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Her massive neck flushed. “So can I.”

“Hundred bucks?” Barney said.

“Make me a smoothie,” she said.

There was a bowl of fruit and nuts on the juice bar. While Barney made fruit smoothies in the blender, Margot took two walnuts in her fist and cracked them.

“Can you do just one nut, with nothing to squeeze it against?” Barney said. He cracked two eggs on the rim of the blender and dropped them in.

“Can you?” Margot said, and handed him a walnut.

The nut lay in Barney’s open palm. “I don’t know.” He cleared the space in front of him on the bar and an orange rolled off on Margot’s side. “Oops, sorry,” Barney said.

She picked it up from the floor and put it back in the bowl.

Barney’s big fist clenched. Margot’s eyes went from his fist to his face, then back and forth as his neck corded with strain, his face flushed. He began to tremble, from his fist a faint cracking sound, Margot’s face falling, he moved his trembling fist over the blender and the cracking came louder. An egg yolk and white plopped into the blender. Barney turned the machine on and licked the tips of his fingers. Margot laughed in spite of herself.

Barney poured the smoothies into glasses. From across the room they might have been wrestlers or power lifters in two weight divisions.

“You feel like you have to do everything guys do?” he said.

“Not some of the dumb stuff.”

“You want to try male bonding?”

Margot’s smile went away. “Don’t set me up for a dick joke, Barney.”

He shook his massive head. “Try me,” he said.

CHAPTER

57

IN HANNIBAL’S House the gleanings grew as day by day Clarice Starling felt her way along the corridors of Dr. Lecter’s taste:

Rachel DuBerry had been somewhat older than Dr. Lecter when she was an active patron of the Baltimore Symphony and she was very beautiful, as Starling could see in the Vogue pictures from the time. That was two rich husbands ago. She was now Mrs. Franz Rosencranz of the textile Rosencranzes. Her social secretary put her on the line:

“Now I just send the orchestra money, dear. We’re away far too much for me to be actively involved,” Mrs. Rosencranz nee DuBerry told Starling. “If it’s some sort of tax question, I can give you the number of our accountants.”

“Mrs. Rosencranz, when you were active on the boards of the Philharmonic and the Westover School you knew Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

A considerable silence.

“Mrs. Rosencranz?”

“I think I’d better take your number and call you back through the FBI switchboard.”

“Certainly.”

When the conversation resumed:

“Yes, I knew Hannibal Lecter socially years ago and the press has camped on my doorstep ever since about it. He was an extraordinarily charming man, absolutely singular. Sort of made a girl’s fur crackle, if you know what I mean. It took me years to believe the other side of him.”

“Did he ever give you any gifts, Mrs. Rosencranz?”

“I received a note from him on my birthdays usually, even after he was in custody. Sometimes a gift, before he was committed. He gives the most exquisite gifts.”

“And Dr. Lecter gave the famous birthday dinner for you. With the wine vintages keyed to your birth date.”