Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift.

Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn't really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling's first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever, and she knew she had to form a callus or it would wear her through.

The school routine didn't help her. All day she had the feeling that things were going on just over the horizon. She seemed to hear a vast murmur of events, like the sound from a distant stadium. Suggestions of movement unsettled her, groups passing in the hallway, cloud shadows moving over, the sound of an airplane.

After class Starling ran too many laps and then she swam. She swam until she thought about the floaters and then she didn't want the water on her anymore.

She watched the seven o'clock news with Mapp and a dozen other students in the recreation room. The abduction of Senator Martin's daughter was not the lead item, but it was first after the Geneva arms talks.

There was film from Memphis, starting with the sign of the Stonehinge Villas, shot across the revolving light of a patrol car. The media were blitzing the story and, with little new to report, reporters interviewed each other in the parking lot at Stonehinge. Memphis and Shelby County authorities ducked their heads to unaccustomed banks of microphones. In a jostling, squealing hell of lens flare and audio feedback, they listed the things they didn't know. Still-photographers stooped and darted, backpedaling into the TV minicams whenever investigators entered or left Catherine Baker Martin's apartment.

A brief, ironic cheer went up in the Academy recreation room when Crawford's face appeared briefly in the apartment window. Starling smiled on one side of her mouth.

She wondered if Buffalo Bill was watching. She wondered what he thought of Crawford's face or if he even knew who Crawford was.

Others seemed to think Bill might be watching, too.

There was Senator Martin, on television live with Peter Jennings. She stood alone in her child's bedroom, a Southwestern University pennant and posters favoring Wile E. Coyote and the Equal Rights Amendment on the wall behind her.

She was a tall woman with a strong, plain face.

"I'm speaking now to the person who is holding my daughter," she said. She walked closer to the camera, causing an unscheduled refocus, and spoke as she never would have spoken to a terrorist.

"You have the power to let my daughter go unharmed. Her name is Catherine. She's very gentle and understanding. Please let my daughter go, please release her unharmed. You have control of this situation. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You can protect her against anything that might want to harm her. You now have a wonderful chance to show the whole world that you are capable of great kindness, that you are big enough to treat others better than the world has treated you. Her name is Catherine."

Senator Martin's eyes cut away from the camera as the picture switched to a home movie of a toddler helping herself walk by hanging on to the mane of a large collie.

The Senator's voice went on: "The film you're seeing now is Catherine as a little child. Release Catherine. Release her unharmed anywhere in this country and you'll have my help and my friendship."

Now a series of still photographs-- Catherine Martin at eight, holding the tiller of a sailboat. The boat was up on blocks and her father was painting the hull. Two recent photographs of the young woman, a full shot and a close-up of her face.,

Now back to the Senator in close-up: "I promise you in front of this entire country, you'll have my unstinting aid whenever you need it. I'm well equipped to help you. I am a United States Senator. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am deeply involved in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space weapons systems which everyone calls 'Star Wars.' If you have enemies, I will fight them. If anyone interferes with you, I can stop them. You can call me at any time, day or night. Catherine is my daughter's name. Please, show us your strength," Senator Martin said in closing, "release Catherine unharmed."

"Boy, is that smart," Starling said. She was trembling like a terrier. "Jesus, that's smart."

"What, the Star Wars?" Mapp said. "If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill's thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him-- is that the pitch?"

Starling nodded. "A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination-- alien control. If that's the way Bill's wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It's a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn't she? At the least it might buy Catherine a few more days. They may have time to work on Bill a little. Or they may not; Crawford thinks his period may be getting shorter. They can try this, they can try other things."

"Nothing I wouldn't try if he had one of mine. Why did she keep saying 'Catherine,' why the name all the time?"

"She's trying to make Buffalo Bill see Catherine as a person. They're thinking he'll have to depersonalize her, he'll have to see her as an object before he can tear her up. Serial murderers talk about that in prison interviews, some of them. They say it's like working on a doll."

"Do you see Crawford behind Senator Martin's statement?"

"Maybe, or maybe Dr. Bloom-- there he is," Starling said. On the screen was an interview taped several weeks earlier with Dr. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago on the subject of serial murder.

Dr. Bloom refused to compare Buffalo Bill with Francis Dolarhyde or Garrett Hobbs, or any of the others in his experience. He refused to use the term "Buffalo Bill." In fact he didn't say much at all, but he was known to be an expert, probably the expert on the subject, and the network wanted to show his face.

They used his final statement for the snapper at the end of the report: "There's nothing we can threaten him with that's more terrible than what he faces every day. What we can do is ask him to come to us. We can promise him kind treatment and relief, and we can mean it absolutely and sincerely."

"Couldn't we all use some relief," Mapp said. "Damn if I couldn't use some relief myself. Slick obfuscation and facile bullshit, I love it. He didn't tell them anything, but then he probably didn't stir Bill up much either."

"I can stop thinking about that kid in West Virginia for a while," Starling said, "it goes away for, say, a half an hour at a time, and then it pokes me in the throat. Glitter polish on her nails-- let me not get into it."

Mapp, rummaging among her many enthusiasms, lightened Starling's gloom at dinner and fascinated eavesdroppers by comparing slant-rhymes in the works of Stevie Wonder and Emily Dickinson.

On the way back to the room, Starling snatched a message out of her box and read this: Please call Albert Roden, and a telephone number.

"That just proves my theory," she told Mapp as they flopped on their beds with their books.

"What's that?"

"You meet two guys, right? The wrong one'll call you every God damned time."

"I been knowing that."

The telephone rang.

Mapp touched the end of her nose with her pencil. "If that's Hot Bobby Lowrance, would you tell him I'm in the library?" Mapp said. "I'll call him tomorrow, tell him."