Memories

Meeting Clarice Starling

He could smell her from the end of the corridor. Another test subject of Chilton's sent to poke at his brain; a woman, because they liked to send him women, thinking perhaps they could nudge some feeling out of him. He made them cry. She smelled of Evyan skin cream, soft leather and nylon with frayed seams. Here she was. He didn't look up from his book until she spoke, pressed his finger against his lips in thought: "Dr Lecter."

Clarice Starling was a small, almost plain woman. There was a strength in her compact body, her hands well formed, callouses from the firing range, and a air of defiance about her; a woman fighting to keep her head above water in a man's world. One of Jack Crawford's. "My name is Clarice Starling," she said. "May I talk with you." So polite. Good. He rose and walked to her, stopping at a conversational distance. Between the two of them there were nets and bars, but in his mind he could whip them away, imagine that they were standing toe to toe, if he so wished.

"Good morning," he said, and she came closer. Came closer. He could almost smell her rising fear now, but her response was challenge, and even as Hannibal noticed it, he never acknowledged it.

"Doctor, we have a hard problem in psychological profiling. I want to ask you for your help." Aha. More straightforward than Will. This time there was no dance, no false flags. A lesson learned.

"'We' being Behavioral Science at Quantico. You're one of Jack Crawford's, I expect."

"I am, yes." He didn't need her answer, but keeping two steps ahead let him control the conversation. He asked her for her credentials, expecting to shake her, and naturally it did. She hadn't expected him to ask, but was too polite to refuse. "I showed them at the--" A hesitation. "Office."

Lecter was cold and direct. He had her in the palm of his hand. "You mean you showed them to Frederick Chilton, Ph.D?" An affirmative. "And did you see his credentials?" Of course not. "The academic ones don't make extensive reading, I can tell you. Did you meet Alan? Isn't he charming? Which of them had you rather talk with?"

He was the one asking the questions now, she answering them. This was what he'd wanted from the beginning. "On the whole, I'd say Alan."

"You could be a reporter Chilton let in for money. I think I'm entitled to see your credentials." She assented, cornered now, and showed him her freshly minted laminate. A gust of perfume erupted from her bag as she removed the card. He asked her to send it through, which of course she couldn't. It was against the rules. He instructed her to call Barney, and the kindly old orderly joined them. A black gentleman with a soft spoken kindness about him. He was never rude, even though he was underpaid. Just an orderly, but he did his job right, and without prejudice.

"Dr. Lecter. I'll let this come through. But if you don't return it when I ask you to--if we have to bother everybody and secure you to get it--then I'll be upset. If you upset me, you'll have to stay bundled up until I feel better toward you. Meals through the tube, dignity pants changed twice a day--the works. And I'll hold your mail for a week. Got it?" See? To the letter, but not out of any kind of power trip. He agreed to the terms, and the card was passed through on a tray. Hannibal took it, examining it in the light, smelled it, and tapped the hard plastic pleasantly against his teeth. Such sensations were rare; few and far between. A trainee, it said. A trainee laminate with an expiry date. Crawford must have some faith in this one to send her to him; faith like he'd once had in Will Graham.

"A trainee?" he asked, as though Clarice could tell him why. "It says 'trainee'. Jack Crawford sent a trainee to interview me?" And perhaps it was meant to make her feel small, too. Unworthy. Barney's soft warning ended his consideration, and Hannibal returned the card, but in the meantime Clarice had rallied, and he could see it in her eyes. She was used to people talking down at her for one reason or another, and she was armed to the teeth with justification. Attacking her competence cut her in a familiar place. She was ready for him.

"I'm still training at the Academy, yes," Starling said, "but we're not discussing the F.B.I.--we're talking about psychology. Can you decide for yourself if I'm qualified in what we talk about?"

Oh, that was clever, sneaky and underhanded in a way Lecter wholly appreciated. Clarice did not claim to be a psychologist, that was why she was here. Her position in the F.B.I. was irrelevant to the conversation, and in the same moment, she earned herself enough respect from Lecter to deserve an extended conversation. As Lecter was forced to reconsider the direction of the conversation and his mastery over it, he hummed, and paused. "That's very slippery of you. Barney, do you think Officer Starling might have a chair."

"Dr. Chilton didn't tell me anything about a chair." He was pleasant, yes, but a little slow.

Hannibal chided him. "What do your manners tell you, Barney?"

There. It was impolite not to offer a seat to a young lady, and a breath of oxygen reached the candle of his intelligence, somewhere deep inside his mind. Hannibal had been giving him lessons. "Would you like a chair?" Barney asked, after a moment. "We could have had one, but he never--well, usually nobody needs to stay that long." What he meant to say was that Hannibal ignored or chased off his visitors, but she would know that. She would have read the files. She agreed, politely, and Hannibal knew that she understood his gesture. Barney brought her a folding chair.

"Now," Lecter said, sitting sideways on his table to face her, "What did Miggs say to you?" His conversation, his question. He knew, but he wanted her to say it. "Multiple Miggs, in the cell down there. He hissed at you. What did he say?"

"He said, 'I can smell your cunt.'" She was firm, answering a question only. He appreciated that, but it was a good measure of how much it would take to unsettle her. He had the measure of her now.

"I see. I myself cannot. You use Evyan skin cream, and sometimes you wear L'Air du Temps, but not today. Today you are determinedly unperfumed. How do you feel about what Miggs said?"

"He's hostile for reasons I couldn't know. It's too bad. He's hostile to people, people are hostile to him. It's a loop."

"Are you hostile to him?"

"I'm sorry he's disturbed. Beyond that, he's noise. How did you know about the perfume?"

"A puff from your bag when you got out your card. Your bag is lovely." She thanked him. "You brought your best bag, didn't you?" He let her assent, and slipped in for the kill. "It's much better than your shoes."

She was ready for him. "Maybe they'll catch up." Hannibal agreed. She asked about his drawings, a foolishly constructed question. "Did you do the drawings on your walls, Doctor?" Well, of course he had, did she think he'd called in a decorator? Starling didn't miss a beat. "The one over the sink is a European city?"

"It's Florence. That's the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, seen from the Belvedere."

"Did you do it from memory, all the detail?"

"Memory, Officer Starling, is what I have instead of a view."

She eyed another image. "The other one is a crucifixion. The middle cross is empty."

"It's Golgotha after the Deposition. Crayon and Magic Marker on butcher paper. It's what the thief who had been promised Paradise really got, when they took the paschal lamb away."

"And what was that?" She didn't know. He pitied her, but at least she offered him curiosity. It wasn't that she didn't want to learn; learning was how she proved she was better than her birth.

