The Silence of the Lambs

  “Yes, Mr. Crawford?”

  “Go back to school.”

  “If you didn’t want me to chase him you shouldn’t have taken me in that funeral home, Mr. Crawford.”

  “No,” Crawford said. “I suppose I shouldn’t. But then we wouldn’t have the insect. You don’t turn in your roscoe. Quantico’s safe enough, but you’ll be armed any time you’re off the base at Quantico until Lecter’s caught or dead.”

  “What about you? He hates you. I mean he’s given this some thought.”

  “Lot of people have, Starling, in a lot of jails. One of these days he might get around to it, but he’s way too busy now. It’s sweet to be out and he’s not ready to waste it that way. And this place is safer than it looks.”

  The phone in Crawford’s pocket buzzed. The one on the desk purred and blinked. He listened for a few moments, said “Okay,” and hung up.

  “They found the ambulance in the underground garage at the Memphis airport.” He shook his head. “No good. Crew was in the back. Dead, both of them.” Crawford took off his glasses, rummaged for his handkerchief to polish them.

  “Starling, the Smithsonian called Burroughs asking for you. The Pilcher fellow. They’re pretty close to finishing up on the bug. I want you to write a 302 on that and sign it for the permanent file. You found the bug and followed up on it and I want the record to say so. You up to it?”

  Starling was as tired as she had ever been. “Sure,” she said.

  “Leave your car at the garage, and Jeff’ll drive you back to Quantico when you’re through.”

  On the steps she turned her face toward the lighted, curtained windows where the nurse kept watch, and then looked back at Crawford.

  “I’m thinking about you both, Mr. Crawford.”

  “Thank you, Starling,” he said.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Officer Starling, Dr. Pilcher said he’d meet you in the Insect Zoo. I’ll take you over there,” the guard said.

  To reach the Insect Zoo from the Constitution Avenue side of the museum, you must take the elevator one level above the great stuffed elephant and cross a vast floor devoted to the study of man.

  Tiers of skulls were first, rising and spreading, representing the explosion of human population since the time of Christ.

  Starling and the guard moved in a dim landscape peopled with figures illustrating human origin and variation. Here were displays of ritual—tattoos, bound feet, tooth modification, Peruvian surgery, mummification.

  “Did you ever see Wilhelm von Ellenbogen?” the guard asked, shining his light into a case.

  “I don’t believe I have,” Starling said without slowing her pace.

  “You should come sometime when the lights are up and take a look at him. Buried him in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century? Turned right to soap when the ground water hit him.”

  The Insect Zoo is a large room, dim now and loud with chirps and whirs. Cages and cases of live insects fill it. Children particularly like the zoo and troop through it all day. At night, left to themselves, the insects are busy. A few of the cases were lit with red, and the fire exit signs burned fiercely red in the dim room.

  “Dr. Pilcher?” the guard called from the door.

  “Here,” Pilcher said, holding a penlight up as a beacon.

  “Will you bring this lady out?”

  “Yes, thank you, Officer.”

  Starling took her own small flashlight out of her purse and found the switch already on, the batteries dead. The flash of anger she felt reminded her that she was tired and she had to bear down.

  “Hello, Officer Starling.”

  “Dr. Pilcher.”

  “How about ‘Professor Pilcher’?”

  “Are you a professor?”

  “No, but I’m not a doctor either. What I am is glad to see you. Want to look at some bugs?”

  “Sure. Where’s Dr. Roden?”

  “He made most of the progress over the last two nights with chaetaxy and finally he had to crash. Did you see the bug before we started on it?”

  “No.”

  “It was just mush, really.”

  “But you got it, you figured it out.”

