Clarice and Hannibal

By Frank Skipp

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Summary:     Hannibal and Clarice enjoy a romantic and erotic voyage as they take their relationship to a whole new level.

Timeline:       Picks up at the end of the Hannibal novel and follows canon.

Rating:          NC-17

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[Chapter101]

He came swiftly from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, and bent to her coral and cream in the firelight his dark sleek head.

Chapter 101.i

Hannibal went to his knees in an ecstasy of passion. From the breast Clarice cradled in her hand he sipped the warm wine in a merging complex of flavors and fragrances, the fruity perfumes of organic acids, the musk of Clarice’s inner thighs, and the pale aroma of her sex. His tongue circled her aureola, unstretched by nursing, unembrowned by age, in a delirium of intermingled feelings. He was erect to painful fullness, his desire still inchoate, free-flaming.

Clarice, in rapture she had never known in her narrow experience, responding only to sensation, slid forward over the striped silk of her chair, her gown resisting, her unclad body baring itself to her navel.

Neither was aware of existing as a person. Neither was aware of time and place, only of a surrounding glow without boundaries, a dream crossed radiance between living and dying.

In this timelessness time passed. Then Hannibal became conscious of Clarice’s labia, the lips curling away from each other in pink passivity and of a small excrescence swollen hard and white-capped at their upper juncture. His desire came to a focus. He opened his mouth and unsheathed his small white teeth. He dropped his mouth over the delicious display, aromatic and tender, and paused in confusion. He shuddered in a convulsion and his vision darkened. Clarice cried out at that moment, reached, found Hannibal’s life, and thrust herself hard against it. Its length and  girth penetrated her, the honey of generation streamed from her, and she met in full spate his ejaculation. Their voices joined in a dissonant cry.

Spent, they lay grotesque and motionless, Clarice’s chin on her breastbone, Hannibal’s features distorted between her breasts.

They awoke in amazed silence, stood, and embracing each other, walked to Clarice’s bed. They undressed and left their clothes where they fell. In bed, they pulled up a silk sheet and lay, holding one another lightly, finding how well their limbs and torsos fitted..  Before sleep came to her, Clarice spoke softly under Hannibal’s ear. “If you wake up and want me, take me. Anytime. Always. Promise!”

Hannibal’s kiss was his happy assent, kissing her lightly with a delicacy that was a measure of his reverence.

He did wake during the night, alert, expectant, with Clarice still in his arms. He felt desire rampant, but knew also that he had undergone nothing less than a metamorphosis, that he was now living in a new dispensation where his senses and his faculties were arranged in a new collocation. The great difference was that his only appetite, now clarified, was to move again with Clarice toward that paradisiacal epiphany where he and she lost their identities in one another and knew only the surrounding radiance in an intersection of a timeless moment and human love..
Chapter 101.ii

And so began a month-long idyll and a new life for each, a  transformation formed as their hearts, minds, and bodies were forged  in the heat of their love-making. Always finding an eager welcome, Hannibal would be awakened from sleep by urgent desire, honor in delight his promise, and move gently against the sleeping Clarice. Clarice would pause as consciousness returned and then reaching out as she turned, thrusting her breasts up to Hannibal’s ravished eyes, guide him dexterously within her heat and with her thighs aslant and her heels lightly touching Hannibal’s hips, move strongly with him to the paradisiacal flood of ecstasy in which their separate selves were dissolved in unity.

Then one morning, sitting above their narrow beach with the sun a tin-dazzle on the Chesapeake,  Clarice and Hannibal were enjoying Lillet  after Eggs Benedict when a phone call came through the empty Philadelphia apartment. Hannibal kissed Clarice lightly on the top of her head as he rose to answer it. He returned shortly.

He stood beside her and took her hand,  pressed his small white teeth against the outside of his lower lip as he looked in her eyes, then characteristically glanced up and back again.

“We must move,” he said. Clarice gave him both her hands and waited. “Von Roeschlaub is returning to Washington. Siemens is expanding across the Atlantic. They are building a large plant over here. They want their American lobbyist back in Washington. Von Roeschlaub wants to move back into his house..”

Clarice pressed his hand. “Can he do that? Don’t you have a lease?”

“We could go to court, but my darling, we are in no position to expose ourselves to legal scrutiny. We must acquiesce, gracefully. Of course, Siemens has offered to find us a comparable house and move us at no expense, but no. We have been given a month’s grace, and before the month expires we must simply disappear, silently. I think it would be prudent to leave the country.”

“Don’t they have all the terminals watched? Planes, ships, trains? Are we on the run?”

“No. Not yet, at least. Finish your wine and come with me. Bring it with you.”

They opened the big garage and got in the Jaguar. Hannibal took the wheel. “Only because I know the way,” he said with a smile. Clarice liked to drive the supercharged Jaguar. Her Roush Mustang was kept garaged and out of sight.

They drove by the two-lane roads of the Maryland Eastern Shore, crossed a river on a four car ferry, to a small water-girt town that in the 17^th Century had been thriving tobacco port. Its days as a transatlantic port were two centuries in the past but it was still almost surrounded by the tributary waters of the Chesapeake. Clarice, following their invariable custom when they drove together, wore nothing beneath her skirt, today a blue denim mini. Hannibal took discreet advantage of the easy access and Clarice helped him in all his loving touches. Clarice half-panting, half moaning moved quickly against Hannibal’s finger tips. Hannibal drove onto the shoulder of the deserted, tree-lined black-top and helped Clarice to completion. With her eyes still closed and without a pause, Clarice exposed Hannibal, now highly excited, dropped her mouth over him and took his full length again and again until his whole body stiffened where he sat and he shouted with his explosion. Clarice never left her task, moving steadily until Hannibal relaxed and sat back in his seat..

“Ah,” he said, smiling in overflowing love at Clarice. “I think there’s a small bottle of Courvoisier in the glove box.”

She found the cognac and handed it to him. She shook her head at his offering gesture. “I’ve just had mine,” she said smiling.
Chapter 101. iii

Apart from tourism, two small boat builders were the main industry of the town, their hand fashioning of wooden yachts of great beauty now reduced by the coming of fiber glass to interior woodwork and exterior painting. At the Tylie Boatyard, Hannibal led the way to a long shed where a deep-hulled boat was stored under a close-fitted cover. Two masts and some smaller spars lay supported on trestles beside it.

“Is that yours?” Clarice asked.

Hannibal nodded. “Ours,” he said. “Cousin Balthus shipped it over to Baltimore gratis. He’s become too important a figure in the world of painting to indulge his hobby, and candidly too old for Baltic sailing. When I asked him for it he very generously gave it to us.”

“Are we going to use it? Sail it? Do you know about boats like this?”

“At one time every young English gentleman and the young men of all families of large property in maritime countries like mine were expected as a matter of course to know how to shoot a gun, ride a horse, and sail a boat. My uncle Gregor taught me sailing. Thoroughly. You and I, if you will consent, my love— ” He looked casually around. A crew was painting a hull on a marine railway fifty yards away. He lowered his voice. “We shall sail away in this boat. To safety. Not only to safety but to something very like luxury.”

A young man in a painter’s cap and bib overalls was slowly walking toward. Them. Hannibal saluted him. “Hello, Plink,” he said. “How soon can you put the sticks in her, paint her bottom, and put her overboard?”

Plink glanced shyly at Clarice. ”Why Mr. Fell, we’ll clear that railway tomorrow and hoist in the masts.  The riggin’ won’t take long.”

“Leave the rigging,” said Hannibal. “We’ll do that when she’s in the water. You know better than I what a classic she is, a supreme example within these dimensions of the genius of Abeking and Rasmussen. I want to keep her authentic and rig her with four-strand manila. I have a special order coming into Baltimore. We’ll bring it with us after you’ve launched her.”

