Note: Although I'm aware of the fact that the filming location of the final scene of The Silence of the Lambs was Bimini, Bahamas (sources: , Wikipedia), I took the liberty of shifting the setting of my own story to Florence, Italy, since the location wasn't specified any further in the movie.

"Memory, Officer Starling, is what I have instead of a view." – Hannibal Lecter

Chapter 1

I smiled to myself and hung up the battered phone receiver while keeping a wary eye on the man in the checkered suit. He was pushing his way across the crowded piazza in front of the little café where I was sitting and looked around nervously. I pulled the fedora hat deeper into my face and adjusted my dark sunglasses. The blond wig was firmly in place. The people in the café did not pay much attention to me. I grabbed hold of my ivory-colored hat as a sudden gust of warm wind tried to claim it. I was very fond of that particular hat. It was custom-made and where else but in Florence, one of the world's centers of fine living, would I get such an exclusive piece. That was one of the reasons why I had chosen to live here: the savoir vivre and all the fine differences it entailed. I know that to most people, the fine differences in life do not matter the way they do to me but then again, I'm also indifferent to most people's lives and matters.

As for the behavior of the people around me, it was no different from anybody else's anywhere anda good example of how manipulable the human mind is: when I had entered the café the whole room had looked up as one, the pack sniffing at the newcomer. Ignoring them, however, had quickly made them lose interest in me because what man likes even more than recognizing novelties is being recognized. My lack thereof made me practically invisible to them despite my exquisite apparel. Mission accomplished. Only two kinds of persons would still have tried to catch my attention at this point: the obtrusive and the curious mind. Clarice Starling, for example, belonged to the latter type. She was an extraordinary case and her mind full of surprises. Though I had at first taken her for some generic fool that would melt under my words like the stravecchio parmesan shavings on a serving of hot pasta (with a hint of white truffle), she had turned out to be more resistant and persevering than I would ever have given her credit for. I must confess, however, that much to my chagrin I had not been able to break her – yet – and it wasn't for lack of trying. At least I had managed to get her hooked on me, very much like Freud had been hooked on his cigars which he hadn't given up although the ensuing cancer had consumed him piecemeal. I should note that I am not oblivious to the irony impliedin this allegory which seeks me out as a fatal disease, though personally, I regard myself as a cure rather than a sickness of mankind – but let's face it: I don't care for most of mankind anyway. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Clarice Starling. And I know that the feeling was (and still is) mutual: there was no doubt in my mind that she wouldn't tell a single person who had just called her at her graduation party. To this day it still fills me with pride up to the point of sheer flattery to know that it was me, and me alone, who had been able to make that carefully hidden seed of self-doubt in her prosper – and voilà, her mask of confidence had collapsed like a house of cards!

It hadn't taken much for me to do it because I know how she thinks; I know her because back in Baltimore she had let me indulge in dissecting her mind and shaking it to its very foundations during our meetings, a price she had been surprisingly willing to pay. But still she would forever patiently be waiting for my next call, and call her I would. I couldn't resist hearing her breath stop the moment she realized who was on the phone or her deceivingly calm voice when she asked me if it was me – oh so subtly betrayed by her fitful breathing in those short moments of silence that accompany a long-distance call. But she wasn't fooling me; what others would have mistaken for fear was just her stifled curiosity mixed with the desire to fight – to fight me. I heard myself softly chuckling at that thought. I couldn't wait to compete with her again but for the time being I had to content myself with calling her every now and then.

A warm evening wind grazed my now impassive face as I followed Dr. Chilton and his plainclothes police escort through the lively, colorful crowd in downtown Florence. I was as good as invisible, untouchable even; no one so much as looked at me as I walked straight through the scurrying masses, not even the carabiniere at the corner in his blue and red uniform. Not very far ahead of me Dr. Chilton kept turning around nervously but his quick glances bypassed me as well. On his way through the crowd he bumped into people but he didn't take the time to apologize. This immediately incurred my disapproval, especially considering that he was only a visitor to this country who had better save his rudeness for a more deserving compatriot. I couldn't suppress an impatient sound escaping my lips at that sight which went by quite unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of the Florentine market we were crossing at the time. Scandalized at my own case of discomposure, I made a mental note to keep any future signs of emotion under control. A fleeting vision of my therapists at the Baltimore Forensic State Hospital making a song and dance about it if they could have seen me just now in this moment of improvidence crossed my mind. I quickly abandoned my concern recalling that while I could enjoy the dusky flair of Italy and tut-tut all day long, their civil servant asses were rotting in the freezing hell of Maryland. This time my face did not even twitch, although I found the thought of the US-policemen trapped in the cages of their daily routine highly amusing, now that I had left my own cage behind.