"His legs broken, of course, just like his companion who mocked Christ. Are you entirely innocent of the Gospel of St. John? Look at Duccio, then--he paints accurate crucifixion. How is Will Graham? How does he look?"

"I don't know Will Graham." Well, that was too bad. She hadn't studied everything, then. He regretted that. Outside information and his own deductions were all the clues he had to the man's fall from grace.

"You know who he is. Jack Crawford's protege. The one before you. How does his face look?" It was almost a threat, a reminder. I can reach you in here.

"I've never seen him."

"This is called 'cutting up a few old touches,' Officer Starling, you don't mind, do you?"

---------------

Will Graham's attack

"I understand your consternation, Will. It disagrees with me that a killer like this is out there, when you and I both know how rarely such men are caught--at least for the crime of murder."

"I know. I know--burglary, maybe. Breaking and entering. Someone will bring him in on a lesser charge, the Ripper files will get mothballed and we'll have to pick up all over again in two years time, but probably only after half a dozen more people are dead. Only after they pick up the pattern again."

"Four murders in ten days."

"Which is why I thought maybe there was something new, something we could use. I almost thought I had it, but it slipped away." Ah, so that was why Will was here. He was close. He visited Lecter because it had given him a scent; he just didn't know why.

Hannibal regarded Will Graham with a professional gaze, his head tilted to one side. Will was smart, but he had sat in the room with Hannibal - with the killer he was hunting - and so far nothing had come of it. He knew it was lurking there though. Will worked his cases by empathy and projection. He absorbed the men he was chasing, lost himself in them, so that there were only blurred lines of morality holding him back from murder himself. All it would take was the right trigger; for most sociopaths it came when one was a child. Will had somehow survived his childhood, and so here he stood, Jack Crawford's pet project.

Will Graham looked comfortable in his office because the killer he hunted, the killer he projected himself onto, was Hannibal himself. His office felt familiar, homely, as if he belonged here. That was the clue that disturbed him. And Hannibal baited it because he enjoyed it.

All games, though, had to end.

Will's eyes drifted again across the lines of antique books that adorned his office shelves. It was warmly decorated; his ancient texts, his elegant Georgian desk, a Moroccan silk carpet, a bronze stag, a miniature of Venus, a small painting sat on the wall beside the window, protected from the light by thick, luxurious curtains. He saw something, then. His miswired mind forged a connection, and Will Graham knew.

When he met Hannibal's eyes again, it was obvious. Friendly, amiable, coworkers crunching down on the same problem--it had dissolved in an instant. No longer was this a conversation between equals, both after the same thing, and if Will thought he could make such a realisation and hide it, he would be a fool. Will Graham had never and would never be such a thing. He knew, and his was the face of understanding, looking into the eyes of a killer with only a desk between them. There was too much to quantify. Will needed time. He couldn't work his way through it. He probably didn't even know how he knew, yet.

Will Graham needed space, and he would call for help, and he would need an answer when dispatch came running as to why he called them. He knew, but convincing another person was another matter. It gave Hannibal time. He didn't have the chaos in his mind that Will had. Everything was ordered stillness. He had been born ready for this moment, expected it. A predator couched among the tall grasses, he set his prey on edge, then moved in for the kill as they lost their heads.

"If you will excuse me. I have to make a call."

"Certainly. There's a public phone in the waiting room. Do you have any change?"

Will didn't acknowledge whether or not he'd even heard Lecter, he simply stood and left. There was fear in the air, pupils constricted, skin pale, already clammy. Lecter watched him leave without rising--

--And toed off his shoes.

There was a linoleum knife in his desk drawer. He slid it into his sleeve, so that if he stepped out into the hall and Will was not at the phone, he might conceal it. As expected, Will was on the phone, his eyes fixed on the main office door. In his panic he had forgotten that there was another exit. The room had a second door to another room, a service door that opened out into the hallway far behind him, each catch well oiled and silent, and even if it wasn't the sound of the blood pounding in Graham's ears would deafen him. Hannibal made it to his side.

The first moment, the knife went exactly where Hannibal intended it to, deep, just above Graham's hip. He pinned him against the wall. The phone, he carefully returned to its bracket with his other hand. Graham had a gun, but he hadn't had the sense to draw it, and now he fumbled, his eyes wide, the warmth of blood about Hannibal's hand, the scent of it, coppery and sweet, singing in the air. He had missed any vital organs, but only for the time being.

"Don't move. You're in shock now. I don't want you to feel any pain." It was the least he could do. Graham didn't have to suffer, and this way he would at least be conscious, at least understand how close he'd come, only to lose. "In a moment, you'll begin to feel lightheaded, then drowsy." Will sank against him, heavy, and Hannibal held his weight easily. "Don't resist. It's so gentle, like slipping into a warm bath."

He was weakening. Now was the moment; Hannibal could feel it, feel the heartbeat against his knife. There'd be gentle unconsciousness, no excess spill of blood, nothing impossible to clean up. Will wouldn't spill every drop onto the floorboards, and it would make the rest of the night easier. There was too much risk if the scene of the crime was found. He hiked up the knife, pulled it through flesh and muscle until it notched into Will Graham's rib. There was an intense rush now, where only stillness had been before. Hannibal felt alive, taking away the life of another. "I regret it came to this, Will, but every game must have its ending."

He breathed it in, treasured it. Crawford would come knocking, but Hannibal would think about that later. He was in this moment now, plastering it in blood to the walls of his memory palace.

"Remarkable boy. I do admire your courage. I think I'll eat your heart." He drew back the knife, and in his blood frenzy, underestimated what strength Will had left. He reached for his gun, and Hannibal slashed at his belly with the knife, but it was too late. The gun sounded, knocked him back. It kept firing until the clip was empty, but Hannibal was falling, blossomed pain against his collarbone sending everything into blackness.

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Mason Verger feeds his face to the dogs

Mason Verger was a disgusting man, twisting the world, twisting the law, to suit him. He had been saved a prison sentence in exchange for five hundred hours community service, a job at the dog pound and time with Hannibal Lecter. He'd told him everything, every disgusting detail, knowing he was protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. But there was no piece of paper signed that agreed to protect him from Hannibal Lecter himself.

He let Verger tie his own noose. Literally.

It was a luxurious, expensive house in Owings Mills. Verger, beautiful and cruel, came to the door in leather, the scent of it offensive. Hannibal could smell the dogs the moment he came inside, smell sex and blood and violence. It offended his nose, but he came in anyway. Verger expected a reaction from him, expected fear, but Hannibal gave him only calm, professional indifference. He followed him upstairs at his invitation, and there they were, two dogs.

