Chapter Eight
As Dr. Lecter listened to Margot's harried voice over the phone and took up the burden of the full weight of her heavy news, he entered that frigid, strangely disconnected state of amoral, razor-edged readiness that was his most elemental response to threat. It was more an innate aspect of self than a skill or habit. He had never consciously sought this frozen, ever- ravenous vacuum at his psyche's core, although he had often found himself there, when the proper set of circumstances arose.
Margot's words slowed, and he began to perceive large temporal gaps between each of them. His vision took on an unnatural clarity. His awareness of scents intensified. His body became very still, the muscles and sinews subtly drawing and pulling inward like a crossbow winding, spring tension ready to explode outward at need. He felt a vague tingling sensation in his hands and the tips of his fingers, and, unaware, flexed them strongly, three times in rapid succession. His respiration slowed. His blood pressure dipped.
His mind ticked through thousands of discrete calculations in the space of moments.
His heart emptied of every last vestige of human kindness or compunction.
He motioned to Clarice, staring at him with stricken eyes.
"I've been identified," he said to her, words clipped and devoid of affect. "Go to the balcony. Check that exit across the courtyard. See what's there. Don't be seen."
He listened to Margot, and at the same time, on another mental track, raced into the Hall of Architecture in his memory palace and set out all his rough sketches of the layout of the hotel, its parking garage, the grid of city streets in the immediate vicinity, and maps of the city as a whole, with outlying areas as well as Interstate routes in and out. On yet another track, he was sifting through his memories of every face he had seen at Margot's earlier, and re-examining every impression or nuance of perception he had experienced there. On a fourth track, he was formulating and discarding one course of action after another, each designed to fit a different set of contingencies. On a fifth track, he was watching the pale, nude form of Clarice rising from the bed and walking swiftly toward the sitting room door.
Before she'd had time to reach the door, his unique memory had locked on a pesky hovering presence at the edge of his first exchange with Margot at the party, some persistent suppliant to Margot Verger's wealth and influence whom he had foolishly dismissed. That would have been Doemling.
Recognition must have been quick. He knew he'd made quite an impression on the fussy, amusingly venomous academic, years before. One could assume the entire conversation between Clarice, himself, Margot and Judy, had been overheard. That had been at about seven o'clock. Why hadn't the police arrived then, at the party?
Blackmail. Doemling must intend to pressure Margot with his knowledge of their association. Excellent. At least one favorable circumstance. The man would have lied about where the identification took place, and would have allowed time to pass before going to the authorities. And he would return to Margot, in time, likely soon, to make his demands.
The familiar biting sting of profound rage, pouring like a black tide out of his center and into his blood, came to him. Dr. Lecter fully intended to renew his own acquaintance with the scholarly professor at that prospective conference with Margot. Oh, yes. Provided he could find a way out of the current dilemma.
Clarice reentered the bedroom, moving quickly and economically.
"Two bureau agents," she said, face white and rigid. "No markers or insignia. Both armed. Equipped with radios. Two uniforms arrived while I watched. PD. Was it the party? Is that where they made us?"
"Never mind. Uniforms? Just arrived? And you're certain about the agents?"
"The shoes," she said, with a wretched, jagged little smile. "I recognize those FBI clunkers. Who saw us?"
"Hush, please, Clarice. I'm not yet certain that YOU have been identified. Let me talk to Margot now."
Clarice nodded and turned away, toward her things in the closet.
"Margot," Lecter was saying. "Do this for me - do you have call conferencing with your phone service? . . . good, dial the hotel switchboard, ask for the front desk, chatter aimlessly for a moment, then ask if there are any messages for Norma Meyer . . . no, I'll be listening, I need to hear how they sound . . . no, then I want you to hang up . . . I'll contact you when I . . . well, I certainly hope it won't be via the evening news, but you never know . . . Margot, that's not important now, please just do as I ask . . . "
Dr. Lecter covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with his palm and listened intently as Margot followed his instructions to the letter. No strain in the switchboard operator's voice. Good. Definite sound of tension in the voice at the desk. Very well, FBI presence there. No spike of recognition or additional tension at the mention of "Norma Meyer" or her room number. VERY good.
So. The FBI was running the operation, then. The Las Vegas police had been enlisted just recently to help make a door to door room search, armed with passkeys. The search would take time. But the exits were well guarded. Still . . .
Had Clarice been identified? Unlikely. Even if Doemling had recognized her, he would not have mentioned her to the FBI, Dr. Lecter reasoned. Bent on blackmail, Doemling would have had to recast the actual circumstances of their meeting into a chance encounter. Here at the hotel, probably. Clarice Starling, supposedly a year dead, was an unlikely detail that would have made his story seem implausible. He would have left it out.
The room search, then, would concentrate on solitary male guests, to begin with. That would give them some more time too.
A potential design began to assemble itself in his mind. As it took form, as he began to see it from multiple angles, and as he began to divine the details of what they would have to do, he shuddered faintly, and he felt the first small stirrings of revulsion.
