1

THE PLAINCLOTHES OFFICER Rene Aden waited outside Trebelaux's hotel until he saw the light go out in the third-floor walk-up. Then he went to the train station for a fast snack and was lucky to return to his post in time to see Trebelaux come out of the hotel again carrying a gym bag.

Trebelaux took a taxi from the line outside the Gare de l'Este and crossed the Seine to a steam bath in the Rue de Babylone and went inside. Aden parked his unmarked car in a fire zone, counted fifty and went into the lobby area. The air was thick and smelled of liniment. Men in bathrobes were reading newspapers in several languages.

Aden did not want to take off his clothes and pursue Trebelaux into the steam. He was a man of some resolution but his father had died of trench foot and he did not want to take off his shoes in this place. He took a newspaper on its wooden holder from a rack and sat down in a chair.

Trebelaux clopped in clogs too short for him through successive rooms of men slumped on the tile benches, giving themselves up to the heat.

The private saunas could be rented by the fifteen-minute interval. He went into the second one. His entry had already been paid. The air was thick and he wiped his glasses on his towel.

"What kept you," Leet said out of the steam. "I'm about to dissolve."

"The clerk didn't give me the message until I'd already gone to bed," Trebelaux said.

"The police were watching you today at the Jeu de Paume; they know the Guardi you sold me is hot."

"Who put them onto me? You?"

"Hardly. They think you know who has the paintings from Lecter Castle. Do you?"

"No. Maybe my client does."

"If you get the other 'Bridge of Sighs,' I can move both of them," Leet said.

"Where could you sell them?"

"That's my business. A major buyer in America. Let's say an institution. Do you know anything, or am I sweating for nothing?"

"I'll get back to you," Trebelaux said.

On the following afternoon, Trebelaux bought a ticket for Luxembourg at the Gare de l'Este. Officer Aden watched him board the train with his suitcase. The porter seemed dissatisfied with his tip.

Aden made a quick call to the Quai des Orfevres and swung aboard the train at the last moment, cupping his badge in his hand for the conductor.

Night fell as the train approached its stop at Meaux. Trebelaux took his shaving kit to the bathroom. He hopped off the train just as it began to roll, abandoning his suitcase.

A car was waiting for him a block from the station.

"Why here?"Trebelaux said as he got in beside the driver. "I could have come to your place in Fontainebleau."

"We have business here," said the man behind the wheel. "Good business." Trebelaux knew him as Christophe Kleber.

Kleber drove to a cafe near the station, where he ate a hearty dinner, lifting his bowl to drink the vichyssoise. Trebelaux toyed with a salad Nicoise and wrote his initials on the edge of the plate with string beans.

"The police seized the Guardi," Trebelaux said as Kleber's veal paillard arrived.

"So you told Hercule. You shouldn't say those things on the telephone. What is the question?"

"They're telling Leet it was looted in the East. Was it?"

"Of course not. Who's asking the question?"

"A police inspector with a list from Arts and Monuments. He said it was stolen. Was it?"

"Did you look at the stamp?"

"A stamp from the Commissariat of Enlightenment, what is that worth?" Trebelaux said.

"Did the policeman say who it belonged to in the East? If it's a Jew it doesn't matter, the Allies are not sending back art taken from Jews. The Jews are dead. The Soviets just keep it."

"It's not a policeman, it's a police inspector," said Trebelaux.

"Spoken like a Swiss. What's his name?"

"Popil, something Popil."

"Ah," Kleber said, mopping his mouth with his napkin. "I thought so. No difficulty then. He has been on my payroll for years. It's just a shakedown. What did Leet tell him?"

"Nothing yet, but Leet sounds nervous. For now he'll lay it on Kopnik, his dead colleague," Trebelaux said.

"Leet knows nothing, not an inkling of where you got the picture?"

"Leet thinks I got it in Lausanne, as we agreed. He's squealing for his money back. I said I would check with my client."