  “Yep. Just now.” He stopped at a mesh cage. “First let me show you a moth like the one you brought in Monday. This is not exactly the same as yours, but the same family, an owlet.” The beam of his flashlight found the large sheeny blue moth sitting on a small branch, its wings folded. Pilcher blew air at it and instantly the fierce face of an owl appeared as the moth flared the undersides of its wings at them, the eye-spots on the wings glaring like the last sight a rat ever sees. “This one’s Caligo beltrao—fairly common. But with this Klaus specimen, you’re talking some heavy moths. Come on.”

  At the end of the room was a case set back in a niche with a rail in front of it. The case was beyond the reach of children and it was covered with a cloth. A small humidifier hummed beside it.

  “We keep it behind glass to protect people’s fingers—it can fight. It likes the damp too, and glass keeps the humidity in.” Pilcher lifted the cage carefully by its handles and moved it to the front of the niche. He lifted off the cover and turned on a small light above the cage.

  “This is the Death’s-head Moth,” he said. “That’s nightshade she’s sitting on—we’re hoping she’ll lay.”

  The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes.

  “Acherontia styx,” Pilcher said. “It’s named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time—did I read that?”

  “Yes,” Starling said. “Is it rare?”

  “In this part of the world it is. There aren’t any at all in nature.”

  “Where’s it from?” Starling leaned her face close to the mesh roof of the case. Her breath stirred the fur on the moth’s back. She jerked back when it squeaked and fiercely flapped its wings. She could feel the tiny breeze it made.

  “Malaysia. There’s a European type too, called atropos, but this one and the one in Klaus’ mouth are Malaysian.”

  “So somebody raised it.”

  Pilcher nodded. “Yes,” he said when she didn’t look at him. “It had to be shipped from Malaysia as an egg or more likely as a pupa. Nobody’s ever been able to get them to lay eggs in captivity. They mate, but no eggs. The hard part is finding the caterpillar in the jungle. After that, they’re not hard to raise.”

  “You said they can fight.”

  “The proboscis is sharp and stout, and they’ll jam it in your finger if you fool with them. It’s an unusual weapon and alcohol doesn’t affect it in preserved specimens. That helped us narrow the field so we could identify it so fast.” Pilcher seemed suddenly embarrassed, as though he had boasted. “They’re tough too,” he hurried on to say. “They go in beehives and Bogart honey. One time we were collecting in Sabah, Borneo, and they’d come to the light behind the youth hostel. It was weird to hear them, we’d be—”

  “Where did this one come from?”

  “A swap with the Malaysian government. I don’t know what we traded. It was funny, there we were in the dark, waiting with this cyanide bucket, when—”

  “What kind of customs declaration came with this one? Do you have records of that? Do they have to be cleared out of Malaysia? Who would have that?”

  “You’re in a hurry. Look, I’ve written down all the stuff we have and the places to put ads if you want to do that kind of thing. Come on, I’ll take you out.”

  They crossed the vast floor in silence. In the light of the elevator, Starling could see that Pilcher was as tired as she was.

  “You stayed up with this,” she said. “That was a good thing to do. I didn’t mean to be a
brupt before, I just—”

  “I hope they get him. I hope you’re through with this soon,” he said. “I put down a couple of chemicals he might be buying if he’s putting up soft specimens.… Officer Starling, I’d like to get to know you.”

  “Maybe I should call you when I can.”

  “You definitely should, absolutely, I’d like that,” Pilcher said.

  The elevator closed and Pilcher and Starling were gone. The floor devoted to man was still and no human figure moved, not the tattooed, not the mummified, the bound feet didn’t stir.

  The fire lights glowed red in the Insect Zoo, reflected in ten thousand active eyes of the older phylum. The humidifier hummed and hissed. Beneath the cover, in the black cage, the Death’s-head Moth climbed down the nightshade. She moved across the floor, her wings trailing like a cape, and found the bit of honeycomb in her dish. Grasping the honeycomb in her powerful front legs, she uncoiled her sharp proboscis and plunged it through the wax cap of a honey cell. Now she sat sucking quietly while all around her in the dark the chirps and whirs resumed, and with them the tiny tillings and killings.

