Hannibal Rising Read online

  “We’re circulating it to the orphanages,” Colonel Timka said. He wore the uniform of the Soviet Border Police and his steel-rimmed spectacles winked in concert with his steel dentition. “It takes time. There are so many.”

  “And I must tell you, Comrade Lecter, the forest is full of … remains still unidentified,” Headmaster added.

  “Hannibal has never said a word?” Count Lecter said.

  “Not to me. Physically he is capable of speech— he screams his sister’s name in his sleep. Mischa. Mischa.” Headmaster paused as he thought how to put it. “Comrade Lecter, I would be … careful with Hannibal until you know him better. It might be best if he did not play with other boys until he’s settled. Someone always gets hurt.”

  “He’s not a bully?”

  “It’s the bullies who get injured. Hannibal does not observe the pecking order. They’re always bigger and he hurts them very quickly and sometimes severely. Hannibal can be dangerous to persons larger than himself. He’s fine with the little ones. Lets them tease him a little. Some of them think he’s deaf as well as mute and say in front of him that he’s crazy. He gives them his treats, on the rare occasions there are any treats.”

  Colonel Timka looked at his watch. “We need to go. Shall I meet you in the car, Comrade Lecter?”

  Colonel Timka waited until Count Lecter was out of the room. He held out his hand. Headmaster sighed and handed over the money.

  With a wink of his spectacles and a flash of his teeth, Colonel Timka licked his thumb and began to count.

  14

  A SHOWER OF RAIN settled the dust as they covered the last miles to the chateau, wet gravel pinging underneath the muddy Delahaye, and the smell of herbs and turned earth blew through the car. Then the rain stopped and the evening light had an orange cast.

  The chateau was more graceful than grand in this strange orange light. The mullions in its many windows were curved like spiderwebs weighted with dew. To Hannibal, casting for omens, the curving loggia of the chateau unwound from the entrance like Huyghens’ volute.

  Four draft horses, steaming after the rain, were hitched to a defunct German tank protruding from the foyer. Big horses like Cesar. Hannibal was glad to see them, hoped they were his totem. The tank was jacked up on rollers. Little by little the horses pulled it out of the entryway as though they were extracting a tooth, the driver leading the horses, their ears moving when he spoke to them.

  “The Germans blew out the doorway with their cannon and backed the tank inside to get away from the airplanes,” the count told Hannibal as the car came to a stop. He had become accustomed to speaking to the boy without a reply. “They left it here in the retreat. We couldn’t move it, so we decorated the damned thing with window boxes and walked around it for five years. Now I can sell my ‘subversive’ pictures again and we can pay to get it hauled away. Come, Hannibal.”

  A houseman had watched for the car and he and the housekeeper came to meet the count with umbrellas if they should need them. A mastiff came with them.

  Hannibal liked his uncle for making the introductions in the driveway, courteously facing the staff, instead of rushing toward the house and talking over his shoulder.

  “This is my nephew, Hannibal. He’s ours now and we’re glad to have him. Madame Brigitte, my housekeeper. And Pascal, who’s in charge of making things work.”

  Madame Brigitte was once a good-looking upstairs maid. She was a quick study and she read Hannibal by his bearing.

  The mastiff greeted the count with enthusiasm and reserved judgment on Hannibal. The dog blew some air out of her cheeks. Hannibal opened his hand to her and, sniffing, she looked up at him from under her brows.

  “We’ll need to find him some clothes,” the count told Madame Brigitte. “Look in my old school trunks in the attic to start and we’ll improve him as we go along.”

  “And the little girl, sir?”

  “Not yet, Brigitte,” he said, and closed the subject with a shake of his head.

  Images as Hannibal approached the house: gleam of the wet cobblestones in the courtyard, the gloss of the horses’ coats after the shower, gloss of a handsome crow drinking from the rainspout at the corner of the roof; the movement of a curtain in a high window: the gloss of Lady Murasaki’s hair, then her silhouette.

