Thomas Harris - Hannibal Rising

Hannibal said "Hello." He said it in Lithuanian, German, English and Polish. The boy did not reply. Red and swollen chilblains were on his ears and fingers. Over the course of the long cold day he managed to convey that he was from Albania and only spoke that language. He said his name was Agon. Hannibal let him feel his pockets for food. He did not let him touch Mischa. When Hannibal indicated he and his sister wanted half the blankets the boy did not resist. The young Albanian started at every sound, his eyes rolling toward the door, and he made chopping motions with his hand.

The looters came back just before sunset. Hannibal heard them and peered through the crack in the double doors of the barn.

They were leading a half-starved little deer, alive and stumbling, a tasseled swag from some looted mansion looped around its neck, an arrow sticking in its side. Milko picked up an axe.

"Don't waste the blood," Pot Watcher said with a cook's authority.

Kolnas came running with his bowl, his eyes shining. A cry from the yard and Hannibal covered Mischa's ears against the sound of the axe. The Albanian boy cried and gave thanks.

Late in the day when the others had eaten, Pot Watcher gave the children a bone to gnaw with a little meat and sinew on it. Hannibal ate a little and chewed up mush for Mischa. The juice got away when he transferred it with his fingers, so he gave it to her mouth to mouth. They moved Hannibal and Mischa back into the lodge and chained them to the balcony railing, and left the Albanian boy in the barn alone. Mischa was hot with fever, and Hannibal held her tight under the cold-dust smell of the rug.

The flu dropped them all; the men lay as close to the dying fire as they could get, coughing on one another, Milko finding Kolnas' comb and sucking the grease from it. The skull of the little deer lay in the dry bathtub, every scrap boiled off it.

Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Watcher gave gristle and broth to Hannibal and Mischa. He carried nothing to the barn.

The weather would not break, the sky low and granite grey, sounds of the woods hushed except for the crack and crash of ice-laden boughs.

The food was gone days before the sky cleared. The coughing seemed louder in the bright afternoon after the wind dropped. Grutas and Milko staggered out on snow-shoes.

After the length of a fever dream, Hannibal heard them return. A loud argument and scuffling. Through the bars of the banister he saw Grutas licking a bloody birdskin, throwing it to the others, and they fell on it like dogs. Grutas' face was smeared with blood and feathers. He turned his bloody face up to the children and he said, "We have to eat or die."

That was the last conscious memory Hannibal Lecter had of the lodge.

Because of the Russian rubber shortage the tank was running on steel road wheels that sent a numbing vibration through the hull and blurred the view in the periscope. It was a big KV-1 going hard along a forest trail in freezing weather, the front moving miles westward with every day of the German retreat. Two infantrymen in winter camouflage rode on the rear deck of the tank, huddled over the radiators, watching for the odd German Werewolf, a fanatic left behind with a Panzerfaust rocket to try to destroy a tank. They saw movement in the brush. The tank commander heard the soldiers on top firing, turned the tank toward their target to bring his coaxial machine gun to bear. His magnifying eyepiece showed a boy, a child coming out of the brush, bullets kicking up the snow beside him as the soldiers shot from the moving tank. The commander stood up in the hatch and stopped the shooting. They had killed a few children by mistake, the way it happens, and were glad enough not to kill this one.

The soldiers saw a child, thin and pale, with a chain locked around his neck, the end of the chain dragging in an empty loop. When they set him near the radiators and cut the chain off him, pieces of his skin came away on the links. He carried good binoculars in a bag clutched fiercely against his chest. They shook him, asking questions in Russian, Polish, and makeshift Lithuanian, until they realized he could not speak at all.

The soldiers shamed each other into not taking the field glasses from the boy. They gave him half an apple and let him ride behind the turret in the warm breath of the radiators until they reached a village.

A SOVIET MOTORIZED unit with a tank destroyer and heavy rocket launcher had sheltered at the abandoned Lecter Castle overnight. They were moving before dawn, leaving melted places in the snow of the courtyard with dark oil stains in them. One light truck remained at the castle entrance, the motor idling.

Grutas and his four surviving companions, in their medical uniforms, watched from the woods. It had been four years since Grutas shot the cook in the castle courtyard, fourteen hours since the looters fled the burning hunting lodge, leaving their dead behind them.

Bombs thudded far away and on the horizon anti-aircraft tracers arched into the sky.

The last soldier backed out the door, paying out fuse from a reel.

"Hell," Milko said. "It's about to rain rocks big as boxcars."

"We're going in there anyway," Grutas said.

The soldier unreeled fuse to the bottom of the steps, cut it and squatted at the end.

"The dump's been looted anyway," Grentz said. "C'est foutu."

"Tu débandes?" Dortlich said.

"Va te faire enculer," Grentz said. They had picked up the French when the Totenkopfs refitted near Marseilles, and liked to insult each other with it in the tight moments before action. The curses reminded them of pleasant times in France.

The Soviet trooper on the steps split the fuse ten centimeters from the end and stuck a match head in the split.

"What color's the fuse?" Milko said.

Grutas had the field glasses. "Dark, I can't tell."

From the woods, they could see the flare of a second match on his face as the trooper lit the fuse.

"Is it orange or is it green?" Milko said. "Does it have stripes on it?"

Grutas did not answer. The soldier walked to the truck, taking his time, laughing as his companions on the truck yelled at him to hurry, the fuse sparking behind him on the snow.

Milko was counting under his breath.

As soon as the vehicle was out of sight, Grutas and Milko ran for the fuse. The fire in the fuse crossing the threshold now as they reached it. They could not make out the stripes until they were close. Burns at twominutesameter twominutesameter twominutesameter. Grutas slashed it in two with his spring knife.

Milko muttered "fuck the farm" and charged up the steps and into the castle, following the fuse, looking, looking, for other fuses, other charges. He crossed the great hall toward the tower, following the fuse and saw what he was looking for, the fuse spliced onto a big loop of detonating cord. He came back into the great hall and called out, "It's got a ring main cord. That's the only fuse. You got it." Breeching charges were packed around the base of the tower to destroy it, coordinated by the single loop of detonating cord.

The Soviet troops had not bothered to close the front door, and their fire still burned on the hearth in the great hall. Graffiti scarred the bare walls and the floor near the fire was littered with droppings and bum wad from their final act in the relative warmth of the castle.

Milko, Grentz and Kolnas searched the upper floors.

Grutas motioned for Dortlich to follow him and descended the stairs to the dungeon. The grate across the wine room door hung open, the lock broken.

Grutas and Dortlich shared one flashlight between them. The yellow beam gleamed off glass shards. The wine room was littered with empty bottles of fine vintages, the necks knocked off by hasty drinkers. The tasting table, knocked over by contesting looters, lay against the back wall.