Asunción is a noisy city, just like any other, Clarice thinks. Traffic, hawkers eagerly selling their wares, and all the sounds of city life. Odd that Paraguay is considered calmer than other South American countries. Somehow they can sense she is an American: whether it is by her clothes or her bearing or if they just have American radar she doesn't know.
Her Spanish has come back pretty well. After living eleven years as Hannibal Lecter's plaything, immersed in Argentine high society, she attained a level of fluency she never thought possible. Over this past decade she has barely used it and it has atrophied. Yet it is coming back. She can understand signs and most of the people who she has to deal with.
In a way it is funny. At home – in English – she has come to terms with her drawl after years of trying to sound Eastern. She is from West Virginia, and she's a-gonna sound like it and be proud of it, and anyone who doesn't like it can deal. But in Spanish she sounds ever so highbrow.
Her fluency in Spanish gives her something quite valuable: the ability to go out and investigate on her own. The cultured accent helps, she thinks. People pay more attention to her.
She is still convinced that Dr. Lecter will have showered her daughter with gifts in order to make her want to stay. The fact that he can do a lot worse to make her stay is not lost on Clarice; she tries to ignore those dark whispers. So she is tracking her daughter's tastes and hoping for the best.
The hotel concierge was helpful in pointing her to the ritzy stores in Asunción. Electronics, clothes, that sort of thing. The FBI has already tracked down Dr. Lecter's shopping trip in Buenos Aires, where he bought Susana an entire wardrobe of clothes. That stirs up a few memories for Clarice that she would rather forget: her own days spent shopping for clothes at those same swanky places. She remembers buying Susana clothes there as a little girl. Back then, Susana had a taste for laces and frills. Fortunately, she grew out of it.
But for now, Clarice is suspecting electronics is the way to go. Dr. Lecter could buy her a ton of clothes in Buenos Aires; that was no problem. Buy a couple of suitcases and presto. Electronics are a different matter. Susana would want a computer, a stereo, a TV – lots of stuff. Dr. Lecter is unlikely to say no to her. He never did in the past; Susana would express interest in something and presto, he would buy it for her.
The thought of that is disconcerting, in a way. Dr. Lecter had done horrible, mind-bendingly evil things in his life. He had served up human organs to his guests. He had executed Pazzi in an exceptionally cruel way. He had bent and warped her mind and made her into his Barbie doll. To think of how he had spoiled Susana reminds her of the unselfconscious glee he took in doing so, of the clear pleasure that seeing his daughter happy gave him, and that in turn reminds her unpleasantly that he did, in his own way, love Susana dearly.
Quit it. He is not some loving daddy. He isn't anything like Daddy. He is an exceptionally dangerous man and he'll brainwash her into staying if he hasn't already.
After quashing her doubts, Clarice steps from the taxi and looks up and down the street. There is a big electronics shop that is rumored to be the best in the city. She doesn't know enough about Paraguayan prices to tell if it is – 'best' to Clarice means the lowest price, but he took a certain glee in the ability to be indifferent to price. It looks like the sort of place where the clerks will fawn all over you if you come in with a big old wad of cash, and that is what she thinks will draw him.
There is something more: a psychic scent, a hunch, whatever you want to call it. As Clarice steps into the store, the idea that her daughter and Dr. Lecter have been in this store grabs a hold of the back of her brain and holds on with strong but soft paws. She can sense her daughter's presence here somehow.
A clerk walks up to her and smiles pleasantly. "Can I help you?" he asks. Clarice blinks. The Paraguayan accent is easily comprehensible but is different from what she is used to.
"Yes," Clarice says, and reaches for her ID. "My name is Clarice Starkey, and I am with the FBI."
For a moment she blinks. Her pseudonym is something she has gotten used to over the years. Part of the price she'd had to pay for her safety from Hannibal Lecter was giving up the name Clarice Starling in favor of the more anonymous Claire Starkey.
