Hannibal Rising

1

HANNIBAL THE GRIM (1365-1428) built Lecter Castle in five years, using for labor the soldiers he had captured at the Battle of Zalgiris. On the first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden and, mounting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of his provender.

Five hundred years later Hannibal Lecter, eight years old and eighth of the name, stood in the kitchen garden with his little sister Mischa and threw bread to the black swans on the black water of the moat. Mischa held on to Hannibal 's hand to steady herself and missed the moat entirely on several throws. Big carp stirred the lily pads and sent the dragonflies soaring.

Now the Alpha swan came out of the water, stumping toward the children on his short legs, hissing his challenge.

The swan had known Hannibal all his life and still he came, his black wings shutting out part of the sky.

"Ohh, Anniba!" Mischa said and hid behind Hannibal 's leg.

Hannibal raised his arms to shoulder height as his father had taught him to do, his reach augmented with willow branches held in his hands. The swan stopped to consider Hannibal 's greater wingspan, and retired to the water to feed.

"We go through this every day," Hannibal told the bird. But today was not every day and he wondered where the swans could flee.

Mischa in her excitement dropped her bread on the damp ground. When Hannibal stooped to help her, she was pleased to daub mud on his nose with her little star-shaped hand. He daubed a bit of mud on the end of her nose and they laughed at their reflections in the moat.

The children felt three hard thumps in the ground and the water shivered, blurring their faces. The sound of distant explosions rolled across the fields. Hannibal grabbed up his sister and ran for the castle.

The hunting wagon was in the courtyard, hitched to the great draft horse Cesar. Berndt in his hostler's apron and the houseman, Lothar, loaded three small trunks into the wagon box. Cook brought out a lunch.

"Master Lecter, Madame wants you in her room," Cook said.

Hannibal passed Mischa along to Nanny and ran up the hollowed steps.

Hannibal loved his mother's room with its many scents, the faces carved in the woodwork, its painted ceiling-Madame Lecter was of the Sforza on one side and a Visconti on the other, and she had brought the room with her from Milan.

She was excited now and her bright maroon eyes reflected the light redly in sparks. Hannibal held the casket as his mother pressed the lips of a cherub in the molding and a hidden cabinet opened. She scooped her jewels into the casket, and some bundled letters; there was not room for them all.

Hannibal thought she looked like the cameo portrait of her grandmother that tumbled into the box.

Clouds painted on the ceiling. As a baby nursing he used to open his eyes and see his mother's bosom blended with the clouds. The feel of the edges of her blouse against his face. The wet nurse too her gold cross gleamed like sunlight between prodigious clouds and pressed against his cheek when she held him, she rubbing the mark of the cross on his skin to make it go away before Madame might see it.

But his father was in the doorway now, carrying the ledgers.

"Simonetta, we need to go."

The baby linens were packed in Mischa's copper bathtub and Madame put the casket among them. She looked around the room, and took a small painting of Venice from its tripod on the sideboard, considered a moment, and gave it to Hannibal.

"Take this to Cook. Take it by the frame." She smiled at him. "Don't smudge the back."

Lothar carried the bathtub out to the wagon in the courtyard, where Mischa fretted, uneasy at the stir around her.

Hannibal held Mischa up to pat Cesar's muzzle. She gave the horse's nose a few squeezes as well to see if it would honk. Hannibal took grain in his hand and trailed it on the ground in the courtyard to make an "M."

The pigeons flocked to it, making an "M" in living birds on the ground.

Hannibal traced the letter in Mischa's palm-she was approaching three years old and he despaired of her ever learning to read. "'M' for Mischa!" he said. She ran among the birds laughing and they flew up around her, circling the towers, lighting in the belfry.

Cook, a big man in kitchen whites, came out carrying a lunch. The horse rolled an eye at Cook and followed his progress with a rotating ear-when Cesar was a colt, Cook had run him out of the vegetable garden on a number of occasions, yelling oaths and swatting his rump with a broom.

"I'll stay and help you load the kitchen," Mr. Jakov said to Cook.

"Go with the boy," Cook said.

Count Lecter lifted Mischa into the wagon and Hannibal put his arms around her. Count Lecter cupped Hannibal 's face in his hand. Surprised by the tingle in his father's hand, Hannibal looked closely into Count Lecter's face.

"Three planes bombed the rail yards. Colonel Timka says we have at least a week, if they reach here at all, and then the fighting will be along the main roads. We'll be fine at the lodge."

It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's lightning sweep across Eastern Europe into Russia.

2

BERNDT WALKED AHEAD of the wagon on the forest path, careful of the horse's face, hacking back the overgrown branches with a Swiss half-pike.

Mr. Jakov followed on a mare, his saddlebags full of books. He was unused to horseback and he hugged the horse's neck to pass beneath the limbs. Sometimes where the trail was steep, he dismounted to push along with Lothar and Berndt and Count Lecter himself. Branches snapped back behind them to close the trail again.

Hannibal smelled greenery crushed by the wheels and Mischa's warm hair beneath his chin as she rode on his lap. He watched the German bombers pass over high. Their vapor trails made a musical staff and Hannibal hummed to his sister the notes the black puffs of flak made in the sky.

It was not a satisfying tune.

"No," Mischa said. "Annibasing 'Das Mannlein'!" And together they sang about the mysterious little man in the woods, Nanny joining in the swaying wagon and Mr. Jakov singing from horseback, though he preferred not to sing in German.

Ein Mannleinstehtim Waldeganzstill undstumm,

Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein urn,

Sagt, wermag das Mannleinsein

Das dastehtim Walde allein

Mit dempurporroten Mantelein

Two hard hours brought them to a clearing beneath the canopy of the high forest.

The hunting lodge had evolved over three hundred years from a crude shelter into a comfortable forest retreat, half-timbered with a steep roof to shed the snow. There was a small barn containing two stalls and a bunkhouse and, behind the lodge, a Victorian privy with gingerbread carvings, its roof just visible over the screening hedge.

Still visible in the foundations of the lodge are the stones of an altar built in the Dark Ages, by a people who venerated the grass snake.

Now Hannibal watched a grass snake flee that ancient place as Lothar cut back some vines so Nanny could open windows.

Count Lecter ran his hands over the big horse while it drank a gallon and a half from the well bucket. "Cook will have the kitchen packed by the time you get back, Berndt. Cesar can rest in his own stall overnight. You and Cook start back here at first light, no later. I want you well clear of the castle by morning."

Vladis Grutas entered the courtyard of Lecter Castle with his most pleasant expression, scanning the windows as he came. He waved and called out "Hello!"

Grutaswas a slight figure, dirty blond, in civilian clothes, with eyes so pale and blue they looked like discs of the empty sky. He called out "Hello in the house!" When there was no reply he went in the kitchen entrance and found cases of supplies packed on the kitchen floor.

Quickly he put coffee and sugar in his pack. The cellar door was open.

He looked down the long stairs and saw a light.

Violating another creature's den is the oldest taboo. To certain warps, slipping in offers the freezing feeling of arousal, as it did now.

Grutas went down the staircase into the cool cave air of the castle's vaulted dungeons. He peered through an arch and saw that the iron grate securing the wine room was open.

A rustling noise. Grutas could see labeled wine racks floor to ceiling filled with bottles and the cook's big shadow moving around the room as he worked by the light of two lanterns. Square wrapped packages were on the tasting table in the center of the room and, with them, a single small painting in an ornate frame.

Grutas showed his teeth when that big bastard of a cook came into view.

Now the cook's wide back was to the door as he worked over the table. A rustling of paper.

Grutas flattened himself against the wall in the shadow of the steps.

The cook wrapped the painting in paper and wrapped it in kitchen string, making a parcel like the others. With a lantern in his free hand, he reached up and pulled on an iron chandelier above the tasting table. A click and at the back of the wine cellar one end of a wine rack swung a few inches away from the wall of the room. Cook swung the rack away from the wall with a groan of hinges. Behind it was a door.

Cook went into the concealed room behind the wine cellar and hung one of his lanterns back there. Then he carried the parcels inside.

As he was swinging the wine rack closed, his back to the door, Grutas started up the steps. He heard a shot fired outside, and then the cook's voice below him.

"Who's that!"

Cook came behind him, fast on the stairs for a big man.

"Stop you! You were never to come here."

Grutas ran through the kitchen and into the courtyard waving and whistling.

Cook grabbed a stave from the corner and ran across the kitchen toward the courtyard when he saw a silhouette in the doorway, an unmistakable helmet shape, and three German paratroopers with submachine guns came into the room. Grutas was behind them.

"Hi, Cookie," Grutas said. He picked up a salted ham from the crate on the floor.

"Put back the meat," the German corporal said, pointing his weapon at Grutas as readily as he did at the cook. "Get outside, go with the patrol."

The trail was easier descending to the castle, Berndt making good time with the empty wagon, wrapping the reins around his arm while he lit his pipe. As he approached the edge of the forest he thought he saw a big stork taking off from high in a tree. As he got closer he saw the flapping white was fabric, a parachute caught in high limbs, the risers cut. Berndt stopped. He put down his pipe and slid off the wagon. He put his hand over Cesar's muzzle and spoke quietly into the horse's ear.

Then he moved forward on foot, cautious.

Suspended from a lower limb was a man in rough civilian clothes, newly hanged with the wire noose well into his neck, his face blue-black, his muddy boots a foot above the ground. Berndt turned back fast toward the wagon, looking for a place to turn around on the narrow trail, his own boots looking strange to him as he found footing on the rough ground.

They came out of the trees then, three German soldiers under a sergeant and six men in civilian clothes. The sergeant considered, drew back the bolt of his machine pistol. Berndt recognized one of the civilians.

"Grutas," he said.

"Berndt, goody Berndt, who always got up his lessons," Grutas said. He walked up to Berndt with a smile that seemed friendly enough.

"He can handle the horse," Grutas said to the German sergeant.

"Maybe he is your friend," the sergeant said.

"Maybe not," Grutas said, and spit in Berndt's face. "I hung the other one, didn't I? I knew him too. Why should we walk?" And softly, "I'll shoot him at the castle if you will lend me back my gun."

3

BLITZKRIEG, HITLER'S lightning war, was faster than anyone imagined.

At the castle Berndt found a company of the Totenkopf Death's Head Division, Waffen -SS. Two Panzer tanks were parked near the moat with a tank destroyer and some half-track trucks.

The gardener Ernst lay facedown in the kitchen yard with blowflies on his head.

Berndt saw this from the wagon box. Only the Germans rode in his wagon.

Grutas and the others had to walk behind. They were only Hilfswillige, or Hiwis, locals who volunteered to help the invading Nazis.

Berndt could see two soldiers, high on a tower of the castle, running down the Lecter's wild-boar pennant and putting up a radio aerial and a swastika flag in its place.

A major wearing SS black and the Totenkopf skull insignia came out of the castle to look at Cesar.

"Very nice, but too wide to ride," he said regretfully-he had brought his jodhpurs and spurs to ride for recreation.

The other horse would do. Behind him two storm troopers came out of the house, hustling Cook along between them.

"Where is the family?"

"In London, sir," Berndt said. "May I cover Ernst's body?"

The major motioned to his sergeant, who stuck the muzzle of the Schmeisser under Berndt's chin.

"And who will cover yours? Smell the barrel. It's still smoking. It can blow your fucking brains out too," the major said. "Where is the family?"

Berndt swallowed. "Fled to London, sir."

"Are you a Jew?"

"No, sir."

"A Gypsy?"

"No, sir."

He looked at a wad of letters from a desk in the house. "There is mail for a Jakov. Are you the Jew Jakov?"

"A tutor, sir. Long gone."

The major checked Berndt's earlobes to see if they were pierced. "Show the sergeant your dick." Then, "Shall I kill you or will you work?"

"Sir, these people all know each other," the sergeant said.

"Is that so? Perhaps they like each other." He turned to Grutas.

"Perhaps your fondness for your landsmen is more than you love us, hem, Hiwis?" The major turned to his sergeant. "Do you think we really need any of them?" The sergeant leveled the gun at Grutas and his men.

"The cook is a Jew," Grutas said. "Here is useful local knowledge-you let him cook for you, you would be dead within the hour from Jew poison." He pushed forward one of his men. "Pot Watcher can cook, and forage and soldier too."

Grutas went to the center of the courtyard, moving slowly, the muzzle of the sergeant's machine pistol tracking him. "Major, you wear the ring and the scars of Heidelberg. Here is military history, of the kind you yourself are making. This is the Ravenstone of Hannibal the Grim. Some of the most valiant Teutonic Knights died here. Is it not time to wash the stone with Jew blood?"

The major raised his eyebrows. "If you want to be SS, let's see you earn it." He nodded to his sergeant. The SS sergeant took a pistol from his flap holster. He shucked all the bullets but one from the clip and handed the pistol to Grutas. Two storm troopers dragged the cook to the Ravenstone.

The major seemed more interested in examining the horse. Grutas held the pistol to the cook's head and waited, wanting the major to watch. Cook spit on him.

Swallows started from the towers at the shot.

Berndt was put to moving furniture for the officers' billet upstairs. He looked to see if he had wet himself. He could hear the radio operator in a small room under the eaves, both code and voice transmissions in heavy static. The operator ran down the stairs with his pad in his hand and returned moments later to break down his equipment. They were moving east.

From an upper window Berndt watched the SS unit passing a backpack radio out of the Panzer to the small garrison they were leaving behind. Grutas and his scruffy civilians, issued German weapons now, carried out everything from the kitchen and piled the supplies into the back of a half-track truck with some support personnel. The troops mounted their vehicles. Grutas ran out of the castle to catch up. The unit moved toward Russia, taking Grutas and the other Hiwis. They seemed to have forgotten Berndt.

A squad of Panzergrenadiers with a machine gun and the radio were left behind at the castle. Berndt waited in the old tower latrine until dark.

The small German garrison all ate in the kitchen, with one sentry posted in the courtyard. They had found some schnapps in a kitchen cabinet.

Berndt came out of the tower latrine, thankful the stone floors did not creak.

He looked into the radio room. The radio was on Madame's dresser, scent bottles pushed off on the floor. Berndt looked at it. He thought about Ernst dead in the kitchen yard and Cook spitting on Grutas with his last breath. Berndt slipped into the room. He felt he should apologize to Madame for the intrusion. He came down the service stairs in his stocking feet carrying his boots and the two packs of the radio and charger and slipped out a sally port. The radio and hand-cranked generator made a heavy load, more than twenty kilos. Berndt humped it into the woods and hid it. He was sorry he could not take the horse.

Dusk and firelight glowing on the painted timbers of the hunting lodge, shining in the dusty eyes of trophy animals as the family gathered around the fireplace. The animal heads were old, patted bald years ago by generations of children reaching through the banister of the upper landing.

Nanny had Mischa's copper bathtub in a corner of the hearth. She added water from a kettle to adjust the temperature, made suds and lowered Mischa into the water. The child batted happily at the foam. Nanny fetched towels to warm before the fire. Hannibal took Mischa's baby bracelet off her wrist, dipped it in the suds and blew bubbles for her through the bracelet. The bubbles, in their brief flight on the draft, reflected all the bright faces before they burst above the fire. Mischa liked to grab for the bubbles, but wanted her bracelet back, and was not satisfied until it was on her arm again.

Hannibal 's mother played baroque counterpoint on a small piano.

Tiny music, the windows covered with blankets as night fell and the black wings of the forest closed around them. Berndt arrived exhausted and the music stopped. Tears stood in Count Lecter's eyes as he listened to Berndt. Hannibal 's mother took Berndt's hand and patted it.

The Germans began at once to refer to Lithuania as Ostland, a German minor colony, which in time could be resettled with Aryans after the lower Slavic life forms were liquidated. German columns were on the roads, German trains on the railways carrying artillery east.

Russian fighter-bombers bombed and strafed the columns. Big Ilyushin bombers out of Russia pounded the columns through heavy flak from the anti-aircraft guns mounted on the trains.

The black swans flew as high as they could comfortably go, the four black swans in echelon, their necks extended, trying for the south, the roar of airplanes above them as dawn broke.

A burst of flak and the lead swan crumpled in mid-stroke and began the long plunge to earth, the other birds turning, calling down the air, losing altitude in great circles. The wounded swan thumped heavily in an open field and did not move. His mate swooped down beside him, poked him with her beak, waddled around him with urgent honks.

He did not move. A shell burst in the field, and Russian infantry were visible moving in the trees at the edge of the meadow. A German Panzer tank jumped a ditch and came across the meadow, firing its coaxial machine gun into the trees, coming, coming. The swan spread her wings and stood her ground over her mate even though the tank was wider than her wings, its engine loud as her wild heart. The swan stood over her mate hissing, hitting the tank with hard blows of her wings at the last, and the tank rolled over them, oblivious, in its whirring treads a mush of flesh and feathers.

4

THE LECTER FAMILY survived in the woods for the terrible three and a half years of Hitler's eastern campaign. The long forest path to the lodge was filled with snow in winter and overgrown in spring, the marshes too soft in summer for tanks.

The lodge was well stocked with flour and sugar to last through the first winter, but most importantly it had salt in casks. In the second winter they came upon a dead and frozen horse. They were able to cut it up with axes and salt the meat. They salted trout as well, and partridges.

Sometimes men in civilian clothes came out of the forest in the night, quiet as shadows. Count Lecter and Berndt talked with them in Lithuanian, and once they brought a man with blood soaked through his shirt, who died on a pallet in the corner while Nanny was mopping his face.

Every day when the snow was too deep to forage, Mr. Jakov gave lessons.

He taught English, and very bad French, he taught Roman history with a heavy emphasis on the sieges of Jerusalem, and everyone attended. He made dramatic tales out of historical events, and Old Testament stories, sometimes embellishing them for his audience beyond the strict bounds of scholarship.

He instructed Hannibal in mathematics privately, as the lessons had reached a level inaccessible to the others.

Among Mr. Jakov's books was a copy bound in leather of Christiaan Huyghens ' Treatise on Light, and Hannibal was fascinated with it, with following the movement of Huyghens ' mind, feeling him moving toward discovery. He associated the Treatise on Light with the glare of the snow and the rainbow distortions in the old windowpanes. The elegance of Huyghens ' thought was like the clean and simplified lines of winter, the structure under the leaves. A box opening with a click and inside, a principle that works every time. It was a dependable thrill, and he had been feeling it since he could read.

Hannibal Lecter could always read, or it seemed that way to Nanny. She read to him for a brief period when he was two, often from a Brothers Grimm illustrated with woodcuts where everyone had pointed toenails. He listened to Nanny reading, his head lolling against her while he looked at the words on the page, and then she found him at it by himself, pressing his forehead to the book and then pushing up to focal distance, reading aloud in Nanny's accent.

Hannibal 's father had one salient emotion-curiosity. In his curiosity about his son, Count Lecter had the houseman pull down the heavy dictionaries in the castle library. English, German, and the twenty-three volumes of the Lithuanian dictionary, and then Hannibal was on his own with the books.

When he was six, three important things happened to him.

First he discovered Euclid 's Elements, in an old edition with hand-drawn illustrations. He could follow the illustrations with his finger, and put his forehead against them.