  Lady Murasaki opened the casement. The evening light touched her face and Hannibal, out of the wastes of nightmare, took his first step on the bridge of dreams …

  To move from barracks into a private home is sweet relief. The furniture throughout the chateau was odd and welcoming, a mix of periods retrieved from the attic by Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki after the looting Nazis were driven out. During the occupation, all the major furniture left France for Germany on a train.

  Hermann Goering and the Führer himself had long coveted the work of Robert Lecter and other major artists in France. After the Nazi takeover, one of Goering’s first acts was to arrest Robert Lecter as a “subversive Slavic artist,” and seize as many of the “decadent” paintings as he could find in order to “protect the public” from them. The paintings were sequestered in Goering’s and Hitler’s private collections.

  When the count was freed from prison by the advancing Allies, he and Lady Murasaki put things back as well as they could and the staff worked for subsistence until Count Lecter was back at his easel.

  Robert Lecter saw his nephew settled in his room. Generous in size and light, the bedroom had been prepared for Hannibal with hangings and posters to enliven the stone. A kendo mask and crossed bamboo swords were mounted high on the wall. Had he been speaking, Hannibal would have asked after Madame.

  15

  HANNIBAL WAS LEFT alone for less than a minute before he heard a knock at the door.

  Lady Murasaki’s attendant, Chiyoh, stood there, a Japanese girl of about Hannibal’s age, with hair bobbed at her ears. Chiyoh appraised him for an instant, then a veil slid across her eyes like the nictitating goggles of a hawk.

  “Lady Murasaki sends greetings and welcome,” she said. “If you will come with me …” Dutiful and severe, Chiyoh led him to the bathhouse in the former wine-pressing room in a dependency of the chateau.

  To please his wife, Count Lecter had converted the winepress into a Japanese bath, the pressing vat now filled with water heated by a Rube Goldberg water heater fashioned from a copper cognac distillery. The room smelled of wood smoke and rosemary. Silver candelabra, buried in the garden during the war, were set about the vat. Chiyoh did not light the candles. An electric bulb would do for Hannibal until his position was clarified.

  Chiyoh handed him towels and a robe and pointed to a shower in the corner. “Bathe there first, scrub vigorously before submerging yourself,” she said. “Chef will have an omelet for you after your bath, and then you must rest.” She gave him a grimace that might have been a smile, threw an orange into the bathwater and waited outside the bathhouse for his clothing. When he handed it out the door, she took the items gingerly between two fingers, draped them over a stick in her other hand and disappeared with them.

  It was evening when Hannibal came awake all at once, the way he woke in barracks. Only his eyes moved until he saw where he was. He felt clean in his clean bed. Through the casement glowed the last of the long French twilight. A cotton kimono was on the chair beside him. He put it on. The stone floor of the corridor was pleasantly cool underfoot, the stone stairs worn hollow like those of Lecter Castle. Outside, under the violet sky, he could hear noises from the kitchen, preparations for dinner.

  The mastiff saw him and thumped her tail twice without getting up.

  From the bathhouse came the sound of a Japanese lute. Hannibal went to the music. A dusty window glowed with candlelight from within. Hannibal looked in. Chiyoh sat beside the bath plucking the strings of a long and elegant koto. She had lit the candles this time. The water heater chuckled. The fire beneath it crackled and the sparks flew upward. Lady Murasaki was in the water. In the water was Lady Murasaki, like
the water flowers on the moat where the swans swam and did not sing. Hannibal watched, silent as the swans, and spread his arms like wings.

  He backed from the window and returned through the gloaming to his room, a curious heaviness on him, and found his bed again.

  Enough coals remain in the master bedroom to glow on the ceiling. Count Lecter, in the semi-darkness, quickens to Lady Murasaki’s touch and to her voice.

  “Missing you, I felt as I did when you were in prison,” she said. “I remembered the poem of an ancestor, Ono no Komachi, from a thousand years ago.” “Ummm.”

  “She was very passionate.” “I’m anxious to know what she said.” “A poem: Hito ni awan tsuki no naki yo wa/omoiokite/mune hashiribi ni/kokoro yaki ori. Can you hear the music in it?”