"An experiment," he crowed, and explained. Two dogs from the pound, good friends. Verger had locked them in together with fresh water but no food. The smell of them, the sight of them, hungry and miserable, tortured creatures, was more offensive still. Hannibal considered Verger again. He deserved to die. It was a risk, killing a patient, but this one - this one deserved it. But the dogs were hungry. Hannibal would be sure that they ate. He knew how it felt to starve, knew--

No, he wouldn't think of that. The dogs would eat their captor and gain their freedom. No more prison, no more hunger, no more cage. Hannibal wanted to reach across and strangle Verger himself, but that was unnecessary. Verger could do it to himself.

"What's that?" he asked, instead, indicating the noose set up above the bed. Verger explained what it was for - autoerotic asphyxiation - but Hannibal feigned not understanding. "Show me," he demanded.

He thinks he has me wrapped around his finger. Good, let him think that.

Hannibal took a seat, well out in the corner of the room, and watched as Verger pulled himself in front of the mirror, slid the noose down around his neck. Two hands, one on the other end of the rope, slung down through a ring in the ceiling above, the other wrapped around his erection. He worked himself; it was truly a banal sight, but Hannibal watched it clinically, observed, and was observed in turn. Verger was used to having his way. He blackmailed people and used them; he couldn't know Lecter's plan.

He rose to his feet, and offered him a tablet, a personal concoction. Verger accepted of course; if Hannibal gave him drugs, he could blackmail him into giving him more, or expose him to the authorities. Foolish boy. Angel dust, metamphetamines and acid, just some of the ingredients; a mixture of drugs that would act fast and leave Verger completely susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. When he'd taken it, Hannibal broke the mirror, took out a shard and handed it to Verger politely. The glass was cold and sharp in his fingertips; it cut Verger's hand, but he didn't seem to notice.

"I want you to cut off your face," he said, and undid the lock on the cage. "And feed it to the dogs."

And Verger politely obeyed. He didn't feel pain; he was high as a kite, and the dogs were eager and hungry, gathering up the scraps with delight. They gathered around his ankles, looked up with the hunger of wolves, not the fond affection of pets, and ate all that they were offered. When Mason cut off his nose, Hannibal paused his progress.

"Don't you want to try some yourself? Go ahead."

The cartilage crunched, and Verger chewed the morsel up and swallowed, delighted: "Tastes just like chicken!" he explained. Hannibal locked the sound away in his memory palace. It amused him.

He took the rope from Mason, curled one hand low and the other high, and snapped down the rope hard enough to break his neck, then turned and left him for dead, left the dogs to their vengeful feast.

------------

Pazzi

He had been betrayed, sold, and that was very rude. It was already decided. Pazzi, of course, would come for another look, and Lecter knew it would be tonight. He was part way through his lecture when Pazzi arrived.

"Ah, Commendator Pazzi, welcome. Since you are nearest to the door, would you be kind enough to dim the lights? You will be interested in this, Commendatore, as there are two Pazzis already in Dante's Inferno." There was dry, mocking laughter from his students, professors of the Studiolo themselves. "There is Camicion de' Pazzi, who murdered a kinsman, and he is expecting the arrival of a second Pazzi--but it's not you--it's Carlino, who will be placed even farther down in Hell for treachery and betrayal of the White Guelphs, the part of Dante himself."

He was speaking about Pazzi's betrayal of course, but there were always safe allegories in history, in literature. There was a little bat in the room, and as it darkened, it began to hunt in the light of the projector, where it cast onto a heavy curtain that Hannibal had spread out like a canvas screen.

"Avarice and hanging, then, linked since antiquity, the image appearing again and again in art." Dr. Lecter touched a switch in his palm, and the projector threw the first image into place, and then the others in turn. "Here is the earliest known depiction of the Crucifixion, carved on an ivory box in Gaul about A.D. 400. It includes the death by hanging of Judas, his face turned up to the branch that suspends him. And here on a reliquary casket of Milan, 4th century, and an ivory diptych of the 9th century, Judas hanging. He's still looking up.

"In this plate from the doors of the Benevento Cathedral, we see Judas hanging with his bowels falling out as St. Luke, the physician, described him in the Acts of the Apostles. Here he hangs beset by Harpies, above him in the sky is the face of Cain-in-the-Moon; and here he's depicted by your own Giotto, again with pendant viscera.

"And finally, here, from the 15th century edition of the Inferno, is Pier della Vigna's body hanging from a bleeding tee. I will not belabor the obvious parallel with Judas Iscariot.

But Dante needed no drawn illustration: It is the genius of Dante Alghieri to make Pier della Vigna, now in Hell, speak in strained hisses and coughing sibilants as though he is hanging still. Listen to him as he tells of dragging, with the other damned, his own dead body to hang upon a thorn tree:

He replicates the rasping hiss, a difficult task, but an excess intended to delight his present audience. He is being judged by them, and he will earn their applause. The blocking of his own esophagus makes him breathless, reddens his cheek, but the effect is perfect, as he clicks through the images again.

'Surge in vermena e in pianta silvestra:
l'Arpie, pascendo poi de le sue foglie,
fanna dolore, e al dolor fenestra.
Come l'altre verrem per nostre spoglie,
ma non pero ch'alcuna sen rivestra,
che non e giusto aver cio ch'om si toglie.
Qui le strascineremo, e per la mesta
selva saranno i nostri corpi appesi,
ciascuno al prun de l'ombra sua molesta.
Io fei gibetto a me de le mie case.

"And I--I made my own house be my gallows."

"On the next occasion you might like to discuss Dante's son Pietro. Incredibly, he was the only one of the early writers on the thirteenth canto who links Pier della Vigna and Judas. I think, too, it would be interesting to take up the matter of chewing in Dante. Count Ugolino chewing on the back of the archbishop's head, Satan with his three faces chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius, all betrayers like Pier della Vigna.

"Thank you for your kind attention."

There was enthusiastic applause, and Lecter moved among them with the lights still down, holding books to his chest so as not to have to shake their hands, but wishing them individual thanks and goodbyes by name. Only Pazzi stayed, the greed and fear and anticipation a particular scent on him, even as the conversation descended down the stairs.

"Would you say that I saved my job, Commendatore?"

"I'm no scholar, Doctor, but anyone can see that you impressed them. Doctor, if it's convenient for you, I'll walk home with you and collect your predecessor's effects."

No, that wouldn't do. He wanted him out in the street with the wolves. That was where it would happen. They wouldn't expect him to be one step ahead - and he would be. Pazzi would not leave the building. But how to do it?

"They fill two suitcases, Commendatore, and you already have your briefcase. Do you want to carry them?"