“Suit yourself,” said Plink. “I  have your number up in Philly. When I call you, you can move aboard.”

Clarice and Hannibal had dinner at an 18^th Century inn where the Tred Avon River branches north from the Choptank. Hannibal went into the kitchen to ask that without fail they be served softshell crabs that no more than eight hours earlier had yet to shed their carapaces. And Chincoteagues from over on the Atlantic side of the DelMarVa peninsula, not Chesapeake oysters. The Robert Morris kept a good wine cellar. Batard-Montrachet was within their gift and it beautifully gilded their seafood.

Chapter 101. iv

Eleven days later Hannibal and Clarice were in a rental Ford Expedition, their clothes, Hannibal’s coppered and tinned  batterie de cuisine, and a 600 foot coil of fragrant four-strand five-eighth inch manila in the SUV’s body. The Jaguar was back in possession of the Delaware holding company and the Mustang, up on jack-stands,  was locked  in the Split City Mini-Storage outside of Baltimore.

They reached the Tiley Yard in time for a dinner of roast canvas back, again with a bottle of Batard-Montrachet, at the Robert Morris, and in the chill of the fall evening they boarded their yacht, now gleaming alongside one of Tiley’s piers, the spruce masts and spars freshly varnished and the wire stainless steel standing rigging shackled aloft and to the bronze chain-plates at the rails.

“Hey,” said Clarice as they stepped across the space from the pier to the boat’s deck, “this is a big boat. What’s her name?”

“She’s forty-six feet on deck. The bowsprit adds eight feet. Her name, bestowed without a by-your-leave, Clarice, is ‘Clarice,’ and since this vessel has a beautiful canoe stern the name is painted four times, once on that side of the stern, once on this, and twice on the bow as well. She was built in l934 in Bremen on the Weser by Abeking and Rasmussen to the highest specifications in the world, and she needs six and a half feet of water to float. So as long as we remain in the Chesapeake we sail into coves and small harbors with great circumspection.  Once you get a look at her I think you’ll agree that like her namesake, she is one of most beautiful things under heaven. She is made entirely of teak and white oak.. Let’s go below.”

Hannibal  slid open the companionway and preceded Clarice down the broad coir-covered steps of the ladder to the main cabin below. Plink had the polished brass lamps in their gimbals burning softly and a square coal-burning stove of Monel metal radiating a soft warmth. They walked through a toilet room occupying a generous section of   ‘midships into a stateroom where a large berth had been made up. Clarice tested the mattress. “Twenty millimeters of foam rubber,” said Hannibal. “That’s about eight inches.”

“Shall we check its response rate?” asked Clarice. “Let’s try it on our knees for firmness and comfort.”

They did and after the resounding proof of their utter satisfaction Clarice said, “It’s good all these portholes and things are shut.”

“The companionway is wide open,” said Hannibal.

Side by side they wiggled their toes, laughed, and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Chapter 101. v

In the morning when Clarice and Hannibal stood on the companionway ladder with mugs of buttered rum hot in their hands the sky was starched blue and Canada Geese floated among the mallards on the surface of Town Creek. They were not long from bed, and Clarice’s legs held a fresh white hand towel between her upper thighs and Hannibal feeling overpouring love and deep sensuous fulfillment held a hand lightly on Clarice’s warm buttock. A cheddar souffle was baking under the slow coal fire of the Monel stove. The aroma of breakfast cooking mingled,  entirely compatibly, with the slightly cheesy odor of the teak of which not only the hull and deck but every shelf, drawer, and locker had been beautifully wrought.

A flight of wild swans flew low over the northwestern horizon and from the building sheds and painting sheds the cheerful, bantering calls of the carpenters and the painters said these artisans  were happy in their work.

After breakfast, Hannibal walked up to the Tylie office and wrote a large check, shook hands with everyone around, and returned to the “Clarice.”  The provisions that had stood overnight on the pier had been stowed. Hannibal, after a careful look around in the engine room, went to the cockpit and started the big, slow-turning German diesel. Clarice stood on the pier in her denim mini, her long legs apart, listening for Hannibal’s instructions, and as she stood every chisel, every caulking iron, every paint brush in the Tylie Yard was motionless as the good church-going townsmen for a moment held their breath. Then the lines were aboard and “Clarice” moved quietly out into Town Creek, headed slowly west, and turned the point into Peach Blossom Creek.

There was nothing on either bank of  Peach Blossom beyond a farmhouse here and there, set far back from the shore. Hannibal consulted the chart folded in his hand. Half a mile into Peach Blossom a small shallow arm opened on the right. Carefully Hannibal moved the ketch ahead, then backed his engine and let go his anchor. Hannibal allowed  the “Clarice” to move slowly astern until the anchor chain rose, dripped, and settled down again into the water. He turned off the engine.

“Sailors have a vulgar expression they enjoy shouting out when there’s been some drinking on deck, a warning that goes, No friggin’ in the riggin,.” said Hannibal as he looked aloft. “I permit myself to utter it now because it is so apropos to what we are about to spend the day doing. Rigging, that is. You, of course, are just a pair of hands, but I am going to send you aloft and instruct you step by step.”

“I’m your tabula rasa,” said Clarice. The little arm of Peach Blossom was dish-calm. “I am as willing and receptive and blank as any tabula rasa but with better biceps and abs than most. Put me to work.”

The workmen who had stepped the masts left running through the topmost pulley of both the mainmast and the shorter mizzen aft  a light line. They called it a gantline. Hannibal rolled the manila, golden as a Circassian’s beard, into the cockpit, pulled a short length of the rope from the center of the coil, and cramped  the slender gantline between its strands. He hauled the manila aloft on the mainmast and through the pulley. “Now that you’re on the water and aboard a sailing vessel,” he said with a smile, “you may call all pulleys ‘blocks.’ Now that I am pulling it up you may say that I am ‘hauling it aloft.’”

When the rope end came through and down to deck level he tied it to a seat with a bridle, a seat very much like the that of a sturdily made swing. “Get in,” he said to Clarice who, in her denim mini, found it easy to step in. “Up you go,” said Hannibal easily hoisting her aloft until the bridle of the swing-seat came up against the masthead block. “Now,” said Hannibal, “take that loose rope end that went aloft with you and run it through that masthead block from aft to fore. Back to front. No, the other way. Right. Good. Now, haul it through and let it come down to me.”

“All right,” said Clarice. “Wow! The view from up her is dynamite! What do I do now?”

And so it went. “Clarice” was an old- fashioned gaff-headed ketch. There were many blocks and many spars. Rigging it was an intricate matter and it was a proof of the deep love of these two that they proceeded from the mainmast to the mizzen without a harshly critical word. They arrived at the lower mizzen gaff block pleased with their performance, pleased with each other.

“You’ve done it!” said Hannibal, exultantly. Clarice gave him a double thumbs up. “You’re coming down.” Hannibal throughout the day had hauled Clarice up and lowered as required. Now as he was lowering her for the final time, he arrested the halyard abruptly. Clarice in her seat, fifteen feet from the deck, stopped with a bounce. “Wait,” he said. Like a happy child, Clarice kicked her legs, her toes bare,  forward and backward. “Please, sweet Clarice, take off your panties and toss them down to me. There’s no breeze. They’ll land on the deck.”