The sound of a fresh clip being socked into a pistol severed all his thoughts cleanly, like a well-honed sword slicing through flesh.
He turned his head slightly to see Clarice.
She was loading the cut down .45 she most preferred, and had set her extra clips, plus a back-up weapon, on the bed. There was a hard shine in her wonderful amber eyes, composed of equal parts force of will and unshed tears. Her slender, smoothly muscled body was poised, weight slightly shifted to her right, beside the bed. She was still entirely nude.
Even before she'd thought to clothe herself, she had looked to her weapons.
The truest hallmark of the born warrior, to array oneself for battle solely in bravery. Just so had Michelangelo's young David gone upon the field to meet his own foes, and with as little hope.
She had never appeared more magnificent to him than she did at this moment, a palely gleaming ivory idol. Her exquisite beauty staggered him. Her courage humbled him. Her commitment to him, love and acceptance that he had never earned and did not truly warrant, impaled his heart.
He would NEVER give her up. Never. Not ever. Not to fortune, not to death. Never.
Not while there was still a way out. A hard route to take, but an open one.
"Clarice, we cannot survive a direct confrontation," he said, quietly. He put out a hand to her. "Come here. Please. Sit down here. Listen to me."
After a long moment of searching scrutiny, she did as he asked.
"Hannibal, we can't get out. Four men on an inside door. What do you think they'll have on the main exits? They have us. We're done. Don't ask me to save myself. I wont do it. We can't get out."
Her voice sounded flat, dead. He could barely stand the sound of his own name, so rarely on her lips, spoken in that pallid, lifeless monotone. But he would have to withstand worse assaults to the senses and sensibilities, before he was done, tonight.
"There isn't much time, Clarice. Listen to me. Yes, you're right, we can't get out. Not both of us."
"NO! I told you, no! I will not leave you here. We knew this day would come, we always knew that. I won't do - "
He put his hands on her upper arms and shook her, slightly, fingers deliberately digging into her skin, hurting, making bruises. Her own shock at the abuse stilled her vehement objections. He had never before offered her such an unkind touch.
"No, Clarice, I'm not asking you to leave me here. I'm going to leave YOU here."
"What? I . . . I don't understand."
"We can't get out together. But alone, moving quietly, I'll be able to slip by. I've gotten through tighter nets."
"And killed five to do it, the first time. No. We can - "
"Clarice," he interrupted, and glanced at her pistol, held like an unnatural, lethal child in her lap. "How many would have fallen to your expert aim, tonight? How well could you have lived with that? But you didn't really expect to have to, did you? Live with it?"
"No. No, I didn't. You won't go back to your prison. And I won't go back to mine. I won't argue with you about this."
"Listen to me. No one is going to die. No one is going to any prison. We've preserved the illusion that you were dead for a year. Now we'll create a different illusion. And you'll help me. You're trained in forensic science; you'll help me stage a story. An ugly story for the police, the Bureau, the media, to swallow whole and savor and gloat over."
He stopped, and waited for her to understand what he was proposing.
"So then . . . I'm not dead? Not dead, but kidnapped. By you." Dawning comprehension was in her eyes, and the first bite of renewed hope, and renewed fear with it, brought life back into her voice.
"Yes. I've held you for a year, against your will. A season in the Underworld, like Persephone. I've drugged you, hurt you, abused you . . . " he paused, having to control his own disgust before he could go on. "Violated you in every possible, perverted way, body and mind. Unimaginable torment. It's a miracle you survived. The tabloids will love it."
He was satisfied to see the gears beginning to mesh in her trained investigator's mind. He could almost discern her scanning through remembered case files, revisiting recalled crime scenes, recreating victim interviews.
"It won't work. We're talking systematic abuse. Over a long period of time. The long term physical evidence won't be there. We can't fake that."
"We won't have to. We'll make the immediate scene vile enough to shock for now. Afterwards, you'll use the media. You'll get on television and whine and weep and shudder and play the victimized heroine. You'll embarrass the FBI fools that left you to 'a fate worse than death' until they'll avoid you like a plague carrier. You'll stay out of protective custody. You'll tell your nightmare story every night like Scheherazade and no one will ever doubt you because no one will really want to. And you'll stay visible, where I can see you. When the time comes, when it's safe, I'll come for you. And then we'll go home, Clarice."
"It's too fantastic. Why wouldn't you have just killed me? No one will believe it."
"EVERYONE will believe it," he hissed, and then laughed, a hideous, broken- glass laugh that was dreadful to hear. "'Hannibal the Cannibal'? Is there ANY manner of depravity such a 'monster' would shrink from? Clarice, my story has been at the top of the charts for years. Death, blood, unspeakable crimes. Boffo, as they say. But there's always been one important element lacking . Now we'll add it."
"Sex," she said, in the same disgusted tone she might have said "filth".
"Yes. People will believe anything, Clarice, as long as it's what they want to hear. As long as it's what they expect. You'll see that I'm right, in the next few weeks."
