“Excuse me,” Barney said. “If you’ve got a lot of papers to wrestle, there’s a one-armed desk, a school desk, in the closet here that the shrinks use. Want it?”
School image. Yes or no?
“May we talk now, Dr. Lecter?”
The doctor held up an open palm.
“Yes, Barney. Thank you.”
Seated now and Barney safely away.
“Dr. Lecter, the Senator has a remarkable offer.”
“I’ll decide that. You spoke to her so soon?”
“Yes. She’s not holding anything back. This is all she’s got, so it’s not a matter for bargaining. This is it, everything, one offer.” She glanced up from her briefcase.
Dr. Lecter, murderer of nine, had his fingers steepled beneath his nose and he was watching her. Behind his eyes was endless night.
“If you help us find Buffalo Bill in time to save Catherine Martin unharmed, you get the following: transfer to the Veteran’s Administration hospital at Oneida Park, New York, to a cell with a view of the woods around the hospital. Maximum security measures still apply. You’ll be asked to help evaluate written psychological tests on some federal inmates, though not necessarily those sharing your own institution. You’ll do the evaluations blind. No identities. You’ll have reasonable access to books.” She glanced up.
Silence can mock.
“The best thing, the remarkable thing: one week a year, you will leave the hospital and go here.” She put a map in the food carrier. Dr. Lecter did not pull it through.
“Plum Island,” she continued. “Every afternoon of that week you can walk on the beach or swim in the ocean with no surveillance closer than seventy-five yards, but it’ll be SWAT surveillance. That’s it.”
“If I decline?”
“Maybe you could hang some café curtains in there. It might help. We don’t have anything to threaten you with, Dr. Lecter. What I’ve got is a way for you to see the daylight.”
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to match stares now. This was not a confrontation.
“Will Catherine Martin come and talk to me—only about her captor—if I decide to publish? Talk exclusively to me?”
“Yes. You can take that as a given.”
“How do you know? Given by whom?”
“I’ll bring her myself.”
“If she’ll come.”
“We’ll have to ask her first, won’t we?”
He pulled the carrier through. “Plum Island.”
“Look off the tip of Long Island, the north finger there.”
“Plum Island. ‘The Plum Island Animal Disease Center. (Federal, hoof and mouth disease research),’ it says. Sounds charming.”
“That’s just part of the island. It has a nice beach and good quarters. The terns nest there in the spring.”
“Terns.” Dr. Lecter sighed. He cocked his head slightly and touched the center of his red lip with his red tongue. “If we talk about this, Clarice, I have to have something on account. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, and you tell me.”
“Go,” Starling said.
She had to wait a full minute before he said, “A caterpillar becomes a pupa in a chrysalis. Then it emerges, comes out of its secret changing room as the beautiful imago. Do you know what an imago is, Clarice?”