Hannibal - Thomas Harris [98]
Dr Doemling looked up at the screen. “The slide, please.”
From somewhere outside the room, Cordell put up the extraordinary sketch on the elevated monitor. The original is charcoal on butcher paper. Mason's copy was made on a blueprint copier and the lines are the blue of a bruise.
“He tried to patent this,” Dr Doemling said. “As you can see, here is Christ crucified on a clock face and His arms revolve to tell the time, just like the Mickey Mouse watches. It's interesting because the face, the head hanging forward, is that of Clarice Starling. He drew it at the time of their interviews. Here's a photograph of the woman, you can see. Cordell, is it? Cordell, put up the photo please.”
There was no question, the Jesus head was Starling.
“Another anomaly is that the figure is nailed to the cross through the wrists rather than the palms.”
“That's accurate,” Mason said. “You've got to nail them through the wrists and use big wooden washers, otherwise they get loose and start flapping. Idi Amin and I found that out the hard way when we reenacted the whole thing in Uganda at Easter. Our Saviour was actually nailed through the wrists. All the Crucifixion paintings are wrong. It's a mistranslation between the Hebrew and Latin Bibles.”
“Thank you,” Dr Doemling said without sincerity. “The Crucifixion clearly represents a destroyed object of veneration. Note that the arm that forms the minute hand is at six, modestly covering the pudenda. The hour hand is at nine, or slightly past. Nine is a clear reference to the traditional hour when Jesus was crucified.”.“And when you put six and nine together, note that you get sixtynine, a figure popular in social intercourse,” Margot could not help saying. In response to Doemling's sharp glance, she cracked her walnuts and shells rattled to the floor.
"Now let's take up Dr Lecter's letters to Clarice Starling.
Cordell, if you'd put them up."
Dr Doemling took a laser pointer from his pocket. "You can see `that the writing, a fluent copperplate executed with a squarenibbed fountain pen, is machinelike in its regularity. You see that sort of handwriting in medieval papal bulls. It's quite beautiful, but freakishly regular. There is nothing spontaneous here. He's planning. He wrote this first one soon after he had escaped, killing five people in the process. Let's read from the text:
Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming? You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that's what I'd like.
An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald- Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.
I won't be surprised if the answer is yes and no.
The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.
I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy . . .
Dr Doemling pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and cleared his throat. "This is a classic example of what I have termed in my published work avunculism - it's beginning to be referred to broadly in the professional literature as Doemling's avunculism. Possibly it will be included in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It may be defined for laymen as the act of posturing as a wise and caring patron to further a private agenda.
“I gather from the case notes that the question about the lambs screaming refers to a childhood experience of Clarice Starling's, the slaughter of the lambs on the ranch in Montana, her foster home,” Dr Doemling went on in his dry voice.
“She was trading information with Lecter,” Krendler said. “He knew something about the serial killer Buffalo Bill.”
“The second letter, seven years later, is on the face of it a letter of condolence