Thomas Harris - Hannibal Rising

"Where am I to sit? Where is the piano bench?" he asked the maid, who asked Mueller. Mueller found him a chair of the correct height, but it had arms. "I'll have to play with my elbows spread," the tuner said.

"Shut the fuck up and play American," Mueller said. "Cocktail American he wants, with the singing along."

The cocktail buffet served thirty guests, curious flotsam of the war.

Ivanov from the Soviet embassy was there, too well tailored for a servant of the state. He was talking with an American first sergeant who kept the books at the U.S. Post Exchange in Neuilly. The sergeant was in mufti, a sack suit in windowpane check of a color that brought out the spider angioma on the side of his nose. The bishop down from Versailles was accompanied by the acolyte who did his nails.

Under the pitiless tube lighting, the bishop's black suit had a greenish roast-beef sheen, Grutas observed as he kissed the bishop's ring. They talked briefly about mutual acquaintances in Argentina. There was a strong strain of Vichy in the room.

The piano player favored the crowd with his skeletal smile and approximated some Cole Porter songs. English was his fourth language and he was forced sometimes to improvise.

"Night and day, you are the sun. Only youbeneese the moon, you are the one."

The basement was almost dark. A single bulb burned near the stairs.

Faintly the music sounded from the floor above.

One wall of the basement was covered with a wine rack. Near it were a number of crates, some of them opened with shavings spilling out. A new stainless-steel sink lay on the floor beside a Rock-OlaLuxury Light-Up jukebox with the latest platters and rolls of nickels to put in it.

Beside the wine wall was a crate labeled POUR LA cave and STORE IN A COOL PLACE. A faint creak came from the crate.

The pianist added some fortissimo to drown himself out at uncertain verses: "Whether me or you depart, no matter darling I'm apart, I think of you Night and Dayyyyy."

Grutas moved through his guests shaking hands. With a small motion of his head he summoned Ivanov into his library. It was stark modern, a trestle-table desk, steel and glass shelves and a sculpture after Picasso by Anthony Quinn entitled "Logic Is a Woman's Behind." Ivanov considered the carving.

"You like sculpture?" Grutas said.

"My father was a curator at St. Petersburg, when it was St. Petersburg."

"You can touch it if you like," Grutas said.

"Thank you. The appliances for Moscow?"

"Sixty refrigerators on the train in Helsinki at this moment.

Kelvinator. And what do you have for me?" Grutas could not help snapping his fingers.

Because of the snap, Ivanov made Grutas wait while he perused the stone buttocks. "There is no file on the boy at the embassy," he said at last.

"He got a visa for Lithuania by proposing to do an article for L'Humanite. It was supposed to be on how well the collectivization worked when the farmlands were seized from his family and how delighted the farmers are to move to the city and build a sewage plant. An aristocrat endorsing the revolution."

Grutas snorted through his nose.

Ivanov put a photograph on the desk and pushed it across to Grutas. It showed Lady Murasaki and Hannibal outside her apartment building.

"When was this taken?"

"Yesterday morning. Milko was with my man when he took it. The Lecter boy is a student, he works at night, sleeps over the medical school. My man showed Milko everything-I don't want to know anything else."

"When did he last see Milko?"

Ivanov looked up sharply. "Yesterday. Something's wrong?"

Grutas shrugged it off. "Probably not. Who is the woman?"

"His stepmother, or something like that. She's beautiful," Ivanov said, touching the stone buttocks.

"Has she got an ass like that one?"

"I don't think so."

"The French police came around?"

"An inspector named Popil."

Grutas pursed his lips and for a moment he seemed to forget Ivanov was in the room.

Mueller and assmann looked over the crowd. They were taking coats and watching that none of the guests stole anything. In the coatroom Mueller pulled Gassmann's bow tie away from his collar on its rubber band, turned it a half-turn, and let it pop back.

"Can you wind it up like a little propeller and fly like a fairy?"

Mueller said.

"Turn it again and you'll think it's the doorknob to Hell," Gassmann said. "Look at you. Tuck in your blouse. Were you never in the service?"

They had to help the caterer pack up. Carrying a folding banquet table down to the basement, they did not see concealed beneath the stairs a fat rubber glove suspended over a dish of powder, with a fuse leading into a three-kilo tin that once held lard. A chemical reaction slows as the temperature cools. Grutas' basement was five degrees cooler than the medical school.

THE MAID WAS laying out Grutas' silk pajamas on the bed when he called for more towels.

The maid did not like to take towels into Grutas' bathroom, but she was always summoned to do it. She had to go in there but she did not have to look. Grutas' bathroom was all white tile and stainless steel, with a big freestanding tub and a steam room with frosted glass doors and a shower off the steam room.

Grutas reclined in his tub. The woman captive he had brought from the boat was shaving his chest using a prison safety razor, the blade locked in with a key. The side of her face was swollen. The maid did not want to meet her eyes.

Like a sense-deprivation chamber, the shower was all white, and big enough for four. Its curious acoustics bounced every crumb of sound.

Hannibal could hear his hair crunch between his head and the tile as he lay on the white floor of the shower. Covered by a couple of white towels he was nearly invisible from the steam room through the frosted shower door. Under the towels he could hear his own breathing. It was like being rolled in the rug with Mischa. Instead of her warm hair near his face, he had the smell of the pistol, machine oil and brass cartridges and cordite.

He could hear Grutas' voice, and he had not yet seen his face except through field glasses. The tone of voice had not changed-the mirthless teasing that precedes the blow.

"Warm up my terry robe," Grutas told the maid. "I want some steam after.

Turn it on." She slid back the steam room door and opened the valve. In the all-white steam chamber the only color was the red bezels of the timer and the thermometer. They had the look of a ship's gauges, with numbers big enough to read in the steam. The timer's minute hand was already moving around the dial toward the red marker hand.

Grutas had his hands behind his head. Tattooed under his arm was the Nazi lightning SS insignia. He twitched his muscle and made the lightning jump. "Boom! Donnerwetter!" He laughed when the woman captive flinched away. "Noooo, I won't hit you more. I like you now. I'm going to fix your teeth with some teeth you can put in a glass beside the bed, out of the way."

Hannibal came through the glass doors in a cloud of steam, the gun up and pointed at Grutas' heart. In his other hand he had a bottle of reagent alcohol.

Grutas' skin squeaked as he pushed himself up in the tub and the woman shied from him before she knew Hannibal was behind her.

"I'm glad you're here," Grutas said. He looked at the bottle, hoping Hannibal was drunk. "I've always felt I owed you something."

"I discussed that with Milko."

"And?"

"He arrived at a solution."

"The money of course! I sent it with him, and he gave it to you? Good!"

Hannibal spoke to the woman without looking down at her. "Wet your towel in the tub. Go over to the corner and sit down, and put the towel over your face. Go on. Wet it in the tub."