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.

  49

  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.

  50

  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.

  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.