That's what Mason wants

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE is the FBI section that deals with serial murder. Down in

its basement offices, the air is cool and still. Decorators with their color

wheels have tried in recent years to brighten the subterranean space. The

result is no more successful than funeral home cosmetics.

The section chief's office remains in the original brown and tan with the

checked cafe curtains on its high windows. There, surrounded by his hellish

files Jack Crawford sat writing at his desk.

A knock, and Crawford looked up to a sight that pleased him - Clarice Starling

stood in his doorway. Crawford smiled and rose from his chair. He and Starling

often talked while standing; it was one of the tacit formalities they had come

to impose on their relationship. They did not need to shake hands.

"I heard you came to the hospital," Starling said' "Sorry I missed you."

"I was just glad they let you go so fast," he said. "Tell me about your ear,

is it okay?"

"It's fine if you like cauliflower. They tell me it'll go down, most of it."

Her ear was covered by her hair. She did not offer to show him.

A little silence.

"They had me taking the fall for the raid, Mr. Crawford. For Evelda Drumgo's

death, all of it. They were like hyenas and then suddenly it stopped and they

slunk away. Something drove them off."

"Maybe you have an angel, Starling."

"Maybe I do. What did it cost you, Mr. Crawford?"

Crawford shook his head. "Close the door, please, Starling." Crawford found a

wadded Kleenex in his pocket and polished his spectacles. "I would have done

it if I could. I didn't have the juice by myself. If Senator Martin was still

in office, you'd have had some cover . . . . They wasted John Brigham on that

raid just threw him away. It would have been a shame if they wasted you like

they wasted John. It felt like I was stacking you and John across a jeep."

Crawford's cheeks colored and she remembered his face in the sharp wind above

John Brigham's grave. Crawford had never talked to her about his war.

"You did something, Mr. Crawford."

He nodded. "I did something. I don't know how glad you'll be. It's a job."

A job. Job was a good word in their private lexicon. It meant a specific and

immediate task and it cleared the air. They never spoke if they could help it

about the troubled central bureaucracy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Crawford and Starling were like medical missionaries, with little patience for

theology, each concentrating hard on the one baby before them, knowing and not

saying that God wouldn't do a goddamned thing to help. That for fifty thousand

Ibo infant lives, He would not bother to send rain.

"Indirectly, Starling, your benefactor is your recent correspondent."

"Dr Lecter." She had long noted Crawford's distaste for the spoken name.

"Yes, the very same. For all this time he'd eluded us - he was away clean -

and he writes you a letter. Why?"

It had been seven years since Dr Hannibal Lecter, known murderer of ten,

escaped from custody in Memphis, taking five more lives in the process.

It was as though Lecter had dropped off the earth. The case remained open at

the FBI and would remain open forever, or until he was caught. The same was

true in Tennessee and other jurisdictions, but there was no task force

assigned to pursue him anymore, though relatives of his victims had wept angry

tears before the Tennessee state legislature and demanded action. Whole tomes

of scholarly conjecture on his mentality were available; most of it authored

by psychologists who had never been exposed to the doctor in person. A few

works appeared by psychiatrists he had skewered in the professional journals,

who apparently felt that it was safe to come out now. Some of them said his

aberrations would inevitably drive him to suicide and that it was likely he

was already dead.

In cyberspace at least, interest in Dr Lecter remained very much alive. The

damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and

sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number. Impostors plagued

the chat rooms and in the phosphorescent swamp of the Web's dark side, police

photographs of his outrages were bootlegged to collectors of hideous arcana.

They were second in popularity only to the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li.

One trace of the doctor after seven years - his letter to Clarice Starling

when she was being crucified by the tabloids.

The letter bore no fingerprints, but the FBI felt reasonably sure it was

genuine. Clarice Starling was certain of it.

"Why did he do it, Starling?"

Crawford seemed almost angry at her. "I've never pretended to understand him

any more than these psychiatric jackasses do. You tell me."

"He thought what happened to me would . . . destroy, would disillusion me

about the Bureau, and he enjoys seeing the destruction of faith, it's his

favorite thing. It's like the church collapses he used to collect. The pile of

rubble in Italy when the church collapsed on all the grandmothers at that

special Mass and somebody stuck a Christmas tree in the top of the pile, he

loved that. I amuse him, he toys with me. When I was interviewing him he liked

to point out holes in my education, he thinks I'm pretty naive."

Crawford spoke from his own age and isolation when he said, "Have you ever

thought that he might like you, Starling?"

