The Silence of the Lambs

Either she found Gumb, or she made sure he’d fled, or she took Catherine out with her, those were the only choices.

  A quick look over her shoulder, around the oubliette room.

  “Catherine. Catherine. Is there a ladder?”

  “I don’t know, I woke up down here. He let the bucket down on strings.”

  Bolted to a wall beam was a small hand winch. There was no line on the drum of the winch.

  “Catherine, I have to find something to get you out with. Can you walk?”

  “Yes. Don’t leave me.”

  “I have to leave the room for just a minute.”

  “You fucking bitch don’t you leave me down here, my mother will tear your goddamn shit brains out—”

  “Catherine shut up. I want you to be quiet so I can hear. To save yourself be quiet, do you understand?” Then, louder, “The other officers will be here any minute, now shut up. We won’t leave you down there.”

  He had to have a rope. Where was it? Go see.

  Starling moved across the stairwell in one rush, to the door of the workroom, door’s the worst place, in fast, back and forth along the near wall until she had seen all the room, familiar shapes swimming in the glass tanks, she too alert to be startled. Quickly through the room, past the tanks, the sinks, past the cage, a few big moths flying. She ignored them.

  Approaching the corridor beyond, it blazing with light. The refrigerator turned on behind her and she spun in a crouch, hammer lifting off the frame of the Magnum, eased the pressure off. On to the corridor. She wasn’t taught to peek. Head and gun at once, but low. The corridor empty. The studio blazing with light at the end of it. Fast along it, gambling past the closed door, on to the studio door. The room all white and blond oak. Hell to clear from the doorway. Make sure every mannequin is a mannequin, every reflection is a mannequin. Only movement in the mirrors your movement.

  The great armoire stood open and empty. The far door open onto darkness, the basement beyond. No rope, no ladder anywhere. No lights beyond the studio. She closed the door into the dark part of the basement, pushed a chair under the knob, and pushed a sewing machine against it. If she could be positive he wasn’t in this part of the basement, she’d risk going upstairs for a moment to find a phone.

  Back down the corridor, one door she’d passed. Get on the side opposite the hinges. All the way open in one move. The door slammed back, nobody behind it. An old bathroom. In it, rope, hooks, a sling. Get Catherine or go for the phone? In the bottom of the well Catherine wouldn’t get shot by accident. But if Starling got killed, Catherine was dead too. Take Catherine with her to the phone.

  Starling didn’t want to stay in the bathroom long. He could come to the door and hose her. She looked both ways and ducked inside for the rope. There was a big bathtub in the room. The tub was almost filled with hard red-purple plaster. A hand and wrist stuck up from the plaster, the hand turned dark and shriveled, the fingernails painted pink. On the wrist was a dainty watch. Starling was seeing everything at once, the rope, the tub, the hand, the watch.

  The tiny insect-crawl of the second-hand was the last thing she saw before the lights went out.

  Her heart knocked hard enough to shake her chest and arms. Dizzy dark, need to touch something, the edge of the tub. The bathroom. Get out of the bathroom. If he can find the door he can hose this room, nothing to get behind. Oh dear Jesus go out. Go out down low and out in the hall. Every light out? Every light. He must have done it at the fuse box, pulled the lever, where would it be? Where would the fuse box be? Near the stairs. Lot of times near the stairs. If it is, he’ll come from that way. But he’s between me and Catherine.

  Catherine Martin was keening again.

  Wait here? Wait forever? Maybe he’s gone. He can’t be sure no backup’s coming. Yes he can. But soon I’ll be missed. Tonight. The stairs are in the direction of the screams. Solve it now.

  She moved, quietly, her shoulder barely brushing the wall, brushing it too lightly for sound, one hand extended ahead, the gun at waist level, close to her in the confined hallway. Out into the workroom now. Feel the space opening up. Open room. In the crouch in the open room, arms out, both hands on the gun. You know exactly where the gun is, it’s just below eye level. Stop, listen. Head and body and arms turning together like a turret. Stop, listen.

  In absolute black the hiss of steam pipes, trickle of water.

  Heavy in her nostrils the smell of the goat.

  Catherine keening.

