Hannibal Rising

When I said that Mercy stood

Within the borders of the wood,

I meant the lenient beast with claws

And bloody swift-dispatching jaws.

– – Lawrence Spingarn

33

ON CENTER STAGE in the Paris Opera, Dr. Faust's time was running out in his deal with the Devil. Hannibal Lecter and Lady Murasaki watched from an intimate box at stage left as Faust's pleas to avoid the flames soared to the fireproof ceiling of Garnier's great theater.

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki, in full fig for the opera. Winks of light came from the opposite boxes as gentlemen turned their opera glasses away from the stage to look at her as well.

Against the stage lights she was in silhouette, just as Hannibal first saw her at the chateau when he was a boy. The images came to him in order: gloss of a handsome crow drinking from the rainspout, gloss of Lady Murasaki's hair. First her silhouette, then she opened a casement and the light touched her face.

Hannibal had come a long way on the bridge of dreams.

He had grown to fill the late count's evening clothes, while in appearance Lady Murasaki remained exactly the same.

Her hand closed on the material of her skirt and he heard the rustle of the cloth above the music. Knowing she could feel his gaze, he looked away from her, looked around the box.

The box had character. Behind the seats, screened from the opposing boxes, was a wicked little goat-footed chaise where lovers might retire while the orchestra provided cadence from down below-in the previous season, an older gentleman had succumbed to heart failure on the chaise during the final measures of "Flight of the Bumblebee," as Hannibal had occasion to know from ambulance service.

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki were not alone in the box.

In the front pair of seats sat the Commissioner of Police for the Prefecture of Paris and his wife, leaving little doubt as to where Lady Murasaki got the tickets. From Inspector Popil, of course. How pleasant that Popil himself could not attend-probably detained by a murder investigation, hopefully a time-consuming and dangerous one, out-of-doors in bad weather perhaps, with the threat of fatal lightning.

The lights came up and tenor Beniamino Gigli got the standing ovation he deserved, and from a tough house. The police commissioner and his wife turned in the box and shook hands all around, everyone's palms still numb from applauding.

The commissioner's wife had a bright and curious eye. She took in Hannibal, fitted to perfection in the count's dinner clothes, and she could not resist a question. "Young man, my husband tells me you were the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France."

"The records are not complete, Madame. Probably there were surgeon's apprentices…"

"Is it true that you read through your textbooks once and then return them to the bookstore within the week to get all your money back?"

Hannibal smiled. "Oh no, Madame. That is not entirely accurate," he said. Wonder where that information came from? The same place as the tickets. Hannibal leaned close to the lady. Trying for an exit line, he rolled his eyes at the commissioner and bent over the lady's hand, to whisper loudly, "That sounds like a crime to me."

The commissioner was in a good humor, having seen Faust suffer for his sins. "I'll turn a blind eye, young man, if you confess to my wife at once."

"The truth is, Madame, I don't get all my money back. The bookstore holds out a two-hundred-franc restocking fee for their trouble."

Away then and down the great staircase of the opera, beneath the torchieres, Hannibal and Lady Murasaki descending faster than Faust to get away from the crowd, Pils ' painted ceilings moving over them, wings everywhere in paint and stone. There were taxis now in the Place de l'Opera. A vendor's charcoal brazier laced the air with a whiff of Faust's nightmare. Hannibal flagged a taxi.

"I'm surprised you told Inspector Popil about my books," he said inside the car.

"He found it out himself," Lady Murasaki said. "He told the commissioner, the commissioner told his wife. She needs to flirt. You are not naturally obtuse, Hannibal."

She is uneasy in closed places with me now; she expresses it as irritation.

"Sorry."

She looked at him quickly as the taxi passed a streetlight. "Your animosity clouds your judgment. Inspector Popil keeps up with you because you intrigue him."

"No, my lady, you intrigue him. I expect he pesters you with his verse…"

Lady Murasaki did not satisfy Hannibal 's curiosity. "He knows you are first in the class," she said. "He's proud of that. His interest is largely benign."

"Largely benign is not a happy diagnosis."

The trees were budding in the Place de Vosges, fragrant in the spring night. Hannibal dismissed the cab, feeling Lady Murasaki's quick glance even in the darkness of the loggia. Hannibal was not a child, he did not stay over anymore.

"I have an hour and I want to walk," he said.

34

"YOU HAVE TIME for tea," Lady Murasaki said.

She took him at once to the terrace, clearly preferring to be outdoors with him. He did not know how he felt about that. He had changed and she had not. A puff of breeze and the oil lamp flame stretched high. When she poured green tea he could see the pulse in her wrist, and the faint fragrance from her sleeve entered him like a thought of his own.

"A letter from Chiyoh," she said. "She has ended her engagement. Diplomacy no longer suits her."

"Is she happy?"

"I think so. It was a good match in the old way of thinking. How can I disapprove-she writes that she is doing what I did-following her heart."

"Following it where?"

"A young man at Kyoto University, the School of Engineering."

"I would like to see her happy."

"I would like to see you happy. Are you sleeping, Hannibal?"

"When there's time. I take a nap on a gurney when I can't sleep in my room."

"You know what I mean."

"Do I dream? Yes. Do you not revisit Hiroshima in your dreams?"

"I don't invite my dreams."

"I need to remember, any way I can."

At the door she gave him a bento box with a snack for overnight and packets of chamomile tea. "For sleep," she said.

He kissed Lady Murasaki's hand, not the little nod of French politesse, but kissed the back of her hand so that he could taste it.

He repeated the haiku he had written to her so long ago, on the night of the butcher.

"Night heron revealed

By the rising harvest moon-

Which is lovelier?"

"This is not the harvest," she said, smiling, putting her hand on his heart as she had done since he was thirteen years old. And then she took her hand away, and the place on his chest felt cold.

"Do you really return your books?"

"Yes."

"Then you can remember everything in the books."

"Everything important."

"Then you can remember it is important not to tease Inspector Popil. Unprovoked he is harmless to you. And to me."

She has put on irritation like a winter kimono. Seeing that, can I use it to keep from thinking about her in the bath at the chateau so long ago, her face and breasts like water flowers? Like the pink and cream lilies on the moat? Can I? I can not.

He went out into the night, uncomfortable in his stride for the first block or two, and emerged from the narrow streets of the Marais to cross the Pont Louis Phillippe with the Seine sliding under the bridge and the bridge touched by the moon.

Seen from the east, Notre Dame was like a great spider with its flying-buttress legs and the many eyes of its round windows. Hannibal could see the stone spider-cathedral scuttling around town in the darkness, grabbing the odd train from the Gare d'Orsay like a worm for its delectation or, better, spotting a nutritious police inspector coming out of his headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres, an easy pounce away.

He crossed the footbridge to the Ile de la Cite and rounded the cathedral. Sounds of a choir practice came from Notre Dame.

Hannibal paused beneath the arches of the center entrance, looking at the Last Judgment in relief on the arches and lintels above the door. He was considering it for a display in his memory palace, to record a complex dissection of the throat: There on the upper lintel St. Michael held a pair of scales as though he himself were conducting an autopsy.

St. Michael's scales were not unlike the hyoid bone, and he was overarched by the Saints of the Mastoid Process. The lower lintel, where the damned were being marched away in chains, would be the clavicle, and the succession of arches would serve as the structural layers of the throat, to a catechism easy to remember, Sternohyoidomohyoidthyrohyoidjuuugular, Amen.

No, it wouldn't do. The problem was the lighting. Displays in a memory palace must be well lit, with generous spaces between them. This dirty stone was too much of one color as well. Hannibal had missed a test question once because the answer was dark, and in his mind he had placed it against a dark background. The complex dissection of the cervical triangle scheduled for the coming week would require clear, well-spaced displays.

The last choristers trailed out of the cathedral, carrying their vestments over their arms. Hannibal went inside. Notre Dame was dark but for the votive candles. He went to St. Joan of Arc, in marble near asouthside exit. Before her, tiers of candles flared in the draft from the door. Hannibal leaned against a pillar in the darkness and looked through the flames at her face. Fire on his mother's clothes. The candle flames reflected redly in his eyes.

The candlelight played on St. Joan and gave random expressions to her face like chance tunes in a wind chime. Memory memory. Hannibal wondered if St. Joan, with her memories, might prefer a votive other than fire.

He knew his mother would.

Footsteps of the sexton coming, his jangling keys echoed off the near walls first, then again from the high ceiling, his footsteps made a double-tap too as they sounded from the floor and echoed down from the vast upper dark.

The sexton saw Hannibal 's eyes first, shining red beyond the firelight, and a primal caution stirred in him. The back of the sexton's neck prickled and he made a cross with his keys. Ah, it was only a man, and a young one at that. The sexton waved his keys before him like a censer.

"It's time," he said and gestured with his chin.

"Yes, it's time, and past time," Hannibal replied and went out the side door into the night.

35

ACROSS THE SEINE on the Pont au Double and down the Rue de la Bucherie, where he heard a saxophone and laughter from a basement jazz club. A couple in the doorway smoking, a whiff of kif about them. The girl raised on her tiptoes to kiss the young man's cheek and Hannibal felt the kiss distinctly on his face. Scraps of music mixed with the music running in his head, keeping time, time. Time.

Along the Rue Dante and across the wide Boulevard Saint-Germain, feeling moonlight on his head, and behind theCluny to the Rue del'Ecole deMedecine and the night entrance to the medical school, where a dim lamp burned. Hannibal unlocked the door and let himself in.

Alone in the building, he changed into a white coat and picked up the clipboard with his list of tasks. Hannibal 's mentor and supervisor at the medical school was Professor Dumas, a gifted anatomist who chose to teach instead of practice on the living. Dumas was a brilliant, abstracted man and lacked the glint of a surgeon. He required each of his students to write a letter to the anonymous cadaver he would dissect, thanking this specific donor for the privilege of studying his or her body and including assurances that the body would be treated with respect, and draped at all times in any area not under immediate study.

For tomorrow's lectures, Hannibal was to prepare two displays: a reflection of the rib cage, exposing the pericardium intact, and a delicate cranial dissection.

Night in the gross-anatomy laboratory. The large room with its high windows and big vent fan was cool enough so that the draped cadavers, preserved with formalin, remained on the twenty tables overnight. In summer they would be returned to the cadaver tank at the end of the workday. Pitiful little bodies underneath the sheets, the unclaimed, the starvelings found huddled in alleys, still hugging themselves in death until rigor passed and then, in the formalin bath of the cadaver tank with their fellows, they let themselves go at last. Frail and birdlike, they were shriveled like the birds frozen and fallen to the snow, that starving men skin with their teeth.

With forty million dead in the war it seemed odd to Hannibal that the medical students would have to use cadavers long preserved in tanks, the color leached out of them by the formalin.

Occasionally the school was lucky enough to get a criminal corpse from the gallows or the firing squad at the fort ofMontrouge orFresnes, or the guillotine at LaSante. Faced with the cranial dissection, Hannibal was lucky to have the head of a LaSante graduate watching him from the sink now, countenance caked with blood and straw.

While the school's autopsy saw awaited a new motor, back-ordered for months, Hannibal had modified an American electric drill, brazing a small rotary blade to the drill bit to aid in dissection. It had a current converter the size of a bread box that made a humming sound nearly as loud as the saw.

Hannibal had finished with the chest dissection when the electricity failed, as it often did, and the lights went out. He worked at the sink by the light of a kerosene lamp, flushing away the blood and straw from his subject's face and waiting for the electricity to come on again.

When the lights came up, he wasted no time reflecting the scalp and removing the top of the cranium in a coronal dissection to expose the brain. He injected the major blood vessels with colored gel, piercing thedura mater covering the brain as little as possible. It was more difficult, but the professor, inclined to the theatrical, would want to remove thedura mater himself before the class, whipping the curtain off the brain, so Hannibal left it largely intact.

He rested his gloved hand lightly on the brain. Obsessed with memory, and the blank places in his own mind, he wished that by touch he could read a dead man's dreams, that by force of will he could explore his own.

The laboratory at night was a good place to think, the quiet broken only by the clink of instruments and, rarely, the groan of a subject in an early stage of dissection, when organs might still contain some air.

Hannibal performed a meticulous partial dissection of the left side of the face, then sketched the head, both the dissected side of the face and the untouched side as well, for the anatomical illustrations that were part of his scholarship.

Now he wanted to permanently store in his mind the muscular, neural and venous structures of the face. Sitting with his gloved hand on the head of his subject, Hannibal went to the center of his own mind and into the foyer of his memory palace. He elected for music in the corridors, a Bach string quartet, and passed quickly through the Hall of Mathematics, through Chemistry, to a room he'd adopted recently from theCarnavalet Museum and renamed the Hall of the Cranium. It took only a few minutes to store everything, associating anatomical details with the set arrangement of displays in theCarnavalet, being careful not to put the venous blues of the face against blues in the tapestries.

When he had finished in the Hall of the Cranium, he paused for a moment in the Hall of Mathematics, near the entrance. It was one of the oldest parts of the palace in his mind. He wanted to treat himself to the feeling he got at the age of seven when he understood the proof Mr. Jakov showed him. All of Mr. Jakov's tutorial sessions at the castle were stored there, but none of their talks from the hunting lodge.

Everything from the hunting lodge was outside the memory palace, still on the grounds, but in the dark sheds of his dreams, scorched black like the hunting lodge, and to get there he would have to go outside. He would have to cross the snow where the ripped pages ofHuyghens ' Treatise on Light blew across Mr. Jakov's brains and blood, scattered and frozen to the snow.

In these palace corridors he could choose music or not, but in the sheds he could not control the sound, and a particular sound there could kill him.

He emerged from the memory palace back into his mind, came back behind his eyes and to his eighteen-year-old body, which sat beside the table in the anatomy laboratory, his hand upon a brain.

He sketched for another hour. In his finished sketch, the veins and nerves of the dissected half of the face exactly reflected the subject on the table. The unmarked side of the face did not resemble the subject at all. It was a face from the sheds. It was the face of Vladis Grutas, though Hannibal only thought of him as Blue-Eyes.

Up the five flights of narrow stairs to his room above the medical school, and sleep.

The garret's ceiling sloped, and the low side was neat, harmonious, Japanese, with a low bed. His desk was on the high side of the room. The walls around and over his desk were wild with images, drawings of dissections, anatomical illustrations in progress. In each case the organs and vessels were exactly rendered, but the faces of the subjects were faces he saw in dreams. Over all, a long-fanged gibbon skull watched from a shelf.

He could scrub away the smell of formalin, and the chemical smell of the lab did not reach this high in the drafty old building. He did not carry grotesque images of the dead and half-dissected into his sleep, nor the criminals, cleaved or hanged, he sometimes picked up from the jails.

There was only one image, one sound, that could drive him out of sleep.

And he never knew when it was coming.

Moonset. The moonlight diffused by the wavy, bubbled window glass creeps across Hannibal 's face and inches silent up the wall. It touches Mischa's hand in the drawing above his bed, moves over the partial faces in the anatomical drawings, moves over the faces from his dreams, and comes at last to the gibbon skull, first shining white on the great fangs and then the brow above the deep eye sockets. From the dark inside its skull, the gibbon watches Hannibal asleep. Hannibal 's face is childlike. He makes a noise and turns on his side, pulling his arm away from an unseen grip.

Standing with Mischa in the barn beside the lodge, holding her close, Mischa coughing. Bowl-Man feels the flesh of their arms and speaks, but no sound comes out of his mouth, only his vile breath visible in the freezing air. Mischa buries her face against Hannibal 's chest to get away from Bowl-Man's breath. Blue-Eyes is saying something, and now they are singing, cozening. Seeing the axe and bowl. Flying at Blue-Eyes, taste of blood and beard stubble, they are taking Mischa away. They have the axe and the bowl. Breaking free and running after them, feet liftingtooosloooow to the door, Blue-Eyed One and Bowl-Man holding Mischa by her wrists above the ground, she twisting her head to look back desperately at him across the bloody snow and calling-

Hannibal came awake, choking, holding on to the end of the dream, clamping his eyes tight shut and tried to force himself past the point where he awoke. He bit the corner of the pillowcase and made himself go over the dream. What did the men call each other? What were their names?

When did he lose the sound? He couldn't remember when it went away. He wanted to know what they called each other. He had to finish the dream.

He went into his memory palace and tried to cross the grounds to the dark sheds, past Mr. Jakov's brains on the snow, but he could not. He could endure to see his mother's clothes on fire, his parents and Berndt and Mr. Jakov dead in the yard. He could see the looters moving below him and Mischa in the hunting lodge. But he could not go past Mischa suspended in the air, turning her head to look at him. He could remember nothing after that, he could only recall much later, he was riding on a tank, found by the soldiers with the chain locked around his neck. He wanted to remember. He had to remember. Teeth in a stool pit. The flash did not come often; it made him sit up. He looked at the gibbon in the moonlight. Teeth much smaller than that. Baby teeth. Not terrible. Like mine can be. I have to hear the voices carried on their stinking breath, I know what their words smell like. I have to remember their names. I have to find them. And I will. How can I interrogate myself?

36

PROFESSOR DUMAS WROTE a mild, round hand, unnatural in a physician. His note said: Hannibal, would you please see what you can do in the matter of LouisFerrat at LaSante?

The professor had attached a newspaper clipping about Ferrat's sentencing with a few details about him: Ferrat, from Lyon, had been a minor Vichy functionary, a petty collaborator during the German occupation, but then was arrested by the Germans for forging and selling ration coupons. After the war he was accused of complicity in war crimes, but released for insufficient evidence. A French court convicted him of killing two women in 1949-1950 for personal reasons. He was scheduled to die in three days.

LaSante Prison is in the 14th arrondissement, not far from the medical school. Hannibal reached it in a fifteen-minute walk.

Workmen with a load of pipe were repairing the drains in the courtyard, the site of guillotine executions since the public was barred from attending in 1939. The guards at the gate knew Hannibal by sight and passed him in. As he signed the visitors' log he saw the signature of Inspector Popil high on the page.

The sound of hammering came from a large bare room off the main corridor. As he passed by, Hannibal caught sight of a face herecognized. The state executioner, AnatoleTourneau himself, traditionally known as "Monsieur Paris," had brought the guillotine from its garage on the Rue de laTombe-Issoire to set it up inside the prison. He was twiddling the little wheels of the blade carrier, the mouton, which prevent the blade from jamming on its way down.

Monsieur Paris was a perfectionist. To his credit, he always used a cover at the top of the uprights so the subject did not have to see the blade.

LouisFerrat was in the condemned cell, separated by a corridor from the other cells on a second-floor tier in the first building of LaSante.

The din of the crowded prison reached his cell as a wash of murmurings and cries and clangs, but he could hear the blows of Monsieur Paris' mallet as the assembly proceeded on the floor below.

LouisFerrat was a slender man, with dark hair, newly cropped off his neck and the back of his head. The hair on top was left long, to provide Monsieur Paris' assistant a better grip than Louis' small ears would provide.