"I'll have a patrol car come for me at the Palazzo Capponi." He had no answer for that, and agreed. So it would have to be now, and he could only use what he had at hand. Pazzi would be ready. He would have his .380 at hand in a moment, fear making him quick to fire first. Hannibal knew, and Pazzi did not know he knew. He wasn't as smart as Will, dull witted and in debt. He excused himself, and Pazzi went to make a call. He would be calling the men sent to kill him; Mason's men, who had put up such a high reward for information leading to his capture.

Lecter could not hear him, but he didn't need to. He gathered his books into a bag, then shifted an image onto the projector screen. "I should have shown them this one," he said. "I can't imagine how I missed it." It was a simple drawing, but small, a man naked hanging beneath the battlements of the palace. "This one will interest you, Commendatore Pazzi, let me see if I can improve the focus."

Pazzi would only have to be decent a little longer. He approached the screen, but was careful not to approach Lecter himself. He was in place now.

"Can you make this out? It won't enlarge any more. Here's where the archbishop bit him. And beneath him is written his name. Can you make out the characters? It says 'Pazzi' along with a rude poem. This is your ancestor, Francesco, hanging outside the Palazzo Vecchio, beneath these windows." He met Pazzi's eyes. There, the prey responded. Its slow mind didn't know quite how it had came to be under the predator's claws. Hannibal didn't smile, he didn't move, his head was still tilted somewhat to the left.

His tone didn't change as he continued to speak.

"On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife."

His left hand pulled down on the cloth, and the heavy canvas fell, swinging down on Pazzi's head before he quite knew what was happening. Lecter had a cloth in his hand from the podium within moments, seized Pazzi around the neck and pressed an ether soaked sponge up against his face. They fought for a moment, falling to the ground in a heap of cloth, and a shot, muffled by flesh and fabric, hummed in the room, unheard beyond. Pazzi shot himself in the thigh, and his cry only smothered him further, and then he fell very still in Hannibal's arms.

tbc




-------------

Escape



--------------

Letter

Dear Clarice,
I have followed with enthusiasm the course of your disgrace and public shaming. My own never bothered me, except for the inconvenience of being incarcerated, but you may lack perspective.
In our discussions down in the dungeon, it was apparent to me that your father, the dead night watchman, figures large in your value system. I think your success in putting an end to Jame Gumb's career as a couturier pleased you most because you could imagine your father doing it.
Now you are in bad odour with the FBI. Have you always imagined your father ahead of you there, have you imagined him a section chief, of--better even than Jack Crawford--a DEPUTY DIRECTOR, watching your progress with pride? And now do you see him shamed and crushed by your disgrace? Your failure? The sorry, petty end of a promising career? Do you see yourself foing the menial tasks your mother was reduced to, after the addicts busted a cap on your DADDY? Hmmmm? Will your failure reflect on them, will people forever wrongly believe that your parents were trailer camp tornado bait white trash? Tell me truly, Special Agent Starling.
Give it a moment before we proceed.
Now I will show you a quality you have that will help you: You are not blinded by tears, you have the onions to read on.
Here's an exercise you might find useful. I want you physically to do this with me:
Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can't imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.
Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother's skillet, and it may well be, it would hold among the molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts of poetry and love.
Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is well cured, it's a black pool, isn't it? It's like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not at the bottom, but you loom there, don't you? The light behind you, there you are in blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire.
We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It's all still there. Listen. How did they really sound, and live--your struggling parents? The concrete memories, not the imagi that swell in your heart.
Why was your father not a deputy sheriff, in tight with the courthouse crowd? Why did your mother clean motels to keep you, even if she failed to keep you all together until you were grown?
What is your most vivid memory of the kitchen? Not the hospital, the kitchen.
What is your best memory in the kitchen?
Your father, Clarice, was a night watchman. Your mother was a chambermaid.
Was a big federal career your hope or theirs? How much would your father bend to get along in a stale bureaucracy? How many buttocks would he kiss? Did you ever in your life see him toady or fawn?
Have your supervisors demonstrated any values, Clarice? How about your parents, did they demonstrate any? If so, are those values the same?
Look into the honest iron and tell me. Have you failed your dead family? You can be as strong as you wish to be.
You are a warrior, Clarice. The enemy is dead, the baby sage. You are a warrior.
The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

Hannibal Lecter.

P.S. You still owe me some information, you know. Yell me if you still wake up hearing the lambs. On any Sunday pleace an ad in the agony column of the national edition of the Times, the International Herald-Tribune, and the China Mail. Address it to A.A.Aaron so it will be first, and sign it Hannah.

-------------

Dr. Lecter takes up the bright tabloid from a pile of parchments and looks at the picture of Clarice Starling on the cover, touches her face with his finger. The bright blade appears in his hand as though he had sprouted it to replace his sixth finger. The knife is called a Harpy and it has a serrated blade shaped like a talon. It slices as easily through the National Tattler as it sliced through the Gypsy's femoral artery--the blade was in the Gypsy and gone so quickly Dr. Lecter did not even need to wipe it.

Dr Lecter cuts out the image of Clarice Starling's face and glues it on a piece of blank parchment.

He picked up a pen and, with a fluid ease, draws on the parchment the body of a winged lioness, a griffon, with Starling's face. Beneath it, he writes in his distinctive copperplate, Did you ever think, Clarice, why the philistines don't understand you? It's because you're the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.


------------


Jakov's Lessons

The lodge was well stocked with flour and sugar to last through the first winter, but most importantly it had salt in casks. In the second winter they came upon a dead and frozen horse. They were able to cut it up with axes and salt the meat. They salted trout as well, and partridges.

Sometimes men in civilian clothes came out of the forest in the night, quiet as shadows. Count Lecter and Berndt talked with them in Lithuanian, and once they brought a man with blood soaked through his shirt, who died on a pallet in the corner while Nanny was mopping his face.

Every day when the snow was too deep to forage, Mr. Jakov gave lessons.

He taught English, and very bad French, he taught Roman history with a heavy emphasis on the sieges of Jerusalem, and everyone attended. He made dramatic tales out of historical events, and Old Testament stories, sometimes embellishing them for his audience beyond the strict bounds of scholarship.

He instructed Hannibal in mathematics privately, as the lessons had reached a level inaccessible to the others.

Among Mr. Jakov's books was a copy bound in leather of Christiaan Huyghens ' Treatise on Light, and Hannibal was fascinated with it, with following the movement of Huyghens ' mind, feeling him moving toward discovery. He associated the Treatise on Light with the glare of the snow and the rainbow distortions in the old windowpanes. The elegance of Huyghens ' thought was like the clean and simplified lines of winter, the structure under the leaves. A box opening with a click and inside, a principle that works every time. It was a dependable thrill, and he had been feeling it since he could read.

