Hannibal Rising (22 page)

The last student left the laboratory. The building was empty now and dark, except for Hannibal’s bright work lights in the anatomy lab. After he turned off the electric saw the only sounds were the wind’s faint moan in chimneys, the insect click of the instruments and the bubbling retorts where the colored injection dyes were warming.

Hannibal considered his subject, a stocky middle-aged man, draped except for his opened thorax, ribs spread like the ribs of a boat. Here were areas Dr. Dumas would want to expose in the course of his lecture, making the last incision himself and lifting out a lung. For his illustration Hannibal needed to see the posterior aspect of the lung, out of sight in the cadaver. Hannibal went down the corridor to
the anatomy museum for a reference, turning on lights as he went.

Zigmas Milko, sitting in a truck across the street, could look into the medical school’s tall windows and track Hannibal’s progress down the hall. Milko had a short crowbar up the sleeve of his jacket, the pistol and silencer in the pockets.

He got a good look when Hannibal turned up the museum lights. The pockets of Hannibal’s lab coat were flat. He did not appear to be armed. He left the museum carrying a jar, and the lights went out progressively as he returned to the anatomy lab. Now only the lab was lighted, the frosted windows and the skylight glowing.

Milko did not think this would require much of a lurk, but just in case he decided to smoke a cigarette first—if the spotter from the embassy had left him any cigarettes before slinking away. You’d think the mooching prick had never seen a decent smoke. Did he take the entire packet? Dammit, at least fifteen of the Lucky Strikes. Do this thing now, get some American cigarettes later at the
bal musette
. Unwind, rub against the bar girls with the silencer tube in the front trouser pocket, look into their faces when they felt it hard against them, pick up Grutas’ piano in the morning.

This boy killed Dortlich. Milko recalled that Dortlich, with a crowbar up his sleeve, had once chipped his own tooth when he tried to light a
cigarette.
“Scheisskopf
, you should have come out with the rest of us,” he said to Dortlich, wherever he was, Hell probably.

Milko carried the black ladder, along with a lunch bucket for cover, across the street and into the shelter of the hedges beside the medical school. He put his foot on the bottom rung and muttered, “Fuck the farm.” It had been his mantra in action since he ran away from home at twelve.

Hannibal completed the blue, venous injections and sketched his work in colored pencil at a drawing board beside the body, referring now and then to the lung preserved in a jar of alcohol. Some papers clipped to the board fluttered slightly in a draft and settled again. Hannibal looked up from his work, looked down the corridor in the direction of the draft, then finished coloring a vein.

Milko closed the window of the anatomy museum behind him, slipped off his boots and, in his socks, crept between the glass cases. He moved along the row of the digestive system, and paused near an enormous pair of clubbed feet in a jar. There was just enough light to move. Wouldn’t want to shoot in here, splash this crap everywhere. He turned up his collar against the draft on the back of his neck. Bit by bit he edged his face into the corridor, looking across the bridge of his nose so his ear was not exposed.

Above the sketchboard, Hannibal’s nostrils opened wide and the work light reflected redly in his eyes.

Looking down the corridor and through the laboratory door, Milko could see Hannibal’s back as he worked around the corpse with his big hypodermic of dye. It was a bit far to shoot, as the silencer blocked the pistol’s sights. Didn’t want to wing him and have to chase him around, knocking things over. God knows what would splash on you, some of these nasty fluids.

Milko made the slight adjustment of the heart that we make before we kill.

Hannibal went out of sight and Milko could only see his hand on the drawing board, sketching, sketching, making a small erasure.

Abruptly, Hannibal put down his pen, came to the corridor and turned on the light. Milko ducked back into the museum, then the light went off again. Milko peered around the door frame. Hannibal was working over the draped body.

Milko heard the autopsy saw. When he looked again Hannibal was out of sight.
Drawing again. Fuck this. Walk in there and shoot him. Tell him say hello to Dortlich when he gets to Hell
. Down the corridor on long strides in his socks, silent on the stone floor, watching the hand on the drawing board, Milko raised the pistol and stepped through the door and saw the hand and sleeve, the lab coat piled on the chair—
where is the rest of him
—and Hannibal stepped close behind Milko and sank the hypodermic full of alcohol into the side of Milko’s neck, catching him as his legs gave way and his eyes rolled up, easing him to the floor.