  Against the wall stood Mr. Gumb with his goggles on. There was no danger she’d bump into him—there was an equipment table between them. He played his infrared light up and down her. She was too slender to be of great utility to him. He remembered her hair though, from the kitchen, and it was glorious, and that would only take a minute. He could slip it right off. Put it on himself. He could lean over the well wearing it and tell that thing “Surprise!”

  It was fun to watch her trying to sneak along. She had her hip against the sinks now, creeping toward the screams with her gun stuck out. It would have been fun to hunt her for a long time—he’d never hunted one armed before. He would have thoroughly enjoyed it. No time for that. Pity.

  A shot in the face would be fine and easy at eight feet. Now.

  He cocked the Python as he brought it up snick snick and the figure blurred, bloomed bloomed green in his vision and his gun bucked in his hand and the floor hit him hard in the back and his light was on and he saw the ceiling. Starling on the floor, flash-blind, ears ringing, deafened by the blast of the guns. She worked in the dark while neither could hear, dump the empties, tip it, feel to see they’re all out, in with the speedloader, feel it, tip it down, twist, drop it, close the cylinder. She’d fired four. Two shots and two shots. He’d fired once. She found the two good cartridges she’d dumped. Put them where? In the speed-loader pouch. She lay still. Move before he can hear?

  The sound of a revolver being cocked is like no other. She’d fired at the sound, seen nothing past the great muzzle flashes of the guns. She hoped he’d fire now in the wrong direction, give her the muzzle flash to shoot at. Her hearing was coming back, her ears still rang, but she could hear.

  What was that sound? Whistling? Like a teakettle, but interrupted. What was it? Like breathing. Is it me? No. Her breath blew warm off the floor, back in her face. Careful, don’t get dust, don’t sneeze. It’s breathing. It’s a sucking chest wound. He’s hit in the chest. They’d taught her how to seal one, to put something over it, a rain slicker, a plastic bag, something airtight, strap it tight. Reinflate the lung. She’d hit him in the chest, then. What to do? Wait. Let him stiffen up and bleed. Wait.

  Starling’s cheek stung. She didn’t touch it, if it was bleeding she didn’t want her hands slick.

  The moaning from the well came again, Catherine talking, crying. Starling had to wait. She couldn’t answer Catherine. She couldn’t say anything or move.

  Mr. Gumb’s invisible light played on the ceiling. He tried to move it and he couldn’t, any more than he could move his head. A great Malaysian Luna Moth passing close beneath the ceiling picked up the infrared and came down, circled, lit on the light. The pulsing shadows of its wings, enormous on the ceiling, were visible only to Mr. Gumb.

  Over the sucking in the dark, Starling heard Mr. Gumb’s ghastly voice, choking: “How … does … it feel … to be … so beautiful?”

  And then another sound. A gurgle, a rattle and the whistling stopped.

  Starling knew that sound too. She’d heard it once before, at the hospital when her father died.

  She felt for the edge of the table and got to her feet. Feeling her way along, going toward the sounds of Catherine, she found the stairwell and climbed the stairs in the dark.

  It seemed to take a long time. There was a candle in the kitchen drawer. With it she found the fuse box beside the stairs, jumped when the lights came on. To get to the fuse box and shut off the lights, he must have left the basement another way and come down again behind her.
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  Starling had to be positive he was dead. She waited until her eyes were well adjusted to the light before she went back in the workroom, and then she was careful. She could see his naked feet and legs sticking out from under the worktable. She kept her eyes on the hand beside the gun until she kicked the gun away. His eyes were open. He was dead, shot through the right side of the chest, thick blood under him. He had put on some of his things from the armoire and she couldn’t look at him long.

  She went to the sink, put the Magnum on the drainboard and ran cold water on her wrists, wiped her face with her wet hand. No blood. Moths batted at the mesh around the lights. She had to step around the body to retrieve the Python.

  At the well she said, “Catherine, he’s dead. He can’t hurt you. I’m going upstairs and call—”

  “No! GET ME OUT. GET ME OUT. GET ME OUT.”

