فصل چهلم

40

UNDER A LOW GREY SKY in Vilnius, Lithuania, a Skoda police sedan turned off the busy Sventaragio and into a narrow street near the university, honking the pedestrians out of the way making them curse into their collars. It pulled to a stop in front of a new Russian-built hive of flats, raw-looking in the block of decrepit apartment buildings. A tall man in Soviet police uniform got out of the car and, running his finger down a line of buttons, pushed a buzzer marked Dortlich.

The buzzer rang in a third-floor flat where an old man lay in bed, medicines crowded on a table beside him. Above the bed was a Swiss pendulum clock. A string hung from the clock to the pillow. This was a tough old man, but in the night, when the dread came on him, he could pull the string in the dark and hear the clock chime the hour, hear that he was not dead yet. The minute hand moved jerk by jerk. He fancied the pendulum was deciding, eeny meeny the moment of his death.

The old man mistook the buzzer for his own rasping breath. He heard his maid’s voice raised in the hall outside and then she stuck her head in the door, bristling beneath her mobcap.

“Your son, sir.”

Officer Dortlich brushed past her and came into the room.

“Hello, Father.”

“I’m not dead yet. It’s too soon to loot.” The old man found it odd how the anger only flashed in his head now and no longer reached his heart.

“I brought you some chocolates.”

“Give them to Bergid on your way out. Don’t rape her. Goodbye, Officer Dortlich.”

“It’s late to be carrying on like this. You are dying. I came to see if there is something I can do for you, other than provide this flat.” “You could change your name. How many times did you change sides?”

“Enough to stay alive.”

Dortlich wore the forest green piping of the Soviet Border Guards. He took off a glove and went to his father’s bedside. He tried to take the old man’s hand, his finger feeling for the pulse, but his father pushed Dortlich’s scarred hand away. The sight of Dortlich’s hand brought a shine of water to his father’s eyes. With an effort the old man reached up and touched the medals swinging off Dortlich’s chest as he leaned over the bed. The decorations included Excellent MVD Policeman, the Institute for Advanced Training in Managing Prison Camps and Jails, and Excellent Soviet Pontoon Bridge Builder. The last decoration was a stretch; Dortlich had built some pontoon bridges, but for the Nazis in a labor battalion. Still, it was a handsome enameled piece and, if questioned about it, he could talk the talk. “Did they throw these to you out of a pasteboard box?” “I did not come for your blessing, I came to see if you needed anything and to say goodbye.” “It was bad enough to see you in Russian uniform.”

“The Twenty-seventh Rifles,” Dortlich said.

“Worse to see you in Nazi uniform; that killed your mother.”

“There were a lot of us. Not just me. I have a life. You have a bed to die in instead of a ditch. You have coal. That’s all I have to give you. The trains for Siberia are jammed. The people trample each other and shit in their hats. Enjoy your clean sheets.” “Grutas was worse than you, and you knew it.” He had to pause to wheeze. “Why did you follow him? You looted with criminals and hooligans, you robbed houses and you stripped the dead.” Dortlich replied as though he had not heard his father. “When I was little and I got burned you sat beside the bed and carved the top for me. You gave it to me and when I could hold the whip you showed me how to spin it. It is a beautiful top, with all the animals on it. I still have it. Thank you for the top.” He put the chocolates near the foot of the bed where the old man could not shove them off on the floor.

“Go back to your police station, pull out my file and mark it No Known Family,” Dortlich’s father said.

Dortlich took a piece of paper from his pocket. “If you want me to send you home when you die, sign this and leave it for me. Bergid will help you and witness your signature.” In the car, Dortlich rode in silence until they were moving with the traffic on the Radvilaites.

Sergeant Svenka at the wheel offered Dortlich a cigarette and said, “Hard to see him?”

“Glad it’s not me,” Dortlich said. “His fucking maid—I should go there when Bergid’s at church. Church—she’s risking jail to go. She thinks I don’t know. My father will be dead in a month. I will ship him to his birth town in Sweden. We should have maybe three cubic meters of space underneath the body good space three meters long.” Lieutenant Dortlich did not have a private office yet, but he had a desk in the common room of the police station, where prestige meant proximity to the stove. Now, in spring, the stove was cold and papers were piled on it. The paperwork that covered Dortlich’s desk was fifty percent bureaucratic nonsense, and half of that could be safely thrown away.

There was very little communication laterally with police departments and MVD in neighboring Latvia and Poland. Police in the Soviet satellite countries were organized around the Central Soviet in Moscow like a wheel with spokes and no rim.

Here was the stuff he had to look at: by official telegraph the list of foreigners holding a visa for Lithuania. Dortlich compared it to the lengthy wanted list and list of the politically suspect. The eighth visa holder from the top was Hannibal Lecter, brand-new member of the youth league of the French Communist Party.

Dortlich drove his own two-cycle Wartburg to the State Telephone Office, where he did business about once a month. He waited outside until he saw Svenka enter to begin his shift. Soon, with Svenka in control of the switchboard, Dortlich was alone in a telephone cabin with a crackling and spitting trunk line to France. He put a signal-strength meter on the telephone and watched the needle in case of an eavesdropper.

In the basement of a restaurant near Fontainebleau, France, a telephone rang in the dark. It rang for five minutes before it was answered.

“Speak.”

“Somebody needs to answer faster, me sitting here with my ass hanging out. We need an arrangement in Sweden, for friends to receive a body,” Dortlich said. “And the Lecter child is coming back. On a student visa through the Youth for the Rebirth of Communism.” “Who?”

“Think about it. We discussed it the last time we had dinner together,” Dortlich said. He glanced at his list. “Purpose of his visit: to catalog for the people the library at Lecter Castle. That’s a joke—the Russians wiped their ass with the books. We may need to do something on your end. You know who to tell.”