Hannibal Rising Read online

  She and Hannibal tied back the heavy draperies, letting in the sun. Hannibal looked down upon the Place des Vosges, all light and space and warm red brick, one of the most beautiful squares in Paris despite a garden still scruffy from the war.

  There, on the field below, King Henri II jousted under the colors of Diane de Poitiers and fell with fatal splinters in his eye, and even Vesalius at his bedside could not save him.

  Hannibal closed one eye and speculated precisely where Henri fell—probably right over there where Inspector Popil now stood, holding a potted plant and looking up at the windows. Hannibal did not wave.

  “I think you have a caller, my lady,” he said over his shoulder.

  Lady Murasaki did not ask who. When the knocking came, she let it go on for a moment before she answered the door.

  Popil came in with his plant and a bag of sweets from Fauchon. There was a mild confusion as he attempted to remove his hat while holding parcels in both hands. Lady Murasaki took the hat from him.

  “Welcome to Paris, Lady Murasaki. The florist swears to me this plant will do well on your terrace.”

  “Terrace? I suspect you are investigating me, Inspector—already you have found out I have a terrace.”

  “Not only that—I have confirmed the presence of a foyer, and I strongly suspect you have a kitchen.”

  “So you work from room to room?”

  “Yes, that is my method, I proceed from room to room.”

  “Until you arrive where?” She saw some color in his face and let him off. “Shall we put this in the light?”

  Hannibal was unpacking the armor when they came upon him. He stood beside the crate, holding the samurai mask. He did not turn his body toward Inspector Popil, but turned his head like an owl to look at the policeman. Seeing Popil’s hat in Lady Murasaki’s hands, Hannibal estimated the size and weight of his head at 19.5 centimeters and six kilos.

  “Do you ever put it on, the mask?” Inspector Popil said.

  “I haven’t earned it.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Do you ever wear your many decorations, Inspector?”

  “When ceremonies require them.”

  “Chocolates from Fauchon. Very thoughtful, Inspector Popil. They will take away the smell of the camp.”

  “But not the scent of oil of cloves. Lady Murasaki, I need to discuss the matter of your residency.”

  Popil and Lady Murasaki talked on the terrace. Hannibal watched them through the window, revising his estimate of Popil’s hat size to twenty centimeters. In the course of conversation Popil and Lady Murasaki moved the plant a number of times to vary its exposure to the light. They seemed to need something to do.

  Hannibal did not continue unpacking the armor, but knelt beside the crate and rested his hand on the rayskin grip of the short sword. He looked out at the policeman through the eyes of the mask.

  He could see Lady Murasaki laughing. Inspector Popil must be making some lame attempt at levity and she was laughing out of kindness, Hannibal surmised. When they came back inside, Lady Murasaki left them alone together.

  “Hannibal, at the time of his death your uncle was trying to find out what happened to your sister in Lithuania. I can try too. It’s hard in the Baltic now—sometimes the Soviets cooperate, more times they don’t. But I keep after them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “We were living at the lodge. There was an explosion. I can remember being picked up by soldiers and riding on a tank to the village. In between I don’t know. I try to remember. I cannot.”

  “I talked with Dr. Rufin.”

  No visible reaction to that.

  “He would not discuss any specifics of his talks with you.”

  Nothing to that either.

  “But he said you are very concerned about your sister, naturally. He said with time your memory might return. If you remember anything, ever, please tell me.”

  Hannibal looked at the inspector steadily. “Why would I not?” He wished he could hear a clock. It would be good to hear a clock.

  “When we talked after … the incident of Paul Momund, I told you I lost relatives in the war. It is very much of an effort for me to think about that. Do you know why?”

  “Tell me why, Inspector.”

  “Because I think I should have saved them, I have a horror of finding something I didn’t do, that I could have done. If you have the fear the same way I do, don’t let it push away some memory that might be helpful to Mischa. You can tell me anything in the world.”

  Lady Murasaki came into the room. Popil stood up and changed the subject. “The Lycée is a good school and you earned your way in. If I can help you, I will. I’ll drop by the school to see about you from time to time.”

