Hannibal Rising (21 page)

“Would you like some food?”

“No, thank you.”

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

HANNIBAL LECTER’S motorcycle was a BMW boxer twin left behind by the retreating German army. It was resprayed 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 Café 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 café terrace is an aviary and the birds in it are ortolans, a sub-rosa specialty of the café. Ordinances against the serving of ortolans came and went. They were listed on the menu as larks. The ortolan 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 ordered ortolans 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
Privé
. 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.”

“Privé, privé!”
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.”

Petras Kolnas 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.

“Ein Mannlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm
— do you know that song?”

While she ate the cherry, Hannibal slipped something into her pocket.
“Es hat von lauter Purpur ein 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.

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 Sacré 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 a tatami. 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. Sternohyoid omohyoid thyrohyoid/juuuguular, 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 Date Masamune she saw the dead to come.

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—Albin Michel 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, and Christiaan Huyghens’
Treatise on Light
. He sat in the Luxembourg Gardens for an hour after that, watching the toy sailboats on the pond, mentally unspooling a volute from the half-circle of the flower bed. The drawings in the new anatomy text would be credited Lecter-Jakov.