Chapter
Seventeen
October 19, Wednesday, Summerlin Parkway, 9:15
AM
"How do I know, Jake?" Terry answered, and abruptly changed lanes to get back into the blind spot of the Roush Mustang he and his companion were tailing. "Dead Man's Party" continued to bop out of the speakers.
Terry and Jake both worked for the National Tattler. He was a
photographer, videographer and documentary filmmaker who also held a Masters in anthropology from Columbia University. It had been his burning ambition to discover and document in film some previously unknown aboriginal tribe or exotic culture from his early teens onward. He had, however, fallen somewhat short of his aspirations in life when financial considerations had behooved him to accept employment as a camera jockey for a supermarket tabloid, several years back.
Not that there weren't certain points of anthropological interest in the field work he now did for the Tattler. Just now, for instance, he was engaged in a study that included such interesting aspects as cannibalism, human sacrifice, and even taboo-transgressive sexual practices. It paid the bills too, and supported his various film projects. There were always compensations. Let his former classmates from Columbia sneer if they would.
"That 'Stang is a fast car," he said to Jake. "I do know that. She's already riding that gas pedal, and if she sees us, she can leave us eating her dust in 30 seconds flat. Those Roush modifications were meant for racing. And Starling never has liked us good folks at the Tattler much."
Jake grinned like a copperhead. "Yeah, the ungrateful bitch! The Tattler made her a star and now she doesn't even want to talk to us! The nerve of some people, getting free publicity and then trying to keep all the really juicy stuff to themselves! Besides, look at her! She drives like a goddamned maniac!"
Terry Phips, who had worked with Jake for six months now, knew full well that she was only half joking.
Jacqueline Snead, called "Jake" for short, and often "Jake the Snake" by those who knew her best, had never wanted to do anything BUT uncover, record, and report on the most scandalous vagaries of her fellow humans, preferably to as large an audience as possible.
Since earliest childhood, Jake had been Jake. As a little girl, she'd alienated her brothers and sisters (as well as all the other little kids in the neighborhood) by consistently telling on them, had graduated to Class Informer by high school, and had discovered journalism, the perfect vehicle for her intense desire to dig out and disseminate confidential information, in college. Working as a video correspondent for the Tattler's syndicated "infotainment" television show, "Tattler Confidential", was her dream job. She'd never wanted to do anything else. Her sustenance was scandal, her anathema was privacy, and her one great passion was dirt.
And her current assignment, shadowing the newly resurfaced Clarice Starling, promised to yield fabulous dirt of the rare earth variety, if only Jake could get an interview on tape.
Clarice M. Starling, darling of the tabloids! Former FBI agent, former bad-ass terminatrix of assorted druggies, criminals and scumbags, and now, it seemed, former captive sex-toy of Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter. Lecter, of all people, who just happened to be THE most lucrative, circulation-boosting media monster in Tattler history.
Jake LOVED Hannibal Lecter. Everyone at the Tattler loved him. They'd have celebrated his birthday every year if anyone had ever been able to discover conclusively what the actual date was. Among Tattler staffers, he'd indirectly helped to finance down payments on mortgages, college tuitions, the keeping of mistresses, orthodontia, Caribbean vacations, purchases of autos, nose jobs, anniversary gifts, bar mitzvahs, coke habits, weddings, stock purchases, and God knew what else. That he'd also been indirectly instrumental in the murder of one of their own, the late Freddy Lounds, was largely forgotten. Memories were short at the Tattler.
Oceans of ink had been spilled in his name; entire forests had been denuded to provide the newsprint on which his story had been told and sold. Sidebars, serials and bylines by the score had hatched out of his gruesome exploits like rich broods of baby spiders. As serial killers went, he was Ali, Godzilla, and Santa-fucking-Claus all rolled up into one.
And Clarice Starling, by all accounts, had actually been up close and personal with the guy for a year! And lived!
Jake the Snake was morally certain that she could gladly have given her right boob and half her teeth to talk to Starling. The so-called "legitimate press" had concentrated on the expected aspects of the story so far, rehashing Lecter's murderous credits ad nauseam and going on and on about the deaths of the two Texans out on I-10. Then there was the ominous disappearance of whistle-blower Doemling, a new angle that had leaked out of some unknown source in the Bureau and broken in the news only yesterday . They'd followed the progress of the ongoing manhunt in detail too, and had also begun to ask some very tough questions about the FBI's role in the failed arrest as well as about what could be construed as its somewhat careless attitude toward former agent Starling. She'd been made into something of a public martyr already, owing to the hideous abuses she had no doubt undergone while in Lecter's keeping. Abuses which had been left tastefully unexplored by the major news agencies so far. It was a sort of tacit understanding: some details were simply too heinous to be pursued without making the pursuers look hopelessly tacky.