"I think I amuse him. Things either amuse him or they don't. If they don't. ."

"Ever felt that he liked you?" Crawford insisted on the distinction between

thought and feeling like a Baptist insists on total immersion.

"On really short acquaintance he told me some things, about myself that were

true. I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy

so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's

hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.

When you see understanding just used as a predator's tool, that's the worst.

I. . I have no idea how Dr Lecter feels about me."

"What sort of thing did he tell you, if you don't mind.

"He said I was an ambitious, hustling little rube and my eyes shined like

cheap birthstones. He told me I wore cheap shoes, but I had some taste, a

little taste."

"That struck you as true?"

"Yep. Maybe it still is. I've improved my shoes."

"Do you think, Starling, he might have been Interested to see if you'd rat him

out when he sent you a letter of encouragement?"

"He knew I'd rat him out, he'd better know it."

"He killed six after the court committed him, Crawford said. "He killed Miggs

in the asylum for throwing semen in your face, and five in his escape" In the

present political climate, if the doctor's caught he'll get the needle."

Crawford smiled at the thought. He had pioneered the study of serial murder.

Now was facing mandatory retirement and the monster who had tried him the most

remained free. The prospect of death for Dr Lecter pleased him mightily.

Starling knew Crawford mentioned Miggs's act to goose her attention, to put

her back in those terrible, days when she was trying to interrogate Hannibal

the Cannibal in the dungeon at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally

Insane. When Lecter toyed with her while a girl crouched in Jame Gumb's pit,

waiting to die.

Usually Crawford heightened your attention when he was coming to the point, as

he did now.

"Did you know, Starling, that one of Dr Lecter's early victims is still

alive?"

"The rich one. The family offered a reward."

"Yes, Mason Verger. He's on a respirator in Maryland. His father died this

year and left him the meatpacking fortune. Old Verger also left Mason a U.S.

congressman and a member of the House Judiciary Oversight Committee who just

couldn't make ends meet without him. Mason says he's got something that might

help us find the doctor. He wants to speak with you."

"With me."

"You. That's what Mason wants and suddenly everyone agrees it's a really good

idea."

"That's what Mason wants after you suggested it to him?"

"They were going to throw you away, Starling, clean up with you like you were

a rag. You would have been wasted just like John Brigham. Just to save some

bureaucrats at BATF. Fear. Pressure. That's all they understand anymore. I had

somebody drop a dime to Mason and tell him how much it would hurt the hunt for

Lecter if you got canned. Whatever else happened, who Mason might have called

after that, I don't want to know, probably Representative Vollmer."

A year ago, Crawford would not have played this way. Starling searched his

face for any of the short-timer craziness that sometimes comes over imminent

retirees. She didn't see any, but he did look weary.

"Mason's not pretty, Starling, and I don't just mean his face. Find out what

he's got. Bring it here, we'll work with it. At last."

Starling knew that for years, ever since she graduated from the FBI Academy,

Crawford had tried to get her assigned to Behavioral Science.

Now that she was a veteran of the Bureau, veteran of many lateral assignments,

she could see that her early triumph in catching the serial murderer Jame Gumb

was part of her undoing in the Bureau. She was a rising star that stuck on the

way up. In the process of catching Gumb, she had made at least one powerful

enemy and excited the jealousy of a number of her male contemporaries. That

and a certain cross-grainedness, had led to years of jump-out squads, and

reactive squad rolling on bank robberies and years of serving warrants seeing

Newark over a shotgun barrel. Finally, deemed too irascible to work with

groups, she was a tech agent, bugging the telephones and cars of gangsters and

child pornographers, keeping lonesome vigils over Title Three wiretaps. And

she was forever on loan when a sister agency needed a reliable hand in a raid

She had wiry strength and she was fast and careful with the gun.

Crawford saw this as a chance for her. He assumed she had always wanted to

chase Lecter. The truth was more complicated than that.

Crawford was studying her now. "You never got that gunpowder out of your

cheek."

Grains of burnt powder from the revolver of the late Jame Gumb marked her

cheekbone with a black spot.

"Never had time," Starling said.

"Do you know what the French call a beauty spot, a mouche like that, high on

the cheek? Do you know what it stands for?"

Crawford owned a sizeable library on tattoos, body symbology, ritual

mutilation.

Starling shook her head.

"They call that one 'courage,'" Crawford said. "You can wear that one. I'd

keep it if I were you."