Hannibal Rising (12 page)

“Gomekudasai
, Monsieur?” Hannibal said.

“Irasshaimase
, Monsieur,” the proprietor said.

“Irasshaimase
, Monsieur,” the parrot said.

“Do you have a suzumushi cricket for sale, Monsieur?”

“Non, je suis désolé
, Monsieur,” the proprietor said.

“Non, je suis désolé
, Monsieur,” the parrot said.

The proprietor frowned at the bird and switched to English to confound the intrusive fowl. “I have a
variety of excellent fighting crickets. Fierce fighters, always victorious, famous wherever crickets gather.”

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

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

“Might you have a personal suzumushi?”

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

“I would be honored,” Hannibal said.

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

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

“Merde,”
it said from beneath the cloth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is there no chance it might survive the fall?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LADY MURASAKI conducted her life with a certain elegance which she achieved by application and taste, and she did it with whatever funds were left to her after the chateau was sold and the death duties paid. She would have given Hannibal anything he asked, but he did not ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be my guest.”

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

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

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

“No, not today. Until next time, Monsieur Leet.”

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

“Where did you get the Guardi?”

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

“Show me the invoice,” Popil said. “You are required to have on this premises the Arts and Monuments advisory on stolen art. Show me that too.”

Leet compared the list of stolen documents to his own catalog. “Look, see here, the looted Guardi is described differently. Robert Lecter listed the stolen
painting as ‘View of Santa Maria della Salute,’ and I bought this painting as ‘View of the Grand Canal.’ ”

“I have a court order to seize the picture, whatever it’s called. I’ll give you a receipt for it. Find me this ‘Kopnik,’ Monsieur Leet, and you could save yourself a lot of unpleasantness.”

“Kopnik is dead, Inspector. He was my associate in this firm. We called it Kopnik and Leet. Leet and Kopnik would have had a better ring to it.”

“Do you have his records?”

“His attorney might.”

“Look for them, Monsieur Leet. Look for them well,” Popil said. “I want to know how this painting got from Lecter Castle to Galerie Leet.”

“Lecter,” Leet said. “Is it the boy who does these drawings?”

“Yes.”

“Extraordinary,” Leet said.

“Yes, extraordinary,” Popil replied. “Wrap the painting for me, please.”

Leet appeared at the Quai des Orfèvres in two days carrying papers. Popil arranged for him to be seated in the corridor near the room marked
Audition 2
, where the noisy interrogation of a rape suspect was under way punctuated by thumps and cries. Popil allowed Leet to marinate in this atmosphere for fifteen minutes before admitting him to the private office. The art dealer handed over a receipt. It showed
Kopnik bought the Guardi from one Emppu Makinen for eight thousand English pounds.

“Do you find this convincing?” Popil asked. “I do not.”

Leet cleared his throat and looked at the floor. A full twenty seconds passed.

“The public prosecutor is eager to initiate criminal proceedings against you, Monsieur Leet. He is a Calvinist of the severest stripe, did you know that?”

“The painting was—”

Popil held up his hand, shushing Leet. “For the moment, I want you to forget about your problem. Assume I could intervene for you if I chose. I want you to help me. I want you to look at this.” He handed Leet a sheaf of legal-length onionskin pages close-typed. “This is the list of items the Arts Commission is bringing to Paris from the Munich Collection Point. All stolen art.”

“To display at the Jeu de Paume.”

“Yes, claimants can view it there. Second page, halfway down. I circled it.”

“ ‘The Bridge of Sighs,’ Bernardo Bellotto, thirty-six by thirty centimeters, oil on board.”

“Do you know this painting?” Popil said.

“I have heard of it, of course.”

“If it is genuine, it was taken from Lecter Castle. You know it is famously paired with another painting of the Bridge of Sighs.”

“By Canaletto, yes, painted the same day.”

“Also taken from Lecter Castle, probably stolen at the same time by the same person,” Popil said. “How
much more money would you make selling the pair together than if you sold them separately?”

“Four times. No rational person would separate them.”

“Then they were separated through ignorance or by accident. Two paintings of the Bridge of Sighs. If the person who stole them still has one of them, wouldn’t he want to get the other back?” Popil said.

“Very much.”

“There will be publicity about this painting when it hangs in the Jeu de Paume. You are going to the display with me and we will see who comes sniffing around it.”

LADY MURASAKI’S invitation got her into the Jeu de Paume Museum ahead of the big crowd that buzzed in the Tuileries, impatient to see more than five hundred stolen artworks brought from the Munich Collection Point by the Allied Commission on Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives in an attempt to find their rightful owners.

A few of the pieces were making their third trip between France and Germany, having been stolen first by Napoleon in Germany and brought back to France, then stolen by the Germans and taken home, then brought back to France once more by the Allies.

Lady Murasaki found in the ground floor of the Jeu de Paume an amazing jumble of Western images. Bloody religion pictures filled one end of the hall, a meathouse of hanging Christs.

For relief she turned to the “Meat Lunch,” a cheerful painting of a sumptuous buffet, unattended except for a springer spaniel who was about to help herself to the ham. Beyond it were big canvases attributed to “School of Rubens,” featuring rosy women of vast acreage surrounded by plump babies with wings.