Hannibal Lecter walked the streets of São Paulo without any trace of fear.  He was perhaps the only intelligent person, and certainly the only sensible tourist, to do so – the city is dangerous for its citizens and can be deadly to the uninitiated.  But there was so much to savor in the busy shops and riotous avenues… the exotic beauties, the rich smells, the decadent beat of the omnipresent samba music.  In the more upscale areas he shopped for hours, looking for more perfect gifts to send to Clarice.

            He discovered one treasure in a small antique dealership.  It was a set of small and delicately balanced bronze apothecary scales.  He didn’t even bother to haggle the price with the elderly proprietor, so delighted was he with the fine patina that had developed over the course of so many years.  He thought of Starling’s ad in the Tattler… “I feel like the Fishes.”  You wouldn’t know it at first glance, but she had a fine head for metaphor and a keen sense of fitness.  He presumed her talent was unconscious, but it was all the more interesting for that.

            As he made his way, driving through the crowded lanes back to the hotel, he mused upon her reluctance to answer his one question… what had she been thinking when she locked the handcuffs around their wrists.  He knew that Starling was perfectly able to lie to herself when it was necessary to achieve an objective, but he judged her as still being incapable of lying to him.  So she really did not know, was sincerely unable to face that part of herself.  He whistled as he turned into the lobby.  And she had felt she needed forgiveness for what she’d done.  He smiled at the irony of Clarice, the most virtuous person he had ever encountered, asking him for absolution.  Though she hadn’t exactly asked… she had assumed it from his actions.  And wondered why.

            Could she really be unaware of how he felt for her?  He was incredulous at the very idea.  Could she have smelled his breath in her nose, borne the scrutiny of his eyes, and not been burned by the strength and purity of his love?  He stopped on the staircase, lost in the thought.  He had been so blatant, so adolescent in his reactions after she had taken him from the barn.  Even though he had not voiced the question that hovered in his mouth, Starling was nothing if not observant.  He had taken it as a given, had assumed she could not help but to know.  He realized then that this, too, was something she could not face yet, even if she thought she wanted to.  Well, this adds a whole new dimension to our little game.  Another stop on her journey.

            There was a jaunt in his step as he continued up the stairs and down the hallway to his room.  He was having more fun that he’d had in years.  The prospect of… dare he even think it… flirting with Clarice was exciting.  He felt like a boy again, only a much different boy than he remembered.  Maybe Clarice isn’t the only one going through a second adolescence here, he thought, and a smile played at the corners of his mouth.

            Back in his suite, he flipped the stereo on and chose a little mood music.  The sound of an organ playing Bach filled the room.  He made himself a caipirinha and sat at the secretary, composing his thoughts for his next missive to Starling.  He bent his head to smell the orchids in the crystal vase he’d placed on the desk.  He touched the velvety petals with his fingers, thinking about the feel of Clarice’s skin.  He closed his eyes, the better to enjoy the exquisite smell and tactile sensation.  He therefore did not witness the near invisible avalanche of pollen triggered when he brushed the center of the blossom.  It cascaded over his fingers, the desk, his pen, and the cerulean blue paper on which he would inscribe his message.

 

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            Cooper and Starling walked slowly back to the office from the café.  Cooper was quiet.  His eyes were downcast, his shoulders slumped.

            “Coop, you look like a condemned man walking to the gallows,” said Starling, trying to inject a little levity into the charged atmosphere.

            He glanced at her, no more than a flicker of his eyes.  She was smiling, but sober.

            “Why shouldn’t I?”

            She stopped walking, took her hands and placed them on his shoulders and turned him to face her.  “Listen to me.  There are a lot of similarities between Windom Earle and Dr. Lecter, and many between you and I.  I’m still wondering exactly how you knew that, but that’s beside the point.  What I’m going to tell you now I want you to remember.  Dr. Lecter is not Windom Earle.  He is a different man with a different agenda and he is not going to hurt you, okay?  I won’t let that happen.”

            Cooper saw the set of her face and was comforted.  He had the feeling that under Starling’s protection there was not much in this world or any other that could harm him.  He nodded and said, “I’m going to hold you to that.”

