Hannibal - Thomas Harris [94]
A smell awakened her, and she was aware that she was not alone. It was the smell of shoe polish.
The room was semidark, and Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler moved along the shelves slowly, peering at the books and pictures. He hadn't bothered to knock - there was no place to knock on the curtains and Krendler was not inclined to knocking anyway, especially at subordinate agencies. Here, in this basement at Quantico, he was definitely slumming.
One wall of the room was devoted to Dr Lecter in Italy, with a large photograph posted of Rinaldo Pazzi hanging with his bowels out from the window at Palazzo Vecchio. The opposite wall was concerned with crimes in the United States and was dominated by a police photograph of the bow hunter Dr Lecter had killed years ago. The body was hanging on a peg board and bore all the wounds of the medieval Wound Man illustrations. Many case files were stacked on the shelves along with civil records of wrongful death lawsuits filed against Dr Lecter by families of the victims.
Dr Lecter's personal books from his medical practice were here in an order identical to their arrangement in his old psychiatric office. Starling had arranged them by examining police photos of the office with a magnifying glass. Much of the light in the dim room came through an Xray of the doctor's head and neck which glowed on a light box on the wall. The other light came from a. computer workstation at a corner desk. The screen theme was “Dangerous Creatures.”
Now and then the computer growled..Piled beside the machine were the results of Starling's gleaning. The painfully gathered scraps of paper receipts, itemized bills that revealed how Dr Lecter had lived his private life in Italy, and in America before he was sent to the asylum. It was a makeshift catalog of his tastes.
Using a flatbed scanner for a table, Starling had laid I a single place setting that survived from his home in Baltimorechina, silver, crystal, napery radiant white, a candlestickfour square feet of elegance against the grotesque hangings of the room.
Krendler picked up the large wineglass and pinged it with his fingernail.
Krendler had never felt the flesh of a criminal, never fought one on the ground, and he thought of Dr Lecter as a sort of media bogeyman and an opportunity. He could see his own photograph in association with a display like this in the FBI museum once Lecter was dead. He could see its enormous campaign value. Krendler had his nose close to the Xray profile of the doctor's capacious skull, and when Starling spoke to him, he jumped enough to smudge the Xray with nose grease.
“Can I help you, Mr. Krendler?”
“Why're you sitting there in the dark?”
“I'm thinking, Mr. Krendler.”
“People on the Hill want to know what we're doing about Lecter. ”
“This is what we're doing.”
“Brief me, Starling. Bring me up to speed.”
“Wouldn't you prefer Mr. Crawford-”
“Where is Crawford?”
“Mr. Crawford's in court.”
“I think he's losing it, do you ever feel that way?”
“No, sir, I don't.”
“What are you doing here? We got a beef from the college when you seized all this stuff out of their library. It could have been handled better.”
“We've gathered everything we can find regarding Dr Lecter here in this place, both objects and records. His weapons are in Firearms and Toolmarks, but we have duplicates. We have what's left of his personal papers.”
“What's the point? You catching a crook, or writing a book?” Krendler paused to store this catchy rhyme in his verbal magazine. “If, say, a ranking Republican on judiciary Oversight should ask me what you, Special Agent Starling, are doing to catch Hannibal Lecter, what could I tell him?”
Starling turned on all the lights. She could see that Krendler was still buying expensive suits while saving money on his shirts and