"Behavioral Science won't buy it. They have dozens of profiles on you. This isn't your MO."
"That won't matter. The whole bureau will be twisting in a public relations cataclysm, the moment the story of your 'ordeal' gets out. You'll parade your wounds before the public and they'll be burning FBI directors in effigy in the streets. Behavioral Science will never dare to breathe a word against you."
He was right. They both knew it. The Bureau had abandoned her totally, set her out as bait and then left her to whatever fate might come. After Ruby Ridge and Richard Jewell, the FBI could ill-afford another public opinion shitstorm. They'd keep quiet, no matter what suspicions a few egg-headed profilers in the basement at Quantico might have.
They stared into each other's eyes, mutually gauging the resolve each saw in the other's gaze.
"All right," she said, finally. "It's our best bet. What do we do?"
"You tell me. You're the forensics expert. You've seen sex crimes?"
"Too many. You'll have to hurt me. Inside and out. Can you do that?"
"I don't know. We'll get to that. What else?"
She rose, almost unconsciously, so deep was she in thought.
"We'll have to sweep these rooms. Too many signs of consensual cohabitation all around."
"We're running out of time . . . "
"So we'll hurry. You go through this room. I'll do the bath and the sitting room. All right?"
She left the room without waiting for an answer, intent on scouring any visible trace of her own ongoing well-being from these rooms. He moved to his own appointed search of their bedroom, reflecting, not without a certain amount of dismay, on how terribly easy it was to erase all evidence of happiness, if such was what one set out to do.
It didn't take long at all. The suite was swept clean of any signs of tenderness or sentimentality in minutes. They met back in the bedroom once the sweep had been accomplished. It was time to get dressed.
Clarice looked at the bed, at her small personal arsenal.
"Can you get these guns out of here when you go?" she asked. "You'll have to ditch them well away from the hotel, you know. They can't be found."
"Understood. What more?"
"Restraints. It's a common element in scenes like this. What do we have on hand?"
The wording of her question cut into their hurried concentration and stood out of context in its own macabre absurdity. Proper bondage restraints were not exactly the same thing as a dozen eggs or a cup of sugar. They were both surprised to find themselves suddenly laughing helplessly.
"I'm devastated to have failed you, Clarice. I haven't been anywhere near deviant enough, it seems. You must have been very bored. What about silk scarves?"
She was slipping an ivory satin nightgown on over her head, manic giggling slightly muffled in the creamy fabric.
"A bit tame for this scenario, aside from the fetish value. Got any duct tape?"
He drew himself up with deliberately comic, huffy hauteur. He was one of the very few individuals in all the world who could manage to look impossibly haughty while completely naked.
"Clarice, I am deeply insulted. How can you have the effrontery to ask? I ALWAYS have duct tape."
The humor of the moment was grim and utterly grotesque, but it helped, nevertheless.
Amidst their second burst of mutual, horrified laughter, Clarice swiftly crossed the room to him and closed her arms around his bare shoulders. The bruises he'd put on her arms were already beginning to show, and tears were glittering, almost ready to spill, in her eyes. But she was smiling, anyway.
"Please kiss me. Right now. I need it. What's next is the hard part."
A request no true gentleman could ever deny a lady. He bowed his head to comply.
He broke the kiss when he tasted the brine of her tears, falling at last.
"Oh, Clarice." He knew of nothing better to say.
"Okay. That helps. That's better. I love you. You do know that?"
"Yes . . . yes, I do."
"Be certain. You don't see things like other people do. You do understand that I love you?"
"I'll never understand, Clarice. But I believe you."
"Well. We're all right then. God, this is so . . . gross. You'll want to cut this nightgown up some. Again, it's a fetish. Use the Harpy, they'll recognize the cut pattern," tears were streaming down her cheeks, unnoticed. "And you'll have to mark my face. Lots of people saw me at Margot's. If I'm going on television, I've got to look . . .different. Unrecognizable. And I'll need a lot more bruises and you'll have to - "
He'd cut off her hurried, unbearable instructions with a single, sharp, closed-fisted blow to her right cheekbone. The feel of the delicate bone crumpling and thin skin splitting under his knuckles would haunt him in his dreams, he knew. She'd have dropped like a stone if she hadn't caught her. She hung limply in his arms.
So small, really. She weighed practically nothing. Strange how very small she seemed to him.
Throughout all of the terrible things he would do now, he wanted her unconscious. For the duration. Were she alert and aware, the pain of the injuries and violations he was about to inflict would have undone them both. He knew very well that he would never have been able to go on.
There would be pain when she came to. The broken cheekbone alone would hurt very badly. He carried her to the bed and gently set her down on it, then raised both her eyelids to check her pupils. All was well. There would be a great deal of swelling and discoloration. At least half of the makeshift "mask" she would wear for the press was made.
He bent to kiss her mouth again, softly, one more time, because he didn't know when he would taste these lips again. Then he bit into the left side of her lower lip and chin and broke the skin. He tasted blood and for the first time in his life, the well-known, often greedily relished taste nearly gagged him.
But the asymmetrical swelling this injury would cause on the left side of her face would complete her disguise. He fervently hoped there wouldn't be a scar.
Two bites to her scalp caused very little actual damage, but released showy amounts of blood. He raised her limp torso from the bed, supporting the back of her head with one hand, and shook, twice, sharply enough to cause gruesome blood splatters on the pillows and counterpane and her gown.
He carefully lowered her back to the pillows and sat up, very still, watching his cherished Clarice bleed, and weathering the blackest, most excoriating wave of abject self-loathing he had ever known.
But there was still more to do. The vile tale he hoped to convey to their pursuers was only half told. He could not shrink from these things.
Hannibal Lecter was a man who could will himself to any excess, no matter how intolerable. It was both his strength and his tragedy that he was such. The memory palace, arcane repository of all his vast stores of acquired knowledge and frequent mental refuge, beckoned benignly to his sickened spirit.
He entered that ordered, mostly bright inner world gratefully and left his body behind to do its grisly work, untenanted.
The work didn't really take very long, all things considered.
Later, centuries and ages later, it seemed to him, Dr. Lecter, fully dressed as Lawrence Perkins and armed with Clarice's weapons as well as his own, stood as still and cold as a graven stone image in the bedroom and considered the scene.
There were easily identifiable traces of himself everywhere, but there was nothing to indicate that Clarice had ever been allowed the slightest autonomy or mercy or dignity in this suite. He consulted his watch. Five to three.
How very odd. The whole appalling series of events had taken no more than twenty-five minutes, from the first strained syllables of Margot's voice on the phone to this.
He forced himself to examine Clarice a final time before he would leave.
Her pupils responded normally and symmetrically to light. She was bound with yards of duct tape, at her wrists and ankles and elbows, splayed on the bloodied bedclothes in her cut white gown. He had not dared to tape her mouth, for fear of accidental aspiration or asphyxiation. Her lovely face was completely obscured by bruising and edema and dried blood. He'd signed her precious flesh with more bites, patterns of them on her breasts and inner thighs, each just enough to break the skin, none, he believed, deep enough to scar. He'd left his genetic calling card in her inner vaults, and had also left brutal evidence of a hard, unloving entry to these vaults.
Five minutes earlier, he had called the city desk at the Las Vegas Sun and had given the night editor an anonymous (but highly convincing) tip about a high profile fugitive and an impending arrest.
There was nothing else to do. The scene was set, the bleak little apocryphal tale was told. Now he must leave her to her own part in the performance. He hoped she would not find her assigned role as hateful as he had his. Although he very much feared that she would.
He did not wish to look at her like this any further. He silently left the room.
There was a small bundle of evidence that they had judged the investigators should not see at the door to the suite. Greeting cards, notes, her birth control pills, day old roses, some of her growing collection of emeralds, her handbag, the clothes she had worn as Norma Meyer. He'd tied the pitifully small collection of things up in a hotel laundry bag.
He also had his shoes, socks, and several clips of ammunition in there. He himself was dressed in an outer layer of pajamas and bathrobe, only slippers on his feet. Suitable street clothes were hidden beneath this layer. His shaggy "Larry" hair was mussed, as though he'd just awakened from a hard sleep. He practiced blinking Larry's mild blue eyes blearily a few times.
He took up the bundle and walked out the door, as silently as a serpent sliding over silk. Anyone seeing him would have taken him for a tired, half asleep hotel guest stumbling around the halls, looking for the laundry chute. He would use this dazed persona to get to the incinerator, located in the hotel basement, and there he would dispose of everything that could be burned. Whatever was left would go with him. And then he would find a lightly manned exit to watch, and he would wait.
When Clarice was discovered, a flurry of exited activity would ensue. There would be ambulances and EMT's, and there would be newspaper reporters and photographers at first, and soon other legions of media representatives. A struggle for control of the crime scene would erupt between the FBI and the Las Vegas Police, and swarms of CSI techs from both law enforcement agencies would arrive. There would be frantic comings and goings, and dozens of warm bodies and uniforms would be hurrying to and fro. There would be chaos and confusion, and garbled and contradictory messages would pipe from all the radios. There would be fear and chagrin and laying of blame and outrage.
And in all this frenzy, he was certain, he would be able to slip through the net. Easily.
He would need a car. The silly blue Aspire that his auto-loving Clarice had so despised would be compromised now. He would need an identity. He could access several via phone. He would need cash and he would need information and he would need a safe place to wait out the inevitable searches and attention. He would be busy.
But first, before anything else, he would find his way to Margot Verger's home in Summerlin and he would wait for Dr. Doemling to arrive.
He had a seminar planned for THAT learned gentleman that would transcend the known limits of suffering. Las Vegas had at least one feature that Dr. Lecter much admired. It was a city surrounded on all sides by open, empty desolation. A handy landscape for complete, uninterrupted privacy. And, of course, for the convenient disposal of earthly remains.
There were always compensations.
