He was turning back to her, laden with his fax machine and briefcase, and she had his full attention.
“Those cops know who you are,” she said. “They look at you to see how to act.” She stood steady, shrugged her shoulders, opened her palms. There it was, it was true.
Crawford performed a measurement on his cold scales.
“Duly noted, Starling. Now get on with the bug.”
“Yes sir.”
She watched him walk away, a middle-aged man laden with cases and rumpled from flying, his cuffs muddy from the riverbank, going home to what he did at home.
She would have killed for him then. That was one of Crawford’s great talents.
CHAPTER 14
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History had been closed for hours, but Crawford had called ahead and a guard waited to let Clarice Starling in the Constitution Avenue entrance.
The lights were dimmed in the closed museum and the air was still. Only the colossal figure of a South Seas chieftain facing the entrance stood tall enough for the weak ceiling light to shine on his face.
Starling’s guide was a big black man in the neat turnout of the Smithsonian guards. She thought he resembled the chieftain as he raised his face to the elevator lights. There was a moment’s relief in her idle fancy, like rubbing a cramp.
The second level above the great stuffed elephant, a vast floor closed to the public, is shared by the departments of Anthropology and Entomology. The anthropologists call it the fourth floor. The entomologists contend it is the third. A few scientists from Agriculture say they have proof that it is the sixth. Each faction has a case in the old building with its additions and subdivisions.
Starling followed the guard into a dim maze of corridors walled high with wooden cases of anthropological specimens. Only the small labels revealed their contents.
“Thousands of people in these boxes,” the guard said. “Forty thousand specimens.”
He found office numbers with his flashlight and trailed the light over the labels as they went along.
Dyak baby carriers and ceremonial skulls gave way to Aphids, and they left Man for the older and more orderly world of Insects. Now the corridor was walled with big metal boxes painted pale green.
“Thirty million insects—and the spiders on top of that. Don’t lump the spiders in with the insects,” the guard advised. “Spider people jump all over you about that. There, the office that’s lit. Don’t try to come out by yourself. If they don’t say they’ll bring you down, call me at this extension, it’s the guard office. I’ll come get you.” He gave her a card and left her.
She was in the heart of Entomology, on a rotunda gallery high above the great stuffed elephant. There was the office with the lights on and the door open.
“Time, Pilch!” A man’s voice, shrill with excitement. “Let’s go here. Time!”
Starling stopped in the doorway. Two men sat at a laboratory table playing chess. Both were about thirty, one black-haired and lean, the other pudgy with wiry red hair. They appeared to be engrossed in the chessboard. If they noticed Starling, they gave no sign. If they noticed the enormous rhinoceros beetle slowly making its way across the board, weaving among the chessmen, they gave no sign of that either.
Then the beetle crossed the edge of the board.
“Time, Roden,” the lean one said instantly.
The pudgy one moved his bishop and immediately turned the beetle around and started it trudging back the other way.
“If the beetle just cuts across the corner, is time up then?” Starling asked.
“Of course time’s up then,” the pudgy one said loudly, without looking up. “Of course it’s up then. How do you play? Do you make him cross the whole board? Who do you play against, a sloth?”
“I have the specimen Special Agent Crawford called about.”
“I can’t imagine why we didn’t hear your siren,” the pudgy one said. “We’re waiting all night here to identify a bug for the FBI. Bugs’re all we do. Nobody said anything about Special Agent Crawford’s specimen. He should show his specimen privately to his family doctor. Time, Pilch!”
“I’d love to catch your whole routine another time,” Starling said, “but this is urgent, so let’s do it now. Time, Pilch.”
The black-haired one looked around at her, saw her leaning against the doorframe with her briefcase. He put the beetle on some rotten wood in a box and covered it with a lettuce leaf.
When he got up, he was tall.