Clarice laughed, kicked her feet again, lifted herself from the bos’n’s seat, reached behind her and tossed her panties to the deck. Hannibal was sitting on the edge of the cockpit below. He pulled his khaki shorts to his ankles. He was as erect as a bos’n pin, and with the rope twisted around his wrist he let Clarice descend, slowly, slowly, carefully as Clarice shifted her seat forward and spreading her legs as wide as the bridle of the bos’n’s seat allowed, let Hannibal  lower her slowly over him as she reached around the supporting ropes of her seat and prepared  to receive him. He entered easily and with the halyard allowed her to descend until their bodies  joined firmly. Then he lifted Clarice in her seat and lowered her again. Clarice shifted  farther forward in her seat, as Hannibal’s  arm on the halyard lifted Clarice up and down, up and down, up and down. Hannibal reached with his left hand for her center of delight, stroked it tenderly, and with a shriek that resounded along the quiet banks of Peach Blossom Creek Clarice fell from the bos’n’s seat onto Hannibal as he embraced her in his arms.

Clarice’s glossy  thighs slid over Hannibal’s. “We’ve rigged our ship,” said Hannibal.

Clarice drew her arms hard and tight around him.. “There’s been friggin’ in the riggin’.” she said.

At anchor in the windless recess of the little arm of Peach Blossom Creek they fitted the fresh new sails to the spars, a task Hannibal did with a speed and perfection that owed everything to his strength in hauling the bolt ropes taut. Clarice placed heavy woven ribbons of canvas as Hannibal directed and together they tied them around the furled Dacron sails.

“Now,” said Hannibal snaking an awning along the deck, tying it at intervals to the life rails, and then hoisting it taut by its oak spreader, “we’ve earned this.” A big jib-topsail filled the cockpit in loose billows. “You haven’t put your panties back on after all your ablutions, have you?” Clarice shook her head, amused. “Good. Then just get down on that sail and lie back as if you were on cloud nine.”

“I’m there already,” said Clarice, settling back into the pillowing of the sail. Hannibal sank into its cushioning beside her. “Ah, my love,” she sighed. “I’m very tired and very happy.”

“Too tired,” said Hannibal. It was like a statement.

“Never,” said Clarice. “Road warrior. But hold me and let’s close our eyes for a little while and listen to the silence.” The sky was reflected  from the mirror of the water. Beyond the bow maples, tulip trees, and locusts flamed in fall glory. Clarice fell asleep. Hannibal watched her quiet breathing in wonder, musing on the health he had recovered in her body and in the never- broken envelopment of her love. He sank deeper into the sail and he too slept.
Chapter 101 .vi

The afternoon waned and the two slept on, but then there came a low groan as of metal under strain and then a clinking as the strain was relieved. Hannibal and Clarice, serene in each other’s arms, opened their eyes. A breeze had sprung up, the boat had moved back with it and swung into it on its anchor chain. The awning was rising and falling in easy undulations.

Hannibal lazily looked at his watch and drew from his shirt pocket a cell phone. “Hungry?” he asked. Clarice nodded, smiling dreamily. He called the Robert Morris. “Jan?” he said. “Harrison Fell. What could we look forward to for dinner?” He held his hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you enjoy frogs’-legs?” he asked Clarice.

“You’re asking corn-pone country pussy whether she likes frogs’-legs?”

“And soft clams just out of the sand in country butter for an appetizer?” He grinned at Clarice.

He spoke into the phone. “And do you bake corn pone? Yes, corn bread? Could you seat us in about an hour? Good. Thank you.” He snapped the phone shut. “Jan orders stone-ground white corn grist from a mill about eighteen miles west of Washington. We won’t have to dress.”

“I’ll pull on my panties,” said Clarice.

Hannibal got in the awning and stowed it. “You can take the stops off the mainsail, those canvas ribbons” he said. “We’ll sail down to the Tred Avon, anchor off the Morris and dinghy in to the ferry dock. He began bringing in the anchor, cranking the chain over the wildcat of the bronze winch in the bow..

“I’ll do that,” said Clarice, taking Hannibal’s place. He went to the mainmast and holding both halyards together in his hands, hauled the main gaff and its white quadrangle aloft. It fluttered in the light breeze.

“Bring that hook in until its right under the bowsprit and let it hang there. It’s only a half-mile or so and as you’ll see, the bottom of the Chesapeake is usually very muddy.”

Slipping quietly along, the “Clarice” was close in under the steep beach at the Robert Morris in fifteen minutes. Clarice let the anchor go again in ten feet. They tied their dinghy at the ferry dock, and walked up to the inn’s broad veranda.

“Did you remember your panties?” Hannibal asked.

Clarice tried hard to look contrite. She shook her head “You sit with your back to the wall and I’ll face you.”

Their plain fare was well-prepared and full of good blunt flavor. They helped it with a bottle of Californian nonmalolactic chardonnay Jan had had the wisdom to add to his wine list. It was a weeknight and Hannibal smiled blandly out over the room. The Robert Morris was on the outermost fringe of restaurant-going for Washingtonians and besides, the face any of the police branches knew was two changes back. Clarice, of course was another matter, but then no mug shot of Clarice Starling yet graced the wall of a Post Office or police station. Not yet, in any case.

When they returned to the “Clarice” they motored back up the Tred Avon far enough to be free of the wash of the ferry, pulled a light cashmere spread over them,  and wearied by their long day, slept, slept until Hannibal woke to feel Clarice’s hand moving gently and cautiously between them and whispering, “Oh, I want you so very, very much.” He could feel her squeezing her thighs together again and again. He was awake now. Clarice twitched off the cashmere and smoothly lay her cheek on his firm pelvis, took his growing life in her hand and moved it lightly on its shaft and in a very few seconds took it in where her tongue could circle its velvet, around and around. .At anchor and well off the dark beach they released their ecstasy without restraint. The companionway was open and it didn’t matter at all.

Chapter 101. vii

During the night the wind came into the southwest and blew a pleasant yachtsman’s breeze.

Hannibal with his head and shoulders out of the companionway sniffed the breeze and with the stern now pointing to the shore measured the interval to danger. “Clarice,” he said, “we’re on a lee shore and this bottom is pretty soupy. Let’s get the hook up and head south.”

“Hey, let’s do it,” said Clarice, nude at the foot of the ladder, her nipples crisping in the chill of the morning. “And I should get a merit badge for my sash when I put one on for never asking where we’re supposed to be going. Should I say heading?” She rubbed the palms of her hands briskly on her upper arms, showing the pleasant development of her biceps and making her breasts bounce just enough to assure a skeptic they had no acquaintance with silicone.

“You should have asked, but I couldn’t have told you. I don’t think I decided until I looked at this superb little ship of ours from the shore, floating alone with a harbor furl in her sails. And last night in the sweet aftermath of our love, your breasts on my chest and I feeling that vacancy of an absolutely satisfied libido, took high aesthetic pleasure in the beauty the builders gave the interior of this stateroom, pleasure in the beauty first and in its corollary, strength.”

Clarice, climbed a step of the ladder, rested her chin on Hannibal’s shoulder, and flicked his earlobe with a finger tip. “I hear what you say and, believe me, I like it, but Hannibal. Where are we , uh, heading?” She let her arms fall naturally and then moved her hands to where she perceived movement, the ineluctable consequence of the warm pressure of her breasts on his back and the silky texture of her pelt at the top of his cleft.

“We should get the anchor up and get out of here,” said Hannibal, turning. Clarice descended two steps, dropped her mouth over Hannibal’s splendor and it was another thirty minutes before the anchor began to come in, the mizzen start aloft, the main following it, and with sheets eased, the bow of the ketch ‘Clarice’ swung handsomely down the Tred Avon toward the broad Choptank and the blue Chesapeake beyond.

As the rust-red caisson of the Bloody Point light slipped by to starboard, the ketch picking up speed as it entered the Bay proper, Clarice gripped a spoke of the wheel and held it immovable,  defeating Hannibal’s efforts to steer. She spoke softly, at variance to the determination of her grip on the wheel. “Hannibal, where in hell are we heading?” She let the wheel go.

