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here on a date. Do you think you could leave us alone?"

"Yes. Answer my question. How long have you been here?"

"Two weeks."

"Has anybody else been here?"

"Some bums Sammie run out."

"Sammie protects you?"

"Mess with me and find out. I can walk good. I get stuff to eat, he's got a safe place to eat it. Lot of people have deals like that."

"Is either one of you in a program someplace? Do you want to be? I can help you there."

"He done all that. You go out in the world and do all that shit and come back to what you know. What are you looking for? What do you want?"

"Some files."

"If it ain't here, somebody stole it, how smart do you have to be to figure that out?"

"Sammie?"

Starling said. "Sammie?"

Sammie did not answer. "He's asleep," his friend said.

"If I leave some money out here, will you buy some food?"

Starling said..."No, I'll buy liquor. You can find food. You can't find liquor. Don't let the doorknob catch you in the butt on the way out."

"I'll put the money on the desk," Starling said. She felt like running, remembered leaving Dr Lecter, remembered holding on to herself as she walked toward what was then the calm island of Barney 's orderly station.

In the light of the stairwell, Starling took a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet. She put the money on Barney's scarred, abandoned desk, and weighted it with an empty wine bottle. She unfolded a plastic shopping bag and put in it the Lecter file jacket containing Miggs's records and the empty Miggs jacket.

"Good-bye." "Bye, Sammie," she called to the man who had circled in the world and come back to the hell he knew. She wanted to tell him she hoped Jesus would come soon, but it sounded too silly to say.

Starling climbed back into the light, to continue her circle in the world.

Part I Washington D.C. Chapter 12

IF THERE are depots on the way to Hell, they must resemble the ambulance entrance to Maryland-Misericordia General Hospital. Over the sirens' dying wail, wails of the dying, clatter of the dripping gurneys, cries and screams, the columns of manhole steam, dyed red by a great neon EMERGENCY sign, rise like Moses' own pillar of fire in the darkness and change to cloud in the day.

Barney came out of the steam, shrugging his powerful shoulders into his jacket, his cropped round head bent forward as he covered the broken pavement in long strides east toward the morning.

He was twenty-five minutes late getting off work - the police had brought in a stoned pimp with a gunshot wound who liked to fight women, and the head nurse had asked him to stay. They always asked Barney to stay when they took in a violent patient.

Clarice Starling peered out at Barney from the deep hood of her jacket and let him get a half-block lead on the other side of the street before she hitched her tote bag on her shoulder and followed. When he passed both the parking lot and the bus stop, she was relieved. Barney would be easier to follow on foot. She wasn't sure where he lived and she needed to know before he saw her.

The neighborhood behind the hospital was quiet, blue-collar and mixed racially. A neighborhood where you put a Chapman lock on your car but you don't have to take the battery in with you at night, and the kids can play outside.

After three blocks, Barney waited for a van to clear the crosswalk and turned north onto a street of narrow houses, some with marble steps and neat front gardens. The few empty storefronts were intact with the windows soaped. Stores were beginning to open and a few people were out. Trucks parked overnight on both sides of the street blocked Starling's view for half a minute and she walked up on Barney before she realized that he had stopped. She was directly across the street when she saw him. Maybe he saw her too, she wasn't sure.

He was standing with his hands in his jacket pockets, head forward, looking from under his brows at something moving in the center of the street. A dead dove lay in the road, one wing flapped by the breeze of passing cars. The dead bird's mate paced around and around the body, cocking an eye at it, small head jerking with each step of its pink feet. Round and round, muttering the soft.dove mutter. Several cars and a