4

"YOU HAVE TIME for tea," Lady Murasaki said.

She took him at once to the terrace, clearly preferring to be outdoors with him. He did not know how he felt about that. He had changed and she had not. A puff of breeze and the oil lamp flame stretched high. When she poured green tea he could see the pulse in her wrist, and the faint fragrance from her sleeve entered him like a thought of his own.

"A letter from Chiyoh," she said. "She has ended her engagement. Diplomacy no longer suits her."

"Is she happy?"

"I think so. It was a good match in the old way of thinking. How can I disapprove - she writes that she is doing what I did - following her heart."

"Following it where?"

"A young man at Kyoto University, the School of Engineering."

"I would like to see her happy."

"I would like to see you happy. Are you sleeping, Hannibal?"

"When there's time. I take a nap on a gurney when I can't sleep in my room."

"You know what I mean."

"Do I dream? Yes. Do you not revisit Hiroshima in your dreams?"

"I don't invite my dreams."

"I need to remember, any way I can."

At the door she gave him a bento box with a snack for overnight and packets of chamomile tea. "For sleep," she said.

He kissed Lady Murasaki's hand, not the little nod of French politesse, but kissed the back of her hand so that he could taste it.

He repeated the haiku he had written to her so long ago, on the night of the butcher.

"Night heron revealed

By the rising harvest moon -

Which is lovelier?"

"This is not the harvest," she said, smiling, putting her hand on his heart as she had done since he was thirteen years old. And then she took her hand away, and the place on his chest felt cold.

"Do you really return your books?"

"Yes."

"Then you can remember everything in the books."

"Everything important."

"Then you can remember it is important not to tease Inspector Popil. Unprovoked he is harmless to you. And to me."

She has put on irritation like a winter kimono. Seeing that, can I use it to keep from thinking about her in the bath at the chateau so long ago, herfaceandbreastslikewaterflowers? Like the pink and cream lilies on the moat? Can I? I can not.

He went out into the night, uncomfortable in his stride for the first block or two, and emerged from the narrow streets of the Marais to cross the Pont Louis Phillippe with the Seine sliding under the bridge and the bridge touched by the moon.

Seen from the east, Notre Dame was like a great spider with its flying-buttress legs and the many eyes of its round windows. Hannibal could see the stone spider-cathedral scuttling around town in the darkness, grabbing the odd train from the Gare d'Orsay like a worm for its delectation or, better, spotting a nutritious police inspector coming out of his headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres, an easy pounce away.

He crossed the footbridge to the Ile de la Cite and rounded the cathedral. Sounds of a choir practice came from Notre Dame.

Hannibal paused beneath the arches of the center entrance, looking at the Last Judgment in relief on the arches and lintels above the door. He was considering it for a display in his memory palace, to record a complex dissection of the throat: There on the upper lintel St. Michael held a pair of scales as though he himself were conducting an autopsy. St. Michael's scales were not unlike the hyoid bone, and he was overarched by the Saints of the Mastoid Process. The lower lintel, where the damned were being marched away in chains, would be the clavicle, and the succession of arches would serve as the structural layers of the throat, to a catechism easy to remember, Sternohyoid omohyoid thyrohyoid/juuugular, Amen.

No, it wouldn't do. The problem was the lighting. Displays in a memory palace must be well lit, with generous spaces between them. This dirty stone was too much of one color as well. Hannibal had missed a test question once because the answer was dark, and in his mind he had placed it against a dark background. The complex dissection of the cervical triangle scheduled for the coming week would require clear, well-spaced displays.

The last choristers trailed out of the cathedral, carrying their vestments over their arms. Hannibal went inside. Notre Dame was dark but for the votive candles. He went to St. Joan of Arc, in marble near a southside exit. Before her, tiers of candles flared in the draft from the door. Hannibal leaned against a pillar in the darkness and looked through the flames at her face. Fire on his mother's clothes. The candle flames reflected redly in his eyes.

The candlelight played on St. Joan and gave random expressions to her face like chance tunes in a wind chime. Memory memory. Hannibal wondered if St. Joan, with her memories, might prefer a votive other than fire. He knew his mother would.

Footsteps of the sexton coming, his jangling keys echoed off the near walls first, then again from the high ceiling, his footsteps made a double-tap too as they sounded from the floor and echoed down from the vast upper dark.

