A/N: This is part one of a really random little idea I had, and just had to follow up on. This part is set during Hannibal (the novel), and although I've taken some tiny liberties, it does more or less follow canon. Part two will follow shortly.
Disclaimer: The characters herein are the intellectual property of Thomas Harris. No copyright infringement is intended.
The Sword of Date Masamune: part 1
She pursued Hannibal Lecter down the corridors of his taste, but it wasn't enough. It was not something she could admit on an official report, or to any of her colleagues. The Bureau was content with capture. Starling wanted more.
She wanted to know. She wanted to know why, and she wanted to know him.
The interminable reports, half baked psychological evaluations and virtually meaningless test results piled across her desk all attempted, in their way, to answer the first question. Having read them forwards and backwards, over and over, Starling was coming to the conclusion that it was not so much a matter of why, but of why not?
She pulled one old report from the time of his capture towards her, eyes seeking out the familiar slanted handwriting of Jack Crawford. He suggested that the doctor's peculiarities could be traced back to his childhood. It was a theme common to many of the evaluations, but what was really known about his childhood, anyway?
In her mind, the metallic voice of Hannibal Lecter scorned the suggestion.
Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened.
She leaned back in her office chair, feet on the desk, and considered. His ego would naturally lead him to claim no outside influences to his behaviour. There were patterns there, of course, but...
Starling sighed. The difficulty with patterns was that, as a psychiatrist, he knew all about them.
They knew more about him now than they ever had before. The son of a Lithuanian count, he had been orphaned during the war, and had gone to live with relatives in France. There was a period of ten years or so after the end of the war and before his appearance in France where he had been off the radar. She wondered at that, but as Lithuania had been part of the USSR, it was difficult to find any information.
They had a photograph of his family home, an old medieval castle in the continental European style. It was derelict now.
They had the names of his relatives, an uncle who had died just after the war, and an aunt who had returned to Japan.
There were paintings in the possession of the French government that he had tried to reclaim as family property. His arrest for suspicion of murder during his teenage years had ensured that they remained locked in the vault.
The arrest was a new piece of information, and it had led her closer to him the person than any list of wines and cars ever had. The corridors of his taste were open to her, and always had been. It was the oubliettes and dungeons of his past that were barred, and that she sought to know.
She moved files, looking for the strip of yellowed paper that had arrived in the post last week. She found it beneath a report that suggested the doctor's catatonia was untreatable.
It was the printout from a lie detector test taken decades ago. The accompanying note had invited her to the Sunset Retirement Home in California.
Finding Popil had been a stroke of luck. The elderly ex police inspector had emigrated to America nearly thirty years ago. Although he hadn't said, she suspected that the doctor's residence in the United States may have had something to do with his relocation. He had, however, never come forward until now.
The tape showed – nothing. No reaction at all to the questions Popil had posed regarding the death of a Vichy sympathiser. Popil was certain that Paul Momand was Hannibal Lecter's first victim.
I asked him if he had any guilty knowledge of Momand's death. He answered that he did not. His pulse never varied, and we both know how unusual that is in a lie detector test. He feels no guilt.
There was reference to a sister in some of the early reports, a sister who had died on the Eastern Front.
Jack Crawford's handwriting swam before her tired eyes. She laid the lie detector tape aside, and concentrated on the original psyche evaluation. Several psychologists postulated that the death of Lecter's sister and his cannibalism were connected. Popil knew it to be so. And if Popil was to be believed, then there were many more deaths to be laid at the doctor's feet.
She had no doubt that Popil was, in a sense, right. The nature of Mischa's death would naturally lead one to conclude that his eating habits were intimately connected with his little sister's fate.
She could not grasp why the notion was unacceptable to her. It had a desperate feel to it, as if people were trying to jam a rectangular peg in a square hole – it almost fit, but not quite. It posed more questions than it answered.
Are you trying to quantify me, Agent Starling? Her 'inner Lecter' was amused.
Sometimes she wondered if she were looking too deeply, seeking reasons that weren't there. After all, simple solutions were the best. Then she laughed at herself. Nothing about Hannibal Lecter was ever simple.
His iron self control, for one. She could not escape the impression that he had no more compulsion to murder than she did. The psychological community speculated on his predatory instincts. They said it was in his nature. Perhaps it was. What she found difficult to accept was the theory that he was completely at the mercy of that nature.
