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.

  51

  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.

  Hannibal rode his motorcycle into a copse of trees and parked it in the brush. He grounded out the motorcycle’s ignition with a bit of hidden wire behind the points and put a note on the saddle saying he had gone for parts. He walked a half-hour to the high road and hitchhiked back to Paris.

  The loading dock of the Gabrielle Instrument Co. is on the Rue de Paradis between a seller of lighting fixtures and a crystal repair shop. In the last task of their workday the warehousemen loaded a Bösendorfer baby grand piano into Milko’s truck, along with a piano stool crated separately. Hannibal signed the invoice Zigmas Milko, saying the name silently as he wrote.

  The instrument company’s own trucks were coming in at the end of the day. Hannibal watched as a woman driver got out of one of them. She was not bad looking in her coveralls, with a lot of French flounce. She went inside the building and came out minutes later in slacks and a blouse, carrying the coveralls folded under her arm. She put them in the saddlebag of a small motorbike. She felt Hannibal’s eyes on her, and turned her gamine face to him. She took out a cigarette and he lit it.

  “Merci, Monsieur … Zippo.” The woman was very street French, animated, with a lot of eye movement, and she exaggerated the gestures of smoking.

  The busybodies sweeping the loading dock strained to hear what they were saying, but could only hear her laugh. She looked into Hannibal’s face as they talked and little by little the coquetry stopped. She seemed fascinated with him, almost mesmerized. They walked together down the street toward a bar.

  Mueller had the gatehouse duty with a German named Gassmann, who had recently finished a tour in the Foreign Legion. Mueller was trying to sell him a tattoo when Milko’s truck approached up the drive.

  “Call the clap doctor, Milko’s back from Paris,” Mueller said.

  Gassmann had the better eyes. “That’s not Milko.”

  They went outside.

  “Where is Milko?” Mueller asked the woman at the wheel.

  “How would I know? He paid me to bring you this piano. He said he would be along in a couple of days. Get my moto out of the back with your big muscles.”

  “Who paid you?”

  “Monsieur Zippo.”

  “You mean Milko.”

  “Right, Milko.”

  A caterer’s truck stopped behind the five-ton and waited, the caterer fuming, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

  Gassmann raised the flap over the tailgate of the five-ton. He saw a piano in a crate and a smaller crate plastered with a sign: POUR LA CAVE and FOR THE WINE CELLAR—STORE IN A COOL PLACE. The motorbike was lashed to the side rails of the truck. A plank ramp was in the truck, but it was easier to lift the little motorbike down.

  Mueller came to help Gassmann with the bike. He looked at the woman.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Not here,” she said, swinging a leg over the bike.

  “Your moto sounds like a fart,” Mueller called after her as she rode away.

  “You’re winning her over with suave conversation,” the other German said.

  The piano tuner was a skeletal man with dark places between his teeth and a fixed rictus smile like that of Lawrence Welk. When he had finished tuning the black Bösendorfer, he changed into his ancient white tie and tailcoat and came out to play cocktail piano as Grutas’ guests arrived. The piano sounded brittle against the tile floor and glass expanses of the house. The shelves of a glass-and-steel bookcase near the piano buzzed along with B-flat until he moved the books around and then it buzzed at B. He had used a kitchen chair when tuning, but he did not want to sit on it to play.

  “Where am I to sit? Where is the piano bench?” he asked the maid, who asked Mueller. Mueller found him a chair of the correct height, but it had arms. “I’ll have to play with my elbows spread,” the tuner said.

  “Shut the fuck up and play American,” Mueller said. “Cocktail American he wants, with the singing along.”

  The cocktail buffet served thirty guests, curious flotsam of the war. Ivanov from the Soviet embassy was there, too well tailored for a servant of the state. He was talking with an American first sergeant who kept the books at the U.S. Post Exchange in Neuilly. The sergeant was in mufti, a sack suit in window-pane check of a color that brought out the spider angioma on the side of his nose. The bishop down from Versailles was accompanied by the acolyte who did his nails.

  Under the pitiless tube lighting, the bishop’s black suit had a greenish roast-beef sheen, Grutas observed as he kissed the bishop’s ring. They talked briefly about mutual acquaintances in Argentina. There was a strong strain of Vichy in the room.

  The piano player favored the crowd with his skeletal smile and approximated some Cole Porter songs. English was his fourth language and he was forced sometimes to improvise.

  “Night and day, you are the sun. Only you beneese the moon, you are the one.”

  The basement was almost dark. A single bulb burned near the stairs. Faintly the music sounded from the floor above.

  One wall of the basement was covered with a wine rack. Near it were a number of crates, some of them opened with shavings spilling out. A new stainless-steel sink lay on the floor beside a Rock-Ola Luxury Light-Up jukebox with the latest platters and rolls of nickels to put in it. Beside the wine wall was a crate labeled POUR LA CAVE AND STORE IN A COOL PLACE. A faint creak came from the crate.

  The pianist added some fortissimo to drown himself out at uncertain verses: “Whether me or you depart, no matter darling I’m apart, I think of you Night and Dayyyyy.”