            They walked the rest of the way in a companionable silence.  Back in the dungeon, she gave him a thorough briefing on the life and times of Hannibal Lecter, the unexpurgated version that no one else had ever heard.  On the way she discovered she could not tell Lecter’s story without intertwining her own.  She respected his honesty with her at the café and found herself unable to give him less in return.  She talked about the lambs, about Catherine, about the whiplash her soul had undergone during the drive to Mason Verger’s farm.

            “Do you know why I asked for you, Coop?”

            “Aside from the way I charmed you at our last encounter?”

            “Because I’m too close to this.  I need a set of clear eyes and a mind unsullied by Lecter’s tricks.”  She shivered, whether with anticipation or fear she couldn’t say.  Perhaps it was just a draft from the basement’s temperamental climate control system.

            “Jack Crawford once said to me, ‘You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.’  What he neglected to tell me was how to keep him out.”

            Cooper focused his intense blue eyes on her face and his sharp mind on the words she wasn’t saying.  He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and knew that the intuition that had so long forsaken him was coming back in spades.  “You don’t want to keep him out, do you?”

            A rosy hue crept up her cheeks.  In a voice as soft as falling leaves she said, “I don’t know.  You can’t imagine what it’s like… to feel someone looking, not at you or over you or through you, but into you.”  She drifted off into silence.

            “But you don’t totally trust him, or why else would you need me here?”

“How could I trust him?  He’s the one in my head.  I’m lucky to get a fleeting glimpse of what’s going on in his.”

“Yet you’d like to see more, wouldn’t you?”

That brought her up short.  “Yes, I guess I would.  So help me God, I would,” she whispered, lost in the very idea of being inside Lecter.

“So, Starling, what are you going to do when you catch him?”  The question was ice water on her reverie.

            She had wanted to kill him.  Now, she wasn’t so sure.  She wanted to slap him, make him hurt.  She wanted to defy him.  She wanted to feel his arms around her as she cried out the pain she hadn’t been able to share with anyone but him since her father died.  She wanted to see herself reflected, whole, in his dark eyes.  She wanted to touch his deadly mouth and feel it caress her fingers with a kiss.  She wanted to capture him, lock him to her again; she wanted to free him so that he would never have to know the bars of a cage again.  She wanted to… she could not think of anything she did not want to do to Hannibal Lecter. “Well, I was hoping you could help me answer that.”

            “Do you mean to tell me that you are considering the idea of letting him go?”  Cooper asked, incredulous.

            The tone of his voice got Starling’s dander up.  “If I have learned one thing in my pitiful and pathetic life, Cooper, it is that good and evil do not always fall into neat little boxes and that right and wrong do not come with nametags attached.  I’ve killed almost as many people as he has.  Just because my murders were sanctioned by some bureaucrat with a swivel-chair spread and a hand in the cookie jar, does that make me any less a monster?”

            She rose from her chair and leaned over to him.  “You know evil, I know you do.  Can you honestly tell me that you see any less of it here?  I will tell you this.  Lecter has never killed except for one of two reasons:  because his freedom was threatened, or to make the world a better place, somehow.  Can you tell me how that makes him different from you?  Because he listens to the voice of a different authority?  Because he doesn’t have the same definitions?  Or maybe you don’t like it that he eats his victims?  What does it matter?  They’re dead, I doubt they care.”

            She heard what she was saying and stopped, aghast.  She realized how close she was to toppling the structure on which she had built the foundation of her entire life.  What the hell was she thinking?  She felt her knees turn to rubber as the room began to spin.  She saw stars rotating in her field of vision, and would have fallen had Cooper not caught her.  He placed her in a tailor seat on the floor and expertly put a hand on the back of her neck and forced her head down to her knees.  Blood rushed back into her head and she felt a real humdinger of a headache coming on.  He released the pressure on her spine and she sat up.

            His hand remained on her back as he crouched next to her, studying her wasted expression.  She tried to say “I’m sorry,” but only a croak emerged.

            He shook his head, amazed.  He realized now that her web of protection extended further around Lecter than he had imagined.  She was shaking; she needed some sort of release from the tension that gripped her.  “You don’t believe much in absolutes, do you?”  There was the barest hint of a smile on his face.

            She grimaced.  “Apparently not.”

