فصل پنجاه و چهارم

CHAPTER 54

On the wall at the foot of the bed there was a clock with numbers large enough to read through the drugs and the pain.

When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was - an intensivecare unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass.

That’s what it was there for.

It said four o’clock. He had no idea which four o’clock and he didn’t care, as long as the hands were moving. He drifted away.

The clock said eight when he opened his eye again.

Someone was to the side of him. Cautiously he turned his eye. It was Molly, looking out the window. She was thin. He tried to speak, but a great ache filled the left side of his head when he moved his jaw. His head and his chest did not throb together. It was more of a syncopation. He made a noise as she left the room.

The window was light when they pulled and tugged at him and did things that made the cords in his neck stand out.

Yellow light when he saw Crawford’s face over him.

Graham managed to wink. When Crawford grinned, Graham could see a piece of spinach between his teeth.

Odd. Crawford eschewed most vegetables.

Graham made writing motions on the sheet beneath his hand.

Crawford slid his notebook under Graham’s hand and put a pen between his fingers.

“Willy OK,” he wrote.

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Crawford said. “Molly too. She’s been in here while you were asleep. Dolarhyde’s dead, Will. I promise you, he’s dead. I took the prints myself and had Price match them. There’s no question. He’s dead.” Graham drew a question mark on the pad.

“We’ll get into it. I’ll be here, I can tell you the whole thing when you feel good. They only give me five minutes.” “Now,” Graham wrote.

“Has the doctor talked to you? No? About you first - you’ll be okay. Your eye’s just swollen shut from a deep stab wound in the face. They’ve got it fixed, but it’ll take time. They took out your spleen. But who needs a spleen? Price left his in Burma in ‘41.” A nurse pecked on the glass.

“I’ve got to go. They don’t respect credentials, nothing, around here. They just throw you out when the time’s up. See you later.” Molly was in the ICU waiting room. A lot of tired people were.

Crawford went to her. “Molly . . .”

“Hello, Jack,” she said. “You’re looking really well. Want to give him a face transplant?”

“Don’t, Molly.”

“Did you look at him?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think I could look at him, but I did.”

“They’ll fix him up. The doctor told me. They can do it. You want somebody to stay with you, Molly? I brought Phyllis down, she-” “No. Don’t do anything else for me.”

She turned away, fumbling for a tissue. He saw the letter when she opened her purse: expensive mauve stationery that he had seen before.

Crawford hated this. He had to do it.

“Molly.”

“What is it?”

“Will got a letter?”

“Yes.”

“Did the nurse give it to you?”

“Yes, she gave it to me. They’re holding some flowers from all his friends in Washington, too.” “May I see the letter?”

“I’ll give it to him when he feels like it.”

“Please let me see it.”

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t need to hear from . . . that particular person.

Something was wrong with the expression on his face and she looked down at the letter and dropped it, purse and all. A lipstick rolled across the floor.

Stooping to pick up Molly’s things, Crawford heard her heels tap fast as she left him, abandoning her purse.

He gave the purse to the charge nurse.

Crawford knew it would be nearly impossible for Lecter to get what he would need, but with Lecter he took no chances.

He had an intern fluoroscope the letter in the Xray department. Crawford slit the envelope on all sides with a penknife and examined its inside surface and the note for any stain or dust - they would have lye for scrubbing at Chesapeake Hospital, and there was a pharmacy.

Satisfied at last, he read it:

Dear Will,

Here we are, you and I, languishing in our hospitals. You have your pain and I am without my books - the learned Dr. Chilton has seen to that.

We live in a primitive time - don’t we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

I wish you a speedy convalescence and hope you won’t be very ugly.

I think of you often.

Hannibal Lecter

The intern looked at his watch, “Do you need me anymore?”

“No,” Crawford said. “Where’s the incinerator?”

When Crawford returned in four hours for the next visiting penod, Molly wasn’t in the waiting room and she wasn’t in the intensivecare unit.

Graham was awake. He drew a question mark on the pad at once. “D. dead how?” he wrote under it.

Crawford told him. Graham lay still for a full minute. Then he wrote, “Lammed how?”

“Okay,” Crawford said. “St. Louis. Dolarhyde must have been looking for Reba MeClane. He came in the lab while we were there and spotted us. His prints were on an open furnaceroom window - it wasn’t reported until yesterday.” Graham tapped the pad. “Bodv?”

“We think it was a guy named Arnold Lang - he’s missing. His car was found in Memphis. It had been wiped down. They’ll run me out in a minute. Let me give it to you in order.

“Dolarhyde knew we were there. He gave us the slip at the plant and drove to a Servco Supreme station at Lindbergh and U.S. 270. Arnold Lang worked there.

“Reba McClane said Dolarhyde had a tiff with a servicestation attendant on Saturday before last. We think it was Lang.

“He snuffed Lang and took his body to the house. Then he went by Reba MeClane’s. She was in a clinch with Ralph Mandy at the door. He shot Mandy and dragged him into the hedge.” The nurse came in.

“For God’s sake, it’s police business,” Crawford said. He talked fast as she pulled him by the coat sleeve to the door. “He chloroformed Reba MeClane and took her to the house. The body was there,” Crawford said from the hall.

Graham had to wait four hours to find out the rest.

“He gave her this and that, you know, ‘Will I kill you or not?’ ” Crawford said as he came in the door.

