Padme's Library: thomas harris

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Friday, October 13, 2023

🎃📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🎃: The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Summary:

Hannibal Lector #2

An ingenious, masterfully written novel, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs is a classic of suspense and storytelling and the basis for the Oscar award-winning horror film starring Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

A serial murderer known only by a grotesquely apt nickname—Buffalo Bill—is stalking particular women. He has a purpose, but no one can fathom it, for the bodies are discovered in different states. Clarice Starling, a young trainee at the F.B.I. Academy, is surprised to be summoned by Jack Crawford, Chief of the Bureau's Behavioral Science section. Her assignment: to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and grisly killer now kept under close watch in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter's insight into the minds of murderers could help track and capture Buffalo Bill.

Smart and attractive, Starling is shaken to find herself in a strange, intense relationship with the acutely perceptive Lecter. His cryptic clues—about Buffalo Bill and about her—launch Clarice on a search that every reader will find startling, harrowing, and totally compelling.

CHAPTER 1

Behavioral Science, the FBI section that deals with serial murder, is on the bottom floor of the Academy building at Quantico, half-buried in the earth. Clarice Starling reached it flushed after a fast walk from Hogan’s Alley on the firing range. She had grass in her hair and grass stains on her FBI Academy windbreaker from diving to the ground under fire in an arrest problem on the range.

No one was in the outer office, so she fluffed briefly by her reflection in the glass doors. She knew she could look all right without primping. Her hands smelled of gunsmoke, but there was no time to wash—Section Chief Crawford’s summons had said now.

She found Jack Crawford alone in the cluttered suite of offices. He was standing at someone else’s desk talking on the telephone and she had a chance to look him over for the first time in a year. What she saw disturbed her.

Normally, Crawford looked like a fit, middle-aged engineer who might have paid his way through college playing baseball—a crafty catcher, tough when he blocked the plate. Now he was thin, his shirt collar was too big, and he had dark puffs under his reddened eyes. Everyone who could read the papers knew Behavioral Science section was catching hell. Starling hoped Crawford wasn’t on the juice. That seemed most unlikely here.

Crawford ended his telephone conversation with a sharp “No.” He took her file from under his arm and opened it.

“Starling, Clarice M., good morning,” he said.

“Hello.” Her smile was only polite.

“Nothing’s wrong. I hope the call didn’t spook you.”

“No.” Not totally true, Starling thought.

“Your instructors tell me you’re doing well, top quarter of the class.”

“I hope so, they haven’t posted anything.”

“I ask them from time to time.”

That surprised Starling; she had written Crawford off as a two-faced recruiting sergeant son of a bitch.

She had met Special Agent Crawford when he was a guest lecturer at the University of Virginia. The quality of his criminology seminars was a factor in her coming to the Bureau. She wrote him a note when she qualified for the Academy, but he never replied, and for the three months she had been a trainee at Quantico, he had ignored her.

Starling came from people who do not ask for favors or press for friendship, but she was puzzled and regretful at Crawford’s behavior. Now, in his presence, she liked him again, she was sorry to note.

Clearly something was wrong with him. There was a peculiar cleverness in Crawford, aside from his intelligence, and Starling had first noticed it in his color sense and the textures of his clothing, even within the FBI-clone standards of agent dress. Now he was neat but drab, as though he were molting.

“A job came up and I thought about you,” he said. “It’s not really a job, it’s more of an interesting errand. Push Berry’s stuff off that chair and sit down. You put down here that you want to come directly to Behavioral Science when you get through with the Academy.”

“I do.”

“You have a lot of forensics, but no law enforcement background. We look for six years, minimum.”

“My father was a marshal, I know the life.”

Crawford smiled a little. “What you do have is a double major in psychology and criminology, and how many summers working in a mental health center—two?”

“Two.”

“Your counselor’s license, is it current?”

“It’s good for two more years. I got it before you had the seminar at UVA—before I decided to do this.”

“You got stuck in the hiring freeze.”

Starling nodded. “I was lucky though—I found out in time to qualify as a Forensic Fellow. Then I could work in the lab until the Academy had an opening.”