The sexton saw Hannibal's eyes first, shining red beyond the firelight, and a primal caution stirred in him. The back of the sexton's neck prickled and he made a cross with his keys. Ah, it was only a man, and a young one at that. The sexton waved his keys before him like a censer. "It's time," he said and gestured with his chin.

"Yes, it's time, and past time," Hannibal replied and went out the side door into the night.

35

ACROSS THE SEINE on the Pont au Double and down the Rue de la Bucherie, where he heard a saxophone and laughter from a basement jazz club. A couple in the doorway smoking, a whiff of kif about them. The girl raised on her tiptoes to kiss the young man's cheek and Hannibal felt the kiss distinctly on his face. Scraps of music mixed with the music running in his head, keeping time, time. Time.

Along the Rue Dante and across the wide Boulevard Saint-Germain, feeling moonlight on his head, and behind the Cluny to the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine and the night entrance to the medical school, where a dim lamp burned. Hannibal unlocked the door and let himself in.

Alone in the building, he changed into a white coat and picked up the clipboard with his list of tasks. Hannibal's mentor and supervisor at the medical school was Professor Dumas, a gifted anatomist who chose to teach instead of practice on the living. Dumas was a brilliant, abstracted man and lacked the glint of a surgeon. He required each of his students to write a letter to the anonymous cadaver he would dissect, thanking this specific donor for the privilege of studying his or her body and including assurances that the body would be treated with respect, and draped at all times in any area not under immediate study.

For tomorrow's lectures, Hannibal was to prepare two displays: a reflection of the rib cage, exposing the pericardium intact, and a delicate cranial dissection.

Night in the gross-anatomy laboratory. The large room with its high windows and big vent fan was cool enough so that the draped cadavers, preserved with formalin, remained on the twenty tables overnight. In summer they would be returned to the cadaver tank at the end of the workday. Pitiful little bodies underneath the sheets, the unclaimed, the starvelings found huddled in alleys, still hugging themselves in death until rigor passed and then, in the formalin bath of the cadaver tank with their fellows, they let themselves go at last. Frail and birdlike, they were shriveled like the birds frozen and fallen to the snow, that starving men skin with their teeth.

With forty million dead in the war it seemed odd to Hannibal that the medical students would have to use cadavers long preserved in tanks, the color leached out of them by the formalin.

Occasionally the school was lucky enough to get a criminal corpse from the gallows or the firing squad at the fort of Montrouge or Fresnes, or the guillotine at La Sante. Faced with the cranial dissection, Hannibal was lucky to have the head of a La Sante graduate watching him from the sink now, countenance caked with blood and straw.

While the school's autopsy saw awaited a new motor, back-ordered for months, Hannibal had modified an American electric drill, brazing a small rotary blade to the drill bit to aid in dissection. It had a current converter the size of a bread box that made a humming sound nearly as loud as the saw.

Hannibal had finished with the chest dissection when the electricity failed, as it often did, and the lights went out. He worked at the sink by the light of a kerosene lamp, flushing away the blood and straw from his subject's face and waiting for the electricity to come on again.

When the lights came up, he wasted no time reflecting the scalp and removing the top of the cranium in a coronal dissection to expose the brain. He injected the major blood vessels with colored gel, piercing the dura mater covering the brain as little as possible. It was more difficult, but the professor, inclined to the theatrical, would want to remove the dura mater himself before the class, whipping the curtain off the brain, so Hannibal left it largely intact.

He rested his gloved hand lightly on the brain. Obsessed with memory, and the blank places in his own mind, he wished that by touch he could read a dead man's dreams, that by force of will he could explore his own.

The laboratory at night was a good place to think, the quiet broken only by the clink of instruments and, rarely, the groan of a subject in an early stage of dissection, when organs might still contain some air.

Hannibal performed a meticulous partial dissection of the left side of the face, then sketched the head, both the dissected side of the face and the untouched side as well, for the anatomical illustrations that were part of his scholarship.

Now he wanted to permanently store in his mind the muscular, neural and venous structures of the face. Sitting with his gloved hand on the head of his subject, Hannibal went to the center of his own mind and into the foyer of his memory palace. He elected for music in the corridors, a Bach string quartet, and passed quickly through the Hall of Mathematics, through Chemistry, to a room he'd adopted recently from the Carnavalet Museum and renamed the Hall of the Cranium. It took only a few minutes to store everything, associating anatomical details with the set arrangement of displays in the Carnavalet, being careful not to put the venous blues of the face against blues in the tapestries.