The "legitimate press" were a bunch of prissy-ass dimwits, as far as Jake the Snake was concerned. It was perfectly fine to look tacky, in her opinion, if that's what it took to get the story. Blah, blah, yadda yadda, rape was a crime of aggression, not a crime of passion, ain't it awful, aren't we PC? All of that stuff was so totally beside the point it wasn't even funny. Where was the real goods in any of it? Where was the nitty-gritty dish that millions would unlimber their wallets to consume? Where was the DIRT?
He'd fucked her! Repeatedly! That was the point here! That was the real horror-show the public would be wild to take in, and there would be only one question that would catch and twist in the public mind like a rusty fish hook.
What had it been like?
Was he hung like King Kong? Did he ejaculate ice cubes? Did he bite when he came, and if so, where? What did he tie her up with? Did he say things to her, before, during or after? Had he made her do stuff? Had he made her EAT stuff? Necrophilia? Bestiality? Satanic rituals? Power tools? Rubber or leather? Outie or innie? Boxers or briefs? What? Where? When? How?
Enquiring minds wanted to know . . .
And Jake Snead wanted desperately to be the one to tell them all about it. She wanted to ask the questions no one else would. She wanted to broadcast the answers no one would admit they were dying to hear. Oh, yeah. She had to get that interview. Had to.
Starling, Lecter, Will Graham, Francis Dolarhyde, Jame Gumb, Frederick Chilton, Jack Crawford, Evelda Drumgo - cops, killers, perps and vics - they all had an intricately twisted connection to each other and to the public through a single common thread - The National Tattler. It was all right there in the Tattler's morgue: a long, complex history common among them all, like the convoluted branches of some hellish family tree. It was probably due to this tangled web of connections that Starling now, like Will Graham had once done before her, absolutely refused to utter one syllable to ANY representative of the National Tattler. Period.
Even though the bitch had been giving phone interviews to other, more reputable members of the press from the hospital. Jake knew this because after her fortieth call to the Sunrise Medical Center, Starling herself had come to the phone and let Jake know that she would not be granting Jake's request to tape an interview, and that she had no statement to make, now or ever. Not to the Tattler, that was. As Starling had put it, snarling into the phone at Jake like a talking meat-grinder, they'd be holding the Winter Olympics in hell before she would EVER say word one to the National-blood-sucking-Tattler.
Jake hadn't been fazed. Not then. So what if Special Agent Gag Order hadn't wanted to talk? So what if she maybe hadn't appreciated that "Bride of Dracula" thing, years back, or the "Death Angel" thing last year? Fuck her if she couldn't take a joke. There were other ways. This was the Tattler's story, always had been, right down the line. It wasn't right for Starling to shut her out. It wasn't fair.
Upon Starling's discharge from the hospital, Jake had gotten some good film of Margot Verger smarting off about the FBI outside the hospital. But that wasn't enough, of course, the entire press corps had gotten the same sound-bite. More follow up was needed. Jake had immediately turned prevaricator and started claiming to be with various news agencies other than the Tattler in each of her next forty or so subsequent calls to Margot Verger's residence.
Unfortunately, Margot's private security people knew their business, and were monitoring the phones. They'd apparently put Jake's name on a list of undesirable callers with undesirable phone numbers, because they'd busted her some dozen times with caller ID. By the time Jake had started calling in on a variety of borrowed mobile lines, most of the security people who were working the phones had come to recognize her voice. By the time she'd given up on trying to disguise her voice and had made Terry Phips do the calling, no calls at all were being forwarded to Starling. She would only respond, if she chose, to written inquiries.
It had also proven impossible for Terry and Jake to get onto the grounds of Margot Verger's residence and snag a few pix. Despite repeated attempts. Nothing worked. The caliber of private security real money could buy was awesome.
Eventually, Terry and Jake had been reduced to camping out in Terry's battered puke green Chevy wagon at the side of the road nearest the Verger property, watching to see who came out, who went in, and waiting for Starling herself to appear, which had not happened. They could see the temporary guard post at the head of the long driveway, and could see the front door of the house from their vantage point too, if they peered through one of Terry's telephoto lenses. But there had been nothing to see throughout their long vigil. They'd been bivouacked there since around one thirty on Tuesday afternoon, and had watched other news vans come and go. Only Jake Snead of the Tattler had been fanatic enough not to budge for over eighteen hours.