“You wrote to me about coming here, didn’t you, and I don’t think I answered—I know I didn’t. I should have.”

“You’ve had plenty else to do.”

“Do you know about VI-CAP?”

“I know it’s the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. The Law Enforcement Bulletin says you’re working on a database, but you aren’t operational yet.”

Crawford nodded. “We’ve developed a questionnaire. It applies to all the known serial murderers in modern times.” He handed her a thick sheaf of papers in a flimsy binding. “There’s a section for investigators, and one for surviving victims, if any. The blue is for the killer to answer if he will, and the pink is a series of questions an examiner asks the killer, getting his reactions as well as his answers. It’s a lot of paperwork.”

Paperwork. Clarice Starling’s self-interest snuffled ahead like a keen beagle. She smelled a job offer coming—probably the drudgery of feeding raw data into a new computer system. It was tempting to get into Behavioral Science in any capacity she could, but she knew what happens to a woman if she’s ever pegged as a secretary—it sticks until the end of time. A choice was coming, and she wanted to choose well.

Crawford was waiting for something—he must have asked her a question. Starling had to scramble to recall it:

“What tests have you given? Minnesota Multiphasic, ever? Rorschach?”

“Yes, MMPI, never Rorschach,” she said. “I’ve done Thematic Apperception and I’ve given children Bender-Gestalt.”

“Do you spook easily, Starling?”

“Not yet.”

“See, we’ve tried to interview and examine all the thirty-two known serial murderers we have in custody, to build up a database for psychological profiling in unsolved cases. Most of them went along with it—I think they’re driven to show off, a lot of them. Twenty-seven were willing to cooperate. Four on death row with appeals pending clammed up, understandably. But the one we want the most, we haven’t been able to get. I want you to go after him tomorrow in the asylum.”

Clarice Starling felt a glad knocking in her chest and some apprehension too.

“Who’s the subject?”

“The psychiatrist—Dr. Hannibal Lecter,” Crawford said.

A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering.

Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. “Hannibal the Cannibal,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, well— Okay, right. I’m glad of the chance, but you have to know I’m wondering—why me?”

“Mainly because you’re available,” Crawford said. “I don’t expect him to cooperate. He’s already refused, but it was through an intermediary—the director of the hospital. I have to be able to say our qualified examiner went to him and asked him personally. There are reasons that don’t concern you. I don’t have anybody left in this section to do it.”

“You’re jammed—Buffalo Bill—and the things in Nevada,” Starling said.

“You got it. It’s the old story—not enough warm bodies.”

“You said tomorrow—you’re in a hurry. Any bearing on a current case?”

“No. I wish there were.”

“If he balks on me, do you still want a psychological evaluation?”

“No. I’m waist-deep in inaccessible-patient evaluations of Dr. Lecter and they’re all different.”

Crawford shook two vitamin C tablets into his palm, and mixed an Alka-Seltzer at the water cooler to wash them down. “It’s ridiculous, you know; Lecter’s a psychiatrist and he writes for the psychiatric journals himself—extraordinary stuff—but it’s never about his own little anomalies. He pretended to go along with the hospital director, Chilton, once in some tests—sitting around with a blood-pressure cuff on his penis, looking at wreck pictures—then Lecter published first what he’d learned about Chilton and made a fool out of him. He responds to serious correspondence from psychiatric students in fields unrelated to his case, and that’s all he does. If he won’t talk to you, I just want straight reporting. How does he look, how does his cell look, what’s he doing. Local color, so to speak. Watch out for the press going in and coming out. Not the real press, the supermarket press. They love Lecter even better than Prince Andrew.”

“Didn’t a sleazo magazine offer him fifty thousand dollars for some recipes? I seem to remember that,” Starling said.

Crawford nodded. “I’m pretty sure the National Tattler has bought somebody inside the hospital and they may know you’re coming after I make the appointment.”

Crawford leaned forward until he faced her at a distance of two feet. She watched his half-glasses blur the bags under his eyes. He had gargled recently with Listerine.