  “Look here. He’s dead. This is his gun. Remember it? I’m going to call the police and the fire department. I’m afraid to hoist you out myself, you might fall. Soon as I call them I’ll come back down and wait with you. Okay? Okay. Try to shut that dog up. Okay? Okay.”

  * * *

  The local television crews arrived just after the fire department and before the Belvedere police. The fire captain, angered at the glare from the lights, drove the television crews back up the stairs and out of the basement while he rigged a pipe frame to hoist out Catherine Martin, not trusting Mr. Gumb’s hook in the ceiling joist. A fireman went down into the well and put her in the rescue chair. Catherine came out holding the dog, kept the dog in the ambulance.

  They drew the line on dogs at the hospital and wouldn’t let the dog in. A fireman, instructed to drop it off at the animal shelter, took it home with him instead.

  CHAPTER 57

  There were about fifty people at National Airport in Washington, meeting the red-eye flight from Columbus, Ohio. Most of them were meeting relatives and they looked sleepy and grumpy enough, with their shirttails sticking out below their jackets.

  From the crowd, Ardelia Mapp had a chance to look Starling over as she came off the plane. Starling was pasty, dark under the eyes. Some black grains of gunpowder were in her cheek. Starling spotted Mapp and they hugged.

  “Hey, Sport,” Mapp said. “You check anything?”

  Starling shook her head.

  “Jeff’s outside in the van. Let’s go home.”

  Jack Crawford was outside too, his car parked behind the van in the limousine lane. He’d had Bella’s relatives all night.

  “I…” he started. “You know what you did. You hit a home run, kid.” He touched her cheek. “What’s this?”

  “Burnt gunpowder. The doctor said it’ll work out by itself in a couple of days—better than digging for it.”

  Crawford took her to him and held her very tight for a moment, just a moment, and then put her away from him and kissed her on the forehead. “You know what you did,” he said again. “Go home. Go to sleep. Sleep in. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  The new surveillance van was comfortable, designed for long stakeouts. Starling and Mapp rode in the big chairs in the back.

  Without Jack Crawford in the van, Jeff drove a little harder. They made good time toward Quantico.

  Starling rode with her eyes closed. After a couple of miles, Mapp nudged her knee. Mapp had opened two short-bottle Cokes. She handed Starling a Coke and took a half-pint of Jack Daniel’s out of her purse.

  They each took a swig out of their Cokes and poured in a shot of sour mash. Then they stuck their thumbs in the necks of the bottles, shook them, and shot the foam in their mouths.

  “Ahhh,” Starling said.

  “Don’t spill that in here,” Jeff said.

  “Don’t worry, Jeff,” Mapp said. Quietly to Starling, “You should have seen my man Jeff waiting for me outside the liquor store. He looked like he was passing peach seeds.” When Mapp saw the whiskey start to work a little, when Starling sank a little deeper in her chair, Mapp said, “How you doing, Starling?”

  “Ardelia, I’m damned if I know.”

  “You don’t have to go back, do you?”

  “Maybe for one day next week, but I hope not. The U.S. Attorney came over from Columbus to talk to the Belvedere cops. I did depositions out the wazoo.”

  “Couple of good things,” Mapp said. “Senator Martin’s been on the phone all evening from Bethesda—you knew they took Catherine to Bethesda? Well, she’s okay. He didn’t mess her up in any physical way. Emotional damage, they don’t know, they have to watch. Don’t worry about school. Crawford and Brigham both called. The hearing’s canceled. Krendler asked for his memo back. These people have got a heart like a greasy BB, Starling—you get no slack. You don’t have to take the Search-and-Seizure exam at 0800 tomorrow, but you take it Monday, and the PE test right after. We’ll jam over the weekend.”

  They finished the half-pint just north of Quantico and dumped the evidence in a barrel at a roadside park.

  “That Pilcher, Doctor Pilcher at the Smithsonian, called three times. Made me promise to tell you he called.”

  “He’s not a doctor.”

  “You think you might do something about him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  “He sounds like he’s pretty funny. I’ve about decided funny’s the best thing in men, I’m talking about aside from money and your basic manageability.”

  “Yeah, and manners too, you can’t leave that out.”