"I own Popil, I'll take care of it, forget the whole thing. I have something much more important to talk with you about. Could you possibly travel to America?"

"I don't take things through customs."

"Customs is not your problem, only the negotiations while you're there. You have to see the stuff before it goes, then you see it again over there, across a table in a bank meeting room. You could go by air, take a week."

"What sort of stuff?"

"Small antiquities. Some icons, a salt cellar. We'll take a look, you tell me what you think."

"About the other?"

"You are safe as houses," Kleber said.

Kleber was his name only in France. His birth name was Petras Kolnas and he knew Inspector Popil's name, but not from his payroll.

32

THE CANAL BOAT Christabel was tied up with only a spring line at a quay on the Marne River east of Paris, and after Trebelaux came aboard the boat was under way at once. It was a black Dutch-built double-ender with low deckhouses to pass under the bridges and a container garden on deck with flowering bushes.

The boat's owner, a slight man with pale blue eyes and a pleasant expression, was at the gangway to welcome Trebelaux and invite him below. "I'm glad to meet you," the man said and extended his hand. The hair on the owner's hand grew backward, toward the wrist, making his hand feel creepy to the Swiss. "Follow Monsieur Milko. I have the things laid out below."

The owner lingered on deck with Kolnas. They strolled for a moment among the terra-cotta planters, and stopped beside the single ugly object in the neat garden, a fifty-gallon oil drum with holes cut in it big enough to admit a fish, the top cut out with a torch and tied back on loosely with wire. A tarp was spread on the deck under it. The owner of the boat patted the steel drum hard enough to make it ring.

"Come," he said.

On the lower deck he opened a tall cabinet. It contained a variety of arms: a Dragunov sniper rifle, an American Thompson submachine gun, a couple of German Schmeissers, five Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons for use against other boats, a variety of handguns. The owner selected a trident fish spear with the barbs filed off the tines. He handed it to Kolnas.

"I'm not going to cut him a lot," the owner said in pleasant tones. "Eva's not here to clean it up. You do it on deck after we find out what he's told. Puncture him good so he won't float the barrel."

"Milko can - " Kolnas began.

"He was your idea, it's your ass, you do it. Don't you cut meat every day? Milko will bring him up dead and help you load him in the barrel when you've stuck him enough. Keep his keys and go through his room. We'll do the dealer Leet if we have to. No loose ends. No more art for a while," said the boat owner, whose name in France was Victor Gustavson.

Victor Gustavson is a very successful businessman, dealing in ex-SS morphine and new prostitutes, mostly women. The name is an alias for Vladis Grutas.

Leet remained alive, but without any of the paintings. They were held in a government vault for years while the court was stalemated on whether the Croatian agreement on reparations could be applied to Lithuania, and Trebelaux stared sightless from his barrel on the bottom of the Marne, no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eel-grass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth.

No other painting from Lecter Castle would surface for years.

Through Inspector Popil's good offices, Hannibal Lecter was allowed to visit the paintings in custody from time to time over the following years. Maddening to sit in the dumb silence of the vault under the eye of a guard, in earshot of the man's adenoidal breathing.

Hannibal looks at the painting he took from his mother's hands and knows the past was not the past at all; the beast that panted its hot stench on his and Mischa's skins continues to breathe, is breathing now. He turns the "Bridge of Sighs" to the wall and stares at the back of the painting for minutes at a time - Mischa's hand erased, it is only a blank square now where he projects his seething dreams.

He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been.

II

When I said that Mercy stood

Within the borders of the wood,

I meant the lenient beast with claws

And bloody swift-dispatching jaws.

------Lawrence Spingarn

33

ON CENTER STAGE in the Paris Opera, Dr. Faust's time was running out in his deal with the Devil. Hannibal Lecter and Lady Murasaki watched from an intimate box at stage left as Faust's pleas to avoid the flames soared to the fireproof ceiling of Garnier's great theater.

