You can see that the writing, a fluent copperplate executed with a square-nibbed fountain pen, is machinelike in its regularity. You see that sort of handwriting in medieval papal bulls. It’s quite beautiful, but freakishly regular. There is nothing spontaneous here. He’s planning. He wrote this first one soon after he had escaped, killing five people in the process. Let’s read from the text:

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that’s what I’d like.

An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.

I won’t be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy….