Chapter Fourteen

October 18, 11:00 AM, Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, Main Entrance

It was a grey Tuesday morning in Las Vegas, windy and haunted by a light drizzle, not unusual for early fall in Southern Nevada.

Margot Verger, Clarice Starling, and a very overwhelmed hospital orderly were trying to make their way through the scores of media vultures that had assembled outside the main entrance to record for posterity (and for the evening news) Starling's discharge from the hospital.

Margot was using her size and bulky strength to bull-doze a path through the crowds, and Clarice was fidgeting in her wheelchair, an insurance-related precaution that all hospitals insist on for departing patients. The orderly, a shy newcomer to the US from Jamaica, goggled at the array of cameras and microphones and correspondents and tried to concentrate on pushing the wheelchair.

The three were on their own against the press corps. The hospital, the police, and the FBI, annoyed with Starling due to earlier events, had withdrawn any support.

How had the press known when and where to gather?

Clarice asked herself this question rhetorically, and with some irritation. She really knew the likely answers. Someone on the hospital staff must have ratted her out to the media. Or possibly someone with the Bureau. Or the Las Vegas PD. Or maybe her own S.O.B. of a doctor.

Yesterday, she had refused to authorize or participate in a pre-arranged press conference, ostensibly organized by the Sunrise Hospital public relations department, but obviously really designed by FBI spin-doctors.

Not that the hospital would have sneered at the opportunity for some free ink; she'd had no doubt that her recent team of medical practioners would have been delighted to cooperate with the Bureau, especially the psychologists, who had probably all had the words "book-deal . . . book-deal . . . book-deal . . ." waltzing gaily through their heads just before they dropped off to sleep for the past few nights.

She had refused rather vehemently.

A glamorous fellow from the Bureau had come to visit Starling just after breakfast yesterday morning. He'd introduced himself brightly, giving a name but no job description. The Bureau's PR consultants operated in relative obscurity, it being bad PR for a law-enforcement agency to visibly concern itself with PR. Something of a Catch-22.

He'd been a glossy gentleman about Starling's age, with a razor-cut hair style and a perfect Prada suit and a truckload of plastic solicitude.

My God, it's The Attack of the Living Ken Dolls, Clarice had thought, and winced as her injured mouth stretched into a grim smile.

Ken, or Chip, or Brandon, or whatever his stupid name had been, had responded to her pained smile with a dazzling display of his own capped pearly whites and asked if she felt up to going over some of questions that might come up in the press conference later that afternoon. And some of her answers to those questions, if that would be all right?

In retrospect, Starling had to admit to herself that she had been in a nasty frame of mind that Tuesday morning. She was hurting, she was confused, and above all, she'd been in a continuous low-grade fury since around midnight the night before, the kind of impotent, hair-trigger temper that makes one wish desperately for some hapless victim to punch out.

Someone, anyone. Anyone at all. Brian, or Jason, or Binky of the FBI, or whatever, had been made to order.

"What press conference would that be?" she'd asked the image consultant whiz, voice deceptively even and well-modulated.

"Oh, didn't they tell you?" he'd answered, clear hazel eyes widening innocently. "The hospital public-relations people thought it would be best. With all the publicity surrounding your . . . urm . . . harrowing ordeal, it seemed like an organized info-event might be the politic way to go. We're thinking, for instance, spin-wise, it might be a good thing if you avoided mentioning the Lecter name."

"Info-event", she had repeated to herself mentally, feeling an odd pulsing sensation behind her eyes. "Politic way to go." "Harrowing ordeal" "Spin-wise" "The Lecter name."

She'd slowly and deliberately gotten up from her bed, swinging her bare knees over the edge and setting her bare feet on the cool linoleum floor. She took a moment to reflect that it was a lucky thing for her visitor that she was currently armed with nothing more lethal than a hospital gown, and had then stood up.

"Tell you what," she'd said to her salon-tanned guest, handsome as a movie star. "I'd like for you to take me to the movies and then to dinner, if you don't mind."

"Excuse me, Agent Starling?" he'd asked, puzzled.

"Dinner and a movie, you know," she'd continued, the volume of her voice rising even as its temperature plunged. "Because, you see, Hannibal the Cannibal's been fucking me blind for a solid year. Before that, the Bureau had been fucking me cross-eyed for a good TEN years. And now YOU want to fuck me too, Binky-baby, and this time I BY GOD WANT DINNER AND A MOVIE FIRST!"