First things first. Hannibal put the corpse’s hand back in place and tacked it on with a few fast stitches in the skin. “Sorry,” he said to his subject. “I’ll include thanks in your note.”

Burning, coughing, cold on Milko’s face now as he came to consciousness, the room swimming and then settling down. He started to lick his lips, and spit. Water pouring over his face.

Hannibal set his pitcher of cold water on the edge of the cadaver tank and sat down in a conversational attitude. Milko wore the chain cadaver harness. He was submerged up to his neck in formalin solution in the tank. The other occupants crowded close around him, regarded him with eyes gone cloudy in embalming fluid, and he shrugged their shriveled hands away.

Hannibal examined Milko’s wallet. He took from his own pocket a dog tag and placed it beside Milko’s ID card on the rim of the tank.

“Zigmas Milko. Good evening.”

Milko coughed and wheezed. “We talked about it. I brought you money. A settlement. We want you to have the money. I brought it. Let me take you to it.”

“That sounds like a superior plan. You killed so many, Milko. So many more than these. Do you feel them in the tank around you? There by your foot, that’s a child from a fire. Older than my sister, and partly cooked.”

“I don’t know what you want.”

Hannibal pulled on a rubber glove. “To hear what you have to say about eating my sister.”

“I did not.”

Hannibal pressed Milko under the surface of the embalming fluid. After a long moment, he seized the chain tether and pulled him up again, poured water in his face, flushing his eyes.

“Don’t say that again,” Hannibal said.

“We all felt badly, so badly,” Milko said as soon as he could talk. “Freezing hands and rotting feet. Whatever we did, we did it to live. Grutas was quick, she never—we kept you alive, we—”

“Where is Grutas?”

“If I tell you, will you let me take you to the money? It’s a lot, in dollars. There is a lot more money too, we could blackmail them with what I know, with your evidence.”

“Where is Grentz?”

“Canada.”

“Correct. The truth for once. Where is Grutas?”

“He has a house near Milly-le-Forêt.”

“What is his name now?”

“He does business as Satrug, Inc.”

“Did he sell my pictures?”

“Once, to buy a lot of morphine, no more. We can get them back.”

“Have you tried the food at Kolnas’ restaurant? The sundaes aren’t bad.”

“I have the money in the truck.”

“Last words? A valedictory?”

Milko opened his mouth to speak and Hannibal
put the heavy cover down with a clang. Less than an inch of air remained between the cover and the surface of the embalming fluid. He left the room, Milko bumping against the lid like a lobster in a pot. He closed the door behind him, rubber seals squealing against the paint.

Inspector Popil stood beside his worktable, looking at his sketch.

Hannibal reached for the cord and switched on the big vent fan and it started with a clatter.

Popil looked up at the sound of the fan. Hannibal did not know what else he had heard. Milko’s gun was between the cadaver’s feet, underneath the sheet.

“Inspector Popil.” Hannibal picked up a syringe of dye and made an injection. “If you’ll excuse me just a moment, I need to use this before it hardens again.”

“You killed Dortlich in your family’s woods.”

Hannibal’s face did not change. He wiped the tip of the needle.

“His face was eaten,” Popil said.

“I would suspect the ravens. Those woods are rife with them. They were at the dog’s dish whenever he turned his back.”

“Ravens who made a shish kabob.”

“Did you mention that to Lady Murasaki?”

“No. Cannibalism—it happened on the Eastern Front, and more than once when you were a child.”
Popil turned his back on Hannibal, watching him in the glass front of a cabinet. “But you know that, don’t you? You were there. And you were in Lithuania four days ago. You went in on a legitimate visa and you came out another way. How?” Popil did not wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you how, you bought papers through a con at Fresnes, and that is a felony.”

In the tank room the heavy lid rose slightly and Milko’s fingers appeared under the edge. He pursed his lips against the lid, sucking for the quarter-inch of air, a wavelet over his face choked him, he pressed his face to the crack at the edge of the lid and sucked in a choking breath.

In the anatomy lab, looking at Popil’s back, Hannibal leaned some weight onto his subject’s lung, producing a satisfactory gasp and gurgle. “Sorry,” he said. “They do that.” He turned up the Bunsen burner underneath a retort to magnify the bubbling.