            He stood and held out his hands.  She took them, and was surprised at his strength as he pulled her up.  They stayed close, still touching for a moment.  He was tall, and she had to tilt her head back a little to look into his eyes.  The ghost of a might-have-been moved between them.  Cooper felt a heat flare in his chest, then die as the chill of that shade touched him.  She may not know it, he thought, but there is a claim staked on her that a blind man could see.

            She felt the distance between them increase faster than the speed of their bodies moving apart.  His blue eyes looked almost green in the strange lighting of the dungeon.  She saw something flicker and fade in them, and they were blue once more.

            “I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that.”

            “I have no right to judge you.”  Not with the darkness inside me, I don’t.  Maybe her path is different.  Perhaps one of us has a chance at happiness.  Who am I to deny her that?  He saw her then, perhaps not as clearly as Lecter did, but well enough to know that hers was a soul in motion.  He glimpsed a hint of her destination, and remembered a red room, hung with velvet curtains, and a black and white floor.  He remembered his Annie, and what he did for her.  He would have killed the man who had stood in the way of that choice.  He found a remnant of his courage in the memory.  If he hurts her…  better not to think of that.  But he would watch.  If the motives he detected in Lecter were less than pure, he would throw himself in front of Starling’s path, no matter what the cost.

            A knock at the door.  Stewart had returned, and her innocent, glowing face effectively ended the conversation.  But, like a dinner bell, she signaled the start of something new.  Starling moved a little too quickly to the chair behind her desk.  “So, what have you got for us?”

            “Well, it’s Lecter, of course, just like you said.  Fingerprints all over the place.  And the red substance on the mirror is indeed his blood… we were able to match it with DNA taken from the singletree at the farm.”  Her excitement dimmed just a little.  “But the package itself is totally untraceable.  I couldn’t get a thing off it.”

            Starling smiled.  “That’s okay.  There will be more.  Do either of you know Lecter’s fatal flaw?”

            Stewart shook her head.  Cooper looked at her sharply, wondering if Starling herself knew.

            In an almost reverential tone, Starling voiced the answer.  “It’s whimsy.  It catches him every single time.  He can’t help himself.”

            She was radiant, almost shining with the thought.  Her uncertainties had vanished now that the chase had started for real.  Here she was comfortable, totally herself.  The hunt was her glory and her pride.  Cooper found himself smiling in spite of his better judgment.  She didn’t know that she was Hannibal Lecter’s flaw and redemption, all rolled into one.

            “Now, kids, while we wait for our next present, we won’t be idle.”  She pulled a CD-ROM out of a drawer.  “Stewart, this is Lecter’s shopping list.  I want you to confine the search to just the top 25 items, since we’re going to have to go global until we can nail him down at least a little bit.  You’re familiar with the concept?”

            Stewart certainly was.  Even through Starling’s disgrace, word of her genius idea had spread in the Bureau.  “Yes, ma’am, I sure am.  Let me get going on that right away.”

            Starling smiled.  “Okay, the new computers are back there.  It’s a long shot, but it’s worth watching.”

            She turned to Cooper.  “How are you with world geography?  Any specialties I should know about?”

            He laughed.  “Unless you think he went to Tibet, I’m pretty useless on that front.”

            “Okay, then.  You haven’t really had a good chance to look at my gift.  I’ll be interested to know what you think.  Don’t worry about contamination… it’s told us all it’s going to.  I’ll just be scouring the society pages, hoping he got caught in the edge of a photograph somewhere.”  Her tone was dry, as if she expected to be bored, but he knew that she was in seventh heaven.

            She picked up a hefty pile of newsprint and got out a magnifying glass, then turned on her bright desk lamp and quickly absorbed herself in glitz and glamour.

            Cooper walked to the table where Amanda had deposited the package.  He drew in a deep breath, performing a quick meditation and centering himself.  The old mental rituals came back like riding a bicycle, but his center point listed off to one side, and he had to compensate to balance himself.  He exhaled, and extended his hands about an inch above the box, palms down.  He sensed the danger that comes with challenge and change, but no malevolence.  He ran his hands through the contents, not looking but feeling.  He noted with interest that the locked off portion of himself was not responding to the vibrations he felt.  An image struck him like a blow.  Waves crashing on sand, a brilliant sky.  He felt warm humid air surround him like a blanket.  Then it was gone.

