“Ah,” Kleber said, mopping his mouth with his napkin. “I thought so. No difficulty then. He has been on my payroll for years. It’s just a shakedown. What did Leet tell him?”
“Nothing yet, but Leet sounds nervous. For now he’ll lay it on Kopnik, his dead colleague,” Trebelaux said.
“Leet knows nothing, not an inkling of where you got the picture?”
“Leet thinks I got it in Lausanne, as we agreed. He’s squealing for his money back. I said I would check with my client.”
“I own Popil, I’ll take care of it, forget the whole thing. I have something much more important to talk with you about. Could you possibly travel to America?”
“I don’t take things through customs.”
“Customs is not your problem, only the negotiations while you’re there. You have to see the stuff before it goes, then you see it again over there, across a table in a bank meeting room. You could go by air, take a week.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Small antiquities. Some icons, a salt cellar. We’ll take a look, you tell me what you think.”
“About the other?”
“You are safe as houses,” Kleber said.
Kleber was his name only in France. His birth name was Petras Kolnas and he knew Inspector Popil’s name, but not from his payroll.
32
THE CANAL BOAT Christabel was tied up with only a spring line at a quay on the Marne River east of Paris, and after Trebelaux came aboard the boat was under way at once. It was a black Dutch-built double-ender with low deckhouses to pass under the bridges and a container garden on deck with flowering bushes.
The boat’s owner, a slight man with pale blue eyes and a pleasant expression, was at the gangway to welcome Trebelaux and invite him below. “I’m glad to meet you,” the man said and extended his hand. The hair on the owner’s hand grew backward, toward the wrist, making his hand feel creepy to the Swiss. “Follow Monsieur Milko. I have the things laid out below.”
The owner lingered on deck with Kolnas. They strolled for a moment among the terra-cotta planters, and stopped beside the single ugly object in the neat garden, a fifty-gallon oil drum with holes cut in it big enough to admit a fish, the top cut out with a torch and tied back on loosely with wire. A tarp was spread on the deck under it. The owner of the boat patted the steel drum hard enough to make it ring.
“Come,” he said.
On the lower deck he opened a tall cabinet. It contained a variety of arms: a Dragunov sniper rifle, an American Thompson submachine gun, a couple of German Schmeissers, five Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons for use against other boats, a variety of handguns. The owner selected a trident fish spear with the barbs filed off the tines. He handed it to Kolnas.
“I’m not going to cut him a lot,” the owner said in pleasant tones. “Eva’s not here to clean it up. You do it on deck after we find out what he’s told. Puncture him good so he won’t float the barrel.”
“Milko can—” Kolnas began.
“He was your idea, it’s your ass, you do it. Don’t you cut meat every day? Milko will bring him up dead and help you load him in the barrel when you’ve stuck him enough. Keep his keys and go through his room. We’ll do the dealer Leet if we have to. No loose ends. No more art for a while,” said the boat owner, whose name in France was Victor Gustavson.
Victor Gustavson is a very successful businessman, dealing in ex-SS morphine and new prostitutes, mostly women. The name is an alias for Vladis Grutas.
Leet remained alive, but without any of the paintings. They were held in a government vault for years while the court was stalemated on whether the Croatian agreement on reparations could be applied to Lithuania, and Trebelaux stared sightless from his barrel on the bottom of the Marne, no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eelgrass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth.
No other painting from Lecter Castle would surface for years.
Through Inspector Popil’s good offices, Hannibal Lecter was allowed to visit the paintings in custody from time to time over the following years. Maddening to sit in the dumb silence of the vault under the eye of a guard, in earshot of the man’s adenoidal breathing.
Hannibal looks at the painting he took from his mother’s hands and knows the past was not the past at all; the beast that panted its hot stench on his and Mischa’s skins continues to breathe, is breathing now. He turns the “Bridge of Sighs” to the wall and stares at the back of the painting for minutes at a time—Mischa’s hand erased, it is only a blank square now where he projects his seething dreams.
He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been.
II
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 t
o 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 des 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, herfaceand-breastslikewaterflowers? 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 Orfèvres, 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, Sternohyoid omohyoid thyrohyoid/juuugular, 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 a southside 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 Bûcherie, 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 the Cluny to the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine and the night entrance to the medical school, where a dim lamp burned. Hanni
bal 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 of Montrouge or Fresnes, or the guillotine at La Santé. Faced with the cranial dissection, Hannibal was lucky to have the head of a La Santé 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.
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