Ferratsat on his cot in combination underwear, rubbing between his thumb and fingers a cross on a chain about his neck. His shirt and pants were carefully arranged on a chair, as though a person had been seated there and evaporated out of the clothing. The shoes were side by side beneath the pants cuffs. The clothing reclined in the chair in the anatomical position. Ferrat heard Hannibal but he did not look up.

"Monsieur LouisFerrat, good afternoon," Hannibal said.

"Monsieur Ferrat has stepped away from his cell,"Ferrat said. "I represent him. What do you want?"

Hannibal took in the clothing without moving his eyes. "I want to ask him to make a gift of his body to the medical school, for science. It will be treated with great respect."

"You'll take his body anyway. Drag it away."

"I can't and I wouldn't take his body without his permission. Or ever drag it."

"Ah, here is my client now," Ferrat said. He turned away from Hannibal and conferred quietly with the clothing as though it had just walked into the cell and seated itself in the chair. Ferrat returned to the bars.

"He wants to know why should he give it to you?"

"Fifteen thousand francs for his relatives."

Ferratturned to the clothing and then back to Hannibal. "MonsieurFerrat says, Fuck my relatives. They hold out their hand and I'll shit in it."Ferrat dropped his voice. "Forgive the language-he is distraught, and the gravity of the matter requires me to quote him exactly."

"I understand perfectly," Hannibal said. "Do you think he'd like to contribute the fee to a cause his family despises, would that be a satisfaction to him, Monsieur…?"

"You may call me Louis-Monsieur Ferrat and I share the same first name.

No. I believe he is adamant. Monsieur Ferrat lives somewhat apart from himself. He says he has very little influence on himself."

"I see. He is not alone in that."

"I hardly see how you understand anything, you're not much more than a chi-not much more than a schoolboy yourself."

"You might help me then. Each student at the medical school writes a personal letter of appreciation to the donor with whom he is involved.

Knowing MonsieurFerrat as you do, could you help me compose a letter of appreciation? Just in case he should decide favorably?"

Ferrat rubbed his face. His fingers appeared to have an extra set of knuckles where they had been broken and badly set years ago.

"Who would ever read it, other than MonsieurFerrat himself?"

"It would be posted at the school, if he wishes. All the faculty would see it, prominent and influential people. He could submit it to Le CanardEnchaine for publication."

"What sort of thing would you want to say?"

"I'd describe him as selfless, cite his contribution to science, to the French people, to medical advances that will help the oncoming generation of children."

"Never mind children. Leave children out."

Hannibal quickly wrote a salutation on his notepad. "Do you think this is sufficiently honorific?" He held it up high enough for LouisFerrat to have to look up at it, the better to gauge the length of his neck.

Not a very long neck. Unless Monsieur Paris got a good grip on his hair, there wouldn't be much left below the hyoid bone, useless for a frontal cervical triangle display.

"We mustn't neglect his patriotism," Ferrat said. "When Le Grand Charles broadcast from London, who responded? It was Ferrat at the barricades!

Vive la France!"

Hannibal watched as patriotic fervor swelled the artery in the traitorFerrat's forehead and caused the jugular and carotid to stand out in his neck-an eminentlyinjectable head.

"Yes, vive la France!" Hannibal said, redoubling his efforts:

"Our letter should emphasize that, though they call him Vichy, he was actually a hero of the Resistance, then?"

"Certainly."

"He saved downed airmen, I would imagine?"

"On a number of occasions."

"Performed the customary acts of sabotage?"

"Often, and without regard for his own safety."

"Tried to protect the Jews?"

Quarter-second hitch. "Heedless of risk to himself."

"Was tortured perhaps, he suffered broken fingers for the sake of France?"

"He could still use them to salute proudly when Le Grand Charles returned,"Ferrat said.

Hannibal finished scribbling. "I've just listed the highlights here, do you think you could show it to him?"

Ferrat looked over the sheet of notebook paper, touching each point with his forefinger, nodding, murmuring to himself. "You might put in a few testimonials from his friends in the Resistance, I could supply those. A moment please."Ferrat turned his back to Hannibal and leaned close to his clothing. He turned back with a decision.

"My client's response is: Merde. Tell the young fucker I'll see the dope and rub it on my gums first before I sign. Pardon, but that is verbatim literatim."Ferrat became confidential, leaning close to the bars. "Others on the tier told him he could get enough laudanum-enough laudanum to be indifferent to the knife. 'To dream and not to scream' is how I'd couch it in a courtroom setting. The St. Pierre medical school is giving laudanum in exchange for… permission. Do you give laudanum?"

"I will be back to see you, with an answer for him."

"I wouldn't wait too long,"Ferrat said. " St. Pierre will be coming round." He raised his voice and gripped the neck of his combination underwear as he might clutch his waistcoat during an oration. "I'm empowered to negotiate on his behalf with St. Pierre as well." Close to the bars and quiet now: "Three days and poor Ferrat will be dead, and I'll be in mourning and out a client. You are a medical person. Do you think it's going to hurt? Hurt Monsieur Ferrat when they…"

"Absolutely not. The uncomfortable part is now. Beforehand. As for the thing itself, no. Not even for an instant." Hannibal had started away, when Ferrat called to him and he went back to the bars.

"The students wouldn't laugh at him, at his parts."

"Certainly not. A subject is always draped, except for the exact field of study."

"Even if he were… somewhat unique?"

"In what way?"

"Even if he had, well, infantile parts?"

"A common circumstance, and never, ever, an occasion for humor,"

Hannibal said. There's a candidate for the anatomy museum, where donors are not credited.

The pounding of the executioner's mallet registered as a twitch in the corner of Louis Ferrat's eye as he sat on his bunk, his hand on the sleeve of his companion, the clothes. Hannibal saw him imagining the assembly in his mind, the uprights lifted into place, the blade with its edge protected by a slit piece of garden hose, beneath it the receptacle.

With a start, seeing it in his mind, Hannibal realized what the receptacle was. It was a baby's bathtub. Like a falling blade Hannibal 's mind cut off the thought and, in the silence after, Louis' anguish was as familiar to him as the veins in the man's face, as the arteries in his own.

"I'll get him the laudanum," Hannibal said. Failing laudanum, he could buy a ball of opium in a doorway.

"Give me the consent form. Collect it when you bring the dope."

Hannibal looked at Louis Ferrat, reading his face as intently as he had studied his neck, smelling the fear on him, and said, "Louis, something for your client to consider. All the wars, all the suffering and pain that happened in the centuries before his birth, before his life, how much did all that bother him?"

"Not at all."

"Then why should anything after his life bother him? It is untroubled sleep. The difference is he will not wake to this."

37

THE ORIGINAL WOOD BLOCK engravings for Vesalius' great atlas of anatomy, De Fabrica, were destroyed in Munich in World War II. For Dr. Dumas the engravings were holy relics and in his grief and anger he became inspired to compile a new atlas of anatomy. It would be the best to date in the line of atlases that succeeded Vesalius' in the four hundred years since De Fabrica.

Dumas found that drawings were superior to photography in illustrating the anatomy, and essential in elucidating cloudy X-rays. Dr. Dumas was a superior anatomist, but he was not an artist. To his great good fortune, he saw Hannibal Lecter's schoolboy drawing of a frog, followed his progress and secured for him a medical scholarship.

Early evening in the laboratory. During the day, Professor Dumas had dissected the inner ear in his daily lecture, and left it to Hannibal, who now drew the cochlear bones on chalkboard at 5x enlargement.

The night bell rang. Hannibal was expecting a delivery from the Fresnes firing squad. He collected a gurney and pushed it down the long corridor to the night entrance. One wheel of the gurney clicked on the stone floor and he made a mental note to fix it.

Standing beside the body was Inspector Popil. Two ambulance attendants transferred the limp and leaking burden from their litter to the gurney and drove away.

Lady Murasaki had once remarked, to Hannibal 's annoyance, that Popil looked like the handsome actor LouisJourdan.

"Good evening, Inspector."

"I'll have a word with you," Inspector Popil said, looking nothing whatever like Louis Jourdan.

"Do you mind if I work while we talk?"

"No."

"Come, then." Hannibal rolled the gurney down the corridor, clicking louder now. A wheel bearing probably.

Popil held open the swinging doors of the laboratory.

As Hannibal had expected, the massive chest wounds occasioned by theFresnes rifles had drained the body very well. It was ready for the cadaver tank. That procedure could have waited, but Hannibal was curious to see if Popil in the cadaver tank room might look even less like Louis Jourdan, and if the surroundings might affect his peachy complexion.

It was a raw concrete space adjacent to the laboratory, reached through double doors with rubber seals. A round tank of formalin twelve feet in diameter was set into the floor and covered with a zinc lid. The lid had a series of doors in it on piano hinges. In one corner of the room an incinerator burned the waste of the day, an assortment of ears on this occasion.

A chain hoist stood above the tank. The cadavers, tagged and numbered, each in a chain harness, were tethered to a bar around the circumference of the tank. A large fan with dusty blades was set into the wall.

Hannibal started the fan and opened the heavy metal doors of the tank.

He tagged the body and put it into a harness and with the hoist swung the body over the tank and lowered it into the formalin.

"Did you come from Fresnes with him?" Hannibal said as the bubbles came up.

"Yes."

"You attended the execution?"

"Yes."

"Why, Inspector?"

"I arrested him. If I brought him to that place, I attend."

"A matter of conscience, Inspector?"

"The death is a consequence of what I do. I believe in consequences. Did you promise Louis Ferrat laudanum?"

"Laudanum legally obtained."

"But not legally prescribed."

"It's a common practice with the condemned, in exchange for permission, I'm sure you know that."

"Yes. Don't give it to him."

"Ferrat is one of yours? You prefer him sober?"

"Yes."

"You want him to feel the full consequence, Inspector? Will you ask Monsieur Paris to take the cover off the guillotine so he can see the blade, sober, with his vision unclouded?"

"My reasons are my own. What you will not do is give him laudanum. If I find him under the influence of laudanum you will never hold a medical license in France: Look at that with your vision unclouded."

Hannibal saw that the room didn't bother Popil. He watched the inspector's duty come up in him.

Popil turned away from him to speak. "It would be a shame, because you show promise. I congratulate you on your remarkable grades," Popil said.

"You have pleased… your family would be-and is-very proud. Good night."

"Good night, Inspector. Thank you for the opera tickets."

38

EVENING IN PARIS, soft rain and the cobbles shining. Shopkeepers, closing for the night, directed the flow of the rainwater in the gutters to suit them with rolled scraps of carpet.

The tiny windshield wiper on the medical school van was powered by manifold vacuum and Hannibal had to lift off the gas from time to time to clear the windshield on the short drive to La Sante Prison.

He backed through the gate into the courtyard, rain falling cold on the back of his neck as he stuck his head out the van window to see, the guard in the sentry box not coming out to direct him.

Inside the main corridor of La Sante, Monsieur Paris' assistant beckoned him into the room with the machine. The man was wearing an oilskin apron and had an oilskin cover on his new derby for the occasion. He had placed the splash shield before his station in front of the blade to better protect his shoes and cuffs.

A long wicker basket lined with zinc stood beside the guillotine, ready for the body to be tipped into it.

"No bagging in here, warden's orders," he said. "You'll have to take the basket and bring it back. Will it go in the van?"

"Yes."

"Had you better measure?"

"No."

"Then you'll take him all together. We'll tuck it under his arm. They're next door."

In a whitewashed room with high barred windows Louis Ferrat lay bound on a gurney in the harsh light of overhead bulbs.

The plank tipping board, the bascule, from the guillotine was under him. An IV was in his arm.

Inspector Popil stood over Louis Ferrat, talking quietly to him, shading Ferrat's eyes from the glare with his hand. The prison doctor inserted a hypodermic into the IV and injected a small amount of clear fluid.

When Hannibal came into the room Popil did not look up.

"Remember, Louis," Popil said. "I need for you to remember."

Louis' rolling eye caught Hannibal at once.

Popil saw Hannibal then and held up a hand for him to keep back. Popil bent close to Louis Ferrat's sweating face. "Tell me."

"I put Cendrine's body in two bags. I weighted them with plowshares, and the rhymes were coming-"

"Not Cendrine, Louis. Remember. Who told Klaus Barbie where the children were hidden, so he could ship them East? I want you to remember."

"I asked Cendrine, I said, 'Just touch it'-but she laughed at me and the rhymes started coming-"

"No! Not Cendrine," Popil said. "Who told the Nazis about the children?"

"I can't stand to think about it."

"You only have to stand it once more. This will help you remember."

The doctor pushed a little more drug into Louis' vein, rubbing his arm to move the drug along.

"Louis, you must remember. Klaus Barbie shipped the children to Auschwitz. Who told him where the children were hidden? Did you tell him?"

Louis' face was grey. "The Gestapo caught me forging ration cards," he said. "When they broke my fingers, I gave them Pardou -Pardou knew where the orphans were hidden. He got so much a head for them and kept his fingers. He's mayor of Trent-la-Foret now. I saw it, but I didn't help. They looked out of the back of the truck at me."

"Pardou." Popil nodded. "Thank you, Louis."

Popil started to turn from him when Louis said, "Inspector?"

"Yes, Louis?"

"When the Nazis threw the children into the trucks, where were the police?"

Popil closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded to a guard, who opened the door into the guillotine room. Hannibal could see a priest and Monsieur Paris standing beside the machine. The executioner's assistant removed the chain and crucifix from around Louis' neck and put it in his hand, bound by his side. Louis looked at Hannibal. He lifted his head and opened his mouth. Hannibal went to his side and Popil did not try to stop him.

"The money, Louis?"

"St.-Sulpice. Not the poor box, the box for souls in Purgatory. Where's the dope?"

"I promise." Hannibal had a vial of dilute tincture of opium in the pocket of his jacket. The guard and executioner's assistant officially looked away. Popil did not look away. Hannibal held it to Louis' lips and he drank it down. Louis nodded toward his hand and opened his mouth again. Hannibal put the crucifix and chain in Louis' mouth before they turned him over on the plank that would carry him under the blade.

Hannibal watched the burden of Louis' heart roll away. The gurney bumped over the threshold of the guillotine room and the guard closed the door.

"He wanted his crucifix to remain with his head instead of his heart,"

Popil said. "You knew what he wanted, didn't you? What else do you and Louis have in common?"

"Our curiosity about where the police were when the Nazis threw the children into the trucks. We have that in common."

Popil might have swung at him then. The moment passed. Popil shut his notebook and left the room.

Hannibal approached the doctor at once.

"Doctor, what is that drug?"

"A combination of thiopental sodium and two other hypnotics. TheSurete has it for interrogations. It releases repressed memory sometimes. In the condemned."

"We need to allow for it in our blood work in the lab. May I have the sample?"

The doctor handed over the vial. "The formula and the dosage are on the label."

From the next room came a heavy thud.

"I'd wait a few minutes if I were you," the doctor said. "Let Louis settle down."

39

HANNIBAL LAY ON the low bed in his garret room. His candles flickered on the faces he has drawn from his dreams, and shadows played over the gibbon skull. He stared into the gibbon's empty sockets and put his lower lip behind his teeth as if to match the gibbon's fangs. Beside him was a windup phonograph with a lily-shaped trumpet. He had a needle in his arm, attached to a hypodermic filled with the cocktail of hypnotics used in the interrogation of LouisFerrat.

"Mischa, Mischa. I'm coming." Fire on his mother's clothes, the votive candles flaring before St. Joan. The sexton said, "It's time."

He started the turntable and lowered the thick needle arm onto the record of children's songs. The record was scratchy, the sound tinny and thin, but it pierced him.

Sagt, wermagdas Mannleinsein

DasdastehtimWaldeallein

He pushed the plunger of the needle a quarter of an inch and felt the drug burn in his vein. He rubbed his arm to move it along. Hannibal stared steadily by candlelight at the faces sketched from his dreams, and tried to make their mouths move. Perhaps they would sing at first, and then say their names. Hannibal sang himself, to start them singing.

He could not make the faces move any more than he could flesh the gibbon. But it was the gibbon who smiled behind his fangs, lipless, his mandible curving in a grin, and the Blue-Eyed One smiled then, the bemused expression burnt in Hannibal 's mind. And then the smell of wood smoke in the lodge, the tiered smoke in the cold room, the cadaverine breath of the men crowded around him and Mischa on the hearth. They took them out to the barn then. Pieces of children's clothing in the barn, stained and strange to him. He could not hear the men talking, could not hear what they called each other, but then the distorted voice of Bowl-Man saying, "Take her, she's going to die anyway. He'll stayfreeeeeaaassh a little longer." Fighting and biting and coming now the thing he could not stand to see, Mischa held up by the arms, feet clear of the bloody snow, twisting, LOOKING BACK AT HIM.

"ANNIBAH" her voice-

Hannibal sat up in the bed. His arm in bending pushed the plunger of the hypodermic all the way down.

And then the barn swam around him.

"ANNIBAH"

Hannibal pulling free running to the door after them, the barn door slamming on his arm, bones cracking, Blue-Eyes turning back to raise the firewood stick, swinging at his head, from the yard the sound of the axe and now the welcome dark.

Hannibal heaved on his garret bed, his vision going in and out of focus, the faces swimming on the wall.

Past it. Past the thing he could not look at, the thing he could not hear and live. Waking in the lodge with blood dried on the side of his head and pain shooting from his upper arm, chained to the upstairs banister and the rug pulled over him. Thunder- no, those were artillery bursts in the trees, the men huddled in front of the fireplace with the cook's leather pouch, pulling off their dog tags and throwing them into the pouch along with their papers, dumping the papers from their wallets, and pulling on Red Cross armbands. And then the scream and brilliant flash of a phosphorus shell bursting against the hull of the dead tank outside and the lodge is burning, burning. The criminals rushing out into the night, to their half-track truck, and at the door the Cooker stops. Holding the satchel up beside his face to protect it from the heat, he takes a padlock key from his pocket and tosses it up to Hannibal as the next shell came and they never heard the shell scream, just the house heaving, the balcony where Hannibal lay tipping, him sliding against the banister and the staircase coming down on top of the Cooker. Hannibal hearing his hair crisp in a tongue of flame and then he is outside, the half-track roaring away through the forest, the rug around him smoldering at its edge, shellbursts shaking the ground, and splinters howling past him. Putting out the smoldering blanket with snow, and trudging, trudging, his arm hanging.

Dawn grey on the roofs of Paris. In the garret room the phonograph has slowed and stopped, and the candles gutter low. Hannibal 's eyes open.

The faces on the walls are still. They are chalk sketches once again, flat sheets moving in a draft. The gibbon has resumed his usual expression. Day is coming. Everywhere the light is rising. New light is everywhere.

40

UNDER A LOW GREY SKY in Vilnius, Lithuania, a Skoda police sedan turned off the busy Sventaragio and into a narrow street near the university, honking the pedestrians out of the way, making them curse into their collars. It pulled to a stop in front of a new Russian-built hive of flats, raw-looking in the block of decrepit apartment buildings. A tall man in Soviet police uniform got out of the car and, running his finger down a line of buttons, pushed a buzzer marked Dortlich.

