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Behind him he heard paper sliding over the stone floor, an envelope pushed under his door. A sprig of pussy willow was attached to the note. Hannibal held the note card to his face in his cupped hands before he read it.
Hannibal,
I will be most pleased if you call on me in my drawing room at the Hour of the Goat. (That is 10 a.m. in France.)
Murasaki Shikibu
Hannibal Lecter, thirteen, his hair slicked down with water, stood outside the closed door of the drawing room. He heard the lute. It was not the same song he had heard from the bath. He knocked.
“Come.”
He entered a combination workroom and salon, with a frame for needlework near the window and an easel for calligraphy.
Lady Murasaki was seated at a low tea table. Her hair was up, held by ebony hairpins. The sleeves of her kimono whispered as she arranged flowers.
Good manners from every culture mesh, having a common aim. Lady Murasaki acknowledged him with a slow and graceful inclination of her head.
Hannibal inclined from the waist as his father had taught him. He saw a skein of blue incense smoke cross the window like a distant flight of birds, and the blue vein faint in Lady Murasaki’s forearm as she held a flower, the sun pink through her ear. Chiyoh’s lute sounded softly from behind a screen.
Lady Murasaki invited him to sit opposite her. Her voice was a pleasant alto with a few random notes not found in the Western scale. To Hannibal, her speech sounded like accidental music in a wind chime.
“If you do not want French or English or Italian, we could use some Japanese words, like kieuseru. It means ‘disappear.’ ” She placed a stem, raised her eyes from the flowers and looked into him. “My world of Hiroshima was gone in a flash. Your world was torn from you too. Now you and I have the world we make—together. In this moment. In this room.”
She picked up other flowers from the mat beside her and placed them on the table beside the vase. Hannibal could hear the leaves rustling together, and the ripple of her sleeve as she offered him flowers.
“Hannibal, where would you put these to best effect? Wherever you like.”
Hannibal looked at the blossoms.
“When you were small, your father sent us your drawings. You have a promising eye. If you prefer to draw the arrangement, use the pad beside you.”
Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where the tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table.
Lady Murasaki seemed pleased. “Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style.” She put the silky weight of a peony in his hand. “But where might you put this? Or would you use it at all?”
In the fireplace, the water in the tea vessel seethed and came to a boil. Hannibal heard it, heard the water boiling, looked at the surface of the boiling water and his face changed and the room went away.
Mischa’s bathtub on the stove in the hunting lodge, horned skull of the little deer banging against the tub in the roiling water as though it tried to butt its way out. Bones rattling in the tumbling water.
Back at himself, back in Lady Murasaki’s room, and the head of the peony, bloody now, tumbled onto the tabletop, the knife clattering beside it. Hannibal mastered himself, got to his feet holding his bleeding hand behind him. He bowed to Lady Murasaki and started to leave the room.
“Hannibal.”
He opened the door.
“Hannibal.” She was up and close to him quickly. She held out her hand to him, held his eyes with hers, did not touch him, beckoned with her fingers. She took his bloody hand and her touch registered in his eyes, a small change in the size of his pupils.
“You will need stitches. Serge can drive us to town.”
Hannibal shook his head and pointed with his chin at the needlework frame. Lady Murasaki looked into his face until she was sure.
“Chiyoh, boil a needle and thread.”
At the window, in the good light, Chiyoh brought Lady Murasaki a needle and thread wrapped around an ebony hairpin, steaming from the boiling tea water. Lady Murasaki held his hand steady and sewed up his finger, six neat stitches. Drops of blood fell onto the white silk of her kimono. Hannibal looked at her steadily as she worked. He showed no reaction to the pain. He appeared to be thinking of something else.
He looked at the thread pulled tight, unwound from the hairpin. The arc of the needle’s eye was a function of the diameter of the hairpin, he thought. Pages of Huyghen
s scattered on the snow, stuck together with brains.
