It was possible that the count, in his working isolation at the chateau, might never have heard of the incident. But in the evening, as he smoked a cigar, the driver Serge returned from the village with the evening papers and drew him aside.
The Friday market was in Villiers, ten miles away. The count, grey and sleepless, climbed out of his car as Paul the Butcher was carrying the carcass of a
lamb into his booth. The count’s cane caught Paul across the upper lip and the count flew at him, slashing with the cane.
“Piece of filth, you would insult my wife!!” Paul dropped the meat and shoved the count hard, the count’s thin frame flying back against a counter and the count came on again, slashing with his cane, and then he stopped, a look of surprise on his face. He raised his hands halfway to his waistcoat and fell facedown on the floor of the butcher’s stall.
DISGUSTED WITH the whining and bleating of the hymns and the droning nonsense of the funeral, Hannibal Lecter, thirteen and the last of his line, stood beside Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh at the church door absently shaking hands as the mourners filed out, the women uncovering their heads as they left the church in the post-war prejudice against head scarves.
Lady Murasaki listened, making gracious and correct responses.
Hannibal’s sense of her fatigue took him out of himself and he found that he was talking so she would not have to talk, his new-found voice degenerating quickly to a croak. If Lady Murasaki was surprised to hear him she did not show it, but took his hand and squeezed it tight as she extended her other hand to the next mourner in line.
A gaggle of Paris press and the news services were there to cover the demise of a major artist who avoided them during his lifetime. Lady Murasaki had nothing to say to them.
In the afternoon of this endless day the count’s lawyer came to the chateau along with an official of the Bureau of Taxation. Lady Murasaki gave them tea.
“Madame, I hesitate to intrude upon your grief,” the tax official said, “but I want to assure you that you will have plenty of time to make other arrangements before the chateau is auctioned for death duties. I wish we could accept your own sureties for the death tax, but as your resident status in France will now come into question, that is impossible.”
Night came at last. Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door, and Chiyoh had made up a pallet to sleep in the room with her.
He lay awake in his room for a long time and when sleep came, with it came dreams.
The Blue-Eyed One’s face smeared with blood and feathers morphing into the face of Paul the Butcher, and back again
.
Hannibal woke in the dark and it did not stop, the faces like holograms on the ceiling. Now that he could speak, he did not scream.
He rose and went quietly up the stairs to the count’s studio. Hannibal lit the candelabra on either side of the easel. The portraits on the walls, finished and half-finished had gained presence with their maker gone. Hannibal felt them straining toward the
spirit of the count as though they might find him breath.
His uncle’s cleaned brushes stood in a canister, his chalks and charcoals in their grooved trays. The painting of Lady Murasaki was gone, and she had taken her kimono from the hook as well.
Hannibal began to draw with big arm motions, as the count had counseled, trying to let it go, making great diagonal strokes across newsprint, slashes of color. It did not work. Toward dawn he stopped forcing; he quit pushing, and simply watched what his hand revealed to him.
HANNIBAL SAT on a stump in a small glade beside the river, plucking the lute and watching a spider spin. The spider was a splendid yellow and black orb weaver, working away. The web vibrated as the spider worked. The spider seemed excited by the lute, running to various parts of its web to check for captives as Hannibal plucked the strings. He could approximate the Japanese song, but he still hit clinkers. He thought of Lady Murasaki’s pleasant alto voice speaking English, with its occasional accidental notes not on the Western scale. He plucked closer to the web and further away. A slow-flying beetle crashed into the web and the spider rushed to bind it.
The air was still and warm, the river perfectly smooth. Near the banks water bugs ran across the surface and dragonflies darted over the reeds. Paul
the Butcher paddled his small boat with one hand, and let it drift near the willows overhanging the bank. The crickets chirped in Paul’s bait basket, attracting a red-eyed fly, which fled from Paul’s big hand as he grabbed a cricket and put it on his hook. He cast under the willows and at once his quill float plunged and his rod came alive.
Paul reeled in his fish and put it with the others on a chain stringer hanging over the side of his boat. Occupied with the fish he only half-heard a thrumming in the air. He sucked fish blood off his thumb and paddled to a small pier on the wooded bank where his truck was parked. He used the rude bench on the pier to clean his biggest fish and put it in a canvas bag with some ice. The others were still alive on the stringer in the water. They pulled the chain under the pier in an attempt to hide.
