فصل بیست و هفتم

27

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

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

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

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

The professor looked carefully into Hannibal’s face. He adjusted his dentures with his tongue and said, “I will take that drawing. There is someone who should see it. You’ll have credit for it.” The professor turned down the top sheet of Hannibal’s tablet and looked at the face. “Who is that?” “I’m not sure, sir. A face I saw somewhere.”

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

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

A holiday from school at last.

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

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

Hannibal folded his cot in the living room early in the morning and bicycled across the Seine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he made another of his frequent inquiries at the menagerie. News today a scribbled note with an address … Ten minutes further south at Place Monge and the Rue Ortolan he found the shop: Poissons Tropicaux, Petites Oiseaux, & Animaux Exotiques.

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

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

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

“Gomekudasai, Monsieur?” Hannibal said.

“Irasshaimase, Monsieur,” the proprietor said.

“Irasshaimase, Monsieur,” the parrot said.

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

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

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

The proprietor frowned at the bird and switched to English to confound the intrusive fowl. “I have a variety of excellent fighting crickets. Fierce fighters, always victorious, famous wherever crickets gather.” “This is a gift for a lady from Japan who pines for the song of the suzumushi at this time of year,” Hannibal said. “A plain cricket is unsuitable.” “I would never suggest a French cricket, whose song is pleasing only for its seasonal associations. But I have no suzumushi for sale. Perhaps she would be amused by a parrot with an extensive Japanese vocabulary, whose expressions embrace all walks of life.” “Might you have a personal suzumushi?”

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

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

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

“Merde,” it said from beneath the cloth.

“Do you suppose I might hire the use of a suzumushi, lease one so to speak, on a weekly basis?” “What sort of fee would you find appropriate?” the proprietor said.

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

The proprietor, holding the drawing carefully by the edges, turned it to the light. He propped it against the cash register. “I could inquire among my colleagues. Could you return after the lunch hour?” Hannibal wandered, purchased a plum at the street market and ate it. Here was a sporting-goods store with trophy heads in the window, a bighorn sheep, an ibex. Leaning in the corner of the window was an elegant Holland & Holland double rifle. It was wonderfully stocked; the wood looked as though it had grown around the metal and together wood and metal had the sinuous quality of a beautiful snake.

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

The proprietor was waiting for him with the cricket. “Will you return the cage after October?” “Is there no chance it might survive the fall?”

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

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

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

Her eyes cleared and she was in the present. She smiled at Hannibal. “I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart.” “My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.” The moon rose to the song of the suzumushi. The terrace seemed to rise with it, drawn into tangible moonlight, lifting them to a place above ghost-ridden earth, a place unhaunted, and being there together was enough.

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