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Grutas blinked, his face convulsed in agony, his ankles buckled and he fell hamstrung, Hannibal twisting from under him. Lady Murasaki, her ankles bound together, kicked Grutas in the head. He tried to raise his gun, but Hannibal seized the barrel, twisting up, the gun went off and Hannibal slashed Grutas’ wrist, the gun falling away and sliding on the floor. Grutas crawled toward the gun, pulling himself on his elbows, then up on his knees, knee-walking, and falling again, pulling himself on his elbows like a broken-backed animal in the road. Hannibal cut Lady Murasaki’s arms free and she jerked the stiletto out of the back of the chair to cut free her ankles and moved into the corner beside the door. Hannibal, his back bloody, cut Grutas off from the gun.
Grutas stopped and on his knees he faced Hannibal. An eerie calm came over him. He looked up at Hannibal with his pale Arctic eyes.
“Together we sail deathward,” Grutas said. “Me, you, the stepmother that you fuck, the men you have killed.”
“They were not men.”
“What did Dortlich taste like, a fish? Did you eat Milko too?”
Lady Murasaki spoke from the corner. “Hannibal, if Popil takes Grutas he may not take you. Hannibal, be with me. Give him to Popil.”
“He ate my sister.”
“So did you,” Grutas said. “Why don’t you kill yourself?”
“No. That’s a lie.”
“Oh, you did. Kindly Pot Watcher fed her to you in the broth. You have to kill everyone who knows it, don’t you? Now that your woman knows it, you really should kill her too.”
Hannibal’s hands are over his ears, holding the bloody knife. He turns to Lady Murasaki, searching her face, goes to her and holds her against him.
“No, Hannibal. It’s a lie,” she said. “Give him to Popil.”
Grutas scuttled toward the gun, talking, talking. “You ate her, half-conscious, your lips were greedy around the spoon.”
Hannibal screamed at the ceiling, “NOOOOO!” and ran to Grutas raising the knife, stepped on the gun and slashed an “M” the length of Grutas’ face screaming “‘M’ for Mischa! ‘M’ for Mischa! ‘M’ for Mischa,” Grutas backward on the floor and Hannibal cutting great “M”s in him.
A cry from behind him. Dimly in the red mist a gunshot. Hannibal felt the muzzle blast above him. He did not know if he was hit. He turned. The captain stood behind him, his back to Lady Murasaki, the handle of the stiletto standing behind his clavicle, the blade through his aorta; the gun slipped from the captain’s fingers and he pitched forward on his face.
Hannibal weaving on his feet, his face a mask of red. Lady Murasaki closed her eyes. She was shaking.
“Are you hit?” he said.
“No.”
“I love you, Lady Murasaki,” he said. He went to her.
She opened her eyes and held his bloody hands away.
“What is left in you to love?” she said and ran from the cabin, up the companionway and over the rail in a clean dive into the canal.
The boat bumped gently along the edge of the canal.
On the Christabel, Hannibal was alone with the dead, their regard fast glazing. Mueller and Gassmann are belowdecks now, at the foot of the companionways. Grutas, herringboned with red, lies in the cabin where he died. Each of them holds in his arms a Panzerfaust like a big-headed doll. Hannibal took from the arms rack the final Panzerfaust and lashed it down in the engine room, its fat anti-tank missile two feet from the fuel tank. From the boat’s ground tackle he took a grapnel and tied the line around the top-mounted trigger of the Panzerfaust. He stood on deck with the grapnel hook in his hand as the boat inched along, bumping gently against the stone border of the canal. From the deck he could see flashlights on the bridge. He heard yelling and a dog was barking.
He dropped the hook into the water. The line snaked slowly over the side as Hannibal stepped onto the bank and set off across the fields. He did not look back. At four hundred meters the explosion came. He felt the shock wave on his back and the pressure rolled over him with the noise. A piece of metal landed in the field behind him. The boat blazed fiercely in the canal and a column of sparks rose into the sky, whipped into spirals by the fire’s draft. More explosions blew the burning timbers wheeling into the sky as the charges in the other Panzerfausts went off.
From a mile distant he saw the flashing lights of police cars at the lock. He did not go back. He walked across the fields and they found him at daylight.
57
THE EAST WINDOWS at Paris police headquarters during the warm months were crowded at breakfast time with young policemen hoping to see Simone Signoret take coffee on her terrace in the nearby Place Dauphin.
Inspector Popil worked at his desk, not looking up even when the actress’s terrace doors were reported to be opening, and remained undisturbed at the groaning when only the housekeeper came out to water the plants.
His window was open and he could hear faintly the Communist demonstration on the Quai des Orfèvres and the Pont Neuf. The demonstrators were mostly students, chanting “Free Hannibal, Free Hannibal.” They carried placards reading DEATH TO FASCISM and demanding the immediate release of Hannibal Lecter, who had become a minor cause célèbre. Letters in L’Humanité and Le Canard Enchaîné defended him and Le Canard ran a photo of the burning wreckage of the Christabel with the caption “Cannibals Cooked.”
A moving childhood reminiscence of the benefits of collectivization ran in L’Humanité as well, in a piece under Hannibal’s own byline, smuggled out of the jail, further bolstering his Communist supporters. He would have written as readily for the extreme right fringe publications, but the rightists were out of fashion and could not demonstrate on his behalf.