A twanging in the air, a broken tune from somewhere far from France. Paul looked at his truck as though it might be a mechanical noise. He walked up the bank, still carrying his filleting knife, and examined his truck, checked the radio aerial and looked at his tires. He made sure his doors were locked. Again came the twanging, a progression of notes now.
Paul followed the sound, rounding some bushes into the little glade, where he found Hannibal seated on the stump playing the Japanese lute, its case propped against a motorbike. Beside him was a drawing pad. Paul went back at once to his truck and checked the gas filler pipe for grains of sugar. Hannibal
did not look up from his playing until the butcher returned and stood before him.
“Paul Momund, fine meats,” Hannibal said. He was experiencing a sharpness of vision, with edges of refracted red like ice on a window or the edge of a lens.
“You’ve started talking, you little mute bastard. If you pissed in my heater I’ll twist your fucking head off. There’s no
flic
to help you here.”
“Nor to help you either.” Hannibal plucked several notes. “What you have done is unforgivable.” Hannibal put down the lute and took up his sketch pad. Looking up at Paul, he used his little finger as a smudge to make a small adjustment on the pad.
He turned the page and rose, extending a blank page to Paul. “You owe a certain lady a written apology.” Paul smelled rank to him, sebum and dirty hair.
“Boy, you are crazy to come here.”
“Write that you are sorry, you realize that you are despicable, and you will never look at her or address her in the market again.”
“Apologize to the Japonnaise?” Paul laughed. “The first thing I’ll do is throw you in the river and rinse you off.” He put his hand on his knife. “Then maybe I’ll slit your pants and give you something where you don’t want it.” He came toward Hannibal then, the boy backing away toward his motorbike and the lute case.
Hannibal stopped. “You inquired about her pussy, I believe. You speculated that it ran which way?”
“Is she your mother? Jap pussy runs crossways! You should fuck the little Jap and see.”
Paul came scuttling fast, his great hands up to crush, and Hannibal in one movement drew the curved sword from the lute case and slashed Paul low across the belly.
“Crossways like that?”
The butcher’s scream rang off the trees and the birds flew with a rush. Paul put his hands on himself and they came away covered with thick blood. He looked down at the wound and tried to hold himself together, intestines spilling in his hands, getting away from him. Hannibal stepping to the side and turning with the blow slashed Paul across the kidneys.
“Or more tangential to the spine?”
Swinging the sword to make Xs in Paul now, Paul’s eyes wide in shock, the butcher trying to run, caught across the clavicle, an arterial hiss that spatters Hannibal’s face. The next two blows sliced him behind the ankles and he went down hamstrung and bellowing like a steer.
Paul the Butcher sits propped against the stump. He cannot raise his arms.
Hannibal looks into his face. “Would you like to see my drawing?”
He offers the pad. The drawing is Paul the Butcher’s head on a platter with a name tag attached to the hair. The tag reads
Paul Momund, Fine Meats
. Paul’s vision is darkening around the edges. Hannibal swings the sword and for Paul everything
is sideways for an instant, before blood pressure is lost and there is the dark.
In his own darkness, Hannibal hears Mischa’s voice as the swan was coming, and he says aloud, “Oooh, Anniba!”
Afternoon faded. Hannibal stayed well into the gloaming, his eyes closed, leaning against the stump where stood the butcher’s head. He opened his eyes and sat for long minutes. At last he rose and went to the dock. The fish stringer was made of slender chain and the sight of it made him rub the scar around his neck. The fish on the stringer were still alive. He wet his hand before he touched them, turning them loose one by one.
“Go,” he said. “Go,” and flung the empty chain far across the water.
He turned the crickets loose as well. “Go, go!” he told them. He looked in the canvas bag at the big cleaned fish and felt a twinge of appetite.
“Yum,” he said.
PAUL THE BUTCHER’S violent death was no tragedy to many of the villagers, whose mayor and several aldermen had been shot by the Nazis as reprisals for Resistance activity during the occupation.