"Miss Starling!" he'd gasped, rising from his chair, green eyes now wide enough to clearly show the edges of his contacts. "Please try to - "

"GET OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU CAPPED-TOOTHED, CALVIN KLEIN, FRAT-RAT MOTHERFUCKER," she'd shrieked. "BEFORE I PINCH YOUR HAIR-GELLED PUBLIC RELATIONS FBI HEAD OFF!!!"

Binky had scrambled out of her room as though the very hounds of Hell were after him. Afterwards, no one from the Bureau, or the hospital, or anywhere else, had dared to utter the words "press conference" in her presence again.

Clarice had burst out laughing as she watched the terrorized press agent scuttle out and away down the hall, and had then lapsed into a violent crying jag that lasted until Margot Verger had shown up unexpectedly, a half hour later.

She'd been horribly embarrassed to be caught crying like that, but she hadn't been able to stop, and that had frightened her rather badly.

Margot had matter-of-factly settled herself in a chair beside Clarice's bed and passed her Kleenex and insisted that Clarice must come and stay with her and Judy when she got out of the hospital the next day. At least until she'd had a chance to figure out what she was going to do.

Clarice's crying jag had brought on a humiliating case of the hiccups, and she'd agreed to do as Margot wished, too tired and too occupied with sobbing and hiccupping to form cogent arguments against it.

Now Clarice and Margot were shoving their way through a knot of cameras, mikes and reporters, trying to get to the limo Margot had wisely arranged to have waiting.

Margot Verger was a recognizable public figure in her own right. The press detected a fascinating human-interest angle in her association with Starling at once, considering her own status as surviving family to a high-profile Lecter victim. Dozens of shouted questions peppered the air outside the Sunrise Hospital.

"Hey, you're Margot Verger, right?"

"Margot, how'd you and Starling meet?"

"Are you going into Federal Custody, Ms. Starling?"

"What's your part in this, Ms. Verger?"

"What would you say to Lecter if you could, Margot?"

"What about you, Clarice?"

"Are you concerned for your safety, Ms. Starling? Ms. Verger?"

"Do either of you think he might come back?"

Clarice thought back to the time immediately after she had shot and killed Jame Gumb, known among the Fourth Estate as "Buffalo Bill". She had been forced to run similar mobs of media representatives every time she'd set foot outside of private property for several weeks, and during that time she'd learned an interesting fact. She'd discovered that photo-journalists, fairly early on in their careers, learn to ask the most provocative, incendiary questions possible in street situations. They do not expect to have any of these questions answered, really. But they do expect to generate vivid photos by angering, frightening, or even just startling their subjects into unguarded facial expressions.

Starling wondered what her own face might be revealing in response to that last shouted question.

Margot stepped up to the plate.

"As far as I can tell," she said to the crowd in a clear, carrying voice. "Hannibal Lecter might run for fucking President for all the FBI can do to stop him."

She paused for effect, allowing the reporters a moment to record the sarcastic and vivid sound-bite. Flashbulbs strobed like sheet lightning.

"They couldn't keep him out of Las Vegas, and they couldn't keep him in, either," she went on. "They couldn't protect the citizens of this city, they couldn't protect my brother, and they sure as hell couldn't protect Ms. Starling here, and she was one of their own agents. That sick bastard's been holding her captive for a whole year, and they haven't even gotten around to listing her as kidnapped yet."

Pens scribbled, mini-recorders whirred, and audiotape rolled. This was primo stuff.

"Now," Margot said. "I've offered her my home, and all my resources in terms of private security, and I'll do what the FBI either couldn't, or wouldn't, do. I'll show her a little human decency, and give her a safe place to start the healing process."

Margot paused again while Starling struggled to control her face, which was attempting to arrange itself into a cynical grin. Margot was sharp, all right. Take that, G-men! Hell hath no fury . . .

The one question Margot had been waiting to hear rose above the general wrack of inquiry.

"Why, Ms. Verger? Why are you willing to help Ms. Starling this way?"

"In memory of my late beloved brother, Mason," Margot said, lifting her chin, looking every inch the grieving sister. "It's what he would have wanted. He'd have done the same himself, if only he were here."

