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At first Krendler had trouble understanding Barney’s high, rough voice, but it was Krendler who asked the pertinent question. “Did Lecter act differently in the Starling interviews, Barney?”

“Yes. Most of the time he didn’t respond at all to visitors,” Barney said. “Sometimes he would open his eyes long enough to insult some academic who was trying to pick his brain. He made one visiting professor cry. He was tough with Starling, but he answered her more than most. He was interested in her. She intrigued him.”

“How?”

Barney shrugged. “He hardly ever got to see women. She’s really good-looking—”

“I don’t need your opinion on that,” Krendler said. “Is that all you know?”

Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler’s brain were two dogs stuck together.

Margot cracked another walnut.

“Go on, Barney,” Mason said.

“They were frank with one another. He’s disarming that way. You have the feeling that he wouldn’t deign to lie.”

“Wouldn’t do what to lie?” Krendler said.

“Deign,” Barney said.

“D-E-I-G-N,” Margot Verger said out of the dark. “To condescend. Or to stoop, Mr. Krendler.”

Barney went on. “Dr. Lecter told her some unpleasant things about herself, and then some pleasant ones. She could face the bad things, and then enjoy the good more, knowing it wasn’t bullshit. He thought she was charming and amusing.”

“You can judge what Hannibal Lecter found ’amusing’?” Dr. Doemling said. “Just how do you go about that, Nurse Barney?”

“By listening to him laugh, Dr. Dumling. They taught us that in LPN school, a lecture called ‘Healing and the Cheerful Outlook.’”

Either Margot snorted or the aquarium behind her made the noise.

“Cool it, Barney. Tell us the rest,” Mason said.

“Yes, sir. Sometimes Dr. Lecter and I would talk late at night, when it got quiet enough. We talked about courses I was taking, and other things. He—”

“Were you taking some kind of mail-order course in psychology, by any chance?” Doemling had to say

“No, sir, I don’t consider psychology a science. Neither did Dr. Lecter.” Barney went on quickly, before Mason’s respirator permitted him to utter a rebuke. “I can just repeat what he told me—he could see what she was becoming, she was charming the way a cub is charming, a small cub that will grow up to be—like one of the big cats. One you can’t play with later. She had the cublike earnestness, he said. She had all the weapons, in miniature and growing, and all she knew so far was how to wrestle with other cubs. That amused him.

“The way it began between them will tell you something. At the beginning he was courteous but he pretty much dismissed her—then as she was leaving another inmate threw some semen in her face. That disturbed Dr. Lecter, embarrassed him. It was the only time I ever saw him upset. She saw it too and tried to use it on him. He admired her moxie, I think.”

“What was his attitude toward the other inmate—who threw the semen? Did they have any kind of relationship?”

“Not exactly,” Barney said. “Dr. Lecter just killed him that night.”

“They were in separate cells?” Doemling asked. “How did he do it?”

“Three cells apart on opposite sides of the corridor,” Barney said. “In the middle of the night Dr. Lecter talked to him awhile and then told him to swallow his tongue.”

“So Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter became … friendly?” Mason said.

“Inside a kind of formal structure,” Barney said. “They exchanged information. Dr. Lecter gave her insight on the serial killer she was hunting, and she paid for it with personal information. Dr. Lecter told me he thought Starling might have too much nerve for her own good, an ’excess of zeal,’ he called it. He thought she might work too close to the edge if she thought her assignment required it. And he said once that she was ‘cursed with taste.’ I don’t know what that means.”

“Dr. Doemling, does he want to fuck her or kill her, or eat her, or what?” Mason asked, exhausting the possibilities he could see.

“Probably all three,” Dr. Doemling said. “I wouldn’t want to predict the order in which he wants to perform those acts. That’s the burden of what I can tell you. No matter how the tabloids—and tabloid mentalities—might want to romanticize it, and try to make it Beauty and the Beast, his object is her degradation, her suffering, and her death. He has responded to her twice: when she was insulted with the semen in her face and when she was torn apart in the newspapers after she shot those people. He comes in the guise of a mentor, but it’s the distress that excites him. When the history of Hannibal Lecter is written, and it will be, this will be recorded as a case of Doemling’s avunculism. To draw him she needs to be distressed.”

A furrow has appeared in the broad rubbery space between Barney’s eyes. “May I put something in here, Mr. Verger, since you asked me?” He did not wait for permission. “In the asylum, Dr. Lecter responded to her when she held on to herself, stood there wiping come off her face and did her job. In the letters he calls her a warrior, and points out that she saved that child in the shoot-out. He admires and respects her courage and her discipline. He says himself he’s got no plans to come around. One thing he does not do is lie.”