“Now. I want your full attention, Starling. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes sir.”

“Be very careful with Hannibal Lecter. Dr. Chilton, the head of the mental hospital, will go over the physical procedure you use to deal with him. Don’t deviate from it. Do not deviate from it one iota for any reason. If Lecter talks to you at all, he’ll just be trying to find out about you. It’s the kind of curiosity that makes a snake look in a bird’s nest. We both know you have to back-and-forth a little in interviews, but you tell him no specifics about yourself. You don’t want any of your personal facts in his head. You know what he did to Will Graham.”

“I read about it when it happened.”

“He gutted Will with a linoleum knife when Will caught up with him. It’s a wonder Will didn’t die. Remember the Red Dragon? Lecter turned Francis Dolarhyde onto Will and his family. Will’s face looks like damn Picasso drew him, thanks to Lecter. He tore a nurse up in the asylum. Do your job, just don’t ever forget what he is.”

“And what’s that? Do you know?”

“I know he’s a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure. Maybe you’ll find out; I didn’t pick you out of a hat, Starling. You asked me a couple of interesting questions when I was at UVA. The Director will see your own report over your signature—if it’s clear and tight and organized. I decide that. And I will have it by 0900 Sunday. Okay, Starling, carry on in the prescribed manner.”

Crawford smiled at her, but his eyes were dead.

A fledgling FBI agent enlists a psychopath's help in catching a serial killer.

Release Date: February 14, 1991

Release Time: 118 minutes

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast:

Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling

Masha Skorobogatov as young Clarice

Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter

Scott Glenn as Jack Crawford

Ted Levine as Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb

Anthony Heald as Dr. Frederick Chilton

Brooke Smith as Catherine Martin

Diane Baker as U.S. Senator Ruth Martin

Kasi Lemmons as Ardelia Mapp

Frankie Faison as Barney Matthews

Tracey Walter as Lamar

Charles Napier as Lt. Bill Boyle

Stuart Rudin as Miggs

Danny Darst as Sgt. Tate

Alex Coleman as Sgt. Jim Pembry

Dan Butler as Roden

Paul Lazar as Pilcher

Ron Vawter as Paul Krendler

Roger Corman as FBI Director Hayden Burke

George A. Romero as a jailer

Chris Isaak as SWAT Commander

Harry Northup as Mr. Bimmel

Brent Hinkley as Officer Murray

Cynthia Ettinger as Officer Jacobs

Lauren Roselli as Stacy Hubka

Daniel Von Bargen as SWAT Negotiator

Darla as the dog, Precious

Awards:

64th Academy Awards

Jonathan Demme - Best Achievement in Directing - Won

Craig McKay - Best Achievement in Film Editing - Nominated

Tom Fleischman, Christopher Newman - Best Achievement in Sound - Nominated

Ron Bozman, Edward Saxon, Kenneth Utt - Best Motion Picture of the Year - Won

Anthony Hopkins - Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role - Won

Jodie Foster - Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role - Won

Ted Tally - Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - Won

45th BAFTA Awards

Anthony Hopkins - Best Actor in a Leading Role - Won

Jodie Foster - Best Actress in a Leading Role - Won

Ted Tally - Best Adapted Screenplay - Nominated

Tak Fujimoto - Best Cinematography - Nominated

Craig McKay - Best Editing - Nominated

Ron Bozman, Jonathan Demme, Edward Saxon, Kenneth Utt - Best Film - Nominated

Howard Shore - Best Original Film Music - Nominated

Tom Fleischman, Skip Lievsay, Christopher Newman - Best Sound - Nominated

Jonathan Demme - The David Lean Award for Achievement in Direction - Nominated

49th Golden Globes

Jonathan Demme - Best Director-Motion Picture - Nominated

Best Motion Picture - Drama - Nominated

Anthony Hopkins - Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama - Nominated

Jodie Foster - Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama - Won

Ted Tally - Best Screenplay-Motion Picture - Nominated

AFI 100 Years

100 Movies – #65

100 Thrills – #5

100 Heroes & Villains: Clarice Starling – #6 Hero & Hannibal Lecter – #1 Villain

100 Movie Quotes: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." – #21

Trailer

Clips

Author Bio:

Thomas Harris began his writing career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in New York City. His first novel, Black Sunday, was printed in 1975, followed by Red Dragon in 1981, The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, Hannibal in 1999, and Hannibal Rising in 2006.

