فصل 36

CHAPTER 36

Officers Pembry and Boyle were experienced men brought especially from Brushy Mountain State Prison to be Dr. Lecter’s warders. They were calm and careful and did not feel they needed their job explained to them by Dr. Chilton.

They had arrived in Memphis ahead of Lecter and examined the cell minutely. When Dr. Lecter was brought to the old courthouse, they examined him as well. He was subjected to an internal body search by a male nurse while he was still in restraints. His clothing was searched thoroughly and a metal detector run over the seams.

Boyle and Pembry came to an understanding with him, speaking in low, civil tones close to his ears as he was examined.

“Dr. Lecter, we can get along just fine. We’ll treat you just as good as you treat us. Act like a gentleman and you get the Eskimo Pie. But we’re not pussyfooting around with you, buddy. Try to bite, and we’ll leave you smooth-mouthed. Looks like you got something good going here. You don’t want to fuck it up, do you?” Dr. Lecter crinkled his eyes at them in a friendly fashion. If he had been inclined to reply he would have been prevented by the wooden peg between his molars as the nurse shined a flashlight in his mouth and ran a gloved finger into his cheeks.

The metal detector beeped at his cheeks.

“What’s that?” the nurse asked.

“Fillings,” Pembry said. “Pull his lip back there. You’ve put some miles on them back ones, haven’t you, Doc?”

“Strikes me he’s pretty much of a broke-dick,” Boyle confided to Pembry after they had Dr. Lecter secure in his cell. “He won’t be no trouble if he don’t flip out.” The cell, while secure and strong, lacked a rolling food carrier. At lunchtime, in the unpleasant atmosphere that followed Starling’s visit, Dr. Chilton inconvenienced everyone, making Boyle and Pembry go through the long process of securing the compliant Dr. Lecter in the straitjacket and leg restraints as he stood with his back to the bars, Chilton poised with the Mace, before they opened the door to carry in his tray.

Chilton refused to use Boyle’s and Pembry’s names, though they wore nameplates, and addressed them indiscriminately as “you, there.” For their part, after the warders heard Chilton was not a real M.D., Boyle observed to Pembry that he was just “some kind of a God damned schoolteacher.” Pembry tried once to explain to Chilton that Starling’s visit had been approved not by them but by the desk downstairs, and saw that in Chilton’s anger it didn’t matter.

Dr. Chilton was absent at supper and, with Dr. Lecter’s bemused cooperation, Boyle and Pembry used their own method to take in his tray. It worked very well.

“Dr. Lecter, you not gonna be needing your dinner jacket tonight,” Pembry said. “I’ll ask you to sit on the floor and scoot backwards till you can just stick your hands out through the bars, arms extended backward. There you go. Scoot up a little and straighten ‘em out more behind you, elbows straight.” Pembry handcuffed Dr. Lecter tightly outside the bars, with a bar between his arms, and a low crossbar above them. “That hurts just a little bit, don’t it? I know it does and they won’t be on there but a minute, save us both a lot of trouble.” Dr. Lecter could not rise, even to a squat, and with his legs straight in front of him on the floor, he couldn’t kick.

Only when Dr. Lecter was pinioned did Pembry return to the desk for the key to the cell door. Pembry slid his riot baton in the ring at his waist, put a canister of Mace in his pocket, and returned to the cell. He opened the door while Boyle took in the tray. When the door was secured, Pembry took the key back to the desk before he took the cuffs off Dr. Lecter. At no time was he near the bars with the key while the doctor was free in the cell.

“Now that was pretty easy, wasn’t it?” Pembry said.

“It was very convenient, thank you, Officer,” Dr. Lecter said. “You know, I’m just trying to get by.”

“We all are, brother,” Pembry said.

Dr. Lecter toyed with his food while he wrote and drew and doodled on his pad with a felt-tipped pen. He flipped over the cassette in the tape player chained to the table leg and punched the play button. Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the piano. The music, beautiful beyond plight and time, filled the bright cage and the room where the warders sat.

For Dr. Lecter, sitting still at the table, time slowed and spread as it does in action. For him the notes of music moved apart without losing tempo. Even Bach’s silver pounces were discrete notes glittering off the steel around him. Dr. Lecter rose, his expression abstracted, and watched his paper napkin slide off his thighs to the floor. The napkin was in the air a long time, brushed the table leg, flared, sideslipped, stalled and turned over before it came to rest on the steel floor. He made no effort to pick it up, but took a stroll across his cell, went behind the paper screen and sat on the lid of his toilet, his only private place. Listening to the music, he leaned sideways on the sink, his chin in his hand, his strange maroon eyes half-closed. The Goldberg Variations interested him structurally. Here it came again, the bass progression from the saraband repeated, repeated. He nodded along, his tongue moving over the edges of his teeth. All the way around on top, all the way around on the bottom. It was a long and interesting trip for his tongue, like a good walk in the Alps.

He did his gums now, sliding his tongue high in the crevice between his cheek and gum and moving it slowly around as some men do when ruminating. His gums were cooler than his tongue. It was cool up in the crevice. When his tongue got to the little metal tube, it stopped.

Over the music he heard the elevator clank and whir as it started up. Many notes of music later, the elevator door opened and a voice he did not know said, “I’m s’posed to get the tray.” Dr. Lecter heard the smaller one coming, Pembry. He could see through the crack between the panels in his screen. Pembry was at the bars.

“Dr. Lecter. Come sit on the floor with your back to the bars like we did before.”

“Officer Pembry, would you mind if I just finish up here? I’m afraid my trip’s gotten my digestion a little out of sorts.” It took a very long time to say.

