Hannibal - Thomas Harris [97]
“Dr Doemling's head of the psychology department at Baylor University. He.holds the Verger Chair,” Mason told Krendler. "I've asked him what kind of bond there might be between Dr Lecter and the FBI agent Clarice Starling. Doctor . . .
Doemling faced forward in his seat as though it were a witness stand and turned his head to Mason as he would to a jury. Krendler could see in him the practiced manner, the careful partisanship of the twothousanddollaraday expert witness.
“Mr. Verger obviously knows my qualifications, would you like to hear them?” Doemling asked.
“No,” Krendler said.
“I've reviewed the Starling woman's notes on her interviews with Hannibal Lecter, his letters to her, and the material you provided me on their backgrounds,” Doemling began.
Krendler winced at this, and Mason said, “Dr Doemling has signed a confidentiality agreement.”
“Cordell will put your slides up on the elmo when you want them, Doctor,” Margot said.
“A little background first.”
Doemling consulted his notes. “We knooowww Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania. His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his mother highborn Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of the servants. The children disappeared after that. There were two of them, Hannibal and his sister. We don't know what happened to the sister. The point is, Lecter was an orphan, like Clarice Starling.”
“Which I told you,” Mason said impatiently.
“But what did you conclude from it?”
Dr Doemling asked. "I'm not proposing a kind of sympathy between two orphans, Mr. Verger. This is not about sympathy. Sympathy does not enter here. And mercy is left bleeding in the dust. Listen to me. What a common experience of being an orphan gives Dr Lecter is simply a better ability to understand her, and ultimately control her. This is all about control.
“The Starling woman spent her childhood in institutions, and from what you tell me she does not evidence any stable personal relationship with a man. She lives with a former classmate, a young AfricanAmerican woman.”
“That's very likely a sex thing,” Krendler said.
The psychiatrist did not even spare Krendler a look. Krendler was automatically overruled. “You can never say to a certainty why someone lives with someone else.”
“It is one of the things that is hid, as the Bible says,” Mason said.
“Starling looks pretty tasty, if you like whole wheat,” Margot offered.
“I think the attraction's from Lecter's end, not hers,” Krendler said. “You've.seen her - she's a pretty cold fish.”
“Is she a cold fish, Mr. Krendler?” Margot sounded amused.
“You think she's queer, Margot?” Mason asked.
“How the hell would I know? Whatever she is, she treats it as her own damn business - that was my impression. I think she's tough, and she had on her game face, but I wouldn't say she's a cold fish. We didn't talk much, but that's what I took from it. That 'was before you needed me to help you, Mason- you ran me out, remember? I'm not going to say she's a cold fish. Girl who looks like Starling has to keep a certain distance in her face because assholes are hitting on her all the time.”
Here Krendler felt that Margot looked at him a beat too long, though he could only see her in outline.
How curious, the voices in this room. Krendler's careful bureauese, Doemling's pedantic bray, Mason's deep and resonant tones with his badly pruned plosives and leaking sibilants and Margot, her voice rough and low, toughmouthed as a livery pony and resentful of the bit. Under it all, the gasping machinery that finds Mason breath.
“I have an idea about her private life, regarding her apparent father fixation,” Doemling went on. “I'll get into it shortly. Now, we have three documents of Dr Lecter's concerning Clarice Starling.