فصل 47

Chapter 47

WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.

The most ramshackle family dwelling of her early childhood had had a warm kitchen where she could share an orange with her father. But death knows where the little houses are, where people live who do dangerous work for not much money. Her father rode away from this house in his old pickup truck on the night patrol that killed him.

Starling rode away from her foster home on a slaughter horse while they were killing the lambs, and she found a kind of refuge in the Lutheran Orphanage.

Institutional structures, big and solid, made her feel safe ever since. The Lutherans might have been short on warmth and oranges and long on Jesus, but the rules were the rules and if you understood them you were okay.

As long as impersonal competitive testing was the challenge, or doing the job on the street, she knew she could make her place secure. But Starling had no gift for institutional politics.

Now, as she got out of her old Mustang at the beginning of the day, the high facades of Quantico were no more the great brick bosom of her refuge. Through the crazed air over the parking lot, the very entrances looked crooked.

She wanted to see Jack Crawford, but there was no time. Filming at Hogan’s Alley began as soon as the sun was well up.

The investigation of the Feliciana Fish Market Massacre required filmed reenactments made on the Hogan’s Alley shooting range at Quantico, with every shot, every trajectory, accounted for.

Starling had to perform her part. The undercover van they used was the original one with body putty, unpainted, plugging the latest bullet holes. Again and again they piled out of the old van, over and over the agent playing John Brigham went down on his face and the one playing Burke writhed on the ground. The process, using noisy blank ammunition, left her wrung out.

They finished in mid-afternoon.

Starling hung up her SWAT gear and found Jack Crawford in his office.

She was back to addressing him as Mr. Crawford now, and he seemed increasingly vague and distant from everyone.

“Want an Alka-Seltzer, Starling?” he said when he saw her in his office door.

Crawford took a number of patent medicines in the course of the day. He was also taking Ginkgo Biloba, Saw Palmetto, St John’s Wort Viand baby aspirin. He took them in a certain order from his palm, his head going back as though he were taking a shot of liquor.

In recent weeks, he had started hanging up his suit coat in the office and putting on a sweater his late wife Bella, had knitted for him. He looked much older now than any memory she had of her own father.

“Mr. Crawford, some of my mail is being opened.”

“I know. They’re not very good at it. Looks like they’re steaming the glue with a teapot.”

“You’ve had mail surveillance since Lecter wrote to you.”

“They just fluoroscoped packages. That was fine, but I can read my own personal mail. Nobody’s said anything to me.”

“It’s not our OPR doing it.”

“It’s not Deputy Dawg either, Mr. Crawford - it’s somebody big enough to get a Title Three intercept warrant under seal.”

“But it looks like amateurs doing the opening?”

She was quiet long enough for him to add, “Better if you noticed it that way, is it, Starling?”

“Yes, sir.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “I’ll look into it.”

He arranged his patent medicine bottles in the top drawer of his desk. “I’ll speak to Carl Schirmer at justice, we’ll straighten that out.”

Schirmer was a lame duck. The grapevine said he’d be retiring at the end of the year - all Crawford’s cronies were retiring.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Anybody in your cop classes show much promise? Anybody recruiting ought to talk to?”

“In the forensics, I can’t tell yet - they’re shy with me in sex crimes. There’s a couple of pretty good shooters.”

“We’ve got all we need of those.”

He looked at her quickly. “I didn’t mean you.”

At the end of this day of playing out his death, she went to John Brigham’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Starling put her hand on his stone, still gritty from the chisel. Suddenly she had on her lips the distinct sensation of kissing his forehead, cold as marble and gritty with powder, when she came to his bier the last time and put in his hand, beneath the white glove, her own last medal as Open Combat Pistol Champion.

Now leaves were falling in Arlington, strewing the crowded ground. Starling, with her hand on John Brigham’s stone, looking over the acres of graves, wondered how many like him had been wasted by stupidity and selfishness and the bargaining of tired old men.

Whether you believe in God or not, if you are a warrior Arlington is a sacred place, and the tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

She felt a bond with Brigham that was no less strong because they were never lovers. On one knee beside his stone she remembered: He asked her something gently and she said no, and then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.

Kneeling in Arlington, she thought about her father’s grave far away. She had not visited it since she graduated first in her college class and went to his grave to tell him. She wondered if it was time to go back.

The sunset through Arlington’s black branches was as orange as the orange she shared with her father; the distant bugle shivered her, the tombstone cold beneath her hand.