فصل پنجاه و یکم

51

A WAR SURPLUS five-ton truck with new canvas was parked across the street from the anatomy lab, blocking half of the sidewalk. Surprisingly there was no ticket yet on the windshield. Hannibal tried Milko’s keys on the driver’s door. It opened. An envelope of papers was over the sun visor on the driver’s side. He looked through them quickly.

A ramp in the bed of the truck let him load his motorcycle at the curb. He drove the truck to Porte de Montempoivre near the Bois de Vincennes and put it in a truck park near the railroad. He locked the plates in the cab beneath the seat.

Hannibal Lecter sat on his motorcycle in a hillside orchard, breakfasting on some excellent African figs he had found in the Rue de Buci market, along with a bite of Westphalian ham. He could see the road below the hill and, a quarter mile further along, the entrance to Vladis Grutas’ home.

Bees were loud in the orchard and several buzzed around his figs until he covered them with his handkerchief. García Lorca, now enjoying a revival in Paris, said the heart was an orchard. Hannibal was thinking about the figure and thinking, as young men do, about the shapes of peaches and pears, when a carpenter’s truck passed below him and pulled up to Grutas’ gate.

Hannibal raised his father’s field glasses.

The house of Vladis Grutas is a Bauhaus mansion built in 1938 on farmland with a view of the Essonne River. It was neglected in the war and, lacking eaves, suffered dark water stains down its white walls. The whole façade and one of the sides had been repainted blinding white and scaffolding was going up on the walls yet unpainted. It had served the Germans as a staff headquarters during the occupation and the Germans had added protection.

The glass and concrete cube of the house was protected by high chain link and barbed wire around the perimeter. The entrance was guarded by a concrete gatehouse that looked like a pillbox. A slit window across the front of the gatehouse was softened by a window box of flowers. Through the window a machine gun could traverse the road, its barrel brushing the blossoms aside.

Two men came out of the gatehouse, one blond and the other dark-haired and covered with tattoos. They used a mirror on a long handle to search beneath the truck. The carpenters had to climb down and show their national identity cards. There was some waving of hands and shrugging. The guards passed the truck inside.

Hannibal rode his motorcycle into a copse of trees and parked it in the brush. He grounded out the motorcycle’s ignition with a bit of hidden wire behind the points and put a note on the saddle saying he had gone for parts. He walked a half-hour to the high road and hitchhiked back to Paris.

The loading dock of the Gabrielle Instrument Co. is on the Rue de Paradis between a seller of lighting fixtures and a crystal repair shop. In the last task of their workday the warehousemen loaded a Bösendorfer baby grand piano into Milko’s truck, along with a piano stool crated separately. Hannibal signed the invoice Zigmas Milko, saying the name silently as he wrote.

The instrument company’s own trucks were coming in at the end of the day. Hannibal watched as a woman driver got out of one of them. She was not bad looking in her coveralls, with a lot of French flounce. She went inside the building and came out minutes later in slacks and a blouse, carrying the coveralls folded under her arm. She put them in the saddlebag of a small motorbike. She felt Hannibal’s eyes on her, and turned her gamine face to him. She took out a cigarette and he lit it.

“Merci, Monsieur … Zippo.” The woman was very street French, animated, with a lot of eye movement, and she exaggerated the gestures of smoking.

The busybodies sweeping the loading dock strained to hear what they were saying, but could only hear her laugh. She looked into Hannibal’s face as they talked and little by little the coquetry stopped. She seemed fascinated with him, almost mesmerized. They walked together down the street toward a bar.

Mueller had the gatehouse duty with a German named Gassmann, who had recently finished a tour in the Foreign Legion. Mueller was trying to sell him a tattoo when Milko’s truck approached up the drive.

“Call the clap doctor, Milko’s back from Paris,” Mueller said.

Gassmann had the better eyes. “That’s not Milko.”

They went outside.

“Where is Milko?” Mueller asked the woman at the wheel.

“How would I know? He paid me to bring you this piano. He said he would be along in a couple of days. Get my moto out of the back with your big muscles.” “Who paid you?”

“Monsieur Zippo.”

“You mean Milko.”

“Right, Milko.”

A caterer’s truck stopped behind the five-ton and waited, the caterer fuming, drumming his fingers on the wheel.

Gassmann raised the flap over the tailgate of the five-ton. He saw a piano in a crate and a smaller crate plastered with a sign: POUR LA CAVE and FOR THE WINE CELLAR—STORE IN A COOL PLACE. The motorbike was lashed to the side rails of the truck. A plank ramp was in the truck, but it was easier to lift the little motorbike down.

Mueller came to help Gassmann with the bike. He looked at the woman.

“Do you want a drink?”

“Not here,” she said, swinging a leg over the bike.

“Your moto sounds like a fart,” Mueller called after her as she rode away.

“You’re winning her over with suave conversation,” the other German said.