KOBO / iTUNES / AUDIBLE

AUDIOBOOKS / GOOGLE PLAY

CHIRP / IMDB / INDIE BOUND

BOOKBUB / B&N / PENGUIN

AMAZON / WIKI / GOODREADS

The Silence of the Lambs #2

AMAZON US / AMAZON UK / B&N

KOBO / iTUNES / iTUNES AUDIO

GOOGLE PLAY / AUDIBLE / WIKI

AUDIOBOOKS / CHIRP / PENGUIN

INDIE BOUND / GOODREADS TBR

Hannibal Lector Series

AMAZON US / AMAZON UK

B&N / AUDIBLE / iTUNES

iTUNES AUDIO / GOOGLE PLAY

KOBO / AUDIOBOOKS / CHIRP

PENGUIN / GOODREADS TBR

Film

AMAZON US / AMAZON UK

B&N / AFI / WIKI

ALL MOVIE / IMDB / TCM

Friday, February 5, 2021

📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘: Black Sunday by Thomas Harris

Summary:

From the genius of Thomas Harris, the #1 New York Times bestselling author who introduced the world to Hannibal Lecter, comes the terrifying and prophetic novel that set the standard for international suspense and heralded one of the most arresting voices in contemporary fiction.

It’s the event of the year. Eighty thousand fans have converged in New Orleans for Super Bowl Sunday. Among them is a young man named Michael Lander. But he has not come to watch the game. A tool for a radical terrorist group, he’s has come to play one. To enact revenge. To feed the rage of others. And the whole world will be watching. Unless someone stops him.

But first, they have to find him.

NIGHT FELL AS THE AIRPORT taxi rattled along the six miles of coastal road into Beirut. From the backseat, Dahlia Iyad watched the Mediterranean surf fade from white to gray in the last light. She was thinking about the American. She would have to answer many questions about him.

The taxi turned onto the Rue Verdun and threaded its way into the heart of the city, the Sabra district, filled with many of the refugees from Palestine. The driver needed no instructions. He scanned his rearview mirror closely, then turned off his lights and pulled into a small courtyard near the Rue Jeb el-Nakhel. The courtyard was pitch dark. Dahlia could hear distant traffic sounds and the ticking of the motor as it cooled. A minute passed.

The taxi rocked as the four doors were snatched open and a powerful flashlight blinded the driver. Dahlia could smell the oil on the pistol held an inch from her eye.

The man with the flashlight came to the rear door of the taxi, and the pistol was withdrawn.

“Djinniy,” she said softly.

“Get out and follow me.” He ran the Arabic words together in the accent of the Jabal.

A hard tribunal waited for Dahlia Iyad in the quiet room in Beirut. Hafez Najeer, head of Al Fatah’s elite Jihaz al-Rasd (RASD) field intelligence unit, sat at a desk leaning his head back against the wall. He was a tall man with a small head. His subordinates secretly called him “The Praying Mantis.” To hold his full attention was to feel sick and frightened.

Najeer was the commander of Black September. He did not believe in the concept of a “Middle East situation.” The restoration of Palestine to the Arabs would not have elated him. He believed in holocaust, the fire that purifies. So did Dahlia lyad.

And so did the other two men in the room: Abu Ali, who controlled the Black September assassination squads in Italy and France, and Muhammad Fasil, ordnance expert and architect of the attack on the Olympic Village at Munich. Both were members of RASD, the brains of Black September. Their position was not acknowledged by the larger Palestinian guerrilla movement, for Black September lives within Al Fatah as desire lives in the body.

It was these three men who decided that Black September would strike within the United States. More than fifty plans had been conceived and discarded. Meanwhile, U.S. munitions continued to pour onto the Israeli docks at Haifa.

