Hannibal - Thomas Harris [32]
Starling put her palms together and nodded. “Well, yes, I am the G. Barney, I need to talk with you. It's just informal, I need to ask you some stuff.”
Barney came down the steps.
When he was standing on the sidewalk in front of Starling, she still had to look up at his face. She was not threatened by his size, as a man would be.
“Would you agree for the record, Officer Starling, that I have not been read my rights?”
His voice was high and rough like the voice of Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan.
“Absolutely. I have not Mirandized you. I acknowledge that.”
“How about saying it into your bag?”
Starling opened her bag and spoke down into it in a loud voice as though it contained a troll. “I have not Mirandized Barney, he is unaware of his rights.”
“There's some pretty good coffee down the street,” Barney said. “How many hats have you got in that bag?” he asked as they walked.
“Three,” she said.
When the van with handicap plates passed by, Starling was aware that the.occupants were looking at her, but the afflicted are often horny, as they have every right to be. The young male occupants of a car at the next crossing looked at her too, but said nothing because of Barney. Anything extended from the windows would have caught Starling's instant attention - she was wary of Crip revenge but silent ogling is to be endured.
When she and Barney entered the coffee shop, the van backed into an alley to turn around and went back the way it came.
They had to wait for a booth in the crowded ham and egg place while the waiter yelled in Hindi to the cook, who handled meat with long tongs and a guilty expression.
“Let's eat,” Starling said when they were seated. “It's on Uncle Sam. How's it going, Barney?”
“The job's okay.”
“What is it?”
“Orderly, LPN.”
“I figured you for an RN by now, or maybe medical school.”
Barney shrugged and reached for the creamer. He looked up at Starling. “They jam you up for shooting Evelda?”
“We'll have to see. Did you know her?”
“I saw her once, when they brought in her husband, Dijon. He was dead, he bled out on them before they ever got him in the ambulance. He was leaking clear I V when he got to us. She wouldn't let him go and tried to fight the nurses. I had to . . . you know . . . Handsome woman, strong too. They didn't bring her in after-”
“No, she was pronounced at the scene.”
“I would think so.”
“Barney, after you turned over Dr Lecter to the Tennessee people-” “They weren't civil to him.”
“After you-” “And they're all dead now.”
“Yes. His keepers managed to stay alive for three days. You lasted eight years keeping Dr Lecter.”
“It was six yearshe was there before I came.”
“How'd you do it, Barney? If you don't mind my asking, how'd you manage to last with him? It wasn't just being civil.”
Barney looked at his refection in his spoon, first convex and then concave, and thought a moment. “Dr Lecter had perfect manners, not stiff, but easy and elegant. I was working on some correspondence courses and he shared his mind with me. That didn't mean he wouldn't kill me any second if he got the chance- one quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better. In maximum lockdown you can't afford to forget that, ever. If you keep it in mind, you're all right. Dr Lecter may have been sorry he showed me Socrates.”.To Barney, lacking the disadvantage of formal schooling, Socrates was a fresh experience, with the quality of an encounter.
“Security was separate from conversation, a whole other thing,” he said. “Security was never personal, even when I had to shut off his mail or put him in restraints.”
“Did you talk with Dr Lecter a lot?”
“Sometimes he went months without saying anything, and sometimes we'd talk, late at night when the crying died down. In fact - I was taking these courses by mail and I knew diddly - and he showed me a whole world, literally, of stuffSuetonius, Gibbon, all that.”
Barney picked up his cup. He had a streak of orange Betadine on a fresh scratch across