The piano tuner was a skeletal man with dark places between his teeth and a fixed rictus smile like that of Lawrence Welk. When he had finished tuning the black Bösendorfer, he changed into his ancient white tie and tailcoat and came out to play cocktail piano as Grutas’ guests arrived. The piano sounded brittle against the tile floor and glass expanses of the house. The shelves of a glass-and-steel bookcase near the piano buzzed along with B-flat until he moved the books around and then it buzzed at B. He had used a kitchen chair when tuning, but he did not want to sit on it to play.

“Where am I to sit? Where is the piano bench?” he asked the maid, who asked Mueller. Mueller found him a chair of the correct height, but it had arms. “I’ll have to play with my elbows spread,” the tuner said.

“Shut the fuck up and play American,” Mueller said. “Cocktail American he wants, with the singing along.” The cocktail buffet served thirty guests, curious flotsam of the war. Ivanov from the Soviet embassy was there, too well tailored for a servant of the state. He was talking with an American first sergeant who kept the books at the U.S. Post Exchange in Neuilly. The sergeant was in mufti, a sack suit in window-pane check of a color that brought out the spider angioma on the side of his nose. The bishop down from Versailles was accompanied by the acolyte who did his nails.

Under the pitiless tube lighting, the bishop’s black suit had a greenish roast-beef sheen, Grutas observed as he kissed the bishop’s ring. They talked briefly about mutual acquaintances in Argentina. There was a strong strain of Vichy in the room.

The piano player favored the crowd with his skeletal smile and approximated some Cole Porter songs. English was his fourth language and he was forced sometimes to improvise.

“Night and day, you are the sun. Only you beneese the moon, you are the one.” The basement was almost dark. A single bulb burned near the stairs. Faintly the music sounded from the floor above.

One wall of the basement was covered with a wine rack. Near it were a number of crates, some of them opened with shavings spilling out. A new stainless-steel sink lay on the floor beside a Rock-Ola Luxury Light-Up jukebox with the latest platters and rolls of nickels to put in it. Beside the wine wall was a crate labeled POUR LA CAVE AND STORE IN A COOL PLACE. A faint creak came from the crate.

The pianist added some fortissimo to drown himself out at uncertain verses: “Whether me or you depart, no matter darling I’m apart, I think of you Night and Dayyyyy.” Grutas moved through his guests shaking hands. With a small motion of his head he summoned Ivanov into his library. It was stark modern, a trestle-table desk, steel and glass shelves and a sculpture after Picasso by Anthony Quinn entitled “Logic Is a Woman’s Behind.” Ivanov considered the carving.

“You like sculpture?” Grutas said.

“My father was a curator at St. Petersburg, when it was St. Petersburg.” “You can touch it if you like,” Grutas said.

“Thank you. The appliances for Moscow?”

“Sixty refrigerators on the train in Helsinki at this moment. Kelvinator. And what do you have for me?” Grutas could not help snapping his fingers.

Because of the snap, Ivanov made Grutas wait while he perused the stone buttocks. “There is no file on the boy at the embassy,” he said at last. “He got a visa for Lithuania by proposing to do an article for L’Humanité. It was supposed to be on how well the collectivization worked when the farmlands were seized from his family and how delighted the farmers are to move to the city and build a sewage plant. An aristocrat endorsing the revolution.” Grutas snorted through his nose.

Ivanov put a photograph on the desk and pushed it across to Grutas. It showed Lady Murasaki and Hannibal outside her apartment building.

“When was this taken?”

“Yesterday morning. Milko was with my man when he took it. The Lecter boy is a student, he works at night, sleeps over the medical school. My man showed Milko everything—I don’t want to know anything else.” “When did he last see Milko?”

Ivanov looked up sharply. “Yesterday. Something’s wrong?”

Grutas shrugged it off. “Probably not. Who is the woman?”

“His stepmother, or something like that. She’s beautiful,” Ivanov said, touching the stone buttocks.

“Has she got an ass like that one?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The French police came around?”

“An inspector named Popil.” Grutas pursed his lips and for a moment he seemed to forget Ivanov was in the room.

Mueller and Gassmann looked over the crowd. They were taking coats and watching that none of the guests stole anything. In the coatroom Mueller pulled Gassmann’s bow tie away from his collar on its rubber band, turned it a half-turn, and let it pop back.

“Can you wind it up like a little propeller and fly like a fairy?” Mueller said.

“Turn it again and you’ll think it’s the doorknob to Hell,” Gassmann said. “Look at you. Tuck in your blouse. Were you never in the service?” They had to help the caterer pack up. Carrying a folding banquet table down to the basement, they did not see concealed beneath the stairs a fat rubber glove suspended over a dish of powder, with a fuse leading into a three-kilo tin that once held lard. A chemical reaction slows as the temperature cools. Grutas’ basement was five degrees cooler than the medical school.