They'd passed the afternoon and evening without seeing anything, and by the morning of Wednesday the nineteenth, Jake could have informed the world, had she wished, that a station wagon crammed with camera equipment, two reporters, and a lot of puke green vinyl upholstery was no place to spend the night.
Jake had begun to feel depressed on that Wednesday morning, had come to believe that she might not be able to get next to Starling after all. This growing feeling of defeat sawed on raw nerve endings so deeply embedded in Jake's psyche that she herself was largely unaware of them. It pained her in a place at the twisted and unknown roots of her vulpine, covetous being. Expose or be exposed. The law of Jake Snead's personal jungle.
Then, at around 8:30, a break in the routine had come at last. A black chick driving a Mustang had turned into the driveway and stopped at the guard post. While the security guards there had relayed whatever message she had to give to the house, Jake had frantically searched through all her background notes on Starling, and had tentatively identified the woman as Ardelia Mapp, Starling's former roommate. Then the woman had been allowed to drive up to the house, and had been let in the front door.
A half hour or so later, the woman Jake thought was Ardelia Mapp and Starling herself had emerged from the house. Jake had reached over to the driver's seat and shaken Terry, who was fast asleep and snoring with his mouth wide open, roughly.
"Wakey, wakey, Terry," Jake had told him. "Gimme one of those long lenses of yours. We may have hit paydirt."
As they watched through Terry's telephotos, the two women appeared to have some sort of discussion as they stood near the Mustang in the circular part of the drive. Terry snapped a few pictures, and Jake was horribly disgruntled not to be able to hear what the two were saying. Long distance audio surveillance equipment was not a line item in the budget for "Tattler Confidential" field units, and Jake had often told her superiors that this was a serious mistake.
Then the two had gotten into the car and Starling at the wheel had spun around the circular drive and peeled out of it as though she was on her way to a high-speed chase. The car brushed by the guard post without stopping and pulled out onto the road so fast that Terry and Jake were momentarily stunned, and sat immobile for a time in their own vehicle, staring stupidly at the rapidly disappearing tail end of the Mustang.
Like a bat out of hell, Jake commented to herself. Wonder what it is she's running from? Or running to?
Then her paralysis broke and she bounced in her seat and banged on roof above her head in her excitement.
"Get this heap moving, Terry!" she yipped like a jackal who has just spotted a fresh pile of tasty carrion over the next rise. "We've got her now! Follow that Mustang!"
Terry had keyed his ignition, popped his transmission into drive,
stalled, endured a radioactive glare from Jake the Snake that probably should have killed him, and then managed to get his old clunker on the road and after Starling. Jake smacked the controls on the car stereo as Terry accelerated, and cranked the volume once she'd found her favorite moldy-oldies station. She liked to listen to loud music when she was on the scent.
It had been damned hard to keep up with their speedy quarry, but they had seen her turning into a Summerlin Parkway on-ramp in the distance, and were able to catch her up some while she was delayed in the queue of cars waiting to get on the mini-freeway. The Parkway was fairly busy at nine thirty AM, still a bit jammed with the last remnants of Wednesday morning rush hour traffic. The heavy traffic was moving, but Starling had been forced to slow down a little as she traveled west on the Parkway, which gave Terry and Jake all the opportunity they needed to creep up on her, car length by car length.
They'd narrowed her lead to two or three car lengths, and had followed her for two miles in the far left lane, the fast lane.
After the fourth mile, the Mustang began to move to the right, lane by lane. Jake thought Starling might be getting ready to take an exit, and had asked aloud, bouncing all the while to Oingo-Boingo's cheerful zombie stomp, where in the hell Ex-Special Agent Speed Racer might be going."Got my best suit and my tie, shiny silver dollar on either eye," "Look at that, Jake," Terry shouted above the music. "Right turn signal. I think they're gonna get off."
Jake thought so too. She scanned the cityscape off the Parkway, but could see nothing that looked like a potential destination. The area was a conglomeration of strip malls, auto dealerships, fast food joints and large retail outlets like Walmart and Circuit City and such.
"Where's the fire, Clarice?" Jake murmured to herself. She glanced at Terry. "Don't lose 'em, babe. I think we're getting there, wherever there is. Can you narrow the gap?"
"Sure could. But what if she sees us?"
"I don't think she's paying much attention to - HEY - there they go - the next exit! Spring Mountain! Get over, Terry!"
Terry zoomed right, into the Spring Mountain Boulevard exit lane, cutting off a Honda Civic in the process. They took the exit four car lengths behind the Mustang as the angry Civic driver laid on his horn. Neither of them even registered the automotive protest.