When he had finished in the Hall of the Cranium, he paused for a moment in the Hall of Mathematics, near the entrance. It was one of the oldest parts of the palace in his mind. He wanted to treat himself to the feeling he got at the age of seven when he understood the proof Mr. Jakov showed him. All of Mr. Jakov's tutorial sessions at the castle were stored there, but none of their talks from the hunting lodge.

Everything from the hunting lodge was outside the memory palace, still on the grounds, but in the dark sheds of his dreams, scorched black like the hunting lodge, and to get there he would have to go outside. He would have to cross the snow where the ripped pages of Huyghens' Treatise on Light blew across Mr. Jakov's brains and blood, scattered and frozen to the snow.

In these palace corridors he could choose music or not, but in the sheds he could not control the sound, and a particular sound there could kill him.

He emerged from the memory palace back into his mind, came back behind his eyes and to his eighteen-year-old body, which sat beside the table in the anatomy laboratory, his hand upon a brain.

He sketched for another hour. In his finished sketch, the veins and nerves of the dissected half of the face exactly reflected the subject on the table. The unmarked side of the face did not resemble the subject at all. It was a face from the sheds. It was the face of Vladis Grutas, though Hannibal only thought of him as Blue-Eyes.

Up the five flights of narrow stairs to his room above the medical school, and sleep.

The garret's ceiling sloped, and the low side was neat, harmonious, Japanese, with a low bed. His desk was on the high side of the room. The walls around and over his desk were wild with images, drawings of dissections, anatomical illustrations in progress. In each case the organs and vessels were exactly rendered, but the faces of the subjects were faces he saw in dreams. Over all, a long-fanged gibbon skull watched from a shelf.

He could scrub away the smell of formalin, and the chemical smell of the lab did not reach this high in the drafty old building. He did not carry grotesque images of the dead and half-dissected into his sleep, nor the criminals, cleaved or hanged, he sometimes picked up from the jails. There was only one image, one sound, that could drive him out of sleep. And he never knew when it was coming.

Moonset. The moonlight diffused by the wavy, bubbled window glass creeps across Hannibal's face and inches silent up the wall. It touches Mischa's hand in the drawing above his bed, moves over the partial faces in the anatomical drawings, moves over the faces from his dreams, and comes at last to the gibbon skull, first shining white on the great fangs and then the brow above the deep eye sockets. From the dark inside its skull, the gibbon watches Hannibal asleep. Hannibal's face is childlike. He makes a noise and turns on his side, pulling his arm away from an unseen grip.

Standing with Mischa in the barn beside the lodge, holding her close, Mischa coughing. Bowl-Man feels the flesh of their arms and speaks, but no sound comes out of his mouth, only his vile breath visible in the freezing air. Mischa buries her face against Hannibal's chest to get away from Bowl-Man's breath. Blue-Eyes is saying something, and now they are singing, cozening. Seeing the axe and bowl. Flying at Blue-Eyes, taste of blood and beard stubble, they are taking Mischa away. They have the axe and the bowl. Breaking free and running after them, feet lifting tooo sloooow to the door, Blue-Eyed One and Bowl-Man holding Mischa by her wrists above the ground, she twisting her head to look back desperately at him across the bloody snow and calling -

Hannibal came awake, choking, holding on to the end of the dream, clamping his eyes tight shut and tried to force himself past the point where he awoke. He bit the corner of the pillowcase and made himself go over the dream. What did the men call each other? What were their names? When did he lose the sound? He couldn't remember when it went away. He wanted to know what they called each other. He had to finish the dream. He went into his memory palace and tried to cross the grounds to the dark sheds, past Mr. Jakov's brains on the snow, but he could not. He could endure to see his mother's clothes on fire, his parents and Berndt and Mr. Jakov dead in the yard. He could see the looters moving below him and Mischa in the hunting lodge. But he could not go past Mischa suspended in the air, turning her head to look at him. He could remember nothing after that, he could only recall much later, he was riding on a tank, found by the soldiers with the chain locked around his neck. He wanted to remember. He had to remember. Teeth-inastoolpit. The flash did not come often; it made him sit up. He looked at the gibbon in the moonlight. Teeth much smaller than that. Baby teeth. Not terrible. Like mine can be. I have to hear the voices carried on their stinking breath, I know what their words smell like. I have to remember their names. I have to find them. And I will. How can I interrogate myself?