  Grutas moved through his guests shaking hands. With a small motion of his head he summoned Ivanov into his library. It was stark modern, a trestle-table desk, steel and glass shelves and a sculpture after Picasso by Anthony Quinn entitled “Logic Is a Woman’s Behind.” Ivanov considered the carving.

  “You like sculpture?” Grutas said.

  “My father was a curator at St. Petersburg, when it was St. Petersburg.”

  “You can touch it if you like,” Grutas said.

  “Thank you. The appliances for Moscow?”

  “Sixty refrigerators on the train in Helsinki at this moment. Kelvinator. And what do you have for me?” Grutas could not help snapping his fingers.

  Because of the snap, Ivanov made Grutas wait while he perused the stone buttocks. “There is no file on the boy at the embassy,” he said at last. “He got a visa for Lithuania by proposing to do an article for L’Humanité. It was supposed to be on how well the collectivization worked when the farmlands were seized from his family and how delighted the farmers are to move to the city and build a sewage plant. An aristocrat endorsing the revolution.”

  Grutas snorted through his nose.

  Ivanov put a photograph on the desk and pushed it across to Grutas. It showed Lady Murasaki and Hannibal outside her apartment building.

  “When was this taken?”

  “Yesterday morning. Milko was with my man when he took it. The Lecter boy is a student, he works at night, sleeps over the medical school. My man showed Milko everything—I don’t want to know anything else.”

  “When did he last see Milko?”

  Ivanov looked up sharply. “Yesterday. Something’s wrong?”

  Grutas shrugged it off. “Probably not. Who is the woman?”

  “His stepmother, or something like that. She’s beautiful,” Ivanov said, touching the stone buttocks.

  “Has she got an ass like that one?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The French police came around?”

  “An inspector named Popil.” Grutas pursed his lips and for a moment he seemed to forget Ivanov was in the room.

  Mueller and Gassmann looked over the crowd. They were taking coats and watching that none of the guests stole anything. In the coatroom Mueller pulled Gassmann’s bow tie away from his collar on its rubber band, turned it a half-turn, and let it pop back.

  “Can you wind it up like a little propeller and fly like a fairy?” Mueller said.

  “Turn it again and you’ll think it’s the doorknob to Hell,” Gassmann said. “Look at you. Tuck in your blouse. Were you never in the service?”

  They had to help the caterer pack up. Carrying a folding banquet table down to the basement, they did not see concealed beneath the stairs a fat rubber glove suspended over a dish of powder, with a fuse leading into a three-kilo tin that once held lard. A chemical reaction slows as the temperature cools. Grutas’ basement was five degrees cooler than the medical school.

  52

  THE MAID WAS laying out Grutas’ silk pajamas on the bed when he called for more towels.

  The maid did not like to take towels into Grutas’ bathroom, but she was always summoned to do it. She had to go in there but she did not have to look. Grutas’ bathroom was all white tile and stainless steel, with a big freestanding tub and a steam room with frosted glass doors and a shower off the steam room.

  Grutas reclined in his tub. The woman captive he had brought from the boat was shaving his chest using a prison safety razor, the blade locked in with a key. The side of her face was swollen. The maid did not want to meet her eyes.

  Like a sense-deprivation chamber, the shower was all white, and big enough for four. Its curious acoustics bounced every crumb of sound. Hannibal could hear his hair crunch between his head and the tile as he lay on the white floor of the shower. Covered by a couple of white towels he was nearly invisible from the steam room through the frosted shower door. Under the towels he could hear his own breathing. It was like being rolled in the rug with Mischa. Instead of her warm hair near his face, he had the smell of the pistol, machine oil and brass cartridges and cordite.

  He could hear Grutas’ voice, and he had not yet seen his face except through field glasses. The tone of voice had not changed—the mirthless teasing that precedes the blow.

  “Warm up my terry robe,” Grutas told the maid. “I want some steam after. Turn it on.” She slid back the steam room door and opened the valve. In the all-white steam chamber the only color was the red bezels of the timer and the thermometer. They had the look of a ship’s gauges, with numbers big enough to read in the steam. The timer’s minute hand was already moving around the dial toward the red marker hand.

  Grutas had his hands behind his head. Tattooed under his arm was the Nazi lightning SS insignia. He twitched his muscle and made the lightning jump. “Boom! Donnerwetter!” He laughed when the woman captive flinched away. “Noooo, I won’t hit you more. I like you now. I’m going to fix your teeth with some teeth you can put in a glass beside the bed, out of the way.”

  Hannibal came through the glass doors in a cloud of steam, the gun up and pointed at Grutas’ heart. In his other hand he had a bottle of reagent alcohol.

  Grutas’ skin squeaked as he pushed himself up in the tub and the woman shied from him before she knew Hannibal was behind her.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Grutas said. He looked at the bottle, hoping Hannibal was drunk. “I’ve always felt I owed you something.”

  “I discussed that with Milko.”

  “And?”

  “He arrived at a solution.”

  “The money of course! I sent it with him, and he gave it to you? Good!”