Hannibal Lecter could always read, or it seemed that way to Nanny. She read to him for a brief period when he was two, often from a Brothers Grimm illustrated with woodcuts where everyone had pointed toenails. He listened to Nanny reading, his head lolling against her while he looked at the words on the page, and then she found him at it by himself, pressing his forehead to the book and then pushing up to focal distance, reading aloud in Nanny's accent.

Hannibal 's father had one salient emotion-curiosity. In his curiosity about his son, Count Lecter had the houseman pull down the heavy dictionaries in the castle library. English, German, and the twenty-three volumes of the Lithuanian dictionary, and then Hannibal was on his own with the books.

When he was six, three important things happened to him.

First he discovered Euclid 's Elements, in an old edition with hand-drawn illustrations. He could follow the illustrations with his finger, and put his forehead against them.

That fall he was presented with a baby sister, Mischa. He thought Mischa looked like a wrinkled red squirrel. He reflected privately that it was a pity she did not get their mother's looks.

Usurped on all fronts, he thought how convenient it would be if the eagle that sometimes soared over the castle should gather his little sister up and gently transport her to some happy peasant home in a country far away, where the residents all looked like squirrels and she would fit right in. At the same time, he found he loved her in a way he could not help, and when she was old enough to wonder, he wanted to show her things, he wanted her to have the feeling of discovery.

Also in the year Hannibal was six, Count Lecter found his son determining the height of the castle towers by the length of their shadows, following instructions which he said came directly from Euclid himself. Count Lecter improved his tutors then-within six weeks arrived Mr. Jakov, a penniless scholar from Leipzig.

Count Lecter introduced Mr. Jakov to his pupil in the library and left them. The library in warm weather had a cold-smoked aroma that was ingrained in the castle's stone.

"My father says you will teach me many things."

"If you wish to learn many things, I can help you."

"He tells me you are a great scholar."

"I am a student."

"He told my mother you were expelled from the university."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I am a Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew to be precise."

"I see. Are you unhappy?"

"To be a Jew? No, I'm glad."

"I meant are you unhappy to be out of school?"

"I am glad to be here."

"Do you wonder if I am worth your time?"

"Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him."

"Did they put you in the room with an iron grate over the door?"

"Yes, they did."

"It doesn't lock anymore."

"I was pleased to see that."

"That's where they kept Uncle Elgar," Hannibal said, aligning his pens in a row before him. "It was in the 1880s, before my time. Look at the windowpane in your room. It has a date he scratched with a diamond into the glass. These are his books."

A row of immense leather tomes occupied an entire shelf. The last one was charred.

"The room will have a smoky smell when it rains. The walls were lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances."

"Did you say his utterances?"

"They were about religion, but-do you know the meaning of 'lewd' or lewdness'?"

"Yes."

"I'm not clear on it myself, but I believe it means the sort of thing one wouldn't say in front of Mother."

"That's my understanding of it as well," Mr. Jakov said.

"If you'll look at the date on the glass, it's exactly the day direct sunlight reaches his window every year."

"He was waiting for the sun."

"Yes, and that's the day he burned up in there. As soon as he got sunlight, he lit the hay with the monocle he wore as he composed these books."

Hannibal further acquainted his tutor with Lecter Castle with a tour of the grounds. They passed through the courtyard, with its big block of stone. A hitching ring was in the stone and, in its flat top, the scars of an axe.

"Your father said you measured the height of the towers."

"Yes."

"How high are they?"

"Forty meters, the south one, and the other is a half-meter shorter."

"What did you use for a gnomon?"

"The stone. By measuring the stone's height and its shadow, and measuring the shadow of the castle at the same hour."

"The side of the stone is not exactly vertical."

"I used my yo-yo as a plumb."

"Could you take both measurements at once?"

"No, Mr. Jakov."

"How much error might you have from the time between the shadow measurements?"

"A degree every four minutes as the earth turns. It's called the Ravenstone. Nanny calls it the Rabenstein. She is forbidden to seat me on it."

"I see," Mr. Jakov said. "It has a longer shadow than I thought."

They fell into a pattern of having discussions while walking and Hannibal, stumping along beside him, watched his tutor adjust to speaking to someone much shorter. Often Mr. Jakov turned his head to the side and spoke into the air above Hannibal, as though he had forgotten he was talking with a child. Hannibal wondered if he missed walking and talking with someone his own age.

Hannibal was interested to see how Mr. Jakov got along with the houseman, Lothar, and Berndt the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind.

Hannibal saw that Mr. Jakov made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free time, he was teaching them how to survey with a makeshift transit. Mr. Jakov took his meals with Cook, from whom he extracted a certain amount of rusty Yiddish, to the surprise of the family.

The parts of an ancient catapult used by Hannibal the Grim against the Teutonic Knights were stored in a barn on the property, and on Hannibal's birthday Mr. Jakov, Lothar and Berndt put the catapult together, substituting a stout new timber for the throwing arm. With it they threw a hogshead of water higher than the castle, it falling to burst with a wonderful explosion of water on the far bank of the moat that sent the wading birds flapping away.

In that week, Hannibal had the keenest single pleasure of his childhood.

As a birthday treat Mr. Jakov showed him a non-mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem using tiles and their impression on a bed of sand.

Hannibal looked at it, walked around it. Mr. Jakov lifted one of the tiles and raised his eyebrows, asking if Hannibal wanted to see the proof again. And Hannibal got it. He got it with a rush that felt like he was being launched off the catapult.

Mr. Jakov rarely brought a textbook to their discussions, and rarely referred to one. At the age of eight, Hannibal asked him why.

"Would you like to remember everything?" Mr. Jakov said.

"Yes."

"To remember is not always a blessing."

"I would like to remember everything."

"Then you will need a mind palace, to store things in. A palace in your mind."

"Does it have to be a palace?"

"It will grow to be enormous like a palace," Mr. Jakov said. "So it might as well be beautiful. What is the most beautiful room you know, a place you know very well?"

"My mother's room," Hannibal said.

"Then that's where we will begin," Mr. Jakov said.

Twice Hannibal and Mr. Jakov watched the sun touch Uncle Elgar's window in the spring, but by the third year they were hiding in the woods.


---------------


Lady Murasaki discovers the butcher


A dark object stood on the altar before the armor. She saw it in silhouette against the candles. She set her candle lamp on a crate near the altar and looked steadily at the head of Paul the Butcher standing in a shallow suiban flower vessel. Paul's face is clean and pale, his lips are intact, but his cheeks are missing and a little blood has leaked from his mouth into the flower vessel, where blood stands like the water beneath a flower arrangement. A tag is attached to Paul's hair. On the tag in a copperplate hand: Momund, Boucherie de Qualite.

Paul's head faced the armor, the eyes upturned to the samurai mask. Lady Murasaki turned her face up too and spoke in Japanese.

