“I’m not a turnkey here, Miss Starling. I don’t come running down here at night just to let people in and out. I had a ticket to Holiday on Ice.”
He realized he’d said a ticket. In that instant Starling saw his life, and he knew it.
She saw his bleak refrigerator, the crumbs on the TV tray where he ate alone, the still piles his things stayed in for months until he moved them—she felt the ache of his whole yellow-smiling Sen-Sen lonesome life—and switchblade-quick she knew not to spare him, not to talk on or look away. She stared into his face, and with the smallest tilt of her head, she gave him her good looks and bored her knowledge in, speared him with it, knowing he couldn’t stand for the conversation to go on.
He sent her with an orderly named Alonzo.
CHAPTER 22
Descending through the asylum with Alonzo toward the final keep, Starling managed to shut out much of the slammings and the screaming, though she felt them shiver the air against her skin. Pressure built on her as though she sank through water, down and down.
The proximity of madmen—the thought of Catherine Martin bound and alone, with one of them snuffling her, patting his pockets for his tools—braced Starling for her job. But she needed more than resolution. She needed to be calm, to be still, to be the keenest instrument. She had to use patience in the face of the awful need to hurry. If Dr. Lecter knew the answer, she’d have to find it down among the tendrils of his thought.
Starling found she thought of Catherine Baker Martin as the child she’d seen in the film on the news, the little girl in the sailboat.
Alonzo pushed the buzzer at the last heavy door.
“Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to be still.”
“Pardon me?” Alonzo said, and Starling realized she had spoken aloud.
He left her with the big orderly who opened the door. As Alonzo turned away, she saw him cross himself.
“Welcome back,” the orderly said, and shot the bolts home behind her.
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“Hello, Barney.”
A paperback book was wrapped around Barney’s massive index finger as he held his place. It was Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Starling was set to notice everything.
“How do you want the lights?” he said.
The corridor between the cells was dim. Near the far end she could see bright light from the last cell shining on the corridor floor.
“Dr. Lecter’s awake.”
“At night, always—even when his lights are off.”
“Let’s leave them like they are.”
“Stay in the middle going down, don’t touch the bars, right?”
“I want to shut that TV off.” The television had been moved. It was at the far end, facing up the center of the corridor. Some inmates could see it by leaning their heads against the bars.
“Sure, turn the sound off, but leave the picture if you don’t mind. Some of ’em like to look at it. The chair’s right there if you want it.”
Starling went down the dim corridor alone. She did not look into the cells on either side. Her footfalls seemed loud to her. The only other sounds were wet snoring from one cell, maybe two, and a low chuckle from another.
The late Miggs’ cell had a new occupant. She could see long legs outstretched on the floor, the top of a head resting against the bars. She looked as she passed. A man sat on the cell floor in a litter of shredded construction paper. His face was vacant. The television was reflected in his eyes and a shiny thread of spit connected the corner of his mouth and his shoulder.
She didn’t want to look into Dr. Lecter’s cell until she was sure he had seen her. She passed it, feeling itchy between the shoulders, went to the television and turned off the sound.
Dr. Lecter wore the white asylum pajamas in his white cell. The only colors in the cell were his hair and eyes and his red mouth, in a face so long out of the sun it leached into the surrounding whiteness; his features seemed suspended above the collar of his shirt. He sat at his table behind the nylon net that kept him back from the bars. He was sketching on butcher paper, using his hand for a model. As she watched, he turned his hand over and, flexing his fingers to great tension, drew the inside of the forearm. He used his little finger as a shading stump to modify a charcoal line.
She came a little closer to the bars, and he looked up. For Starling every shadow in the cell flew into his eyes and widow’s peak.
“Good evening, Dr. Lecter.”