The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [84]
The cell, while secure and strong, lacked a rolling food carrier. At lunchtime, in the unpleasant atmo?sphere that followed Starling's visit, Dr. Chilton incon?venienced everyone, making Boyle and Pembry go through the long process of securing the compliant Dr. Lecter in the straitjacket and leg restraints as he stood with his back to the bars, Chilton poised with the Mace, before they opened the door to carry in his tray.
Chilton refused to use Boyle's and Pembry's names, though they wore nameplates, and addressed them in?discriminately as “you, there.”
For their part, after the warders heard Chilton was not a real M.D., Boyle observed to Pembry that he was just “some kind of a God damned schoolteacher.”
Pembry tried once to explain to Chilton that Star?ling's visit had been approved not by them but by the desk downstairs, and saw that in Chilton's anger it didn't matter.
Dr. Chilton was absent at supper and, with Dr. Lecter's bemused cooperation, Boyle and Pembry used their own method to take in his tray. It worked very well.
“Dr. Lecter, you not gonna be needing your dinner jacket tonight,” Peinbry said. “I'll ask you to sit on the floor and scoot backwards till you can just stick your hands out through the bars, arms extended backward. There you go. Scoot up a little and straighten 'em out more behind you, elbows straight.” Pembry hand?cuffed Dr. Lecter tightly outside the bars, with a bar between his arms, and a low crossbar above them. “That hurts just a little bit, don't it? I know it does and they won't be on there but a minute, save us both a lot of trouble.”
Dr. Lecter could not rise, even to a squat, and with his legs straight in front of him on the floor, he couldn't kick.
Only when Dr. Lecter was pinioned did Pembry re?turn to the desk for the key to the cell door. Pembry slid his riot baton in the ring at his waist, put a canister of Mace in his pocket, and returned to the cell. He opened the door while Boyle took in the tray. When the door was secured, Pembry took the key back to the desk before he took the cuffs off Dr. Lecter. At no time was he near the bars with the key while the doctor was free in the cell.
“Now that was pretty easy, wasn't it?” Pembry said.
“It was very convenient, thank you, Officer,” Dr. Lecter said. “You know, I'm just trying to get by.”
“We all are, brother,” Pembry said.
Dr. Lecter toyed with his food while he wrote and drew and doodled on his pad with a felttipped pen. He flipped over the cassette in the tape player chained to the table leg and punched the play button. Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on the piano. The music, beautiful beyond plight and time, filled the bright cage and the room where the warders sat.
For Dr. Lecter, sitting still at the table, time slowed and spread as it does in action. For him the notes of music moved apart without losing tempo. Even Back's silver pounces were discrete notes glittering off the steel around him. Dr. Lecter rose, his expression ab?stracted, and watched his paper napkin slide off his thighs to the floor. The napkin was in the air a long time, brushed the table leg, flared, sideslipped, stalled and turned over before it came to rest on the steel floor. He made no effort to pick it up, but took a stroll across his cell, went behind the paper screen and sat on the lid of his toilet, his only private place. Listening to the music, he leaned sideways on the sink, his chin in his hand, his strange maroon eyes halfclosed. The Goldberg Variations interested him structurally. Here it came again, the bass progression from the saraband repeated, repeated. He nodded along, his tongue moving over the edges of his teeth. All the way around on top, all the way around on the bottom. It was a long and interest?ing trip for his tongue, like a good walk in the Alps.
He did his gums now, sliding his tongue high in the crevice between his cheek and gum and moving it slowly