It was the perfect exit line, and besides, both Margot and Clarice were in imminent danger of bursting into ugly guffaws. They continued to push their way toward the curb and the waiting limo, and finally managed to get inside the luxurious vehicle, away from the melee of clicking cameras and cawing reporters outside. The Jamaican orderly was left behind at the curb, more or less ignored by the media mob, and hoping fervently that HE would never become famous in America, not as long as he lived.

Margot and Clarice both sank into the plush seats gratefully and looked at each other as the driver pulled the limo away from the hospital.

"My 'late, beloved brother' would have staked you out naked in the fucking pig-pen and posted photos on every billboard on the planet, if only he were here," Margot commented to Starling.

"I know. With a hand-painted bull's-eye taped to my ass, and maybe an 'Eat at Mason's' sign on the barn door, if he'd have thought that might work," Clarice agreed, starting to giggle in jagged, manic bursts.

Margot snorted laughter too. "Just like Wile E. Coyote and his 'free bird seed'! WOULD that have worked, do you think?"

"Maybe. Dr. Lecter might have killed himself laughing," Clarice answered, still chuckling. "Meep, meep, Mason."

The image of Mason as a faceless Coyote sucking his air from an Acme respirator, and that of Dr. Lecter as some sinister version of the Roadrunner, were both wildly inappropriate and strangely apt. Both women relaxed and allowed themselves the mean-spirited guffaws they had not wanted the cameras to record earlier.

Clarice's was dismayed to realize that her own laughter was wavering on the knife's edge of weeping, just as it had when she'd thrown that glossy Bureau flack out of her room, the day before. She looked out the car window and watched the city roll past as she tried to ease back.

She had quite a weakness for vintage Warner Brothers cartoons, and would occasionally rent a stack of cartoon videos and commune with Bugs and the gang over a bowl of corn flakes on Saturday mornings. When Dr. Lecter had ferreted out this particular penchant of hers, his delighted teasing had been relentless and without mercy. He'd given her a complete set of the cartoon videos (including some very rare and hard-to-find ones) on the very next gift-giving occasion he could contrive, as well as a gallon of chocolate milk and a pair of pink flannel pajamas with feet. But from that time forward, he'd also left a bowl of fresh cut strawberries in the fridge every Friday night. Just in case she might want them for her cereal.

Her chuckles tapered off and she had to clamp down hard to keep them from being transmuted to sobs by the passage through her hurt, the way light is bent and distorted when it shines through a prism.

My prism of pain, she thought, mocking herself savagely. Well, isn't that just about the most poetic thing you ever heard? Aren't I just the ONE? I could go to work for Hallmark!

One of the many new potentials and opportunities open before me now. I'll make a new career writing fiendishly depressing captions for a new line of woeful greeting cards!

She was certain her absent S.O. would love such a line of cards and would be in a perfect frenzy to send them to all his old pals in the Bureau and the asylum and the Maryland correctional system. Those that still had above-ground addresses, anyway. When you care enough to send the very best . . .

"Starling?"

Clarice turned away from her window and looked at Margot. She saw that Margot looked almost embarrassed, as though she might be about to confess some failing or misdeed.

"For whatever it's worth, we really did try to talk him out of this. I just don't want you to think we helped him because either of us agreed with him. Judy even told him he was making a mistake."

"Did she?" Clarice asked, with a grim smile. "THAT must have been an . . . edgy conversation. I'd like to have seen it. Margot, I want you to listen to me now. I want you to hear me. Tell Judy too. I do not have any kind of a problem with anything you did, I promise you. I don't blame either of you in any way."

She laughed, a brittle, ironic little laugh, and went on. "Hannibal Lecter is my . . . boyfriend. Sounds like the premise for a comedy skit, doesn't it? God help us. Anyway, I'm saying I know what he's like, Margot, none better. And I know exactly how useless it would have been to try to talk him into, or out of, anything. Might as well try to persuade a twister not to blow down your house."

Margot smiled. "Judy tells me the little chat they had was pretty much just like that."

"I can imagine. He seriously hates being questioned. And he doesn't believe that he makes mistakes. Hell, most of the time he doesn't."