It's nothing. It's just jet lag.
The clerk's eyebrow raises. "Is there a problem?" This must look odd, Clarice thinks. An American FBI agent in Paraguay with an Argentine accent.
"I'm looking for a girl," Clarice says, and takes Susana's school picture out of her blazer pocket. "I believe she may be here in Asunción with her kidnapper. Can you tell me if she's been in here? Have you ever seen her before?"
Recognition lights up in the clerk's face. A bolt of pure savage joy bolts through Clarice. She was right. Susana is here, in Asunción. She will have to call and get Bowman to send the troops here. But in the meantime, she is on the right track.
"Ojos marrònes," the clerk muses.
"Sì, ojos marrònes," Clarice repeats. "So she was here?"
The clerk nods. "A few days ago, yes. With an older gentleman," he says. "I thought at first he was her grandfather, but she called him 'papa'. They bought a great deal of merchandise."
"The best?" Clarice asks, grinning tightly.
"Yes. Quite expensive. Everything they bought was top of the line. Is there something wrong?"
Bing fucking go.
Clarice shakes her head. "No," she says. "Did they leave an address? Or did they have anything delivered?"
The clerk shakes his head, and Clarice's joy falls into icy shards for a moment. "I'm afraid not," he says mournfully. "They paid cash and had a van. We assisted them in getting everything out to the car. They said they could handle the rest themselves."
That matches up with what Clarice knows of her daughter. Dr. Lecter himself may be aged and not as strong as he used to be, but he may still be surprisingly strong. Susana has always been far stronger than one would expect for her size and weight.
"Did you happen to see a license plate?"
"I'm sorry, no," the clerk says.
Goddammit. But she's here. That's what I need to know. Now if we get the FBI's kidnapping experts here....
A doubt strikes her. Dr. Lecter has remained free for four decades now. His senses are sharp and his knowledge of his enemies acute and detailed. If they send the FBI's kidnapping experts here, is there some w ay he can find out? Some little clerk in a police department or embassy somewhere, some little nobody who will know they are coming and mention it in passing? Some article on the FBI's website, or some other way he can sense the approach of his hunters?
Clarice takes out a card and scribbles her hotel's phone number on it. "If they should come back here, could you call me, please?"
"Of course," the clerk says. He takes the card and places it in his shirt pocket. Clarice takes a moment to think.
Okay. Susana is in Asunción. He is in Asunción. Already her mind begins to sift this knowledge through her existing knowledge of the dark psychiatrist. That means he'll be living in the fancy areas, he'll want to go to the opera and classical music, and he'll want to show her that. Not too much because she'll get bored with it. She's going to want to play on the Internet and she'll want things like music CD's and horror movies – both of which will probably drive him crazy. But I know her, and I know him, and between the two of those I should be able to figure out where they are.
Clarice Starling hits the street with a newfound confidence. It won't be long.
...
Dr. Hannibal Lecter sits in his office and ponders the issues before him. He is alone; Susana is in her room listening to music. Both of them are waiting for the chef to announce that dinner is ready.
He does not know yet that his former mate is in the city he calls home. He is otherwise occupied. His daughter is taking up most of his time. He has to strike a balance.
Throughout his life, the doctor has held most of his fellow humans in contempt. He knew all too well that he was far more intelligent than most of the stupid sheep who walked the earth with him. He knew also that the yoke of morality that confined so many of them had no restraint on his behavior.
Principles are all well and good to have, but Dr. Lecter knows the weak basis most of them are based on. Someone might claim to hold a particular value as sacrosanct, worth giving up one's very life for. He knows better. It is easy for a fat and happy man to claim to love individual freedom. Take that fat man, control his food intake, shut him off from the sun in a small cell, administer the right series of drugs and ask the right questions, and within six months that very man will proclaim fascism to be the greatest gift humankind has ever known.
How could he not have contempt for his fellows? He knows perfectly well how malleable and weak they truly are. He can change everything that they are if so he chooses.
