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“I brought something for your oven.” Hannibal reached behind him and threw onto the table his bloody bag. “We can cook together, like old times.” He dropped Mischa’s bracelet onto the kitchen table. It rolled around and around before it settled to a stop.
Kolnas made a gagging sound. For a moment he could not touch the bag with his trembling hands and then he tore at it, tore at the bloody butcher paper inside, tore down to meat and bones.
“It’s a beef roast, Herr Kolnas, and a melon. I got them at Les Halles. But do you see how it feels?”
Kolnas lunged across the table, bloody hands finding Hannibal’s face, but he was off his feet stretched over the table and Hannibal pulled him down, and he brought the pistol down on the base of Kolnas’ skull, not too hard, and Kolnas’ lights went out.
Hannibal’s face, smeared with blood, looked like the demonic faces in his own dreams. He poured water in Kolnas’ face until his eyes opened.
“Where is Katerina, what have you done with her?” Kolnas said.
“She is safe, Herr Kolnas. She is pink and perfect. You can see the pulse in her temple. I will give her back to you when you give me Lady Murasaki.”
“If I do that I am a dead man.”
“No. Grutas will be arrested and I will not remember your face. You get a pass for the sake of your children.”
“How do I know they are alive?”
“I swear on my sister’s soul you will hear their voices. Safe. Help me or I will kill you and leave the child to starve. Where is Grutas? Where is Lady Murasaki?”
Kolnas swallowed, choked on some blood in his mouth. “Grutas has a houseboat, a canal boat, he moves around. He’s in the Canal de Loing south of Ne
mours.”
“The name of the boat?”
“Christabel. You gave your word, where are my children?”
Hannibal let Kolnas up. He picked up the telephone beside the cash register, dialed a number and handed Kolnas the receiver.
For a moment Kolnas could not recognize his wife’s voice, and then “Hello! Hello! Astrid?? Check on the children, let me speak to Katerina! Just do it!”
As Kolnas listened to the puzzled sleepy voice of the awakened child, his face changed. First relief and then curious blankness as his hand crept toward the gun on the shelf beneath the cash register. His shoulders slumped. “You tricked me, Herr Lecter.”
“I kept my word. I will spare your life for the sake of your—”
Kolnas spun with the big Webley in his fist, Hannibal’s hand slashing toward it, the gun going off beside them, and Hannibal drove the tanto dagger underneath Kolnas’ chin and the point came out the top of his head.
The telephone receiver swung from its wire. Kolnas fell forward on his face. Hannibal rolled him over and sat for a moment in a kitchen chair looking at him. Kolnas’ eyes were open, already glazing. Hannibal put a bowl over his face.
He carried the cage of ortolans outside and opened it. He had to grab the last one and toss it into the moonbright sky. He opened the outdoor aviary and shooed the birds out. They formed up in a flock and circled once, tiny shadows flicking across the patio, climbing to test the wind and pick up the polestar. “Go,” Hannibal said. “The Baltic is that way. Stay all season.”
56
THROUGH THE VAST NIGHT a single point of light shot across the dark fields of Ile de France, the motorcycle flat out, Hannibal down on the gas tank. Off the concrete south of Nemours and following an old towpath along the Canal de Loing, asphalt and gravel, now a single lane of asphalt overgrown on both sides, Hannibal once zigging at speed through cows on the road and feeling a tail-brush sting him as he passed, swerving off the pavement, gravel rattling under the fenders, and back on again, the motorcycle shaking its head and catching itself, settling into speed again.
The lights of Nemours dimming behind him, flat country now, and only the darkness ahead, the details of the gravel and the weeds absurdly sharp, insistent in his headlight, and the dark ahead swallowed up the yellow beam. He wondered if he joined the canal too far south—was the boat behind him?
He stopped and turned off his lights, to sit in darkness and decide, the motorcycle shivering under him.
Far ahead, far into the dark, it appeared that two little houses moved in tandem across the meadow, deckhouses just visible above the banks of the Canal de Loing.
Vladis Grutas’ houseboat was wonderfully quiet as it motored southward sending a soft ripple against the sides of the canal, cows asleep in the fields on both sides. Mueller, nursing stitches in his thigh, sat in a canvas chair on the foredeck, a shotgun propped against the railing of the companionway beside him. At the stern, Gassmann opened a locker and took out some canvas fenders.
Three hundred meters back, Hannibal slowed, the BMW burbling along, weeds brushing his shins. He stopped and took his father’s field glasses from the saddlebag. He could not read the name of the boat in the darkness.
Only the boat’s running lights showed and the glow from behind the window curtains. Here the canal was too wide to be sure of making a jump onto the deck.
