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“Because you lost family in the war?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask how?”
“Some in combat. Some were shipped east.”
“Did you catch who did it?”
“No.”
“But they were Vichy—men like the butcher.”
“Yes.”
“Can we be perfectly honest with each other?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you sorry to see Paul Momund dead?”
On the far side of the square the village barber, M. Rubin, came off a leafy side street for his nightly round of the square with his small terrier. M. Rubin, after talking with his customers all day, continued talking to his dog in the evening. He pulled the dog away from the grassy strip in front of the post office.
“You should have performed your duty on the lawn of Felipe, where no one was looking,” M. Rubin said. “Here you might incur a fine. You have no money. It would fall to me to pay.”
In front of the post office was a post box on a pole. The dog strained toward it against the leash and raised his leg.
Seeing a face above the mailbox, Rubin said, “Good evening, Monsieur,” and to the dog, “Attend you do not befoul Monsieur!” The dog whined and Rubin noticed there were no legs beneath the mailbox on the other side.
The motorbike sped along the one-lane paved road, nearly overrunning the cast of its dim headlight. Once when a car approached from the other way, the rider ducked into the roadside trees until the car’s taillights were out of sight.
In the dark storage shed of the chateau, the headlight of the bike faded out, the motor ticking as it cooled. Lady Murasaki pulled off the black balaclava and by touch she put up her hair.
The beams of police flashlights converged on Paul Momund’s head on top of the mailbox. Boche was printed across his forehead just below the hairline. Late drinkers and night workers were gathering to see.
Inspector Popil brought Hannibal up close and looked at him by the light glowing off the dead man’s face. He could detect no change in the boy’s expression.
“The Resistance killed Momund at last,” the barber said, and explained to everyone how he had found him, carefully leaving out the transgressions of the dog.
Some in the crowd thought Hannibal shouldn’t have to look at it. An older woman, a night nurse going home, said so aloud.
Popil sent him home in a police car. Hannibal arrived at the chateau in the rosy dawn and cut some flowers before he went into the house, arranging them for height in his fist. The poem to accompany them came to him as he was cutting the stems off even. He found Lady Murasaki’s brush in the studio still wet and used it to write:
Night heron revealed
By the rising harvest moon—
Which is lovelier?
Hannibal slept easily later in
the day. He dreamed of Mischa in the summer before the war, Nanny had her bathtub in the garden at the lodge, letting the sun warm the water, and the cabbage butterflies flew around Mischa in the water. He cut the eggplant for her and she hugged the purple eggplant, warm from the sun.
When he woke there was a note beneath his door along with a wisteria blossom. The note said: One would choose the heron, if beset by frogs.
26
CHIYOH PREPARED for her departure to Japan by drilling Hannibal in elementary Japanese, in the hope that he could provide some conversation for Lady Murasaki and relieve her of the tedium of speaking English.