************************************************************
As Dr. Lecter listened to Margot's harried voice over the phone and took up the burden of the full weight of her heavy news, he entered that frigid, strangely disconnected state of amoral, razor-edged readiness that was his most elemental response to threat. It was more an innate aspect of self than a skill or habit. He had never consciously sought this frozen, ever- ravenous vacuum at his psyche's core, although he had often found himself there, when the proper set of circumstances arose.
Margot's words slowed, and he began to perceive large temporal gaps between each of them. His vision took on an unnatural clarity. His awareness of scents intensified. His body became very still, the muscles and sinews subtly drawing and pulling inward like a crossbow winding, spring tension ready to explode outward at need. He felt a vague tingling sensation in his hands and the tips of his fingers, and, unaware, flexed them strongly, three times in rapid succession. His respiration slowed. His blood pressure dipped.
His mind ticked through thousands of discrete calculations in the space of moments.
His heart emptied of every last vestige of human kindness or compunction.
He motioned to Clarice, staring at him with stricken eyes.
"I've been identified," he said to her, words clipped and devoid of affect. "Go to the balcony. Check that exit across the courtyard. See what's there. Don't be seen."
He listened to Margot, and at the same time, on another mental track, raced into the Hall of Architecture in his memory palace and set out all his rough sketches of the layout of the hotel, its parking garage, the grid of city streets in the immediate vicinity, and maps of the city as a whole, with outlying areas as well as Interstate routes in and out. On yet another track, he was sifting through his memories of every face he had seen at Margot's earlier, and re-examining every impression or nuance of perception he had experienced there. On a fourth track, he was formulating and discarding one course of action after another, each designed to fit a different set of contingencies. On a fifth track, he was watching the pale, nude form of Clarice rising from the bed and walking swiftly toward the sitting room door.
Before she'd had time to reach the door, his unique memory had locked on a pesky hovering presence at the edge of his first exchange with Margot at the party, some persistent suppliant to Margot Verger's wealth and influence whom he had foolishly dismissed. That would have been Doemling.
Recognition must have been quick. He knew he'd made quite an impression on the fussy, amusingly venomous academic, years before. One could assume the entire conversation between Clarice, himself, Margot and Judy, had been overheard. That had been at about seven o'clock. Why hadn't the police arrived then, at the party?
Blackmail. Doemling must intend to pressure Margot with his knowledge of their association. Excellent. At least one favorable circumstance. The man would have lied about where the identification took place, and would have allowed time to pass before going to the authorities. And he would return to Margot, in time, likely soon, to make his demands.
The familiar biting sting of profound rage, pouring like a black tide out of his center and into his blood, came to him. Dr. Lecter fully intended to renew his own acquaintance with the scholarly professor at that prospective conference with Margot. Oh, yes. Provided he could find a way out of the current dilemma.
Clarice reentered the bedroom, moving quickly and economically.
"Two bureau agents," she said, face white and rigid. "No markers or insignia. Both armed. Equipped with radios. Two uniforms arrived while I watched. PD. Was it the party? Is that where they made us?"
"Never mind. Uniforms? Just arrived? And you're certain about the agents?"
"The shoes," she said, with a wretched, jagged little smile. "I recognize those FBI clunkers. Who saw us?"
"Hush, please, Clarice. I'm not yet certain that YOU have been identified. Let me talk to Margot now."
Clarice nodded and turned away, toward her things in the closet.
"Margot," Lecter was saying. "Do this for me - do you have call conferencing with your phone service? . . . good, dial the hotel switchboard, ask for the front desk, chatter aimlessly for a moment, then ask if there are any messages for Norma Meyer . . . no, I'll be listening, I need to hear how they sound . . . no, then I want you to hang up . . . I'll contact you when I . . . well, I certainly hope it won't be via the evening news, but you never know . . . Margot, that's not important now, please just do as I ask . . . "
Dr. Lecter covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with his palm and listened intently as Margot followed his instructions to the letter. No strain in the switchboard operator's voice. Good. Definite sound of tension in the voice at the desk. Very well, FBI presence there. No spike of recognition or additional tension at the mention of "Norma Meyer" or her room number. VERY good.
So. The FBI was running the operation, then. The Las Vegas police had been enlisted just recently to help make a door to door room search, armed with passkeys. The search would take time. But the exits were well guarded. Still . . .
Had Clarice been identified? Unlikely. Even if Doemling had recognized her, he would not have mentioned her to the FBI, Dr. Lecter reasoned. Bent on blackmail, Doemling would have had to recast the actual circumstances of their meeting into a chance encounter. Here at the hotel, probably. Clarice Starling, supposedly a year dead, was an unlikely detail that would have made his story seem implausible. He would have left it out.
The room search, then, would concentrate on solitary male guests, to begin with. That would give them some more time too.
A potential design began to assemble itself in his mind. As it took form, as he began to see it from multiple angles, and as he began to divine the details of what they would have to do, he shuddered faintly, and he felt the first small stirrings of revulsion.