The greater part of Paul himself lay on a zinc table in the embalming room at Pompes Funebres Roget, where he had succeeded Count Lecter on the slab. At dusk a black Citroën Traction Avant pulled up to the funeral home. A gendarme stationed in front hastened to open the car door.
“Good evening, Inspector.”
The man who got out was about forty neat in a suit. He returned the gendarme’s smart salute with a friendly nod, turned back to the car and spoke to the driver and another officer in the backseat. “Take the cases to the police station.”
The inspector found the funeral home proprietor, Monsieur Roget, and the Commandant of Police in the embalming room, all faucets and hoses and enamel with supplies in cases fronted with glass.
The commandant brightened at the sight of the policeman from Paris.
“Inspector Popil! I’m happy you could come. You won’t remember me but …”
The inspector considered the commandant. “I do, of course. Commandant Balmain. You delivered De Rais to Nuremberg and sat behind him at the trial.”
“I saw you bring the evidence. It’s an honor, sir.”
“What do we have?”
The funeral director’s assistant Laurent pulled back the covering sheet.
Paul the Butcher’s body was still clothed, long stripes of red diagonally across him where the clothing was not soaked with blood. He was absent his head.
“Paul Momund, or most of him,” the commandant said. “That is his dossier?”
Popil nodded. “Short and ugly. He shipped Jews from Orléans.” The inspector considered the body, walked around it, picked up Paul’s hand and arm, its rude tattoo brighter now against the pallor. He spoke absently as though to himself. “He has defense wounds on his hands, but the bruises on his knuckles are days old. He fought recently.”
“And often,” the mortician said.
Assistant Laurent piped up. “Last Saturday he had a bar fight, and knocked teeth from a man and a
girl.” Laurent jerked his head to illustrate the force of the blows, the pompadour bobbing on his petite skull.
“A list please. His recent opponents,” the inspector said. He leaned over the body, sniffing. “You have done nothing to this body, Monsieur Roget?”
“No, Monsieur. The commandant specifically forbade me …”
Inspector Popil beckoned him to the table. Laurent came too. “Is this the odor of anything you use here?”
“I smell cyanide,” Mortician Roget said. “He was poisoned first!”
“Cyanide is a burnt-almond smell,” Popil said.
“It smells like that toothache remedy,” Laurent said, unconsciously rubbing his jaw.
The mortician turned on his assistant. “Cretin! Where do you see his teeth?”
“Yes. Oil of cloves,” Inspector Popil said. “Commandant, could we have the pharmacist and his books?”
Under the tutelage of the chef, Hannibal baked the splendid fish in its scales with herbs in a crust of Brittany sea salt and now he took it from the oven. The crust broke at the sharp tap with the back of a chef’s knife and peeled away, the scales coming with it, and the kitchen filled with the wonderful aroma. “Regard, Hannibal,” the chef said. “The best morsels of the fish are the cheeks. This is true of
many creatures. When carving at the table, you give one cheek to Madame, and the other to the guest of honor. Of course, if you are plating in the kitchen you eat them both yourself.”
Serge came in carrying staple groceries from the market. He started unpacking the bags and putting food away.
Behind Serge, Lady Murasaki came quietly into the kitchen.
“I saw Laurent at the Petit Zinc,” Serge said. “They haven’t found the butcher’s damned ugly head yet. He said the body was scented with—get this—oil of cloves, the toothache stuff. He said—”
Hannibal saw Lady Murasaki and cut Serge off. “You really should eat something, my lady. This will be very, very good.”
“And I brought some peach ice cream, fresh peaches,” Serge said.
Lady Murasaki looked into Hannibal’s eyes for a long moment.
He smiled at her, perfectly calm. “Peach!” he said.
MIDNIGHT, LADY MURASAKI lay in her bed. The window was open to a soft breeze that carried the scent of a mimosa blooming in a corner of the courtyard below. She pushed the covers down to feel the moving air on her arms and feet. Her eyes were open, looking up at the dark ceiling, and she could hear the tiny clicks when she blinked her eyes.
Below in the courtyard the old mastiff stirred in her sleep, her nostrils opened and she took in a lot of air. A few folds appeared in the pelt on her forehead, and she relaxed again to pleasant dreams of a chase and blood in her mouth.