The Mustang ahead of them turned right off the Parkway exit onto Spring Mountain and merged into the flow of westbound traffic. Terry and Jake merged into the same flow and managed to whittle the gap between Starling's vehicle and theirs by two car lengths.
They watched as Starling moved to the right lane of the well traveled boulevard, and watched as she slowed, as though she was looking for something.
"What and where and where and what and what and where . . ." Jake chanted monotonously under her breath as Terry moved his Chevy into Starling's lane and gained another car-length on her."Goin' to a party where no one's still alive," They both saw Starling's right turn signal at the same time, and they both saw her turn into a wide driveway at the same time, a few moments later. They both saw where she had apparently been going with such lead-footed determination all along.
They both stared at each other, flabbergasted.
Then Terry Phips and Jake Snead turned into the same wide driveway, and pulled up directly behind Clarice Starling's muscular Roush Mustang, their front bumper only two or three feet away from her rear end.
They had arrived.
"You've GOT to be fucking kidding me!" Jake commented, shaking her head in wonder. There seemed to be nothing better to say."I was struck by lighting, walkin' down the street,
I was hit by something last night in my sleep,"A few minutes earlier, Ardelia Mapp had turned to Clarice Starling as they wove through traffic on the Summerlin Parkway. Although they did not know it, their car stereo was tuned to the exact same oldies station that Jake Snead preferred.
"We've got a tail, C," Ardelia remarked casually.
"I see 'em. Three cars behind, one lane over. Driver and passenger, green Chevy station wagon."
"Puke green," Ardelia amended. "I think they've been on us since the on-ramp."
"Yep, that's right. Not Bureau, not likely, not in that old beater.
What do you think, Ardelia?"
"What else?" Ardelia sighed, disgusted. "Press. Supermarket press, too, from the looks of the car."
Clarice made an odd sound, something between a sigh and a chuckle and a groan. She shrugged, a small, rather hopeless looking gesture.
"This gets old," she remarked, quietly. "You know it? This gets old in a hurry."
Ardelia was silent a moment, and then grinned, perhaps a touch maliciously.
"Well, girl, you've got no one but yourself to blame. You just HAD to date a celebrity."
Starling surprised herself by laughing aloud. Hadn't Dr. Lecter said something about the "cult of celebrity" at the christening party? A hundred or so years ago, at the party? What had he said? Something about Bruce Springsteen, hadn't it been?
She grinned back at Ardelia, showing almost all of her teeth.
"How'd you like a knuckle sandwich for breakfast, girlfriend?"
"Get out! You and what army? Besides, I thought we had other breakfast plans."
Clarice smiled, nodded in agreement, and checked her rearview mirror. The green wagon was still following.
"Clarice?" Ardelia asked. "What do you want to do? You know we're never gonna shake those two sleaze-hounds in the wagon. Think we should just go back?"
Clarice was staring at the road ahead, thinking, and did not immediately answer Ardelia. She was thinking about the Cult of Celebrity. She supposed she was a full-fledged member of the mass media celebrity pantheon now. She thought of an unsettling thing she had seen on television, channel surfing one sleepless night several months ago.
It had been a taped rerun of an old Friar's Club roast. The honoree had been Hugh Hefner, and she'd stumbled on the program quite by accident. She would have clicked on by quickly, seeking greener viewing pastures, had she not recognized a familiar face sitting on the panel.
It was Patty Hearst. Kidnapped heiress, world famous domestic terrorist hostage turned bank-robber, "Tanya" of the SLA, poster-girl for the Stockholm Syndrome. Starling had read a great many of the FBI's files on the kidnapping and subsequent capture of Patty Hearst, and various accounts of the bloody last stand of the Symbionese Liberation Army had been required reading at the Quantico Academy.
Twenty years later, Hearst could be found grinning like an organ grinder's monkey on a fifth rate television program designed to "honor" the founder of Playboy magazine. Starling had watched, fascinated and somehow profoundly dismayed, as Hearst made a few slightly off-color jokes about Hef and then returned to her seat. She'd been expertly coifed, gowned, and made up, given the glamour treatment for the cameras, and although it was clear from her delivery that she would never be a charismatic movie star, she had certainly looked like one.