Writing it in a report was difficult. She had already trodden on many toes in her career, and she did not want to bruise those of her superiors in Behavioural Sciences any more than absolutely necessary, but... Not only that, but every sentence of her tentative analysis rang with – what? Admiration? Respect? She had deleted several versions of the same report, and each time the fresh version ended up extolling his willpower, his intelligence and his cunning. Sometimes, she sounded like a fan.
She knew he would find her dilemma funny.
Popil had raised a couple of very interesting points during her interview with him at his home. His first murder was a result of an insult to his aunt, the Lady Murasaki. If, indeed, he was responsible. When she heard that, Starling was irresistibly drawn back to the doctor whispering at night to Multiple Miggs in the next cell. She suspected Popil was right on that count.
She thought it telling that he had not killed for himself. That, she felt, pointed towards the solution of a conscious choice, rather than impulsive violent behaviour. The French police inspector thought it pointed towards an innate need within him, one he could not control. He would have killed anyway, Popil said. It just happened that this man upset his aunt.
The other point was his attachment to his aunt, something Popil had noted on several occasions. The psychological reports all claimed that he was incapable of feeling. Starling knew, viscerally, that that wasn't true. Popil's tale had confirmed it.
What did that make Dr Lecter, then? Not a victim of his own monstrous psyche, but the architect of it. It came back to the question of free will. When she read the crime scene reports, she saw flashes of art, of a man enjoying himself. Revenge was all well and good as a motive, and explained his early career – if Popil's information was accurate. But once Mischa was avenged, with a glittering career in medicine before him, why continue killing?
Her notes were a web of scrawled words that individually did not reveal much. He likes it, she had written. Below that, a note that read contempt. He had served up Benjamin Raspail's sweetbreads to the board because the man was an appalling musician. Beside that note, she had scrawled humour and underlined it. Arrows connected all, but it was a join-the-dots exercise in sheer futility.
She had no doubt that he saw himself as separate from, and above, the rest of humanity, the common herd. She thought that this was less a sign of mental illness, and more an acknowledgement of his own towering intelligence. He was, in one sense, above mere mortals in that his mind was so far out of reach that you might as well try and grab hold of the sun.
The thought amused her. Was that not what she wanted to do?
He had a strong sense of right and wrong, too. That wouldn't look good on a report, either. His moral compass was definitely skewed, but she could see the justice in Mason Verger's grinning skull, and the deaths of those Nazi supporters Popil had talked about.
Sometimes she wondered if her own morals were becoming skewed themselves, by mere association with his.
Starling tossed the report back down on the desk, and picked up the transcript of her interview with Inspector Popil. She had leads, of course. But, as she had told Jeffrey, they didn't lead to him. Not in person, anyway.
Following up the Japanese connection had revealed that Lady Murasaki had passed away over a decade ago, and was buried in France, beside her husband. Starling had asked the local police to keep an eye on the grave, but she had no great hopes of a lead from that quarter.
Lady Murasaki's possessions had largely been sold by impoverished family members. Starling's eye travelled over Popil's words.
I believe he killed the butcher with a samurai sword, one which Lady Murasaki had in her possession. The cut was so clean, only a blade of exceptional sharpness and quality could have accomplished the deed.
Three days ago, she had received a letter from Lady Murasaki's solicitor, stating that the weapons and armour of Date Masamune, the lady's revered ancestor, had been sold to a private collector three years ago. That collector chose to remain anonymous, going only by the online pseudonym 'dragon.'
Was that him? She felt it must be, and felt that it gave her a glimpse of Hannibal Lecter, the man. She had no doubt that he had loved Lady Murasaki once. Call it an educated guess, call it woman's intuition, call it whatever you want. Popil thought that he was incapable of love, but spoke instead of loyalty and attachment. Starling wondered if those three things were not one and the same.
Starling growled her frustration to the room at large. She knew she was thinking herself into knots. Everything that was written about him clashed with her experience of him, and she could not find her way through the twists and turns of his life and his mind to reach any kind of conclusion. Everything was open to discussion, evaluation and re-evaluation. Nobody could answer her questions but him, but she would never get to ask him until she found him...