The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [58]
Silence can mock.
“The best thing, the remarkable thing: one week a year, you will leave the hospital and go here.” She put a map in the food carrier. Dr. Letter did not pull it through.
“Plum Island,” she continued. “Every afternoon of that week you can walk on the beach or swim in the ocean with no surveillance closer than seventyfive yards, but it'll be SWAT surveillance. That's it.”
“If I decline?”
“Maybe you could hang some café curtains in there. It might help. We don't have anything to threaten you with, Dr. Lecter. What I've got is a way for you to see the daylight.”
She didn't look at him. She -didn't want to match stares now. This was not a confrontation.
“Will Catherine Martin come and talk to me--- only about her captor--- if I decide to publish? Talk exclusively to me?”
“Yes. You can take that as a given.”
“How do you know? Given by whom?”
“I'll bring her myself.”
“If she'll come.”
“We'll have to ask her first, won't we?”
He pulled the carrier through. “Plum Island.”
“Look off the tip of Long Island, the north finger there.”
“Plum Island. 'The Plum Island Animal Disease Center. (Federal, hoof and mouth disease research),' it says. Sounds charming.”
“That's just part of the island. It has a nice beach and good quarters. The terns nest there in the spring.”
“Terns.” Dr. Letter sighed. He cocked his head slightly and touched the center of his red lip with his red tongue. “If we talk about this, Clarice, I have to have something on account. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, and you tell me.”
“Go,” Starling said.
She had to wait a full minute before he said, “A caterpillar becomes a pupa in a chrysalis. Then it emerges; comes out of its secret changing room as the beautiful imago. Do you know what an imago is, Cla?rice?”
“An adult winged insect.”
“But what else?”
She shook her head.
“It's a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of the parent buried in the un?conscious from infancy and bound with infantile affect. The word comes from the wax portrait busts of their ancestors the ancient Romans carried in funeral proces?sions... Even the phlegmatic Crawford must see some significance in the insect chrysalis.”
“Nothing to jump on except checking the entomol?ogy journals' subscription lists against known sex of?fenders in the descriptor index.”
“First, let's drop Buffalo Bill. It's a misleading term and has nothing to do with the person you want. For convenience we'll call him Billy. I'll give you a precis of what I think. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. He's making himself a girl suit out of real girls. Hence the large victims--- he has to have things that fit. The number of victims suggests he may see it as a series of molts. He's doing this in a twostory house, did you find out why two stories?”
“For a while he was hanging them on the stairs.”
“Correct.”
“Dr. Lecter, there's no correlation that I ever saw between transsexualism and violence--- transsexuals are passive types, usually.”
“That's true, Clarice. Sometimes you see a tendency to surgical addiction--- cosmetically, transsexuals are hard to satisfy--- but that's about all. Billy's not a real transsexual. You're very close, Clarice, to the way you re going to catch him, do you realize that?”
“No, Dr. Lecter.”
“Good. Then you won't mind telling me what hap?pened to you after your father's death.”
Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.
“I don't imagine the answer's in your papers, Cla?rice.”
“My mother kept us