  “But you would prefer to call here,” Hannibal said.

  “Where you will be welcome,” Lady Murasaki said.

  “Good afternoon, Inspector,” Hannibal said.

  Lady Murasaki let Popil out and she returned angry.

  “Inspector Popil likes you, I can see it in his face,” Hannibal said.

  “What can he see in yours? It is dangerous to bait him.”

  “You will find him tedious.”

  “I find you rude. It is quite unlike you. If you wish to be rude to a guest, do it in your own house,” Lady Murasaki said.

  “Lady Murasaki, I want to stay here with you.”

  The anger went out of her. “No. We will spend our holidays together, and weekends, but you must board at the school as the rules require. You know my hand is always on your heart.” And she put it there.

  On his heart. The hand that held Popil’s hat was on his heart. The hand that held the knife to Momund’s brother’s throat. The hand that gripped the butcher’s hair and dropped his head into a bag and set it on the mailbox. His heart beat against her palm. Fathomless her face.

  27

  THE FROGS HAD BEEN preserved in formaldehyde from before the war, and what differentiating color their organs ever had was long ago leached away. There was one for each six students in the malodorous school laboratory. A circle of schoolboys crowded around each plate where the little cadaver rested, the chaff of grubby erasures dusting the table as they sketched. The schoolroom was cold, coal still being in short supply and some of the boys wore gloves with the fingertips cut out.

  Hannibal came and looked at the frog and returned to his desk to work. He made two trips. Professor Bienville had a teacher’s suspicion of anyone who chose to sit in the back of the room. He approached Hannibal from the flank, his suspicions justified as he saw the boy sketching a face instead of a frog.

  “Hannibal Lecter, why are you not drawing the specimen?”

  “I finished it, sir.” Hannibal lifted the top sheet and there was the frog, exactly rendered, in the anatomical position and circumscribed like Leonardo’s drawing of man. The internals were hatched and shaded.

  The professor looked carefully into Hannibal’s face. He adjusted his dentures with his tongue and said, “I will take that drawing. There is someone who should see it. You’ll have credit for it.” The professor turned down the top sheet of Hannibal’s tablet and looked at the face. “Who is that?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. A face I saw somewhere.”

  In fact, it was the face of Vladis Grutas, but Hannibal did not know his name. It was a face he had seen in the moon and on the midnight ceiling.

  A year of grey light through classroom windows. At least the light was diffuse enough to draw by, and the classrooms changed as the instructors put him up a form, and then another and another.

  A holiday from school at last.

  In this first fall since the death of the count and the departure of Chiyoh, Lady Murasaki’s losses quickened in her. When her husband was alive she had arranged outdoor suppers in the fall in a meadow near the chateau with Count Lecter and Hannibal and Chiyoh, to view the harvest moon and to listen to the fall insects.

  Now, on the
terrace at her residence in Paris, she read to Hannibal a letter from Chiyoh about her wedding arrangements, and they watched the moon wax toward full, but no crickets could be heard.

  Hannibal folded his cot in the living room early in the morning and bicycled across the Seine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he made another of his frequent inquiries at the menagerie. News today a scribbled note with an address …

  Ten minutes further south at Place Monge and the Rue Ortolan he found the shop: Poissons Tropicaux, Petites Oiseaux, & Animaux Exotiques.

  Hannibal took a small portfolio from his saddlebag and went inside.

  There were tiers of tanks and cages in the small storefront, twittering and chirping and the whir of hamster wheels. It smelled of grain and warm feathers and fish food.

  From a cage beside the cash register, a large parrot addressed Hannibal in Japanese. An older Japanese man with a pleasant face came from the back of the store, where he was cooking.

  “Gomekudasai, Monsieur?” Hannibal said.

  “Irasshaimase, Monsieur,” the proprietor said.

  “Irasshaimase, Monsieur,” the parrot said.

  “Do you have a suzumushi cricket for sale, Monsieur?”

