فصل سی و دوم

32

THE CANAL BOAT Christabel was tied up with only a spring line at a quay on the Marne River east of Paris, and after Trebelaux came aboard the boat was under way at once. It was a black Dutch-built double-ender with low deckhouses to pass under the bridges and a container garden on deck with flowering bushes.

The boat’s owner, a slight man with pale blue eyes and a pleasant expression, was at the gangway to welcome Trebelaux and invite him below. “I’m glad to meet you,” the man said and extended his hand. The hair on the owner’s hand grew backward, toward the wrist, making his hand feel creepy to the Swiss. “Follow Monsieur Milko. I have the things laid out below.” The owner lingered on deck with Kolnas. They strolled for a moment among the terra-cotta planters, and stopped beside the single ugly object in the neat garden, a fifty-gallon oil drum with holes cut in it big enough to admit a fish, the top cut out with a torch and tied back on loosely with wire. A tarp was spread on the deck under it. The owner of the boat patted the steel drum hard enough to make it ring.

“Come,” he said.

On the lower deck he opened a tall cabinet. It contained a variety of arms: a Dragunov sniper rifle, an American Thompson submachine gun, a couple of German Schmeissers, five Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons for use against other boats, a variety of handguns. The owner selected a trident fish spear with the barbs filed off the tines. He handed it to Kolnas.

“I’m not going to cut him a lot,” the owner said in pleasant tones. “Eva’s not here to clean it up. You do it on deck after we find out what he’s told. Puncture him good so he won’t float the barrel.” “Milko can—” Kolnas began.

“He was your idea, it’s your ass, you do it. Don’t you cut meat every day? Milko will bring him up dead and help you load him in the barrel when you’ve stuck him enough. Keep his keys and go through his room. We’ll do the dealer Leet if we have to. No loose ends. No more art for a while,” said the boat owner, whose name in France was Victor Gustavson.

Victor Gustavson is a very successful businessman, dealing in ex-SS morphine and new prostitutes, mostly women. The name is an alias for Vladis Grutas.

Leet remained alive, but without any of the paintings. They were held in a government vault for years while the court was stalemated on whether the Croatian agreement on reparations could be applied to Lithuania, and Trebelaux stared sightless from his barrel on the bottom of the Marne, no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eelgrass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth.

No other painting from Lecter Castle would surface for years.

Through Inspector Popil’s good offices, Hannibal Lecter was allowed to visit the paintings in custody from time to time over the following years. Maddening to sit in the dumb silence of the vault under the eye of a guard, in earshot of the man’s adenoidal breathing.

Hannibal looks at the painting he took from his mother’s hands and knows the past was not the past at all; the beast that panted its hot stench on his and Mischa’s skins continues to breathe, is breathing now. He turns the “Bridge of Sighs” to the wall and stares at the back of the painting for minutes at a time—Mischa’s hand erased, it is only a blank square now where he projects his seething dreams.

He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been.