“You know the routine about the key hanging around his neck - that was to make sure she felt the body. So she could tell us she certainly did feel a body. All right, it’s this way and that way. ‘I can’t stand to see you burn,’ he says, and blows Lang’s head off with a twelvegauge.

“Lang was perfect. He didn’t have any teeth anyway. Maybe Dolarhyde knew the maxillary arch survives fires a lot of times - who knows what he knew? Anyway, Lang didn’t have any maxillary arch after Dolarhyde got through with him. He shot the head off Lang’s body and he must have tipped a chair or something for the thud of the body falling. He’d hung the key around Lang’s neck.

“Now Reba’s scrambling around looking for the key. Dolarhyde’s in the corner watching. Her ears are ringing from the shotgun. She won’t hear his little noises.

“He’s started a fire, but he hasn’t put the gas to it yet. He’s got gas in the room. She got out of the house okay. If she had panicked too much, run into a wall or something or frozen, I guess he’d have sapped her and dragged her outside. She wouldn’t have known how she got out. But she had to get out for it to work. Oh hell, here comes that nurse.” Graham wrote fast. “How vehicle?”

“You have to admire this,” Crawford said. “He knew he’d have to leave his van at the house. He couldn’t drive two vehicles out there, and he needed a getaway piece.

“This is what he did: he made Lang hook up the servicestation tow truck to his van. He snuffed Lang, locked the station, and towed his van out to his house. Then he left the tow truck on a dirt road back in the fields behind the house, got back in his van and went after Reba. When she got out of the house all right, he dragged out his dynamite, put the gasoline around the fire, and lammed out the back. He drove the tow truck back to the service station, left it and got Lang’s car. No loose ends.

“It drove me crazy until we figured it out. I know it’s right because he left a couple of prints on the tow bar.

“We probably met him in the road when we were going up there to the house . . . Yes, ma’am. I’m coming. Yes, ma’am.” Graham wanted to ask a question, but it was too late.

Molly took the next fiveminute visit.

Graham wrote “I love you” on Crawford’s pad.

She nodded and held his hand.

A minute later he wrote again. “Willy okay?”

She nodded.

“Here?”

She looked up at him too quickly from the pad. She made a kiss with her mouth and pointed to the approaching nurse.

He tugged her thumb.

“Where?” he insisted, underlining twice.

“Oregon,” she said.

Crawford came a final time.

Graham was ready with his note. It said, “Teeth?”

“His grandmother’s,” Crawford said. “The ones we found in the house were his grandmother’s. St. Louis PD located one Ned Vogt - Dolarhyde’s mother was Vogt’s stepmother. Vogt saw Mrs. Dolarhyde when he was a kid, and he never forgot the teeth.

“That’s what I was calling you about when you ran into Dolarhyde. The Smithsonian had just called me. They finally had gotten the teeth from the Missouri authorities, just to examine for their own satisfaction. They noticed the upper part was made of vulcanite instead of acrylic like they use now. Nobody’s made vulcanite plates in thirtyfive years.

“Dolarhyde had a new acrylic pair just like them made to fit him. The new ones were on his body. Smithsonian looked at some features on them - the fluting, they said, and rugae. Chinese manufacture. The old ones were Swiss.

“He had a key on him too, for a locker in Miami. Big book in there. Kind of a diary - hell of a thing. I’ll have it when you want to see it.

“Look, sport, I have to go back to Washington. I’ll get back down here the weekend, if I can. You gonna be okay?” Graham drew a question mark, then scratched it out and wrote “sure.”

The nurse came after Crawford left. She shot some Demerol into his intravenous line and the clock grew fuzzy. He couldn’t keep up with the second hand.

He wondered if Dernerol would work on your feelings. He could hold Molly a while with his face. Until they finished fixing it anyway. That would be a cheap shot. Hold her for what? He was drifting off and he hoped he wouldn’t dream.

He did drift between memory and dream, but it wasn’t so bad. He didn’t dream of Molly leaving, or of Dolarhyde. It was a long memorydream of Shiloh, interrupted by lights shone in his face and the gasp and hiss of the bloodpressure cuff . . .

It was spring, soon after he shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs, when Graham visited Shiloh.

On a soft April day he walked across the asphalt road to Bloody Pond. The new grass, still light green, grew down the slope to the water. The clear water had risen into the grass and the grass was visible in the water, growing down, down, as though it covered the bottorn of the pond.

Graham knew what had happened there in April 1862.

He sat down in the grass, felt the damp ground through his trousers.

A tourist’s automobile went by and after it had passed, Graham saw movement behind it in the road. The car had broken a chicken snake’s back. It slid in endless figure eights across itself in the center of the asphalt road, sometimes showing its black back, sometimes its pale belly.

Shiloh’s awesome presence hooded him with cold, though he was sweating in the mild spring sun.

Graham got up off the grass, his trousers damp behind. He was lightheaded.

The snake looped on itself. He stood over it, picked it up by the end of its smooth dry tail, and with a long fluid motion cracked it like a whip.

Its brains zinged into the pond. A bream rose to them.

He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty sinister like flags.

Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight.

He roused and watched the mindless clock, but he couldn’t stop thinking.

In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too.

He understood murder uncomfortably well, though.

He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against.

He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine. Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t haunted - men are haunted.

Shiloh doesn’t care.

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

-ECCLESIASTES