“That drawing is not the face of your subject. It is the face of Vladis Grutas. Like the ones in your room. Did you kill Grutas too?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Have you found him?”

“If I found him, I give you my word I would bring him to your attention.”

“Don’t fool with me! Do you know that he sawed off the rabbi’s head in Kaunas? That he shot the Gypsy children in the woods? Do you know he walked away from Nuremberg when a witness got
acid down her throat? Every few years I pick up the stench of him and then he’s gone. If he knows you are hunting him, he’ll kill you. Did he murder your family?”

“He killed my sister and ate her.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes.”

“You would testify.”

“Of course.”

Popil looked at Hannibal for a long moment. “If you kill in France, Hannibal, I will see your head in a bucket. Lady Murasaki will be deported. Do you love Lady Murasaki?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“There are photographs of him in the Nuremberg archives. If the Soviets will circulate them, if they can find him, the Sureté is holding someone we might trade for him. If we can get him, I will need your deposition. Is there any other evidence?”

“Teeth marks on the bones.”

“If you are not in my office tomorrow, I’ll have you arrested.”

“Good night, Inspector.”

In the tank room, Milko’s spadelike farmer’s hand slips back into the tank, the lid closes down tight, and to a shriveled face before him he mouths his valediction:
Fuck the farm
.

Night in the anatomy laboratory, Hannibal working alone. He was nearly finished with his sketch, working
beside the body. On the counter was a fat rubber glove filled with fluid and tied at the wrist. The glove was suspended over a beaker of powder. A timer ticked beside it.

Hannibal covered the sketch pad with a clear overlay. He draped the cadaver and rolled it into the lecture theater. From the anatomy museum he brought Milko’s boots and put them beside Milko’s clothing on a gurney near the incinerator, with the contents of his pockets, a jackknife, keys and a wallet. The wallet contained money and the rim of a condom Milko rolled on to deceive women in semi-darkness. Hannibal removed the money. He opened the incinerator. Milko’s head stood in the flames. He looked like the Stuka pilot burning. Hannibal threw in his boots and one of them kicked the head over backward out of sight.

A WAR SURPLUS five-ton truck with new canvas was parked across the street from the anatomy lab, blocking half of the sidewalk. Surprisingly there was no ticket yet on the windshield. Hannibal tried Milko’s keys on the driver’s door. It opened. An envelope of papers was over the sun visor on the driver’s side. He looked through them quickly.

A ramp in the bed of the truck let him load his motorcycle at the curb. He drove the truck to Porte de Montempoivre near the Bois de Vincennes and put it in a truck park near the railroad. He locked the plates in the cab beneath the seat.

Hannibal Lecter sat on his motorcycle in a hillside orchard, breakfasting on some excellent African figs he had found in the Rue de Buci market, along with
a bite of Westphalian ham. He could see the road below the hill and, a quarter mile further along, the entrance to Vladis Grutas’ home.

Bees were loud in the orchard and several buzzed around his figs until he covered them with his handkerchief. García Lorca, now enjoying a revival in Paris, said the heart was an orchard. Hannibal was thinking about the figure and thinking, as young men do, about the shapes of peaches and pears, when a carpenter’s truck passed below him and pulled up to Grutas’ gate.

Hannibal raised his father’s field glasses.

The house of Vladis Grutas is a Bauhaus mansion built in 1938 on farmland with a view of the Essonne River. It was neglected in the war and, lacking eaves, suffered dark water stains down its white walls. The whole façade and one of the sides had been repainted blinding white and scaffolding was going up on the walls yet unpainted. It had served the Germans as a staff headquarters during the occupation and the Germans had added protection.

The glass and concrete cube of the house was protected by high chain link and barbed wire around the perimeter. The entrance was guarded by a concrete gatehouse that looked like a pillbox. A slit window across the front of the gatehouse was softened by a window box of flowers. Through the window a machine gun could traverse the road, its barrel brushing the blossoms aside.

Two men came out of the gatehouse, one blond and the other dark-haired and covered with tattoos.
They used a mirror on a long handle to search beneath the truck. The carpenters had to climb down and show their national identity cards. There was some waving of hands and shrugging. The guards passed the truck inside.