That fall he was presented with a baby sister, Mischa. He thought Mischa looked like a wrinkled red squirrel. He reflected privately that it was a pity she did not get their mother's looks.

Usurped on all fronts, he thought how convenient it would be if the eagle that sometimes soared over the castle should gather his little sister up and gently transport her to some happy peasant home in a country far away, where the residents all looked like squirrels and she would fit right in. At the same time, he found he loved her in a way he could not help, and when she was old enough to wonder, he wanted to show her things, he wanted her to have the feeling of discovery.

Also in the year Hannibal was six, Count Lecter found his son determining the height of the castle towers by the length of their shadows, following instructions which he said came directly from Euclid himself. Count Lecter improved his tutors then-within six weeks arrived Mr. Jakov, a penniless scholar from Leipzig.

Count Lecter introduced Mr. Jakov to his pupil in the library and left them. The library in warm weather had a cold-smoked aroma that was ingrained in the castle's stone.

"My father says you will teach me many things."

"If you wish to learn many things, I can help you."

"He tells me you are a great scholar."

"I am a student."

"He told my mother you were expelled from the university."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I am a Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew to be precise."

"I see. Are you unhappy?"

"To be a Jew? No, I'm glad."

"I meant are you unhappy to be out of school?"

"I am glad to be here."

"Do you wonder if I am worth your time?"

"Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him."

"Did they put you in the room with an iron grate over the door?"

"Yes, they did."

"It doesn't lock anymore."

"I was pleased to see that."

"That's where they kept Uncle Elgar," Hannibal said, aligning his pens in a row before him. "It was in the 1880s, before my time. Look at the windowpane in your room. It has a date he scratched with a diamond into the glass. These are his books."

A row of immense leather tomes occupied an entire shelf. The last one was charred.

"The room will have a smoky smell when it rains. The walls were lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances."

"Did you say his utterances?"

"They were about religion, but-do you know the meaning of 'lewd' or lewdness'?"

"Yes."

"I'm not clear on it myself, but I believe it means the sort of thing one wouldn't say in front of Mother."

"That's my understanding of it as well," Mr. Jakov said.

"If you'll look at the date on the glass, it's exactly the day direct sunlight reaches his window every year."

"He was waiting for the sun."

"Yes, and that's the day he burned up in there. As soon as he got sunlight, he lit the hay with the monocle he wore as he composed these books."

Hannibal further acquainted his tutor with Lecter Castle with a tour of the grounds. They passed through the courtyard, with its big block of stone. A hitching ring was in the stone and, in its flat top, the scars of an axe.

"Your father said you measured the height of the towers."

"Yes."

"How high are they?"

"Forty meters, the south one, and the other is a half-meter shorter."

"What did you use for a gnomon?"

"The stone. By measuring the stone's height and its shadow, and measuring the shadow of the castle at the same hour."

"The side of the stone is not exactly vertical."

"I used my yo-yo as a plumb."

"Could you take both measurements at once?"

"No, Mr. Jakov."

"How much error might you have from the time between the shadow measurements?"

"A degree every four minutes as the earth turns. It's called the Ravenstone. Nanny calls it the Rabenstein. She is forbidden to seat me on it."

"I see," Mr. Jakov said. "It has a longer shadow than I thought."

They fell into a pattern of having discussions while walking and Hannibal, stumping along beside him, watched his tutor adjust to speaking to someone much shorter. Often Mr. Jakov turned his head to the side and spoke into the air above Hannibal, as though he had forgotten he was talking with a child. Hannibal wondered if he missed walking and talking with someone his own age.

Hannibal was interested to see how Mr. Jakov got along with the houseman, Lothar, and Berndt the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind.

Hannibal saw that Mr. Jakov made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free time, he was teaching them how to survey with a makeshift transit. Mr. Jakov took his meals with Cook, from whom he extracted a certain amount of rusty Yiddish, to the surprise of the family.

The parts of an ancient catapult used by Hannibal the Grim against the Teutonic Knights were stored in a barn on the property, and on Hannibal's birthday Mr. Jakov, Lothar and Berndt put the catapult together, substituting a stout new timber for the throwing arm. With it they threw a hogshead of water higher than the castle, it falling to burst with a wonderful explosion of water on the far bank of the moat that sent the wading birds flapping away.

In that week, Hannibal had the keenest single pleasure of his childhood.

As a birthday treat Mr. Jakov showed him a non-mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem using tiles and their impression on a bed of sand.

Hannibal looked at it, walked around it. Mr. Jakov lifted one of the tiles and raised his eyebrows, asking if Hannibal wanted to see the proof again. And Hannibal got it. He got it with a rush that felt like he was being launched off the catapult.

Mr. Jakov rarely brought a textbook to their discussions, and rarely referred to one. At the age of eight, Hannibal asked him why.

"Would you like to remember everything?" Mr. Jakov said.

"Yes."

"To remember is not always a blessing."

"I would like to remember everything."

"Then you will need a mind palace, to store things in. A palace in your mind."

"Does it have to be a palace?"

"It will grow to be enormous like a palace," Mr. Jakov said. "So it might as well be beautiful. What is the most beautiful room you know, a place you know very well?"

"My mother's room," Hannibal said.

"Then that's where we will begin," Mr. Jakov said.

Twice Hannibal and Mr. Jakov watched the sun touch Uncle Elgar's window in the spring, but by the third year they were hiding in the woods.

5

*Winter, 1944-45*

WHEN THE EASTERN FRONT collapsed, the Russian Army rolled like lava across Eastern Europe, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, peopled by the starving and the dead.

From the east and from the south the Russians came, up toward the Baltic Sea from the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Waffen-SS, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Denmark.

It was the end of the Hiwis' ambitions. After they had faithfully killed and pillaged for their Nazi masters, shot Jews and Gypsies, none of them got to be SS. They were called Osttruppen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death.

But a few deserted and went into business for themselves…

A handsome Lithuanian estate house near the Polish border, open like a dollhouse on one side where an artillery shell had blown the wall away.

The family, flushed from the basement by the first shellburst and killed by the second, were dead in the ground-floor kitchen. Dead soldiers, German and Russian, lay in the garden. A German staff car was on its side, blown half in two by a shell.

An SS major was propped on a divan in front of the living room fireplace, blood frozen on the legs of his trousers. His sergeant pulled a blanket off a bed and put it over him and got a fire going, but the room was open to the sky. He got the major's boot off and his toes were black. The sergeant heard a noise outside. He unslung his carbine and went to the window.

A half-track ambulance, a Russian-made ZiS-44 but with International Red Cross markings, rumbled up the gravel drive.

Grutas got out of the ambulance first with a white cloth.

"We are Swiss. You have wounded? How many are you?"

The sergeant looked over his shoulder. "Medics, Major. Will you go with them, sir?" The major nodded.

Grutas and Dortlich, a head taller, pulled a stretcher out of the half-track.

The sergeant came out to speak to them. "Easy with him, he's hit in the legs. His toes are frozen. Maybe frostbite gangrene. You have a field hospital?"

"Yes, of course, but I can operate here," Grutas told the sergeant and shot him twice in the chest, dust flying off the uniform. The man's legs collapsed and Grutas stepped over him through the doorway and shot the major through the blanket.

Milko, Kolnas, and Grentz piled out of the back of the halftrack. They wore a mix of uniforms-Lithuanian police, Lithuanian medics, Estonian medical corps, International Red Cross-but all wore large medical insignia on their armbands.

There is much bending involved in stripping the dead; the looters grunted and bitched at the effort, scattering papers and wallet photos.

The major still lived, and he raised his hand to Milko. Milko took the wounded man's watch and stuffed it into his pocket.

Grutas and Dortlich carried a rolled tapestry out of the house and threw it into their half-track truck.

They put the canvas stretcher on the ground and tossed onto it watches, gold eyeglasses, rings.

A tank came out of the woods, a Russian T- 34 in winter camouflage, its cannon traversing the field, the machine gunner standing up in the hatch.

A man hiding in a shed behind the farmhouse broke from cover and ran across the field toward the trees, carrying in his arms an ormolu clock, leaping over bodies.

The tank's machine gun stuttered and the running looter pitched forward, tumbling to fall beside the clock, his face smashed and the clock's face smashed too; his heart and the clock beat once and stopped.

"Grab a body!" Grutas said.

They threw a corpse on top of the loot on the stretcher. The tank's turret turned toward them. Grutas waved a white flag and pointed to the medical insignia on the truck. The tank moved on.

A last look around the house. The major was still alive. He gripped Grutas' pants leg as he passed. He got his arms around Grutas' leg and would not let go. Grutas bent to him, seized the insignia on his collar.

"We were supposed to get these skulls," he said. "Maybe the maggots can find one in your face." He shot the major in the chest. The man let go of Grutas' pants leg and looked at his own bare wrist as though curious about the time of his death.

The half-track truck bounced across the field, its tracks mushing bodies, and as it reached the woods, the canvas lifted on the back and Grentz threw the body out.

From above, a screaming Stuka dive bomber came after the Russian tank, cannon blazing. Under the cover of the forest canopy buttoned up in the tank, the crew heard a bomb go off in the trees and splinters and shrapnel rang on the armored hull.

6

"DO YOU KNOW what today is?" Hannibal asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. "It's the day the sun reaches Uncle Elgar's window."

"What time will it appear?" Mr. Jakov asked, as though he didn't know.

"It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty," Hannibal said.

"That was in 1941," Mr. Jakov said. "Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?"

"Yes."

"But the year is more than 365 days long."

"But, Mr. Jakov, this is the year after leap year. So was 1941, the last time we watched."

"Then does the calendar adjust perfectly, or do we live by gross corrections?"

A thorn popped in the fire.

"I think those are separate questions," Hannibal said.

Mr. Jakov was pleased, but his response was just another question: "Will the year 2000 be a leap year?"

"No-yes, yes, it will be a leap year."

"But it is divisible by one hundred," Mr. Jakov said.

"It's also divisible by four hundred," Hannibal said.

"Exactly so," Mr. Jakov said. "It will be the first time the Gregorian rule is applied. Perhaps, on that day, surviving all gross corrections, you will remember our talk. In this strange place." He raised his cup.

"Next year in Lecter Castle."

Lothar heard it first as he drew water, the roar of an engine in low gear and cracking of branches. He left the bucket on the well and in his haste he came into the lodge without wiping his feet.

A Soviet tank, a T- 34 in winter camouflage of snow and straw, crashed up the horse trail and into the clearing. Painted on the turret in Russian were avenge our SOVIET GIRLS and WIPE OUT THE FASCIST VERMIN. Two soldiers in white rode on the back over the radiators. The turret swiveled to point the tank's cannon at the house. A hatch opened and a gunner in hooded winter white stood behind a machine gun. The tank commander stood in the other hatch with a megaphone. He repeated his message in Russian and in German, barking over the diesel clatter of the tank engine.

"We want water, we will not harm you or take your food unless a shot comes from the house. If we are fired on, every one of you will die. Now come outside. Gunner, lock and load. If you don't see faces by the count of ten, fire." A loud clack as the machine gun's bolt went back.

Count Lecter stepped outside, standing straight in the sunshine, his hands visible. "Take the water. We are no harm to you."

The tank commander put his megaphone aside. "Everyone outside where I can see you."

The count and the tank commander looked at each other for a long moment.

The tank commander showed his palms. The count showed his palms.

The count turned to the house. "Come."

When the commander saw the family he said, "The children can stay inside where it's warm." And to his gunner and crew, "Cover them. Watch the upstairs windows. Start the pump. You can smoke."

The machine gunner pushed up his goggles and lit a cigarette. He was no more than a boy, the skin of his face paler around his eyes. He saw Mischa peeping around the door facing and smiled at her.

Among the fuel and water drums lashed to the tank was a small petrol-powered pump with a rope starter.

The tank driver snaked a hose with a screen filter down the well and after many pulls on the rope the pump clattered, squealed, and primed itself.

The noise covered the scream of the Stuka dive bomber until it was almost on them, the tank's gunner swiveling his muzzle around, cranking hard to elevate his gun, firing as the airplane's winking cannon stitched the ground. Rounds screamed off the tank, the gunner hit, still firing with his remaining arm.

The Stuka's windscreen starred with fractures, the pilot's goggles filled with blood and the dive bomber, still carrying one of its eggs, hit treetops, plowed into the garden and its fuel exploded, cannon under the wings still firing after the impact.

Hannibal, on the floor of the lodge, Mischa partly under him, saw his mother lying in the yard, bloody and her dress on fire.

"Stay here!" to Mischa and he ran to his mother, ammunition in the airplane cooking off now, slow and then faster, casings flying backward striking the snow, flames licking around the remaining bomb beneath the wing. The pilot sat in the cockpit, dead, his face burned to a death's head in flaming scarf and helmet, his gunner dead behind him.

Lothar alone survived in the yard and he raised a bloody arm to the boy.

Then Mischa ran to her mother, out into the yard and Lothar tried to reach her and pull her down as she passed, but a cannon round from the flaming plane slammed through him, blood spattering the baby and Mischa raised her arms and screamed into the sky. Hannibal heaped snow onto the fire in his mother's clothes, stood up and ran to Mischa amid the random shots and carried her into the lodge, into the cellar. The shots outside slowed and stopped as bullets melted in the breeches of the cannon. The sky darkened and snow came again, hissing on the hot metal.

Darkness, and snow again. Hannibal among the corpses, how much later he did not know, snow drifting down to dust his mother's eyelashes and her hair. She was the only corpse not blackened and crisped. Hannibal tugged at her, but her body was frozen to the ground. He pressed his face against her. Her bosom was frozen hard, her heart silent. He put a napkin over her face and piled snow on her. Dark shapes moved at the edge of the woods. His torch reflected on wolves' eyes. He shouted at them and waved a shovel. Mischa was determined to come out to her mother-he had to choose. He took Mischa back inside and left the dead to the dark. Mr. Jakov's book was undamaged beside his blackened hand until a wolf ate the leather cover and amid the scattered pages of Huyghens ' Treatise on Light licked Mr. Jakov's brains off the snow.

Hannibal and Mischa heard snuffling and growling outside. Hannibal built up the fire. To cover the noise he tried to get Mischa to sing; he sang to her. She clutched his coat in her fists.

"Ein Mannlein…"

Snowflakes on the windows. In the corner of a pane, a dark circle appeared, made by the tip of a glove. In the dark circle a pale blue eye.

7

THE DOOR BURST OPEN then and Grutas came in with Milko and Dortlich.

Hannibal grabbed a boar spear from the wall and Grutas, with his sure instinct turned his gun on the little girl.

"Drop it or I'll shoot her. Do you understand me?"

The looters swarmed Hannibal and Mischa then.

The looters in the house, Grentz outside waved for the half-track truck to come up, the truck slit-eyed, its blackout lights picking up wolves' eyes at the edge of the clearing, a wolf dragging something.

The men gathered around Hannibal and his sister at the fire, the fire warming from the looters' clothes a sweetish stink of weeks in the field and old blood caked in the treads of their boots, they gathered close.

Pot Watcher caught a small insect emerging from his clothes and popped its head off with his thumbnail.

They coughed on the children. Predator breath, ketosis from their scavenged diet of mostly meat, some scraped from the half-track's treads, made Mischa bury her face in Hannibal 's coat. He gathered her inside his coat and felt her heart beating hard. Dortlich picked up Mischa's bowl of porridge and wolfed it down himself, getting the last wipe from the bowl on his scarred and webbed fingers. Kolnas extended his bowl, but Dortlich did not give him any.

Kolnas was stocky and his eyes took on a shine when he looked at precious metal. He slipped Mischa's bracelet off her wrist and put it in his pocket. When Hannibal grabbed at his hand, Grentz pinched him on the side of the neck and his whole arm went numb.

Distant artillery boomed.

Grutas said, "If a patrol comes-either side-we're setting up a field hospital here. We saved these little ones and we're protecting their family's stuff in the truck. Get a Red Cross off the truck and hang it over the door. Do it now."

"The other two will freeze if you leave them in the truck," Pot Watcher said. "They got us by the patrol, they may be useful again."

"Put them in the bunkhouse," Grutas said. "Lock them in."

"Where would they go?" Grentz said. "Who would they tell?"

"They can tell you about their sad fucking lives, in Albanian, Grentz.

Get your ass out there and do it."

In the blowing snow, Grentz lifted two small figures out of the truck and prodded them toward the barn bunkhouse.

8

GRUTAS HAD A SLENDER chain, freezing against the children's skin as he looped it around their necks. Kolnas snapped on the heavy padlocks.

Grutas and Dortlich chained Hannibal and Mischa to the banister on the upper landing of the staircase, where they were out of the way but visible. The one called Pot Watcher brought them a chamber pot and blanket from a bedroom.

Through the bars of the banister, Hannibal watched them throw the piano stool onto the fire. He tucked Mischa's collar underneath the chain to keep it off her neck.

The snow banked high against the lodge, only the upper panes of the windows admitted a grey light. With the snow blowing sideways past the windows and the wind squeal, the lodge was like a great train moving.

Hannibal rolled himself and his sister in the blanket and the landing carpet. Mischa's coughs were muffled. Her forehead was hot against Hannibal 's cheek. From beneath his coat, he took a crust of stale bread and put it in his mouth. When it was soft, he gave it to her.

Grutas drove one of his men outside every few hours to shovel the doorway, keeping a path to the well. And once Pot Watcher took a pan of scraps to the barn.

Snowed in, the time passing in a slow ache. There was no food, and then there was food, Kolnas and Milko carrying Mischa's bathtub to the stove lidded with a plank, which scorched where it overhung the tub, Pot Watcher feeding the fire with books and wooden salad bowls. With one eye on the stove, Pot Watcher caught up on his journal and accounts. He piled small items of loot on the table for sorting and counting. In a spidery hand he wrote each man's name at the top of a page:

Vladis

Grutas

Zigmas

Milko

Bronys

Grentz

Enrikas

Dortlich

Petras

Kolnas

And last he wrote his own name, Kazys Porvik.

Beneath the names he listed each man's share of the loot-gold eyeglasses, watches, rings and earrings, and gold teeth, which he measured in a stolen silver cup.

Grutas and Grentz searched the lodge obsessively, snatching out drawers, tearing the backs off bureaus.

After five days the weather cleared. They all put on snow-shoes and walked Hannibal and Mischa out to the barn. Hannibal saw a wisp of smoke from the bunkhouse chimney. He looked at Cesar's big horseshoe nailed above the door for luck and wondered if the horse was still alive.

Grutas and Dortlich shoved the children into the barn and locked the door. Through the crack between the double doors, Hannibal watched them fan out into the woods. It was very cold in the barn. Pieces of children's clothing lay wadded in the straw. The door into the bunkhouse was closed but not locked. Hannibal pushed it open. Wrapped in all the blankets off the cots and as close as possible to the small stove was a boy not more than eight years old. His face was dark around his sunken eyes. He wore a mixture of clothing, layer on layer, some of it girl's garments. Hannibal put Mischa behind him. The boy shrank away from him.