The buzzer rang in a third-floor flat where an old man lay in bed, medicines crowded on a table beside him. Above the bed was a Swiss pendulum clock. A string hung from the clock to the pillow. This was a tough old man, but in the night, when the dread came on him, he could pull the string in the dark and hear the clock chime the hour, hear that he was not dead yet. The minute hand moved jerk by jerk. He fancied the pendulum was deciding, eenymeeny, the moment of his death.

The old man mistook the buzzer for his own rasping breath. He heard his maid's voice raised in the hall outside and then she stuck her head in the door, bristling beneath her mobcap.

"Your son, sir."

Officer Dortlich brushed past her and came into the room.

"Hello, Father."

"I'm not dead yet. It's too soon to loot." The old man found it odd how the anger only flashed in his head now and no longer reached his heart.

"I brought you some chocolates."

"Give them to Bergid on your way out. Don't rape her. Goodbye, Officer Dortlich."

"It's late to be carrying on like this. You are dying. I came to see if there is something I can do for you, other than provide this flat."

"You could change your name. How many times did you change sides?"

"Enough to stay alive."

Dortlich wore the forest green piping of the Soviet Border Guards. He took off a glove and went to his father's bedside. He tried to take the old man's hand, his finger feeling for the pulse, but his father pushed Dortlich's scarred hand away. The sight of Dortlich's hand brought a shine of water to his father's eyes. With an effort the old man reached up and touched the medals swinging off Dortlich's chest as he leaned over the bed. The decorations included Excellent MVD Policeman, the Institute for Advanced Training in Managing Prison Camps and Jails, and Excellent Soviet Pontoon Bridge Builder. The last decoration was a stretch; Dortlich had built some pontoon bridges, but for the Nazis in a labor battalion. Still, it was a handsome enameled piece and, if questioned about it, he could talk the talk. "Did they throw these to you out of a pasteboard box?"

"I did not come for your blessing, I came to see if you needed anything and to say goodbye."

"It was bad enough to see you in Russian uniform."

"The Twenty-seventh Rifles," Dortlich said.

"Worse to see you in Nazi uniform; that killed your mother."

"There were a lot of us. Not just me. I have a life. You have a bed to die in instead of a ditch. You have coal. That's all I have to give you.

The trains for Siberia are jammed. The people trample each other and shit in their hats. Enjoy your clean sheets."

"Grutas was worse than you, and you knew it." He had to pause to wheeze.

"Why did you follow him? You looted with criminals and hooligans, you robbed houses and you stripped the dead."

Dortlich replied as though he had not heard his father. "When I was little and I got burned you sat beside the bed and carved the top for me. You gave it to me and when I could hold the whip you showed me how to spin it. It is a beautiful top, with all the animals on it. I still have it. Thank you for the top." He put the chocolates near the foot of the bed where the old man could not shove them off on the floor.

"Go back to your police station, pull out my file and mark it No Known Family," Dortlich's father said.

Dortlich took a piece of paper from his pocket. "If you want me to send you home when you die, sign this and leave it for me. Bergid will help you and witness your signature."

In the car, Dortlich rode in silence until they were moving with the traffic on the Radvilaites.

Sergeant Svenka at the wheel offered Dortlich a cigarette and said, "Hard to see him?"

"Glad it's not me," Dortlich said. "His fucking maid-I should go there when Bergid's at church. Church-she's risking jail to go. She thinks I don't know. My father will be dead in a month. I will ship him to his birth town in Sweden. We should have maybe three cubic meters of space underneath the body good space three meters long."

Lieutenant Dortlich did not have a private office yet, but he had a desk in the common room of the police station, where prestige meant proximity to the stove. Now, in spring, the stove was cold and papers were piled on it. The paperwork that covered Dortlich's desk was fifty percent bureaucratic nonsense, and half of that could be safely thrown away.

There was very little communication laterally with police departments and MVD in neighboring Latvia and Poland. Police in the Soviet satellite countries were organized around the Central Soviet in Moscow like a wheel with spokes and no rim.

Here was the stuff he had to look at: by official telegraph the list of foreigners holding a visa for Lithuania. Dortlich compared it to the lengthy wanted list and list of the politically suspect. The eighth visa holder from the top was Hannibal Lecter, brand-new member of the youth league of the French Communist Party.

Dortlich drove his own two-cycle Wartburg to the State Telephone Office, where he did business about once a month. He waited outside until he saw Svenka enter to begin his shift. Soon, with Svenka in control of the switchboard, Dortlich was alone in a telephone cabin with a crackling and spitting trunk line to France. He put a signal-strength meter on the telephone and watched the needle in case of an eavesdropper.

In the basement of a restaurant near Fontainebleau, France, a telephone rang in the dark. It rang for five minutes before it was answered.

"Speak."

"Somebody needs to answer faster, me sitting here with my ass hanging out. We need an arrangement in Sweden, for friends to receive a body,"

Dortlich said. "And the Lecter child is coming back. On a student visa through the Youth for the Rebirth of Communism."

"Who?"

"Think about it. We discussed it the last time we had dinner together,"

Dortlich said. He glanced at his list. "Purpose of his visit: to catalog for the people the library at Lecter Castle. That's a joke-the Russians wiped their ass with the books. We may need to do something on your end. You know who to tell."

41

NORTHWEST OF VILNIUS near the Neris River are the ruins of an old power plant, the first in the region. In happier times it supplied a modest amount of electricity to the city, and to several lumber mills and a machine shop along the river. It ran in all weathers, as it could be supplied with Polish coal by a narrow-gauge rail spur or by river barge.

The Luftwaffe bombed it flat in the first five days of the German invasion. With the advent of the new Soviet transmission lines, it had never been rebuilt.

The road to the power plant was blocked by a chain padlocked to concrete posts. The lock was rusty on the outside, but well-greased within. A sign in Russian, Lithuanian and Polish said: UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE, ENTRY FORBIDDEN.

Dortlich got out of the truck and dropped the chain to the ground.

Sergeant Svenka drove across it. The gravel was covered in patches by spreading weeds that brushed beneath the truck with a gasping sound.

Svenka said, "This is where all the crew-"

"Yes," Dortlich said, cutting him off.

"Do you think there are really mines?"

"No. And if I'm wrong keep it to yourself," Dortlich said. It was not his nature to confide, and his need for Svenka's help made him irritable.

A Lend-Lease Nissen hut, scorched on one side, stood near the cracked and blackened foundation of the power plant.

"Pull up over there by the mound of brush. Get the chain out of the back," Dortlich said.

Dortlich tied the chain to the tow bar on the truck, shaking the knot to settle the links. He rooted in the brush to find the end of a timber pallet and fastening the chain to it, he waved the truck forward until the pallet piled with brush moved enough to reveal the metal doors of a bomb shelter.

"After the last air raid, the Germans dropped paratroopers to control the crossings of theNeris," Dortlich said. "The power-station crew had taken shelter in here. A paratrooper knocked on the door and when they opened it he threw in a phosphorus grenade. It was difficult to clean.

Takes a minute to get used to it." As Dortlich talked he took off three padlocks securing the door.

He swung it open and the puff of stale air that hit Svenka's face had a scorched smell. Dortlich turned on his electric lantern and went down the steep metal steps. Svenka took a deep breath and followed him. The inside was whitewashed and there were rows of rough wooden shelves. On them were art. Icons wrapped in rags, and row after row of numbered aluminum-tube map cases, their threaded caps sealed with wax. In the back of the shelter were stacked empty picture frames, some with the tacks pulled out, some with the frayed edges of paintings that had been cut hastily out of the frames.

"Bring everything on that shelf, and the ones standing on end there,"

Dortlich said. He gathered several bundles in oilcloth and led Svenka to the Nissen hut. Inside on sawhorses was a fine oak coffin carved with the symbol of theKlaipeda Ocean and River Workers Association. The coffin had a decorative rub rail around it and the bottom half was a darker color like the waterline and hull of a boat, a handsome piece of design.

"My father's soul ship," Dortlich said. "Bring me that box of cotton waste. The important thing is for it not to rattle."

"If it rattles they'll think it's his bones," Svenka said.

Dortlich slappedSvenka across the mouth. "Show some respect. Get me the screwdriver."

42

HANNIBAL LECTER LOWERED the dirty window of the train, watching, watching as the train wound through tall second growths of linden and pine on both sides of the tracks and then, as he passed at a distance of less than a mile, he saw the towers of Lecter Castle. Two miles further, the train came to a screeching and wheezing halt at theDubrunst watering station. Some soldiers and a few laborers climbed off to urinate on the roadbed. A sharp word from the conductor made them turn their backs to the passenger cars. Hannibal climbed off with them, his pack on his back. When the conductor went back into the train, Hannibal stepped into the woods. He tore a page of newspaper as he went, in case the second trainman saw him from the top of the tank. He waited in the woods through the chuff, chuff of the steam locomotive laboring away.

Now he was alone in the quiet woods. He was tired and gritty.

When Hannibal was six Berndt had carried him up the winding stairs beside the water tank and let him peer over the mossy edge into water that reflected a circle of the sky. There was a ladder down the inside too. Berndt used to swim in the tank with a girl from the village at every opportunity. Berndt was dead, back there, deep in the forest. The girl was probably dead too.

Hannibal took a quick bath in the tank and did his laundry. He thought about Lady Murasaki in the water, thought about swimming with her in the tank.

He hiked back along the railroad, stepping off into the woods once when he heard a handcart coming down the tracks. Two brawny Magyars pumped the handles with their shirts tied around their waists.

A mile from the castle a new Soviet power line crossed the rails.

Bulldozers had cleared its path through the woods. Hannibal could feel the static as he passed under the heavy electrical lines and the hair stood up on his arms. He walked far enough from the lines and the rails for the compass on his father's binoculars to settle down. So there were two ways to the hunting lodge, if it was still there. This power line ran dead straight out of sight. If it continued in that direction it would pass within a few kilometers of the hunting lodge.

He took a U.S. surplus C-ration from his pack, threw the yellowed cigarettes away, and ate the potted meat while he considered. The stairs collapsing on the Cooker, the timbers coming down.

The lodge might not be there at all. If the lodge was there and anything remained at the lodge it was because looters could not move heavy wreckage. To do what the looters could not do, he needed strength. To the castle, then.

Just before nightfall Hannibal approached Lecter Castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

Hannibal saw the castle black against the fading light in the west, flat like the cutout pasteboard castle where Mischa's paper dolls used to live. Her pasteboard castle loomed larger in him than this stone one.

Paper dolls curl when they burn. Fire on his mother's clothes.

From the trees behind the stable he could hear the clatter of supper and the orphans singing "The Internationale." A fox barked in the woods behind him.

A man in muddy boots left the stable with a spade and pail and walked across the kitchen garden. He sat down on the Ravenstone to take off his boots and went inside to the kitchen.

Cook was sitting on the Ravenstone, Berndt said. Shot for being a Jew, and he spit on theHiwi that shot him. Berndt never said the Hiwi's name. "Better you don't know when I settle it after the war," he said, squeezing his hands together.

Full dark now. The electricity was working in at least part of Lecter Castle. When the light came on up in Headmaster's office, Hannibal raised his field glasses. He could see through the window that his mother's Italian ceiling had been covered with Stalinist whitewash to cover the painted figures from the bourgeois religion-myth. Soon Headmaster himself appeared in the window with a glass in his hand. He was heavier, stooped. First Monitor came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. Headmaster turned away from the window and in a few moments the light went out.

Ragged clouds blew across the moon, their shadows scaling the battlements and slipping over the roof. Hannibal waited another half-hour. Then, moving with a cloud shadow, he crossed to the stable.

He could hear the big horse snoring in the dark.

Cesar woke and cleared his throat, and his ears turned back to listen as Hannibal came into the stall. Hannibal blew in the horse's nose and rubbed his neck.

"Wake up, Cesar," he said in the horse's ear. Cesar's ear twitched across Hannibal 's face. Hannibal had to put his finger under his nose to keep from sneezing. He cupped his hand over his flashlight and looked over the horse. Cesar was brushed and his hooves looked good. He would be thirteen now, born when Hannibal was five. "You've only put on about a hundred kilos," Hannibal said. Cesar gave him a friendly bump with his nose and Hannibal had to catch himself against the side of the stall.

Hannibal put a bridle and padded collar and a two-strap pulling harness on the horse and tied up the traces. He hung a nosebag and grain on the harness, Cesar turning his head in an attempt to put on the nosebag at once.

Hannibal went to the shed where he had been locked as a child and took a coil of rope, tools and a lantern. No lights showed in the castle.

Hannibal led the horse off the gravel and across soft ground, toward the forest and the horns of the moon.

There was no alarm from the castle. Watching from the crenellated top of the west tower, Sergeant Svenka picked up the handset of the field radio he had lugged up two hundred steps.

43

AT THE EDGE of the woods a big tree had been felled across the trail, and a sign said in Russian danger, UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE.

Hannibal had to lead the horse around the fallen tree and into the forest of his childhood. Pale moonlight through the forest canopy made patches of grey on the overgrown trail. Cesar was cautious about his footing in the dark. They were well into the woods before Hannibal lit a lantern. He walked ahead, the horse's plate-sized hooves treading the edge of the lantern light. Beside the forest path the ball of a human femur stuck out of the ground like a mushroom.

Sometimes he talked to the horse. "How many times did you bring us up this trail in the cart, Cesar? Mischa and me and Nanny and Mr. Jakov?"

Three hours breasting the weeds brought them to the edge of the clearing.

The lodge was there, all right. It did not look diminished to him. The lodge was not flat like the castle; it loomed as it did in his dreams.

Hannibal stopped at the edge of the woods and stared. Here the paper dolls still curled in the fire. The hunting lodge was half-burned, with part of the roof fallen in; stone walls had prevented its total collapse. The clearing was grown up in weeds waist high and bushes taller than a man.

The burned-out tank in front of the lodge was overgrown with vines, a flowering vine hanging from its cannon, and the tail of the crashed Stuka stood up out of the high grass like a sail. There were no paths in the grass. The beanpoles from the garden stuck up above the high weeds.

There, in the kitchen garden, Nanny put Mischa's bathtub, and when the sun had warmed the water, Mischa sat in the tub and waved her hands at the white cabbage butterflies around her. Once he cut the stem of an eggplant and gave it to her in the tub because she loved the color, the purple in the sun, and she hugged the warm eggplant.

The grass before the door was not trampled. Leaves were piled on the steps and in front of the door. Hannibal watched the lodge while the moon moved the width of a finger.

Time, it was time. Hannibal came out of the cover of the trees leading the big horse in the moonlight. He went to the pump, primed it with a cup of water from the waterskin and pumped until the squealing suckers pulled cold water from the ground. He smelled and tasted the water and gave some to Cesar, who drank more than a gallon and had two handfuls of grain from the nosebag. The squealing of the pump carried into the woods. An owl hooted and Cesar turned his ears toward the sound.

A hundred meters into the trees, Dortlich heard the squealing pump and took advantage of its noise to move forward. He could push quietly through the high-grown ferns, but his footsteps crunched on the forest mast. He froze when silence fell in the clearing, and then he heard the bird cry somewhere between him and the lodge, then it flew, shutting out patches of sky as it passed over him, wings stretched impossibly wide as it sailed through the tangle of branches without a sound.

Dortlich felt a chill and turned his collar up. He sat down among the ferns to wait.

Hannibal looked at the lodge and the lodge looked back. All the glass was blown out. The dark windows watched him like the sockets of the gibbon skull. Its slopes and angles changed by the collapse, its apparent height changed by the high growth around it, the hunting lodge of his childhood became the dark sheds of his dreams. Approaching now across the overgrown garden.

There his mother lay, her dress on fire, and later in the snow he put his head on her chest and her bosom was frozen hard. There was Berndt, and there Mr. Jakov's brains frozen on the snow among the scattered pages. His father facedown near the steps, dead of his own decisions.

There was nothing on the ground anymore.

The front door to the lodge was splintered and hung on one hinge. He climbed the steps and pushed it into the darkness. Inside something small scratched its way to cover. Hannibal held his lantern out beside him and went in.

The room was partly charred, half-open to the sky. The stairs were broken at the landing and roof timbers lay on top of them. The table was crushed. In the corner the small piano lay on its side, the ivory keyboard toothy in his light. A few words of Russian graffiti were on the walls. FUCK THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN and CAPTAINGRENKO HAS A BIG ASSHOLE.

Two small animals jumped out the window.

The room pressed a hush on Hannibal. Defiant, he made a great clatter with his pry bar, raking off the top of the big stove to set his lantern there. The ovens were open and the oven racks were gone, probably taken along with the pots for thieves to use over a campfire.

Working by lantern, Hannibal cleared away as much loose debris from around the staircase as he could move. The rest was pinned down by the big roof timbers, a scorched pile of giant pick-up sticks.

Dawn came in the empty windows as he worked and the eyes of a singed trophy head on the wall caught the red gleam of sunrise.

Hannibal studied the pile of timbers for several minutes, hitched a doubled line around a timber near the middle of the pile and paid out rope as he backed through the door.

Hannibal woke Cesar, who was alternately dozing and cropping grass. He walked the horse around for a few minutes to loosen him up. A heavy dew soaked through his trouser legs and sparkled on the grass and stood like cold sweat on the aluminum skin of the dive bomber. In the daylight he could see a vine had gotten an early start in the greenhouse of the Stuka canopy with big leaves and new tendrils now. The pilot was still inside with his gunner behind him and the vine had grown around and through him, curling between his ribs and through his skull.

Hannibal hitched his rope to the harness traces and walked Cesar forward until the big horse's shoulders and chest felt the load. He clicked in Cesar's ear, a sound from his boyhood. Cesar leaned into the load, his muscles bunched and he moved forward. A crash and thud from inside the lodge. Soot and ash puffed out the window and blew into the woods like fleeing darkness.

Hannibal patted the horse. Impatient for the dust to settle, he tied a handkerchief over his face and went inside, climbing over the collapsed pile of wreckage, coughing, tugging to free his lines and hitch them again. Two more pulls and the heaviest debris was off the deep layer of rubble where the stairs had collapsed. He left Cesar hitched and with pry bar and shovel he dug into the wreckage, throwing broken pieces of furniture, half-burned cushions, a cork thermos chest. He lifted out of the pile a singed boar's head on a plaque.

His mother's voice: Pearls before swine.

The boar's head rattled when he shook it. Hannibal grasped the boar's tongue and tugged. The tongue came out with its attached stopper. He tilted the head nose-down and his mother's jewelry spilled out onto the stovetop. He did not stop to examine the jewelry, but went back at once to digging.

When he saw Mischa's bathtub, the end of the copper tub with its scrolled handle, he stopped and stood up. The room swam for a moment and he held on to the cold edge of the stove, put his forehead against the cold iron. He went outside and returned with yards of flowering vine. He did not look inside the tub, but coiled the line of flowers on top and set it on the stove, could not stand to see it there, and carried it outside to set it on the tank.