  “Non, je suis désolé, Monsieur,” the proprietor said.

  “Non, je suis désolé, Monsieur,” the parrot said.

  The proprietor frowned at the bird and switched to English to confound the intrusive fowl. “I have a variety of excellent fighting crickets. Fierce fighters, always victorious, famous wherever crickets gather.”

  “This is a gift for a lady from Japan who pines for the song of the suzumushi at this time of year,” Hannibal said. “A plain cricket is unsuitable.”

  “I would never suggest a French cricket, whose song is pleasing only for its seasonal associations. But I have no suzumushi for sale. Perhaps she would be amused by a parrot with an extensive Japanese vocabulary, whose expressions embrace all walks of life.”

  “Might you have a personal suzumushi?”

  The proprietor looked into the distance for a moment. The law on the importation of insects and their eggs was fuzzy this early in the new Republic. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “I would be honored,” Hannibal said.

  The proprietor disappeared behind a curtain at the rear of the store and returned with a small cricket cage, a cucumber and a knife. He placed the cage on the counter, and under the avid gaze of the parrot, cut off a tiny slice of cucumber and pushed it into the cricket cage. In a moment came the clear sleigh-bell ring of the suzumushi. The proprietor listened with a beatific expression as the song came again.

  The parrot imitated the cricket’s song as well as it could—loudly and repeatedly. Receiving nothing, it became abusive and raved until Hannibal thought of Uncle Elgar. The proprietor put a cover over the cage.

  “Merde,” it said from beneath the cloth.

  “Do you suppose I might hire the use of a suzumushi, lease one so to speak, on a weekly basis?”

  “What sort of fee would you find appropriate?” the proprietor said.

  “I had in mind an exchange,” Hannibal said. He took from his portfolio a small drawing in pen and ink wash of a beetle on a bent stem.

  The proprietor, holding the drawing carefully by the edges, turned it to the light. He propped it against the cash register. “I could inquire among my colleagues. Could you return after the lunch hour?”

  Hannibal wandered, purchased a plum at the street market and ate it. Here was a sporting-goods store with trophy heads in the window, a bighorn sheep, an ibex. Leaning in the corner of the window was an elegant Holland & Holland double rifle. It was wonderfully stocked; the wood looked as though it had grown around the metal and together wood and metal had the sinuous quality of a beautiful snake.

  The gun was elegant and it was beautiful in one of the ways that Lady Murasaki was beautiful. The thought was not comfortable to him under the eyes of the trophy heads.

  The proprietor was waiting for him with the cricket. “Will you return the cage after October?”

  “Is there no chance it might survive the fall?”

  “It might last into the winter if you keep it warm. You may bring me the cage at … an appropriate time.” He gave Hannibal the cucumber. “Don’t give it all to the suzumushi at once,” he said.

  Lady Murasaki came to the terrace from prayers, thoughts of autumn still in her expression.

  Dinner at the low table on the terrace in a luminous twilight. They were well into the noodles when, primed with cucumber, the cricket surprised her with its crystal song, singing from concealment in the dark beneath the flowers. Lady Murasaki seemed to think she heard it in her dreams. It sang again, the clear sleigh-bell song of the suzumushi.

  Her eyes cleared and she was in the present. She smiled at Hannibal. “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.”

  The moon rose to the song of the suzumushi. The terrace seemed to rise with it, drawn into tangible moonlight, lifting them to a place above ghost-ridden earth, a place unhaunted, and being there together was enough.

  In time he would say the cricket was borrowed, that he must take it back at the waning of the moon. Best not to keep it too long into the fall.

  28

  LADY MURASAKI conducted her life with a certain elegance which she achieved by application and taste, and she did it with whatever funds were left to her after the chateau was sold and the death duties paid. She would have given Hannibal anything he asked, but he did not ask.

  Robert Lecter had provided for Hannibal’s minimal school expenses, but no extras.