Hannibal said "Hello." He said it in Lithuanian, German, English and Polish. The boy did not reply. Red and swollen chilblains were on his ears and fingers. Over the course of the long cold day he managed to convey that he was from Albania and only spoke that language. He said his name was Agon. Hannibal let him feel his pockets for food. He did not let him touch Mischa. When Hannibal indicated he and his sister wanted half the blankets the boy did not resist. The young Albanian started at every sound, his eyes rolling toward the door, and he made chopping motions with his hand.

The looters came back just before sunset. Hannibal heard them and peered through the crack in the double doors of the barn.

They were leading a half-starved little deer, alive and stumbling, a tasseled swag from some looted mansion looped around its neck, an arrow sticking in its side. Milko picked up an axe.

"Don't waste the blood," Pot Watcher said with a cook's authority.

Kolnas came running with his bowl, his eyes shining. A cry from the yard and Hannibal covered Mischa's ears against the sound of the axe. The Albanian boy cried and gave thanks.

Late in the day when the others had eaten, Pot Watcher gave the children a bone to gnaw with a little meat and sinew on it. Hannibal ate a little and chewed up mush for Mischa. The juice got away when he transferred it with his fingers, so he gave it to her mouth to mouth. They moved Hannibal and Mischa back into the lodge and chained them to the balcony railing, and left the Albanian boy in the barn alone. Mischa was hot with fever, and Hannibal held her tight under the cold-dust smell of the rug.

The flu dropped them all; the men lay as close to the dying fire as they could get, coughing on one another, Milko finding Kolnas' comb and sucking the grease from it. The skull of the little deer lay in the dry bathtub, every scrap boiled off it.

Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Watcher gave gristle and broth to Hannibal and Mischa. He carried nothing to the barn.

The weather would not break, the sky low and granite grey, sounds of the woods hushed except for the crack and crash of ice-laden boughs.

The food was gone days before the sky cleared. The coughing seemed louder in the bright afternoon after the wind dropped. Grutas and Milko staggered out on snow-shoes.

After the length of a fever dream, Hannibal heard them return. A loud argument and scuffling. Through the bars of the banister he saw Grutas licking a bloody birdskin, throwing it to the others, and they fell on it like dogs. Grutas' face was smeared with blood and feathers. He turned his bloody face up to the children and he said, "We have to eat or die."

That was the last conscious memory Hannibal Lecter had of the lodge.

Because of the Russian rubber shortage the tank was running on steel road wheels that sent a numbing vibration through the hull and blurred the view in the periscope. It was a big KV-1 going hard along a forest trail in freezing weather, the front moving miles westward with every day of the German retreat. Two infantrymen in winter camouflage rode on the rear deck of the tank, huddled over the radiators, watching for the odd German Werewolf, a fanatic left behind with a Panzerfaust rocket to try to destroy a tank. They saw movement in the brush. The tank commander heard the soldiers on top firing, turned the tank toward their target to bring his coaxial machine gun to bear. His magnifying eyepiece showed a boy, a child coming out of the brush, bullets kicking up the snow beside him as the soldiers shot from the moving tank. The commander stood up in the hatch and stopped the shooting. They had killed a few children by mistake, the way it happens, and were glad enough not to kill this one.

The soldiers saw a child, thin and pale, with a chain locked around his neck, the end of the chain dragging in an empty loop. When they set him near the radiators and cut the chain off him, pieces of his skin came away on the links. He carried good binoculars in a bag clutched fiercely against his chest. They shook him, asking questions in Russian, Polish, and makeshift Lithuanian, until they realized he could not speak at all.

The soldiers shamed each other into not taking the field glasses from the boy. They gave him half an apple and let him ride behind the turret in the warm breath of the radiators until they reached a village.

9

A SOVIET MOTORIZED unit with a tank destroyer and heavy rocket launcher had sheltered at the abandoned Lecter Castle overnight. They were moving before dawn, leaving melted places in the snow of the courtyard with dark oil stains in them. One light truck remained at the castle entrance, the motor idling.

Grutas and his four surviving companions, in their medical uniforms, watched from the woods. It had been four years since Grutas shot the cook in the castle courtyard, fourteen hours since the looters fled the burning hunting lodge, leaving their dead behind them.

Bombs thudded far away and on the horizon anti-aircraft tracers arched into the sky.

The last soldier backed out the door, paying out fuse from a reel.

"Hell," Milko said. "It's about to rain rocks big as boxcars."

"We're going in there anyway," Grutas said.

The soldier unreeled fuse to the bottom of the steps, cut it and squatted at the end.

"The dump's been looted anyway," Grentz said. "C'est foutu."

"Tu débandes?" Dortlich said.

"Va te faire enculer," Grentz said. They had picked up the French when the Totenkopfs refitted near Marseilles, and liked to insult each other with it in the tight moments before action. The curses reminded them of pleasant times in France.

The Soviet trooper on the steps split the fuse ten centimeters from the end and stuck a match head in the split.

"What color's the fuse?" Milko said.

Grutas had the field glasses. "Dark, I can't tell."

From the woods, they could see the flare of a second match on his face as the trooper lit the fuse.

"Is it orange or is it green?" Milko said. "Does it have stripes on it?"

Grutas did not answer. The soldier walked to the truck, taking his time, laughing as his companions on the truck yelled at him to hurry, the fuse sparking behind him on the snow.

Milko was counting under his breath.

As soon as the vehicle was out of sight, Grutas and Milko ran for the fuse. The fire in the fuse crossing the threshold now as they reached it. They could not make out the stripes until they were close. Burns at twominutesameter twominutesameter twominutesameter. Grutas slashed it in two with his spring knife.

Milko muttered "fuck the farm" and charged up the steps and into the castle, following the fuse, looking, looking, for other fuses, other charges. He crossed the great hall toward the tower, following the fuse and saw what he was looking for, the fuse spliced onto a big loop of detonating cord. He came back into the great hall and called out, "It's got a ring main cord. That's the only fuse. You got it." Breeching charges were packed around the base of the tower to destroy it, coordinated by the single loop of detonating cord.

The Soviet troops had not bothered to close the front door, and their fire still burned on the hearth in the great hall. Graffiti scarred the bare walls and the floor near the fire was littered with droppings and bum wad from their final act in the relative warmth of the castle.

Milko, Grentz and Kolnas searched the upper floors.

Grutas motioned for Dortlich to follow him and descended the stairs to the dungeon. The grate across the wine room door hung open, the lock broken.

Grutas and Dortlich shared one flashlight between them. The yellow beam gleamed off glass shards. The wine room was littered with empty bottles of fine vintages, the necks knocked off by hasty drinkers. The tasting table, knocked over by contesting looters, lay against the back wall.

"Balls," Dortlich said. "Not a swig left."

"Help me," Grutas said. Together they pulled the table away from the wall, crunching glass underfoot. They found the decanting candle behind the table and lit it.

"Now, pull on the chandelier," Grutas told the taller Dortlich. "Just give it a tug, straight down."

The wine rack swung away from the back wall. Dortlich reached for his pistol when it moved. Grutas went into the chamber behind the wine room. Dortlich followed him.

"God in Heaven!" Dortlich said.

"Get the truck," Grutas said.

10

* Lithuania, 1946*

HANNIBAL LECTER, thirteen, stood alone on the rubble beneath the moat's embankment at the former Lecter Castle and threw crusts of bread onto the black water. The kitchen garden, its bounding hedges overgrown, was now the People's Orphanage Cooperative Kitchen Garden, featuring mostly turnips. The moat and its surface were important to him. The moat was constant; on its black surface reflected clouds swept past the crenellated towers of Lecter Castle just as they always had.

Over his orphanage uniform Hannibal now wore the penalty shirt with the painted words NO GAMES. Forbidden to play in the orphans' soccer game on the field outside the walls, he did not feel deprived. The soccer game was interrupted when the draft horse Cesar and his Russian driver crossed the field with a load of firewood on the wagon.

Cesar was glad to see Hannibal when he could visit the stable, but he did not care for turnips.

Hannibal watched the swans coming across the moat, a pair of black swans that survived the war. Two cygnets accompanied them, still fluffy, one riding on his mother's back, one swimming behind. Three older boys on the embankment above parted a hedge to watch Hannibal and the swans.

The male swan climbed out onto the bank to challenge Hannibal.

A blond boy named Fedor whispered to the others. "Watch that black bastard flap the dummy-he'll knock shit out of him like he did you when you tried to get the eggs. We'll see if the dummy can cry." Hannibal raised his willow branches and the swan went back into the water.

Disappointed, Fedor took a slingshot of red inner-tube rubber out of his shirt and reached into his pocket for a stone. The stone hit the mud at the edge of the moat, spattering Hannibal 's legs with mud. Hannibal looked up at Fedor expressionless and shook his head. The next stone Fedor shot splashed into the water beside the swimming cygnet, Hannibal raising his branches now, hissing, shooing the swans out of range.

A bell sounded from the castle.

Fedor and his followers turned, laughing from their fun, and Hannibal stepped out of the hedge swinging a yard of weeds with a big dirt ball on the roots. The dirt ball caught Fedor hard in the face and Hannibal, a head shorter, charged and shoved him down the steep embankment to the water, scrambling after the stunned boy and had him in the black water, holding him under, driving the slingshot handle again and again into the back of his neck, Hannibal's face curiously blank, only his eyes alive, the edges of his vision red. Hannibal heaved to turn Fedor over to get to his face. Fedor's companions scrambled down, did not want to fight in the water, yelling to a monitor for help. First Monitor Petrov led the others cursing down the bank, spoiled his shiny hoots and got mud on his flailing truncheon.

Evening in the great hall of Lecter Castle, stripped now of its finery and dominated by a big portrait of Joseph Stalin. A hundred boys in uniform, having finished their supper, stood in place at plank tables singing "The Internationale." Headmaster, slightly drunk, directed the singing with his fork.

First Monitor Petrov, newly appointed, and Second Monitor in jodhpurs and boots walked among the tables to be sure everyone was singing.

Hannibal was not singing. The side of his face was blue and one of his eyes was half-closed. At another table Fedor watched, a bandage on his neck and scrapes on his face. One of his fingers was splinted.

The monitors stopped before Hannibal. Hannibal palmed a fork.

"Too good to sing with us, Little Master?" First Monitor Petrov said over the singing. "You're not Little Master here anymore, you're just another orphan, and by God you'll sing!"

First Monitor swung his clipboard hard against the side of Hannibal 's face. Hannibal did not change his expression. Neither did he sing. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth.

"He's mute," Second Monitor said. "No sense in beating him."

The song ended and First Monitor's voice was loud in the silence.

"For a mute, he can scream well enough at night," First Monitor said, and swung with his other hand. Hannibal blocked the blow with the fork in his fist, the tines digging into First Monitor's knuckles. First Monitor started around the table after him.

"Stop! Do not hit him again. I don't want him marked." Headmaster might be drunk, but he ruled. "Hannibal Lecter, report to my office."

Headmaster's office contained an army surplus desk and files and two cots. It was here that the change in the castle's smell struck Hannibal most. Instead of lemon-oil furniture polish and perfume there was the cold stink of piss in the fireplace. The windows were bare, the only remaining ornament the carved woodwork.

" Hannibal, was this your mother's room? It has a sort of feminine feeling." Headmaster was capricious. He could be kind, or cruel when his failures goaded him. His little eyes were red and he was waiting for an answer.

Hannibal nodded.

"It must be hard for you to live in this house."

No response.

Headmaster took a cable from his desk. "Well, you won't be here much longer. Your uncle is coming to take you to France."

11

THE FIRE ON THE kitchen hearth gave the only light. Hannibal in shadow watched the cook's assistant asleep and drooling in a chair near the fire, an empty glass beside him. Hannibal wanted the lantern on the shelf just behind him. He could see the glass mantle gleam in the firelight.

The man's breathing was deep and regular with a rumble of catarrh.

Hannibal moved across the stone floor, into the vodka-and-onion aura of the cook's assistant, and came close behind him.

The wire handle of the lantern would creak. Better to lift it by the base and the top, holding the glass mantle steady so that it would not rattle. Lift it straight up and off the shelf. He had it now in both hands.

A loud pop, as a piece of firewood, hissing steam, burst in the fireplace, sending sparks and small coals skipping across the hearth, a coal coming to rest an inch from the assistant cook's foot in its felt boot liner.

What tool was close? On the countertop was a canister, a 150-mm shell casing full of wooden spoons and spatulas. Hannibal set the lantern down and, with a spoon, flipped the coal to the center of the floor.

The door to the dungeon stairs was in the corner of the kitchen. It swung open quietly at Hannibal 's touch, and he went through it into absolute darkness, remembering the upper landing in his mind, and closed the door behind him. He struck a match on the stone wall, lit the lantern and went down the familiar stairs, the air cooling as he descended. The lantern light jumped from vault to vault as he passed through low arches to the wine room. The iron gate stood open.

The wine, long ago looted, had been replaced on the shelves with root vegetables, primarily turnips. Hannibal reminded himself to put a few sugar beets in his pocket-as Cesar would eat them in the absence of apples, though they turned his lips red, and gave him the appearance of wearing lipstick.

In his time in the orphanage, seeing his house violated, everything stolen, confiscated, abused, he had not looked here. Hannibal put the lantern on a high shelf and dragged some sacks of potatoes and onions from in front of the rear wine shelves. He climbed onto the table, gripped the chandelier and pulled. Nothing. He released the chandelier and tugged it again. Now he swung from it with his full weight. The chandelier dropped an inch with a jar that made the dust fly off it, and he heard a groan from the rear wine shelves. He scrambled down. He could get his fingers in the gap and pull.

The wine shelves came away from the wall with a considerable squeal of hinges. He went back to his lantern, ready to blow it out if he heard a sound. Nothing.

It was here, in this room, that he had last seen Cook, and for a moment Cook's great round face appeared to him in vital clarity, without the scrim time gives our images of the dead.

Hannibal took his lantern and went into the hidden room behind the wine room. It was empty.

One large gilt picture frame remained, threads of canvas sticking out of it where the painting had been cut out of the frame. It had been the largest picture in the house, a romanticized view of the Battle of Zalgiris emphasizing the achievements of Hannibal the Grim.

Hannibal Lecter, last of his line, stood in the looted castle of his childhood looking into the empty picture frame in the knowledge that he was of his line and not of his line. His memories were of his mother, a Sforza, and of Cook and Mr. Jakov from a tradition other than his own.

He could see them in the empty frame, gathered before the fire at the lodge.

He was not Hannibal the Grim in any way he understood. He would conduct his life beneath the painted ceiling of his childhood. But it was as thin as Heaven, and nearly as useless. So he believed.

They were all gone, the paintings with faces that were as familiar to him as his family.

There was an oubliette in the center of the room, a dry stone well into which Hannibal the Grim could cast his enemies and forget them. It had been fenced round in later years to prevent accidents. Hannibal held his lantern over it and the light gave out halfway down the shaft. His father had told him that in his own childhood a jumble of skeletons remained at the bottom of the oubliette.

Once as a treat, Hannibal had been lowered into the oubliette in a basket. Near the bottom, a word was scratched into the wall. He could not see it now by lantern light, but he knew it was there, uneven letters scratched in the dark by a dying man-the word "Pourquoi?"

12

IN THE LONG dormitory the orphans were sleeping. They were in the order of their age. The youngest end of the dormitory had the brooder-house smell of a kindergarten. The youngest hugged themselves in sleep and some called out to their remembered dead, seeing in the dreamed faces a concern and tenderness they would not find again.

Further along some older boys masturbated under their covers.

Each child had a footlocker and on the wall above each bed was a space to put drawings or, rarely a family photograph.

Here is a row of crude crayon drawings above the successive beds. Above Hannibal Lecter's bed is an excellent chalk and pencil drawing of a baby's hand and arm, arresting and appealing in its gesture, the plump arm foreshortened as the baby reaches to pat. There is a bracelet on the arm. Beneath the drawing, Hannibal sleeps, his eyelids twitching. His jaw muscles bunch and his nostrils flare and pinch at a dreamed whiff of cadaverine breath.

The hunting lodge in the forest. Hannibal and Mischa in the cold-dust smell of the rug rolled around them, ice on the windows refracting the light green and red. The wind gusts and for a moment the chimney does not draw. Blue smoke hangs in tiers under the peaked roof, in front of the balcony railing, and Hannibal hears the front door blast open and looks through the railing. Mischa's bathtub is on the stove where the Cooker boils the little deer's horned skull with some shriveled tubers.

The roiling water bangs the horns against the metal walls of the tub as though the little deer is making a last effort to butt. Blue-Eyes and Web-Hand come in with a blast of cold air, knocking off their snowshoes and leaning them against the wall. The others crowd them, Bowl-Man stumping from the corner on frostbitten feet. Blue-Eyes takes from his pocket the starved bodies of three small birds. He puts a bird, feathers and all, into the water until it is soft enough to rip off the skin. He licks the bloody bird-skin, blood and feathers on his face, the men crowding around him. He flings the skin to them and they fall on it like dogs.

He turns his blood-smeared face to the balcony, spits out a feather and speaks. "We have to eat or die."

They put into the fire the Lecter family album and Mischa's paper toys, her castle, her paper dolls. Hannibal is standing on the hearth now, suddenly, no sense of descending, and then they are in the barn, where clothing was wadded in the straw, child's clothing strange to him and stiff with blood. The men crowded close, feeling his meat and Mischa's.

"Take her, she's going to die anyway. Come and play, come and play."

Singing now, they take her. "Ein Mannlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm…"

He hangs on to Mischa's arm, the children dragged toward the door. He will not release his sister and Blue-Eyes slams the heavy barn door on his arm, the bone cracking, opens the door again and comes back to Hannibal swinging a stick of firewood, thud against his head, terrific blows falling on him, flashes of light behind his eyes, banging, Mischa calling "Anniba!"

And the blows became First Monitor's stick banging on the bed frame and Hannibal screaming in his sleep, "Mischa! Mischa."

"Shut up! Shut up! Get up you little fuck!" First Monitor ripped the bed clothing off the cot and threw it at him. Outside on the cold ground to the tool shed, prodded with the stick. First Monitor followed him into the shed with a shove. The shed was hung with gardening tools, rope, a few carpenter's tools. First Monitor set his lantern on a keg and raised his stick. He held up his bandaged hand.

"Time to pay for this."

Hannibal seemed to cringe away, circling away from the light, feeling nothing he could name. First Monitor read fear and circled after him, drawn away from the light. First Monitor got a good crack on Hannibal 's thigh. The boy was at the lantern now. Hannibal picked up a sickle and blew out the light. He lay down on the floor in the darkness, gripping the sickle in both hands above his head, heard scrambling footfalls past him, swung the sickle hard through the black air, struck nothing, and heard the door close and the rattle of a chain.

"The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you," First Monitor said. He and Second Monitor were looking at a Delahaye parked in the gravel courtyard of the castle, a lovely example of French coachwork, horizon blue, with diplomatic flags on its front fenders, Soviet and GDR. The car was exotic in the way of pre-war French cars, voluptuous to eyes accustomed to square tanks and jeeps. First Monitor wanted to scratch "fuck" in the side of the car with his knife, but the driver was big and watchful.

From the stable Hannibal saw the car arrive. He did not run to it. He watched his uncle go into the castle with a Soviet officer.