He seemed to have been abstracted, showing no irritation at Clarice’s persistence. “What?” he said. “Oh, yes.” He checked the eight-inch compass rose, gimbaled in its hexagonal binnacle of mahogany, glass, and brass. “We’re going to sea.” He took in a great lung-full of the sea air and expelled it, as if heaving a long-held sigh of relief.

“I should have told you,” he continued. “There’s a lot about me you don’t know, isn’t there?”

“No,” said Clarice. “Nothing that matters. Not really.”

“I suppose your right. You’re right. It isn’t important. But I have property here and there, some in Mexico. I own a small island, a very nice small island. It lies among some others quite close to the northeast shoulder of Jamaica, just off Port Antonio. We’re on the run now. We are being pursued or soon will be when von Roeschlaub finds his excellent tenants have suddenly decamped.  I have this familiar and unmistakable feeling. If we’re not yet on the run, I think we soon will be. At any rate, we’re running now, pursued or not. Are you very distressed by this?”

“No, Hannibal.”

He took another deep breath and again expelled it with what seemed like relief. “The island, by the by, was once owned by Errol Flynn. He lived there off and on until his premature death. It’s a remarkable place. I have a caretaker who keeps he place up and a small staff. You’ll like it.”

Clarice appeared to be something between unbelieving and pleased. “And we’re going there now? In this boat? Oh wow!”

Hannibal looked up from the compass and then at Clarice intently, seriously, solemnly almost. They were ploughing south down the middle of the Bay. Their compass heading was not narrowly important. A rusty freighter was about three miles ahead. Another was just raising its bow over the horizon. The wind had increased and was blowing from the west, crossing the ketch just forward of amidships. “You are my life, my love, my health, my happiness. To see you standing beside me on this surface, metaphorically and truly more than a little unstable,  happy, buoyant, life-loving, life giving, is to me, a firm non-believer in miracles,  what that incorrigible old optimist Ralph Waldo Emerson called God in Man. He saw it everywhere. Evil was only the absence of good.” A rogue wave struck the bow, shattered, and sprinkled them with cold salt water. Clarice laughed, threw her arms out to her sides, and stood laughing at the oncoming seas.

The shock broke Hannibal’s somber vein. He laughed too, shook the water from his sunglasses, grabbed Clarice and planted a wet, salty kiss on her cheek. “He would have liked you once he got to know you, Ralph, that is,  and the friendship might have modified some of his certainties” Hannibal looked ahead at the approaching freighter, smiling as broadly as he ever smiled, pulling Clarice close as the ketch rolled and plunged.

The freighter passed between them and the western shore where a long-abandoned lighthouse, a tall brown square structure, stood on the south shoulder of a broad river. To the east the horizon was empty. The beautiful ketch, picturesque, perhaps, to modern eyes, with the wind just to her liking, was sailing at something close to eight knots. A gaggle of ducks, flying very fast, disappeared within minutes over the southern horizon. Hannibal’s heart rose. He pulled Clarice closer as he cranked the helm to correct a swing of the ketch’s bow. She kissed him fervently on his cheek, slippery with salt water. Hannibal felt his whole being respond.

“Take the helm,“ he said. “Steer for that ship way up there ahead. You feel okay?” She nodded vigorously. “Road warrior,” she said with a concern-clearing broad smile.

Hannibal opened a lazarette aft of the cockpit. With an effortlessness possible in the circumstances only to one of his dexterity, balance, and strength, he withdrew a device with an aluminum blade shaped somewhat like that of a modern canoe paddle, attached to a stainless-steel rod of four feet or so. Holding to the after standing rigging he cautiously leaned over the yacht’s heartbreakingly beautiful canoe stern and fitted it carefully into the after edge of the rudder. He looked over his shoulder at the sails, back at the vane, made a setting, and returned to the cockpit. “Clarice, my love,” he said, “you may now turn loose of that wheel.” Clarice gave a last look at the seas rolling in from the west and stood back. The ketch, making its corrections in response to the impulses from the wind-vane, continued on her course.

“Oh, Hannibal,” said Clarice, “that wind vane is truly a wonder. I just might be able to go without you for a couple of hours. Make that an hour. But if we have an ocean to cross, how could we keep our sanity without each other for all that time?”  Her question had a profoundly life-related importance. “This boat will steer itself. We can make love right now! And so, my oh-so-desired, oh-so-desirable Hannibal, my horny one, what is stopping us?”

She snatched at the buckle of his belt, the rise of her color appearing even in the wind and spray. He embraced her, kissing her deeply, his pink tongue plunging and plunging. He tugged off her panties and with them flopping and rolling around one ankle led her by the hand along the rolling deck toward the mainmast, the mainsail and boom leaning off over the left rail. Clarice’s panties went by the board.

Hannibal lifted her and seated her on the boom where the sail began its upward curve, a pocket of dacron with the sail stretching up behind to the upward slanting gaff. The yacht was rolling and plunging, the tip of its mainmast, above where Clarice sat, describing, again and again, the symbol of infinity, an S on its side.  Hannibal cast his shorts to the wind and moved beneath Clarice who was holding to the sail’s leading edge with her left hand and the rope that bound the sail’s foot with her right.  Hannibal, mast-rigid, moved beneath Clarice, and waiting for the propitious roll and plunge of the yacht, leaned in and up and the two were joined.

The main boom moved up and down and away and back. Hannibal, holding to the bolt rope of the sail’s foot, leaned against Clarice and with the downward tilt of the deck, pressed to the hilt, leaned back, and let its roll and plunge, culminating in the  S of infinity above,  bring them both to a simultaneous streaming climax. Their only connection at the climax was genital, that and the deep searching probing of their kiss.

Their positions were precarious. The imperative of staying on aboard above all, brought them both from the eternal moment to a sharp appreciation of their need  for quiet and stability. Hannibal braced Clarice across her back and holding her right hand helped her slide her hip, foot by foot, along the main boom toward the cockpit. “I can do this alone,” said Clarice. She turned and holding the main boom completed the move aft.

“I loved that,” said Clarice. “Can we do it that way whenever we want?”

“Whenever you want.”

“I want all the time. Every way.”

“I do too. Are we not fortunate?”

Chapter 101. viii

The Chesapeake Bay extends about 120 miles from its northern source, the Susquehanna River, to its wide exit to the sea between Cape Charles and Cape Henry. The coastline on both shores between runs for 1200 miles of pleasant bays, rivers, and shallow creeks. These pleasures were often not open to craft like the ketch ‘Clarice,’ deep in the keel and designed for Baltic cruising. Two hours of sunlight remained, and after their first day of sailing they would like quiet water in a snug anchorage and a meal of the best from the freezer. The wind off the western shore where excellent shelter lay was freshening, however, while to the east across miles of roughening water lay two small islands, oystering and crabbing communities, but set in waters too shoal for the ‘Clarice’ to navigate.

“My pet,” said Hannibal, gripping the mizzen shrouds and surveying sky and water, “our choices are two. We can crank up the diesel, get in our sails, and punch through this stuff and anchor for the night in Wicomico Bay or we can do what we’ll have to do tomorrow anyway. Sail on south through the Capes and head for Jamaica…”

Clarice was gripping the brass guard that looped over the binnacle. Her expression was severe, but her eyes glinted with the excitement of a challenge. “Road warrior,” she said. Then she grinned as spray ran down her cheeks. “Winter’s in that wind,” she said. “How does Jimmy Buffett put it? You don’t know him, but he’s got the right idea.” She tossed wet hair off her forehead. “‘Changes in latitude, Changes in attitude,’ and ‘I gotta go where it’s warm’.”