Starling had not been able to get the image of a younger Patty Hearst out of her mind as she watched: a slim, pretty girl dressed in fatigues and black beret, brandishing a machine gun, chin lifted defiantly and eyes as glassy as beads. The past and present images, SLA soldier Patty and fin-de-siecle public personality Patty, melded in her mind's eye and created a mingled whole that was infinitely disturbing in some hard-to-define way. The Cult of Celebrity had swallowed Patty Hearst whole. And never coughed her up again, not in twenty years.
Is that what's going to happen to me?
Starling asked herself this question as she drove west on the Summerlin Parkway and watched her pursuers in her rear-view.
Get real, Starling. It's already happening.
All this used to be a hell of a lot easier when I was still dead, she thought, with a sharp twist of annoyance. Thanks a lot, Hannibal. This uninvited gift of freedom you've given me has its little drawbacks, I find. For example, now it seems I can't even make a quick breakfast-run without it being front page news.
She suddenly understood, with complete clarity and for the first time, how totally she and her problematical love had managed to split themselves off from the rest of the world. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, they'd danced on their terrace in an all too precarious separate reality composed only of desire and sheer will. Gossamer building materials indeed.
She also saw, perhaps not for the first time, but more clearly than she ever had before, how much he had shielded her, how extensive had been his efforts to keep her sheltered from the harsher realities, how easy he had made it for her to come to him, and to remain with him.
Purely altruistic motives on his part? Not bloody likely. She did not often entertain illusions about her beloved; to do so would have been worse than foolish, it would have been actively dangerous. It was not in his nature to make anything easy for others; there was very little of that kind of gentleness in him. But it was in his nature to stack the deck in his own favor, to manipulate circumstances to suit his ends. He'd wanted her, and having won her, wanted to keep her. Therefore, he'd woven a sort of secret garden all around her, a lovely and protected environment that would tempt her not to think too much.
It had been so easy, really, to enter that inviolate bubble of suspended judgment, easy to stay there too. She knew that he believed she'd made sacrifices in order to inhabit the world he'd made for her, and believed that she sometimes hungered for all she'd lost.
But she knew a different truth. What sacrifices? She'd turned away from a life that only became colder and emptier with each passing year, she'd set aside questionable goals that she had already come to know were forever unreachable, she'd set down crushing burdens that had continuously broken her heart since she'd been a small child. But she hadn't made any bona fide sacrifices. She hadn't had anything of worth to give away.
Hell, she hadn't even had to sustain injury to her reputation.
"Hannibal the Cannibal" might be the very epitome of vile perversion, a being so far outside the social pale that he was scarcely regarded as human at all. But Clarice Starling was an innocent in the mass cultural mind, dead or alive. Either as a brave fallen agent or as a courageous survivor of hellish captivity, her name remained unsullied.
She'd never had to answer for the choices she'd made. Even now, as she stood pinned like an insect in the revealing glare of media attention, she was still spared this particular cost of loving a terrible man. Had he doubted her willingness to pay? Had he ever wondered if, should it come to a choice, she could willingly accept the deep opprobrium that was attached to his name for herself?
Had he been unable, ultimately, to truly believe?
In this moment, Clarice Starling feared that it might have been so.
"But I'm not an innocent," she objected softly, unaware that she had spoken aloud, not knowing to whom she was objecting. "I never was."
Ardelia glanced at her.
"Hmm? What'd you say?"
Clarice, again, did not answer immediately. She checked the rearview mirror once more, and saw that the green wagon was still on her tail. She looked to her right and saw, off the Parkway, the very destination she had set out on this drizzly morning to seek. She looked at the road ahead of her, and saw years as well as miles unfolding in the distance. She looked inward and saw a stony pier of utter rebellion rising like an outcropping of hard granite from the bedrock of her being.
She flipped on her right turn signal and turned to Ardelia.
"I said I want some friggin' breakfast, and that's what I'm by God gonna get if it's the last thing I do. Screw the reporters, it's a free country. Hang on, Ardie - golden arches next stop. We need to get over."
Ardelia groaned as Clarice cackled like a madwoman once again. She kicked her Mustang into hyperdrive and swept across the lanes of the Summerlin Parkway to take the Spring Mountain exit."Don't run away it's only me . . . " As Clarice pulled into a McDonald's drive-thru lane, five cars away from the menu signs and order box, Ardelia Mapp groaned again.
"THIS was your big breakfast idea??" she complained to her friend. "Junk food?"
Clarice was watching the green Chevy wagon pull into the drive-thru right behind her. She saw a woman start to scramble out of the passenger seat even before the wagon came to a full stop.
"Do you have any idea how long it's been since I had an Egg McMuffin?" she asked Ardelia conversationally as she watched the woman from the Chevy dash toward her car, brandishing a tape recorder and a small microphone. The woman was a short, whippet-thin specimen with an amazing profusion of kinky, carrot-red hair.