Hannibal put his hand flat against Cesar's cheek. The long face turned to him, crunching oats. The Soviet groom was taking good care of him.

Hannibal rubbed the horse's neck and put his face close to the turning ear, but no sound came out of his mouth. He kissed the horse between the eyes. At the back of the hayloft, hanging in the space between double walls, were his father's binoculars. He hung them around his neck and crossed the beaten parade ground.

Second Monitor was looking for him from the steps. Hannibal 's few possessions were stuffed in a bag.

13

WATCHING FROM HEADMASTER'S window, Robert Lecter saw his driver buy a small sausage and a piece of bread from the cook for a pack of cigarettes. Robert Lecter was actually Count Lecter now, with his brother presumed dead. He was already accustomed to the title, having used it illegitimately for years.

Headmaster did not count the money, but shoved it into a breast pocket, with a glance at Colonel Timka.

"Count, eh, Comrade Lecter, I just want to tell you I saw two of your paintings at the Catherine Palace before the war, and there were some photos published in Gorn. I admire your work enormously."

Count Lecter nodded. "Thank you, Headmaster. Hannibal 's sister, what do you know?"

"A baby picture is not much help," Headmaster said.

"We're circulating it to the orphanages," Colonel Timka said. He wore the uniform of the Soviet Border Police and his steel-rimmed spectacles winked in concert with his steel dentition. "It takes time. There are so many."

"And I must tell you, Comrade Lecter, the forest is full of… remains still unidentified," Headmaster added.

" Hannibal has never said a word?" Count Lecter said.

"Not to me. Physically he is capable of speech-he screams his sister's name in his sleep. Mischa. Mischa." Headmaster paused as he thought how to put it. "Comrade Lecter, I would be… careful with Hannibal until you know him better. It might be best if he did not play with other boys until he's settled. Someone always gets hurt."

"He's not a bully?"

"It's the bullies who get injured. Hannibal does not observe the pecking order. They're always bigger and he hurts them very quickly and sometimes severely. Hannibal can be dangerous to persons larger than himself. He's fine with the little ones. Lets them tease him a little.

Some of them think he's deaf as well as mute and say in front of him that he's crazy. He gives them his treats, on the rare occasions there are any treats."

Colonel Timka looked at his watch. "We need to go. Shall I meet you in the car, Comrade Lecter?"

Colonel Timka waited until Count Lecter was out of the room. He held out his hand. Headmaster sighed and handed over the money.

With a wink of his spectacles and a flash of his teeth, Colonel Timka licked his thumb and began to count.

14

A SHOWER OF RAIN settled the dust as they covered the last miles to the chateau, wet gravel pinging underneath the muddy Delahaye, and the smell of herbs and turned earth blew through the car. Then the rain stopped and the evening light had an orange cast.

The chateau was more graceful than grand in this strange orange light.

The mullions in its many windows were curved like spider webs weighted with dew. To Hannibal, casting for omens, the curving loggia of the chateau unwound from the entrance like Huyghens' volute.

Four draft horses, steaming after the rain, were hitched to a defunct German tank protruding from the foyer. Big horses like Cesar. Hannibal was glad to see them, hoped they were his totem. The tank was jacked up on rollers. Little by little the horses pulled it out of the entryway as though they were extracting a tooth, the driver leading the horses, their ears moving when he spoke to them.

"The Germans blew out the doorway with their cannon and backed the tank inside to get away from the airplanes," the count told Hannibal as the car came to a stop. He had become accustomed to speaking to the boy without a reply. "They left it here in the retreat. We couldn't move it, so we decorated the damned thing with window boxes and walked around it for five years. Now I can sell my 'subversive' pictures again and we can pay to get it hauled away. Come, Hannibal."

A houseman had watched for the car and he and the housekeeper came to meet the count with umbrellas if they should need them. A mastiff came with them.

Hannibal liked his uncle for making the introductions in the driveway, courteously facing the staff, instead of rushing toward the house and talking over his shoulder.

"This is my nephew, Hannibal. He's ours now and we're glad to have him.

Madame Brigitte, my housekeeper. And Pascal, who's in charge of making things work."

Madame Brigitte was once a good-looking upstairs maid. She was a quick study and she read Hannibal by his bearing.

The mastiff greeted the count with enthusiasm and reserved judgment on Hannibal. The dog blew some air out of her cheeks. Hannibal opened his hand to her and, sniffing, she looked up at him from under her brows.

"We'll need to find him some clothes," the count told Madame Brigitte.

"Look in my old school trunks in the attic to start and we'll improve him as we go along."

"And the little girl, sir?"

"Not yet, Brigitte," he said, and closed the subject with a shake of his head.

Images as Hannibal approached the house: gleam of the wet cobblestones in the courtyard, the gloss of the horses' coats after the shower, gloss of a handsome crow drinking from the rainspout at the corner of the roof; the movement of a curtain in a high window: the gloss of Lady Murasaki's hair, then her silhouette.

Lady Murasaki opened the casement. The evening light touched her face and Hannibal, out of the wastes of nightmare, took his first step on the bridge of dreams…

To move from barracks into a private home is sweet relief. The furniture throughout the chateau was odd and welcoming, a mix of periods retrieved from the attic by Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki after the looting Nazis were driven out. During the occupation, all the major furniture left France for Germany on a train.

Hermann Goering and the Führer himself had long coveted the work of Robert Lecter and other major artists in France. After the Nazi takeover, one of Goering's first acts was to arrest Robert Lecter as a "subversive Slavic artist," and seize as many of the "decadent" paintings as he could find in order to "protect the public" from them.

The paintings were sequestered in Goering's and Hitler's private collections.

When the count was freed from prison by the advancing Allies, he and Lady Murasaki put things back as well as they could and the staff worked for subsistence until Count Lecter was back at his easel.

Robert Lecter saw his nephew settled in his room. Generous in size and light, the bedroom had been prepared for Hannibal with hangings and posters to enliven the stone. A kendo mask and crossed bamboo swords were mounted high on the wall. Had he been speaking, Hannibal would have asked after Madame.

15

HANNIBAL WAS LEFT alone for less than a minute before he heard a knock at the door.

Lady Murasaki's attendant, Chiyoh, stood there, a Japanese girl of about Hannibal 's age, with hair bobbed at her ears. Chiyoh appraised him for an instant, then a veil slid across her eyes like the nictitating goggles of a hawk.

"Lady Murasaki sends greetings and welcome," she said. "If you will come with me…" Dutiful and severe, Chiyoh led him to the bathhouse in the former wine-pressing room in a dependency of the chateau.

To please his wife, Count Lecter had converted the winepress into a Japanese bath, the pressing vat now filled with water heated by a Rube Goldberg water heater fashioned from a copper cognac distillery. The room smelled of wood smoke and rosemary. Silver candelabra, buried in the garden during the war, were set about the vat. Chiyoh did not light the candles. An electric bulb would do for Hannibal until his position was clarified.

Chiyoh handed him towels and a robe and pointed to a shower in the corner. "Bathe there first, scrub vigorously before submerging yourself," she said. "Chef will have an omelet for you after your bath, and then you must rest." She gave him a grimace that might have been a smile, threw an orange into the bathwater and waited outside the bathhouse for his clothing. When he handed it out the door, she took the items gingerly between two fingers, draped them over a stick in her other hand and disappeared with them.

It was evening when Hannibal came awake all at once, the way he woke in barracks. Only his eyes moved until he saw where he was. He felt clean in his clean bed. Through the casement glowed the last of the long French twilight. A cotton kimono was on the chair beside him. He put it on. The stone floor of the corridor was pleasantly cool underfoot, the stone stairs worn hollow like those of Lecter Castle. Outside, under the violet sky, he could hear noises from the kitchen, preparations for dinner.

The mastiff saw him and thumped her tail twice without getting up.

From the bathhouse came the sound of a Japanese lute. Hannibal went to the music. A dusty window glowed with candlelight from within. Hannibal looked in. Chiyoh sat beside the bath plucking the strings of a long and elegant koto. She had lit the candles this time. The water heater chuckled. The fire beneath it crackled and the sparks flew upward. Lady Murasaki was in the water. In the water was Lady Murasaki, like the water flowers on the moat where the swans swam and did not sing.

Hannibal watched, silent as the swans, and spread his arms like wings.

He backed from the window and returned through the gloaming to his room, a curious heaviness on him, and found his bed again.

Enough coals remain in the master bedroom to glow on the ceiling. Count Lecter, in the semi-darkness, quickens to Lady Murasaki's touch and to her voice.

"Missing you, I felt as I did when you were in prison," she said. "I remembered the poem of an ancestor, Ono no Komachi, from a thousand years ago."

"Ummm."

"She was very passionate."

"I'm anxious to know what she said."

"A poem: Hito ni awan tsuki no naki yowaomoiokitemunehashiribinikokoroyaki ori. Can you hear the music in it?"

Robert Lecter's Western ear could not hear the music in it but, knowing where the music lay, he was enthusiastic: "Oh my, yes. Tell me the meaning."

"No way to see him on this moonless night. I lie awake longing, burning breasts racing fire, heart in flames."

"My God, Sheba."

She took exquisite care to spare him exertion.

In the hall of the chateau, the tall clock tells the lateness of the hour, soft bongs down the stone corridors. The mastiff bitch in her kennel stirs, and with thirteen short howls she makes her answer to the clock. Hannibal in his own clean bed turns over in his sleep. And dreams.

In the barn, the air is cold, the children's clothes are pulled down to their waists as Blue-Eyes and Web-Hand feel the flesh of their upper arms. The others behind them nicker and mill like hyenas who have to wait. Here is the one who always proffers his bowl. Mischa is coughing and hot, turning her face from their breath. Blue-Eyes grips the chains around their necks. Blood and feathers from a birdskin he gnawed are stuck to Blue-Eyes' face.

Bowl-Man's distorted voice: "Take her, she's going todieee anyway. He'll stayfreeeeeesh a little longer."

Blue-Eyes to Mischa, a ghastly cozening, "Come and play, come and play!"

Blue-Eyes starts to sing and Web-Hand joins in:

“Ein Mannleinstehtim Waldeganz still und stumm,

Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein um…”

Bowl-Man brings his bowl. Web-Hand picks up the axe, Blue-Eyes seizing Mischa and Hannibal screaming flies at him, gets his teeth into Blue-Eyes' cheek, Mischa suspended in the air by her arms, twisting to look back at him.

"Mischa, Mischa!"

The cries ringing down the stone corridors and Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki burst into Hannibal 's room. He has ripped the pillow with his teeth and feathers are flying, Hannibal growls and screams, thrashing, fighting, gritting his teeth. Count Lecter puts his weight on him and confines the boy's arms in the blanket, gets his knees on the blanket.

"Easy, easy."

Fearing for Hannibal's tongue, Lady Murasaki whips off the belt of her robe, holds his nose until he has to gasp, and gets the belt between his teeth.

He shivers and is still, like a bird dies. Her robe has come open and she holds him against her, holds between her breasts his face wet with tears of rage, feathers stuck to his cheeks.

But it is the count she asks, "Are you all right?"

16

HANNIBAL ROSE EARLY and washed his face at the bowl and pitcher on his nightstand. A little feather floated on the water. He had only a vague and jumbled memory of the night.

Behind him he heard paper sliding over the stone floor, an envelope pushed under his door. A sprig of pussy willow was attached to the note.

Hannibal held the note card to his face in his cupped hands before he read it.

“ Hannibal,

I will be most pleased if you call on me in my drawing room at the Hour of the Goat. (That is 10 a.m. in France.)

Murasaki Shikibu”

Hannibal Lecter, thirteen, his hair slicked down with water, stood outside the closed door of the drawing room. He heard the lute. It was not the same song he had heard from the bath. He knocked.

"Come."

He entered a combination workroom and salon, with a frame for needlework near the window and an easel for calligraphy.

Lady Murasaki was seated at a low tea table. Her hair was up, held by ebony hairpins. The sleeves of her kimono whispered as she arranged flowers.

Good manners from every culture mesh, having a common aim. Lady Murasaki acknowledged him with a slow and graceful inclination of her head.

Hannibal inclined from the waist as his father had taught him. He saw a skein of blue incense smoke cross the window like a distant flight of birds, and the blue vein faint in Lady Murasaki's forearm as she held a flower, the sun pink through her ear. Chiyoh's lute sounded softly from behind a screen.

Lady Murasaki invited him to sit opposite her. Her voice was a pleasant alto with a few random notes not found in the Western scale. To Hannibal, her speech sounded like accidental music in a wind chime.

"If you do not want French or English or Italian, we could use some Japanese words, like kieuseru. It means 'disappear.'" She placed a stem, raised her eyes from the flowers and looked into him. "My world of Hiroshima was gone in a flash. Your world was torn from you too. Now you and I have the world we make-together. In this moment. In this room."

She picked up other flowers from the mat beside her and placed them on the table beside the vase. Hannibal could hear the leaves rustling together, and the ripple of her sleeve as she offered him flowers.

" Hannibal, where would you put these to best effect? Wherever you like."

Hannibal looked at the blossoms.

"When you were small, your father sent us your drawings. You have a promising eye. If you prefer to draw the arrangement, use the pad beside you."

Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where the tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table.

Lady Murasaki seemed pleased. "Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style." She put the silky weight of a peony in his hand. "But where might you put this? Or would you use it at all?"

In the fireplace, the water in the tea vessel seethed and came to a boil. Hannibal heard it, heard the water boiling, looked at the surface of the boiling water and his face changed and the room went away.

Mischa's bathtub on the stove in the hunting lodge, horned skull of the little deer banging against the tub in the roiling water as though it tried to butt its way out. Bones rattling in the tumbling water.

Back at himself, back in Lady Murasaki's room, and the head of the peony, bloody now, tumbled onto the tabletop, the knife clattering beside it. Hannibal mastered himself, got to his feet holding his bleeding hand behind him. He bowed to Lady Murasaki and started to leave the room.

" Hannibal."

He opened the door.

" Hannibal." She was up and close to him quickly. She held out her hand to him, held his eyes with hers, did not touch him, beckoned with her fingers. She took his bloody hand and her touch registered in his eyes, a small change in the size of his pupils.

"You will need stitches. Serge can drive us to town."

Hannibal shook his head and pointed with his chin at the needlework frame. Lady Murasaki looked into his face until she was sure.

"Chiyoh, boil a needle and thread."

At the window, in the good light, Chiyoh brought Lady Murasaki a needle and thread wrapped around an ebony hairpin, steaming from the boiling tea water. Lady Murasaki held his hand steady and sewed up his finger, six neat stitches. Drops of blood fell onto the white silk of her kimono. Hannibal looked at her steadily as she worked. He showed no reaction to the pain. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

He looked at the thread pulled tight, unwound from the hairpin. The arc of the needle's eye was a function of the diameter of the hairpin, he thought. Pages of Huyghens scattered on the snow, stuck together with brains.

Chiyoh applied an aloe leaf and Lady Murasaki bandaged his hand. When she returned his hand to him, Hannibal went to the tea table, picked up the peony and trimmed the stem. He added the peony to the vase, completing an elegant arrangement. He faced Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh.

Across his face a movement like the shiver of water and he tried to say "Thank you." She rewarded the effort with the smallest and best of smiles, but she did not let him try for long.

"Would you come with me, Hannibal? And could you help me bring the flowers?"

Together they climbed the attic stairs.

The attic door had once served elsewhere in the house; a face was carved in it, a Greek comic mask. Lady Murasaki, carrying a candle lamp, led the way far down the vast attic, past a three-hundred-year collection of attic items, trunks, Christmas decorations, lawn ornaments, wicker furniture, Kabuki and Noh Theater costumes and a row of life-size marionettes for festivals hanging from a bar.

Faint light came around the blackout shade of a dormer window far from the door. Her candle lit a small altar, a God shelf opposite the window.

On the altar were pictures of her ancestors and of Hannibal 's. About the photographs was a flight of origami paper cranes, many cranes. Here was a picture of Hannibal 's parents on their wedding day. Hannibal looked at his mother and father closely in the candlelight. His mother looked very happy. The only flame was on his candle-her clothes were not on fire.

Hannibal felt a presence looming beside him and above him and he peered into the dark. As Lady Murasaki raised the blind over the dormer window, the morning light rose over Hannibal, and over the dark presence beside him, rose over armored feet, a war fan held in gauntlets, a breastplate and at last the iron mask and horned helmet of a samurai commander. The armor was seated on the raised platform. The samurai's weapons, the long and short swords, a tanto dagger and a war axe, were on a stand before the armor.

"Let's put the flowers here, Hannibal," Lady Murasaki said, clearing a place on the altar before the photos of his parents.

"This is where I pray for you, and I strongly recommend you pray for yourself, that you consult the spirits of your family for wisdom and strength."

Out of courtesy he bowed his head at the altar for a moment, but the pull of the armor was swarming him, he felt it all up his side. He went to the rack to touch the weapons. Lady Murasaki stopped him with an upraised hand.

"This armor stood in the embassy in Paris when my father was ambassador to France before the war. We hid it from the Germans. I only touch it once a year. On my great-great-great-grandfather's birthday I am honored to clean his armor and his weapons and oil them with camellia oil and oil of cloves, a lovely scent."

She removed the stopper from a vial and offered him a sniff.

There was a scroll on the dais before the armor. It was unrolled only enough to show the first panel, the samurai wearing the armor at a levee of his retainers. As Lady Murasaki arranged the items on the God shelf, Hannibal unrolled the scroll to the next panel, where the figure in armor is presiding at a samurai head presentation, each of the enemy heads tagged with the name of the deceased, the tag attached to the hair, or in the case of baldness, tied to the ear.

Lady Murasaki took the scroll from him gently and rolled it up again to show only her ancestor in his armor.

"This is after the battle for Osaka Castle," she said. "There are other, more suitable scrolls that will interest you. Hannibal, it would please your uncle and me very much if you became the kind of man your father was, that your uncle is."

Hannibal looked at the armor, a questioning glance.

She read the question in his face. "Like him too? In some ways, but with more compassion"-she glanced at the armor as though it could hear and smiled at Hannibal-"but I wouldn't say that in front of him in Japanese."

She came closer, the candle lamp in her hand. " Hannibal, you can leave the land of nightmare. You can be anything that you can imagine. Come onto the bridge of dreams. Will you come with me?"

She was very different from his mother. She was not his mother, but he felt her in his chest. His intense regard may have unsettled her; she chose to break the mood.

"The bridge of dreams leads everywhere, but first it passes through the doctor's office, and the schoolroom," she said. "Will you come?"

Hannibal followed her, but first he took the bloodstained peony, lost among the flowers, and placed it on the dais before the armor.

17

DR. J. RUFIN PRACTICED in a townhouse with a tiny garden. The discreet sign beside the gate bore his name and his titles: DOCTEUR EN MÉDECINE, PH. D., PSYCHIATRE.

Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki sat in straight chairs in the waiting room amid Dr. Rufin's patients, some of whom had difficulty sitting still.

The doctor's inner office was heavy Victorian, with two armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace, a chaise longue with a fringed throw and, nearer the windows, an examining table and stainless-steel sterilizer.