36

PROFESSOR DUMAS WROTE a mild, round hand, unnatural in a physician. His note said: Hannibal, would you please see what you can do in the matter of Louis Ferrat at La Sante?

The professor had attached a newspaper clipping about Ferrat's sentencing with a few details about him: Ferrat, from Lyon, had been a minor Vichy functionary, a petty collaborator during the German occupation, but then was arrested by the Germans for forging and selling ration coupons. After the war he was accused of complicity in war crimes, but released for insufficient evidence. A French court convicted him of killing two women in 1949-1950 for personal reasons. He was scheduled to die in three days.

La Sante Prison is in the 14th arrondissement, not far from the medical school. Hannibal reached it in a fifteen-minute walk.

Workmen with a load of pipe were repairing the drains in the courtyard, the site of guillotine executions since the public was barred from attending in 1939. The guards at the gate knew Hannibal by sight and passed him in. As he signed the visitors' log he saw the signature of Inspector Popil high on the page.

The sound of hammering came from a large bare room off the main corridor. As he passed by, Hannibal caught sight of a face he recognized.The state executioner, Anatole Tourneau himself, traditionally known as "Monsieur Paris," had brought the guillotine from its garage on the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire to set it up inside the prison. He was twiddling the little wheels of the blade carrier, the mouton, which prevent the blade from jamming on its way down.

Monsieur Paris was a perfectionist. To his credit, he always used a cover at the top of the uprights so the subject did not have to see the blade.

Louis Ferrat was in the condemned cell, separated by a corridor from the other cells on a second-floor tier in the first building of La Sante. The din of the crowded prison reached his cell as a wash of murmurings and cries and clangs, but he could hear the blows of Monsieur Paris' mallet as the assembly proceeded on the floor below.

Louis Ferrat was a slender man, with dark hair, newly cropped off his neck and the back of his head. The hair on top was left long, to provide Monsieur Paris' assistant a better grip than Louis' small ears would provide.

Ferrat sat on his cot in combination underwear, rubbing between his thumb and fingers a cross on a chain about his neck. His shirt and pants were carefully arranged on a chair, as though a person had been seated there and evaporated out of the clothing. The shoes were side by side beneath the pants cuffs. The clothing reclined in the chair in the anatomical position. Ferrat heard Hannibal but he did not look up.

"Monsieur Louis Ferrat, good afternoon," Hannibal said.

"Monsieur Ferrat has stepped away from his cell," Ferrat said. "I represent him. What do you want?"

Hannibal took in the clothing without moving his eyes. "I want to ask him to make a gift of his body to the medical school, for science. It will be treated with great respect."

"You'll take his body anyway. Drag it away."

"I can't and I wouldn't take his body without his permission. Or ever drag it."

"Ah, here is my client now," Ferrat said. He turned away from Hannibal and conferred quietly with the clothing as though it had just walked into the cell and seated itself in the chair. Ferrat returned to the bars.

"He wants to know why should he give it to you?"

"Fifteen thousand francs for his relatives."

Ferrat turned to the clothing and then back to Hannibal. "Monsieur Ferrat says, Fuck my relatives. They hold out their hand and I'll shit in it." Ferrat dropped his voice. "Forgive the language - he is distraught, and the gravity of the matter requires me to quote him exactly."

"I understand perfectly," Hannibal said. "Do you think he'd like to contribute the fee to a cause his family despises, would that be a satisfaction to him, Monsieur... ?"

"You may call me Louis - Monsieur Ferrat and I share the same first name. No. I believe he is adamant. Monsieur Ferrat lives somewhat apart from himself. He says he has very little influence on himself."

"I see. He is not alone in that."

"I hardly see how you understand anything, you're not much more than a chi - not much more than a schoolboy yourself."

"You might help me then. Each student at the medical school writes a personal letter of appreciation to the donor with whom he is involved. Knowing Monsieur Ferrat as you do, could you help me compose a letter of appreciation? Just in case he should decide favorably?"

Ferrat rubbed his face. His fingers appeared to have an extra set of knuckles where they had been broken and badly set years ago.

"Who would ever read it, other than Monsieur Ferrat himself?"

"It would be posted at the school, if he wishes. All the faculty would see it, prominent and influential people. He could submit it to Le Canard Enchaine for publication."