  Robert Lecter’s Western ear could not hear the music in it but, knowing where the music lay, he was enthusiastic: “Oh my, yes. Tell me the meaning.”

  “No way to see him/on this moonless night/I lie awake longing, burning/breasts racing fire, heart in flames.”

  “My God, Sheba.”

  She took exquisite care to spare him exertion.

  In the hall of the chateau, the tall clock tells the lateness of the hour, soft bongs down the stone corridors. The mastiff bitch in her kennel stirs, and with thirteen short howls she makes her answer to the clock. Hannibal in his own clean bed turns over in his sleep. And dreams.

  In the barn, the air is cold, the children’s clothes are pulled down to their waists as Blue-Eyes and Web-Hand feel the flesh of their upper arms. The others behind them nicker and mill like hyenas who have to wait. Here is the one who always proffers his bowl. Mischa is coughing and hot, turning her face from their breath. Blue-Eyes grips the chains around their necks. Blood and feathers from a birdskin he gnawed are stuck to Blue-Eyes’ face.

  Bowl-Man’s distorted voice: “Take her, she’s going to dieee anyway. He’ll stay freeeeeesh a little longer.”

  Blue-Eyes to Mischa, a ghastly cozening, “Come and play, come and play!”

  Blue-Eyes starts to sing and Web-Hand joins in: Ein Mannlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm, Es hat von lauter Purpur ein Mantlein um

  Bowl-Man brings his bowl. Web-Hand picks up the axe, Blue-Eyes seizing Mischa and Hannibal screaming flies at him, gets his teeth into Blue-Eyes’ cheek, Mischa suspended in the air by her arms, twisting to look back at him.

  “Mischa, Mischa!”

  The cries ringing down the stone corridors and Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki burst into Hannibal’s room. He has ripped the pillow with his teeth and feathers are flying, Hannibal growls and screams, thrashing, fighting, gritting his teeth. Count Lecter puts his weight on him and confines the boy’s arms in the blanket, gets his knees on the blanket. “Easy, easy.”

  Fearing for Hannibal’s tongue, Lady Murasaki whips off the belt of her robe, holds his nose until he has to gasp, and gets the belt between his teeth.

  He shivers and is still, like a bird dies. Her robe has come open and she holds him against her, holds between her breasts his face wet with tears of rage, feathers stuck to his cheeks.

  But it is the count she asks, “Are you all right?”

  16

  HANNIBAL ROSE EARLY and washed his face at the bowl and pitcher on his nightstand. A little feather floated on the water. He had only a vague and jumbled memory of the night.

  Behind him he heard paper sliding over the stone floor, an envelope pushed under his door. A sprig of pussy willow was attached to the note. Hannibal held the note card to his face in his cupped hands before he read it.

  Hannibal,

  I will be most pleased if you call on me in my drawing room at the Hour of the Goat. (That is 10 a.m. in France.)

  Murasaki Shikibu

  Hannibal Lecter, thirteen, his hair slicked down with water, stood outside the closed door of the drawing room. He heard the lute. It was not the same song he had heard from the bath. He knocked.

  “Come.”

  He entered a combination workroom and salon, with a frame for needlework near the window and an easel for calligraphy.

  Lady Murasaki was seated at a low tea table. Her hair was up, held by ebony hairpins. The sleeves of her kimono whispered as she arranged flowers.

  Good manners from every culture mesh, having a common aim. Lady Murasaki acknowledged him with a slow and graceful inclination of her head.

  Hannibal inclined from the waist as his father had taught him. He saw a skein of blue incense smoke cross the window like a distant flight of birds, and the blue vein faint in Lady Murasaki’s forearm as she held a flower, the sun pink through her ear. Chiyoh’s lute sounded softly from behind a screen.

  Lady Murasaki invited him to sit opposite her. Her voice was a pleasant alto with a few random notes not found in the Western scale. To Hannibal, her speech sounded like accidental music in a wind chime.

  “If you do not want French or English or Italian, we could use some Japanese words, like kieuseru. It means ‘disappear.’ ” She placed a stem, raised her eyes from the flowers and looked into him. “My world of Hiroshima was gone in a flash. Your world was torn from you too. Now you and I have the world we make—together. In this moment. In this room.”