“I don’t know Mr. Buffett,” said Hannibal, “but he might be worth cultivating. ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhne? Mocht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn’,” is the way someone else put it years back. Port Antonio is about 1,200 miles from here, but we could stop at an island along the way. It’ll be warm enough there to suit both Mr. Buffett and Johann Goethe. Go below, my love, and change into something dry but with easy access. Open the draft on the stove and choose something from the deep freeze for me to astonish you with…I’ll set the running lights.”
Chapter 101.ix

The wind held in the southwest and by a little after midnight they had threaded their way through the blinking reds, greens, and whites of Norfolk Harbor and had passed at seven knots through its wide entrance between Cape Charles and Cape Henry into the Atlantic. When dinner was over and the galley in order, Clarice lifted Hannibal’s apron over his head as the little ship rolled before the wind, unceremoniously tugged his belt and his trousers open, and said, “Now, Doctor Lecter, if you please.” She made her way forward to their stateroom, clutching the hand-holds overhead, her legs wide

Hannibal, kicking off his Topsiders and his trousers, went aft and up the companionway ladder. He stood on a step that let him look into the moonless night intensely bright with stars in every direction. As the yacht rolled the sea streaming by was lit along the creamy wake first red along the left rail and then green. Satisfied that no other craft was on the dark horizon he joined Clarice. She was on all fours, hands and knees wide against the motion, looking eagerly over her shoulder, lowering the small of her back as Hannibal, naked now, came into the berth behind her and placed his knees outside hers.

The lamps were swinging in their gimbals but Clarice lifted her harbor and Hannibal came to dock surely and smoothly. They found at once that the yacht’s movement added unexpected and delightful complexity to their own. Their orgasm came soon and they tumbled on the berth, rolling in happy confusion against the retaining bunk-boards on one side and back against the hull on the other.

Hannibal sobered, kissed Clarice on her damp pelt, and hurried to the companionway for another surveillance of the black sea and the brilliant sky. Satisfied there was no present danger, he returned to Clarice. The elegant Monel coal stove was sending an even heat throughout the yacht and Clarice on her back, her arms and legs spread wide against the roll, was still naked. “If we had radar we could stay right here in this berth and just check the monitor.”

“We should have radar,” said Hannibal dropping his chin in concession, “but forgive me, I could not bring myself to maim, to mutilate the beauty of our ‘Clarice’ by affixing all that ugly hardware to her mizzen mast. Sorry.”

Clarice reflected a moment. “Yeah,” she said, “I forgive you. You are, admit it or not, the most romantic, beauty-loving man, maybe in this world. Surely the best. And my dearly, deepest beloved, I am therefore the most lucky–you’d prefer ‘fortunate?’–woman in the world. You want to check things again?” During the interval of his surveillance Hannibal’s manhood had detumesced. Now he sucked Clarice’s near breast as he rolled out of the berth, heading again for the companionway. As his feet touched the cabin sole he began again to rise, at first with hesitant upward pulses and then uninterruptedly to the sturdy angle with which nature so serendipitously equipped it to penetrate its intended enclosure.

The wind backed during the night into the northwest and blew. The steering vane had to be brought inboard and stowed, but the ‘Clarice’ was driving toward the trades at eight knots and the interval when one or the other had to be on deck was short. It had become too warm for the Monel stove. Hannibal let it burn out, dumped the white powder of its ashes down-wind, and reluctantly set a four-burner propane stove on top of it.

There were some hours of uncertain winds, a period of calm when with sails slatting, Clarice and Hannibal plunged overside into the calm water that from the deck looked as if one could fill a fountain pen with it but as they regarded each other’s body through it,  was as transparent as plate glass. Hannibal hung from the stay that ran between the tip of the bowsprit and the waterline, his legs apart, erect.  Clarice breast-stroked toward him, reversing her direction by flipping her wrists just before the moment of contact, and received him with a squeal as she embraced him and amidst much splashing brought them together to that heavenly loss of individuality in the radiance of no-time. As they separated Hannibal’s ejaculation drifted away like a small jellyfish.

Chapter 101 .x

The trades arrived in puffs from the southeast and then after an interval blew steadily, as the ‘Clarice’ trimmed sheets, reset the steering vane, and steered more southerly along the eastern line of the Bahama’s Exuma Islands. The mode of love they had enjoyed back on the Chesapeake was practical once again, and in the blazing sunlight, with the cumulus of fair weather streaming above them to the westward, Hannibal set Clarice on the main boom, her firm buns cupped in the sail, the lips of her sex wide before Hannibal standing on the deck, and with the riggish rhythms of Orff’s Carmina Burana streaming through the open hatches from their reel-to-reel stereo, reached orgasm after orgasm. Hannibal dipped into the sea the yacht’s handsome canvas bucket on its bridle and lanyard, hauled it with a mighty lifting sweep aboard, and sluiced the teak beneath them, again and again.

At noon time Hannibal asked Clarice, as they lay back in the cockpit, please to spread her legs once again. With a long and very pink tongue, he kissed her in a deep plunging, lingering stroking motion, and then smilingly went below and prepared a lunch of canned premium tuna with capers in  Lucullus sauce,  pouring into Riedel glasses a light chablis.

As they sailed south along the eastern fringe of the Atlantic,  the islands of the Exuma chain, marking the eastern boundary of the Great Bahama Bank moved past them to the west perhaps three miles distant. Hannibal picked up his chart. “Clarice, my beauty, you wont have to dress just yet–and I hope you won’t–but we’re going inside the Exumas and take a day’s and a night’s rest. We’ve earned it. You above all, have earned it.” He reached for the main sheet, eased it, cleated it, and then eased the mizzen.. “You can ease that staysail, if you will, and then grand woman that you are, get in the jib topsail. No clothes yet. I want to watch you. I want to watch you in all prurience until you have that sail down and come back to the helmsman’s seat and as I steer, sit on my lap with your belly against mine; move as if you trusted me to steer safely through this coral reef. Move spasmodically if you’re nervous. I’d like that.”

“Ah, Clarice,” Hannibal moaned minutes later, “Oh, yes Clarice!” He looked wildly about him and grabbed from the cockpit sole a rope becket, threw it over a spoke of the wheel. His actions dislodged him from Clarice, and he spurted left and right as he tried frantically to re-enter. She wiped the rich emission from her thighs and belly, from Hannibal’s thighs, and smeared everything in her hands up and across his belly, licking her hands clean of the residue, and dropped her chin, exhausted, over his shoulder. Ahead boulders of white and light brown coral loomed. Hannibal seized a spoke of the wheel, turned it hard right and after a count of four, turned it sharply left. The ketch sailed fast between the boulders into quiet water beyond and into a rock-bound harbor open to the west and the Banks beyond.

They rounded the ketch into the wind, got in sail, and anchored off a village of four scattered hip-roofed white-washed houses, their window-length shutters propped open, and an Anglican church.. Nearer the harbor another white-washed building, this one with a roof of galvanized iron. A sign over the door in broad blue lettering said, “The Royal Entertainer.” Off their stern.at the harbor’s center, a coral rock, the size of one of the native houses, stood in eight feet of water. There were no other boats.

They went below, stripped off their few clothes, and smiling in rueful pleasure washed each other with sudsy sponges. When Clarice has dried him, Hannibal went to the galley, filled two Sazerac glasses with ice and Ron Barbancourt. There were five stars on the bottle. “Think of this rum as fine cognac,” he said handing Clarice her glass. They sat on their berth, pillows at their backs, sipping appreciatively. “This is one of the things Haiti gets absolutely right.”

