Hannibal - Thomas Harris [166]
“Really excellent,” Starling said. “I've never had caper berries before.”
Dr Lector found the shine of butter sauce on her lip intensely moving.
Krendler sang behind the greens, mostly daycare songs, and he invited requests.
Oblivious to him, Dr Lector and Starling discussed Mischa. Starling knew of the doctor's sister's fate from their conversations about loss, but now the doctor spoke in a hopeful way about her possible return. It did not seem unreasonable to Starling on this evening that Mischa might return She expressed the hope that she might meet Mischa.
"You could never answer the phone in my office.
You sound like a cornbread country cunt," Krendler yelled through the flowers.
“See if I sound like Oliver Twist when I ask for MORE,” Starling replied, releasing in Dr Lector glee he could scarcely contain..A second helping consumed most of the frontal lobe, back nearly to the premotor cortex. Krendler was reduced to irrelevant observations about things in his immediate vision and the tuneless recitation behind the flowers of a lengthy lewd verse called “Shine.”
Absorbed in their talk, Starling and Lector were no more disturbed than they would have been by the singing of happy birthday at another table in a restaurant, but when Krendler's volume became intrusive, Dr Lector retrieved his crossbow from a corner.
“I want you to listen to the sound of this stringed instrument, Clarice.”
He waited for a moment of silence from Krendler and shot a bolt across the table through the tall flowers.
“That particular frequency of the crossbow string, should you hear it again in any context, means only your complete freedom and peace and self- sufficiency,” Dr Lector said.
The feathers and part of the shaft remained on the visible side of the flower arrangement and moved at more or less the pace of a baton directing a heart.
And if, as you say, there's room in me for my father, why is there not room in you for Mischa?"
Dr Lecter seemed pleased, whether with the idea, or with Starling's resource is impossible to say. Perhaps he felt a vague concern that he had built better than he knew.
When she replaced her glass on the table beside her, she pushed off her coffee cup and it shattered on the hearth. She did not look down at it.
Dr Lecter watched the shards, and they were still.
“I don't think you have to make up your mind right this minute,” Starling said. Her eyes and the cabochons shone in the firelight. A sigh from the fire, the warmth of the fire through her gown, and there came to Starling a passing memory - Dr Lecter, so long ago, asking Senator Martin if she breast fed her daughter. A jeweled movement turning in Starling's unnatural calm: For an instant many windows in her mind aligned and she saw far across her own experience. She said, “Hannibal Lecter, did your mother feed you at her breast?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever feel that you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa? Did you ever feel you were required to give it up for her?”
A beat. “I don't recall that, Clarice. If I gave it up, I did it gladly.”
Clarice Starling reached her cupped hand into the deep neckline of her gown and freed her breast, quickly peaky in the open air. “You don't have to give up this one,” she said. Looking always into his eyes, with her trigger finger she took warm Chateau d'Yquem from her mouth and a thick sweet drop suspended from her nipple like a golden cabochon and trembled with her breathing.
He came swiftly- from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, and bent to her coral and cream in the firelight his dark sleek head.
Chapter 102
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, three years later: Barney and Lillian Hersh walked near the Obelisk on the Avenida 9 de Julio in the early evening. Ms Hersh is a lecturer at London University, on sabbatical. She and Barney met in the anthropology museum in Mexico City. They like each other and have been traveling together two weeks, trying it a day at a time, and it is getting to be more and more fun. They are not getting tired of one another.
They had arrived in Buenos