Suddenly a solution had come, and now, if Najeer gave his final approval, the mission would be in the hands of this young woman.

She tossed her djellaba on a chair and faced them. “Good evening, comrades.”

“Welcome, Comrade Dahlia,” Najeer said. He had not risen when she entered the room. Nor had the other two. Her appearance had changed during her year in the United States. She was chic in her pantsuit and a little disarming.

“The American is ready,” she said. “I am satisfied that he will go through with it. He lives for it.”

“How stable is he?” Najeer seemed to be staring into her skull.

“Stable enough. I support him. He depends on me.”

“I understand that from your reports, but code is clumsy. There are questions. Ali?”

Abu Ali looked at Dahlia carefully. She remembered him from his psychology lectures at the American University of Beirut.

“The American always appears rational?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But you believe him to be insane?”

“Sanity and apparent rationality are not the same, comrade.”

“Is his dependency on you increasing? Does he have periods of hostility toward you?”

“Sometimes he is hostile, but not as often now.”

“Is he impotent?”

“He says he was impotent from the time of his release in North Vietnam until two months ago.” Dahlia watched Ali. With his small, neat gestures and his moist eyes, he reminded her of a civet cat.

“Do you take credit for overcoming his impotence?”

“It is not a matter of credit, comrade. It is a matter of control. My body is useful in maintaining that control. If a gun worked better, I would use a gun.”

Najeer nodded approval. He knew she was telling the truth. Dahlia had helped train the three Japanese terrorists who struck at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, slaying at random. Originally there had been four Japanese terrorists. One lost his nerve in training, and, with the other three watching, Dahlia blew his head off with a Schmeisser machine pistol.

“How can you be sure he will not have an attack of conscience and turn you in to the Americans?” Ali persisted.

“What would they get if he did?” Dahlia said. “I am a small catch. They would get the explosives, but the Americans have plenty of plastique already, as we have good reason to know.” This was intended for Najeer, and she saw him look up at her sharply.

Israeli terrorists almost invariably used American C-4 plastic explosive. Najeer remembered carrying his brother’s body out of a shattered apartment in Bhandoum, then going back inside to look for the legs.

“The American turned to us because he needed explosives. You know that, comrade,” Dahlia said. “He will continue to need me for other things. We do not offend his politics, because he has none. Neither does the term conscience apply to him in the usual sense. He will not turn me in.”

“Let’s look at him again,” Najeer said. “Comrade Dahlia, you have studied this man in one setting. Let me show him to you in quite different circumstances. Ali?”

Abu Ali set a 16-millimeter movie projector on the desk and switched out the lights. “We got this quite recently from a source in North Vietnam, Comrade Dahlia. It was shown once on American television, but that was before you were stationed in the House of War. I doubt that you have seen it.”

The numbered film leader blurred on the wall and distorted sound came from the speaker. As the film picked up speed, the sound tightened into the anthem of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the square of light on the wall became a whitewashed room. Seated on the floor were two dozen American prisoners of war. A cut to a lectern with a microphone clamped to it. A tall, gaunt man approached the lectern, walking slowly. He wore the baggy uniform of a POW, socks, and thong sandals. One of his hands remained in the folds of his jacket, the other was placed flat on his thigh as he bowed to the officials at the front of the room. He turned to the microphone and spoke slowly.

“I am Michael J. Lander, lieutenant commander, U.S. Navy, captured February 10, 1967, while firebombing a civilian hospital near Ninh Binh ... near Ninh Binh. Though the evidence of my war crimes is unmistakable, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has not done to me punishment, but showed me the suffering which resulted from American war crimes like those of my own and others... and others. I am sorry for what I have done. I am sorry we killed children. I call upon the American people to stop this war. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam holds no ... holds no animosity toward the American people. It is the warmongers in power. I remain ashamed of what I have done.”

The camera panned over the other prisoners, sitting like an attentive class, their faces carefully blank. The film ended with the anthem.