"Good evening, Honored Ancestor. Please excuse this inadequate bouquet.

With all respect, this is not the type of help I had in mind."

Automatically she picked up a wilted flower and ribbon from the floor and put it in her sleeve, her eyes moving all the while. The long sword was in its place, and the war axe. The short sword was missing from its stand.

She took a step backward, went to the dormer window and opened it. She took a deep breath. Her pulse sounded in her ears. The breeze fluttered her robe and the candles.

A soft rattle from behind the Noh costumes. One of the masks had eyes in it, watching her.

She said in Japanese, "Good evening, Hannibal."

Out of the darkness came the reply in Japanese, "Good evening, my lady."

"May we continue in English, Hannibal? There are matters I prefer to keep private from my ancestor."

"As you wish, my lady. In any case, we have exhausted my Japanese."

He came into the lamplight then, carrying the short sword and a cleaning cloth. She went toward him. The long sword was in its rack before the armor. She could reach it if she had to.

"I would have used the butcher's knife," Hannibal said. "I used Masamune-dono's sword because it seemed so appropriate. I hope you don't mind. Not a nick in the blade, I promise you. The butcher was like butter."

"I am afraid for you."

"Please don't be concerned. I'll dispose of... that."

"You did not need to do this for me."

"I did it for myself, because of the worth of your person, Lady Murasaki. No onus on you at all. I think Masamune-dono permitted the use of his sword. It's an amazing instrument, really."

Hannibal returned the short sword to its sheath and with a respectful gesture to the armor, replaced it on its stand.

"You are trembling," he said. "You are in perfect possession of yourself, but you are trembling like a bird. I would not have approached you without flowers. I love you, Lady Murasaki."

Below, outside the courtyard, the two-note cry of a French police siren, sounded only once.



---------------


Inspector Popil's warnings


THE EMBALMING ROOM was dark, and silent except for a slow drip in the sink. The inspector stood in the doorway with Hannibal, raindrops on their shoulders and their shoes.

Momund was in there. Hannibal could smell him. He waited for Popil to turn on the light, interested to see what the policeman would consider a dramatic interval.

"Do you think you would recognize Paul Momund if you saw him again?"

"I'll do my best, Inspector."

Popil switched on the light. The mortician had removed Momund's clothing and put it in paper bags as instructed. He had closed the abdomen with coarse stitching over a piece of rubber raincoat, and placed a towel over the severed neck.

"Do you remember the butcher's tattoo?"

Hannibal walked around the body. "Yes. I hadn't read it."

The boy looked at Inspector Popil across the body. He saw in the inspector's eyes the smudged look of intelligence.

"What does it say?" the inspector asked.

"Here's mine, where's yours?"

"Perhaps it should say, Here's yours, where's mine? Here is your first kill, where is my head? What do you think?"

"I think that's probably unworthy of you. I would hope so. Do you expect his wounds to bleed in my presence?"

"What did this butcher say to the lady that drove you crazy?"

"It did not drive me crazy, Inspector. His mouth offended everyone who heard it, including me. He was rude."

"What did he say, Hannibal?"

"He asked if it were true that Japanese pussy runs sideways, Inspector.

His address was 'Hey, Japonnaise!'"

"Sideways." Inspector Popil traced the line of stitches across Paul Momund's abdomen, nearly touching the skin. "Sideways like this?" The inspector scanned Hannibal 's face for something. He did not find it. He did not find anything, so he asked another question.

"How do you feel, seeing him dead?"

Hannibal looked under the towel covering the neck. "Detached," he said.

The polygraph set up in the police station was the first the village policemen had seen, and there was considerable curiosity about it. The operator, who had come from Paris with Inspector Popil, made a number of adjustments, some purely theatrical, as the tubes warmed up and the insulation added a hot-cotton smell to the atmosphere of sweat and cigarettes. Then the inspector, watching Hannibal watching the machine, cleared the room of everyone but the boy, himself and the operator. The polygrapher attached the instrument to Hannibal.

"State your name," the operator said.

" Hannibal Lecter." The boy's voice was rusty.

"What is your age?"

"Thirteen years."

The ink styluses ran smoothly over the polygraph paper.

"How long have you been a resident of France?"

"Six months."

"Were you acquainted with the butcher Paul Momund?"

"We were never introduced."

The styluses did not quiver.

"But you knew who he was."

"Yes."

"Did you have an altercation, that is a fight, with Paul Momund at the market on Thursday?"

"Yes."

"Do you attend school?"

"Yes."

"Does your school require uniforms?"

"No."

"Do you have any guilty knowledge of the death of Paul Momund?"

"Guilty knowledge?"

"Limit your responses to yes or no."

"No."

The peaks and valleys in the ink lines are constant. No increase in blood pressure, no increase in heartbeat, respiration constant and calm.

"You know that the butcher is dead."

"Yes."

The polygrapher appeared to make several adjustments to the knobs of the machine.

"Have you studied mathematics?"

"Yes."

"Have you studied geography?"

"Yes."

"Did you see the dead body of Paul Momund?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill Paul Momund?"

"No."

No distinctive spikes in the inked lines. The operator took off his glasses, a signal to Inspector Popil that ended the examination.

Inspector Popil and Hannibal sat in the commandant's office. Inspector Popil read the label on the commandant's bottle of Clanzoflat and considered taking a dose.

Then he put the roll of polygraph tape on the desk and pushed it with his finger. The tape unrolled its line of many small peaks. The peaks looked to him like the foothills of a mountain obscured by cloud. "Did you kill the butcher, Hannibal?"

"May I ask you a question?"

"Yes."

"It's a long way to come from Paris. Do you specialize in the deaths of butchers?"

"My specialty is war crimes, and Paul Momund was suspected in several.

War crimes do not end with the war, Hannibal." Popil paused to read the advertising on each facet of the ashtray. "Perhaps I understand your situation better than you think."

"What is my situation, Inspector?"

"You were orphaned in the war. You lived in an institution, living inside yourself, your family dead. And at last, at last your beautiful stepmother made up for all of it." Working for the bond, Popil put his hand on Hannibal 's shoulder. "The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. And then the butcher spews filth at her. If you killed him, I could understand. Tell me. Together we could explain to a magistrate..."

Hannibal moved back in his chair, away from Popil's touch.

"The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp? May I ask if you compose verse, Inspector?"

"Did you kill the butcher?"

"Paul Momund killed himself. He died of stupidity and rudeness."

Inspector Popil had considerable experience and knowledge of the awful, and this was the voice Popil had been listening for; it had a faintly different timbre and was surprising coming from the body of a boy.

This specific wavelength he had not heard before, but he recognized it as Other.