His daughter's unexpected resilience has brought him to a place he did not expect. He had thought that her years in the normative world had rendered her just like the rest. Apparently his biological gift to her has not gone wasted. Somehow, she can shelter herself in her own mind from his probes.
Yet she cannot last against him if he chooses not to pull his punches. In the end, he can control her if he chooses. He could simply lock her in a room, deprive her of outside stimulation, strictly control her access to food, keep her awake at night. Her cherished principles would be like anyone else's: once sleep deprivation fogs the brain and blood sugar drops to low levels, she would crawl like anyone else.
That option remains open to him. The thought of it makes him quail, and that is something he is unfamiliar with. He can appreciate the idea of it intellectually: the methods are crude, but they do work. When he began his practice of psychiatry, he had betrayed a certain interest in the work of Chinese and North Korean brainwashing; there was a certain frank amorality in molding the minds of others that appealed to him. He had occasionally performed his own experiments, usually on victims who were destined to end up in a soup pot anyway. When one's fate is to be served up with some caviar, what difference does it make if one professes to love communism? He had wanted to satisfy his curiosity, and so he had. For his own idle amusement he had made a few of his victims chant slogans about the motherland in the hours before their deaths. It had been droll then. All the same, those victims had served far better in goulash.
Yet something holds him back. The thought of making his daughter suffer so makes him tremble. He, who has ignored begging and disregarded tearful pleas, he who has never allowed the suffering of others to stop his plans. The thought of confining and isolating her, knowing she would suffer, is something he quails at, and he cannot remember the last time he quailed. There is an interesting paradox in it: he understands intellectually why – she is his daughter – but compassion has been alien to his nature for so very long he does not quite know how to integrate the feeling into his life.
Clarice Starling once asked him many years ago if he was afraid to point his high-powered perception at himself. The answer to that question is the same as it was then: no. He is not afraid to look into himself. The limitations of compassion for his daughter are something he will accept, just as a rook must accept that it cannot move diagonally on the chessboard. He will have to find a way around this unexpected roadblock.
There are two examples he can draw from his own past. Dr. Chilton had, admittedly, a few successes in his petty tyranny. Never over him, but other inmates were weaker and gave in to the administrator's dictates. Dr. Lecter had privately held him in contempt for both his failure and his weakness. Chilton had been the king of half-measures, waving small clubs because he lacked the inner strength to wield larger ones. Dr. Lecter remained in his cell but had access to the media. And why? Because the court said he could? Had Chilton the stomach to run his own asylum the way Dr. Lecter would have, it was entirely possible that eventually he might have won. Dr. Lecter could look at himself realistically – his reserves of intelligence and strength were strong, but he was loathe to say they might be inexhaustible. Holding an overly arrogant opinion of himself was not good; he could delude himself. He might have his limits like any other man, even if those limits were far beyond those of others.
But no, Chilton was an animal like all the rest, and he would roll over and expose the back of the neck when a bigger dog came calling. He satisfied himself with petty torments and did not have the stomach for larger ones. As a practitioner of what others called evil himself, Dr. Lecter had little respect for a man like that. Chilton attempted to use his petty evils to puff himself up and make himself look bigger than he was.
Had Dr. Lecter been in his shoes, a troublesome inmate such as he had once been would have been simply killed or lobotomized, either with a scalpel or chemically. That would have taken care of the problem much more effectively and cleanly. There were times he had wanted to tell that to Clarice, to answer her question on his perception of himself.
Barney, on the other hand, earned vastly more respect for Dr. Lecter. He could be cold when the situation demanded coldness – he had held Dr. Lecter's mail plenty of times. So long as Dr. Lecter behaved himself he received everything he was entitled to. Barney worked within the system, which marked him down a hair or two in Dr. Lecter's eyes. There were times Dr. Lecter thought Barney too patient, too willing to give second chances. All the same, there was a fundamental simplicity and truth in the large black orderly that was completely absent from his supervisor. Barney could not order drugs or a lobotomy, but he did not tremble at the thought of using any of the options open to him. Chilton wanted to be a bully but did not have the intestinal fortitude to complete the transaction. Barney did not want to be a bully, and his actions flowed from that truth. Dr. Lecter can respect a man who chooses not to play far more easily than he can respect a man who plays and plays badly.