“All right.” Pembry calling down the room, “We’ll call down when we got it.”

“Can I look at him?”

“We’ll call you.”

The elevator again and then only the music.

Dr. Lecter took the tube from his mouth and dried it on a piece of toilet tissue. His hands were steady, his palms perfectly dry.

In his years of detention, with his unending curiosity, Dr. Lecter had learned many of the secret prison crafts. In all the years after he savaged the nurse in the Baltimore asylum, there had been only two lapses in the security around him, both on Barney’s days off. Once a psychiatric researcher loaned him a ballpoint pen and then forgot it. Before the man was out of the ward, Dr. Lecter had broken up the plastic barrel of the pen and flushed it down his toilet. The metal ink tube went in the rolled seam edging his mattress.

The only sharp edge in his cell at the asylum was a burr on the head of a bolt holding his cot to the wall. It was enough. In two months of rubbing, Dr. Lecter cut the required two incisions, parallel and a quarter-inch long, running along the tube from its open end. Then he cut the ink tube in two pieces one inch from the open end and flushed the long piece with the point down the toilet. Barney did not spot the calluses on his fingers from the nights of rubbing.

Six months later, an orderly left a heavy-duty paper clip on some documents sent to Dr. Lecter by his attorney. One inch of the steel clip went inside the tube and the rest went down the toilet. The little tube, smooth and short, was easy to conceal in seams of clothing, between the cheek and gum, in the rectum.

Now, behind his paper screen, Dr. Lecter tapped the little metal tube on his thumbnail until the wire inside it slipped out. The wire was a tool and this was the difficult part. Dr. Lecter stuck the wire halfway into the little tube and with infinite care used it as a lever to bend down the strip of metal between the two incisions. Sometimes they break. Carefully, with his powerful hands, he bent the metal and it was coming. Now. The minute strip of metal was at right angles to the tube. Now he had a handcuff key.

Dr. Lecter put his hands behind him and passed the key back and forth between them fifteen times. He put the key back in his mouth while he washed his hands and meticulously dried them. Then, with his tongue, he hid the key between the fingers of his right hand, knowing Pembry would stare at his strange left hand when it was behind his back.

“I’m ready when you are, Officer Pembry,” Dr. Lecter said. He sat on the floor of the cell and stretched his arms behind him, his hands and wrists through the bars. “Thank you for waiting.” It seemed a long speech, but it was leavened by the music.

He heard Pembry behind him now. Pembry felt his wrist to see if he had soaped it. Pembry felt his other wrist to see if he had soaped it. Pembry put the cuffs on tight. He went back to the desk for the key to the cell. Over the piano, Dr. Lecter heard the clink of the key ring as Pembry took it from the desk drawer. Now he was coming back, walking through the notes, parting the air that swarmed with crystal notes. This time Boyle came back with him. Dr. Lecter could hear the holes they made in the echoes of the music.

Pembry checked the cuffs again. Dr. Lecter could smell Pembry’s breath behind him. Now Pembry unlocked the cell and swung the door open. Boyle came in. Dr. Lecter turned his head, the cell moving by his vision at a rate that seemed slow to him, the details wonderfully sharp—Boyle at the table gathering the scattered supper things onto the tray with a clatter of annoyance at the mess. The tape player with its reels turning, the napkin on the floor beside the bolted-down leg of the table. Through the bars, Dr. Lecter saw in the corner of his eye the back of Pembry’s knee, the tip of the baton hanging from his belt as he stood outside the cell holding the door.

Dr. Lecter found the keyhole in his left cuff, inserted the key and turned it. He felt the cuff spring loose on his wrist. He passed the key to his left hand, found the keyhole, put in the key and turned it.

Boyle bent for the napkin on the floor. Fast as a snapping turtle the handcuff closed on Boyle’s wrist and as he turned his rolling eye to Lecter the other cuff locked around the fixed leg of the table. Dr. Lecter’s legs under him now, driving to the door, Pembry trying to come from behind it and Lecter’s shoulder drove the iron door into him, Pembry going for the Mace in his belt, his arm mashed to his body by the door. Lecter grabbed the long end of the baton and lifted. With the leverage twisting Pembry’s belt tight around him, he hit Pembry in the throat with his elbow and sank his teeth in Pembry’s face. Pembry trying to claw at Lecter, his nose and upper lip caught between the tearing teeth. Lecter shook his head like a rat-killing dog and pulled the riot baton from Pembry’s belt. In the cell Boyle bellowing now, sitting on the floor, digging desperately in his pocket for his handcuff key, fumbling, dropping it, finding it again. Lecter drove the end of the baton into Pembry’s stomach and throat and he went to his knees. Boyle got the key in a lock of the handcuffs, he was bellowing, Lecter coming to him now. Lecter shut Boyle up with a shot of the Mace and as he wheezed, cracked his upstretched arm with two blows of the baton. Boyle tried to get under the table, but blinded by the Mace he crawled the wrong way and it was easy, with five judicious blows, to beat him to death.

Pembry had managed to sit up and he was crying. Dr. Lecter looked down at him with his red smile. “I’m ready if you are, Officer Pembry,” he said.

The baton, whistling in a flat arc, caught Pembry pock on the back of the head and he shivered out straight like a clubbed fish.

Dr. Lecter’s pulse was elevated to more than one hundred by the exercise, but quickly slowed to normal. He turned off the music and listened.

He went to the stairs and listened again. He turned out Pembry’s pockets, got the desk key and opened all its drawers. In the bottom drawer were Boyle’s and Pembry’s duty weapons, a pair of .38 Special revolvers. Even better, in Boyle’s pocket he found a pocket knife.