The noise of digging and prying made it easy for Dortlich to advance. He watched from the dark wood, exposing one eye and one barrel of his field glasses, peeping only when he heard the sound of shoveling and prying.

Hannibal 's shovel hit and scooped up a skeletal hand and then exposed the skull of the cook. Good tidings in the skeleton smile-its gold teeth showed looters had not reached this far-and then he found, still clutched by arm bones in a sleeve, the cook's leather dispatch case.

Hannibal seized it from under the arm, and carried it to the stove. The contents rattled on the iron as he dumped them out: assorted military collar brass, Lithuanian police insignia, Nazi SS lightning brass, Nazi Waffen-SS skull-and-crossbones cap device, Lithuanian aluminum police eagles, Salvation Army collar brass, and last, six stainless-steel dog tags.

The top one was Dortlich's.

Cesar took notice of two classes of things in the hands of men: apples and feedbags were the first, and whips and sticks second. He could not be approached with a stick in hand, a consequence of being driven out of the vegetables by an infuriated cook when he was a colt. If Dortlich had not been carrying a leaded riot baton in his hand when he came out of the trees, Cesar might have ignored him. As it was, the horse snorted and clopped a few steps further away, trailing his rope down the steps of the lodge, and turned to face the man.

Dortlich backed into the trees and disappeared in the woods. He went a hundred meters further from the lodge, among the breast-high ferns wet with dew and out of the view of the empty windows. He took out his pistol and jacked a round into the chamber. A Victorian privy with gingerbread under the eaves was about forty meters behind the lodge, the thyme planted on its narrow path grown wild and tall, and the hedges that screened it from the lodge were grown together across the path.

Dortlich could barely squeeze through, branches and leaves in his collar, brushing his neck, but the hedge was supple and did not crackle.

He held his baton before his face and pushed through quietly. Baton ready in one hand and pistol in the other, he advanced two steps toward a side window of the lodge when the edge of a shovel caught him across the spine and his legs went numb. He fired a shot into the ground as his legs crumpled under him and the flat of the shovel clanged against the back of his skull and he was conscious of grass against his face before the dark came down.

Birdsong, ortolans flocking and singing in the trees and the morning sunlight yellow on the tall grass, bent over where Hannibal and Cesar had passed.

Hannibal leaned against the burned-out tank with his eyes closed for about five minutes. He turned to the bathtub, and moved the vine with his finger enough to see Mischa's remains. It was oddly comforting to him to see she had all her baby teeth-one awful vision dispelled. He plucked a bay leaf out of the tub and threw it away.

From the jewelry on the stove he chose a brooch he remembered seeing on his mother's breast, a line of diamonds turned into a Mobius tape. He took a ribbon from a cameo and fastened the brooch where Mischa had worn a ribbon in her hair.

On a pleasant east-facing slope above the lodge he dug a grave and lined it with all the wildflowers he could find. He put the tub into the grave and covered it with roof tiles.

He stood at the head of the grave. At the sound of Hannibal's voice, Cesar raised his head from cropping.

"Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day."

Hannibal filled in the grave and patted down the dirt with his hands. He covered the grave with pine needles, leaves and twigs until it looked like the rest of the forest floor.

In a small clearing at some distance from the grave, Dortlich sat gagged and bound to a tree. Hannibal and Cesar joined him.

Settling himself on the ground, Hannibal examined the contents of Dortlich's pack. A map and car keys, an army can opener, a sandwich in an oilskin pouch, an apple, a change of socks, and a wallet. From the wallet he took an ID card and compared it to the dog tags from the lodge.

"Herr… Dortlich. On behalf of myself and my late family, I want to thank you for coming today. It means a great deal to us, and to me personally, having you here. I'm glad to have this chance to talk seriously with you about eating my sister."

He pulled out the gag and Dortlich was talking at once.

"I am a policeman from the town, the horse was reported stolen,"

Dortlich said. "That's all I want here, just say you'll return the horse and we'll forget it."

Hannibal shook his head. "I remember your face. I have seen it many times. And your hand on us with the webs between your fingers, feeling who was fattest. Do you remember that bathtub bubbling on the stove?"

"No. From the war I only remember being cold."

"Did you plan to eat me today, Herr Dortlich? You have your lunch right here." Hannibal examined the contents of the sandwich. "So much mayonnaise, Herr Dortlich!"

"They'll come looking for me very soon," Dortlich said.

"You felt our arms." Hannibal felt Dortlich's arm. "You felt our cheeks, Herr Dortlich," he said, tweaking Dortlich's cheek. "I call you 'Herr' but you aren't German, are you, or Lithuanian, or Russian or anything, are you? You are your own citizen-a citizen of Dortlich. Do you know where the others are? Do you keep in touch?"

"All dead, all dead in the war."

Hannibal smiled at him and untied the bundle of his own handkerchief. It was full of mushrooms. "Morels are one hundred francs a centigram in Paris, and these were growing on a stump!" He got up and went to the horse.

Dortlich writhed in his bonds for the moment when Hannibal 's attention was elsewhere.

There was a coil of rope on Cesar's broad back. Hannibal attached the free end to the traces of the harness. The other end was tied in a hangman's noose. Hannibal paid out rope and brought the noose back to Dortlich. He openedDortlich's sandwich and greased the rope with mayonnaise, and applied a liberal coating of mayonnaise toDortlich's neck.

Flinching away from his hands, Dortlich said, "One remains alive! In Canada-Grentz-look there for his ID. I would have to testify."

"To what, Herr Dortlich?"

"To what you said. I didn't do it, but I will say I saw it."

Hannibal fixed the noose about Dortlich's neck and looked into his face.

"Do I seem upset with you?" He returned to the horse.

"That's the only one, Grentz-he got out on a refugee boat from Bremerhaven -I could give a sworn statement-"

"Good, then you are willing to sing?"

"Yes, I will sing."

"Then let us sing for Mischa, Herr Dortlich. You know this song. Mischa loved it." He turned Cesar's rump to Dortlich. "I don't want you to see this," he said into the horse's ear, and broke into song:

"Ein Mannleinstehtim Waldeganz still und stumm…"He clicked in Cesar's ear and walked him forward. "Sing for slack, Herr Dortlich. Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein um."

Dortlich turned his neck from side to side in the greasy noose, watching the rope uncoil in the grass.

"You're not singing, Herr Dortlich."

Dortlich opened his mouth and sang in a tuneless shout, "Sagt, wermagdas Mannleinsein."

And then they were singing together, "Dasdastehtim Waldallein…"

The rope rose out of the grass, some belly in it, and Dortlich screamed, "Porvik! His name was Porvik! We called him Pot Watcher. Killed in the lodge. You found him."

Hannibal stopped the horse and walked back to Dortlich, bent over and looked into his face.

Dortlich said, "Tie him, tie the horse, a bee might sting him."

"Yes, there are a lot of them in the grass." Hannibal consulted the dog tags. "Milko?"

"I don't know, I don't know. I swear."

"And now we come to Grutas."

"I don't know, I don't. Let me go and I will testify against Grentz. We will find him in Canada."

"A few more verses, Herr Dortlich."

Hannibal led the horse forward, dew glistened on the rope, almost level now.

"Dasdastehtim Waldeallein-"

Dortlich's strangled scream, "It's Kolnas! Kolnas deals with him."

Hannibal patted the horse and came back to bend over Dortlich. "Where is Kolnas?"

" Fontainebleau, near the Place Fontainebleau in France. He has a cafe. I leave messages. It's the only way I can contact him." Dortlich looked Hannibal in the eye. "I swear to God she was dead. She was dead anyway, I swear it."

Staring into Dortlich's face, Hannibal clicked to the horse. The rope tightened and the dew flew off it as the little hairs on the rope stood up. A strangled scream from Dortlich cut off, as Hannibal howled the song into his face.

"Dasdastehtim Waldeallein,

Mitdempurporroten Mantelein."

A wet crunch and a pulsing arterial spray. Dortlich's head followed the noose for about six meters and lay looking up at the sky.

Hannibal whistled and the horse stopped, his ears turned backward.

"Dempurporroten Mantelein, indeed."

Hannibal dumped the contents of Dortlich's pack on the ground and took his car keys and ID. He made a crude spit from green sticks and patted his pockets for matches.

While his fire was burning down to useful coals, Hannibal took Dortlich's apple to Cesar. He took all the harness off the horse so he could not get tangled in the brush and walked him down the trail toward the castle. He hugged the horse's neck and then slapped him on the rump.

"Go home. Cesar, go home." Cesar knew the way.

44

GROUND FOG SETTLED in the bare ripped path of the power line and SergeantSvenka told his driver to slow the truck for fear of hitting a stump. He looked at his map and checked the number on a pylon holding up the heavy transmission line.

"Here."

The tracks of Dortlich's car continued into the distance, but here it had sat and dripped oil on the ground.

The dogs and policemen came off the back of the truck, two big black Alsatians excited about going into the woods, and a serious hound.

Sergeant Svenka gave them Dortlich's flannel pajama top to sniff and they were off. Under the overcast sky the trees looked grey with soft-edged shadows and mist hung in the glades.

The dogs were milling about the hunting lodge, the hound casting around the perimeter, dashing into the woods and back, when a trooper called out from back in the trees. When the others did not hear him at once, he blew his whistle.

Dortlich's head stood on a stump and on his head stood a raven. As the troopers approached, the raven flew, taking with it what it could carry.

Sergeant Svenka took a deep breath and set an example for the men, walking up toDortlich's head. Dortlich's cheeks were missing, excised cleanly, and his teeth were visible at the sides. His mouth was held open by his dog tag, wedged between his teeth.

They found the fire and the spit. Sergeant Svenka felt the ashes to the bottom of the little fire pit. Cold.

"A brochette, cheeks and morels," he said.

45

INSPECTOR POPIL WALKED from police headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres to the Place de Vosges, carrying a slender portfolio. When he stopped at a bar on the way for a fast espresso, he smelled a calvados on the service bar and wished it were already evening.

Popil walked back and forth on the gravel, looking up at Lady Murasaki's windows. Sheer draperies were closed. Now and then the thin cloth moved in a draft.

The daytime concierge, an older Greek woman, recognized him.

"Madame is expecting me," Popil said. "Has the young man been by?"

The concierge felt a tremor in her concierge antennae and she said the safe thing. "I haven't seen him, sir, but I've had days off." She buzzed Popil in.

Lady Murasaki reclined in her fragrant bath. She had four gardenias floating in the water, and several oranges. Her mother's favorite kimono was embroidered with gardenias. It was cinders now. Remembering, she made a wavelet that rearranged the blossoms. It was her mother who understood when she married Robert Lecter. Her father's occasional letters from Japan still carried a chill. Instead of a pressed flower or fragrant herb, his most recent note contained a blackened twig from Hiroshima.

Was that the doorbell? She smiled, thinking " Hannibal," and reached for her kimono. But he always called or sent a note before he came, and rang before he used his key No key in the lock now, just the bell again.

She left the bath and wrapped herself hurriedly in the cotton robe. Her eye at the peephole. Popil. Popil in the peephole.

Lady Murasaki had enjoyed occasional lunches with Popil. The first one, at Le Pre Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne, was rather stiff, but the others were at Chez Paul near his work and they were easier and more relaxed. He sent dinner invitations as well, always by note, one accompanied by a haiku with excessive seasonal references. She had declined the dinners, also in writing.

She unbolted the door. Her hair was gathered up and she was gloriously barefoot.

"Inspector."

"Forgive me for coming unannounced, I tried to call."

"I heard the telephone."

"From your bath, I think."

"Come in."

Following his eyes, she saw him account at once for the weapons in place before the armor: the tanto dagger, the short sword, the long sword, the war axe.

" Hannibal?"

"He is not here."

Being attractive, Lady Murasaki was a still hunter. She stood with her back to the mantle, her hands in her sleeves, and let the game come to her. Popil's instinct was to move, to flush game.

He stood behind a divan, touched the cloth. "I have to find him. When did you last see him?"

"How many days is it? Five. What is wrong?"

Popil stood near the armor. He rubbed the lacquered surface of a chest.

"Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Did he indicate where he might be going?"

Indicate. Lady Murasaki watched Popil. Now the tips of his ears were flushed. He was moving and asking and touching things. He liked alternate textures, touching something smooth, then something with a nap. She'd seen it at the table too. Rough then smooth. Like the top and bottom of the tongue. She knew she could electrify him with that image and divert blood from his brain.

Popil went around a potted plant. When he peered at her through the foliage, she smiled at him and disrupted his rhythm.

"He is at an outing, I am not sure where."

"Yes, an outing," Popil said. "An outing hunting war criminals, I think."

He looked into her face. "I'm sorry, but I have to show you this." Popil put on the tea table a fuzzy picture, still damp and curling from the Thermo-Fax at the Soviet embassy. It showed Dortlich's head on the stump and police standing around it with two Alsatians and a hound. Another photo of Dortlich was from a Soviet police ID card. "He was found in the forest Hannibal 's family owned before the war. I know Hannibal was nearby-he crossed the Polish border the day before."

"Why must it be Hannibal? This man must have many enemies, you said he was a war criminal."

Popil pushed forward the ID photo. "This is how he looked in life."

Popil took a sketch from his portfolio, the first of a series. "This is how Hannibal drew him and put the drawing on the wall of his room." Half the face in the sketch was dissected, the other half clearly Dortlich.

"You were not in his room by invitation."

Popil was suddenly angry. "Your pet snake has killed a man. Probably not the first, as you would know better than I. Here are others," he said, putting down sketches. "This was in his room, and this and this and this. That face is from the Nuremberg Trials, I remember it. They are fugitives and now they will kill him if they can."

"And the Soviet police?"

"They are inquiring quietly in France. A Nazi like Dortlich on the People's Police is an embarrassment to the Soviets. They have his file now from Stasi in the GDR."

"If they catch Hannibal- "

"If they catch him in the East, they'll just shoot him. If he gets out, they might let the case wither and die if he keeps his mouth shut."

"Would you let it wither and die?"

"If he strikes in France he'll go to prison. He could lose his head."

Popil stopped moving. His shoulders slumped.

Popil put his hands in his pockets.

Lady Murasaki took her hands out of her sleeves.

"You would be deported," he said. "I would be unhappy. I like to see you."

"Do you live by your eyes alone, Inspector?"

"Does Hannibal? You would do anything for him, wouldn't you?"

She started to say something, some qualifier to protect herself, and then she just said "Yes," and waited.

"Help him. Help me. Pascal." She had never said his first name before.

"Send him to me."

46

THE RIVER ESSONNE, smooth and dark, slid past the warehouse and beneath the black houseboat moored to a quay near Vert le Petit. Its low cabins were curtained. Telephone and power lines ran to the boat. The leaves of the container garden were wet and shiny.

The ventilators were open on the deck. A shriek came out of one of them.

A woman's face appeared at one of the lower portholes, agonized, cheek pressed against the glass, and then a thick hand pushed the face away and jerked the curtain closed. No one saw.

A light mist made halos around the lights on the quay, but directly overhead a few stars shone through. They were too weak and watery to read.

Up on the road, a guard at the gate shined his light into the van marked Cafe de L'Este and, recognizing Petras Kolnas, waved him into the barbed-wire parking compound.

Kolnas walked quickly through the warehouse, where a workman was painting out the markings on appliance crates stenciled U.S. POST EXCHANGE, NEUILLY. The warehouse was jammed with boxes and Kolnas weaved through them to come out onto the quay.

A guard sat beside the boat's gangway at a table made from a wooden box.

He was eating a sausage with his pocket knife and smoking at the same time. He wiped his hands on his handkerchief to perform a pat-down, then recognized Kolnas and sent him past with a jerk of his head.

Kolnas did not meet often with the others, having a life of his own. He went about his restaurant kitchen with his bowl, sampling everything, and he had gained weight since the war.

ZigmasMilko, lean as ever, let him into the cabin.

Vladis Grutas was on a leather settee getting a pedicure from a woman with a bruise on her cheek. She looked cowed and was too old to sell.

Grutas looked up with the pleasant, open expression that was often a sign of temper. The boat captain played cards at a chart table with a boulder-bellied thug named Mueller, late of the SS Dirlewanger Brigade, whose prison tattoos covered the back of his neck and his hands and continued up his sleeves out of sight. When Grutas turned his pale eyes on the players, they folded the cards and left the cabin.

Kolnas did not waste time on greetings.

"Dortlich's dog tag was jammed in his teeth. Good German stainless steel, didn't melt, didn't burn. The boy will have yours too, and mine and Milko's, and Grentz's."

"You told Dortlich to search the lodge four years ago," Milko said.

"Poked around with his picnic fork, lazy bastard," Grutas said. He pushed the woman away with his foot, never looking at her, and she hurried out of the cabin.

"Where is he, this poison little boy who kills Dortlich?" Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. "A student in Paris. I don't know how he got the visa.

He used it going in. No information on him coming out. They don't know where he is."

"What if he goes to the police?" Kolnas said.

"With what?" Grutas said. "Baby memories, child nightmares, old dog tags?"

"Dortlich could have told him how he telephones me to get in touch with you," Kolnas said.

Grutas shrugged. "The boy will try to be a nuisance."

Milko snorted. "A nuisance? I would say he was nuisance enough to Dortlich. Killing Dortlich could not have been easy; he probably shot him in the back."

"Ivanov owes me," Grutas said. "Soviet Embassy security will point out little Hannibal, and we will do the rest. So Kolnas will not worry."

Muffled cries and the sound of blows came from elsewhere in the boat.

The men paid no attention.

"Taking over from Dortlich will be Svenka," Kolnas said, to show he was not worrying.

"Do we want him?" Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. "We have to have him. Svenka worked with Dortlich two years. He has our items. He's the only link we have left to the pictures. He sees the deportees, he can mark the decent-looking ones forDPCBremerhaven. We can get them from there."

Frightened by thePleven Plan's potential for rearming Germany, Joseph Stalin was purging Eastern Europe with mass deportations. The jammed trains ran weekly, to death in the labor camps in Siberia, and to misery in refugee camps in the West. The desperate deportees provided Grutas with a rich supply of women and boys. He stood behind his merchandise. His morphine was German medical-grade. He supplied ACDC converters for the black-market appliances, and made any mental adjustments his human merchandise required in order to perform.

Grutas was pensive. "Was this Svenka at the front?" They did not believe anyone innocent of the Eastern Front could be truly practical.

Kolnas shrugged. "He sounds young on the telephone. Dortlich had some arrangements."

"We'll bring everything out now. It's too soon to sell, but we need to get it out. When is he calling again?"

"Friday."

"Tell him to do it now."

"He'll want out. He'll want papers."

"We can get him to Rome. I don't know if we want him here. Promise him whatever, you know?"

"The art is hot," Kolnas said.

"Go back to your restaurant, Kolnas. Keep feeding the flics for free and they will keep tearing up your traffic tickets. Bring some profiteroles next time you come down here to bleat."

"He's all right," Grutas told Milko, when Kolnas was gone.

"I hope so," Milko said. "I don't want to run a restaurant."

"Dieter! Where is Dieter?" Grutas pounded on a cabin door on the lower deck, and shoved it open.