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki, in full fig for the opera. Winks of light came from the opposite boxes as gentlemen turned their opera glasses away from the stage to look at her as well.

Against the stage lights she was in silhouette, just as Hannibal first saw her at the chateau when he was a boy. The images came to him in order: gloss of a handsome crow drinking from the rainspout, gloss of Lady Murasaki's hair. First her silhouette, then she opened a casement and the light touched her face.

Hannibal had come a long way on the bridge of dreams.

He had grown to fill the late count's evening clothes, while in appearance Lady Murasaki remained exactly the same.

Her hand closed on the material of her skirt and he heard the rustle of the cloth above the music. Knowing she could feel his gaze, he looked away from her, looked around the box.

The box had character. Behind the seats, screened from the opposing boxes, was a wicked little goat-footed chaise where lovers might retire while the orchestra provided cadence from down below - in the previous season, an older gentleman had succumbed to heart failure on the chaise during the final measures of "Flight of the Bumblebee," as Hannibal had occasion to know from ambulance service.

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki were not alone in the box.

In the front pair of seats sat the Commissioner of Police for the Prefecture of Paris and his wife, leaving little doubt as to where Lady Murasaki got the tickets. From Inspector Popil, of course. How pleasant that Popil himself could not attend - probably detained by a murder investigation, hopefully a time-consuming and dangerous one, out-of-doors in bad weather perhaps, with the threat of fatal lightning.

The lights came up and tenor Beniamino Gigli got the standing ovation he deserved, and from a tough house. The police commissioner and his wife turned in the box and shook hands all around, everyone's palms still numb from applauding.

The commissioner's wife had a bright and curious eye. She took in Hannibal, fitted to perfection in the count's dinner clothes, and she could not resist a question. "Young man, my husband tells me you were the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France."

"The records are not complete, Madame. Probably there were surgeon's apprentices..."

"Is it true that you read through your textbooks once and then return them to the bookstore within the week to get all your money back?"

Hannibal smiled. "Oh no, Madame. That is not entirely accurate," he said. Wonder where that information came from? The same place as the tickets. Hannibal leaned close to the lady. Trying for an exit line, he rolled his eyes at the commissioner and bent over the lady's hand, to whisper loudly, "That sounds like a crime to me."

The commissioner was in a good humor, having seen Faust suffer for his sins. "I'll turn a blind eye, young man, if you confess to my wife at once."

"The truth is, Madame, I don't get all my money back. The bookstore holds out a two-hundred-franc restocking fee for their trouble."

Away then and down the great staircase of the opera, beneath the torchieres, Hannibal and Lady Murasaki descending faster than Faust to get away from the crowd, Pils' painted ceilings moving over them, wings everywhere in paint and stone. There were taxis now in the Place de l'Opera. A vendor's charcoal brazier laced the air with a whiff of Faust's nightmare. Hannibal flagged a taxi.

"I'm surprised you told Inspector Popil about my books," he said inside the car.

"He found it out himself," Lady Murasaki said. "He told the commissioner, the commissioner told his wife. She needs to flirt. You are not naturally obtuse, Hannibal."

She is uneasy in closed places with me now; she expresses it as irritation.

"Sorry."

She looked at him quickly as the taxi passed a streetlight. "Your animosity clouds your judgment. Inspector Popil keeps up with you because you intrigue him."

"No, my lady, you intrigue him. I expect he pesters you with his verse . .."

Lady Murasaki did not satisfy Hannibal's curiosity. "He knows you are first in the class," she said. "He's proud of that. His interest is largely benign."

"Largely benign is not a happy diagnosis."

The trees were budding in the Place de Vosges, fragrant in the spring night. Hannibal dismissed the cab, feeling Lady Murasaki's quick glance even in the darkness of the loggia. Hannibal was not a child, he did not stay over anymore.

"I have an hour and I want to walk," he said.