"Looks to me like he made a big one here," Margot said. "Just so you know what I think about it."

"He's not really much for half measures, Margot. All or nothing. Best or worst. Life or death. Yes or no . . . I'll tell you a little secret, if you want. Sometimes I think that the smarter the individual, the more spectacularly bone-headed the mistakes."

"They say Lecter's a genius," Margot commented, smiling.

"I rest my case," Clarice answered. Her own amused smile was heartbreaking in its sorrow, and in its enduring affection. Judy Ingram would have recognized this smile. She had seen its twin cross Hannibal Lecter's features only two nights past, as he had spoken of Clarice.

"What will you do now, Starling?" Margot asked her, more so that she would not have to continue to look at that terrible, beautiful smile than because she thought there might be a ready answer.

"I don't know. I can't do any of the things that I want, he's seen to that. He's got me completely boxed in. Always clever, don't you know, even in something as wrong as this. Always a step or two ahead of me. It's damned tiring, to tell you the truth. I'm damned tired."

Starling's face hardened as some of the betrayed anger she'd been suppressing spilled out of its hastily contrived and flimsy containment.

"In spite of everything, he actually HAS done me a favor, in a very real way. Maybe what I really ought to do is send him a thank-you note," she remarked coldly. "At least it would be polite. He likes 'polite'."

Margot recognized the edged ice in Starling's tone. She had heard ITS twin in Dr. Lecter's voice, when he had first greeted the doomed Everett Doemling in her study, just before dawn on a long Monday morning.

She had a sudden, frighteningly clear image of Clarice Starling, twenty or thirty years from today, as a blighted, beautiful middle-aged woman, remote and untouchable as the horizon, crystallized in an early frost, like a wild spring rose that had bloomed out of season and had been both destroyed and preserved by a killing snow.

He's killed her, Margot thought to herself, strangely shocked. Or he will have. In his effort to protect her. Doesn't he KNOW that?

Was he so utterly damned by his own nature that all he could ever do was destroy? That every action he took and every hope he harbored must inevitably come to the same deadly end, regardless of his intentions? What hellish sort of world was it that laid such horrific curses on its inhabitants?

"Margot? May I ask you something, now?"

Margot nodded slowly, still somewhat bound by her disturbing vision of a future Starling, of a lovely icebound ghost with a ruined heart.

"Why are you really doing this?" Starling waved her hand at the car, the driver, the drizzly, overcast day outside. "All of this? Helping me, I mean. You hardly know me, and you don't really owe me anything."

"It's not a matter of debts, Starling," Margot replied, remembering that she had tried to explain the exact same thing, in almost the exact same words, to Dr. Lecter only the day before yesterday. How alike he and Starling were, in so many ways. Neither of them readily understood that kindness could be an end in itself.

"I can tell you this," Margot went on. "I don't know if it'll make things better or worse, but almost the last thing he did before he left was ask me to be your friend."

Clarice stared at Margot, and the tears she had been fighting all morning and all the night before welled and stood and glittered in her eyes, but did not spill. Welled and glittered, like ice crystals, only just beginning to form.

"Oh, Margot," Clarice whispered, and her voice sounded like dead leaves rattling faintly, stirred into a last dance, perhaps, by a frigid winter breeze. "Be my friend, then, if you want to, and thank you. God knows, I'll need one now. But it does make things worse. Far worse. He asked you to be my friend, fine, but it's what he forgot that frightens me."

"What did he forget?"

"He'll be alone, even more alone now, really, then he ever was before. It wasn't just me taking the risks when we decided to try make our lives together. I wasn't the only one who traded safety for hope. He asked you to be my friend, Margot. But who'll be HIS friend?"

There was no reassuring answer to this question, there was only the obvious answer. Starling turned back to her window, and her view of the city, sad and faded-looking in the grey, watery light.

He's killed her, Margot thought unhappily, and he's probably killed himself too. Judy and I should have done more, we should have tried harder to stop him.

She put this line of thought aside, although it was an oddly tempting one. Ultimately, though, it was pointless. She hoped Starling was privately shedding those standing tears that had been in her eyes now, while her face was turned away and she had a semblance of privacy.

Margot hoped she would let those tears spill while she still could, before it would be too late. Before they could freeze solid in her eyes and in her heart, and never be spilled again.

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