Two frightened young women were sitting on their bunks, each chained by a wrist to the pipe frame of the bunk. Dieter, twenty-five, held one of them by a fistful of her hair.

"You bruise their faces, split their lip, the money goes down," Grutas said. "And that one is mine for now."

Dieter released the woman's hair and rummaged in the manifold contents of his pockets for a key. "Eva!"

The older woman came into the cabin and stood close to the wall.

"Clean that one up and Mueller will take her to the house," Dieter said.

Grutas and Milko walked through the warehouse to the car. In a special area bound off by a rope were crates marked HOUSEHOLD. Grutas spotted among the appliances a British refrigerator.

"Milko, do you know why the English drink warm beer? Because they have Lucas refrigerators. Not for my house. I wantKelvinator, Frigidaire, Magnavox, Curtis-Mathis. I want all made in America." Grutas raised the cover of an upright piano and played a few notes. "This is a whorehouse piano. I don't want it. Kolnas found me aBosendorfer. The best. Pick it up in Paris, Milko… when you do the other thing."

47

KNOWING HE WOULD not come to her until he was scrubbed and groomed, she waited in his room. He had never invited her there, and she did not poke around. She looked at the drawings on the walls, the medical illustrations that filled one half of the room. She stretched out on his bed in the perfect order of the Japanese half beneath the eaves. On a small shelf facing the bed was a framed picture covered by a silk cloth embroidered with night herons. Lying on her side Lady Murasaki reached over and lifted the silk. It covered a beautiful drawing of her naked in the bath at the chateau, in pencil and chalk and tinted with pastel. The drawing was signed with the chop for Eternity in Eight Strokes and the Japanese symbols in the grass style, and not strictly correct, for "water flowers."

She looked at it for a long time, and then she covered it and closed her eyes, a poem ofYosano Akiko running in her head:

Amid the notes of my koto is another

Deep mysterious tone,

A sound that comes from.

Within my own breast.

Shortly after daylight on the second day, she heard footsteps on the stairs. A key in the lock, and Hannibal stood there, scruffy and tired, his pack hanging from his hand.

Lady Murasaki was standing.

" Hannibal, I need to hear your heart," she said. "Robert's heart went silent. Your heart stopped in my dreams." She went to him and put her ear against his chest. "You smell of smoke and blood."

"You smell of jasmine and green tea. You smell of peace."

"Do you have wounds?"

"No."

Her face was against the scorched dog tags hanging around Hannibal 's neck. She took them out of his shirt.

"Did you take these from the dead?"

"What dead would that be?"

"The Soviet police know who you are. Inspector Popil came to see me. If you go directly to him he will help you."

"These men are not dead. They are very much alive."

"Are they in France? Then give them to Inspector Popil."

"Give them to the French police? Why?" He shook his head. "Tomorrow is Sunday-do I have that right?"

"Yes, Sunday."

"Come with me tomorrow. I'll pick you up. I want you to look at a beast with me and tell me he should fear the French police."

"Inspector Popil-"

"When you see Inspector Popil, tell him I have some mail for him."

Hannibal 's head was nodding.

"Where do you bathe?"

"The hazard shower in the lab," he said. "I'm going down there now."

"Would you like some food?"

"No, thank you."

"Then sleep," she said. "I will go with you tomorrow. And the days after that."

48

HANNIBAL LECTER'S motorcycle was a BMW boxer twin left behind by the retreating German army. It was re-sprayed flat black and had low handlebars and a pillion seat. Lady Murasaki rode behind him, her headband and boots giving her a touch of Paris Apache. She held on to Hannibal, her hands lightly on his ribs.

Rain had fallen in the night and the pavement now was clean and dry in the sunny morning, grippy when they leaned into the curves on the road through the forest of Fontainebleau, flashing through the stripes of tree shadow and sunlight across the road, the air hanging cool in the dips, then warm in their faces as they crossed the open glades.

The angle of a lean on a motorcycle feels exaggerated on the pillion, and Hannibal felt her behind him trying to correct it for the first few miles, but then she got the feel of it, the last five degrees being on faith, and her weight became one with his as they sped through the forest. They passed a hedge full of honeysuckle and the air was sweet enough to taste on her lips. Hot tar and honeysuckle.

The Cafe de L'Este is on the west bank of the Seine about a half-mile from the village of Fontainebleau, with a pleasant prospect of woods across the river. The motorcycle went silent, and began to tick as it cooled. Near the entrance to the cafe terrace is an aviary and the birds in it are ortolans, a sub-rosa specialty of the cafe. Ordinances against the serving ofortolans came and went. They were listed on the menu as larks. Theortolan is a good singer, and these were enjoying the sunshine.

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki paused to look at them.

"So small, so beautiful," she said, her blood still up from the ride.

Hannibal rested his forehead against the cage. The little birds turned their heads to look at him using one eye at a time. Their songs were the Baltic dialect he heard in the woods at home. "They're just like us," he said. "They can smell the others cooking, and still they try to sing. Come."

Three quarters of the terrace tables were taken, a mixture of country and town in Sunday clothes, eating an early lunch. The waiter found a place for them.

A table of men next to them had orderedortolans all around. When the little roasted birds arrived, they bent low over their plates and tented their napkins over their heads to keep all the aroma in.

Hannibal sniffed their wine from the next table and determined it was corked. He watched without expression as, oblivious, they drank it anyway.

"Would you like an ice cream sundae?"

"Perfect."

Hannibal went inside the restaurant. He paused before the specials chalked on the blackboard while he read the restaurant license posted near the cash register.

In the corridor was a door marked Prive. The corridor was empty. The door was not locked. Hannibal opened it and went down the basement steps. In a partly opened crate was an American dishwasher. He bent to read the shipping label.

Hercule, the restaurant helper, came down the stairs carrying a basket of soiled napkins. "What are you doing down here, this is private."

Hannibal turned and spoke English. "Well, where is it then? The door says privy, doesn't it? I come down here and there's only the basement. The loo, man, the pissoir, the toilet, where is it? Speak English. Do you understand loo? Tell me quickly, I'm caught rather short."

"Prive, prive!" Hercule gestured up the stairs. "Toilette!" and at the top waved Hannibal in the right direction.

He arrived back at the table as the sundaes arrived. "Kolnas is using the name 'Kleber.' It's on the license. Monsieur Kleber residing on the Rue Juliana. Ahhh, regard."

PetrasKolnas came onto the terrace with his family, dressed for church.

The conversations around Hannibal took on a swoony sound as he looked at Kolnas, and dark motes swarmed in his vision.

Kolnas' suit was of inky new broadcloth, a Rotary pin in the lapel. His wife and two children were handsome, Germanic-looking. In the sun, the short red hairs and whiskers on Kolnas' face gleamed like hog bristles.

Kolnas went to the cash register. He lifted his son onto a barstool.

"Kolnas the Prosperous," Hannibal said. "The Restaurateur. The Gourmand.

He's come by to check the till on his way to church. How neat he is."

The headwaiter took the reservation book from beside the telephone and opened it for Kolnas' inspection.

"Remember us in your prayers, Monsieur," the headwaiter said.

Kolnas nodded. Shielding his movement from the diners with his thick body, he took a Webley. 455 revolver from his waistband, put it on a curtained shelf beneath the cash register and smoothed down his waistcoat. He selected some shiny coins from the till and wiped them with his handkerchief. He gave one to the boy on the barstool. "This is your offering for church, put it in your pocket."

He bent and gave the other to his little daughter. "Here is your offering, liebchen. Don't put it in your mouth. Put it safe in the pocket!"

Some drinkers at the bar engaged Kolnas and there were customers to greet. He showed his son how to give a firm handshake. His daughter let go of his pants leg and toddled between the tables, adorable in ruffles and a lacy bonnet and baby jewelry, customers smiling at her.

Hannibal took the cherry from the top of his sundae and held it at the edge of the table. The child came to get it, her hand extended, her thumb and forefinger ready to pluck. Hannibal 's eyes were bright. His tongue appeared briefly, and then he sang to the child.

"EinMannleinstehtimWaldeganz still undstumm -do you know that song?"

While she ate the cherry, Hannibal slipped something into her pocket.

"Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein um."

Suddenly Kolnas was beside the table. He picked his daughter up. "She doesn't know that song."

"You must know it, you don't sound French to me."

"Neither do you, Monsieur," Kolnas said. "I would not guess that you and your wife are French. We're all French now."

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki watched Kolnas bundle his family into a Traction Avant.

"Lovely children," she said. "A beautiful little girl."

"Yes," Hannibal said. "She's wearing Mischa's bracelet."

High above the altar at the Church of the Redeemer is a particularly bloody representation of Christ on the cross, a seventeenth-century spoil from Sicily. Beneath the hanging Christ, the priest raised the communion cup.

"Drink," he said. "This is my blood, shed for the remission of your sins." He held up the wafer. "This is my body, broken for you, sacrificed that you might not perish, but have everlasting life. Take, eat, and as oft as ye do this, do it in remembrance of me."

Kolnas, carrying his children in his arms, took the wafer in his mouth, and returned to the pew beside his wife. The line shuffled around and then the collection plate was passed. Kolnas whispered to his son. The child took a coin from his pocket and put it in the plate. Kolnas whispered to his daughter, who sometimes was reluctant to give up her offering.

"Katerina…"

The little girl felt in her pocket and put into the plate a scorched dog tag with the name Petras Kolnas. Kolnas did not see it until the steward took the dog tag from the plate and returned it, waiting with a patient smile for Kolnas to replace the dog tag with a coin.

49

ON LADY MURASAKI'S terrace a weeping cherry in a planter overhung the table, its lowest tendrils brushing Hannibal 's hair as he sat across from her. Above her shoulder floodlit Sacre Coeur hung in the night sky like a drop of the moon.

She was playing Miyagi Michio's "The Sea in Spring" on the long and elegant koto. Her hair was down, the lamplight warm on her skin. She looked steadily at Hannibal as she played.

She was difficult to read, a quality Hannibal found refreshing much of the time. Over the years he had learned to proceed, not with caution, but with care.

The music slowed progressively. The last note rang still. A suzumushi cricket in a cage answered the koto. She put a sliver of cucumber between the bars and the cricket pulled it inside. She seemed to look through Hannibal, beyond him, at a distant mountain, and then he felt her attention envelop him as she spoke the familiar words. "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," he said.

"Give them to Inspector Popil. Kolnas and the rest of them."

Hannibal finished his sake and put down the cup. "It's Kolnas' children, isn't it? You fold cranes for the children."

"I fold cranes for your soul, Hannibal. You are drawn into the dark."

"Not drawn. When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me."

"Out of the silence you came to me, and you spoke to me. I know you, Hannibal, and it is not easy knowledge. You are drawn toward the darkness, but you are also drawn to me."

"On the bridge of dreams."

The lute made a little noise as she put it down. She extended her hand to him. He got to his feet, the cherry trailing across his cheek, and she led him toward the bath. The water was steaming. Candles burned beside the water. She invited him to sit on atatami. They were facing knee to knee, their faces a foot apart.

" Hannibal, come home with me to Japan. You could practice at a clinic in my father's country house. There is much to do. We would be there together." She leaned close to him. She kissed his forehead. "In Hiroshima green plants push up through ashes to the light." She touched his face. "If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain."

Lady Murasaki took an orange from a bowl beside the bath. She cut into it with her fingernails and pressed her fragrant hand to Hannibal 's lips.

"One real touch is better than the bridge of dreams." She snuffed the candle beside them with a sake cup, leaving the cup inverted on the candle, her hand on the candle longer than it had to be.

She pushed the orange with her finger and it rolled along the tiles into the bath. She put her hand behind Hannibal 's head and kissed him on the mouth, a blossoming bud of a kiss, fast opening.

Her forehead pressed against his mouth, she unbuttoned his shirt. He held her at arm's length and looked into her lovely face, her shining.

They were close and they were far, like a lamp between two mirrors.

Her robe fell away. Eyes, breasts, points of light at her hips, symmetry on symmetry his breath growing short.

" Hannibal, promise me."

He pulled her to him very tight, his eyes squeezed tight shut. Her lips, her breath on his neck, the hollow of his throat, his collarbone. His clavicle. St. Michael's scales.

He could see the orange bobbing in the bath. For an instant it was the skull of the little deer in the boiling tub, butting, butting in the knocking of his heart, as though in death it were still desperate to get out. The damned in chains beneath his chest marched off across his diaphragm to hell beneath the scales. Sternohyoidomohyoidthyrohyoidjuuuguular, ahhhhhmen.

Now was the time and she knew it. " Hannibal, promise me."

A beat, and he said, "I already promised Mischa."

She sat still beside the bath until she heard the front door close. She put on her robe and carefully tied the belt. She took the candles from the bath and put them before the photographs on her altar. They glowed on the faces of the present dead, and on the watching armor, and in the mask of DateMasamune she saw the dead to come.

50

DR. DUMAS PUT HIS laboratory coat on a hanger and buttoned the top button with his plump pink hands. He was pink cheeked too, with crispy blond hair, and the crispness of his clothes lasted throughout the day.

There was a sort of unearthly cheer about him that lasted through the day as well. A few students remained in the lab, cleaning their dissection stations.

" Hannibal, tomorrow morning in the theater I will need a subject with the thoracic cavity open, the ribs reflected and the major pulmonary vessels injected, as well as the major cardiac arteries. I suspect from his color that Number Eighty-eight died of a coronary occlusion. That would be useful to see," he said cheerfully. "Do the left anterior descending and circumflex in yellow. If there's a blockage, shoot from both sides. I left you notes. It's a lot of work. I'll have Graves stay and help you if you like."

"I'll work alone, Professor Dumas."

"I thought so. Good news-AlbinMichel has the first engravings back. We can see them tomorrow! I can't wait."

Weeks ago Hannibal had delivered his sketches to the publisher on the Rue Huyghens. Seeing the name of the street made him think of Mr. Jakov, andChristiaan Huyghens' Treatise on Light. He sat in the Luxembourg Gardens for an hour after that, watching the toy sailboats on the pond, mentallyunspooling a volute from the half-circle of the flower bed. The drawings in the new anatomy text would be credited Lecter-Jakov.

The last student left the laboratory. The building was empty now and dark, except for Hannibal 's bright work lights in the anatomy lab. After he turned off the electric saw the only sounds were the wind's faint moan in chimneys, the insect click of the instruments and the bubbling retorts where the colored injection dyes were warming.

Hannibal considered his subject, a stocky middle-aged man, draped except for his opened thorax, ribs spread like the ribs of a boat. Here were areas Dr. Dumas would want to expose in the course of his lecture, making the last incision himself and lifting out a lung. For his illustration Hannibal needed to see the posterior aspect of the lung, out of sight in the cadaver. Hannibal went down the corridor to the anatomy museum for a reference, turning on lights as he went.

ZigmasMilko, sitting in a truck across the street, could look into the medical school's tall windows and track Hannibal 's progress down the hall. Milko had a short crowbar up the sleeve of his jacket, the pistol and silencer in the pockets. He got a good look when Hannibal turned up the museum lights. The pockets of Hannibal 's lab coat were flat. He did not appear to be armed. He left the museum carrying a jar, and the lights went out progressively as he returned to the anatomy lab. Now only the lab was lighted, the frosted windows and the skylight glowing.

Milko did not think this would require much of a lurk, but just in case he decided to smoke a cigarette first-if the spotter from the embassy had left him any cigarettes before slinking away. You'd think the mooching prick had never seen a decent smoke. Did he take the entire packet? Dammit, at least fifteen of the Lucky Strikes. Do this thing now, get some American cigarettes later at the balmusette. Unwind, rub against the bar girls with the silencer tube in the front trouser pocket, look into their faces when they felt it hard against them, pick up Grutas' piano in the morning.

This boy killed Dortlich. Milko recalled that Dortlich, with a crowbar up his sleeve, had once chipped his own tooth when he tried to light a cigarette. "Scheisskopf, you should have come out with the rest of us," he said to Dortlich, wherever he was, Hell probably.

Milko carried the black ladder, along with a lunch bucket for cover, across the street and into the shelter of the hedges beside the medical school. He put his foot on the bottom rung and muttered, "Fuck the farm." It had been his mantra in action since he ran away from home at twelve.

Hannibal completed the blue, venous injections and sketched his work in colored pencil at a drawing board beside the body, referring now and then to the lung preserved in a jar of alcohol. Some papers clipped to the board fluttered slightly in a draft and settled again. Hannibal looked up from his work, looked down the corridor in the direction of the draft, then finished coloring a vein.

Milko closed the window of the anatomy museum behind him, slipped off his boots and, in his socks, crept between the glass cases. He moved along the row of the digestive system, and paused near an enormous pair of clubbed feet in a jar. There was just enough light to move. Wouldn't want to shoot in here, splash this crap everywhere. He turned up his collar against the draft on the back of his neck. Bit by bit he edged his face into the corridor, looking across the bridge of his nose so his ear was not exposed.

Above thesketchboard, Hannibal 's nostrils opened wide and the work light reflected redly in his eyes.

Looking down the corridor and through the laboratory door, Milko could see Hannibal 's back as he worked around the corpse with his big hypodermic of dye. It was a bit far to shoot, as the silencer blocked the pistol's sights. Didn't want to wing him and have to chase him around, knocking things over. God knows what would splash on you, some of these nasty fluids.

Milko made the slight adjustment of the heart that we make before we kill.

Hannibal went out of sight and Milko could only see his hand on the drawing board, sketching, sketching, making a small erasure.

Abruptly, Hannibal put down his pen, came to the corridor and turned on the light. Milko ducked back into the museum, then the light went off again. Milko peered around the door frame. Hannibal was working over the draped body.

Milko heard the autopsy saw. When he looked again Hannibal was out of sight. Drawing again. Fuck this. Walk in there and shoot him. Tell him say hello to Dortlich when he gets to Hell. Down the corridor on long strides in his socks, silent on the stone floor, watching the hand on the drawing board, Milko raised the pistol and stepped through the door and saw the hand and sleeve, the lab coat piled on the chair-where is the rest of him-and Hannibal stepped close behind Milko and sank the hypodermic full of alcohol into the side ofMilko's neck, catching him as his legs gave way and his eyes rolled up, easing him to the floor.

First things first. Hannibal put the corpse's hand back in place and tacked it on with a few fast stitches in the skin. "Sorry," he said to his subject. "I'll include thanks in your note."

Burning, coughing, cold onMilko's face now as he came to consciousness, the room swimming and then settling down. He started to lick his lips, and spit. Water pouring over his face.

Hannibal set his pitcher of cold water on the edge of the cadaver tank and sat down in a conversational attitude. Milko wore the chain cadaver harness. He was submerged up to his neck in formalin solution in the tank. The other occupants crowded close around him, regarded him with eyes gone cloudy in embalming fluid, and he shrugged their shriveled hands away.

Hannibal examinedMilko's wallet. He took from his own pocket a dog tag and placed it besideMilko's ID card on the rim of the tank.

"ZigmasMilko. Good evening."