Turning into the main street I saw Dr. Chilton and his company disappear in the back of a car parked at the curb. His driver had to wait for a gap in the dense rush-hour traffic to jump into his seat, which gave me enough time to hail one of the white taxis that were moving past languidly. Even though I was running the risk of getting spotted by Chilton or losing track of him respectively, my voice and pulse were completely calm when I told the taxi driver the address where Chilton was going. This was how you controlled your breathing, Agent Starling… I knew the address because I had already found out weeks ago that Chilton would come to Italy to present a paper on his work with criminals undergoing psychiatric treatment at a conference of an association of psychiatrists and psychologists of which I too was a member. After seeing his name on the program in the latest issue of their magazine I had called the association under the name of a former colleague of mine and asked where the conference participants and Chilton would stay. It had turned out that Chilton had switched accommodations for reasons unknown – quite unlike his new address.

As I sat there in the faded, worn-out car seat that smelled of a regular cigarettes and human sweat treatment, I couldn't help but remember some of my former patients: poor, pitiful creatures of habit I had dealt with in my days as a practitioner; pathological criminals and murderers who would get excited by stalking their prey, by virtually smelling their victim's fear before giving way to their aching desires and throwing diligence even more than caution to the winds. They were weak minds, of course, every single one of them that had sat there in a guilty hunch, clasping cigarettes in their sweaty, shaky fingers, governed by their primal urges, torn between grief-stricken wailing and suffering on the one hand; tossing and turning on my office couch during their confessions while they had been guiltily drooling over their deeds as they had eagerly been trying to hide the physical proof of their crime's nature from me. How embarrassing they were – in every way possible. It wasn't a surprise to me that my own clinical signs were of the reversed nature: even there, in the cab in Florence, right on my victim's tail, my pulse did not quicken, no blood was rushing to my head and my hands did not shake for one second as I kept my gaze fixed on Chilton's car that was bobbing over the cobblestone of the side street we were in.

Still, I didn't delude myself about my own nature. I never had. It would have been unspeakably absurd to declare me a sane character, for I of all people would know the symptoms that accompany a dissocial personality disorder if I saw them – and I saw them clear as daylight. But while for any ordinary patient this kind of "handicap" would inevitably have resulted in misery and lifelong treatment (not necessarily in this order) I had been able to make the illness my own, to embrace it and to step up to the next level. In this respect I almost resembled Clarice, who – with a little help from the puppet master's hand – had just managed to overcome her childhood trauma and take control of her life.

Since in contrast to most other personality disorder cases the full impact of my state was within my grasp and under my control, too, I was in a superior position, even to those not affected by sociopathy. After all, my lifelong success proved me right: I had led everyone astray for years, had made them believe that I was the mundane, eloquent Dr. Jekyll who would prepare most delicious dinners of sirloin flambé for his guests – sometimes it was beef, at other times something else that needed to be disposed of – until one day by a mere fluke one of the slavering hunters had been able to discover my inner Edward Hyde, to smoke the fox out of its den! Even then, sitting in the backseat of the taxi that followed Chilton perseveringly through the twilight city of Florence, I could hardly smother a disapproving hiss at the memory of how every hound in the police pack had subsequently tried to get the biggest bite out of me. Not that I had not had my share of fun with the police and the inmates at the Baltimore where I found it a convenient diversion from my idle days to mess with their minds to keep myself from going mad. But at the end of the day my stay there had not only cost me precious lifetime: for far too long I had also had to forfeit all those little luxuries that make life worthwhile in the first place. I didn't blame the justice system for that though. From their point of view they certainly had had good reasons for confining me, but personally, I was still holding a grudge against the way they had done it, the place where I had been detained, the company I had been left with: in a mentally and physically abusive hellhole, a hellhole where sunbeams came to die on scarred walls and naked floors. They were by far not the only deaths there, some of which had borne my scratchy signature – which by the way the guards had been surprisingly slow to decipher, except for Multiple Miggs maybe, who had actually been kind of an impromptu decision after he had insulted Clarice when she was paying her first visit to me.

I don't really expect anyone to mind, but I should add that talking Miggs into suicide had not given me any personal satisfaction; I had done it purely as an act of punishment. Normally I didn't concern myself with anything so pedestrian. When I killed I did it for me and I did it with style. I would keep it discreet, intimate almost, with only the other and I involved, and I would do it quickly though differently with every single one. There was no specific ritual that I would compulsively follow like the ordinary serial killers with whom all my former psychiatrists had tried to align me; no, I had elevated killing to a form of art. What most people would be too ignorant to understand and what I didn't care to elaborate on in the presence of my despairing "colleagues" in Baltimore is this: When I speak of "killing" I don't mean the mere act of taking another's life in the sense of making his biological functions stop for good, but I'm talking about extinguishing a human being so completely that his social as well as his material existence just gets wiped out. In order to achieve that my way of killing ultimately, inevitably has to result in consumption. That is what killing is all about after all. It is about consuming the other's body, about incorporating and executing the ultimate power over him, to rob the world of him and to enrich my own existence with him instead. It is like feeding a black hole that gets more powerful the more it consumes.