The sound of a fresh clip being socked into a pistol severed all his thoughts cleanly, like a well-honed sword slicing through flesh.
He turned his head slightly to see Clarice.
She was loading the cut down .45 she most preferred, and had set her extra clips, plus a back-up weapon, on the bed. There was a hard shine in her wonderful amber eyes, composed of equal parts force of will and unshed tears. Her slender, smoothly muscled body was poised, weight slightly shifted to her right, beside the bed. She was still entirely nude.
Even before she'd thought to clothe herself, she had looked to her weapons.
The truest hallmark of the born warrior, to array oneself for battle solely in bravery. Just so had Michelangelo's young David gone upon the field to meet his own foes, and with as little hope.
She had never appeared more magnificent to him than she did at this moment, a palely gleaming ivory idol. Her exquisite beauty staggered him. Her courage humbled him. Her commitment to him, love and acceptance that he had never earned and did not truly warrant, impaled his heart.
He would NEVER give her up. Never. Not ever. Not to fortune, not to death. Never.
Not while there was still a way out. A hard route to take, but an open one.
"Clarice, we cannot survive a direct confrontation," he said, quietly. He put out a hand to her. "Come here. Please. Sit down here. Listen to me."
After a long moment of searching scrutiny, she did as he asked.
"Hannibal, we can't get out. Four men on an inside door. What do you think they'll have on the main exits? They have us. We're done. Don't ask me to save myself. I wont do it. We can't get out."
Her voice sounded flat, dead. He could barely stand the sound of his own name, so rarely on her lips, spoken in that pallid, lifeless monotone. But he would have to withstand worse assaults to the senses and sensibilities, before he was done, tonight.
"There isn't much time, Clarice. Listen to me. Yes, you're right, we can't get out. Not both of us."
"NO! I told you, no! I will not leave you here. We knew this day would come, we always knew that. I won't do - "
He put his hands on her upper arms and shook her, slightly, fingers deliberately digging into her skin, hurting, making bruises. Her own shock at the abuse stilled her vehement objections. He had never before offered her such an unkind touch.
"No, Clarice, I'm not asking you to leave me here. I'm going to leave YOU here."
"What? I . . . I don't understand."
"We can't get out together. But alone, moving quietly, I'll be able to slip by. I've gotten through tighter nets."
"And killed five to do it, the first time. No. We can - "
"Clarice," he interrupted, and glanced at her pistol, held like an unnatural, lethal child in her lap. "How many would have fallen to your expert aim, tonight? How well could you have lived with that? But you didn't really expect to have to, did you? Live with it?"
"No. No, I didn't. You won't go back to your prison. And I won't go back to mine. I won't argue with you about this."
"Listen to me. No one is going to die. No one is going to any prison. We've preserved the illusion that you were dead for a year. Now we'll create a different illusion. And you'll help me. You're trained in forensic science; you'll help me stage a story. An ugly story for the police, the Bureau, the media, to swallow whole and savor and gloat over."
He stopped, and waited for her to understand what he was proposing.
"So then . . . I'm not dead? Not dead, but kidnapped. By you." Dawning comprehension was in her eyes, and the first bite of renewed hope, and renewed fear with it, brought life back into her voice.
"Yes. I've held you for a year, against your will. A season in the Underworld, like Persephone. I've drugged you, hurt you, abused you . . . " he paused, having to control his own disgust before he could go on. "Violated you in every possible, perverted way, body and mind. Unimaginable torment. It's a miracle you survived. The tabloids will love it."
He was satisfied to see the gears beginning to mesh in her trained investigator's mind. He could almost discern her scanning through remembered case files, revisiting recalled crime scenes, recreating victim interviews.
"It won't work. We're talking systematic abuse. Over a long period of time. The long term physical evidence won't be there. We can't fake that."
"We won't have to. We'll make the immediate scene vile enough to shock for now. Afterwards, you'll use the media. You'll get on television and whine and weep and shudder and play the victimized heroine. You'll embarrass the FBI fools that left you to 'a fate worse than death' until they'll avoid you like a plague carrier. You'll stay out of protective custody. You'll tell your nightmare story every night like Scheherazade and no one will ever doubt you because no one will really want to. And you'll stay visible, where I can see you. When the time comes, when it's safe, I'll come for you. And then we'll go home, Clarice."
"It's too fantastic. Why wouldn't you have just killed me? No one will believe it."
"EVERYONE will believe it," he hissed, and then laughed, a hideous, broken- glass laugh that was dreadful to hear. "'Hannibal the Cannibal'? Is there ANY manner of depravity such a 'monster' would shrink from? Clarice, my story has been at the top of the charts for years. Death, blood, unspeakable crimes. Boffo, as they say. But there's always been one important element lacking . Now we'll add it."
"Sex," she said, in the same disgusted tone she might have said "filth".
"Yes. People will believe anything, Clarice, as long as it's what they want to hear. As long as it's what they expect. You'll see that I'm right, in the next few weeks."