Milko coughed and wheezed. "We talked about it. I brought you money. A settlement. We want you to have the money. I brought it. Let me take you to it."

"That sounds like a superior plan. You killed so many, Milko. So many more than these. Do you feel them in the tank around you? There by your foot, that's a child from a fire. Older than my sister, and partly cooked."

"I don't know what you want."

Hannibal pulled on a rubber glove. "To hear what you have to say about eating my sister."

"I did not."

Hannibal pressed Milko under the surface of the embalming fluid. After a long moment, he seized the chain tether and pulled him up again, poured water in his face, flushing his eyes.

"Don't say that again," Hannibal said.

"We all felt badly, so badly," Milko said as soon as he could talk.

"Freezing hands and rotting feet. Whatever we did, we did it to live.

Grutas was quick, she never-we kept you alive, we-"

"Where is Grutas?"

"If I tell you, will you let me take you to the money? It's a lot, in dollars. There is a lot more money too, we could blackmail them with what I know, with your evidence."

"Where is Grentz?"

" Canada."

"Correct. The truth for once. Where is Grutas?"

"He has a house nearMilly-le-Foret."

"What is his name now?"

"He does business asSatrug, Inc."

"Did he sell my pictures?"

"Once, to buy a lot of morphine, no more. We can get them back."

"Have you tried the food at Kolnas' restaurant? The sundaes aren't bad."

"I have the money in the truck."

"Last words? A valedictory?"

Milko opened his mouth to speak and Hannibal put the heavy cover down with a clang. Less than an inch of air remained between the cover and the surface of the embalming fluid. He left the room, Milko bumping against the lid like a lobster in a pot. He closed the door behind him, rubber seals squealing against the paint.

Inspector Popil stood beside his worktable, looking at his sketch.

Hannibal reached for the cord and switched on the big vent fan and it started with a clatter.

Popil looked up at the sound of the fan. Hannibal did not know what else he had heard. Milko's gun was between the cadaver's feet, underneath the sheet.

"Inspector Popil." Hannibal picked up a syringe of dye and made an injection. "If you'll excuse me just a moment, I need to use this before it hardens again."

"You killed Dortlich in your family's woods."

Hannibal 's face did not change. He wiped the tip of the needle.

"His face was eaten," Popil said.

"I would suspect the ravens. Those woods are rife with them. They were at the dog's dish whenever he turned his back."

"Ravens who made a shish kabob."

"Did you mention that to Lady Murasaki?"

"No. Cannibalism-it happened on the Eastern Front, and more than once when you were a child." Popil turned his back on Hannibal, watching him in the glass front of a cabinet. "But you know that, don't you? You were there. And you were in Lithuania four days ago. You went in on a legitimate visa and you came out another way. How?" Popil did not wait for an answer. "I'll tell you how, you bought papers through a con atFresnes, and that is a felony."

In the tank room the heavy lid rose slightly andMilko's fingers appeared under the edge. He pursed his lips against the lid, sucking for the quarter-inch of air, a wavelet over his face choked him, he pressed his face to the crack at the edge of the lid and sucked in a choking breath.

In the anatomy lab, looking at Popil's back, Hannibal leaned some weight onto his subject's lung, producing a satisfactory gasp and gurgle.

"Sorry," he said. "They do that." He turned up the Bunsen burner underneath a retort to magnify the bubbling.

"That drawing is not the face of your subject. It is the face of Vladis Grutas. Like the ones in your room. Did you kill Grutas too?"

"Absolutely not."

"Have you found him?"

"If I found him, I give you my word I would bring him to your attention."

"Don't fool with me! Do you know that he sawed off the rabbi's head inKaunas? That he shot the Gypsy children in the woods? Do you know he walked away from Nuremberg when a witness got acid down her throat?

Every few years I pick up the stench of him and then he's gone. If he knows you are hunting him, he'll kill you. Did he murder your family?"

"He killed my sister and ate her."

"You saw it?"

"Yes."

"You would testify."

"Of course."

Popil looked at Hannibal for a long moment. "If you kill in France, Hannibal, I will see your head in a bucket. Lady Murasaki will be deported. Do you love Lady Murasaki?"

"Yes. Do you?"

"There are photographs of him in the Nuremberg archives. If the Soviets will circulate them, if they can find him, theSurete is holding someone we might trade for him. If we can get him, I will need your deposition.

Is there any other evidence?"

"Teeth marks on the bones."

"If you are not in my office tomorrow, I'll have you arrested."

"Good night, Inspector."

In the tank room, Milko's spadelike farmer's hand slips back into the tank, the lid closes down tight, and to a shriveled face before him he mouths his valediction: Fuck the farm.

Night in the anatomy laboratory, Hannibal working alone. He was nearly finished with his sketch, working beside the body. On the counter was a fat rubber glove filled with fluid and tied at the wrist. The glove was suspended over a beaker of powder. A timer ticked beside it.

Hannibal covered the sketch pad with a clear overlay. He draped the cadaver and rolled it into the lecture theater. From the anatomy museum he brought Milko's boots and put them besideMilko's clothing on a gurney near the incinerator, with the contents of his pockets, a jackknife, keys and a wallet. The wallet contained money and the rim of a condom Milko rolled on to deceive women in semi-darkness. Hannibal removed the money. He opened the incinerator. Milko's head stood in the flames. He looked like the Stuka pilot burning. Hannibal threw in his boots and one of them kicked the head over backward out of sight.

51

A WAR SURPLUS five-ton truck with new canvas was parked across the street from the anatomy lab, blocking half of the sidewalk. Surprisingly there was no ticket yet on the windshield. Hannibal tried Milko's keys on the driver's door. It opened. An envelope of papers was over the sun visor on the driver's side. He looked through them quickly.

A ramp in the bed of the truck let him load his motorcycle at the curb.

He drove the truck to Porte de Montempoivre near the Bois de Vincennes and put it in a truck park near the railroad. He locked the plates in the cab beneath the seat.

Hannibal Lecter sat on his motorcycle in a hillside orchard, breakfasting on some excellent African figs he had found in the Rue de Buci market, along with a bite of Westphalian ham. He could see the road below the hill and, a quarter mile further along, the entrance to Vladis Grutas' home.

Bees were loud in the orchard and several buzzed around his figs until he covered them with his handkerchief. GarciaLorca, now enjoying a revival in Paris, said the heart was an orchard. Hannibal was thinking about the figure and thinking, as young men do, about the shapes of peaches and pears, when a carpenter's truck passed below him and pulled up to Grutas' gate.

Hannibal raised his father's field glasses.

The house of Vladis Grutas is a Bauhaus mansion built in 1938 on farmland with a view of the Essonne River. It was neglected in the war and, lacking eaves, suffered dark water stains down its white walls. The whole façade and one of the sides had been repainted blinding white and scaffolding was going up on the walls yet unpainted. It had served the Germans as a staff headquarters during the occupation and the Germans had added protection.

The glass and concrete cube of the house was protected by high chain link and barbed wire around the perimeter. The entrance was guarded by a concrete gatehouse that looked like a pillbox. A slit window across the front of the gatehouse was softened by a window box of flowers. Through the window a machine gun could traverse the road, its barrel brushing the blossoms aside.

Two men came out of the gatehouse, one blond and the other dark-haired and covered with tattoos. They used a mirror on a long handle to search beneath the truck. The carpenters had to climb down and show their national identity cards. There was some waving of hands and shrugging.

The guards passed the truck inside.

Hannibal rode his motorcycle into a copse of trees and parked it in the brush. He grounded out the motorcycle's ignition with a bit of hidden wire behind the points and put a note on the saddle saying he had gone for parts. He walked a half-hour to the high road and hitchhiked back to Paris.

The loading dock of the Gabrielle Instrument Co. is on the Rue de Paradis between a seller of lighting fixtures and a crystal repair shop.

In the last task of their workday, the warehousemen loaded a Bosendorfer baby grand piano into Milko's truck, along with a piano stool crated separately. Hannibal signed the invoice Zigmas Milko, saying the name silently as he wrote.

The instrument company's own trucks were coming in at the end of the day. Hannibal watched as a woman driver got out of one of them. She was not bad looking in her coveralls, with a lot of French flounce. She went inside the building and came out minutes later in slacks and a blouse, carrying the coveralls folded under her arm. She put them in the saddlebag of a small motorbike. She felt Hannibal 's eyes on her, and turned her gamine face to him. She took out a cigarette and he lit it.

"Merci, Monsieur… Zippo." The woman was very street French, animated, with a lot of eye movement, and she exaggerated the gestures of smoking.

The busybodies sweeping the loading dock strained to hear what they were saying, but could only hear her laugh. She looked into Hannibal 's face as they talked and little by little the coquetry stopped. She seemed fascinated with him, almost mesmerized. They walked together down the street toward a bar.

Mueller had the gatehouse duty with a German named Gassmann, who had recently finished a tour in the Foreign Legion. Mueller was trying to sell him a tattoo when Milko's truck approached up the drive.

"Call the clap doctor, Milko's back from Paris," Mueller said.

Gassmann had the better eyes. "That's not Milko."

They went outside.

"Where is Milko?" Mueller asked the woman at the wheel.

"How would I know? He paid me to bring you this piano. He said he would be along in a couple of days. Get mymoto out of the back with your big muscles."

"Who paid you?"

"Monsieur Zippo."

"You mean Milko."

"Right, Milko."

A caterer's truck stopped behind the five-ton and waited, the caterer fuming, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

Gassmann raised the flap over the tailgate of the five-ton. He saw a piano in a crate and a smaller crate plastered with a sign: POUR LA CAVE and FOR THE WINE CELLAR-STORE IN A COOL PLACE. The motorbike was lashed to the side rails of the truck. A plank ramp was in the truck, but it was easier to lift the little motorbike down.

Mueller came to help Gassmann with the bike. He looked at the woman.

"Do you want a drink?"

"Not here," she said, swinging a leg over the bike.

"Your moto sounds like a fart," Mueller called after her as she rode away.

"You're winning her over with suave conversation," the other German said.

The piano tuner was a skeletal man with dark places between his teeth and a fixed rictus smile like that of Lawrence Welk. When he had finished tuning the black Bosendorfer, he changed into his ancient white tie and tailcoat and came out to play cocktail piano as Grutas' guests arrived. The piano sounded brittle against the tile floor and glass expanses of the house. The shelves of a glass-and-steel bookcase near the piano buzzed along with B-flat until he moved the books around and then it buzzed at B. He had used a kitchen chair when tuning, but he did not want to sit on it to play.

"Where am I to sit? Where is the piano bench?" he asked the maid, who asked Mueller. Mueller found him a chair of the correct height, but it had arms. "I'll have to play with my elbows spread," the tuner said.

"Shut the fuck up and play American," Mueller said. "Cocktail American he wants, with the singing along."

The cocktail buffet served thirty guests, curious flotsam of the war.

Ivanov from the Soviet embassy was there, too well tailored for a servant of the state. He was talking with an American first sergeant who kept the books at the U.S. Post Exchange in Neuilly. The sergeant was in mufti, a sack suit in windowpane check of a color that brought out the spider angioma on the side of his nose. The bishop down from Versailles was accompanied by the acolyte who did his nails.

Under the pitiless tube lighting, the bishop's black suit had a greenish roast-beef sheen, Grutas observed as he kissed the bishop's ring. They talked briefly about mutual acquaintances in Argentina. There was a strong strain of Vichy in the room.

The piano player favored the crowd with his skeletal smile and approximated some Cole Porter songs. English was his fourth language and he was forced sometimes to improvise.

"Night and day, you are the sun. Only youbeneese the moon, you are the one."

The basement was almost dark. A single bulb burned near the stairs.

Faintly the music sounded from the floor above.

One wall of the basement was covered with a wine rack. Near it were a number of crates, some of them opened with shavings spilling out. A new stainless-steel sink lay on the floor beside a Rock-OlaLuxury Light-Up jukebox with the latest platters and rolls of nickels to put in it.

Beside the wine wall was a crate labeled POUR LA cave and STORE IN A COOL PLACE. A faint creak came from the crate.

The pianist added some fortissimo to drown himself out at uncertain verses: "Whether me or you depart, no matter darling I'm apart, I think of you Night and Dayyyyy."

Grutas moved through his guests shaking hands. With a small motion of his head he summoned Ivanov into his library. It was stark modern, a trestle-table desk, steel and glass shelves and a sculpture after Picasso by Anthony Quinn entitled "Logic Is a Woman's Behind." Ivanov considered the carving.

"You like sculpture?" Grutas said.

"My father was a curator at St. Petersburg, when it was St. Petersburg."

"You can touch it if you like," Grutas said.

"Thank you. The appliances for Moscow?"

"Sixty refrigerators on the train in Helsinki at this moment.

Kelvinator. And what do you have for me?" Grutas could not help snapping his fingers.

Because of the snap, Ivanov made Grutas wait while he perused the stone buttocks. "There is no file on the boy at the embassy," he said at last.

"He got a visa for Lithuania by proposing to do an article for L'Humanite. It was supposed to be on how well the collectivization worked when the farmlands were seized from his family and how delighted the farmers are to move to the city and build a sewage plant. An aristocrat endorsing the revolution."

Grutas snorted through his nose.

Ivanov put a photograph on the desk and pushed it across to Grutas. It showed Lady Murasaki and Hannibal outside her apartment building.

"When was this taken?"

"Yesterday morning. Milko was with my man when he took it. The Lecter boy is a student, he works at night, sleeps over the medical school. My man showed Milko everything-I don't want to know anything else."

"When did he last see Milko?"

Ivanov looked up sharply. "Yesterday. Something's wrong?"

Grutas shrugged it off. "Probably not. Who is the woman?"

"His stepmother, or something like that. She's beautiful," Ivanov said, touching the stone buttocks.

"Has she got an ass like that one?"

"I don't think so."

"The French police came around?"

"An inspector named Popil."

Grutas pursed his lips and for a moment he seemed to forget Ivanov was in the room.

Mueller and assmann looked over the crowd. They were taking coats and watching that none of the guests stole anything. In the coatroom Mueller pulled Gassmann's bow tie away from his collar on its rubber band, turned it a half-turn, and let it pop back.

"Can you wind it up like a little propeller and fly like a fairy?"

Mueller said.

"Turn it again and you'll think it's the doorknob to Hell," Gassmann said. "Look at you. Tuck in your blouse. Were you never in the service?"

They had to help the caterer pack up. Carrying a folding banquet table down to the basement, they did not see concealed beneath the stairs a fat rubber glove suspended over a dish of powder, with a fuse leading into a three-kilo tin that once held lard. A chemical reaction slows as the temperature cools. Grutas' basement was five degrees cooler than the medical school.

52

THE MAID WAS laying out Grutas' silk pajamas on the bed when he called for more towels.

The maid did not like to take towels into Grutas' bathroom, but she was always summoned to do it. She had to go in there but she did not have to look. Grutas' bathroom was all white tile and stainless steel, with a big freestanding tub and a steam room with frosted glass doors and a shower off the steam room.

Grutas reclined in his tub. The woman captive he had brought from the boat was shaving his chest using a prison safety razor, the blade locked in with a key. The side of her face was swollen. The maid did not want to meet her eyes.

Like a sense-deprivation chamber, the shower was all white, and big enough for four. Its curious acoustics bounced every crumb of sound.

Hannibal could hear his hair crunch between his head and the tile as he lay on the white floor of the shower. Covered by a couple of white towels he was nearly invisible from the steam room through the frosted shower door. Under the towels he could hear his own breathing. It was like being rolled in the rug with Mischa. Instead of her warm hair near his face, he had the smell of the pistol, machine oil and brass cartridges and cordite.

He could hear Grutas' voice, and he had not yet seen his face except through field glasses. The tone of voice had not changed-the mirthless teasing that precedes the blow.

"Warm up my terry robe," Grutas told the maid. "I want some steam after.

Turn it on." She slid back the steam room door and opened the valve. In the all-white steam chamber the only color was the red bezels of the timer and the thermometer. They had the look of a ship's gauges, with numbers big enough to read in the steam. The timer's minute hand was already moving around the dial toward the red marker hand.

Grutas had his hands behind his head. Tattooed under his arm was the Nazi lightning SS insignia. He twitched his muscle and made the lightning jump. "Boom! Donnerwetter!" He laughed when the woman captive flinched away. "Noooo, I won't hit you more. I like you now. I'm going to fix your teeth with some teeth you can put in a glass beside the bed, out of the way."

Hannibal came through the glass doors in a cloud of steam, the gun up and pointed at Grutas' heart. In his other hand he had a bottle of reagent alcohol.

Grutas' skin squeaked as he pushed himself up in the tub and the woman shied from him before she knew Hannibal was behind her.

"I'm glad you're here," Grutas said. He looked at the bottle, hoping Hannibal was drunk. "I've always felt I owed you something."

"I discussed that with Milko."

"And?"

"He arrived at a solution."

"The money of course! I sent it with him, and he gave it to you? Good!"

Hannibal spoke to the woman without looking down at her. "Wet your towel in the tub. Go over to the corner and sit down, and put the towel over your face. Go on. Wet it in the tub."

The woman doused the towel and backed into the corner with it.

"Kill him," she said.

"I've waited so long to see your face," Hannibal said. "I put your face on every bully I ever hurt. I thought you would be bigger."

The maid came into the bedroom with the robe. Through the open bathroom door she could see the barrel and the silencer of the extended gun. She backed out of the room, her slippers silent on the carpet.

Grutas was looking at the gun too. It was Milko's gun. It had a breech lock on the receiver for use with the silencer. If little Lecter was not familiar with it, he would be limited to one shot. Then he'd have to fumble with the pistol.

"Did you see the things I have in this house, Hannibal? Opportunities from the war! You are accustomed to nice things, and you can have them.

We are alike! We are the New Men, Hannibal. You, me-the cream-we will always float to the top!" He raised suds in his hand to illustrate floating, getting little Lecter used to his movement.

"Dog tags don't float." Hannibal tossed Grutas' dog tag into the tub and it settled like a leaf to the bottom. "Alcohol floats." Hannibal threw the bottle and it smashed on the tile above Grutas, showering stinging fluid down on his head, pieces of glass falling in his hair. Hannibal took from his pocket a Zippo to light Grutas. As he flipped open the lighter, Mueller cocked a pistol behind his ear.

Gassmann and Dieter grabbed Hannibal 's arms from both sides. Mueller pushed the muzzle of Hannibal 's gun toward the ceiling and took it from his hand. Mueller stuck the gun in his waistband.

"No shooting," Grutas said. "Don't break the tile in here. I want to talk with him a little. Then he can die in a tub like his sister."

Grutas got out of the tub and stood on a towel. He gestured to the woman, now desperate to please. She sprayed him with seltzer over his shaved body as he turned in place, his arms extended.

"Do you know how that feels, the fizzy water?" Grutas said. "It feels like being born again. I'm all new, in a new world with no room in it for you. I can't believe you killed Milko by yourself."

"Someone lent me a hand," Hannibal said.

"Hold him over the tub and cut him when I tell you."