Dr. Rufin, bearded and middle aged, and Hannibal sat in the armchairs, the doctor speaking to him in a low and pleasant voice.

" Hannibal, as you watch the metronome swinging, swinging, and listen to the sound of my voice, you will enter a state we call wakeful sleep. I won't ask you to speak, but I want you to try to make a vocal sound to indicate yes or no. You have a sense of peace, of drifting."

Between them on a table, the pendulum of a ticking metronome wagged back and forth. A clock painted with zodiac signs and cherubs ticked on the mantle. As Dr. Rufin talked, Hannibal counted the beats of the metronome against those of the clock. They went in and out of phase. Hannibal wondered if, counting the intervals in and out of phase, and measuring the wagging pendulum of the metronome, he could calculate the length of the unseen pendulum inside the clock. He decided yes, Dr. Rufin talking all the while.

"A sound with your mouth, Hannibal, any sound will do."

Hannibal, his eyes fixed dutifully on the metronome, made a low-pitched farting sound by flubbering air between his tongue and lower lip.

"That's very good," Dr. Rufin said. "You remain calm in the state of wakeful sleep. And what sound might we use for no? No, Hannibal. No."

Hannibal made a high farting sound by taking his lower lip between his teeth and expelling air from his cheek past his upper gum.

"This is communicating, Hannibal, and you can do it. Do you think we can work forward now, you and I together?"

Hannibal 's affirmative was loud enough to be audible in the waiting room, where patients exchanged anxious looks. Count Lecter went so far as to cross his legs and clear his throat and Lady Murasaki's lovely eyes rolled slowly toward the ceiling.

A squirrelly-looking man said, "That wasn't me."

" Hannibal, I know that your sleep is often disturbed," Dr. Rufin said.

"Remaining calm now in the state of wakeful sleep, can you tell me some of the things you see in dreams?"

Hannibal, counting ticks, gave Dr. Rufin a reflective Rubber.

The clock used the Roman IV on its face, rather than IIII, for symmetry with the VIII on the other side. Hannibal wondered if that meant it had Roman striking-two chimes, one meaning "five" and another meaning "one."

The doctor handed him a pad. "Could you write down perhaps some of the things you see? You call out your sister's name, do you see your sister?"

Hannibal nodded.

In Lecter Castle some of the clocks had Roman striking and some did not, but all those that did have Roman striking had the IV rather than IIII.

When Mr. Jakov opened a clock and explained the escapement, he told about Knibb and his early clocks with Roman striking-it would be good to visit in his mind the Hall of Clocks to examine the escapement. He considered going there right now, but it would be a long shout for Dr. Rufin.

" Hannibal. Hannibal. When you think about the last time you saw your sister, would you write down what you see? Would you write down what you imagine you see?"

Hannibal wrote without looking at the pad, counting both the beats of the metronome and those of the clock at the same time.

Looking at the pad Dr. Rufin appeared encouraged. "You see her baby teeth? Only her baby teeth? Where do you see them, Hannibal?"

Hannibal reached out and stopped the pendulum, regarded its length, and the position of the weight against a scale on the metronome. He wrote on the pad: In a stool pit, Doctor. May I open the back of the clock?

Hannibal waited outside with the other patients.

"It was you, it wasn't me," the squirrelly patient offered. "You might as well admit it. Do you have any gum?"

"I tried to ask him further about his sister, but he closed down," Dr. Rufin said. The count stood behind Lady Murasaki's chair in the examining room.

"To be frank, he is perfectly opaque to me. I have examined him and physically he is sound. I find scars on his scalp but no evidence of a depressed fracture. But I would guess the hemispheres of his brain may be acting independently, as they do in some cases of head trauma, when communication between the hemispheres is compromised. He follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any, and one of the trains is always for his own amusement.

"The scar on his neck is the mark of a chain frozen to the skin. I have seen others like it, just after the war when the camps were opened. He will not say what happened to his sister. I think he knows, whether he realizes it or not, and here is the danger: The mind remembers what it can afford to remember and at its own speed. He will remember when he can stand it.

"I would not push him, and it's futile to try to hypnotize him. If he remembers too soon, he could freeze inside forever to get away from the pain. You will keep him in your home?"

"Yes," they both said quickly.

Rufin nodded. "Involve him in your family as much as you can. As he emerges, he will become more attached to you than you can imagine."

18

THE HIGH FRENCH SUMMER, a pollen haze on the surface of the Essonne and ducks in the reeds. Hannibal still did not speak, but he had dreamless sleep, and the appetite of a growing thirteen-year-old.

His uncle Robert Lecter was warmer and less guarded than Hannibal 's father had been. He had a kind of artist's recklessness in him that had lasted and combined with the recklessness of age.

There was a gallery on the roof where they could walk. Pollen had gathered in drifts in the valleys of the roof, gilding the moss, and parachute spiders rode by on the wind. They could see the silver curve of the river through the trees.

The count was tall and birdlike. His skin was grey in the good light on the roof. His hands on the railing were thin, but they looked like Hannibal 's father's hands.

"Our family, we are somewhat unusual people, Hannibal," he said. "We learn it early, I expect you already know. You'll become more comfortable with it in years to come, if it bothers you now. You have lost your family and your home, but you have me and you have Sheba. Is she not a delight? Her father brought her to an exhibition of mine at the Tokyo Metropolitan twenty-five years ago. I had never seen so beautiful a child. Fifteen years later, when he became Ambassador to France, she came too. I could not believe my luck and showed up at the embassy at once, announcing my intention to convert to Shinto. He said my religion was not among his primary concerns. He has never approved of me but he likes my pictures. Pictures! Come.

"This is my studio." It was a big whitewashed room on the top floor of the chateau. Canvases in progress stood on easels and more were propped against the walls. A chaise longue sat on a low platform and, beside it on a coat stand, was a kimono. A draped canvas stood on an easel nearby.

They passed into an adjoining room, where a big easel stood with a pad of blank newsprint, charcoal and some tubes of color.

"I have made a space here for you, your own studio," the count said.

"You can find relief here, Hannibal. When you feel that you may explode, draw instead! Paint! Big arm motions, lots of color. Don't try to aim it or finesse it when you draw. You will get enough finesse from Sheba." He looked beyond the trees to the river. "I'll see you at lunch. Ask Madame Brigitte to find you a hat. We'll row in the late afternoon, after your lessons."

After the count left him, Hannibal did not at once go to his easel; he wandered about the studio looking at the count's works in progress. He put his hand on the chaise, touched the kimono on its peg and held it to his face. He stood before the draped easel and raised the cloth. The count was painting Lady Murasaki nude on the chaise. The picture came into Hannibal 's wide eyes, points of light danced in his pupils, fireflies glowed in his night.

Fall approached and Lady Murasaki organized lawn suppers where they could view the harvest moon and hear the fall insects. They waited for the moonrise, Chiyoh playing the lute in the dark when the crickets faltered. With only the rustle of silk and a fragrance to guide him, Hannibal always knew exactly where Lady Murasaki was.

The French crickets were no match for the superb bell cricket of Japan, the suzumushi, the count explained to him, but they would do. The count had sent to Japan a number of times before the war to try to obtain suzumushi crickets for Lady Murasaki but none had survived the trip and he never told her.

On still evenings, when the air was damp after a rain, they played the Aroma Identification Game, Hannibal burning a variety of barks and incense on a mica chip for Chiyoh to identify. Lady Murasaki played the koto on these occasions so Chiyoh could concentrate, her teacher sometimes providing musical hints from a repertoire Hannibal could not follow.

He was sent to monitor classes in the village school, and was an object of curiosity because he could not recite. On his second day a lout from an upper form spit in the hair of a small first-grader and Hannibal broke the spitter's coccyx and his nose. He was sent home, his expression never changing throughout.

He attended Chiyoh's lessons at home instead. Chiyoh had been engaged for years to the son of a diplomatic family in Japan and now, at thirteen, she was learning from Lady Murasaki the skills she would need.

The instruction was very different from that of Mr. Jakov, but the subjects had a peculiar beauty, like Mr. Jakov's mathematics, and Hannibal found them fascinating.

Standing near the good light from the windows in her salon, Lady Murasaki taught calligraphy, painting on sheets of the daily newspaper, and could achieve remarkably delicate effects with a large brush. Here was the symbol for eternity, a triangular shape pleasing to contemplate.

Beneath this graceful symbol, the headline on the newspaper sheet read DOCTORS INDICTED AT NUREMBERG.

"This exercise is called Eternity in Eight Strokes," she said. "Try it."

At the end of class, Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh each folded an origami crane, which they would later put on the altar in the attic.

Hannibal picked up a piece of origami paper to make a crane. Chiyoh's questioning glance at Lady Murasaki made him feel like an outsider for a moment. Lady Murasaki handed him a scissors. (Later she would correct Chiyoh for the lapse, which could not be permitted in a diplomatic setting.)

"Chiyoh has a cousin in Hiroshima named Sadako," Lady Murasaki explained. "She is dying of radiation poisoning. Sadako believes that if she folds one thousand paper cranes she will survive. Her strength is limited, and we help her each day by making paper cranes. Whether the cranes are curative or not, as we make them she is in our thoughts, along with others everywhere poisoned by the war. You would fold cranes for us, Hannibal, and we would fold them for you. Let us make cranes together for Sadako."

19

ON THURSDAYS the village had a good market under umbrellas around the fountain and statue of Marshal Foch. There was a briny vinegar on the wind from the pickle merchant and the fish and shellfish on beds of seaweed brought the smell of the ocean.

A few radios played rival tunes. The organ grinder and his monkey, released after breakfast from their frequent accommodation in the jail, ground out "Sous les Ponts de Paris" relentlessly until someone gave them a glass of wine and a piece of peanut brittle, respectively. The organ grinder drank all the wine at once and confiscated half the peanut brittle for himself, the monkey noting with his wise little eyes which pocket his master put the candy in. Two gendarmes gave the musician the usual futile admonitions and found the pastry stall.

Lady Murasaki's objective was Legumes Bulot, the premier vegetable booth, to obtain fiddlehead ferns. Fiddleheads were a great favorite of the count, and they sold out early.

Hannibal trailed behind her carrying a basket. He paused to watch as a cheese merchant oiled a length of piano wire and used it to cut a great wheel of Grana. The merchant gave him a bite and asked him to recommend it to Madame.

Lady Murasaki did not see any fiddleheads on display and before she had the chance to ask, Bulot of the Vegetables brought a basket of the coiled ferns from under his counter. "Madame, these are so superlative I would not allow the sun to touch them. Awaiting your arrival, I covered them with this cloth, dampened not with water, but with actual garden dew."

Across the aisle from the greengrocer, Paul Momund sat in his bloody apron at a butcher-block table cleaning fowl, throwing the offal into a bucket, and dividing gizzards and livers between two bowls. The butcher was a big, beefy man with a tattoo on his forearm-a cherry with the legend Voici la Mienne, óu est la Tienne? The red of the cherry had faded paler than the blood on his hands. Paul the Butcher's brother, more suited to dealing with the public, worked the counter under the banner of Momund's Fine Meats.

Paul's brother brought him a goose to draw. Paul had a drink from the bottle of marc beside him and wiped his face with his bloody hand, leaving blood and feathers on his cheeks.

"Take it easy, Paul," his brother said. "We have a long day."

"Why don't you pluck the fucking thing? I think you'd rather pluck than fuck," Paul the Butcher said, to his own intense amusement.

Hannibal was looking at a pig's head in a display case when he heard Paul's voice.

"Hey, Japonnaise!"

And the voice of Bulot of the Vegetables: "Please, Monsieur! That is unacceptable."

And Paul again: "Hey, Japonnaise, tell me, is it true that your pussy runs crossways? With a little puff of straight hairs like an explosion?"

Hannibal saw Paul then, his face smeared with blood and feathers, like the Blue-Eyed One, like the Blue-Eyed One gnawing a birdskin.

Paul turned to his brother now. "I'll tell you, I had one in Marseilles one time that could take your whole-"

The leg of lamb smashing into Paul's face drove him over backward in a spill of bird intestines, Hannibal on top of him, the leg of lamb rising and slamming down until it slipped from Hannibal's hand, the boy reaching behind him for the poultry knife on the table, not finding it, finding a handful of chicken innards and smashing them into Paul's face, the butcher pounding at him with his great bloody hands. Paul's brother kicked Hannibal in the back of the head, picked up a veal hammer from the counter, Lady Murasaki flying into the butcher stall, shoved away and then a cry, "Kiai!"

Lady Murasaki held a large butcher knife against the butcher's brother's throat, exactly where he would stick a pig, and she said, "Be perfectly still, Monsieurs." They froze for a long moment, the police whistles coming, Paul's great hands around Hannibal 's throat and his brother's eye twitching on the side where the steel touched his neck, Hannibal feeling, feeling on the tabletop behind him. The two gendarmes, slipping on the offal, pulled Paul the Butcher and Hannibal apart, a gendarme prying the boy off the butcher, lifting him off the ground and setting him on the other side of the booth.

Hannibal 's voice was rusty with disuse, but the butcher understood him.

He said "Beast" very calmly. It sounded like taxonomy rather than insult.

The police station faced the square, a sergeant behind the counter.

The Commandant of Gendarmes was in civvies today, a rumpled tropical suit. He was about fifty and tired from the war. In his office he offered Lady Murasaki and Hannibal chairs and sat down himself. His desk was bare except for a Cinzano ashtray and a bottle of the stomach remedy Clanzoflat. He offered Lady Murasaki a cigarette. She declined.

The two gendarmes from the market knocked and came in. They stood against the wall, examining Lady Murasaki out of the sides of their eyes.

"Did anyone here strike at you or resist you?" the commandant asked the policemen.

"No, Commandant."

He beckoned for the rest of their testimony.

The older gendarme consulted his notebook. "Bulot of the Vegetables stated that the butcher became deranged and was trying to get the knife, yelling that he would kill everyone, including all the nuns at the church."

The commandant rolled his eyes to the ceiling, searching for patience.

"The butcher was Vichy, and is much hated as you probably know," he said. "I will deal with him. I am sorry for the insult you suffered, Lady Murasaki. Young man, if you see this lady offended again I want you to come to me. Do you understand?"

Hannibal nodded.

"I will not have anyone attacked in this village, unless I attack them myself." The commandant rose and stood behind the boy. "Excuse us, Madame. Hannibal, come with me."

Lady Murasaki looked up at the policeman. He shook his head slightly.

The commandant led Hannibal to the back of the police station, where there were two cells, one occupied by a sleeping drunk, the other recently vacated by the organ grinder and his monkey, whose bowl of water remained on the floor.

"Stand in there."

Hannibal stood in the middle of the cell. The commandant shut the cell door with a clang that made the drunk stir and mutter.

"Look at the floor. Do you see how the boards are stained and shrunken?

They are pickled with tears. Try the door. Do it. You see it will not open from that side. Temper is a useful but dangerous gift. Use judgment and you will never occupy a cell like this. I never give but one pass.

This is yours. But don't do it again. Flog no one else with meat."

The commandant walked Lady Murasaki and Hannibal to their car. When Hannibal was inside, Lady Murasaki had a moment with the policeman.

"Commandant, I don't want my husband to know. Dr. Rufin could tell you why."

He nodded. "If the count learns of it at all and asks me, I will say it was a brawl among drunks and the boy happened to be in the middle. I'm sorry if the count is not well. In other ways he is the most fortunate of men."

It was possible that the count, in his working isolation at the chateau, might never have heard of the incident. But in the evening, as he smoked a cigar, the driver Serge returned from the village with the evening papers and drew him aside.

The Friday market was in Villiers, ten miles away. The count, grey and sleepless, climbed out of his car as Paul the Butcher was carrying the carcass of a lamb into his booth. The count's cane caught Paul across the upper lip and the count flew at him, slashing with the cane. "Piece of filth, you would insult my wife!!" Paul dropped the meat and shoved the count hard, the count's thin frame flying back against a counter and the count came on again, slashing with his cane, and then he stopped, a look of surprise on his face. He raised his hands halfway to his waistcoat and fell facedown on the floor of the butcher's stall.

20

DISGUSTED WITH the whining and bleating of the hymns and the droning nonsense of the funeral, Hannibal Lecter, thirteen and the last of his line, stood beside Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh at the church door absently shaking hands as the mourners filed out, the women uncovering their heads as they left the church in the post-war prejudice against head scarves.

Lady Murasaki listened, making gracious and correct responses.

Hannibal 's sense of her fatigue took him out of himself and he found that he was talking so she would not have to talk, his new-found voice degenerating quickly to a croak. If Lady Murasaki was surprised to hear him she did not show it, but took his hand and squeezed it tight as she extended her other hand to the next mourner in line.

A gaggle of Paris press and the news services were there to cover the demise of a major artist who avoided them during his lifetime. Lady Murasaki had nothing to say to them.

In the afternoon of this endless day the count's lawyer came to the chateau along with an official of the Bureau of Taxation. Lady Murasaki gave them tea.

"Madame, I hesitate to intrude upon your grief' the tax official said, "but I want to assure you that you will have plenty of time to make other arrangements before the chateau is auctioned for death duties. I wish we could accept your own sureties for the death tax, but as your resident status in France will now come into question, that is impossible."

Night came at last. Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door, and Chiyoh had made up a pallet to sleep in the room with her.

He lay awake in his room for a long time and when sleep came, with it came dreams.

The Blue-Eyed One's face smeared with blood and feathers morphing into the face of Paul the Butcher, and back again.

Hannibal woke in the dark and it did not stop, the faces like holograms on the ceiling. Now that he could speak, he did not scream.

He rose and went quietly up the stairs to the count's studio. Hannibal lit the candelabra on either side of the easel. The portraits on the walls, finished and half-finished had gained presence with their maker gone. Hannibal felt them straining toward the spirit of the count as though they might find him breath.

His uncle's cleaned brushes stood in a canister, his chalks and charcoals in their grooved trays. The painting of Lady Murasaki was gone, and she had taken her kimono from the hook as well.

Hannibal began to draw with big arm motions, as the count had counseled, trying to let it go, making great diagonal strokes across newsprint, slashes of color. It did not work. Toward dawn he stopped forcing; he quit pushing, and simply watched what his hand revealed to him.

21

HANNIBAL SAT on a stump in a small glade beside the river, plucking the lute and watching a spider spin. The spider was a splendid yellow and black orb weaver, working away. The web vibrated as the spider worked.

The spider seemed excited by the lute, running to various parts of its web to check for captives as Hannibal plucked the strings. He could approximate the Japanese song, but he still hit clinkers. He thought of Lady Murasaki's pleasant alto voice speaking English, with its occasional accidental notes not on the Western scale. He plucked closer to the web and further away. A slow-flying beetle crashed into the web and the spider rushed to bind it.

The air was still and warm, the river perfectly smooth. Near the banks water bugs ran across the surface and dragonflies darted over the reeds.

Paul the Butcher paddled his small boat with one hand, and let it drift near the willows overhanging the bank. The crickets chirped in Paul's bait basket, attracting a red-eyed fly, which fled from Paul's big hand as he grabbed a cricket and put it on his hook. He cast under the willows and at once his quill float plunged and his rod came alive.

