فصل بیست و یکم

21

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.