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coming back to herself a little. She knew she was weary of something. Maybe it was tackiness, worse than tackiness, stylelessness maybe. An indifference to things that please the eye. Maybe she was hungry for some style. Even snuff-queen style was better than nothing, it was a statement, whether you wanted to hear it or not.
Starling examined herself for snobbism and decided she had damn little to be snobbish about. Then, thinking of style, she thought of Evelda Drumgo, who had plenty of it. With the thought, Starling wanted badly to get outside herself again.
Chapter 11
AND SO, Starling returned to the place where it all began for her, the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, now defunct. The old brown building, house of pain, is chained and barred, marked with graffiti and awaiting the wrecking ball.
It had been going downhill for years before the disappearance on vacation of its director, Dr Frederick Chilton. Subsequent revelations of waste and mismanagement and the decrepitude of the building itself soon caused the legislature to choke off its funds. Some patients were moved to other state institutions, some were dead and a few wandered the streets of Baltimore as Thorazine zombies in an ill-conceived outpatient program that got more than one of them frozen to death...Waiting in front of the old building, Clarice Starling realized she had exhausted the other possibilities first because she did not want to go in this place again.
The caretaker was forty-five minutes late. He was a stocky older man with a built-up shoe that clopped, and an eastern European haircut that may have been done at home. He wheezed as he led her to a side door, a few steps down from the sidewalk. The lock had been punched out by scavengers and the door secured with a chain and two padlocks. There were fuzzy webs in the links of the chain. Grass growing in the cracks of the steps tickled Starling's ankles as the caretaker fumbled with his keys. The late afternoon was overcast, the light grainy and without shadows.
"I am not knowing this building well, I just check the fire alarums," the man said.
"Do you know if any papers are stored here? Any filing cabinets, any records?"
He shrugged. "After the hospital, they had the methadone clinic here, a few months. They put everything in the basement, some beds, some linens, I don't know what it was. It's bed in there for my asthma, the mold, very bed mold. The mattresses on the beds were moldy, bad mold on the beds. I kint breed in dere. The stairs are hal on my leck. I would show you, but-?"
Starling would have been glad of some company, even his, but he would slow her down. "No, go on. Where's your office?"
"Down the block there where the driver's license bureau was before."
"If I'm not back in an hour-"
He looked at his watch. "I'm supposed to be off in a half hour."
That's just about E goddamned nuff. "What you're going to do for me, sir, is wait for your keys in your office. If I'm not back in an hour, call this number here on the card and show them where I went. If you aren't there when I come out-if you have closed up and gone home, I will personally go to see your supervisor in the morning to report you. In addition-in addition you will be audited by the Internal Revenue Service and your situation reviewed by the Bureau of Immigration and... and Naturalization. Do you understand? I'd appreciate a reply, sir."
"I would have waited for you, of course. You don't have to say these things."
"Thank you very much, sir," Starling said.
The caretaker put his big hands on the railing to pull himself up to sidewalk level and Starling heard his uneven gait trail off to silence. She pushed open the door and went in to a landing on the fire stairs. High, barred windows in the stairwell admitted the gray light. She debated whether to lock the door behind her and settled on tying the chain in a knot inside the door so she could open it if she lost the key.
On Starling's previous trips to the asylum, to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, she came through the front entrance and now it took her a moment to orient herself.
She climbed the fire stairs to the main floor. The frosted windows further cut the failing daylight and the room was in semidarkness. With her heavy.flashlight, Starling found a switch