“Shall we let the Royal Entertainer feed us this evening?” Clarice asked. She laid just the chuff of her hand against Hannibal’s demure and freshly-washed manhood. It pulsed at her touch. She placed the icy bottom of her glass on its length, running it back and forth. Hannibal pulsed again and stiffened to perfection, placed the glasses, empty of all but ice on a shelf beside him, and slid down from his pillow with a hand on Clarice’s shoulder. She sat astride him, holding her warmth just above his eager domed tip, fixing him against the berth with her hands on his hips, and bending her arms a little brought her labia briefly, briefly over his upward straining dome.

It was a game. Hannibal, who could have taken Clarice’s ribcage and lifted her above his head, knew it was a delicious game, allowed Clarice to play, finding the slight suction of her rhythmic rising as maddeningly delicious as anything to be experienced in the Hades of King Tantalus.

Clarice had fine arms. She showed no sign of tiring, but now with each cycle she descended just a small fraction of an inch lower. The upward suction increased. The back of Hannibal’s head on the pillow rolled back and forth in his frustrated desire as the heat  grew and with it the most heavenly feeling known to mankind, but now Hannibal’s entry was touching the edge of her erect clitoris. She lowered and raised her body four times, five times more and then as if her strength suddenly gave out she dropped down over the full length of Hannibal’s shaft and rubbed her  pudenda against his pubic bone, provoking her own wild orgasm that chimed with Hannibal’s own long-suppressed explosion.

They were the Royal Entertainer’s only guests that evening. Clarice, observing from their cockpit the well-kept appearance of the Anglican Church, wore a demure, light yellow shortsleeved frock with a hemline that came just a little below the knee. She remembered to wear panties which she had washed out in salt-water sudsing detergent and dried from the lifeline in the fresh trade-wind breeze. Their host in immaculate white shirt and black trousers pointed over the bar to the horse-flesh tiller of a native sloop, and as if  reciting told how after he had won the annual Out Island Regatta he had been asked by Prince Philip whether he might sit at the tiller of the winning craft and steer it around the course. The Prince’s genial condescension had hallowed the tiller his hand had held, and was the source of the Entertainer’s instant fame and a new name for the long-established restaurant.

Who were his patrons? Charter schooners from Nassau.  Staniel Cay was the third  port of call,  two days southeast on their milk-runs, carrying like so much cord wood at one hundred fifty a head, government clerks from Washington, mainly, and medical students, law students, singles and couples.

The Entertainer recommended Lane Snapper, “two houahs out of de wahtah, sah an’ mahdam,  done Island Style.” Clarice and Hannibal found it expertly cooked. There was nothing to drink but St. Pauli Girl beer, but the Entertainer told them about the big rock in the harbor. It was hollow and could be entered by diving down five or six feet and swimming through any of several natural orifices that illuminated the interior by reflecting sunlight from the white sand bottom. Yes, said Hannibal, they intended to stay over the next day and would explore that rock. When they left the restaurant was empty.

Back on board they put their heads gratefully on their pillows, but not before Hannibal, becoming erect as Clarice tucked her firm fundament against him, entered her and felt her contract around him twice before both fell asleep.

Perhaps he lost his rigidity and regained it later, but hours later he rose toward  consciousness not merely desirous, but on his way toward an orgasm neither of them had done anything to provoke but which could not be suppressed nor did he wish to. Without moving he became possessed by sensation that began somewhere behind  the root of his now fully engorged shaft and radiated farther and farther outward in his body, bringing his sense of Clarice sleeping so beautifully conformed against him closer and closer until his body seemed  to be merging with hers, his body absorbing hers in heavenly anthropophagy. He filled her as he came. Clarice slept.

In the morning, feeling the evidence of Hannibal’s devouring her in the night, Clarice, turned and kissed him lightly, looked at him with a quizzical smile, went on deck in the still-empty harbor and dove into the crystalline water. Hannibal followed her on deck, put the boarding ladder over, and joined her in the water. He enjoyed washing her, douching her, entering her gently with three bunched fingers, laving her inside, and then separating the cheeks of  her firm bifurcation and with a cupped hand running the pure saline between them again and again.

On board, Hannibal broke four eggs carefully in butter between simmering Canadian bacon slices and after a moment dashed Worcestershire sauce generously over his fry. Slices from the home-baked bread Bahamians call a “shilling loaf” were toasting on a tetrahedonal rack on the propane stove and Gevalia Danish coffee was brewing.

“Man,” said Clarice, “we’re eating pretty well on this cruise.”

“I hope my poor improvisations have pleased you,” said Hannibal. “It’s a three-day sail from here to Jamaica and when at last we’re there I will be able to remind you of the saying,’ the way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach’.”

“No,” said Clarice soberly, “you know where to find the entrance to my heart. It’s elsewhere. It’s there, there, and always will be, always open for you. I do love to be your pet gourmet,  but until then and after then, and on and on please, Hannibal,  exercise greatly that other large part of your genius, a part of the sort that very few other woman encounter, and let me feel it in ways they can’t even dream about.”

“Very nicely put, my darling Starling,” Hannibal said, and waited until she mounted the boarding ladder, not so much out of polite consideration as for the pleasure he took in her body seen from beneath. “Ah,” he thought to himself, “when I am standing with her amidst Errol’s mirrors, reflections infinite in their variety, I will feast on her every luscious part. She is wonderfully edible. I dine when her body moves with mine enclosed and moves more ways than one, and as now, I eat up her beauty. I feed on the love and devotion and courage and loyalty and sense of justice and insistence on truth that are her heart.”

He watched as she took the next upward rung and her labia slipped past each other in unintended heartstopping  provocation. He followed her up the ladder and ran his hand lightly over the tender swellings high inside her thighs.

They washed their breakfast things, replaced every dish and utensil to the drawers, slots, and shelves with retaining edges that are so much a part of the order that rules a boat. Then they took the outboard dinghy and motored quietly to the rock that rested with overwhelming presence in the heart of the harbor.

They dropped their five-pound anchor in ten feet and saw it settle on the white bottom. They rubbed  saliva over the plates of their face masks and tumbled overboard into eighty degree water. Clarice arched in a surface dive and pulled for the bottom, Hannibal beside her. They found an aperture three feet below the surface almost at once, a jagged-edged oval perhaps six feet wide, a yard from bottom to top, and twelve feet through the rock wall. They surfaced inside a great hollow egg, their every stroke producing resounding cool-echoing splashes. The bright tropical sun reflected through eight or ten underwater apertures from the white sand bottom outside made the interior luminous as an artificial pool, while direct sunlight streaming through a small oval opening in the top fourteen or fifteen feet above them, struck the water agitated by their swimming and dappled the rough orange-brown interior.

They shouted in pleasure, found the crashing, ringing echoes too loud, and quieted. Clarice turned onto her back and wrist-finned along, her kick a small flutter. When Hannibal breast-stroked up in her wake she stopped her flutter and spread her legs but continued finning as Hannibal with a shallow stroke swam into her V, placed his open mouth just beneath her tawny pelt, and stroked her with his tongue until he got water up his nose and  left her in an explosion of coughing. Clarice laughed.

Then another person joined them and then another and another, all chattering happily, excitedly. Clarice and Hannibal were upright in the water, side by side. Only their heads were now above the surface. In the agitated water Hannibal’s erect manhood and Clarice’s rosy-edges where Hannibal’s tongue had given such short-lived pleasure were only a little less than perfectly visible. Their swim-suits lay on a ledge above their entry aperture. Some of the frolicking newcomers were splashing nearby.

Someone spotting them shouted with cheerful resonance, “Orgy! And pulled off his Speedos and threw them atop Hannibal’s and Clarice’s suits  A laughing girl added both parts of her bikini. A few of the new arrivals appeared sober and unamused. Others shouting, “Orgy! Orgy!” splashed the other swimmers. One of the men chased a pretty woman, grabbed an ankle and pulled her close.