  CHAPTER 41

  Catherine Baker Martin down in the hateful dark. Dark swarmed behind her eyelids and, in jerky seconds of sleep, she dreamed the dark came into her. Dark came insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each of her body openings. She put her hand over her mouth and nose, put her other hand over her vagina, clenched her buttocks, turned one ear to the mattress and sacrificed the other ear to the intrusion of the dark. With the dark came a sound, and she jerked awake. A familiar busy sound, a sewing machine. Variable speed. Slow, now fast.

  Up in the basement the lights were on—she could see a feeble disc of yellow high above her where the small hatch in the well lid stood open. The poodle barked a couple of times and the unearthly voice was talking to it, muffled.

  Sewing. Sewing was so wrong down here. Sewing belongs to the light. The sunny sewing room of Catherine’s childhood flashed so welcome in her mind … the housekeeper, dear Bea Love, at the machine … her little cat batted at the blowing curtain.

  The voice blew it all away, fussing at the poodle.

  “Precious, put that down. You’ll stick yourself with a pin and then where will we be? I’m almost done. Yes, Darlingheart. You get a Chew-wy when we get through-y, you get a Chew-wy doody doody doo.”

  Catherine did not know how long she had been captive. She knew that she had washed twice—the last time she had stood up in the light, wanting him to see her body, not sure if he was looking down from behind the blinding light. Catherine Baker Martin naked was a show-stopper, a girl and a half in all directions, and she knew it. She wanted him to see. She wanted out of the pit. Close enough to fuck is close enough to fight—she said it silently to herself over and over as she washed. She was getting very little to eat and she knew she’d better do it while she had her strength. She knew she would fight him. She knew she could fight. Would it be better to fuck him first, fuck him as many times as he could do it and wear him out? She knew if she could ever get her legs around his neck she could send him home to Jesus in about a second and a half. Can I stand to do that? You’re damned right I can. Balls and eyes, balls and eyes, ballsandeyes. But there had been no sound from above as she finished washing and put on the fresh jumpsuit. There was no reply to her offers as the bath bucket swayed up on its flimsy string and was replaced by her toilet bucket.

  She waited now, hours later, listening to the sewing machine. She did not call out to him. In time, maybe a thousand breaths, she heard him going up the stairs, talking to the dog, saying something, “—breakfast when I get back.” He left the basement light on. Sometimes he did that.

  Toenails and footsteps on the kitchen floor above. The dog whining. She believed her captor was leaving. Sometimes he went away for a long time.

  Breaths went by. The little dog walked around in the kitchen above, whining, rattling something along the floor, bonging something along the floor, maybe its bowl. Scratching, scratching above. And barking again, short sharp barks, this time not as clear as the sounds had been when the dog was above her in the kitchen. Because the little dog was not in the kitchen. It had nosed the door open and it was down in the basement chasing mice, as it had done before when he was out.

  Down in the dark, Catherine Martin felt beneath her mattress. She found the piece of chicken bone and sniffed it. It was hard not to eat the little shreds of meat and gristle on it. She put it in her mouth to get it warm. She stood up now, swaying a little in the dizzy dark. With her in the sheer pit was nothing but her futon, the jumpsuit she was wearing, the plastic toilet bucket and its flimsy cotton string stretching upward toward the pale yellow light.

  She had thought about it in every interval when she could think. Catherine stretched as high as she could and grasped the string. Better to jerk or to pull? She had thought about it through thousands of breaths. Better to pull steadily.

  The cotton string stretched more than she expected. She got a new grip as high as she could and pulled, swinging her arm from side to side, hoping the string was fraying where it passed over the wooden lip of the opening above her. She frayed until her shoulder ached. She pulled, the string stretching, now not stretching, no more stretch. Please break high. Pop, and it fell, hanks of it across her face.