"Behavioral Science won't buy it. They have dozens of profiles on you. This isn't your MO."
"That won't matter. The whole bureau will be twisting in a public relations cataclysm, the moment the story of your 'ordeal' gets out. You'll parade your wounds before the public and they'll be burning FBI directors in effigy in the streets. Behavioral Science will never dare to breathe a word against you."
He was right. They both knew it. The Bureau had abandoned her totally, set her out as bait and then left her to whatever fate might come. After Ruby Ridge and Richard Jewell, the FBI could ill-afford another public opinion shitstorm. They'd keep quiet, no matter what suspicions a few egg-headed profilers in the basement at Quantico might have.
They stared into each other's eyes, mutually gauging the resolve each saw in the other's gaze.
"All right," she said, finally. "It's our best bet. What do we do?"
"You tell me. You're the forensics expert. You've seen sex crimes?"
"Too many. You'll have to hurt me. Inside and out. Can you do that?"
"I don't know. We'll get to that. What else?"
She rose, almost unconsciously, so deep was she in thought.
"We'll have to sweep these rooms. Too many signs of consensual cohabitation all around."
"We're running out of time . . . "
"So we'll hurry. You go through this room. I'll do the bath and the sitting room. All right?"
She left the room without waiting for an answer, intent on scouring any visible trace of her own ongoing well-being from these rooms. He moved to his own appointed search of their bedroom, reflecting, not without a certain amount of dismay, on how terribly easy it was to erase all evidence of happiness, if such was what one set out to do.
It didn't take long at all. The suite was swept clean of any signs of tenderness or sentimentality in minutes. They met back in the bedroom once the sweep had been accomplished. It was time to get dressed.
Clarice looked at the bed, at her small personal arsenal.
"Can you get these guns out of here when you go?" she asked. "You'll have to ditch them well away from the hotel, you know. They can't be found."
"Understood. What more?"
"Restraints. It's a common element in scenes like this. What do we have on hand?"
The wording of her question cut into their hurried concentration and stood out of context in its own macabre absurdity. Proper bondage restraints were not exactly the same thing as a dozen eggs or a cup of sugar. They were both surprised to find themselves suddenly laughing helplessly.
"I'm devastated to have failed you, Clarice. I haven't been anywhere near deviant enough, it seems. You must have been very bored. What about silk scarves?"
She was slipping an ivory satin nightgown on over her head, manic giggling slightly muffled in the creamy fabric.
"A bit tame for this scenario, aside from the fetish value. Got any duct tape?"
He drew himself up with deliberately comic, huffy hauteur. He was one of the very few individuals in all the world who could manage to look impossibly haughty while completely naked.
"Clarice, I am deeply insulted. How can you have the effrontery to ask? I ALWAYS have duct tape."
The humor of the moment was grim and utterly grotesque, but it helped, nevertheless.
Amidst their second burst of mutual, horrified laughter, Clarice swiftly crossed the room to him and closed her arms around his bare shoulders. The bruises he'd put on her arms were already beginning to show, and tears were glittering, almost ready to spill, in her eyes. But she was smiling, anyway.
"Please kiss me. Right now. I need it. What's next is the hard part."
A request no true gentleman could ever deny a lady. He bowed his head to comply.
He broke the kiss when he tasted the brine of her tears, falling at last.
"Oh, Clarice." He knew of nothing better to say.
"Okay. That helps. That's better. I love you. You do know that?"
"Yes . . . yes, I do."
"Be certain. You don't see things like other people do. You do understand that I love you?"
"I'll never understand, Clarice. But I believe you."
"Well. We're all right then. God, this is so . . . gross. You'll want to cut this nightgown up some. Again, it's a fetish. Use the Harpy, they'll recognize the cut pattern," tears were streaming down her cheeks, unnoticed. "And you'll have to mark my face. Lots of people saw me at Margot's. If I'm going on television, I've got to look . . .different. Unrecognizable. And I'll need a lot more bruises and you'll have to - "
He'd cut off her hurried, unbearable instructions with a single, sharp, closed-fisted blow to her right cheekbone. The feel of the delicate bone crumpling and thin skin splitting under his knuckles would haunt him in his dreams, he knew. She'd have dropped like a stone if she hadn't caught her. She hung limply in his arms.
So small, really. She weighed practically nothing. Strange how very small she seemed to him.
Throughout all of the terrible things he would do now, he wanted her unconscious. For the duration. Were she alert and aware, the pain of the injuries and violations he was about to inflict would have undone them both. He knew very well that he would never have been able to go on.
There would be pain when she came to. The broken cheekbone alone would hurt very badly. He carried her to the bed and gently set her down on it, then raised both her eyelids to check her pupils. All was well. There would be a great deal of swelling and discoloration. At least half of the makeshift "mask" she would wear for the press was made.
He bent to kiss her mouth again, softly, one more time, because he didn't know when he would taste these lips again. Then he bit into the left side of her lower lip and chin and broke the skin. He tasted blood and for the first time in his life, the well-known, often greedily relished taste nearly gagged him.