The water within was eight feet deep, unbroken by any sort of support, and shortly the cavorters, the sexual opportunists, the onlookers were exhausted and clinging to the rough walls.  “Wait,” said Hannibal to Clarice, and swam to the heap of peeled-off suits. He climbed unexcitedly from the water, sorted through the damp cloth and found his suit and Clarice’s suit.

He looked back. One of the naked newcomers was beside Clarice. “Hey I know you! I know you!” he was saying. “You’re Agent Starling. What a surprise.” Hannibal swam alongside them, without ostentation locked the young man’s thumb in an inconspicuous grip, and tightened the grip to the edge of fracture. The man shouted in complaint and pain, tried to pull away, and felt his bone snap. Hannibal instantly took his wrist, compressed his grip as the man’s jaw dropped in surrender. Clarice was shimmying into her snug suit. With one hand Hannibal pulled on his own.

“This was Paul Krendler’s mole in the FBI DNA lab,” said Clarice. “His name is Eric Pickford.” The noise had dropped but some of the small crowd inside the rock were beginning to swim again. No more swimmers had stripped but none had dressed either. No one realized that a man had been subdued and was now being conducted very quietly toward an aperture, pulled with a crushing grip beneath the surface, and outside. In the open Pickford raised his voice in a half-shout instantly suppressed with a twitch on his wrist that dropped the shout to a moan.  Clarice swam up behind.

The ketch was no longer alone in the harbor. A schooner of nearly 100 feet, her topmasts long ago forgone for safety and simplicity,  was anchored a hundred yards to windward, hand-laundry turning her life-lines into clothes lines, rust from the iron nails of her fastenings streaking the white sides, her ends fallen from age so that in profile her hull suggested a hog’s back. The captain, picturesque in bare feet and full beard, loose white trousers, a matelot shirt, a black-billed cap with a dirty white cover, an elaborate device of rank in gold over the visor, and a bosn’s pipe on a chain around his neck. He was helping two magnificent Bahamian crew-members set a gray canvas awning. Across the schooner’s heart-shaped stern was her pilfered name, “Blue Nose”, and her port of registry: “Nassau, B. W. I.”

“Agent Starling,” said Hannibal evenly, eyeing the schooner with disapproval, “would you please get in the dinghy. Pull up the anchor, detach it, and toss its line over the transom to Mr. Pickford and me. Then start the outboard and tow us to the “Clarice.”

Eric Pickford climbed the yacht’s boarding ladder with great difficulty, great pain, and great reluctance. “I will give you something for your pain, Pickford,” said the doctor, “and then reduce and splint that fracture you so stupidly incurred. Then we’ll decide what to do with you, or perhaps I should say, how to dispose of you.” He turned with formality of manner to Clarice. “Agent Starling, may I ask you to find my black bag in the locker in the forepeak and bring it here to the cockpit?”

Hannibal retained his bone-crushing grip on the whimpering Pickford’s wrist; Pickford,  Krendler’s bio-medical techie. W hen Clarice returned with the bag he directed her wordlessly to select a 50cc syringe and a #20 needle, and to load it with Thorazine. He indicated with his thumb nail a 600 mg dose.  As he poised the needle he said, “Please scrub Mr Pickford’s hip with a pledget of alcohol.”

In less than two minutes Eric Pickford was unconscious and in less than five he lay in a berth designed for a crew member in the forepeak of the “Clarice.” Hannibal fitted the bunkboards so Eric Pickford would not roll out of his berth, and would enjoy a safe passage to wherever Hannibal decided to take him.

With sails still in stops, Hannibal, economizing on every movement, cranked up the anchor, brought it on board and secured it for an ocean passage. Clarice stood straight and still at the helm and at a nod from Hannibal engaged the slow-turning diesel, steering the ketch through the reef and to the profound deeps of the ink-blue ocean beyond.
Chapter 101 .xi

Outside the shelter of the harbor life immediately took on a strenuous brightness. Hannibal helped Clarice set a reef in the mainsail, and in order they raised mizzen, reefed main, staysail, and number two jib topsail. With Clarice at the helm, he re-affixed the steering vane. “Clarice” heeled to the brisk trades of fall and the small arid islands of the Exumas began to rise one after the other ahead on their right and drop beneath the horizon astern.

Nothing hitherto in all their time together since the threat of Paul Krendler had been disposed of  had blunted their keen-edged appetite for love-making, but this morning they thrashed through the sparkle and spray subdued and silent until Clarice, staring at the passing islands, said quietly, “Are we really going to maroon Pickford over on one of those things just to dry out and blow away?”

“You don’t think he deserves that?” asked Hannibal. “Dante reserved the deepest level of Hell for the disloyal, the traitors to a cause they had sworn to uphold. You don’t think Eric would fit in nicely with that group? Dante tells of two traitors, one gnawing at the other’s head. How about Pickford and Krendler? Who would do the chewing? In any case, I should go below and look at him. He has another hour or so to slumber.” He disappeared through the companionway, leaving Clarice to ponder

“Like a baby,” Hannibal said when he returned. He looked at a passing island. “You don’t want to consign him to this inferno where there is water everywhere, nor any drop to drink? Tell me, Clarice, what is Eric Pickford’s most visible weakness?”

Without hesitation Clarice replied: “He’s corrupt, he’s disloyal. He and Krendler are traitors to their government, to their country, two of your traitors in Dante’s Hell.”

“Exactly. And the corruptible gladly choose their corruption. We’ll corrupt Eric Pickford. We’ll make him an offer he’ll gratefully accept and thus corrupt himself. By corrupting him we’ll dispose of any threat the living Eric might present to us. For always.”

“Fine. How?”

“Through my friend Manley Benigoe, an influential Rastifarian, we will make him at our expense the proprietor of a mountainside marijuana plantation. We will buy him a small house in Port Antonio and open an account for him in Barclay’s Bank. We will get him a Mini-Cooper from Kingston for going up and down the mountain. Manley will arrange a reliable connection in Miami. It will not be only the threat of a long prison sentence that will paralyze him. He will become very rich, very corruptly rich, and he’ll find he wouldn’t change a thing.

“Oh, yes,” said Clarice. “Oh, yes!”

Hannibal went below to Eric Pickford, saw that he was recovering, injected him with a  hypnotic he had used on Clarice months earlier,  and locked him in the forepeak.

Eric tried to sit up, thought better of his attempt and lay down again as the ketch dropped into a wave-trough. “Where are you taking me?” he asked. His throat was dry, his words barely intelligible. The doctor lifted him again to a sitting position, braced him, and gave him a sip of water. “I think you’re Hannibal Lecter,” he croaked.  The doctor let him drink again and laid him back on his pillow.

“Eric,” the doctor said, “like almost every other real American you’d like to be a millionaire and live a life of luxurious ease. Am I  right?” Eric closed his eyes. “I read your silence as assent,” the doctor continued. “We are steering for the lush island of Jamaica, to a small island I own very near Jamaica’s pleasant little mountainside city of Port Antonio. You will be confined to my island for a short time—there is no way for you to leave it—until you become accustomed to the idea of great wealth and silken ease and I can make the arrangements, all of which are within my gift, for your perfect independence and freedom. The work will be easy, merely nominal, in fact, and you will be working entirely in your own behalf.”

Eyes still closed and still silent Eric rolled onto his side. The doctor opened the forepeak door. “I’ll leave you now to ponder what I’ve said. We’ll talk again in a little while about your becoming a man of wealth and independence.”

The doctor patted Eric’s shoulder genially and turned to go. Eric turned onto his back and blinked.

