Hannibal Rising (17 page)

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.