-----------

The death of Dortlich


The grass before the door was not trampled. Leaves were piled on the steps and in front of the door. Hannibal watched the lodge while the moon moved the width of a finger.

Time, it was time. Hannibal came out of the cover of the trees leading the big horse in the moonlight. He went to the pump, primed it with a cup of water from the waterskin and pumped until the squealing suckers pulled cold water from the ground. He smelled and tasted the water and gave some to Cesar, who drank more than a gallon and had two handfuls of grain from the nosebag. The squealing of the pump carried into the woods. An owl hooted and Cesar turned his ears toward the sound.

A hundred meters into the trees, Dortlich heard the squealing pump and took advantage of its noise to move forward. He could push quietly through the high-grown ferns, but his footsteps crunched on the forest mast. He froze when silence fell in the clearing, and then he heard the bird cry somewhere between him and the lodge, then it flew, shutting out patches of sky as it passed over him, wings stretched impossibly wide as it sailed through the tangle of branches without a sound.

Dortlich felt a chill and turned his collar up. He sat down among the ferns to wait.

Hannibal looked at the lodge and the lodge looked back. All the glass was blown out. The dark windows watched him like the sockets of the gibbon skull. Its slopes and angles changed by the collapse, its apparent height changed by the high growth around it, the hunting lodge of his childhood became the dark sheds of his dreams. Approaching now across the overgrown garden.

There his mother lay, her dress on fire, and later in the snow he put his head on her chest and her bosom was frozen hard. There was Berndt, and there Mr. Jakov's brains frozen on the snow among the scattered pages. His father facedown near the steps, dead of his own decisions.

There was nothing on the ground anymore.

The front door to the lodge was splintered and hung on one hinge. He climbed the steps and pushed it into the darkness. Inside something small scratched its way to cover. Hannibal held his lantern out beside him and went in.

The room was partly charred, half-open to the sky. The stairs were broken at the landing and roof timbers lay on top of them. The table was crushed. In the corner the small piano lay on its side, the ivory keyboard toothy in his light. A few words of Russian graffiti were on the walls. FUCK THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN and CAPTAINGRENKO HAS A BIG ASSHOLE.

Two small animals jumped out the window.

The room pressed a hush on Hannibal. Defiant, he made a great clatter with his pry bar, raking off the top of the big stove to set his lantern there. The ovens were open and the oven racks were gone, probably taken along with the pots for thieves to use over a campfire.

Working by lantern, Hannibal cleared away as much loose debris from around the staircase as he could move. The rest was pinned down by the big roof timbers, a scorched pile of giant pick-up sticks.

Dawn came in the empty windows as he worked and the eyes of a singed trophy head on the wall caught the red gleam of sunrise.

Hannibal studied the pile of timbers for several minutes, hitched a doubled line around a timber near the middle of the pile and paid out rope as he backed through the door.

Hannibal woke Cesar, who was alternately dozing and cropping grass. He walked the horse around for a few minutes to loosen him up. A heavy dew soaked through his trouser legs and sparkled on the grass and stood like cold sweat on the aluminum skin of the dive bomber. In the daylight he could see a vine had gotten an early start in the greenhouse of the Stuka canopy with big leaves and new tendrils now.

The pilot was still inside with his gunner behind him and the vine had grown around and through him, curling between his ribs and through his skull.

Hannibal hitched his rope to the harness traces and walked Cesar forward until the big horse's shoulders and chest felt the load. He clicked in Cesar's ear, a sound from his boyhood. Cesar leaned into the load, his muscles bunched and he moved forward. A crash and thud from inside the lodge. Soot and ash puffed out the window and blew into the woods like fleeing darkness.

Hannibal patted the horse. Impatient for the dust to settle, he tied a handkerchief over his face and went inside, climbing over the collapsed pile of wreckage, coughing, tugging to free his lines and hitch them again. Two more pulls and the heaviest debris was off the deep layer of rubble where the stairs had collapsed. He left Cesar hitched and with pry bar and shovel he dug into the wreckage, throwing broken pieces of furniture, half-burned cushions, a cork thermos chest. He lifted out of the pile a singed boar's head on a plaque.

His mother's voice: Pearls before swine.

The boar's head rattled when he shook it. Hannibal grasped the boar's tongue and tugged. The tongue came out with its attached stopper. He tilted the head nose-down and his mother's jewelry spilled out onto the stovetop. He did not stop to examine the jewelry, but went back at once to digging.

When he saw Mischa's bathtub, the end of the copper tub with its scrolled handle, he stopped and stood up. The room swam for a moment and he held on to the cold edge of the stove, put his forehead against the cold iron. He went outside and returned with yards of flowering vine. He did not look inside the tub, but coiled the line of flowers on top and set it on the stove, could not stand to see it there, and carried it outside to set it on the tank.

The noise of digging and prying made it easy for Dortlich to advance. He watched from the dark wood, exposing one eye and one barrel of his field glasses, peeping only when he heard the sound of shoveling and prying.

Hannibal 's shovel hit and scooped up a skeletal hand and then exposed the skull of the cook. Good tidings in the skeleton smile-its gold teeth showed looters had not reached this far-and then he found, still clutched by arm bones in a sleeve, the cook's leather dispatch case.

Hannibal seized it from under the arm, and carried it to the stove. The contents rattled on the iron as he dumped them out: assorted military collar brass, Lithuanian police insignia, Nazi SS lightning brass, Nazi Waffen-SS skull-and-crossbones cap device, Lithuanian aluminum police eagles, Salvation Army collar brass, and last, six stainless-steel dog tags.

The top one was Dortlich's.

Cesar took notice of two classes of things in the hands of men: apples and feedbags were the first, and whips and sticks second. He could not be approached with a stick in hand, a consequence of being driven out of the vegetables by an infuriated cook when he was a colt. If Dortlich had not been carrying a leaded riot baton in his hand when he came out of the trees, Cesar might have ignored him. As it was, the horse snorted and clopped a few steps further away, trailing his rope down the steps of the lodge, and turned to face the man.

Dortlich backed into the trees and disappeared in the woods. He went a hundred meters further from the lodge, among the breast-high ferns wet with dew and out of the view of the empty windows. He took out his pistol and jacked a round into the chamber. A Victorian privy with gingerbread under the eaves was about forty meters behind the lodge, the thyme planted on its narrow path grown wild and tall, and the hedges that screened it from the lodge were grown together across the path.

Dortlich could barely squeeze through, branches and leaves in his collar, brushing his neck, but the hedge was supple and did not crackle.

