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The doctor pushed a little more drug into Louis’ vein, rubbing his arm to move the drug along.
“Louis, you must remember. Klaus Barbie shipped the children to Auschwitz. Who told him where the children were hidden? Did you tell him?”
Louis’ face was grey. “The Gestapo caught me forging ration cards,” he said. “When they broke my fingers, I gave them Pardou—Pardou knew where the orphans were hidden. He got so much a head for them and kept his fingers. He’s mayor of Trent-la-Forêt now. I saw it, but I didn’t help. They looked out of the back of the truck at me.”
“Pardou.” Popil nodded. “Thank you, Louis.”
Popil started to turn from him when Louis said, “Inspector?”
“Yes, Louis?”
“When the Nazis threw the children into the trucks, where were the police?”
Popil closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded to a guard, who opened the door into the guillotine room. Hannibal could see a priest and Monsieur Paris standing beside the machine. The executioner’s assistant removed the chain and crucifix from around Louis’ neck and put it in his hand, bound by his side. Louis looked at Hannibal. He lifted his head and opened his mouth. Hannibal went to his side and Popil did not try to stop him.
“The money, Louis?”
“St.-Sulpice. Not the poor box, the box for souls in Purgatory. Where’s the dope?”
“I promise.” Hannibal had a vial of dilute tincture of opium in the pocket of his jacket. The guard and executioner’s assistant officially looked away. Popil did not look away. Hannibal held it to Louis’ lips and he drank it down. Louis nodded toward his hand and opened his mouth again. Hannibal put the crucifix and chain in Louis’ mouth before they turned him over on the plank that would carry him under the blade.
Hannibal watched the burden of Louis’ heart roll away. The gurney bumped over the threshold of the guillotine room and the guard closed the door.
“He wanted his crucifix to
remain with his head instead of his heart,” Popil said. “You knew what he wanted, didn’t you? What else do you and Louis have in common?”
“Our curiosity about where the police were when the Nazis threw the children into the trucks. We have that in common.”
Popil might have swung at him then. The moment passed. Popil shut his notebook and left the room.
Hannibal approached the doctor at once.
“Doctor, what is that drug?”
“A combination of thiopental sodium and two other hypnotics. The Sûreté has it for interrogations. It releases repressed memory sometimes. In the condemned.”
“We need to allow for it in our blood work in the lab. May I have the sample?”
The doctor handed over the vial. “The formula and the dosage are on the label.”
From the next room came a heavy thud.
“I’d wait a few minutes if I were you,” the doctor said. “Let Louis settle down.”
39
HANNIBAL LAY ON the low bed in his garret room. His candles flickered on the faces he has drawn from his dreams, and shadows played over the gibbon skull. He stared into the gibbon’s empty sockets and put his lower lip behind his teeth as if to match the gibbon’s fangs. Beside him was a windup phonograph with a lily-shaped trumpet. He had a needle in his arm, attached to a hypodermic filled with the cocktail of hypnotics used in the interrogation of Louis Ferrat.
“Mischa, Mischa. I’m coming.” Fire on his mother’s clothes, the votive candles flaring before St. Joan. The sexton said, “It’s time.”
He started the turntable and lowered the thick needle arm onto the record of children’s songs. The record was scratchy the sound tinny and thin, but it pierced him.
Sagt, wer mag das Mannlein sein
Das da steht im Walde allein
He pushed the plunger of the needle a quarter of an inch and felt the drug burn in his vein. He rubbed his arm to move it along. Hannibal stared steadily by candlelight at the faces sketched from his dreams, and tried to make their mouths move. Perhaps they would sing at first, and then say their names. Hannibal sang himself, to start them singing.
