Hannibal - Thomas Harris [29]
I WAN TO GO TO JESA I WAN TO GO WIV CRIEZ.I CAN GO WIV JESA EF I AC RELL NIZE.
She still had the labored crayon text, somewhere.
The cell was stacked with mattresses now, and bales of bed linens tied up in sheets.
And at last, Dr Lecter's cell.
The sturdy table where he read was still bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. The boards were gone from the shelves that had held his books, but the brackets still stuck out of the walls.
Starling should turn to the cabinets, but she was fixed on the cell. Here she had had the most remarkable encounter of her life. Here she had been startled, shocked, surprised.
Here she had heard things about herself so terribly true her heart resounded like a great deep bell.
She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.
Starling shined her light around her, looked on the back side of the row of filing cabinets, swept her light through the nearby cells.
Curiosity carried her across the threshold. She stood in the middle of the cell where Dr Hannibal Lecter had spent eight years. She occupied his space, where she had seen him standing, and expected to tingle, but she did not. Put her pistol and her flashlight on his table, careful that the flashlight didn't roll, and put her hands flat on his table, and beneath her hands felt only crumbs.
Overall, the affect was disappointing. The cell was as empty of its former occupant as a snake's shed skin. Starling thought then that she came to understand something: Death and danger do not have to come with trappings. They can come to you in the sweet breath of your beloved. Or on a sunny afternoon in a fish market with “La Macarena” playing on a boom box.
To business. There were about eight feet of filing cabinets, four cabinets in all, chinhigh. Each had five drawers, secured by a single fourpin lock beside the top drawer. None of them was locked. All were full of files, some of them fat, all of them in folders. Old marbleized paper folders gone limp with time, and newer ones in manila folders. The files on the health of dead men, dating back to the hospital's opening in 1932. They were roughly alphabetical, with some material piled flat behind the folders in the long drawers. Starling skipped quickly along, holding her heavy flashlight on her shoulder, walking the fingers of her free hand through the files, wishing she had brought a small light she could hold in her teeth. As soon as she had some sense of the files she could skip whole drawers, through the Y's, very few K's, on to the L's and bam: Lecter, Hannibal.
Starling pulled out the long manila folder, felt it at once for the stiffness of an X ray negative, laid the folder on top of the other files and opened it to find the health history of the late I. J. Miggs. Goddammit. Miggs was going to plague her from the grave. She put the file on top of the cabinet and raced ahead into the M's. Miggs's own manila folder was there, in alphabetical order. It was empty. Filing error? Did someone accidentally put Miggs's.records in Hannibal Lecter's jacket? She went through all the M's looking for a file without a jacket. She went back to the Ys. Aware of an increasing annoyance. The smell of the place was bothering her more. The caretaker was right, it was hard to breathe in this place. She was halfway through the Y's when she realized the stench was . . . increasing rapidly.
A small splash behind her and she spun, flashlight cocked for a blow, hand fast beneath her blazer to the gun butt. A tall man in filthy rags stood in the beam of her light, one of his outsize swollen feet in the water. One of his hands was spread from his side.