Hannibal Page 0,91

job and every time you could you've stuck the knife in me. What is it with you, Mr. Krendler?"

"You're welcome to come talk about it... I'll make time for you, if you want to review..."

"We're talking about it now."

"You figure it out, Starling."

"Is it because I wouldn't see you on the side? Was it when I told you to go home to your wife?"

He looked at her again. She really wasn't wearing a wire.

"Don't flatter yourself, Starling... this town is full of cornpone country pussy."

He got in beside his driver and tapped on the dash, and the big car moved away. His lips moved, as he wished he had framed it: "Cornpone cunts like you."

There was a lot of political speaking in Krendler's future, he believed, and he wanted to sharpen his `verbal karate, and get the knack of the sound bite.

Part III TO THE NEW WORLD Chapter 50-51

Chapter 50

"IT COULD work, I'm telling you," Krendler said into the wheezing dark where Mason lay. "Ten years ago, you couldn't have done it, but she can move customer lists through that computer like shit through a goose."

He shifted on the couch under the bright lights of the seating area.

Krendler could see Margot silhouetted against the aquarium. He was used to cursing in front of her now, and rather enjoyed it. He bet Margot wished she had a dick. He felt like saying dick in front of Margot, and thought of a way: "It's how she's got the fields set up, and paired Lecter's preferences. She could probably tell you which way he carries his dick."

"On that note, Margot, bring in Dr Doemling," Mason said.

Dr Doemling had been waiting out in the playroom among the giant stuffed animals. Mason could see him on video examining the plush scrotum of the big giraffe, much as the Viggerts had orbited the David. On the screen he looked much smaller than the toys, as though he had compressed himself, the better to worm his way into some childhood other than his own.

Seen under the lights of Mason's seating area, the psychologist was a dry person, extremely clean but flaking, with a dry combover on his spotted scalp and a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. He sat down on the opposite side of the coffee table from Krendler and seemed familiar with the room.

There was a worm hole in the apple on his side of the 4 bowl of fruits and nuts. Dr Doemling turned the hole to face the other way. Behind his glasses, his eyes followed Margot with a degree of wonderment bordering on the oafish as she got another pair of walnuts and returned to her place by the aquarium.

"Dr Doemling's head of the psychology department at Baylor University. He.holds the Verger Chair," Mason told Krendler. "I've asked him what kind of bond there might be between Dr Lecter and the FBI agent Clarice Starling. Doctor...

Doemling faced forward in his seat as though it were a witness stand and turned his head to Mason as he would to a jury. Krendler could see in him the practiced manner, the careful partisanship of the two-thousand-dollar-a-day expert witness.

"Mr. Verger obviously knows my qualifications, would you like to hear them?" Doemling asked.

"No," Krendler said.

"I've reviewed the Starling woman's notes on her interviews with Hannibal Lecter, his letters to her, and the material you provided me on their backgrounds," Doemling began.

Krendler winced at this, and Mason said, "Dr Doemling has signed a confidentiality agreement."

"Cordell will put your slides up on the elmo when you want them, Doctor," Margot said.

"A little background first."

Doemling consulted his notes. "We knooowww Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania. His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his mother high-born Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of the servants. The children disappeared after that. There were two of them, Hannibal and his sister. We don't know what happened to the sister. The point is, Lecter was an orphan, like Clarice Starling."

"Which I told you," Mason said impatiently.

"But what did you conclude from it?"

Dr Doemling asked. "I'm not proposing a kind of sympathy between two orphans, Mr. Verger. This is not about sympathy. Sympathy does not enter here. And mercy is left bleeding in the dust. Listen to me. What a common experience of being an orphan gives Dr Lecter is simply a better ability to