  Squatting on the floor, the string lying on her head and shoulder, not enough light from the hole far above to see the string piled on her. She didn’t know how much she had. Must not tangle. Carefully she laid the string out on the floor in bights, measuring them on her forearm. She counted fourteen forearms. The string had broken at the lip of the well.

  She tied the chicken bone with its shredded morsels of flesh securely into the line where it attached to the bucket handle.

  Now the harder part.

  Work carefully. She was in her heavy-weather mind-set. It was like taking care of yourself in a small boat in heavy weather.

  She tied the broken end of the string to her wrist, tightening the knot with her teeth.

  She stood as clear of the string as possible. Holding the bucket by the handle, she swung it in a big circle and threw it straight upward at the faint disc of light above her. The plastic bucket missed the open hatch, hit the underside of the lid and fell back, hitting her in the face and shoulder. The little dog barked louder.

  She took the time to lay out the line and threw again, and again. On the third throw, the bucket hit her broken finger when it fell and she had to lean against the in-sloping wall and breathe until the nausea went away. Throw four banged down on her, but five did not. It was out. The bucket was somewhere on the wooden cover of the well beside the open trap. How far from the hole? Get steady. Gently she pulled. She twitched the string to hear the bucket handle rattle against the wood above her.

  The little dog barked louder.

  She mustn’t pull the bucket over the edge of the hole, but she must pull it close. She pulled it close.

  The little dog among the mirrors and the mannequins in a nearby basement room. Sniffing at the threads and shreds beneath the sewing machine. Nosing around the great black armoire. Looking toward the end of the basement where the sounds were coming from. Dashing toward the gloomy section to bark and dash back again.

  Now a voice, echoing faintly through the basement.

  “Preeeee-cious.”

  The little dog barked and jumped in place. Its fat little body quivered with the barks.

  Now a wet kissing sound.

  The dog looked up at the kitchen floor above, but that wasn’t where the sound came from.

  A smack-smack sound like eating. “Come on, Precious. Come on, Sweetheart.”

  On its tiptoes, ears up, the dog went into the gloom.

  Slurp-slurp. “Come on, Sweetums, come on, Precious.”

  The poodle could smell the chicken bone tied to the bucket handle. It scratched at the side of the well and whined.

  Smack-smac
k-smack.

  The small poodle jumped up onto the wooden cover of the well. The smell was over here, between the bucket and the hole. The little dog barked at the bucket, whined in indecision. The chicken bone twitched ever so slightly.

  The poodle crouched with its nose between its front paws, behind in the air, wagging furiously. It barked twice and pounced on the chicken bone, gripping it with its teeth. The bucket seemed to be trying to nose the little dog away from the chicken. The poodle growled at the bucket and held on, straddling the handle, teeth firmly clamped on the bone. Suddenly the bucket bumped the poodle over, off its feet, pushed it, it struggled to get up, bumped again, it struggled with the bucket, a back foot and haunch went off in the hole, its claws scrabbled frantically at the wood, the bucket sliding, wedging in the hole with the dog’s hindquarters and the little dog pulled free, the bucket slipping over the edge and plunging, the bucket escaping down the hole with the chicken bone. The poodle barked angrily down the hole, barks ringing down in the well. Then it stopped barking and cocked its head at a sound only it could hear. It scrambled off the top of the well and went up the stairs yipping as a door slammed somewhere upstairs.

  Catherine Baker Martin’s tears spread hot on her cheeks and fell, plucking at the front of her jumpsuit, soaking through, warm on her breasts, and she believed that she would surely die.

  CHAPTER 42

  Crawford stood alone in the center of his study with his hands jammed deep in his pockets. He stood there from 12:30 A.M. to 12:33, demanding an idea. Then he telexed the California Department of Motor Vehicles requesting a trace on the motor home Dr. Lecter said Raspail had bought in California, the one Raspail used in his romance with Klaus. Crawford asked the DMV to check for traffic tickets issued to any driver other than Benjamin Raspail.