Hannibal Rising Read online

  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!”

  Hannibal spoke to the woman without looking down at her. “Wet your towel in the tub. Go over to the corner and sit down, and put the towel over your face. Go on. Wet it in the tub.”

  The woman doused the towel and backed into the corner with it.

  “Kill him,” she said.

  “I’ve waited so long to see your face,” Hannibal said. “I put your face on every bully I ever hurt. I thought you would be bigger.”

  The maid came into the bedroom with the robe. Through the open bathroom door she could see the barrel and the silencer of the extended gun. She backed out of the room, her slippers silent on the carpet.

  Grutas was looking at the gun too. It was Milko’s gun. It had a breech lock on the receiver for use with the silencer. If little Lecter was not familiar with it, he would be limited to one shot. Then he’d have to fumble with the pistol.

  “Did you see the things I have in this house, Hannibal? Opportunities from the war! You are accustomed to nice things, and you can have them. We are alike! We are the New Men, Hannibal. You, me—the cream—we will always float to the top!” He raised suds in his hand to illustrate floating, getting little Lecter used to his movement.

  “Dog tags don’t float.” Hannibal tossed Grutas’ dog tag into the tub and it settled like a leaf to the bottom. “Alcohol floats.” Hannibal threw the bottle and it smashed on the tile above Grutas, showering stinging fluid down on his head, pieces of glass falling in his hair. Hannibal took from his pocket a Zippo to light Grutas. As he flipped open the lighter, Mueller cocked a pistol behind his ear.

  Gassmann and Dieter grabbed Hannibal’s arms from both sides. Mueller pushed the muzzle of Hannibal’s gun toward the ceiling and took it from his hand. Mueller stuck the gun in his waistband.

  “No shooting,” Grutas said. “Don’t break the tile in here. I want to talk with him a little. Then he can die in a tub like his sister.” Grutas got out of the tub and stood on a towel. He gestured to the woman, now desperate to please. She sprayed him with seltzer over his shaved body as he turned in place, his arms extended.

  “Do you know how that feels, the fizzy water?” Grutas said. “It feels like being born again. I’m all new, in a new world with no room in it for you. I can’t believe you killed Milko by yourself.”

  “Someone lent me a hand,” Hannibal said.

  “Hold him over the tub and cut him when I tell you.”

  The three men wrestled Hannibal to the floor and held his head and neck over the bathtub. Mueller had a switch knife. He put the edge to Hannibal’s throat.

  “Look at me, Count Lecter, my prince, twist your head and look at me, get your throat stretched tight and you’ll bleed out fast. It won’t hurt so long.”

  Through the steam room door, Hannibal could see the hand of the timer moving tick by tick.

  “Answer this,” Grutas said. “Would you have fed me to the little girl if she were starving? Because you loved her?”

  “Of course.”

  Grutas smiled and tweaked Hannibal’s cheek. “There. There you have it. Love. I love myself that much. I would never apologize to you. You lost your sister in the war.” Grutas belched and laughed. “That burp is my commentary. Are you looking for sympathy? You’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis. Cut him, Mueller. This is the last thing you will ever hear, I’ll tell you what YOU did to live. You—”

  The explosion shuddered the bathroom and the sink jumped off the wall, water spurting from the pipes, and the lights went out. Wrestling in the dark on the floor, Mueller, Gassmann, Dieter swarming on him and tangled up with the woman. The knife got into Gassmann’s arm, him cursing and shrieking. Hannibal caught someone hard in the face with his elbow and was on his feet, a muzzle flash as a gun went off in the tiled room and splinters stung his face. Smoke, heavy smoke, curled out of the wall. A gun was sliding across the tiles, Dieter after it. Grutas picked up the gun, the woman jumping on him with her nails at his face and he shot her twice in the chest. Climbed to his feet, the gun coming up. Hannibal snapped the wet towel across Grutas’ eyes. Dieter on Hannibal’s back, Hannibal threw himself backward on top of him and felt the impact as the edge of the tub caught Dieter across the kidneys and Dieter let go. Mueller on him now before he could get up, trying to jam his big thumbs under Hannibal’s chin. Hannibal butted Mueller in the face, slid his hand between them, finding a gun in Mueller’s waistband, and pulled the trigger with the gun still in Mueller’s pants, the big German rolling off him with a howl, and Hannibal ran with the gun. He had to slow in the dark bedroom, then fast into the corridor filling with smoke. He picked up the maid’s pail in the corridor and carried it with him through the house, once hearing a gun go off behind him.

  The gate guard was out of the blockhouse and halfway to the front door. “Get water!” Hannibal yelled to him. He handed the man the bucket as he rushed past. “I’ll get the hose!” Running hard down the driveway, cutting into the trees as soon as he could. He heard shouts behind him. Up the hill to the orchard. Quick the ignition, feeling for the wire in the dark.

  Compression release, twist a little gas, kick, kick. Kick, kick. Touch of choke. Kick. The BMW awakened with a growl and Hannibal exploded out of the brush, down an allée between the trees, knocking loose a muffler on a stump and then on the road, roaring off into the dark, the hanging pipe against the pavement leaving a trail of sparks.

&n
bsp; The firemen stayed late into the night, hosing embers in the basement of Grutas’ house, shooting water into the spaces in the walls. Grutas stood at the edge of his garden, smoke and steam rising into the night sky behind him, and stared in the direction of Paris.

  53

  THE NURSING STUDENT had dark red hair and maroon eyes about the same color as Hannibal’s. When he stood back from the fountain in the medical school corridor so that she could drink first, she put her face close to him and sniffed. “When did you start smoking?”

  “I’m trying to quit,” he said.

  “Your eyebrows are singed!”

  “Careless lighting up.”

  “If you’re careless with fire you shouldn’t be cooking.” She licked her thumb and smoothed his eyebrow. “My roommate and I are making a daube this evening, there’s plenty if …”

  “Thank you. Really. But I have an engagement.”

  His note to Lady Murasaki asked if he might visit. He found a branch of wisteria to go with it, suitably withered in abject apology. Her note of invitation was accompanied by two sprigs, watermelon crepe myrtle and a sprig of pine with a tiny cone. Pine is not sent lightly. Thrilling and boundless, the possibilities of pine.

  Lady Murasaki’s poissonnier did not fail her. He had for her four perfect sea urchins in cold seawater from their native Brittany. Next door the butcher produced sweetbreads, already soaked in milk and pressed between two plates. She stopped by Fauchon for a pear tart and last she bought a string bag of oranges.

  She paused before the florist, her arms full. No, Hannibal would certainly bring flowers.

  Hannibal brought flowers. Tulips and Casablanca lilies and ferns in a tall arrangement sticking up from the pillion seat of his motorcycle. Two young women crossing the street told him the flowers looked like a rooster’s tail. He winked at them when the light changed and roared away with a light feeling in his chest.