  “Right. Give me a son of a bitch with some manners every time.”

  Starling went like a zombie from the shower to the bed.

  Mapp kept her reading light on for a while, until Starling’s breathing was regular. Starling jerked in her sleep, a muscle in her cheek twitched, and once her eyes opened wide.

  Mapp woke sometime before daylight, the room feeling empty. Mapp turned on her light. Starling was not in her bed. Both of their laundry bags were missing, so Mapp knew where to look.

  She found Starling in the warm laundry room, dozing against the slow rump-rump of a washing machine in the smell of bleach and soap and fabric softener. Starling had the psychology background—Mapp’s was law—yet it was Mapp who knew that the washing machine’s rhythm was like a great heartbeat and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear—our last memory of peace.

  CHAPTER 58

  Jack Crawford woke early on the sofa in his study and heard the snoring of his in-laws in his house. In the free moment before the weight of the day came on him, he remembered not Bella’s death, but the last thing she’d said to him, her eyes clear and calm: “What’s going on in the yard?”

  He took Bella’s grain scoop and, in his bathrobe, went out and fed the birds as he had promised to do. Leaving a note for his sleeping in-laws, he eased out of the house before sunrise. Crawford had always gotten along with Bella’s relatives, more or less, and it helped to have the noise in the house, but he was glad to get away to Quantico.

  He was going through the overnight telex traffic and watching the early news in his office when Starling pressed her nose to the glass of the door. He dumped some reports out of a chair for her and they watched the news together without saying anything. Here it came.

  The outside of Jame Gumb’s old building in Belvedere with its empty storefront and soaped windows covered with heavy gates. Starling hardly recognized it.

  “Dungeon of Horrors,” the news reader called it.

  Harsh, jostled pictures of the well and the basement, still cameras held up before the television camera, and angry firemen waving the photographers back. Moths crazed by the television lights, flying into the lights, a moth on the floor on its back, wings beating down to a final tremor.

  Catherine Martin refusing a stretcher and walking to the ambulance with a policeman’s coat around her, the dog sticking its face out between the lapels.

  A side view of Starling walking fast to a car, her head down, hands in the pockets of her coat.

  The film was edited to exclude
some of the more grisly objects. In the far reaches of the basement, the cameras could show only the low, lime-sprinkled thresholds of the chambers holding Gumb’s tableaux. The body count in that part of the basement stood at six so far.

  Twice Crawford heard Starling expel air through her nose. The news went to a commercial break.

  “Good morning, Starling.”

  “Hello,” she said, as though it were later in the day.

  “The U.S. Attorney in Columbus faxed me your depositions overnight. You’ll have to sign some copies for him.… So you went from Fredrica Bimmel’s house to Stacy Hubka, and then to the Burdine woman at the store Bimmel sewed for, Richards’ Fashions, and Mrs. Burdine gave you Mrs. Lippman’s old address, the building there.”

  Starling nodded. “Stacy Hubka had been by the place a couple of times to pick up Fredrica, but Stacy’s boyfriend was driving and her directions were vague. Mrs. Burdine had the address.”

  “Mrs. Burdine never mentioned a man at Mrs. Lippman’s?”

  “No.”

  The television news had film from Bethesda Naval Hospital. Senator Ruth Martin’s face framed in a limousine window.

  “Catherine was rational last night, yes. She’s sleeping, she’s sedated right now. We’re counting our blessings. No, as I said before, she’s suffering from shock, but she’s rational. Just bruises, and her finger is broken. And she’s dehydrated as well. Thank you.” She poked her chauffeur in the back. “Thank you. No, she mentioned the dog to me last night, I don’t know what we’ll do about it, we already have two dogs.”

  The story closed with a nothing quote from a stress specialist who would be talking with Catherine Martin later in the day to assess emotional damage.

  Crawford shut it off.

  “How’re you hittin’ ’em, Starling?”

  “Kind of numb … you too?”

  Crawford nodded, quickly moved along. “Senator Martin’s been on the phone overnight. She wants to come see you. Catherine does too, as soon as she can travel.”

  “I’m always home.”

  “Krendler too, he wants to come down here. He asked for his memo back.”