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 Louis Jourdan.
“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 the Fresnes 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 Santé 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 Santé, 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-Forêt 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. The Sûreté 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 Louis Ferrat.
“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, wer mag das Mannlein sein
Das da steht im Walde allein
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 stay freeeeeaaassh 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.
“ANNIBA!!” 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.
“ANNIBA!!”
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, eeny meeny 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.
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