The three men wrestled Hannibal to the floor and held his head and neck over the bathtub. Mueller had a switch knife. He put the edge to Hannibal 's throat.

"Look at me, Count Lecter, my prince, twist your head and look at me, get your throat stretched tight and you'll bleed out fast. It won't hurt so long."

Through the steam room door, Hannibal could see the hand of the timer moving tick by tick.

"Answer this," Grutas said. "Would you have fed me to the little girl if she were starving? Because you loved her?"

"Of course."

Grutas smiled and tweaked Hannibal 's cheek. "There. There you have it.

Love. I love myself that much. I would never apologize to you. You lost your sister in the war." Grutas belched and laughed. "That burp is my commentary. Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis. Cut him, Mueller. This is the last thing you will ever hear, I'll tell you what YOU did to live. You-"

The explosion shuddered the bathroom and the sink jumped off the wall, water spurting from the pipes, and the lights went out. Wrestling in the dark on the floor, Mueller, Gassmann, Dieter swarming on him and tangled up with the woman. The knife got into Gassmann's arm, him cursing and shrieking. Hannibal caught someone hard in the face with his elbow and was on his feet, a muzzle flash as a gun went off in the tiled room and splinters stung his face. Smoke, heavy smoke, curled out of the wall. A gun was sliding across the tiles, Dieter after it. Grutas picked up the gun, the woman jumping on him with her nails at his face and he shot her twice in the chest. Climbed to his feet, the gun coming up. Hannibal snapped the wet towel across Grutas' eyes. Dieter on Hannibal 's back, Hannibal threw himself backward on top of him and felt the impact as the edge of the tub caught Dieter across the kidneys and Dieter let go.

Mueller on him now before he could get up, trying to jam his big thumbs under Hannibal 's chin. Hannibal butted Mueller in the face, slid his hand between them, finding a gun in Mueller's waistband, and pulled the trigger with the gun still in Mueller's pants, the big German rolling off him with a howl, and Hannibal ran with the gun. He had to slow in the dark bedroom, then fast into the corridor filling with smoke. He picked up the maid's pail in the corridor and carried it with him through the house, once hearing a gun go off behind him.

The gate guard was out of the blockhouse and halfway to the front door.

"Get water!" Hannibal yelled to him. He handed the man the bucket as he rushed past. "I'll get the hose!" Running hard down the driveway, cutting into the trees as soon as he could. He heard shouts behind him.

Up the hill to the orchard. Quick the ignition, feeling for the wire in the dark.

Compression release, twist a little gas, kick, kick. Kick, kick. Touch of choke. Kick. The BMW awakened with a growl and Hannibal exploded out of the brush, down anallée between the trees, knocking loose a muffler on a stump and then on the road, roaring off into the dark, the hanging pipe against the pavement leaving a trail of sparks.

The firemen stayed late into the night, hosing embers in the basement of Grutas' house, shooting water into the spaces in the walls. Grutas stood at the edge of his garden, smoke and steam rising into the night sky behind him, and stared in the direction of Paris.

53

THE NURSING STUDENT had dark red hair and maroon eyes about the same color as Hannibal 's. When he stood back from the fountain in the medical school corridor so that she could drink first, she put her face close to him and sniffed. "When did you start smoking?"

"I'm trying to quit," he said.

"Your eyebrows are singed!"

"Careless lighting up."

"If you're careless with fire you shouldn't be cooking." She licked her thumb and smoothed his eyebrow. "My roommate and I are making adaube this evening, there's plenty if…"

"Thank you. Really. But I have an engagement."

His note to Lady Murasaki asked if he might visit. He found a branch of wisteria to go with it, suitably withered in abject apology. Her note of invitation was accompanied by two sprigs, watermelon crepe myrtle and a sprig of pine with a tiny cone. Pine is not sent lightly. Thrilling and boundless, the possibilities of pine.

Lady Murasaki's poissonnier did not fail her. He had for her four perfect sea urchins in cold seawater from their native Brittany. Next door the butcher produced sweetbreads, already soaked in milk and pressed between two plates. She stopped by Fauchon for a pear tart and last she bought a string bag of oranges.

She paused before the florist, her arms full. No, Hannibal would certainly bring flowers.

Hannibal brought flowers. Tulips and Casablanca lilies and ferns in a tall arrangement sticking up from the pillion seat of his motorcycle.

Two young women crossing the street told him the flowers looked like a rooster's tail. He winked at them when the light changed and roared away with a light feeling in his chest.

He parked in the alley beside Lady Murasaki's building and walked around the corner to the entrance with his flowers. He was waving to the concierge when Popil and two beefy policemen stepped out of a doorway and seized him. Popil took the flowers.

"Those aren't for you," Hannibal said.

"You're under arrest," Popil said. When Hannibal was handcuffed, Popil stuck the flowers under his arm.

In his office at the Quai des Orfevres, Inspector Popil left Hannibal alone and let him wait for a half-hour in the atmosphere of the police station. He returned to his office to find the young man placing the last stem in a flower arrangement in a water carafe on Popil's desk.

"How do you like that?" Hannibal said.

Inspector Popil slugged him with a small rubber sap and he went down.

"How do you like that?" Popil said.

The larger of the two policemen crowded in behind Popil and stood over Hannibal. "Answer every question: I asked you how do you like that?"

"It's more honest than your handshake. And at least the club is clean."

Popil took from an envelope two dog tags on a loop of string. "Found in your room. These two were charged in absentia at Nuremberg. Question:

Where are they?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you want to watch them hang? The hangman uses the English drop, but not enough to tear their heads off. He does not boil and stretch his rope. They yo-yo a lot. That should be to your taste."

"Inspector, you will never know anything about my taste."

"Justice doesn't matter, it just has to be you killing them."

"It has to be you too, doesn't it, Inspector? You always watch them die.

It's to your taste. Do you think we could talk alone?" He took from his pocket a bloodstained note wrapped in cellophane. "You have mail from Louis Ferrat."

Popil motioned for the policemen to leave the room.

"When I cut the clothes off Louis' body, I found this note to you." He read aloud the part above the fold. "Inspector Popil, why do you torment me with questions you will not answer yourself? I saw you in Lyons. And he goes on." Hannibal passed the note to Popil. "If you want to open it, it's dry now. It doesn't smell."

The note crackled when Popil opened it, and dark flakes fell out of the fold. When he had finished he sat holding the note beside his temple.

"Did some of your family wave bye-bye to you from thechoo-choo?"

Hannibal said. "Were you directing traffic at the depot that day?"

Popil drew back his hand.

"You don't want to do that," Hannibal said softly. "If I knew anything, why should I tell you? It's a reasonable question, Inspector. Maybe you'll get them passage to Argentina."

Popil closed his eyes and opened them again. "Pétain was always my hero.

My father, my uncles fought under him in the First War. When he made the new government, he told us, 'Just keep the peace until we throw the Germans off. Vichy will save France.' We were already policemen, it seemed like the same duty."

"Did you help the Germans?"

Popil shrugged. "I kept the peace. Perhaps that helped them. Then I saw one of their trains. I deserted and found the Resistance. They wouldn't trust me until I killed a Gestapo. The Germans shot eight villagers in reprisal. I felt like I had killed them myself. What kind of war is that? We fought in Normandy, in the hedges, clicking these to identify each other." He picked up a cricket clicker from his desk. "We helped the Allies coming in from the beachheads." He clicked twice. "This meant I'm a friend, don't shoot. I don't care about Dortlich. Help me find them. How are you hunting Grutas?"

"Through relatives in Lithuania, my mother's connections in the church."

"I could hold you for the false papers, just on the con's testimony. If I let you go, will you swear to tell me everything you find out? Will you swear to God?"

"To God? Yes, I swear to God. Do you have a Bible?" Popil had a copy of thePensées in his bookcase. Hannibal took it out. "Or we could use your Pascal, Pascal."

"Would you swear on Lady Murasaki's life?"

A moment's hesitation. "Yes, on Lady Murasaki's life." Hannibal picked up the clicker and clicked it twice.

Popil held out the dog tags and Hannibal took them back.

When Hannibal had left the office, Popil's assistant came in. Popil signaled from the window. When Hannibal emerged from the building a plainclothes policeman followed him.

"He knows something. His eyebrows are singed. Check fires in the Ile de France for the last three days," Popil said. "When he leads us to Grutas, I want to try him for the butcher when he was a child."

"Why the butcher?"

"It's a juvenile crime, Etienne, a crime of passion. I don't want a conviction, I want him declared insane. In an asylum they can study him and try to find out what he is."

"What do you think he is?"

"The little boy Hannibal died in 1945 out there in the snow trying to save his sister. His heart died with Mischa. What is he now? There's not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we'll call him a monster."

54

AT LADY MURASAKI'S building in the Place de Vosges, the concierge's booth was dark, the Dutch door with its frosted window closed. Hannibal let himself into the building with his key and ran up the stairs.

Inside her booth, seated in her chair the concierge had the mail spread before her on her desk, stacked tenant by tenant as though she were playing solitaire. The cable of a bicycle lock was buried nearly out of sight in the soft flesh of her neck and her tongue was hanging out.

Hannibal knocked on Lady Murasaki's door. He could hear the telephone ringing inside. It sounded oddly shrill to him. The door swung open when he pushed his key into the lock. He ran through the apartment, looking, looking, flinching when he pushed open her bedroom door, but the room was empty. The telephone was ringing, ringing. He picked up the receiver.

In the kitchen of the Café de L'Este, a cage ofortolans waited to be drowned in Armagnac and scalded in the big pot of boiling water on the stove. Grutas gripped Lady Murasaki's neck and held her face close to the boiling pot. With his other hand he held the telephone receiver. Her hands were tied behind her. Mueller gripped her arms from behind.

When he heard Hannibal 's voice on the line, Grutas spoke into the phone.

"To continue our conversation, do you want to see the Jap alive?" Grutas asked.

"Yes."

"Listen to her and guess if she still has her cheeks."

What was that sound behind Grutas' voice? Boiling water? Hannibal did not know if the sound was real; he heard boiling water in his dreams.

"Speak to your little fuckboy."

Lady Murasaki said, "My dear, DON'T-" before she was snatched away from the telephone. She struggled in Mueller's grip and they banged into the cage ofortolans. The birds screeched and twittered among themselves.

Grutas spoke to Hannibal. "'My DEAR,' you have killed two men for your sister and you have blown up my house. I offer you a life for a life.

Bring everything, the dog tags, Pot Watcher's little inventory, every fucking thing. I feel like making her squeal."

"Where-"

"Shut up. Kilometer thirty-six on the road to Trilbardou, there is a telephone kiosk. Be there at sunrise and you'll get a call. If you are not there you get her cheeks in the mail. If I see Popil, or any policeman, you get her heart parcel post. Maybe you can use it in your studies, poke through the chambers, see if you can find your face. A life for a life?"

"A life for a life," Hannibal said. The line went dead.

Dieter and Mueller brought Lady Murasaki to a van outside the cafe.

Kolnas changed the license plate on Grutas' car.

Grutas opened the trunk and got out a Dragunov sniper rifle. He gave it to Dieter. "Kolnas, bring a jar." Grutas wanted Lady Murasaki to hear.

He watched her face with a kind of hunger as he gave instructions.

"Take the car. Kill him at the telephone," Grutas told Dieter. He handed him the jar. "Bring his balls to the boat below Nemours."

Hannibal did not want to look out the window; Popil's plainclothesman would be looking up. He went into the bedroom. He sat on the bed for a moment with his eyes closed. The background sounds rang on in Hannibal 's head. Chirpchirp. The Baltic dialect of theortolan.

Lady Murasaki's sheets were lavender-scented linen. He gripped them in his fists, held them to his face, then stripped them off the bed and soaked them quickly in the tub. He stretched a clothesline across the living room and hung a kimono from it, set an oscillating fan on the floor and turned it on, the fan turning slowly, moving the kimono and its shadow on the sheer curtains.

Standing before the samurai armor, he held up the tanto dagger and stared into the mask of Lord Date Masamune.

"If you can help her, help her now."

He put the lanyard around his neck and slipped the dagger down the back of his collar.

Hannibal twisted and knotted the wet sheets like a jail suicide, and when he had finished the sheets hung from a terrace railing to within fifteen feet of the alley pavement.

He took his time going down. When he let go of the sheet the last drop through the air seemed to take a long time, the bottoms of his feet stinging as he hit and rolled.

He pushed the motorcycle down the alley behind the building and out into the back street, dropped the clutch and swung aboard as the engine fired. He needed enough of a lead to retrieve Milko's gun.

55

IN THE AVIARY OUTSIDE the Café de L'Este theortolans stirred and murmured, restive under the bright moon. The patio awning was rolled up and the umbrellas folded. The dining room was darkened, but the lights were still on in the kitchen and the bar.

Hannibal could see Hercule mopping the bar floor. Kolnas sat on a barstool with a ledger. Hannibal stepped further back into the darkness, started his motorcycle and rode away without turning on his lights.

He walked the last quarter-mile to the house on the Rue Juliana. A Citroen Deux Cheveaux was parked in the driveway; a man in the driver's seat took the last drag off a cigarette. Hannibal watched the butt arc away from the car and splash sparks in the street. The man settled himself in the seat and laid back his head. He may have gone to sleep.

From a hedge outside the kitchen, Hannibal could look into the house.

Madame Kolnas passed a window talking to someone who was too short to see. The screened windows were open to the warm night. The screen door to the kitchen opened onto the garden. The tanto dagger slid easily through the mesh and disengaged the hook. Hannibal wiped his shoes on the mat and stepped into the house. The kitchen clock seemed loud. He could hear running water and splashing from the bathroom. He passed the bathroom door, staying close to the wall to keep the floor from squeaking. He could hear Madame Kolnas in the bathroom talking to a child.

The next door was partly open. Hannibal could see shelves of toys and a big plush elephant. He looked into the room. Twin beds. Katerina Kolnas was asleep on the nearer one. Her head was turned to the side, her thumb touching her forehead. Hannibal could see the pulse in her temple. He could hear his heart. She was wearing Mischa's bracelet. He blinked in the warm lamplight. He could hear himself blink. He could hear the child's breathing. He could hear Madame Kolnas' voice from down the hall. Small sounds audible over the great roaring in him.

"Come, Muffin, time to dry off," Madame Kolnas said.

Grutas' houseboat, black and prophetic-looking, was moored to the quay in a layered fog. Grutas and Mueller carried Lady Murasaki bound and gagged up the gangway and down the companionway at the rear of the cabin. Grutas kicked open the door of his treatment room on the lower deck. A chair was in the middle of the floor with a bloody sheet spread beneath it.

"Sorry your room isn't quite ready," Grutas said. "I'll contact room service. Eva!!" He went down the passageway to the next cabin and shoved open the door. Three women chained to their bunks looked at him with hate in their faces. Eva was collecting their mess gear.

"Get in here."

Eva came into the treatment room, staying out of Grutas' reach. She took up the bloody sheet and spread a clean sheet beneath the chair. She started to take the bloodstained sheet away, but Grutas said, "Leave it. Bundle it there where she can see it."

Grutas and Mueller bound Lady Murasaki to the chair.

Grutas dismissed Mueller. He lounged on a chaise against the wall, his legs spread, rubbing his thighs. "Do you have any idea what will happen if you don't find me some bliss?" Grutas said.

Lady Murasaki closed her eyes. She felt the boat tremble and begin to move.

Hercule made two trips out of the café with the garbage cans. He unlocked his bicycle and rode away.

His taillight was still visible when Hannibal slipped into the kitchen door. He carried a bulky object in a bloodstained bag.

Kolnas came into the kitchen carrying his ledger. He opened the firebox of the wood-burning oven, put in some receipts and poked them back into the fire.

Behind him, Hannibal said, "Herr Kolnas, surrounded by bowls."

Kolnas spun around to see Hannibal leaning against the wall, a glass of wine in one hand and a pistol in the other.

"What do you want? We are closed here."

"Kolnas in bowl heaven. Surrounded by bowls. Are you wearing your dog tag, Herr Kolnas?"

"I am Kleber, citizen of France, and I am calling the police."

"Let me call them for you." Hannibal put down his glass and picked up the telephone. "Do you mind if I call the War Crimes Commission at the same time? I'll pay for the call."

"Fuck you. Call who you please. You can call them, I'm serious. Or I'll do it. I have papers, I have friends."

"I have children. Yours."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I have both of them. I went to your home on the Rue Juliana. I went into the room with the big stuffed elephant and I took them."

"You are lying."

"Take her, she's going to die anyway, that's what you said. Remember?

Tagging along behind Grutas with your bowl.

"I brought something for your oven." Hannibal reached behind him and threw onto the table his bloody bag. "We can cook together, like old times." He dropped Mischa's bracelet onto the kitchen table. It rolled around and around before it settled to a stop.

Kolnas made a gagging sound. For a moment he could not touch the bag with his trembling hands and then he tore at it, tore at the bloody butcher paper inside, tore down to meat and bones.

"It's a beef roast, Herr Kolnas, and a melon. I got them at Les Halles. But do you see how it feels?"

Kolnas lunged across the table, bloody hands finding Hannibal 's face, but he was off his feet stretched over the table and Hannibal pulled him down, and he brought the pistol down on the base of Kolnas' skull, not too hard, and Kolnas' lights went out.

Hannibal 's face, smeared with blood, looked like the demonic faces in his own dreams. He poured water in Kolnas' face until his eyes opened.

"Where is Katerina, what have you done with her?" Kolnas said.

"She is safe, Herr Kolnas. She is pink and perfect. You can see the pulse in her temple. I will give her back to you when you give me Lady Murasaki."

"If I do that I am a dead man."

"No. Grutas will be arrested and I will not remember your face. You get a pass for the sake of your children."

"How do I know they are alive?"

"I swear on my sister's soul you will hear their voices. Safe. Help me or I will kill you and leave the child to starve. Where is Grutas? Where is Lady Murasaki?"

Kolnas swallowed, choked on some blood in his mouth. "Grutas has a houseboat, a canal boat, he moves around. He's in the Canal de Loing south of Nemours."

"The name of the boat?"

"Christabel. You gave your word, where are my children?"

Hannibal let Kolnas up. He picked up the telephone beside the cash register, dialed a number and handed Kolnas the receiver.

For a moment Kolnas could not recognize his wife's voice, and then "Hello! Hello! Astrid?? Check on the children, let me speak to Katerina!

Just do it!"

As Kolnas listened to the puzzled sleepy voice of the awakened child, his face changed. First relief and then curious blankness as his hand crept toward the gun on the shelf beneath the cash register. His shoulders slumped. "You tricked me, Herr Lecter."

"I kept my word. I will spare your life for the sake of your-"

Kolnas spun with the big Webley in his fist, Hannibal 's hand slashing toward it, the gun going off beside them, and Hannibal drove the tanto dagger underneath Kolnas' chin and the point came out the top of his head.

The telephone receiver swung from its wire. Kolnas fell forward on his face. Hannibal rolled him over and sat for a moment in a kitchen chair looking at him. Kolnas' eyes were open, already glazing. Hannibal put a bowl over his face.