He can try to ratchet things up just a bit, increasing the dosages of the drugs he gives her, keeping her under longer, cutting her access to the sugary sweets she likes so well, and seeing if that builds a stronger foundation. But to ignore what is in front of him is not bright either; he must see things as they are rather than how he wishes them to be. It is the doctor's belief that hypnosis does not appear to work on Susana just as it did not work on him; the effect holds for a few days and then washes away as a sand castle would. He had hoped to treat her with the least intrusive methods.
Yet now things are different: he does not think that more of the same will help, and he knows that he cannot move to the harshest methods. This leaves him with the unpleasant choice of using half-measures because he cannot bear the thought of full measures. In other words, emulate Chilton.
Is there another way, perhaps? He had grown to respect Barney in a way he never would have granted to Chilton. Are there lessons he can draw from the orderly's example? Perhaps there is. At the minimum, he can buy some time to reassess her personality and what weak points she may have. And she must have weak points somewhere. Chilton's weak points were glaringly apparent. Barney had his weak points as well. Boyle, Pembry, Mason, Pazzi...even Clarice. He has overcome them all in the end.
Dr. Lecter does not know if this will work to accomplish his goal, but at the least it will work to buy some time. He can be very convincing without the need of chemical agents. All she needs is to see things the way he does. He lets his mind play over how he must present things: how her mother hurt him so dreadfully, and how there is no way that she can safely return to the United States without subjecting him to grave risk. Besides, he is an old man, and he does not have many years left to him. If he lives another decade it will be remarkable.
None of this is falsehood, and the doctor knows how to package it. Clarice has raised her alone; the concept of the lambs will be strong in her mind if not the image itself. Eventually, too, there are his other tricks: she is separated from her mother, and so long as Clarice is on the other side of the world the advantage is his. It is said that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy, and if he can keep Susana separated from her mother long enough, apathy may weaken the bonds between mother and daughter just as the bonds between father and daughter strengthen.
Will she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him? He hopes that she will. Perhaps he was too hasty with moving to stronger therapies. Perhaps he should try to gain her confidence more and then move to them. After all, he can restart them if he judges they will do more good than harm. It is not lost on him that he has vacillated more on how to get his daughter to stay with him than he has vacillated on any subject for decades. Does that mean anything?
Merely that it is vital that she stay, Dr. Lecter thinks, and pauses. There is some way to make her comply with his wishes: drugs and hypnosis, appealing to her sympathies, spoiling her. There are other, darker ways, but Dr. Lecter does not wish to use them. Neither does he wish to find out if his self-control is so absolute as to allow him to overcome those if he must.
The chef contacts him on the intercom, informing him that dinner is ready. Dr. Lecter rises and walks slowly to his daughter's room. Knocking on the door, he waits for a moment.
"One moment," Susana says from behind the door. A moment later she is at her door. He observes her for a moment. No dress – she seems to have a marked dislike for dresses now, compared to when she was young. In lieu of jeans, though, she wears a nice blouse and dress slacks. Dr. Lecter finds himself unreasonably pleased by that.
"Dinner is ready," he says gently.
"All right," she says, and glances down at the staircase. This mansion is larger than any other house she has lived in, with the possible exception of the mansion in Buenos Aires. Together they walk down the stairs to the dining room. The butler will have set the table already.
He takes a deep breath and feels his confidence return. This is merely a moment's doubt . In his time he has convinced people to do far worse than to stay in his home and lead a charmed life. Somehow or another, he will find the right combination.
She will stay with him. She must.