Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

He had worked in straight journalism for ten years when he realized that no one would ever send him to the White House. He saw that his publishers would wear his legs out, use him until it was time for him to become a broken-down old drunk manning a dead-end desk, drifting inevitably toward cirrhosis or a mattress fire.

They wanted the information he could get, but they didn't want Freddy. They paid him top scale, which is not very much money if you have to buy women. They patted his back and told him he had a lot of balls and they refused to put his name on a parking place.

One evening in 1969 while in the office working rewrite, Freddy had an epiphany.

Frank Larkin was seated near him taking dictation on the telephone. Dictation was the glue factory for old reporters on the paper where Freddy worked. Frank Larkin was fifty-five, but he looked seventy. He was oystereyed and he went to his locker every half-hour for a drink. Freddy could smell him from where he sat.

Larkin got up and shuffled over to the slot and spoke in a hoarse whisper to the news editor, a woman. Freddy always listened to other people's conversatious.

Larkin asked the woman to get him a Kotex from the machine in the ladies' room. He had to use them on his bleeding behind.

Freddy stopped typing. He took the story out of his typewriter, replaced the paper and wrote a letter of resignation.

A week later he was working for the Tattler .

He started as cancer editor at a salary nearly double what he had earned before. Management was impressed with his attitude.

The Tattler could afford to pay him well because the paper found cancer very lucrative.

One in five Americans dies of it. The relatives of the dying, worn out, prayed out, trying to fight a raging carcinoma with pats and banana pudding and copper-tasting jokes, are desperate for anything hopeful.

Marketing surveys showed that a bold "New Cure for Cancer" or "Cancer Miracle Drug" cover line boosted supermarket sales of any Tattler issue by 22.3 percent. There was a six-percentile drop in those sales when the story ran on page one beneath the cover line, as the reader had time to scan the empty text while the groceries were being totaled.

Marketing experts discovered it was better to have the big cover line in color on the front and play the story in the middle pages, where it was difficult to hold the paper open and manage a purse and grocery cart at the same time.

The standard story featured an optimistic five paragraphs in ten-point type, then a drop to eight point, then to six point before mentioning that the "miracle drug" was unavailable or that animal research was just beginning.

Freddy earned his money turning them out, and the stories sold a lot of Tattlers .

In addition to increased readership, there were many spinoff sales of miracle medallions and healing cloths. Manufacturers of these paid a premium to get their ads located close to the weekly cancer story.

Many readers wrote to the paper for more information. Some additional revenue was realized by selling their names to a radio "evangelist," a screaming sociopath who wrote to them for money, using envelopes stamped "Someone You Love Will Die Unless…”

Freddy Lounds was good for the Tattler , and the Tattler was good to him. Now, after eleven years with the paper, he earned $72,000 a year. He covered pretty much what he pleased and spent the money trying to have a good time. He lived as well as he knew how to live.

The way things were developing, he believed he could raise the ante on his paperback deal, and there was movie interest. He had heard that Hollywood was a fine place for obnoxious fellows with money.

Freddy felt good. He shot down the ramp to the underground garage in his building and wheeled into his parking place with a spirited squeal of rubber. There on the wall was his name in letters a foot high, marking his private spot. Mr. Frederick Lounds.

Wendy was here already – her Datsun was parked next to his space. Good. He wished he could take her to Washington with him. That would make those flatfeet’s eyes pop. He whistled in the elevator on his way upstairs.

Wendy was packing for him. She had lived out of suitcases and she did a good job.

Neat in her jeans and plaid shirt, her brown hair gathered in a chipmunk tail on her neck, she might have been a farm girl except for her pallor and her shape. Wendy's figure was almost a caricature of puberty.

She looked at Lounds with eyes that had not registered surprise in years. She saw that he was trembling.

"You're working too hard, Roscoe." She liked to call him Roscoe, and it pleased him for some reason. "What are you taking, the six-o'clock shuttle?" She brought him a drink and moved her sequined jump suit and wig case off the bed so he could lie down. "I can take you to the airport. I'm not going to the club 'til six."

" Wendy City " was her own topless bar, and she didn't have to dance anymore. Lounds had cosigned the note.

"You sounded like Morocco Mole when you called me," she said.

"Who?"

"You know, on television Saturday morning, he's real mysterious and he helps Secret Squirrel. We watched it when you had the flu… You really pulled one off today, didn't you? You're really pleased with yourself."

"Damn straight. I took a chance today, baby, and it paid off. I've got a chance at something sweet."

"You've got time for a nap before you go. You're running yourself in the ground."

Lounds lit a cigarette. He already had one burning in the ashtray.

"You know what?" she said. "I bet if you drink your drink and get it off, you could go to sleep."

Lounds's face, like a fist pressed against her neck, relaxed at last, became mobile as suddenly as a fist becomes a hand. His trembling stopped. He told her all about it, whispering into the buck jut of her augmented breasts; she tracing eights on the back of his neck with a finger.

"That is some kind of smart, Roscoe," she said. "You go to sleep now. I'll get you up for the plane. It'll be all right, all of it. And then we'll have a high old time."

They whispered about the places they would go. He went to sleep.

Dr. Alan Bloom and Jack Crawford sat on folding chairs, the only furniture left in Crawford’s office.

“The cupboard is bare, Doctor.”

Dr. Bloom studied Crawford’s simian face and wondered what was coming. Behind Crawford’s grousing and his Alka-Seltzers the doctor saw an intelligence as cold as an X-ray table.

“Where did Will go?”

“He’ll walk around and cool off,” Crawford said. “He hates Lounds.”

“Did you think you might lose Will after Lecter published his home address? That he might go back to his family?”

“For a minute, I did. It shook him.”

“Understandably,” Dr. Bloom said.

“Then I realized – he can’t go home, and neither can Molly and Willy, never, until the Tooth Fairy is out of the way.”

“You’ve met Molly?”

“Yeah. She’s great, I like her. She’d be glad to see me in hell with my back broken, of course. I’m having to duck her right now.”

“She thinks you use Will?”

Crawford looked at Dr Bloom sharply. “I’ve got some things I have to talk to him about. We’ll need to check with you. When do you have to be at Quantico?”

“Not until Tuesday morning. I put it off.” Dr. Bloom was a guest lecturer at the behavioral-science section of the FBI Academy.

“Graham likes you. He doesn’t think you run any mind games on him,” Crawford said. Bloom’s remark about using Graham stuck in his craw.

“I don’t. I wouldn’t try,” Dr. Bloom said. “I’m as honest with him as I’d be with a patient.”