Paul reeled in his fish and put it with the others on a chain stringer hanging over the side of his boat. Occupied with the fish he only half-heard a thrumming in the air. He sucked fish blood off his thumb and paddled to a small pier on the wooded bank where his truck was parked. He used the rude bench on the pier to clean his biggest fish and put it in a canvas bag with some ice. The others were still alive on the stringer in the water. They pulled the chain under the pier in an attempt to hide.

A twanging in the air, a broken tune from somewhere far from France.

Paul looked at his truck as though it might be a mechanical noise. He walked up the bank, still carrying his filleting knife, and examined his truck, checked the radio aerial and looked at his tires. He made sure his doors were locked. Again came the twanging, a progression of notes now.

Paul followed the sound, rounding some bushes into the little glade, where he found Hannibal seated on the stump playing the Japanese lute, its case propped against a motorbike. Beside him was a drawing pad. Paul went back at once to his truck and checked the gas filler pipe for grains of sugar. Hannibal did not look up from his playing until the butcher returned and stood before him.

"Paul Momund, fine meats," Hannibal said. He was experiencing a sharpness of vision, with edges of refracted red like ice on a window or the edge of a lens.

"You've started talking, you little mute bastard. If you pissed in my heater I'll twist your fucking head off. There's no flic to help you here."

"Nor to help you either." Hannibal plucked several notes.

"What you have done is unforgivable." Hannibal put down the lute and took up his sketch pad. Looking up at Paul, he used his little finger as a smudge to make a small adjustment on the pad.

He turned the page and rose, extending a blank page to Paul. "You owe a certain lady a written apology." Paul smelled rank to him, sebum and dirty hair.

"Boy, you are crazy to come here."

"Write that you are sorry, you realize that you are despicable, and you will never look at her or address her in the market again."

"Apologize to the Japonnaise?" Paul laughed. "The first thing I'll do is throw you in the river and rinse you off." He put his hand on his knife.

"Then maybe I'll slit your pants and give you something where you don't want it." He came toward Hannibal then, the boy backing away toward his motorbike and the lute case.

Hannibal stopped. "You inquired about her pussy, I believe. You speculated that it ran which way?"

"Is she your mother? Jap pussy runs crossways! You should fuck the little Jap and see."

Paul came scuttling fast, his great hands up to crush, and Hannibal in one movement drew the curved sword from the lute case and slashed Paul low across the belly.

"Crossways like that?"

The butcher's scream rang off the trees and the birds flew with a rush.

Paul put his hands on himself and they came away covered with thick blood. He looked down at the wound and tried to hold himself together, intestines spilling in his hands, getting away from him. Hannibal stepping to the side and turning with the blow slashed Paul across the kidneys.

"Or more tangential to the spine?"

Swinging the sword to make Xs in Paul now, Paul's eyes wide in shock, the butcher trying to run, caught across the clavicle, an arterial hiss that spatters Hannibal 's face. The next two blows sliced him behind the ankles and he went down hamstrung and bellowing like a steer.

Paul the Butcher sits propped against the stump. He cannot raise his arms.

Hannibal looks into his face. "Would you like to see my drawing?"

He offers the pad. The drawing is Paul the Butcher's head on a platter with a name tag attached to the hair. The tag reads Paul Momund, Fine Meats. Paul's vision is darkening around the edges. Hannibal swings the sword and for Paul everything is sideways for an instant, before blood pressure is lost and there is the dark.

In his own darkness, Hannibal hears Mischa's voice as the swan was coming, and he says aloud, "Oooh, Anniba!"

Afternoon faded. Hannibal stayed well into the gloaming, his eyes closed, leaning against the stump where stood the butcher's head. He opened his eyes and sat for long minutes. At last he rose and went to the dock. The fish stringer was made of slender chain and the sight of it made him rub the scar around his neck. The fish on the stringer were still alive. He wet his hand before he touched them, turning them loose one by one.

"Go," he said. "Go," and flung the empty chain far across the water.

He turned the crickets loose as well. "Go, go!" he told them. He looked in the canvas bag at the big cleaned fish and felt a twinge of appetite.

"Yum," he said.

22

PAUL THE BUTCHER'S violent death was no tragedy to many of the villagers, whose mayor and several aldermen had been shot by the Nazis as reprisals for Resistance activity during the occupation.

The greater part of Paul himself lay on a zinc table in the embalming room at Pompes Funebres Roget, where he had succeeded Count Lecter on the slab. At dusk a black Citroen Traction Avant pulled up to the funeral home. A gendarme stationed in front hastened to open the car door.

"Good evening, Inspector."

The man who got out was about forty, neat in a suit. He returned the gendarme's smart salute with a friendly nod, turned back to the car and spoke to the driver and another officer in the backseat. "Take the cases to the police station."

The inspector found the funeral home proprietor, Monsieur Roget, and the Commandant of Police in the embalming room, all faucets and hoses and enamel with supplies in cases fronted with glass.

The commandant brightened at the sight of the policeman from Paris.

"Inspector Popil! I'm happy you could come. You won't remember me but…,"

The inspector considered the commandant. "I do, of course. Commandant Balmain. You delivered De Rais to Nuremberg and sat behind him at the trial."

"I saw you bring the evidence. It's an honor, sir."

"What do we have?"

The funeral director's assistant Laurent pulled back the covering sheet.

Paul the Butcher's body was still clothed, long stripes of red diagonally across him where the clothing was not soaked with blood. He was absent his head.

"Paul Momund, or most of him," the commandant said. "That is his dossier?"

Popil nodded. "Short and ugly. He shipped Jews from Orleans." The inspector considered the body, walked around it, picked up Paul's hand and arm, its rude tattoo brighter now against the pallor. He spoke absently as though to himself. "He has defense wounds on his hands, but the bruises on his knuckles are days old. He fought recently."

"And often," the mortician said.

Assistant Laurent piped up. "Last Saturday he had a bar fight, and knocked teeth from a man and a girl." Laurent jerked his head to illustrate the force of the blows, the pompadour bobbing on his petite skull.

"A list please. His recent opponents," the inspector said. He leaned over the body, sniffing. "You have done nothing to this body, Monsieur Roget?"

"No, Monsieur. The commandant specifically forbade me…"

Inspector Popil beckoned him to the table. Laurent came too. "Is this the odor of anything you use here?"

"I smell cyanide," Mortician Roget said. "He was poisoned first!"

"Cyanide is a burnt-almond smell," Popil said.

"It smells like that toothache remedy," Laurent said, unconsciously rubbing his jaw.

The mortician turned on his assistant. "Cretin! Where do you see his teeth?"

"Yes. Oil of cloves," Inspector Popil said. "Commandant, could we have the pharmacist and his books?"

Under the tutelage of the chef, Hannibal baked the splendid fish in its scales with herbs in a crust of Brittany sea salt and now he took it from the oven. The crust broke at the sharp tap with the back of a chef's knife and peeled away, the scales coming with it, and the kitchen filled with the wonderful aroma.

"Regard, Hannibal," the chef said. "The best morsels of the fish are the cheeks. This is true of many creatures. When carving at the table, you give one cheek to Madame, and the other to the guest of honor. Of course, if you are plating in the kitchen you eat them both yourself."

Serge came in carrying staple groceries from the market. He started unpacking the bags and putting food away.

Behind Serge, Lady Murasaki came quietly into the kitchen.

"I saw Laurent at the Petit Zinc," Serge said. "They haven't found the butcher's damned ugly head yet. He said the body was scented with-get this-oil of cloves, the toothache stuff. He said-"

Hannibal saw Lady Murasaki and cut Serge off. "You really should eat something, my lady. This will be very, very good."

"And I brought some peach ice cream, fresh peaches," Serge said.

Lady Murasaki looked into Hannibal 's eyes for a long moment.

He smiled at her, perfectly calm. "Peach!" he said.

23

MIDNIGHT, LADY MURASAKI lay in her bed. The window was open to a soft breeze that carried the scent of a mimosa blooming in a corner of the courtyard below. She pushed the covers down to feel the moving air on her arms and feet. Her eyes were open, looking up at the dark ceiling, and she could hear the tiny clicks when she blinked her eyes.

Below in the courtyard the old mastiff stirred in her sleep, her nostrils opened and she took in a lot of air. A few folds appeared in the pelt on her forehead, and she relaxed again to pleasant dreams of a chase and blood in her mouth. Above Lady Murasaki in the dark, the attic floor creaked. Weight on the boards, not the squeak of a mouse. Lady Murasaki took a deep breath and swung her feet onto the cold stone floor of the bedroom. She put on her light kimono, touched her hair, gathered flowers from a vase in the hall and, carrying a candle lamp, mounted the stairs to the attic.

The mask carved on the attic door smiled at her. She straightened, she put her hand on the carved face and pushed. She felt the draft press her robe against her back, a tiny push, and far, far down the dark attic she saw the flicker of a tiny light. Lady Murasaki went toward the light, her candle lamp glowing on the Noh masks watching her, and the hanging row of marionettes gestured in the breath of her passing. Past wicker baskets and stickered trunks of her years with Robert, toward the family altar and the armor where candles burned.

A dark object stood on the altar before the armor. She saw it in silhouette against the candles. She set her candle lamp on a crate near the altar and looked steadily at the head of Paul the Butcher standing in a shallow suiban flower vessel. Paul's face is clean and pale, his lips are intact, but his cheeks are missing and a little blood has leaked from his mouth into the flower vessel, where blood stands like the water beneath a flower arrangement. A tag is attached to Paul's hair. On the tag in a copperplate hand: Momund, Boucherie de Qualité.

Paul's head faced the armor, the eyes upturned to the samurai mask. Lady Murasaki turned her face up too and spoke in Japanese.

"Good evening, Honored Ancestor. Please excuse this inadequate bouquet.

With all respect, this is not the type of help I had in mind."

Automatically she picked up a wilted flower and ribbon from the floor and put it in her sleeve, her eyes moving all the while. The long sword was in its place, and the war axe. The short sword was missing from its stand.

She took a step backward, went to the dormer window and opened it. She took a deep breath. Her pulse sounded in her ears. The breeze fluttered her robe and the candles.

A soft rattle from behind the Noh costumes. One of the masks had eyes in it, watching her.

She said in Japanese, "Good evening, Hannibal."

Out of the darkness came the reply in Japanese, "Good evening, my lady."

"May we continue in English, Hannibal? There are matters I prefer to keep private from my ancestor."

"As you wish, my lady. In any case, we have exhausted my Japanese."

He came into the lamplight then, carrying the short sword and a cleaning cloth. She went toward him. The long sword was in its rack before the armor. She could reach it if she had to.

"I would have used the butcher's knife," Hannibal said. "I used Masamune-dono's sword because it seemed so appropriate. I hope you don't mind. Not a nick in the blade, I promise you. The butcher was like butter."

"I am afraid for you."

"Please don't be concerned. I'll dispose of… that."

"You did not need to do this for me."

"I did it for myself, because of the worth of your person, Lady Murasaki. No onus on you at all. I think Masamune-dono permitted the use of his sword. It's an amazing instrument, really."

Hannibal returned the short sword to its sheath and with a respectful gesture to the armor, replaced it on its stand.

"You are trembling," he said. "You are in perfect possession of yourself, but you are trembling like a bird. I would not have approached you without flowers. I love you, Lady Murasaki."

Below, outside the courtyard, the two-note cry of a French police siren, sounded only once. The mastiff roused herself and came out to bark.

Lady Murasaki quick to Hannibal, taking his hands in hers, holding them to her face. She kissed his forehead, and then the intense whisper of her voice: "Quickly! Scrub your hands! Chiyoh has lemons in the maid's room."

Far down in the house the knocker boomed.

24

LADY MURASAKI let Inspector Popil wait through one hundred beats of her heart before she appeared on the staircase. He stood in the center of the high-ceilinged foyer with his assistant and looked up at her on the landing. She saw him alert and still, like a handsome spider standing before the webbed mullions of the windows, and beyond the windows she saw endless night.

Popil's breath came in a bit sharply at the sight of Lady Murasaki. The sound was amplified in the dome of the foyer, and she was listening.

Her descent seemed one motion with no increment of steps. Her hands were in her sleeves.

Serge, red-eyed, stood to the side.

"Lady Murasaki, these gentlemen are from the police."

"Good evening."

"Good evening, ma'am. I'm sorry to disturb you so late. I need to ask questions of your… nephew?"

"Nephew. May I see your credentials?" Her hand came out of her sleeve slowly, her hand disrobing. She read all the text in his credentials, and examined the photograph.

"Inspector POP-il?"

"Po-PIL, Madame."

"You wear the Legion of Honor in your photograph, Inspector."

"Yes, Madame."

"Thank you for coming in person."

A fragrance, fresh and faint, reached Popil as she gave him back his identification. She watched his face for its arrival, and saw it there, a minute change in his nostrils and the pupils of his eyes.

"Madame…?"

"Murasaki Shikibu."

"Madame is the Countess Lecter, customarily addressed by her Japanese title as Lady Murasaki," Serge said, brave for him, speaking with a policeman.

"Lady Murasaki, I would like to speak with you in private, and then with your nephew separately."

"With all due respect to your office, I'm afraid that is not possible, Inspector," Lady Murasaki said.

"Oh, Madame, it is entirely possible," Inspector Popil said.

"You are welcome here in our home, and you are entirely welcome to speak with us together."

Hannibal spoke from the stairs. "Good evening, Inspector."

He turned to Hannibal. "Young man, I want you to come with me."

"Certainly, Inspector."

Lady Murasaki said to Serge, "Would you get my wrap?"

"That will not be necessary, Madame," Popil said. "You won't be coming.

I will interview you here tomorrow, Madame. I will not harm your nephew."

"It's fine, my lady," Hannibal said.

Inside her sleeves Lady Murasaki's grip on her wrists relaxed a little in relief.

25

THE EMBALMING ROOM was dark, and silent except for a slow drip in the sink. The inspector stood in the doorway with Hannibal, raindrops on their shoulders and their shoes.

Momund was in there. Hannibal could smell him. He waited for Popil to turn on the light, interested to see what the policeman would consider a dramatic interval.

"Do you think you would recognize Paul Momund if you saw him again?"

"I'll do my best, Inspector."

Popil switched on the light. The mortician had removed Momund's clothing and put it in paper bags as instructed. He had closed the abdomen with coarse stitching over a piece of rubber raincoat, and placed a towel over the severed neck.

"Do you remember the butcher's tattoo?"

Hannibal walked around the body. "Yes. I hadn't read it."

The boy looked at Inspector Popil across the body. He saw in the inspector's eyes the smudged look of intelligence.

"What does it say?" the inspector asked.

"Here's mine, where's yours?"

"Perhaps it should say, Here's yours, where's mine? Here is your first kill, where is my head? What do you think?"

"I think that's probably unworthy of you. I would hope so. Do you expect his wounds to bleed in my presence?"

"What did this butcher say to the lady that drove you crazy?"

"It did not drive me crazy, Inspector. His mouth offended everyone who heard it, including me. He was rude."

"What did he say, Hannibal?"

"He asked if it were true that Japanese pussy runs sideways, Inspector.

His address was 'Hey, Japonnaise!'"

"Sideways." Inspector Popil traced the line of stitches across Paul Momund's abdomen, nearly touching the skin. "Sideways like this?" The inspector scanned Hannibal 's face for something. He did not find it. He did not find anything, so he asked another question.

"How do you feel, seeing him dead?"

Hannibal looked under the towel covering the neck. "Detached," he said.

The polygraph set up in the police station was the first the village policemen had seen, and there was considerable curiosity about it. The operator, who had come from Paris with Inspector Popil, made a number of adjustments, some purely theatrical, as the tubes warmed up and the insulation added a hot-cotton smell to the atmosphere of sweat and cigarettes. Then the inspector, watching Hannibal watching the machine, cleared the room of everyone but the boy, himself and the operator. The polygrapher attached the instrument to Hannibal.

"State your name," the operator said.

" Hannibal Lecter." The boy's voice was rusty.

"What is your age?"

"Thirteen years."

The ink styluses ran smoothly over the polygraph paper.

"How long have you been a resident of France?"

"Six months."

"Were you acquainted with the butcher Paul Momund?"

"We were never introduced."

The styluses did not quiver.

"But you knew who he was."

"Yes."

"Did you have an altercation, that is a fight, with Paul Momund at the market on Thursday?"

"Yes."

"Do you attend school?"

"Yes."

"Does your school require uniforms?"

"No."

"Do you have any guilty knowledge of the death of Paul Momund?"

"Guilty knowledge?"

"Limit your responses to yes or no."

"No."

The peaks and valleys in the ink lines are constant. No increase in blood pressure, no increase in heartbeat, respiration constant and calm.

"You know that the butcher is dead."

"Yes."

The polygrapher appeared to make several adjustments to the knobs of the machine.

"Have you studied mathematics?"

"Yes."

"Have you studied geography?"

"Yes."

"Did you see the dead body of Paul Momund?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill Paul Momund?"

"No."

No distinctive spikes in the inked lines. The operator took off his glasses, a signal to Inspector Popil that ended the examination.

A known burglar from Orléans with a lengthy police record replaced Hannibal in the chair. The burglar waited while Inspector Popil and the polygrapher conferred in the hall outside.

Popil unspooled the paper tape.

"Vanilla."

"The boy responds to nothing," the polygrapher said. "He's a blunted war orphan or he has a monstrous amount of self-control."

"Monstrous," Popil said.

"Do you want to question the burglar first?"

"He does not interest me, but I want you to run him. And I may whack him a few times in front of the boy. Do you follow me?"

On the downslope of the road leading into the village, a motorbike coasted with its lights out, its engine off. The rider wore black coveralls and a black balaclava. Silently the bike rounded a corner at the far side of the deserted square, disappeared briefly behind a postal van parked in front of the post office and moved on, the rider peddling hard, not starting the engine before the upslope out of the village.

Inspector Popil and Hannibal sat in the commandant's office. Inspector Popil read the label on the commandant's bottle of Clanzoflat and considered taking a dose.

Then he put the roll of polygraph tape on the desk and pushed it with his finger. The tape unrolled its line of many small peaks. The peaks looked to him like the foothills of a mountain obscured by cloud. "Did you kill the butcher, Hannibal?"

"May I ask you a question?"

"Yes."

"It's a long way to come from Paris. Do you specialize in the deaths of butchers?"

"My specialty is war crimes, and Paul Momund was suspected in several.

War crimes do not end with the war, Hannibal." Popil paused to read the advertising on each facet of the ashtray. "Perhaps I understand your situation better than you think."

"What is my situation, Inspector?"

"You were orphaned in the war. You lived in an institution, living inside yourself, your family dead. And at last, at last your beautiful stepmother made up for all of it." Working for the bond, Popil put his hand on Hannibal 's shoulder. "The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. And then the butcher spews filth at her. If you killed him, I could understand. Tell me. Together we could explain to a magistrate…"

Hannibal moved back in his chair, away from Popil's touch.

"The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp? May I ask if you compose verse, Inspector?"

"Did you kill the butcher?"

"Paul Momund killed himself. He died of stupidity and rudeness."