  The most important element in Hannibal’s budget was a letter of his own composition. The letter was signed Dr. Gamil Jolipoli, Allergist and it alerted the school that Hannibal had a serious reaction to chalk dust, and should be seated as far as possible from the blackboard.

  Since his grades were exceptional, he knew the teachers did not really care what he was doing, as long as the other pupils did not see and follow his bad example.

  Freed to sit alone in the very back of the classroom, he was able to manufacture ink and water-color washes of birds in the style of Musashi Miyamoto, while listening to the lecture with half an ear.

  There was a vogue in Paris for things Japanese. The drawings were small, and suited to the limited wall space of Paris apartments, and they could be packed easily in a tourist’s suitcase. He signed them with a chop, the symbol called Eternity in Eight Strokes.

  There was a market for these drawings in the Quarter, in the small galleries along the Rue Saints-Pères and the Rue Jacob, though some galleries required him to deliver his work after hours, to prevent their clients from knowing the drawings were done by a child.

  Late in the summer, while the sunlight still remained in the Luxembourg Gardens after school, he sketched the toy sailboats on the pond while waiting for closing time. Then he walked to Saint-Germain to work the galleries—Lady Murasaki’s birthday was approaching and he had his eye on a piece of jade in the Place Furstenberg.

  He was able to sell the sailboat sketch to a decorator on the Rue Jacob, but he was holding out his Japanese-type sketches for a larcenous little gallery on the Rue Saints-Pères. The drawings were more impressive matted and framed and he had found a good framer who would extend him credit.

  He carried them in a backpack down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The outdoor tables at the cafés were full and the sidewalk clowns were badgering passersby for the amusement of the crowd at the Café de Flore. In the small streets nearer the river, the Rue Saint-Benoit and the Rue de l’Abbaye, the jazz clubs were still shut tight, but the restaurants were open.

  Hannibal was trying to forget his lunch at school, an entrée known as “Martyr’s Relics,” and he examined the bills of fare with keen interest as he passed. Soon he hoped to have the funds for a birthday dinner, and he was looking for sea urchins.

 
; Monsieur Leet of Galerie Leet was shaving for an evening engagement when Hannibal rang his bell. The lights were still on in the gallery, though the curtains were drawn. Leet had a Belgian’s impatience with the French and a ravening desire to fleece Americans, whom he believed would buy anything. The gallery featured high-end representational painters, small statuary and antiquities, and was known for marine paintings and seascapes.

  “Good evening, Monsieur Lecter,” Leet said. “Delighted to see you. I trust you are well. I must ask you to wait while I crate a painting, it has to go tonight to Philadelphia in America.”

  In Hannibal’s experience such a warm welcome usually masked sharp practice. He gave Monsieur Leet the drawings and his price written in a firm hand. “May I look around?”

  “Be my guest.”

  It was pleasant to be away from the school, to be looking at good pictures. After an afternoon of sketching boats on the pond, Hannibal was thinking about water, the problems of depicting water. He thought about Turner’s mist and his colors, impossible to emulate, and he went from picture to picture looking at the water, the air over the water. He came upon a small painting on an easel, the Grand Canal in bright sunlight, Santa Maria della Salute in the background.

  It was a Guardi from Lecter Castle. Hannibal knew before he knew, a flash from memory on the backs of his eyelids and now the familiar painting before him in this frame. Perhaps it was a copy. He picked it up and looked closely. The mat was stained in a small pattern of brown dots in the upper left corner. When he was a small child he had heard his parents say the stain was “foxing” and he had spent minutes staring at it, trying to make out the image of a fox or a fox’s pawprint. The painting was not a copy. The frame felt hot in his hands.

  Monsieur Leet came into the room. He frowned. “We don’t touch unless we are prepared to buy. Here is a check for you.” Leet laughed. “It is too much, but it won’t cover the Guardi.”

  “No, not today. Until next time, Monsieur Leet.”

  29

  INSPECTOR POPIL, IMPATIENT with the genteel tones of the door chime, banged upon the door of Galerie Leet in the Rue Saints-Pères. Admitted by the gallery owner, he got straight to the point.