Natural, Clarice thought. Has to be. No sane woman would have the nerve to get a color like that out of a bottle.
Clarice began to roll her window down. No use putting it off.
"And do you have any idea how bad this trash is for your body?" Ardelia asked, grimacing at the small red-headed woman who was fairly flying toward the driver's side of the Mustang. "Not to mention Brenda Starr back there. You're not really gonna talk to her, are you?"
"I'm sick to death of skulking around, Ardelia. Just plain SICK of it. I have had enough."
"Enough of what, Ms. Starling?" Jake Snead broke in, having reached Clarice's side of the car. She thrust her little microphone through the car window and grabbed the car door in a death grip with her free hand. "WHAT have you had enough OF?"
Clarice chuckled coldly. "I've had enough of you people sticking to me like ticks, for one thing. Get your hand off my car. Does it look like I'm gonna make a break for it to you?"
She nodded at all the cars ahead of her in the drive-thru lane, blocking her path.
Jake nodded briefly and took her hand off the door. The mike, however, stayed right where it was: in Starling's face.
"I gotta tell you," Jake said, glancing toward the large red "McDonald's" sign that adorned the small building. "This wasn't what I expected. Why Mickey-D's?"
"Why not?" Clarice answered. "I'm hungry. What's your name, babe?"
"Mary Jones," Jake answered promptly. "CNN."
Ardelia and Clarice both guffawed.
"CNN?" Ardelia snorted. "Oh, come ON. That puke green pile of junk back there your news van, Mary?"
"You're Ardelia Mapp, aren't you?" Jake countered without missing a beat.
"Nope, I'm Diana Ross," Ardelia answered. "And my bud driving the 'Stang here is Julia Roberts. We're on a top-secret corporate espionage mission for Jack in the Box."
"Watch your arm there, whatever-your-name is," Starling warned Jake. "Gotta move up."
She very slowly inched one car-length forward as the first car in the line ahead of her pulled around to the pick-up window. Jake walked along beside the car, her arm still thrust inside the window.
"Listen to me," Clarice said, staring through her car window into Jake's eyes. "Let's get this straight. You've pretty much got me cornered here. For another four cars or so at least, I might consider talking to you. What the hell, I'm in kind of a mood this morning. But I'm not gonna say a goddamned thing unless you stop lying to me about who you are."
"Okay, okay," Jake agreed eagerly. "You're right. I'm sorry I lied, okay? I'm really with CBS, and my name is - "
Clarice suddenly grabbed Jake's wrist, and quickly twisted the microphone out of her grasp. She began to slowly roll up her car window.
"Hey!" Jake yowled, and made a fruitless grab at the mike.
"Okay-fine," Clarice remarked mildly, ignoring Jake's furious flailing and continuing to roll up the window. "If you really feel you have to keep on lying, that's fine with me. Have a nice breakfast."
"Give me my mike back!" Jake demanded. "I'm just doing my job, here! I'm just a reporter!"
"You want to report something?" Clarice asked nastily. "Report this: two Egg McMuffins, two coffees, hash browns, and an order of pancakes!"
"God DAMN it - " Jake squawked as Clarice rolled up the window another two inches.
"You know, much as I hate McDonald's food," Ardelia remarked. "I do have to admit they make nice pancakes."
"Going, going, gone . . . " Clarice said to Jake and rolled up the window another inch. "So you want me to get you an order too?" she added to Ardelia. "Pancakes, I mean?"
"All RIGHT, ferchrissakes!" Jake snarled. "Jake Snead! My name is Jake Snead!"
Starling stopped rolling up the window.
"Snead? " she asked, somewhat bemused. "Jake Snead? You're not that crazy woman from the Tattler who called the hospital a zillion times, are you?"
"Listen, can I get my mike back n - " Jake started to say.
"National everfucking TATTLER!" Starling marveled, suddenly laughing helplessly. "Of course! Tattler. I should have known. It's fate, I'm sure it is . . ."
She leaned back in her seat and just laughed and laughed as Ardelia, and even Jake, listened silently. The sound was as ugly and as disturbing as the sound of blows smacking repeatedly into flesh.
Full circle, Clarice was thinking, remembering a sunstruck morning on the terrace in Buenos Aires, a morning that now seemed at least a lifetime ago. What had she called the Tattler on that lovely summer morning, when all the world's troubles had seemed so very far away? The international fugitive's social register?
Tattler in the beginning and Tattler in the end. Wherever you go, there you are. Full circle.