Inspector Popil had considerable experience and knowledge of the awful, and this was the voice Popil had been listening for; it had a faintly different timbre and was surprising coming from the body of a boy.

This specific wavelength he had not heard before, but he recognized it as Other. It had been some time since he felt the thrill of the hunt, the prehensile quality of the opposing brain. He felt it in his scalp and forearms. He lived for it.

Part of him wished the burglar outside had killed the butcher. Part of him considered how lonely and in need of company Lady Murasaki might be with the boy in an institution.

"The butcher was fishing. He had blood and scales on his knife, but he had no fish. The chef tells me you brought in a splendid fish for dinner. Where did you get the fish?"

"By fishing, Inspector. We keep a baited line in the water behind the boathouse. I'll show you if you like. Inspector, did you choose war crimes?"

"Yes."

"Because you lost family in the war?"

"Yes."

"May I ask how?"

"Some in combat. Some were shipped east."

"Did you catch who did it?"

"No."

"But they were Vichy-men like the butcher."

"Yes."

"Can we be perfectly honest with each other?"

"Absolutely."

"Are you sorry to see Paul Momund dead?"

On the far side of the square the village barber, M. Rubin, came off a leafy side street for his nightly round of the square with his small terrier. M. Rubin, after talking with his customers all day, continued talking to his dog in the evening. He pulled the dog away from the grassy strip in front of the post office.

"You should have performed your duty on the lawn of Felipe, where no one was looking," M. Rubin said. "Here you might incur a fine. You have no money. It would fall to me to pay."

In front of the post office was a post box on a pole. The dog strained toward it against the leash and raised his leg.

Seeing a face above the mailbox, Rubin said, "Good evening, Monsieur," and to the dog, "Attend you do not befoul Monsieur!" The dog whined and Rubin noticed there were no legs beneath the mailbox on the other side.

The motorbike sped along the one-lane paved road, nearly overrunning the cast of its dim headlight. Once when a car approached from the other way, the rider ducked into the roadside trees until the car's taillights were out of sight.

In the dark storage shed of the chateau, the headlight of the bike faded out, the motor ticking as it cooled. Lady Murasaki pulled off the black balaclava and by touch she put up her hair.

The beams of police flashlights converged on Paul Momund's head on top of the mailbox. Boche was printed across his forehead just below the hairline. Late drinkers and night workers were gathering to see.

Inspector Popil brought Hannibal up close and looked at him by the light glowing off the dead man's face. He could detect no change in the boy's expression.

"The Resistance killed Momund at last," the barber said, and explained to everyone how he had found him, carefully leaving out the transgressions of the dog.

Some in the crowd thought Hannibal shouldn't have to look at it. An older woman, a night nurse going home, said so aloud.

Popil sent him home in a police car. Hannibal arrived at the chateau in the rosy dawn and cut some flowers before he went into the house, arranging them for height in his fist. The poem to accompany them came to him as he was cutting the stems off even. He found Lady Murasaki's brush in the studio still wet and used it to write:

Night heron revealed

By the rising harvest moon

Which is lovelier?

Hannibal slept easily later in the day. He dreamed of Mischa in the summer before the war, Nanny had her bathtub in the garden at the lodge, letting the sun warm the water, and the cabbage butterflies flew around Mischa in the water. He cut the eggplant for her and she hugged the purple eggplant, warm from the sun.

When he woke there was a note beneath his door along with a wisteria blossom. The note said: One would choose the heron, if beset by frogs.

26

CHIYOH PREPARED for her departure to Japan by drilling Hannibal in elementary Japanese, in the hope that he could provide some conversation for Lady Murasaki and relieve her of the tedium of speaking English.

She found him an apt pupil in the Heian tradition of communication by poem and engaged him in practice poem exchanges, confiding that this was a major deficiency in her prospective groom. She made Hannibal swear to look out for Lady Murasaki, using a variety of oaths sworn on objects she thought Westerners might hold sacred. She required pledges as well at the altar in the attic, and a blood oath that involved pricking their fingers with a pin.

They could not hold off the time with wishing. When Lady Murasaki and Hannibal packed for Paris, Chiyoh packed for Japan. Serge and Hannibal heaved Chiyoh's trunk onto the boat train at the Gare de Lyon while Lady Murasaki sat beside her in the train, holding her hand until the last minute. An outsider watching them part might have thought them emotionless as they exchanged a final bow.

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki felt Chiyoh's absence sharply on the way home. Now there were only the two of them.

The Paris apartment vacated before the war by Lady Murasaki's father was very Japanese in its subtle interplay of shadows and lacquer. If the furniture, undraped piece by piece, brought Lady Murasaki memories of her father, she did not reveal them.

She and Hannibal tied back the heavy draperies, letting in the sun.

Hannibal looked down upon the Place de Vosges, all light and space and warm red brick, one of the most beautiful squares in Paris despite a garden still scruffy from the war.

There, on the field below, King Henri II jousted under the colors of Diane de Poitiers and fell with fatal splinters in his eye, and even Vesalius at his bedside could not save him.

Hannibal closed one eye and speculated precisely where Henri fell-probably right over there where Inspector Popil now stood, holding a potted plant and looking up at the windows. Hannibal did not wave.

"I think you have a caller, my lady," he said over his shoulder.

Lady Murasaki did not ask who. When the knocking came, she let it go on for a moment before she answered the door.

Popil came in with his plant and a bag of sweets from Fauchon. There was a mild confusion as he attempted to remove his hat while holding parcels in both hands. Lady Murasaki took the hat from him.

"Welcome to Paris, Lady Murasaki. The florist swears to me this plant will do well on your terrace."

"Terrace? I suspect you are investigating me, Inspector- already you have found out I have a terrace."

"Not only that-I have confirmed the presence of a foyer, and I strongly suspect you have a kitchen."

"So you work from room to room?"

"Yes, that is my method, I proceed from room to room."

"Until you arrive where?" She saw some color in his face and let him off. "Shall we put this in the light?"

Hannibal was unpacking the armor when they came upon him. He stood beside the crate, holding the samurai mask. He did not turn his body toward Inspector Popil, but turned his head like an owl to look at the policeman. Seeing Popil's hat in Lady Murasaki's hands, Hannibal estimated the size and weight of his head at 19.5 centimeters and six kilos.

"Do you ever put it on, the mask?" Inspector Popil said.

"I haven't earned it."

"I wonder."

"Do you ever wear your many decorations, Inspector?"

"When ceremonies require them."

"Chocolates from Fauchon. Very thoughtful, Inspector Popil. They will take away the smell of the camp."

"But not the scent of oil of cloves. Lady Murasaki, I need to discuss the matter of your residency."

Popil and Lady Murasaki talked on the terrace. Hannibal watched them through the window, revising his estimate of Popil's hat size to twenty centimeters. In the course of conversation Popil and Lady Murasaki moved the plant a number of times to vary its exposure to the light. They seemed to need something to do.

Hannibal did not continue unpacking the armor, but knelt beside the crate and rested his hand on the rayskin grip of the short sword. He looked out at the policeman through the eyes of the mask.

He could see Lady Murasaki laughing. Inspector Popil must be making some lame attempt at levity and she was laughing out of kindness, Hannibal surmised. When they came back inside, Lady Murasaki left them alone together.

" Hannibal, at the time of his death your uncle was trying to find out what happened to your sister in Lithuania. I can try too. It's hard in the Baltic now-sometimes the Soviets cooperate, more times they don't.

But I keep after them."

"Thank you."

"What do you remember?"

"We were living at the lodge. There was an explosion. I can remember being picked up by soldiers and riding on a tank to the village. In between I don't know. I try to remember. I cannot."

"I talked with Dr. Rufin."

No visible reaction to that.

"He would not discuss any specifics of his talks with you."

Nothing to that either.

"But he said you are very concerned about your sister, naturally. He said with time your memory might return. If you remember anything, ever, please tell me."

Hannibal looked at the inspector steadily. "Why would I not?" He wished he could hear a clock. It would be good to hear a clock.

"When we talked after… the incident of Paul Momund, I told you I lost relatives in the war. It is very much of an effort for me to think about that. Do you know why?"

"Tell me why, Inspector."

"Because I think I should have saved them, I have a horror of finding something I didn't do, that I could have done. If you have the fear the same way I do, don't let it push away some memory that might be helpful to Mischa. You can tell me anything in the world."

Lady Murasaki came into the room. Popil stood up and changed the subject. "The Lycée is a good school and you earned your way in. If I can help you, I will. I'll drop by the school to see about you from time to time."

"But you would prefer to call here," Hannibal said.

"Where you will be welcome," Lady Murasaki said.

"Good afternoon, Inspector," Hannibal said.

Lady Murasaki let Popil out and she returned angry.

"Inspector Popil likes you, I can see it in his face," Hannibal said.

"What can he see in yours? It is dangerous to bait him."

"You will find him tedious."

"I find you rude. It is quite unlike you. If you wish to be rude to a guest, do it in your own house," Lady Murasaki said.

"Lady Murasaki, I want to stay here with you."

The anger went out of her. "No. We will spend our holidays together, and weekends, but you must board at the school as the rules require. You know my hand is always on your heart." And she put it there.

On his heart. The hand that held Popil's hat was on his heart. The hand that held the knife to Momund's brother's throat. The hand that gripped the butcher's hair and dropped his head into a bag and set it on the mailbox. His heart beat against her palm. Fathomless her face.

27

THE FROGS HAD BEEN preserved in formaldehyde from before the war, and what differentiating color their organs ever had was long ago leached away. There was one for each six students in the malodorous school laboratory. A circle of schoolboys crowded around each plate where the little cadaver rested, the chaff of grubby erasures dusting the table as they sketched. The schoolroom was cold, coal still being in short supply, and some of the boys wore gloves with the fingertips cut out.

Hannibal came and looked at the frog and returned to his desk to work.

He made two trips. Professor Bienville had a teacher's suspicion of anyone who chose to sit in the back of the room. He approached Hannibal from the flank, his suspicions justified as he saw the boy sketching a face instead of a frog.

"Hannibal Lecter, why are you not drawing the specimen?"

"I finished it, sir." Hannibal lifted the top sheet and there was the frog, exactly rendered, in the anatomical position and circumscribed like Leonardo's drawing of man. The internals were hatched and shaded.

The professor looked carefully into Hannibal 's face. He adjusted his dentures with his tongue and said, "I will take that drawing. There is someone who should see it. You'll have credit for it." The professor turned down the top sheet of Hannibal 's tablet and looked at the face.

"Who is that?"

"I'm not sure, sir. A face I saw somewhere."

In fact, it was the face of Vladis Grutas, but Hannibal did not know his name. It was a face he had seen in the moon and on the midnight ceiling.

A year of grey light through classroom windows. At least the light was diffuse enough to draw by, and the classrooms changed as the instructors put him up a form, and then another and another.

A holiday from school at last.

In this first fall since the death of the count and the departure of Chiyoh, Lady Murasaki's losses quickened in her. When her husband was alive she had arranged outdoor suppers in the fall in a meadow near the chateau with Count Lecter and Hannibal and Chiyoh, to view the harvest moon and to listen to the fall insects.

Now, on the terrace at her residence in Paris, she read to Hannibal a letter from Chiyoh about her wedding arrangements, and they watched the moon wax toward full, but no crickets could be heard.

Hannibal folded his cot in the living room early in the morning and bicycled across the Seine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he made another of his frequent inquiries at the menagerie. News today, a scribbled note with an address…

Ten minutes further south at Place Monge and the Rue Ortolan he found the shop: Poissons Tropicaux, Petites Oiseaux, amp; Animaux Exotiques.

Hannibal took a small portfolio from his saddlebag and went inside.

There were tiers of tanks and cages in the small storefront, twittering and chirping and the whir of hamster wheels. It smelled of grain and warm feathers and fish food.

From a cage beside the cash register, a large parrot addressed Hannibal in Japanese. An older Japanese man with a pleasant face came from the back of the store, where he was cooking.

"Gomekudasai, Monsieur?" Hannibal said.

"Irasshaimase, Monsieur," the proprietor said.

"Irasshaimase, Monsieur," the parrot said.

"Do you have a suzumushi cricket for sale, Monsieur?"

"Non, je suis désolée, Monsieur," the proprietor said.

"Non, je suis désolée. Monsieur," the parrot said.

The proprietor frowned at the bird and switched to English to confound the intrusive fowl. "I have a variety of excellent fighting crickets.

Fierce fighters, always victorious, famous wherever crickets gather."

"This is a gift for a lady from Japan who pines for the song of the suzumushi at this time of year," Hannibal said. "A plain cricket is unsuitable."

"I would never suggest a French cricket, whose song is pleasing only for its seasonal associations. But I have no suzumushi for sale. Perhaps she would be amused by a parrot with an extensive Japanese vocabulary, whose expressions embrace all walks of life."

"Might you have a personal suzumushi?"

The proprietor looked into the distance for a moment. The law on the importation of insects and their eggs was fuzzy this early in the new Republic. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would be honored," Hannibal said.

The proprietor disappeared behind a curtain at the rear of the store and returned with a small cricket cage, a cucumber and a knife. He placed the cage on the counter, and under the avid gaze of the parrot, cut off a tiny slice of cucumber and pushed it into the cricket cage. In a moment came the clear sleigh-bell ring of the suzumushi. The proprietor listened with a beatific expression as the song came again.

The parrot imitated the cricket's song as well as it could-loudly and repeatedly. Receiving nothing, it became abusive and raved until Hannibal thought of Uncle Elgar. The proprietor put a cover over the cage.

"Merde," it said from beneath the cloth.

"Do you suppose I might hire the use of a suzumushi, lease one so to speak, on a weekly basis?"

"What sort of fee would you find appropriate?" the proprietor said.

"I had in mind an exchange," Hannibal said. He took from his portfolio a small drawing in pen and ink wash of a beetle on a bent stem.

The proprietor, holding the drawing carefully by the edges, turned it to the light. He propped it against the cash register. "I could inquire among my colleagues. Could you return after the lunch hour?"

Hannibal wandered, purchased a plum at the street market and ate it.

Here was a sporting-goods store with trophy heads in the window, a bighorn sheep, an ibex. Leaning in the corner of the window was an elegant Holland amp; Holland double rifle. It was wonderfully stocked; the wood looked as though it had grown around the metal and together wood and metal had the sinuous quality of a beautiful snake.

The gun was elegant and it was beautiful in one of the ways that Lady Murasaki was beautiful. The thought was not comfortable to him under the eyes of the trophy heads.

The proprietor was waiting for him with the cricket. "Will you return the cage after October?"

"Is there no chance it might survive the fall?"

"It might last into the winter if you keep it warm. You may bring me the cage at… an appropriate time." He gave Hannibal the cucumber. "Don't give it all to the suzumushi at once," he said.

Lady Murasaki came to the terrace from prayers, thoughts of autumn still in her expression.

Dinner at the low table on the terrace in a luminous twilight. They were well into the noodles when, primed with cucumber, the cricket surprised her with its crystal song, singing from concealment in the dark beneath the flowers. Lady Murasaki seemed to think she heard it in her dreams.

It sang again, the clear sleigh-bell song of the suzumushi.

Her eyes cleared and she was in the present. She smiled at Hannibal. "I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart."

"My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing."

The moon rose to the song of the suzumushi. The terrace seemed to rise with it, drawn into tangible moonlight, lifting them to a place above ghost-ridden earth, a place unhaunted, and being there together was enough.

In time he would say the cricket was borrowed, that he must take it back at the waning of the moon. Best not to keep it too long into the fall.

28

LADY MURASAKI conducted her life with a certain elegance which she achieved by application and taste, and she did it with whatever funds were left to her after the chateau was sold and the death duties paid.

She would have given Hannibal anything he asked, but he did not ask.

Robert Lecter had provided for Hannibal 's minimal school expenses, but no extras.

The most important element in Hannibal 's budget was a letter of his own composition. The letter was signed Dr. Gamil Jolipoli, Allergist and it alerted the school that Hannibal had a serious reaction to chalk dust, and should be seated as far as possible from the blackboard.

Since his grades were exceptional, he knew the teachers did not really care what he was doing, as long as the other pupils did not see and follow his bad example.

Freed to sit alone in the very back of the classroom, he was able to manufacture ink and watercolor washes of birds in the style of Musashi Miyamoto, while listening to the lecture with half an ear.

There was a vogue in Paris for things Japanese. The drawings were small, and suited to the limited wall space of Paris apartments, and they could be packed easily in a tourist's suitcase. He signed them with a chop, the symbol called Eternity in Eight Strokes.

There was a market for these drawings in the Quarter, in the small galleries along the Rue Saints-Peres and the Rue Jacob, though some galleries required him to deliver his work after hours, to prevent their clients from knowing the drawings were done by a child.

Late in the summer, while the sunlight still remained in the Luxembourg Gardens after school, he sketched the toy sailboats on the pond while waiting for closing time. Then he walked to Saint-Germain to work the galleries-Lady Murasaki's birthday was approaching and he had his eye on a piece of jade in the Place Furstenberg.

He was able to sell the sailboat sketch to a decorator on the Rue Jacob, but he was holding out his Japanese-type sketches for a larcenous little gallery on the Rue Saints-Peres. The drawings were more impressive matted and framed and he had found a good framer who would extend him credit.

He carried them in a backpack down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The outdoor tables at the cafes were full and the sidewalk clowns were badgering passersby for the amusement of the crowd at the Cafe Flore. In the small streets nearer the river, the Rue Saint-Benoit and the Rue de l'Abbaye, the jazz clubs were still shut tight, but the restaurants were open.

Hannibal was trying to forget his lunch at school, an entree known as "Martyr's Relics," and he examined the bills of fare with keen interest as he passed. Soon he hoped to have the funds for a birthday dinner, and he was looking for sea urchins.

Monsieur Leet of Galerie Leet was shaving for an evening engagement when Hannibal rang his bell. The lights were still on in the gallery, though the curtains were drawn. Leet had a Belgian's impatience with the French and a ravening desire to fleece Americans, whom he believed would buy anything. The gallery featured high-end representational painters, small statuary and antiquities, and was known for marine paintings and seascapes.

"Good evening, Monsieur Lecter," Leet said. "Delighted to see you. I trust you are well. I must ask you to wait while I crate a painting, it has to go tonight to Philadelphia in America."

In Hannibal 's experience such a warm welcome usually masked sharp practice. He gave Monsieur Leet the drawings and his price written in a firm hand. "May I look around?"

"Be my guest."

It was pleasant to be away from the school, to be looking at good pictures. After an afternoon of sketching boats on the pond, Hannibal was thinking about water, the problems of depicting water. He thought about Turner's mist and his colors, impossible to emulate, and he went from picture to picture looking at the water, the air over the water. He came upon a small painting on an easel, the Grand Canal in bright sunlight, Santa Maria della Salute in the background.

It was a Guardi from Lecter Castle. Hannibal knew before he knew, a flash from memory on the backs of his eye-lids and now the familiar painting before him in this frame. Perhaps it was a copy. He picked it up and looked closely. The mat was stained in a small pattern of brown dots in the upper left corner. When he was a small child he had heard his parents say the stain was "foxing" and he had spent minutes staring at it, trying to make out the image of a fox or a fox's pawprint. The painting was not a copy. The frame felt hot in his hands.