"What sort of thing would you want to say?"

"I'd describe him as selfless, cite his contribution to science, to the French people, to medical advances that will help the oncoming generation of children."

"Never mind children. Leave children out."

Hannibal quickly wrote a salutation on his notepad. "Do you think this is sufficiently honorific?" He held it up high enough for Louis Ferrat to have to look up at it, the better to gauge the length of his neck.

Not a very long neck. Unless Monsieur Paris got a good grip on his hair, there wouldn't be much left below the hyoid bone, useless for a frontal cervical triangle display.

"We mustn't neglect his patriotism," Ferrat said. "When Le Grand Charles broadcast from London, who responded? It was Ferrat at the barricades! Vive la France!"

Hannibal watched as patriotic fervor swelled the artery in the traitor Ferrat's forehead and caused the jugular and carotid to stand out in his neck - an eminently injectable head.

"Yes, vive la France!" Hannibal said, redoubling his efforts:

"Our letter should emphasize that, though they call him Vichy, he was actually a hero of the Resistance, then?"

"Certainly."

"He saved downed airmen, I would imagine?"

"On a number of occasions."

"Performed the customary acts of sabotage?"

"Often, and without regard for his own safety."

"Tried to protect the Jews?"

Quarter-second hitch. "Heedless of risk to himself."

"Was tortured perhaps, he suffered broken fingers for the sake of France?"

"He could still use them to salute proudly when Le Grand Charles returned," Ferrat said.

Hannibal finished scribbling. "I've just listed the highlights here, do you think you could show it to him?"

Ferrat looked over the sheet of notebook paper, touching each point with his forefinger, nodding, murmuring to himself. "You might put in a few testimonials from his friends in the Resistance, I could supply those. A moment please." Ferrat turned his back to Hannibal and leaned close to his clothing. He turned back with a decision.

"My client's response is: Merde. Tell the young fucker I'll see the dope and rub it on my gums first before I sign. Pardon, but that is verbatim literatim." Ferrat became confidential, leaning close to the bars. "Others on the tier told him he could get enough laudanum - enough laudanum to be indifferent to the knife. 'To dream and not to scream' is how I'd couch it in a courtroom setting. The St. Pierre medical school is giving laudanum in exchange for ... permission. Do you give laudanum?"

"I will be back to see you, with an answer for him."

"I wouldn't wait too long," Ferrat said. "St. Pierre will be coming round." He raised his voice and gripped the neck of his combination underwear as he might clutch his waistcoat during an oration. "I'm empowered to negotiate on his behalf with St. Pierre as well." Close to the bars and quiet now: "Three days and poor Ferrat will be dead, and I'll be in mourning and out a client. You are a medical person. Do you think it's going to hurt? Hurt Monsieur Ferrat when they . .."

"Absolutely not. The uncomfortable part is now. Beforehand. As for the thing itself, no. Not even for an instant." Hannibal had started away, when Ferrat called to him and he went back to the bars.

"The students wouldn't laugh at him, at his parts."

"Certainly not. A subject is always draped, except for the exact field of study."

"Even if he were .. . somewhat unique?"

"In what way?"

"Even if he had, well, infantile parts?"

"A common circumstance, and never, ever, an occasion for humor," Hannibal said. There's a candidate for the anatomy museum, where donors are not credited.

The pounding of the executioner's mallet registered as a twitch in the corner of Louis Ferrat's eye as he sat on his bunk, his hand on the sleeve of his companion, the clothes. Hannibal saw him imagining the assembly in his mind, the uprights lifted into place, the blade with its edge protected by a slit piece of garden hose, beneath it the receptacle.

With a start, seeing it in his mind, Hannibal realized what the receptacle was. It was a baby's bathtub. Like a falling blade Hannibal's mind cut off the thought and, in the silence after, Louis' anguish was as familiar to him as the veins in the man's face, as the arteries in his own.

"I'll get him the laudanum," Hannibal said. Failing laudanum, he could buy a ball of opium in a doorway.

"Give me the consent form. Collect it when you bring the dope."

Hannibal looked at Louis Ferrat, reading his face as intently as he had studied his neck, smelling the fear on him, and said, "Louis, something for your client to consider. All the wars, all the suffering and pain that happened in the centuries before his birth, before his life, how much did all that bother him?"

"Not at all."

"Then why should anything after his life bother him? It is untroubled sleep. The difference is he will not wake to this."