But the asymmetrical swelling this injury would cause on the left side of her face would complete her disguise. He fervently hoped there wouldn't be a scar.
Two bites to her scalp caused very little actual damage, but released showy amounts of blood. He raised her limp torso from the bed, supporting the back of her head with one hand, and shook, twice, sharply enough to cause gruesome blood splatters on the pillows and counterpane and her gown.
He carefully lowered her back to the pillows and sat up, very still, watching his cherished Clarice bleed, and weathering the blackest, most excoriating wave of abject self-loathing he had ever known.
But there was still more to do. The vile tale he hoped to convey to their pursuers was only half told. He could not shrink from these things.
Hannibal Lecter was a man who could will himself to any excess, no matter how intolerable. It was both his strength and his tragedy that he was such. The memory palace, arcane repository of all his vast stores of acquired knowledge and frequent mental refuge, beckoned benignly to his sickened spirit.
He entered that ordered, mostly bright inner world gratefully and left his body behind to do its grisly work, untenanted.
The work didn't really take very long, all things considered.
Later, centuries and ages later, it seemed to him, Dr. Lecter, fully dressed as Lawrence Perkins and armed with Clarice's weapons as well as his own, stood as still and cold as a graven stone image in the bedroom and considered the scene.
There were easily identifiable traces of himself everywhere, but there was nothing to indicate that Clarice had ever been allowed the slightest autonomy or mercy or dignity in this suite. He consulted his watch. Five to three.
How very odd. The whole appalling series of events had taken no more than twenty-five minutes, from the first strained syllables of Margot's voice on the phone to this.
He forced himself to examine Clarice a final time before he would leave.
Her pupils responded normally and symmetrically to light. She was bound with yards of duct tape, at her wrists and ankles and elbows, splayed on the bloodied bedclothes in her cut white gown. He had not dared to tape her mouth, for fear of accidental aspiration or asphyxiation. Her lovely face was completely obscured by bruising and edema and dried blood. He'd signed her precious flesh with more bites, patterns of them on her breasts and inner thighs, each just enough to break the skin, none, he believed, deep enough to scar. He'd left his genetic calling card in her inner vaults, and had also left brutal evidence of a hard, unloving entry to these vaults.
Five minutes earlier, he had called the city desk at the Las Vegas Sun and had given the night editor an anonymous (but highly convincing) tip about a high profile fugitive and an impending arrest.
There was nothing else to do. The scene was set, the bleak little apocryphal tale was told. Now he must leave her to her own part in the performance. He hoped she would not find her assigned role as hateful as he had his. Although he very much feared that she would.
He did not wish to look at her like this any further. He silently left the room.
There was a small bundle of evidence that they had judged the investigators should not see at the door to the suite. Greeting cards, notes, her birth control pills, day old roses, some of her growing collection of emeralds, her handbag, the clothes she had worn as Norma Meyer. He'd tied the pitifully small collection of things up in a hotel laundry bag.
He also had his shoes, socks, and several clips of ammunition in there. He himself was dressed in an outer layer of pajamas and bathrobe, only slippers on his feet. Suitable street clothes were hidden beneath this layer. His shaggy "Larry" hair was mussed, as though he'd just awakened from a hard sleep. He practiced blinking Larry's mild blue eyes blearily a few times.
He took up the bundle and walked out the door, as silently as a serpent sliding over silk. Anyone seeing him would have taken him for a tired, half asleep hotel guest stumbling around the halls, looking for the laundry chute. He would use this dazed persona to get to the incinerator, located in the hotel basement, and there he would dispose of everything that could be burned. Whatever was left would go with him. And then he would find a lightly manned exit to watch, and he would wait.
When Clarice was discovered, a flurry of exited activity would ensue. There would be ambulances and EMT's, and there would be newspaper reporters and photographers at first, and soon other legions of media representatives. A struggle for control of the crime scene would erupt between the FBI and the Las Vegas Police, and swarms of CSI techs from both law enforcement agencies would arrive. There would be frantic comings and goings, and dozens of warm bodies and uniforms would be hurrying to and fro. There would be chaos and confusion, and garbled and contradictory messages would pipe from all the radios. There would be fear and chagrin and laying of blame and outrage.
And in all this frenzy, he was certain, he would be able to slip through the net. Easily.
He would need a car. The silly blue Aspire that his auto-loving Clarice had so despised would be compromised now. He would need an identity. He could access several via phone. He would need cash and he would need information and he would need a safe place to wait out the inevitable searches and attention. He would be busy.
But first, before anything else, he would find his way to Margot Verger's home in Summerlin and he would wait for Dr. Doemling to arrive.
He had a seminar planned for THAT learned gentleman that would transcend the known limits of suffering. Las Vegas had at least one feature that Dr. Lecter much admired. It was a city surrounded on all sides by open, empty desolation. A handy landscape for complete, uninterrupted privacy. And, of course, for the convenient disposal of earthly remains.
There were always compensations.
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