“Clumsy enough,” said Ali, whose English was almost flawless. “The hand must have been tied to his side.” He had watched Dahlia closely during the film. Her eyes had widened for a second at the close-up of the gaunt face. Otherwise she remained impassive.

“Firebombing a hospital,” Ali mused. “He has experience in this sort of thing, then.” “He was captured flying a rescue helicopter.

He was trying to retrieve the crew of a downed Phantom,” Dahlia said. “You have seen my report.”

“I have seen what he told you,” Najeer said.

“He tells me the truth. He is beyond lying,” she said. “I have lived with him for two months. I know.”

“It’s a small point, anyway,” Ali said. “There are other things about him of much more interest.”

During the next half hour, Ali questioned her about the most intimate details of the American’s behavior. When he had finished, it seemed to Dahlia that there was a smell in the room. Real or imagined, it took her back to the Palestinian refugee camp at Tyre when she was eight years old, folding the wet bedroll where her mother and the man who brought food had groaned together in the dark.

Fasil took over the questioning. He had the blunt, capable hands of a technician, and there were calluses on the tips of his fingers. He sat forward in his chair, his small satchel on the floor beside him.

“Has the American handled explosives?”

“Only packaged military ordnance. But he has planned carefully and in minute detail. His plan appears reasonable,” Dahlia answered.

“It appears reasonable to you, comrade. Perhaps because you are so intimately involved with it. We will see how reasonable it is.”

She wished for the American then, wished these men could hear his slow voice as, step by step, he reduced his terrible project into a series of clearly defined problems, each with a solution.

She took a deep breath and began to talk about the technical problems involved in killing eighty thousand people all at once, including the new president of the United States, with an entire nation watching.

“The limitation is weight,” Dahlia said. “We are restricted to six hundred kilos of plastique. Give me a cigarette please, and a pen and paper.”

Bending over the desk, she drew a curve that resembled a cross section of a bowl. Inside it and slightly above, she drew another, smaller curve of the same parameter.

“This is the target,” she said, indicating the larger curve. Her pen moved to the smaller curve. “The principle of the shaped charge, it—”

“Yes, yes,” Fasil snapped. “Like a great claymore mine. Simple. The density of the crowd?”

“Seated shoulder to shoulder, entirely exposed at this angle from the pelvis up. I need to know if the plastique—”

“Comrade Najeer will tell you what you need to know,” Fasil said loftily.

Dahlia continued unfazed. “I need to know if the explosive Comrade Najeer may choose to give me is prepackaged antipersonnel plastique with steel balls, such as a claymore contains. The weight requested is of plastique only. The containers and this type of shrapnel would not be of use.”

“Why?”

“Weight, of course.” She was tired of Fasil.

“And if you have no shrapnel? What then, comrade? If you are counting on concussion, allow me to inform you—”

“Allow me to inform you, comrade. I need your help and I will have it. I do not pretend to your expertise. We are not contending, you and I. Jealousy has no place in the Revolution.”

“Tell her what she wants to know.” Najeer’s voice was hard.

Instantly Fasil said, “The plastique is not packaged with shrapnel. What will you use?”

“The outside of the shaped charge will be covered with layers of .177 caliber rifle darts. The American believes they will disperse over 150 degrees vertically through a horizontal arc of 260 degrees. It works out to an average of 3.5 projectiles per person in the kill zone.”

Fasil’s eyes widened. He had seen an American claymore mine, no bigger than a schoolbook, blast a bloody path through a column of advancing troops and mow down the grass in a swath around them. What she proposed would be like a thousand claymores going off at once.

“Detonation?”

“Electric blasting cap fired by a twelve-volt system already in the craft. There is an identical backup system with separate battery. Also a fuse.”

“That’s all,” the technician said. “I am finished.”

Dahlia looked at him. He was smiling—whether from satisfaction or fear of Hafez Najeer, she could not tell. She wondered if Fasil knew the larger curve represented Tulane Stadium, where on January 12 the first twenty-one minutes of the Super Bowl game would be played.