He carried the cage ofortolans outside and opened it. He had to grab the last one and toss it into the moon bright sky. He opened the outdoor aviary and shooed the birds out. They formed up in a flock and circled once, tiny shadows flicking across the patio, climbing to test the wind and pick up the polestar. "Go," Hannibal said. "The Baltic is that way.

Stay all season."

56

THROUGH THE VAST NIGHT a single point of light shot across the dark fields ofIle de France, the motorcycle flat out, Hannibal down on the gas tank. Off the concrete south of Nemours and following an old towpath along the Canal de Loing, asphalt and gravel, now a single lane of asphalt overgrown on both sides, Hannibal once zigging at speed through cows on the road and feeling a tail-brush sting him as he passed, swerving off the pavement, gravel rattling under the fenders, and back on again, the motorcycle shaking its head and catching itself, settling into speed again.

The lights of Nemours dimming behind him, flat country now, and only the darkness ahead, the details of the gravel and the weeds absurdly sharp, insistent in his headlight, and the dark ahead swallowed up the yellow beam. He wondered if he joined the canal too far south-was the boat behind him?

He stopped and turned off his lights, to sit in darkness and decide, the motorcycle shivering under him.

Far ahead, far into the dark, it appeared that two little houses moved in tandem across the meadow, deckhouses just visible above the banks of the Canal de Loing.

Vladis Grutas' houseboat was wonderfully quiet as it motored southward sending a soft ripple against the sides of the canal, cows asleep in the fields on both sides. Mueller, nursing stitches in his thigh, sat in a canvas chair on the fore-deck, a shotgun propped against the railing of the companionway beside him. At the stern, Gassmann opened a locker and took out some canvas fenders.

Three hundred meters back, Hannibal slowed, the BMW burbling along, weeds brushing his shins. He stopped and took his father's field glasses from the saddlebag. He could not read the name of the boat in the darkness.

Only the boat's running lights showed and the glow from behind the window curtains. Here the canal was too wide to be sure of making a jump onto the deck.

From the bank he might be able to hit the captain in the wheelhouse with the pistol-he could surely drive him from the helm-but then the boat would be alerted, he would have to face them all at once as he came aboard. They could be coming from both ends at once. He could see a covered companionway at the stern and a dark lump near the bow that was probably another entrance to the lower deck.

The binnacle light glowed in the wheelhouse windows near the stern, but he could not make out anyone inside. He needed to get ahead of them. The towpath was close beside the water and the fields too rough for a detour.

Hannibal rode past the canal boat on the towpath, feeling his side toward the boat tingling. A glance at the boat. Gassmann on the stern was pulling canvas fenders out of a locker. He looked up as the motorcycle passed. Moths fluttered above a cabin skylight.

Hannibal held himself to a moderate pace. A kilometer ahead he saw the lights of a car crossing the canal.

The Loing narrowed to a lock not more than twice the beam of a canal boat. The lock was integral with a stone bridge, its upstream doors set into the stone arch, the lock's enclosure like a box beyond the bridge, not much longer than the Christabel.

Hannibal turned left along the bridge road in case the boat captain was watching him and drove a hundred yards. He turned off his lights, turned around and returned near the bridge, putting the motorcycle in brush beside the road. He walked forward in the dark.

A few rowboats were upside down on the canal bank. Hannibal sat on the ground among them and peered over the hulls at the boat coming on, still a half-kilometer away. It was very dark. He could hear a radio in a small house at the far end of the bridge, probably the house of the lockkeeper. He buttoned the pistol into the pocket of his jacket.

The tiny running lights of the canal boat came very slowly, the red portside light toward him and behind it the high white light on a folding mast above the cabin. The boat would have to stop and lower itself a meter in the lock. He lay beside the canal, weeds all around him. It was too early in the year for the crickets to sing.

Waiting as the canal boat came, slowly slowly. Time to think. Part of what he did at Kolnas' cafe was unpleasant to remember: It was difficult to spare Kolnas' life even for that short time, and distasteful to allow him to speak. Good, the crunch he felt in his hand when the tanto blade broke out the top of Kolnas' skull like a little horn. More satisfying than Milko. Good things to enjoy: the Pythagorean proof with tiles, tearing off Dortlich's head. Much to look forward to: He would invite Lady Murasaki for the jugged hare at Restaurant Champs de Mars. Hannibal was calm. His pulse was 72.

Dark beside the lock, and the sky clear and frosted with stars. The mast light of the canal boat should just be among the low stars when the boat reached the lock.

It had not quite reached the low stars when the mast folded back, the light like a falling star descending in an arc. Hannibal saw the filament glow in the boat's big searchlight and flung himself down as the light gathered its beam and swept over him to the gates of the lock and the horn of the canal boat sounded. A light came on in the lockkeeper's cabin and in less than a minute the man was outside pulling on his galluses. Hannibal screwed the silencer onto Milko's gun.

Vladis Grutas came up the front companionway and stood on the deck. He stretched and threw a cigarette into the water. He said something to Mueller and put the shotgun on the deck among the planters, out of sight of the lock-keeper, and went below again.

Gassmann at the stern put out fenders and readied his line. The upstream lock doors stood open. The lockkeeper went into his booth beside the canal and turned on bollard lights at each end of the lock. The canal boat slid under the bridge into the lock, the captain reversing his engine to stop. At the sound of the motor, Hannibal sprinted onto the bridge in a low crouch, keeping below the stone railing.

He looked down into the boat as it slid beneath him, down on the deck and through the skylights. Skylight sliding under, a glimpse of Lady Murasaki bound to a chair, visible only for an instant from directly above.

It took about ten minutes to equalize the level of the water with the downstream side, the heavy doors rumbling open, Gassmann and Mueller gathering in the lines. The lockkeeper turned back toward his house. The captain advanced the throttle and the water boiled behind the canal boat.

Hannibal leaned over the railing. At a range of two feet he shot Gassmann in the top of the head, up on the railing now and jumping, landing on Gassmann and rolling to the deck. The captain felt the thud of Gassmann falling, and looked first to the stern lines, saw they were clear.

Hannibal tried the stern companionway door. Locked.

The captain leaned out of the wheelhouse. "Gassmann?"

Hannibal crouched beside the body on the stern, patted the waist.

Gassmann was not armed. Hannibal would have to pass the wheelhouse to go forward, and Mueller was on the bow. He went forward on the right side.

The captain came out of the wheelhouse on the left and sawGassmann sprawled there, his head leaking into the scuppers.

Hannibal scuttling forward fast, bent over beside the low deck cabins.

He felt the boat go into neutral, and running now he heard a gun go off behind him, the bullet screaming off a stanchion and fragments stinging his shoulder. He turned and saw the captain duck behind the aft cabin.

Near the forward companionway a tattooed hand and arm were visible for a second, grabbing the shotgun from beneath the bushes. Hannibal fired to no effect. His upper arm felt hot and wet. He ducked between the two deck cabins and out onto the portside deck, running forward low, up beside the forward cabin to the foredeck, Mueller crouched on the foredeck, standing when he heard Hannibal, swinging the shotgun, the muzzle hitting the corner of the companionway for a half-instant, swinging again, and Hannibal shot him four times in the chest as fast as he could pull the trigger, the shotgun going off blowing a ragged hole in the woodwork beside the companionway door. Mueller staggered and looked at his chest, collapsed backward and sat dead against the railing. The companionway door was unlocked. Hannibal went down the stairs and locked the door behind him.

At the stern, the captain, crouched on the afterdeck beside Gassmann's body, fumbled in his pocket for the keys.

Fast down the stairs and along the narrow passage of the lower deck. He looked into the first cabin, empty, nothing but cots and chains. He slammed open the second door, saw Lady Murasaki tied to the chair and rushed to her. Grutas shot Hannibal in the back from behind the door, the bullet striking between his shoulder blades and he went down on his back, blood spreading from under him.

Grutas smiled and came to him. He put his pistol under Hannibal 's chin and patted him down. He kicked Hannibal 's gun away. Grutas took a stiletto from his belt and poked the tip into Hannibal 's legs. They did not move.

"Shot in the spine, my little Mannlein," Grutas said. "Can't feel your legs? Too bad. You won't feel it when I cut off your balls." Grutas smiled at Lady Murasaki. "I'll make you a coin purse to keep your tips."

Hannibal 's eyes opened.

"You can see?" Grutas wagged the long blade before Hannibal 's face.

"Excellent!. Look at this." Grutas stood before Lady Murasaki and trailed the point lightly down her cheek, barely dimpling the skin. "I can put some color in her cheeks." He drove the stiletto into the back of the chair beside her head. "I can make some new places for sex."

Lady Murasaki said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on Hannibal. His fingers twitched, his hand moved slightly toward his head. His eyes moved from Lady Murasaki to Grutas and back again. Lady Murasaki looked up at Grutas, excitement in her face along with anguish. She could be as beautiful as she chose to be. Grutas bent and kissed her hard, cutting her lips against her teeth, his face crushed over hers, his hard empty face paling, his pale eyes unblinking as he groped inside her blouse.

Hannibal got his hand behind his head, pulled from behind his collar the tanto knife, bloody, bent and dimpled by Grutas' bullet.

Grutas blinked, his face convulsed in agony, his ankles buckled and he fell hamstrung, Hannibal twisting from under him. Lady Murasaki, her ankles bound together, kicked Grutas in the head. He tried to raise his gun, but Hannibal seized the barrel, twisting up, the gun went off and Hannibal slashed Grutas' wrist, the gun falling away and sliding on the floor. Grutas crawled toward the gun, pulling himself on his elbows, then up on his knees, knee-walking, and falling again, pulling himself on his elbows like a broken-backed animal in the road. Hannibal cut Lady Murasaki's arms free and she jerked the stiletto out of the back of the chair to cut free her ankles and moved into the corner beside the door.

Hannibal, his back bloody, cut Grutas off from the gun.

Grutas stopped and on his knees he faced Hannibal. An eerie calm came over him. He looked up at Hannibal with his pale Arctic eyes.

"Together we sail deathward," Grutas said. "Me, you, the stepmother that you fuck, the men you have killed."

"They were not men."

"What did Dortlich taste like, a fish? Did you eat Milko too?"

Lady Murasaki spoke from the corner. " Hannibal, if Popil takes Grutas he may not take you. Hannibal, be with me. Give him to Popil."

"He ate my sister."

"So did you," Grutas said. "Why don't you kill yourself?"

"No. That's a lie."

"Oh, you did. Kindly Pot Watcher fed her to you in the broth. You have to kill everyone who knows it, don't you? Now that your woman knows it, you really should kill her too."

Hannibal 's hands are over his ears, holding the bloody knife. He turns to Lady Murasaki, searching her face, goes to her and holds her against him.

"No, Hannibal. It's a lie," she said. "Give him to Popil."

Grutas scuttled toward the gun, talking, talking. "You ate her, half-conscious, your lips were greedy around the spoon."

Hannibal screamed at the ceiling, "NOOOOO!" and ran to Grutas raising the knife, stepped on the gun and slashed an "M" the length of Grutas' face screaming "'M' for Mischa! 'M' for Mischa! 'M' for Mischa," Grutas backward on the floor and Hannibal cutting great "M"sin him.

A cry from behind him. Dimly in the red mist a gunshot. Hannibal felt the muzzle blast above him. He did not know if he was hit. He turned.

The captain stood behind him, his back to Lady Murasaki, the handle of the stiletto standing behind his clavicle, the blade through his aorta; the gun slipped from the captain's fingers and he pitched forward on his face.

Hannibal weaving on his feet, his face a mask of red. Lady Murasaki closed her eyes. She was shaking.

"Are you hit?" he said.

"No."

"I love you, Lady Murasaki," he said. He went to her.

She opened her eyes and held his bloody hands away.

"What is left in you to love?" she said and ran from the cabin, up the companionway and over the rail in a clean dive into the canal.

The boat bumped gently along the edge of the canal.

On the Christabel, Hannibal was alone with the dead, their regard fast glazing. Mueller and Gassmann are below decks now, at the foot of the companionways. Grutas, herringboned with red, lies in the cabin where he died. Each of them holds in his arms a Panzerfaust like a big-headed doll. Hannibal took from the arms rack the final Panzerfaust and lashed it down in the engine room, its fat anti-tank missile two feet from the fuel tank. From the boat's ground tackle he took a grapnel and tied the line around the top-mounted trigger of the Panzerfaust. He stood on deck with the grapnel hook in his hand as the boat inched along, bumping gently against the stone border of the canal. From the deck he could see flashlights on the bridge. He heard yelling and a dog was barking.

He dropped the hook into the water. The line snaked slowly over the side as Hannibal stepped onto the bank and set off across the fields. He did not look back. At four hundred meters the explosion came. He felt the shock wave on his back and the pressure rolled over him with the noise.

A piece of metal landed in the field behind him. The boat blazed fiercely in the canal and a column of sparks rose into the sky, whipped into spirals by the fire's draft. More explosions blew the burning timbers wheeling into the sky as the charges in the other Panzerfausts went off.

From a mile distant he saw the flashing lights of police cars at the lock. He did not go back. He walked across the fields and they found him at daylight.

57

THE EAST WINDOWS at Paris police headquarters during the warm months were crowded at breakfast time with young policemen hoping to see Simone Signoret take coffee on her terrace in the nearby Place Dauphin.

Inspector Popil worked at his desk, not looking up even when the actress's terrace doors were reported to be opening, and remained undisturbed at the groaning when only the housekeeper came out to water the plants.

His window was open and he could hear faintly the Communist demonstration on the Quai des Orfèvres and the Pont Neuf. The demonstrators were mostly students, chanting "Free Hannibal, Free Hannibal." They carried placards reading DEATH TO FASCISM and demanding the immediate release of Hannibal Lecter, who had become a minor cause célèbre. Letters in L'Humanité and Le Canard Enchaîné defended him and Le Canard ran a photo of the burning wreckage of the Christabel with the caption "Cannibals Cooked."

A moving childhood reminiscence of the benefits of collectivization ran in L'Humanité as well, in a piece under Hannibal 's own byline, smuggled out of the jail, further bolstering his Communist supporters.

He would have written as readily for the extreme right fringe publications, but the rightists were out of fashion and could not demonstrate on his behalf.

Before Popil was a memorandum from the public prosecutor asking what could positively be proved against Hannibal Lecter. In the spirit of retribution, I'épuration sauvage, remaining from the war, a conviction for the murder of fascists and war criminals would have to be airtight and, even justified, it would be politically unpopular.

The murder of the butcher Paul Momund was years ago, and the evidence consisted of the smell of oil of cloves, the prosecutor pointed out.

Would it help to detain the woman Murasaki? Might she have colluded? the prosecutor asked. Inspector Popil advised against the detention of the woman Murasaki.

The exact circumstances surrounding the death of the restaurateur Kolnas, or Cryto -Fascist Restaurateur and Black-Marketeer Kolnas, as he was known in the papers, could not be determined. Yes, there was a hole of unknown origin in the top of his skull and his tongue and hard palate were pierced by persons unknown. He had fired a revolver, as a paraffin test proved.

The dead men in the canal boat were reduced to grease and soot. They were known to be kidnappers and white slavers. Was not a van recovered containing two captive women, by dint of a license number provided by the woman Murasaki?

The young man had no criminal record. He led his class at medical school.

Inspector Popil looked at his watch and went down the corridor to Audition 3, the best of the interrogation rooms because it received some sunlight and the graffiti had been painted over with thick white paint. A guard stood outside the door. Popil nodded to the guard and he pulled the bolt to admit him. Hannibal sat at the bare table in the center of the room. His ankle was shackled to the table leg and his wrists to a ring in the table.

"Take off the iron," Popil told the guard.

"Good morning, Inspector," Hannibal said.

"She's here," Popil said. "Dr. Dumas and Dr. Rufin are coming back after lunch." Popil left him alone.

Now Hannibal could stand when Lady Murasaki came into the room.

The door closed behind her and she reached behind her and put her hand flat on the door.

"Are you sleeping?" she said.

"Yes. I sleep well."

"Chiyoh sends her good wishes. She says she is very happy."

"I'm glad."

"Her young man has graduated and they are betrothed."

"I couldn't be more pleased for her."

A pause.

"Together they are manufacturing motor scooters, small motorcycles, in partnership with two brothers. They have made six of them. She hopes they will catch on."

"Surely they will-I'll buy one myself."

Women pick up surveillance faster than men do, as part of their survival skills, and they at once recognize desire. They also recognize its absence. She felt the change in him. Something was missing behind his eyes.

The words of her ancestor Murasaki Shikibu came to her and she said them:

"The troubled waters

Are frozen fast.

Under clear heaven

Moonlight and shadow

Ebb and flow."

Hannibal made Prince Genji's classic reply:

"The memories of long love

Gather like drifting snow.

Poignant as the mandarin ducks

Who float side by side in sleep."

"No," Lady Murasaki said. "No. Now there is only ice. It's gone. Is it not gone?"

"You are my favorite person in the world," he said, quite truthfully.

She inclined her head to him and left the room.

In Popil's office she found Dr. Rufin and Dr. Dumas in close conversation. Rufin took Lady Murasaki's hands.

"You told me he might freeze inside forever," she said.

"Do you feel it?" Rufin said.

"I love him and I cannot find him," Lady Murasaki said. Can you?"

"I never could," Rufin said.

She left without seeing Popil.

Hannibal volunteered to work in the jail dispensary and petitioned the court to allow him to return to medical school. Dr. Claire De Vrie, the head of the fledgling Police Forensics Laboratory, a bright and attractive woman, found Hannibal extremely useful in setting up a compact qualitative analysis and toxin identification unit with the minimum of reagents and equipment. She wrote a letter on his behalf.

Dr. Dumas, whose relentless cheer irritated Popil beyond measure, submitted a ringing endorsement of Hannibal, and explained that Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, America, was offering him an internship, after reviewing his illustrations for the new anatomy text. Dumas addressed the morals clause in no uncertain terms.

In three weeks' time, over the objections of Inspector Popil, Hannibal walked out of the Palace of Justice and returned to his room above the medical school. Popil did not say goodbye to him, a guard simply brought him his clothes.

He slept very well in his room. In the morning he called the Place de Vosges and found Lady Murasaki's telephone had been disconnected. He went there and let himself in with his key. The apartment was empty except for the telephone stand. Beside the telephone was a letter for him. It was attached to the blackened twig from Hiroshima sent to Lady Murasaki by her father.

The letter said Goodbye, Hannibal. I have gone home.

He tossed the burnt twig into the Seine on his way to dinner. At the Restaurant Champs de Mars he had a splendid jugged hare on the money Louis left to buy Masses for his soul. Warmed with wine, he decided that in strict fairness he should read some prayers in Latin for Louis and perhaps sing one to a popular tune, reasoning that his own prayers would be no less efficacious than those he could buy at St. Sulpice.

He dined alone and he was not lonely.

Hannibal had entered his heart's long winter. He slept soundly, and was not visited in dreams as humans are.