Monsieur Leet came into the room. He frowned. "We don't touch unless we are prepared to buy. Here is a check for you." Leet laughed. "It is too much, but it won't cover the Guardi."

"No, not today. Until next time, Monsieur Leet."

29

INSPECTOR POPIL, IMPATIENT with the genteel tones of the door chime, banged upon the door of Galerie Leet in the Rue Saints-Peres. Admitted by the gallery owner, he got straight to the point.

"Where did you get the Guardi?"

"I bought it from Kopnik, when we divided the business," Leet said. He mopped his face and thought how abominably French Popil looked in his ventless frog jacket. "He said he got it from a Finn, he didn't say the name."

"Show me the invoice," Popil said. "You are required to have on this premises the Arts and Monuments advisory on stolen art. Show me that too."

Leet compared the list of stolen documents to his own catalog. "Look, see here, the looted Guardi is described differently. Robert Lecter listed the stolen painting as 'View of Santa Maria della Salute,' and I bought this painting as 'View of the Grand Canal.'"

"I have a court order to seize the picture, whatever it's called. I'll give you a receipt for it. Find me this 'Kopnik,' Monsieur Leet, and you could save yourself a lot of unpleasantness."

"Kopnik is dead, Inspector. He was my associate in this firm. We called it Kopnik and Leet. Leet and Kopnik would have had a better ring to it."

"Do you have his records?"

"His attorney might."

"Look for them, Monsieur Leet. Look for them well," Popil said. "I want to know how this painting got from Lecter Castle to Galerie Leet."

"Lecter," Leet said. "Is it the boy who does these drawings?"

"Yes."

"Extraordinary," Leet said.

"Yes, extraordinary," Popil replied. "Wrap the painting for me, please."

Leet appeared at the Quai des Orfevres in two days carrying papers.

Popil arranged for him to be seated in the corridor near the room marked Audition 2, where the noisy interrogation of a rape suspect was under way punctuated by thumps and cries. Popil allowed Leet to marinate in this atmosphere for fifteen minutes before admitting him to the private office.

The art dealer handed over a receipt. It showed Kopnik bought the Guardi from one Emppu Makinen for eight thousand English pounds.

"Do you find this convincing?" Popil asked. "I do not."

Leet cleared his throat and looked at the floor. A full twenty seconds passed.

"The public prosecutor is eager to initiate criminal proceedings against you, Monsieur Leet. He is a Calvinist of the severest stripe, did you know that?"

"The painting was-"

Popil held up his hand, shushing Leet. "For the moment, I want you to forget about your problem. Assume I could intervene for you if I chose.

I want you to help me. I want you to look at this." He handed Leet a sheaf of legal-length onionskin pages close-typed. "This is the list of items the Arts Commission is bringing to Paris from the Munich Collection Point. All stolen art."

"To display at the Jeu de Paume."

"Yes, claimants can view it there. Second page, halfway down. I circled it."

"'The Bridge of Sighs,' Bernardo Bellotto, thirty-six by thirty centimeters, oil on board."

"Do you know this painting?" Popil said.

"I have heard of it, of course."

"If it is genuine, it was taken from Lecter Castle. You know it is famously paired with another painting of the Bridge of Sighs."

"By Canaletto, yes, painted the same day."

"Also taken from Lecter Castle, probably stolen at the same time by the same person," Popil said. "How much more money would you make selling the pair together than if you sold them separately?"

"Four times. No rational person would separate them."

"Then they were separated through ignorance or by accident. Two paintings of the Bridge of Sighs. If the person who stole them still has one of them, wouldn't he want to get the other back?" Popil said.

"Very much."

"There will be publicity about this painting when it hangs in the Jeu de Paume. You are going to the display with me and we will see who comes sniffing around it."

30

LADY MURASAKI'S invitation got her into the Jeu de Paume Museum ahead of the big crowd that buzzed in the Tuileries, impatient to see more than five hundred stolen artworks brought from the Munich Collection Point by the Allied Commission on Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives in an attempt to find their rightful owners.

A few of the pieces were making their third trip between France and Germany, having been stolen first by Napoleon in Germany and brought back to France, then stolen by the Germans and taken home, then brought back to France once more by the Allies.

Lady Murasaki found in the ground floor of the Jeu de Paume an amazing jumble of Western images. Bloody religion pictures filled one end of the hall, a meathouse of hanging Christs.

For relief she turned to the "Meat Lunch," a cheerful painting of a sumptuous buffet, unattended except for a springer spaniel who was about to help herself to the ham. Beyond it were big canvases attributed to " School of Rubens," featuring rosy women of vast acreage surrounded by plump babies with wings.

And that is where Inspector Popil first caught sight of Lady Murasaki in her counterfeit Chanel, slender and elegant against the pink nudes of Rubens.

Popil soon spotted Hannibal coming up the stairs from the floor below.

The inspector did not show himself, but watched.

Ah, now they see each other, the beautiful Japanese lady and her ward.

Popil was interested to see their greeting; they stopped a few feet from each other and, while they did not bow, they each acknowledged the other's presence with a smile. Then they came together in a hug. She kissed Hannibal 's forehead and touched his cheek, and at once they were in conversation.

Hanging over their warm greeting was a good copy of Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofernes." Popil might have been amused, before the war. Now the back of his neck prickled.

Popil caught Hannibal 's eye and nodded toward a small office near the entrance, where Leet was waiting.

"Munich Collection Point says the painting was seized from a smuggler at the Polish border a year and a half ago," Popil said.

"Did he roll over? Did he tell his source?" Leet said.

Popil shook his head. "The smuggler was strangled in the U.S. Military Prison at Munich by a German trusty. The trusty disappeared that night, into the Dragunovic ratline, we think. It was a dead end.

"The painting is hanging in position eighty-eight near the corner.

Monsieur Leet says it looks real. Hannibal, you can tell if it is the painting from your home?"

"Yes."

"If it is your painting, Hannibal, touch your chin. If you are approached, you are just so happy to see it, you have only passing curiosity about who stole it. You are greedy, you want to get it back and sell it as soon as possible, but you want the mate to it as well.

"Be difficult, Hannibal, selfish and spoiled," Popil said, with unbecoming relish. "Do you think you can manage that? Have some friction with your guardian. The person will want a way to contact you, not the other way around. He'll feel safer if the two of you are at odds. Insist on a way to contact him. Leet and I will go out, give us a couple of minutes before you come into the show.

"Come," Popil said to Leet beside him. "We're on legitimate business, man, you don't have to slink."

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki looking, looking along a row of small paintings.

There, at eye level, "The Bridge of Sighs." The sight of it affected Hannibal more than finding the Guardi; with this picture he saw his mother's face.

Other people were streaming in now, lists of artworks in their hands, documentation of ownership in sheaves beneath their arms. Among them was a tall man in a suit so English the jacket appeared to have ailerons.

Holding his list in front of his face, he stood close enough to Hannibal to listen.

"This painting was one of two in my mother's sewing room," Hannibal said. "When we left the castle for the last time, she handed it to me and told me to take it to Cook. She told me not to smudge the back."

Hannibal took the painting off the wall and turned it over. Sparks snapped in his eyes. There, on the back of the painting, was the chalk outline of a baby's hand, mostly worn away, just the thumb and forefinger remaining. The tracing was protected with a sheet of glassine.

Hannibal looked at it for a long time. In this heady moment he thought the finger and thumb moved, a fragment of a wave.

With an effort he remembered Popil's instructions. If it is your painting, touch your chin.

He took a deep breath at last and gave the signal.

"This is Mischa's hand," he told Lady Murasaki. "When I was eight they were whitewashing upstairs. This painting and its partner were moved to a divan in my mother's room and draped with a sheet. Mischa and I got under the sheet with the paintings; it was our tent, we were nomads in the desert. I took a chalk from my pocket and traced around her hand to keep away the evil eye. My parents were angry, but the painting wasn't hurt, and finally they were amused, I think."

A man in a homburg hat was coming, hurrying, identification swinging from a string around his neck.

The Monuments man will take a tone with you, quickly be at odds with him, Popil had instructed.

"Please don't do that. Please don't touch," the official said.

"I wouldn't touch it if it didn't belong to me," Hannibal said.

"Until you prove ownership don't touch it or I'll have you escorted from the building. Let me get someone from Registry."

As soon as the official left them, the man in the English suit was at their elbow. "I'm Alec Trebelaux," he said. "I can be of some assistance to you."

Inspector Popil and Leet watched from twenty meters away.

"Do you know him?" Popil said.

"No," Leet said.

Trebelaux invited Hannibal and Lady Murasaki into the shelter of a recessed casement window. He was in his fifties, his bald head deeply suntanned, as were his hands. In the good light of the window, flakes were visible in his eyebrows. Hannibal had never seen him before.

Most men are happy to see Lady Murasaki. Trebelaux was not and she sensed it at once, though his manner was unctuous.

"I'm delighted to meet you, Madame. Is there a question of guardianship?"

"Madame is my valued advisor," Hannibal said. "You deal with me."

Be greedy, Popil said. Lady Murasaki will be the voice of moderation.

"There is a question of guardianship, Monsieur," Lady Murasaki said.

"But it's my painting," Hannibal said.

"You'll have to present your claim at a hearing before the commissioners, and they are booked solid for a year and a half. The painting will be impounded until then."

"I am in school, Monsieur Trebelaux, I had counted on being able to-"

"I can help you," Trebelaux said.

"Tell me how, Monsieur."

"I have a hearing scheduled on another matter in three weeks."

"You are a dealer, Monsieur?" Lady Murasaki asked.

"I would be a collector if I could, Madame. But to buy, I must sell.

It's a pleasure to have beautiful things in my hands if only for a little while. Your family's collection at Lecter Castle was small but exquisite."

"You knew the collection?" Lady Murasaki said.

"The Lecter Castle losses were listed with the MFAA by your late-by Robert Lecter, I believe."

"And you could present my case at your hearing?" Hannibal said.

"I would claim it for you under the Hague Convention of 1907; let me explain it to you-"

"Yes, under Article Forty-six, we have talked about it," Hannibal said, glancing at Lady Murasaki and licking his lips to appear avaricious.

"But we talked about a lot of options, Hannibal," Lady Murasaki said.

"What if I do not want to sell, Monsieur Trebelaux?" Hannibal said.

"You would have to wait your turn before the commission. You may be an adult by then."

"This painting is one of a pair, my husband explained to me," Lady Murasaki said. "They are worth much more together. You wouldn't happen to know where the other one is, the Canaletto?"

"No, Madame."

"It would be very much worth your while to find it, Monsieur Trebelaux."

She met Trebelaux's eyes. "Can you tell me how I can reach you?" she said, with the faintest emphasis on I.

He gave the name of a small hotel near the Gare del'Este, shook Hannibal 's hand without looking at him, and disappeared into the crowd.

Hannibal registered as a claimant, and he and Lady Murasaki wandered through the great jumble of art. Seeing the tracing of Mischa's hand left him numb, except for his face where he could feel her touch, patting his cheek.

He stopped in front of a tapestry called "The Sacrifice of Isaac" and looked at it for a long time. "Our upstairs corridors were hung with tapestries," he said. "I could just stand on my tiptoes and reach the bottom edges." He turned up the corner of the fabric and looked at the back. "I've always preferred this side of a tapestry. The threads and strings that make the picture."

"Like tangled thoughts," Lady Murasaki said.

He dropped the corner of the tapestry and Abraham quivered, holding his son's throat taut, the angel extending a hand to stop the knife.

"Do you think God intended to eat Isaac, and that's why he told Abraham to kill him?" Hannibal said.

"No, Hannibal. Of course not. The angel intervenes in time."

"Not always," Hannibal said.

When Trebelaux saw them leave the building, he wet his handkerchief in the men's room and returned to the picture. He looked around quickly. No museum officials were facing him. With a little thrill he took down the painting and, raising the glassine sheet, with his wet handkerchief he scrubbed the outline of Mischa's hand off the back. It could have happened from careless handling when the painting went into escrow. Just as well to get the sentimental value out of the way.

31

THE PLAINCLOTHES OFFICER Rene Aden waited outside Trebelaux's hotel until he saw the light go out in the third-floor walk-up. Then he went to the train station for a fast snack and was lucky to return to his post in time to see Trebelaux come out of the hotel again carrying a gym bag.

Trebelaux took a taxi from the line outside the Gare del'Este and crossed the Seine to a steam bath in the Rue de Babylone and went inside. Aden parked his unmarked car in a fire zone, counted fifty and went into the lobby area. The air was thick and smelled of liniment. Men in bathrobes were reading newspapers in several languages.

Aden did not want to take off his clothes and pursue Trebelaux into the steam. He was a man of some resolution but his father had died of trench foot and he did not want to take off his shoes in this place. He took a newspaper on its wooden holder from a rack and sat down in a chair.

Trebelaux clopped in clogs too short for him through successive rooms of men slumped on the tile benches, giving themselves up to the heat.

The private saunas could be rented by the fifteen-minute interval. He went into the second one. His entry had already been paid. The air was thick and he wiped his glasses on his towel.

"What kept you," Leet said out of the steam. "I'm about to dissolve."

"The clerk didn't give me the message until I'd already gone to bed,"

Trebelaux said.

"The police were watching you today at the Jeu de Paume; they know the Guardi you sold me is hot."

"Who put them onto me? You?"

"Hardly. They think you know who has the paintings from Lecter Castle. Do you?"

"No. Maybe my client does."

"If you get the other ' Bridge of Sighs,' I can move both of them," Leet said.

"Where could you sell them?"

"That's my business. A major buyer in America. Let's say an institution. Do you know anything, or am I sweating for nothing?"

"I'll get back to you," Trebelaux said.

On the following afternoon, Trebelaux bought a ticket for Luxembourg at the Gare del'Este. Officer Aden watched him board the train with his suitcase. The porter seemed dissatisfied with his tip.

Aden made a quick call to the Quai des Orfevres and swung aboard the train at the last moment, cupping his badge in his hand for the conductor.

Night fell as the train approached its stop atMeaux. Trebelaux took his shaving kit to the bathroom. He hopped off the train just as it began to roll, abandoning his suitcase.

A car was waiting for him a block from the station.

"Whyhere?" Trebelaux said as he got in beside the driver. "I could have come to your place in Fontainebleau."

"We have business here," said the man behind the wheel. "Good business."

Trebelaux knew him as Christophe Kleber.

Kleber drove to a cafe near the station, where he ate a hearty dinner, lifting his bowl to drink the vichyssoise. Trebelaux toyed with a salad Nicoise and wrote his initials on the edge of the plate with string beans.

"The police seized the Guardi," Trebelaux said as Kleber's vealpaillard arrived.

"So you told Hercule. You shouldn't say those things on the telephone.

What is the question?"

"They're telling Leet it was looted in the East. Was it?"

"Of course not. Who's asking the question?"

"A police inspector with a list from Arts and Monuments. He said it was stolen. Was it?"

"Did you look at the stamp?"

"A stamp from the Commissariat of Enlightenment, what is that worth?"

Trebelaux said.

"Did the policeman say who it belonged to in the East? If it's a Jew it doesn't matter, the Allies are not sending back art taken from Jews. The Jews are dead. The Soviets just keep it."

"It's not a policeman, it's a police inspector," said Trebelaux.

"Spoken like a Swiss. What's his name?"

"Popil, something Popil."

"Ah," Kleber said, mopping his mouth with his napkin. "I thought so. No difficulty then. He has been on my payroll for years. It's just a shakedown. What did Leet tell him?"

"Nothing yet, but Leet sounds nervous. For now he'll lay it on Kopnik, his dead colleague," Trebelaux said.

"Leet knows nothing, not an inkling of where you got the picture?"

"Leet thinks I got it in Lausanne, as we agreed. He's squealing for his money back. I said I would check with my client."

"I own Popil, I'll take care of it, forget the whole thing. I have something much more important to talk with you about. Could you possibly travel to America?"

"I don't take things through customs."

"Customs is not your problem, only the negotiations while you're there.

You have to see the stuff before it goes, then you see it again over there, across a table in a bank meeting room. You could go by air, take a week."

"What sort of stuff?"

"Small antiquities. Some icons, a salt cellar. We'll take a look, you tell me what you think."

"About the other?"

"You are safe as houses," Kleber said.

Kleber was his name only in France. His birth name was Petras Kolnas and he knew Inspector Popil's name, but not from his payroll.

32

THE CANAL BOAT Christabel was tied up with only a spring line at a quay on the Marne River east of Paris, and after Trebelaux came aboard the boat was under way at once. It was a black Dutch-built double-ender with low deckhouses to pass under the bridges and a container garden on deck with flowering bushes.

The boat's owner, a slight man with pale blue eyes and a pleasant expression, was at the gangway to welcome Trebelaux and invite him below. "I'm glad to meet you," the man said and extended his hand. The hair on the owner's hand grew backward, toward the wrist, making his hand feel creepy to the Swiss. "Follow Monsieur Milko. I have the things laid out below."

The owner lingered on deck with Kolnas. They strolled for a moment among the terra-cotta planters, and stopped beside the single ugly object in the neat garden, a fifty-gallon oil drum with holes cut in it big enough to admit a fish, the top cut out with a torch and tied back on loosely with wire. A tarp was spread on the deck under it. The owner of the boat patted the steel drum hard enough to make it ring.

"Come," he said.

On the lower deck he opened a tall cabinet. It contained a variety of arms: a Dragunov sniper rifle, an American Thompson submachine gun, a couple of German Schmeissers, five Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons for use against other boats, a variety of handguns. The owner selected a trident fish spear with the barbs filed off the tines. He handed it to Kolnas.

"I'm not going to cut him a lot," the owner said in pleasant tones.

"Eva's not here to clean it up. You do it on deck after we find out what he's told. Puncture him good so he won't float the barrel."

"Milko can-" Kolnas began.

"He was your idea, it's your ass, you do it. Don't you cut meat every day? Milko will bring him up dead and help you load him in the barrel when you've stuck him enough. Keep his keys and go through his room.

We'll do the dealer Leet if we have to. No loose ends. No more art for a while," said the boat owner, whose name in France was Victor Gustavson.

Victor Gustavson is a very successful businessman, dealing in ex-SS morphine and new prostitutes, mostly women. The name is an alias for Vladis Grutas.

Leet remained alive, but without any of the paintings. They were held in a government vault for years while the court was stalemated on whether the Croatian agreement on reparations could be applied to Lithuania, and Trebelaux stared sightless from his barrel on the bottom of the Marne, no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eel-grass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth.

No other painting from Lecter Castle would surface for years.

Through Inspector Popil's good offices, Hannibal Lecter was allowed to visit the paintings in custody from time to time over the following years. Maddening to sit in the dumb silence of the vault under the eye of a guard, in earshot of the man's adenoidal breathing.

Hannibal looks at the painting he took from his mother's hands and knows the past was not the past at all; the beast that panted its hot stench on his and Mischa's skins continues to breathe, is breathing now. He turns the " Bridge of Sighs " to the wall and stares at the back of the painting for minutes at a time-Mischa's hand erased, it is only a blank square now where he projects his seething dreams.

He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been.