Dahlia waited for an hour in a room down the hall. When she was summoned back to Najeer’s office, she found the Black September commander alone. Now she would know.

The room was dark except for the area lit by a reading lamp. Najeer, leaning back against the wall, wore a hood of shadow. His hands were in the light and they toyed with a black commando knife. When he spoke, his voice was very soft.

“Do it, Dahlia. Kill as many as you can.”

Abruptly he leaned in to the light and smiled as though relieved, his teeth bright in his dark face. He seemed almost jovial as he opened the technician’s case and withdrew a small statue. It was a figure of the Madonna, like the ones in the windows of religious articles stores, the painting bright and hurriedly executed. “Examine it,” he said.

She turned the figure in her hands. It weighed about a half-kilo and did not feel like plaster. A faint ridge ran around the sides of the figure as though it had been pressed in a mold rather than cast. Across the bottom were the words MADE IN TAIWAN.

“Plastique,” Najeer said. “Similar to the American C-4 but made farther east. It has some advantages over C-4. It’s more powerful for one thing, at some small cost to its stability, and it is very malleable when heated above 50 degrees centigrade.

“Twelve hundred of these will arrive in New York two weeks from tomorrow aboard the freighter Leticia. The manifest will show they were transshipped from Taiwan. The importer, Muzi, will claim them on the dock. Afterward you will make sure of his silence.”

Najeer rose and stretched. “You have done well, Comrade Dahlia, and you have come a long way. You will rest now with me.”

Najeer had a sparsely furnished apartment on an upper floor of 18 Rue Verdun, similar to the quarters Fasil and Ali had on other floors of the building.

Dahlia sat on the side of Najeer’s bed with a small tape recorder in her lap. He had ordered her to make a tape for use on Radio Beirut after the strike was made. She was naked, and Najeer, watching her from the couch, saw her become visibly aroused as she talked into the microphone.

“Citizens of America,” she said, “today the Palestinian freedom fighters have struck a great blow in the heart of your country. This horror was visited upon you by the merchants of death in your own land, who supply the butchers of Israel. Your leaders have been deaf to the cries of the homeless. Your leaders have ignored the ravages by the Jews in Palestine and have committed their own crimes in Southeast Asia. Guns, warplanes, and hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed from your country to the hands of warmongers while millions of your own people starve. The people will not be denied.

“Hear this, people of America. We want to be your brothers. It is you who must overthrow the filth that rules you. Henceforth, for every Arab that dies by an Israeli hand, an American will die by Arab hands. Every Moslem holy place, every Christian holy place destroyed by Jewish gangsters will be avenged with the destruction of a property in America.”

Dahlia’s face was flushed and her nipples were erect as she continued. “We hope this cruelty will go no further. The choice is yours. We hope never to begin another year with bloodshed and suffering. Salaam aleikum.”

Najeer was standing before her, and she reached for him as his bathrobe fell to the floor.

Two miles from the room where Dahlia and Najeer were locked together in the tangled sheets, a small Israeli missile launch sliced quietly up the Mediterranean.

The launch hove to one thousand meters south of the Grotte aux Pigeons, and a raft was slipped over the side. Twelve armed men climbed down into it. They wore business suits and neckties tailored by Russians, Arabs, and French-men. All wore crepe-soled shoes and none carried any identification. Their faces were hard. It was not their first visit to Lebanon.

The water was smoky gray under the quarter moon, and the sea was riffled by a warm offshore breeze. Eight of the men paddled, stretching to make the longest strokes possible as they covered the four hundred meters to the sandy beach of the Rue Verdun. It was four eleven a.m., twenty-three minutes before sunrise and seventeen minutes before the first blue glaze of day would spread over the city. Silently they pulled the raft up on the sand, covered it with a sand-colored canvas, and walked quickly up the beach to the Rue Ramlet el-Baida, where four men and four cars awaited them, silhouetted against the glow from the tourist hotels to the north.

They were only a few yards from the cars when a brown-and-white Land Rover braked loudly thirty yards up the Rue Ramlet, its headlights on the little convoy. Two men in tan uniforms leaped from the truck, their guns leveled.