  She picked up other flowers from the mat beside her and placed them on the table beside the vase. Hannibal could hear the leaves rustling together, and the ripple of her sleeve as she offered him flowers.

  “Hannibal, where would you put these to best effect? Wherever you like.”

  Hannibal looked at the blossoms.

  “When you were small, your father sent us your drawings. You have a promising eye. If you prefer to draw the arrangement, use the pad beside you.”

  Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where the tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table.

  Lady Murasaki seemed pleased. “Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style.” She put the silky weight of a peony in his hand. “But where might you put this? Or would you use it at all?”

  In the fireplace, the water in the tea vessel seethed and came to a boil. Hannibal heard it, heard the water boiling, looked at the surface of the boiling water and his face changed and the room went away.

  Mischa’s bathtub on the stove in the hunting lodge, horned skull of the little deer banging against the tub in the roiling water as though it tried to butt its way out. Bones rattling in the tumbling water.

  Back at himself, back in Lady Murasaki’s room, and the head of the peony, bloody now, tumbled onto the tabletop, the knife clattering beside it. Hannibal mastered himself, got to his feet holding his bleeding hand behind him. He bowed to Lady Murasaki and started to leave the room.

  “Hannibal.”

  He opened the door.

  “Hannibal.” She was up and close to him quickly. She held out her hand to him, held his eyes with hers, did not touch him, beckoned with her fingers. She took his bloody hand and her touch registered in his eyes, a small change in the size of his pupils.

  “You will need stitches. Serge can drive us to town.”

  Hannibal shook his head and pointed with his chin at the needlework frame. Lady Murasaki looked into his face until she was sure.

  “Chiyoh, boil a needle and thread.”

  At the window, in the good light, Chiyoh brought Lady Murasaki a needle and thread wrapped around an ebony hairpin, steaming from the boiling tea water. Lady Murasaki held his hand steady and sewed up his finger, six neat stitches. Drops of blood fell onto the white silk of her kimono. Hannibal looked at her steadily as she worked. He showed no reaction to the pain. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

  He looked at the thread pulled tight, unwound from the hairpin. The arc of the needle’s eye was a function of the diameter of the hairpin, he thought. Pages of Huyghen
s scattered on the snow, stuck together with brains.

  Chiyoh applied an aloe leaf and Lady Murasaki bandaged his hand. When she returned his hand to him, Hannibal went to the tea table, picked up the peony and trimmed the stem. He added the peony to the vase, completing an elegant arrangement. He faced Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh.

  Across his face a movement like the shiver of water and he tried to say “Thank you.” She rewarded the effort with the smallest and best of smiles, but she did not let him try for long.

  “Would you come with me, Hannibal? And could you help me bring the flowers?”

  Together they climbed the attic stairs.

  The attic door had once served elsewhere in the house; a face was carved in it, a Greek comic mask. Lady Murasaki, carrying a candle lamp, led the way far down the vast attic, past a three-hundred-year collection of attic items, trunks, Christmas decorations, lawn ornaments, wicker furniture, Kabuki and Noh Theater costumes and a row of life-size marionettes for festivals hanging from a bar.

  Faint light came around the blackout shade of a dormer window far from the door. Her candle lit a small altar, a God shelf opposite the window. On the altar were pictures of her ancestors and of Hannibal’s. About the photographs was a flight of origami paper cranes, many cranes. Here was a picture of Hannibal’s parents on their wedding day. Hannibal looked at his mother and father closely in the candlelight. His mother looked very happy. The only flame was on his candle—her clothes were not on fire.

  Hannibal felt a presence looming beside him and above him and he peered into the dark. As Lady Murasaki raised the blind over the dormer window, the morning light rose over Hannibal, and over the dark presence beside him, rose over armored feet, a war fan held in gauntlets, a breastplate and at last the iron mask and horned helmet of a samurai commander. The armor was seated on the raised platform. The samurai’s weapons, the long and short swords, a tanto dagger and a war axe, were on a stand before the armor.