He held his baton before his face and pushed through quietly. Baton ready in one hand and pistol in the other, he advanced two steps toward a side window of the lodge when the edge of a shovel caught him across the spine and his legs went numb. He fired a shot into the ground as his legs crumpled under him and the flat of the shovel clanged against the back of his skull and he was conscious of grass against his face before the dark came down.

Birdsong, ortolans flocking and singing in the trees and the morning sunlight yellow on the tall grass, bent over where Hannibal and Cesar had passed.

Hannibal leaned against the burned-out tank with his eyes closed for about five minutes. He turned to the bathtub, and moved the vine with his finger enough to see Mischa's remains. It was oddly comforting to him to see she had all her baby teeth-one awful vision dispelled. He plucked a bay leaf out of the tub and threw it away.

From the jewelry on the stove he chose a brooch he remembered seeing on his mother's breast, a line of diamonds turned into a Mobius tape. He took a ribbon from a cameo and fastened the brooch where Mischa had worn a ribbon in her hair.

On a pleasant east-facing slope above the lodge he dug a grave and lined it with all the wildflowers he could find. He put the tub into the grave and covered it with roof tiles.

He stood at the head of the grave. At the sound of Hannibal's voice, Cesar raised his head from cropping.

"Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day."

Hannibal filled in the grave and patted down the dirt with his hands. He covered the grave with pine needles, leaves and twigs until it looked like the rest of the forest floor.

In a small clearing at some distance from the grave, Dortlich sat gagged and bound to a tree. Hannibal and Cesar joined him.

Settling himself on the ground, Hannibal examined the contents of Dortlich's pack. A map and car keys, an army can opener, a sandwich in an oilskin pouch, an apple, a change of socks, and a wallet. From the wallet he took an ID card and compared it to the dog tags from the lodge.

"Herr... Dortlich. On behalf of myself and my late family, I want to thank you for coming today. It means a great deal to us, and to me personally, having you here. I'm glad to have this chance to talk seriously with you about eating my sister."

He pulled out the gag and Dortlich was talking at once.

"I am a policeman from the town, the horse was reported stolen,"

Dortlich said. "That's all I want here, just say you'll return the horse and we'll forget it."

Hannibal shook his head. "I remember your face. I have seen it many times. And your hand on us with the webs between your fingers, feeling who was fattest. Do you remember that bathtub bubbling on the stove?"

"No. From the war I only remember being cold."

"Did you plan to eat me today, Herr Dortlich? You have your lunch right here." Hannibal examined the contents of the sandwich. "So much mayonnaise, Herr Dortlich!"

"They'll come looking for me very soon," Dortlich said.

"You felt our arms." Hannibal felt Dortlich's arm. "You felt our cheeks, Herr Dortlich," he said, tweaking Dortlich's cheek. "I call you 'Herr' but you aren't German, are you, or Lithuanian, or Russian or anything, are you? You are your own citizen-a citizen of Dortlich. Do you know where the others are? Do you keep in touch?"

"All dead, all dead in the war."

Hannibal smiled at him and untied the bundle of his own handkerchief. It was full of mushrooms. "Morels are one hundred francs a centigram in Paris, and these were growing on a stump!" He got up and went to the horse.

Dortlich writhed in his bonds for the moment when Hannibal 's attention was elsewhere.

There was a coil of rope on Cesar's broad back. Hannibal attached the free end to the traces of the harness. The other end was tied in a hangman's noose. Hannibal paid out rope and brought the noose back to Dortlich. He openedDortlich's sandwich and greased the rope with mayonnaise, and applied a liberal coating of mayonnaise toDortlich's neck.

Flinching away from his hands, Dortlich said, "One remains alive! In Canada-Grentz-look there for his ID. I would have to testify."

"To what, Herr Dortlich?"

"To what you said. I didn't do it, but I will say I saw it."

Hannibal fixed the noose about Dortlich's neck and looked into his face.

"Do I seem upset with you?" He returned to the horse.

"That's the only one, Grentz-he got out on a refugee boat from Bremerhaven -I could give a sworn statement-"

"Good, then you are willing to sing?"

"Yes, I will sing."

"Then let us sing for Mischa, Herr Dortlich. You know this song. Mischa loved it." He turned Cesar's rump to Dortlich. "I don't want you to see this," he said into the horse's ear, and broke into song:

"Ein Mannleinstehtim Waldeganz still und stumm..."He clicked in Cesar's ear and walked him forward. "Sing for slack, Herr Dortlich. Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein um."

Dortlich turned his neck from side to side in the greasy noose, watching the rope uncoil in the grass.

"You're not singing, Herr Dortlich."

Dortlich opened his mouth and sang in a tuneless shout, "Sagt, wermagdas Mannleinsein."

And then they were singing together, "Dasdastehtim Waldallein..."

The rope rose out of the grass, some belly in it, and Dortlich screamed, "Porvik! His name was Porvik! We called him Pot Watcher. Killed in the lodge. You found him."

Hannibal stopped the horse and walked back to Dortlich, bent over and looked into his face.

Dortlich said, "Tie him, tie the horse, a bee might sting him."

"Yes, there are a lot of them in the grass." Hannibal consulted the dog tags. "Milko?"

"I don't know, I don't know. I swear."

"And now we come to Grutas."

"I don't know, I don't. Let me go and I will testify against Grentz. We will find him in Canada."

"A few more verses, Herr Dortlich."

Hannibal led the horse forward, dew glistened on the rope, almost level now.

"Dasdastehtim Waldeallein-"

Dortlich's strangled scream, "It's Kolnas! Kolnas deals with him."

Hannibal patted the horse and came back to bend over Dortlich. "Where is Kolnas?"

" Fontainebleau, near the Place Fontainebleau in France. He has a cafe. I leave messages. It's the only way I can contact him." Dortlich looked Hannibal in the eye. "I swear to God she was dead. She was dead anyway, I swear it."

Staring into Dortlich's face, Hannibal clicked to the horse. The rope tightened and the dew flew off it as the little hairs on the rope stood up. A strangled scream from Dortlich cut off, as Hannibal howled the song into his face.

"Dasdastehtim Waldeallein,

Mitdempurporroten Mantelein."

A wet crunch and a pulsing arterial spray. Dortlich's head followed the noose for about six meters and lay looking up at the sky.

Hannibal whistled and the horse stopped, his ears turned backward.

"Dempurporroten Mantelein, indeed."

Hannibal dumped the contents of Dortlich's pack on the ground and took his car keys and ID. He made a crude spit from green sticks and patted his pockets for matches.

While his fire was burning down to useful coals, Hannibal took Dortlich's apple to Cesar. He took all the harness off the horse so he could not get tangled in the brush and walked him down the trail toward the castle. He hugged the horse's neck and then slapped him on the rump.

"Go home. Cesar, go home." Cesar knew the way.