“Stand still. Identify yourselves.”

There was a sound like popping corn, and dust flew from the Lebanese officers’ uniforms as they collapsed in the road, riddled by 9 mm bullets from the raiders’ silenced Parabel lums.

A third officer, at the wheel of the truck, tried to drive away. A bullet shattered the windshield and his forehead. The truck careered into a palm tree at the roadside, and the policeman was thrown forward onto the horn. Two men ran to the truck and pulled the dead man off the horn, but lights were going on in some of the beachfront apartments.

A window opened, and there was an angry shout in Arabic. “What is that hellish racket? Someone call the police.”

The leader of the raid, standing by the truck, shouted back in hoarse and drunken Arabic, “Where is Fatima? We’ll leave if she doesn’t get down here soon.”

“You drunken bastards get away from here or I’ll call the police myself.”

“Aleikum salaam, neighbor. I’m going,” the drunken voice from the street replied. The light in the apartment went out.

In less than two minutes the sea closed over the truck and the bodies it contained.

Two of the cars went south on the Rue Ramlet, while the other two turned onto the Corniche Ras Beyrouth for two blocks, then turned north again on the Rue Verdun....

Number 18 Rue Verdun was guarded round the dock. One sentry was stationed in the foyer, and another armed with a machine gun watched from the roof of the building across the street. Now the rooftop sentry lay in a curious attitude behind his gun, his throat smiling wetly in the moonlight. The sentry from the foyer lay outside the door where he had gone to investigate a drunken lullaby.

Najeer had fallen asleep when Dahlia gently pulled free from him and walked into the bathroom. She stood under the shower for a long time, enjoying the stinging spray. Najeer was not an exceptional lover. She smiled as she soaped herself. She was thinking about the American, and she did not hear the footsteps in the hall.

Najeer half-started from the bed as the door to his apartment smashed open and a flashlight blinded him.

“Comrade Najeer!” the man said urgently.

“Aiwa:”

The machine gun flickered, and blood exploded from Najeer as the bullets slammed him back into the wall. The killer swept everything from the top of Najeer’s desk into a bag as an explosion in another part of the building shook the room.

The naked girl in the bathroom doorway seemed frozen in horror. The killer pointed his machine gun at her wet breast. His finger tightened on the trigger. It was a beautiful breast. The muzzle of the machine gun wavered.

“Put on some clothes, you Arab slut,” he said, and backed out of the room.

The explosion two floors below, which tore out the wall of Abu Ali’s apartment, killed Ali and his wife instantly. The raiders, coughing in the dust, had started for the stairs, when a thin man in pajamas came out of the apartment at the end of the hall, trying to cock a submachine gun. He was still trying when a hail of bullets tore through him, blowing shreds of his pajamas into his flesh and across the hall.

The raiders scrambled to the street and their cars were roaring southward toward the sea as the first police sirens sounded.

Dahlia, wearing Najeer’s bathrobe and clutching her purse, was on the street in seconds, mingling with the crowd that had poured out of the buildings on the block. She was trying desperately to think, when she felt a hard hand grip her arm. It was Muhammad Fasil. A bullet had cut a bloody stripe across his cheek. He wrapped his tie around his hand and held it to the wound.

“Najeer?” he asked.

“Dead.”

“Ali, too, I think. His window blew out just as I turned the corner. I shot at them from the car, but—listen to me carefully. Najeer has given the order. Your mission must be completed. The explosives are not affected, they will arrive on schedule. Automatic weapons also—your Schmeisser and an AK-47, packed separately with bicycle parts.”

Dahlia looked at him with smoke-reddened eyes. “They will pay,” she said. “They will pay ten thousand to one.”

Fasil took her to a safe house in the Sabra to wait through the day. After dark he took her to the airport in his rattletrap Citroën. Her borrowed dress was two sizes too large, but she was too tired to care.

At ten thirty p.m., the Pan Am 707 roared out over the Mediterranean, and, before the Arabian lights faded off the starboard wing, Dahlia fell into an exhausted sleep.