Jesus, is that all our lives really are? Just six billion individual little exercise wheels that spin endlessly, yet never really go anywhere? No purpose, no progress, just frantic, meaningless activity? Are we all just God's lab rats?
And if that's the case, does it really matter who killed who or what the world thinks or what's wrong and what's right? Does it really matter what I do next?
Is there anything that does matter?
"Look, Starling," Jake was saying. "Maybe you've had your problems with the Tattler in the past. But that's the paper. I'm not a print journalist - I work for the TV show. So you've really got no problem with ME, right? All I want is - "
"The Tattler has a television show?" Clarice asked Ardelia, surprised.
"Sure," Ardelia answered. "Five nights a week. Celebrity scandals, blood, guts, sleazy innuendo and plenty of T&A. Worse than "Hard Copy"."
"Sounds pretty much like the paper, then," Clarice commented. She eased the Mustang another car length closer to the order box.
"We aren't anything like the goddamned paper!" Jake objected angrily, walking stiffly beside the car, one arm still inside. "'Tattler Confidential' has a consistent 25 percent share! Try matching those numbers with a print rag!"
"That's the name of your show? 'Tattler CONFIDENTIAL'?"
"All I want is one quick interview, Clarice," Jake pleaded. "We could tape it right here. I really think it could help you get over your ordeal if you'd just talk about it and - "
" - and might even boost your ratings into the forty percent range in the bargain," Ardelia finished with a deceptively pleasant smile at Jake.
"Seeing as how an interview with me would constitute blood, guts, AND T&A all in one economical package," Starling finished, also smiling blandly. "I have to warn you, JAKE, I'm gonna be peeved if you start lying to me again. You don't give a flying fuck about my welfare and we both know it. " She eased her foot off her brake and let the Mustang bump ahead abruptly to emphasize her point.
"The public has a right to know," Jake declared, her pale, freckled complexion beginning to redden with balked anger as she had to scramble to keep pace with the car. "Tell me this. After the first few months going at it with Lecter, did you ever get to where you actually liked it? Even a little? I mean, a lot can happen in a year . . ."
Clarice stared, amazed, at the vile little woman while Ardelia instantly went grey. She clawed at her own seat belt, groping for the release button.
"That does it," she ground out hoarsely, through her teeth. "I'm gonna clean this blood-sucking bitch's clock . . ."
She'd thrown open her car door and was halfway out of her seat before Starling's hand on her arm stilled her in mid leap.
"Ardelia," she was saying, quietly. "Ardelia, look at me."
Ardelia did as she was asked and saw a familiar expression in her old roommate's cat-amber eyes, a sort of shine. She had seen this expression before, only on occasion. She had seen it on firing ranges, she'd seen it in the practice ring at the academy, and once she'd seen it as Clarice had studied the case file on the Buffalo Bill murders, trying to divine the telling pattern that a helpful madman had told her could be found there. It was the wild hunting light that was the unreachable part of Clarice. The part that Ardelia hated, and even worse, feared.
"This is my play," Clarice said. "Understand? Whatever you hear next, whatever you may think about it, it's my play. Are we straight?"
"Clarice - " Ardelia began.
"Are we straight on this, Ardelia?" Clarice interrupted.
Ardelia shook Starling's restraining hand off her arm and flopped angrily back into her seat. She grabbed her open car door and slammed it back shut.
"Fine," she answered. "Have it your way, Starling. Right-O. Your play. Your fucking funeral too, knowing you. Just do me a favor, okay? Before you do whatever crazy-ass thing you're planning now, could you get me my pancakes? I'm hungry." She heaved a great, gusty sigh and stiffly turned her head toward her window.
Starling smiled at her friend and squeezed her shoulder, despite Ardelia's irritated attempt to shrug away from the touch.
"Thanks, pal," Starling said softly, and smiled at the back of Ardelia's head one more time. Then she turned back toward Jake Snead, hanging like a small red-headed storm cloud just outside Starling's window.
"My friend here would like to take your head off," Clarice remarked conversationally. "She could do it, too, trust me. Lickety-split."
"Then I hope she likes lawsuits," Jake the Snake retorted, in an almost equally off-handed tone of voice.
"Probably about as much as you like traction, Ms. Snead," Clarice answered, and showed Jake her teeth in a predator's humorless grin. "Now me, I'm thinking I might just give you a break, you know it? I don't like your paper, and I don't think I much like you, but there is something . . . fitting about this whole situation, in a way. So, what I'd like to know is, would you like me to give you a break? Tape your interview for you? Give you the real dirt?"