“How?” croaked Eric. Hannibal paused, smiled to himself, and returned to the cockpit.

“We’ve got him,” Hannibal said. “Clarice, he’s ours. We’ll have our entry papers from Jamaican Customs in thirty hours and we’ll be admiring ourselves in Flynn’s Hall of Mirrors an hour later.”

“Naked?”

“There’s no other way. The rule is on the door, embossed on a bronze plaque.”

Chapter 101 .xii

Before a month had passed Eric Pickford’s men had trucked down through cold mountain nights hundreds of seventy pound plastic-wrapped bales of marijuana–McConey, Collie, Goat Shit, and Goat Horn–and sold it at $700 a bale to boats waiting in the night with their running lights out at the head of Hog Channel. Back in Miami the night-runners resold their cargo. Its street value was seven thousand dollars a bale. Eric grew very rich very fast.

In his vast island mansion Hannibal re-occupied his kitchen. He brought in to Kingston by air express his refrigerated meats, and Joshua, his Rastafarian major-domo,  made the clockwise drive around the coastal road when a shipment arrived, and bought on the same trip the wines set aside for the Harrison Fell account at excellent Kingston wine merchants.

When Hannibal did not cook, Hattie and Manuel, his handsome, shining-black kitchen staff of many years, served curried goat with rice and boiled banana,  ackee-rice and salt cod or fresh fish, brown-stew style, which Clarice learned to eat with gusto.

On the night following their arrival, Hannibal conducted Clarice, blindfolded with peach colored silk, odorous with a fragrance subtly compounded of yellow bergamot, sandalwood, cinnamon and mimosa,  past the plaque enjoining nudity, into the mirrored room. No alarm sounded. They were not violating Errol Flynn’s stricture.

The spacious room was windowless, lightless, and cool. Hannibal touched the remote in his hand, and a mere suspiration, fragrant and comforting, surrounded them as they stood in silence.  Hannibal brought up a rosy blush of light. He gently removed the blindfold and Clarice stood with her nudity rose-dusted.   The room’s moment of faint chill had crisped Clarice’s nipples and raised the almost invisible silk in the small of her back.  Hannibal smoothed it down. An eerie thread from a recorded theremin wound around them from four speakers, dimly visible in their black cloth, tall and broad as a large person but less than a palm’s breadth from front to back.

Clarice remained motionless. Hannibal allowed his arm to fall, palm inward, along her waist, and downward along her hip, along her flank. Glowing from the center of the mirrored wall before them, glowing and brightening against a black velvet background, emerged the image of full-rounded breasts and moving between them an heroic phallus, its movement exposing and then covering the great Duomo of its head, the theremin’s sinuous sound following its movements.

Up from the warm sheet of mirror they stood upon and which extended outward into darkness, there rose at Hannibal’s summons from between Clarice’s feet, a clear shaft of light that illuminated her inner thighs and fell precisely focused on her sex. The image before them went to black. Dimly visible but unmistakably erect behind her stood Hannibal, and as he pressed a hand gently to her back and she bent forward she felt his erection pressed along her cleft. She spread her wet lips, and attending closely to their reflection on the floor, reached back between her legs, and as Hannibal dipped, guided him within her and watched as his length entered inch by inch, her vagina stretching snugly, until their full conjunction mirrored itself in all its heart-stopping detail.

With the fading of the theremin, the rhythms that had spiced their intercourse at sea, Carmina Burana, filled the room. They moved with energy and more and more, their eyes fixed on their wonderful interaction, seen as never before together in such fullness, entirety, and perfection, their watching heightening the delectation rising, spreading from the smooth interfacing of their mucosa deeper and deeper into the seat of sensation.

Suddenly Clarice cried out, “Oh, God!,” deepening the curve in the small of her back and pulling Hannibal deeper with both her hands but never letting her eyes waver, “This is outrageous. I love it, I love it.” Hannibal’s middle finger-tip was circling her clitoris and they watched as its delicate sheath rippled around the wet pad of his finger. “Hannibal,” she shouted, “faster, faster!” He rotated his finger lightly as before but faster and thrust himself into Clarice with a rising tempo, their bodies with each thrust now meeting audibly. “Faster, oh yes, yes, yes!” Clarice reached for Hannibal’s piston and climaxed.  Her own orgasm overflowed with Hannibal’s.

Hannibal sank on Clarice’s back as Clarice sat on Hannibal’s slippery half-flexed thighs. Then Hannibal’s breathing eased and after another moment he lightly picked her up and carried her to the bed that awaited them against a mirrored wall, its mattress but ten inches above the mirrored floor, eider-down silk pillows were scattered about its vast cashmere covered surface.

They pulled pillows under their heads and lay back in each other’s arms.  Carmina Burana had stopped with their final shouts, and now Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits drew over them a coverlet of peace, fulfillment, and love.

Chapter 101. xiii

The months passed in security, contentment, and ever-deepening love. They relished the delights of the mirrored room, but chose for their regular use another bedroom, simple and sparely decorated but with a replica of the ten-inch high bed and its surface designed for love-making in its endless varieties. They knew their present life was wholly discontinuous with their lives that preceded the night of brutal chaos at the Verger Farm and Clarice’s long return journey from near-extinction to life, health, and love under the tender care of Dr Hannibal Lecter. Her progress in acquiring languages proceeded apace, and Hannibal’s Clavier, re-strung and restored throughout, resounded with Bach and Scarlatti once again, and if a connoisseur now overheard the Goldberg Variations borne across the water by the Southeast Trades he would never detect a flaw, however slight, from a defective finger in the player’s left hand.

One would judge from appearances that Eric Pickford, moving into a new and far more spacious house in Port Antonio with a striking young Jamaican girl for a companion, would be similarly, if not equally, content, but such, alas, was not the case. Eric had known from the start the multiple of profit from the sale of ganga in Jamaica and on the streets of Miami, U. S. A. He found it unfair, but at first he co-existed with the fact.

As time went on, however, it came to bore in on him as an insupportable injustice. He began to scheme to share the lucre from both ends of his enterprise. Prudently taking Philomena with him he flew to Miami and it was a month before they returned. One day Philomena was nowhere to be found and shortly thereafter a Morris Minor with all its windows down blocked his driveway as he was backing his Mini-Cooper out of his garage, Four men with dredlocks and Uzis walked up to him and severally emptied a clip in him from several angles, returned to their Morris, and drove back, it is assumed, to West Kingston.

Everyone in Port Antonio had the news within the hour. It even wafted around Folly Point and on to Woods Island where Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling learned a pretty reliable version of the facts.

“Well Clarice,” said Hannibal, “it appears that our destiny lies yet elsewhere, for as you of all people should know, an investigation into the question of who put the quietus on Eric Pickford begins with the command, ‘Follow the money,’ That would lead straight to us. Pity that young man was such a fool.” He reached for his wireless phone and called the Club Nautico in San Juan. He spoke in Spanish, for courtesy, although English speakers can manage perfectly well to have their needs attended to there.

“Harrison Fell here. How soon can you haul my ketch ‘Clarice’ to paint the bottom and perform whatever chores are necessary to fit her for sailing on from Puerto Rico to South America? Rio, possibly beyond? Good. We’re in Port Antonio and will start for San Juan day after tomorrow. We’ll tie alongside somewhere until you’re ready for us. Yes ‘Clarice.’ Lloyd’s Register page 337, 45 by 12 by six and a half. Abeking and Rasmussen. I have her docking plan, of course. Check my credit with Morgan Stanley. Right. Good. See you then.”

“Oh, Hannibal. Where did you say we were going?”

“I didn’t say, my darling, but I think Buenos Aires is a pretty good likelihood.”

Fin

Copyright 2001, Frank Skipp