            He opened his eyes and was back in the dungeon.  He sat down and examined the letter, the mirror, and the map in a more customary fashion, prepared for the spicy mixture of respect, derision, love, and pain he found there.  He put them down, suddenly feeling like a trespasser.  He had yet to meet this man, but already knew more about him than the census-takers and psychiatrists who had attempted to question him.  He had thought that Lecter would be kin to the darkness that diseased him, but the Doctor seemed to be made of different stuff.  Seemed, he emphasized to himself.  Never forget that the night wears many masks.  This could just be one more… the perfect trap to ensnare a deer like Starling.  He glanced at Stewart, who was speaking animatedly with someone from a Paris perfumery.  He walked over to Starling and bent low over the desk.  She was quickly yet carefully passing her glass over the London Times.

            “You can stop that.  He’s on the seashore, somewhere warm.  Not equatorial, but probably tropical.  South America, likely, from what you’ve told me about his past exploits.”

            She looked up at him, skeptical.  “Look, Coop, I know you believe in all that jazz, but…”

            He cut her off.  “You can waste your time if you like, it’s all the same to me.  But I know what I know.”

            She made a face.  “It just feels like cheating, that’s all.”

            He cast a line into his intuition, and came up with a prize catch.  “Just imagine the look on his face when you show up before he’s given you all the clues.  You don’t have to tell him how you did it.”

            She lit up like a candle, just as he’d known she would.  “Well, there is that,” she purred.

            Cooper understood her love of the game.  He just didn’t share it anymore.  But he could still use it.  “Clarice,” he said, using her given name for the first time.  “I can keep the clues coming.  But I want you to promise me something in return.”

            She nodded slowly.  “What?”

            “When you go, let me come with you.”

            “I don’t think so, Coop.  I can’t put you in that kind of danger.  I have no idea what he would do.”

            “I do.  Don’t underestimate me, Clarice.  I may be damaged goods, but I’ve still got it,” he said ruefully.  “You’re too close, you told me yourself.  I can see him better than you can.  And I won’t let you get near him until I’ve checked him out in person.  I don’t think he means you harm.  But I won’t know for certain until I’ve seen him for myself.”

            “I thought you made me the keeper of your courage.”

            He laughed, a sound that surprised him in its freedom.  “You are.  That’s why I have to make sure you’re okay.”

            She met his eyes.  “Okay, you can come, but you do as I tell you, agreed?”

            “Whatever you say, Special Agent Starling.”

            “Oh, shut up,” she said, and threw a pencil at him.  He caught it, saluted her with it, and went over to give Stewart a plausible excuse for narrowing her search parameters considerably.  It felt so good to have a friend again.  Someone she didn’t have to hide from or perform for.  She had a feeling he felt the same way.

            They worked until seven.  Amanda left to go visit her parents.  Starling and Cooper walked out together.  He raised an eyebrow at her.  She nodded her assent, and they went out for dinner.  By unspoken but mutual agreement, they did not discuss anything remotely resembling philosophy, theology, politics, or ethics.  Over the next few days, as they futilely searched for any trace of Lecter in South America, this became a little ritual.  Starling wondered a little, as time went by, that he never made one single pass at her, not even a joking half-flirtatious glance.  But, on the whole, she was relieved.

            They settled into a routine.  Starling looked in Argentina, Cooper looked in Brazil, those being the places Clarice judged likeliest to house Lecter, and Stewart took care of the purchase tracers and skimmed the rest of the continent.  They all knew what they were waiting for, but when it came, with no special fanfare, just a brown paper package on the mail cart, the atmosphere in the dungeon charged with electricity.

            Silently, Starling took the package to her desk.  Stewart handed her a pair of gloves.  Cooper stood at the side of the desk, patterning his breathing to heighten his awareness.  Starling reached into her pocket automatically, then sighed and took the Exacto knife that Stewart proffered.  The sound of the blade sliding along the paper was the only noise in the room.  She opened the packaging to reveal another silver-wrapped box with dark navy ribbons.  She drew open the bow, removed the wrapping, and lifted the lid.  The envelope was addressed this time simply to ‘Clarice,’ and lay again on a bed of tissue paper.  As she broke the seal, Cooper heard the call of a bird he did not recognize, a sweet and haunting sound.