Jake blinked at the use of the word "dirt". It was something of a Pavlovian response in her.
"Well . . . uh . . . sure I would," she answered, a bit cautiously.
"Okey dokey, then," Clarice said. "We're making progress. Can you work with a few conditions, ya think? Can you make some effort not to piss my friend off again, for one thing? And who's the guy you left in the Chevy? Your cameraman? "
"Terry . . ." Jake agreed, beginning to feel provisionally encouraged. "Yeah, he's . . . he runs the tape and the audio . . . "
"And you ask the questions, huh, Jake? You dig up the dirt and get the scoops, don't you? Can I call you Jake? Let me ask you a question, Jake. Do you think you can refrain from fucking with me? I'm telling you, I am not the person you want to fuck with, seriously. Think you could agree to that, too?"
"I . . . I . . . don't - "
"Well, we can come back to that question later, Jake. I'll ask you again after we get your interview in the can, shall I? Here's the REALLY important question, Jake, so you might want to listen up. If we tape an interview today . . . what's the name of your show, again?"
"'Tattler Confidential'" Jake supplied at once, half mesmerized by the wildly improved story prospects that appeared to be materializing right before her eyes.
"Yes, right, 'Tattler Confidential'. If we taped today, how soon,
exactly, would the tape air? And before you answer, Jake, you want to make sure you're not fucking with me on this in particular. Because on this issue, I would definitely have to fuck back if you were."
"Why, it'd air this Friday, I guess, earliest," Jake answered, obviously a bit surprised by Starling's quiet vehemence. "We broadcast out of L.A. and I'd need to get the tape into the studio for editing and we'd need some time for the promos and . . . and look, if you wanted it to air sooner, maybe I could - "
"Well, Friday might be okay. You're sure you couldn't push it up any? Say, by tomorrow night? Tell me the truth now, Jake." She pushed her face very close to the window and transfixed the reporter in the same accusing stare she'd once used while interrogating suspects.
Jake squirmed in that gaze. She was SO close. But she thought she'd better not lie. Not at this delicate stage of the negotiations.
"Jesus, Starling, we're not magicians. Friday really is it, that's the earliest we could make it. What are you in such a damned hurry about, anyway?"
"Hurry?" Starling answered, visibly relaxing, smiling like a cat who has just successfully eaten the family canary. "There's no hurry. What gave you that idea?"
"But you -" Jake started to object.
"Relax, Jake," Starling interrupted. "We're gonna go ahead and give our order now, and then we're gonna drive around and pick it up. See that nice spot under the tree over there at the end of the parking lot? That'd be a nice place to kick back and scarf down some breakfast, don't you think? That's where I'm planning to park. If you and your guy Terry meet me there, I'll tell you anything you want to know."
A strained pause followed as Jake stared into the eyes of this odd woman behind the wheel of the Mustang, trying to gauge her thoughts. Her face was black and blue, beat all to shit, and she would look damned good on camera. But something in those eyes didn't look beaten at all. Something there looked like it maybe couldn't be beaten. Not by the likes of Jake "the Snake" Snead, anyway.
"How do I know you won't - " Jake started to ask.
"You don't," Clarice interrupted again. "You don't know that I won't get past the cars in line ahead of me and just take off. But you don't really have a choice, anyway, do you?"
Jake shook her head. "No, I guess not."
"Right," Starling said. "So why don't go on back to your car and order some breakfast for yourself? Try the pancakes, that's my advice."
She pulled the car away from Jake without another word and pulled up to the order box.
"What in hell do you think you're doing, Clarice?" Ardelia asked, still staring out the window, too frustrated with her friend to look at her face. "Do you even know?"
"Sure I do," Clarice answered, after a small pause. "You may not know this, but all us outlaw types have been using the Tattler as a sort of underground Western Union for years. All I'm doing now is sending . . . a sort of telegram. "
This statement succeeded in tempting Ardelia to abandon her view of the McDonald's parking lot and to face Clarice.
"Oh? Is that how it is?" she asked, needing to know yet dreading those answers that she might hear. "What's your message, then, C? What are you gonna say to him?"
Neither of them ever found out what Clarice Starling's answer to Ardelia's question might have been, or if she even had an answer she could have cast into words. The canned, tinny voice of the McDonald's order taker brayed out of the order box and cut the moment short before it was properly begun.
Sometimes, even the most important answers are drowned in the great, surging tide of trivia that is the essential sea of life.
"Welcome to McDonald's," the small tin speaker box whined metallically. "May I take your order?"