Of course, the common person is prone to find the thought of eating others repellent; it is simply a cultural but also the crucial paradigm that for most people defines the line between the sane and the pervert. Little do they know that cannibalism has been – and sometimes to this day is – an integral part of some, mostly indigenous societies where eating others underlies strict rules and regulations – certain ethics even. This is probably also why (in contrast to my dear fellow human beings) I have never thought of myself or of my behavior as unethical. I pay respect to the bodies I ingest, I appreciate them as best I can: I carefully prepare them together with first class ingredients and almost devoutly indulge in the final act of eating the other.

I don't expect nor do I wish for anyone to understand my motives and I admit that my recent killings, for which I was forced to deviate from my usual rules, are not exactly helpful in proving my point. For example, the police officer in Tennessee whose face I had taken to escape from prison had been such an undignified – yet necessary – occurrence, although I hadn't stayed to explain that to anyone… Still, I wouldn't forget it in a hurry. The act itself had borne no surprises; the splattering of the blood as I slew the man, the sound of the cranium breaking, the red, sticky mess on the floor, on my clothes and arms had not affected me. They were only the usual, unpleasant side effects. I cannot deny, however, that the taste of the officer's blood and tongue had given me the thrill I had been craving for a very long time. I had welcomed the memories rising inside of me at the touch of the warm human flesh as well as the adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins while I had felt the other's pulse grow weaker and weaker under my hands before he sank to the floor, soon to be as cold and empty as the metal cage surrounding us.

Back in the car in Florence I caught myself inadvertently licking my lips and immediately put a stop to it. The taxi driver next to me did not need to see my treacherous display of desire. Glad he didn't notice or speak to me at that moment because he was busy concentrating on the heavy traffic, I turned my face towards the window and immersed myself in thought again.

I did not exactly take pride in my deeds as Dr. Chilton had repeatedly tried to insinuate in our unpleasant little therapy sessions which in my opinion were nothing more than holistic nonsense, of course, because there is no cure for a sociopathic mind like mine. Much to my annoyance he had insisted on disagreeing with me… All our personal differences aside, but how dare he belittle my expertise! Was not I at least as qualified as him or even more so, having lifelong, firsthand experience with the subject matter? To make a long story short: Since we were both men of our principles we chose to categorically refuse each other's viewpoints. Nevertheless I would surely have expected a man in Chilton's position to foresee Miggs's doom once the moronic had so violently insulted Clarice in my presence, she who been a guest of mine – if you could speak of "receiving guests" in such an embarrassing environment at all. What an imprudent move of Miggs to infringe on common courtesy, one of my highest principles… If there is one thing that bears witness to the degree of a person's civilization, it is their sense of etiquette. And the combined etiquette of Miggs's many personalities could easily have fit through the eye of a needle, although by the end of the day even that pathetic rest had gone the way of all flesh – along with Miggs.

It still makes my blood boil when I think back to the fateful day that Clarice Starling first walked into my prison wing and our everlasting pas de deux began… My initial contempt for her had soon enough turned into a peculiar curiosity when she had parried every riposte that I had thrown at her in order to counter her questions. What might have looked like rudeness on my part had actually been a vain attempt to knock her off course to see how much of a fighter was really in her. She hadn't disappointed, quite the contrary: imagine my delight when she intimated her disdain for Dr. Chilton which so accurately mirrored my own distaste for the man! In a way it made us partners in crime and it was in a way she didn't seem to be aware of, probably because she had already been sucked into the vortex of our little game. Quid pro quo, Clarice… It had been the first interesting deal I had been offered in years and I had clutched at and thoroughly feasted on it. I had picked at her brain and splayed her thoughts out in front of me like the million pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was marvelous! Putting the pieces back together was like composing a Monet painting, and while talking to Clarice I had added some of my own dashes of color to the picture by planting certain things in her head. Nothing that would permanently damage her though. No, I had saved my ideas about maiming and dismembering for other people – people like Chilton. My gaze wandered from the houses drifting past us left and right back to Chilton's car that moved forward some car lengths ahead of us, the rays of the dying sun reflecting off its chrome trims. I noticed the smile that was carved into my face and wondered how long it had already been there.