"Come in."

Following his eyes, she saw him account at once for the weapons in place before the armor: the tanto dagger, the short sword, the long sword, the war axe.

" Hannibal?"

"He is not here."

Being attractive, Lady Murasaki was a still hunter. She stood with her back to the mantle, her hands in her sleeves, and let the game come to her. Popil's instinct was to move, to flush game.

He stood behind a divan, touched the cloth. "I have to find him. When did you last see him?"

"How many days is it? Five. What is wrong?"

Popil stood near the armor. He rubbed the lacquered surface of a chest.

"Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Did he indicate where he might be going?"

Indicate. Lady Murasaki watched Popil. Now the tips of his ears were flushed. He was moving and asking and touching things. He liked alternate textures, touching something smooth, then something with a nap. She'd seen it at the table too. Rough then smooth. Like the top and bottom of the tongue. She knew she could electrify him with that image and divert blood from his brain.

Popil went around a potted plant. When he peered at her through the foliage, she smiled at him and disrupted his rhythm.

"He is at an outing, I am not sure where."

"Yes, an outing," Popil said. "An outing hunting war criminals, I think."

He looked into her face. "I'm sorry, but I have to show you this." Popil put on the tea table a fuzzy picture, still damp and curling from the Thermo-Fax at the Soviet embassy. It showed Dortlich's head on the stump and police standing around it with two Alsatians and a hound. Another photo of Dortlich was from a Soviet police ID card. "He was found in the forest Hannibal 's family owned before the war. I know Hannibal was nearby-he crossed the Polish border the day before."

"Why must it be Hannibal? This man must have many enemies, you said he was a war criminal."

Popil pushed forward the ID photo. "This is how he looked in life."

Popil took a sketch from his portfolio, the first of a series. "This is how Hannibal drew him and put the drawing on the wall of his room." Half the face in the sketch was dissected, the other half clearly Dortlich.

"You were not in his room by invitation."

Popil was suddenly angry. "Your pet snake has killed a man. Probably not the first, as you would know better than I. Here are others," he said, putting down sketches. "This was in his room, and this and this and this. That face is from the Nuremberg Trials, I remember it. They are fugitives and now they will kill him if they can."

"And the Soviet police?"

"They are inquiring quietly in France. A Nazi like Dortlich on the People's Police is an embarrassment to the Soviets. They have his file now from Stasi in the GDR."

"If they catch Hannibal- "

"If they catch him in the East, they'll just shoot him. If he gets out, they might let the case wither and die if he keeps his mouth shut."

"Would you let it wither and die?"

"If he strikes in France he'll go to prison. He could lose his head."

Popil stopped moving. His shoulders slumped.

Popil put his hands in his pockets.

Lady Murasaki took her hands out of her sleeves.

"You would be deported," he said. "I would be unhappy. I like to see you."

"Do you live by your eyes alone, Inspector?"

"Does Hannibal? You would do anything for him, wouldn't you?"

She started to say something, some qualifier to protect herself, and then she just said "Yes," and waited.

"Help him. Help me. Pascal." She had never said his first name before.

"Send him to me."

46

THE RIVER ESSONNE, smooth and dark, slid past the warehouse and beneath the black houseboat moored to a quay near Vert le Petit. Its low cabins were curtained. Telephone and power lines ran to the boat. The leaves of the container garden were wet and shiny.

The ventilators were open on the deck. A shriek came out of one of them.

A woman's face appeared at one of the lower portholes, agonized, cheek pressed against the glass, and then a thick hand pushed the face away and jerked the curtain closed. No one saw.

A light mist made halos around the lights on the quay, but directly overhead a few stars shone through. They were too weak and watery to read.

Up on the road, a guard at the gate shined his light into the van marked Cafe de L'Este and, recognizing Petras Kolnas, waved him into the barbed-wire parking compound.

Kolnas walked quickly through the warehouse, where a workman was painting out the markings on appliance crates stenciled U.S. POST EXCHANGE, NEUILLY. The warehouse was jammed with boxes and Kolnas weaved through them to come out onto the quay.

A guard sat beside the boat's gangway at a table made from a wooden box.

He was eating a sausage with his pocket knife and smoking at the same time. He wiped his hands on his handkerchief to perform a pat-down, then recognized Kolnas and sent him past with a jerk of his head.

Kolnas did not meet often with the others, having a life of his own. He went about his restaurant kitchen with his bowl, sampling everything, and he had gained weight since the war.

ZigmasMilko, lean as ever, let him into the cabin.

Vladis Grutas was on a leather settee getting a pedicure from a woman with a bruise on her cheek. She looked cowed and was too old to sell.

Grutas looked up with the pleasant, open expression that was often a sign of temper. The boat captain played cards at a chart table with a boulder-bellied thug named Mueller, late of the SS Dirlewanger Brigade, whose prison tattoos covered the back of his neck and his hands and continued up his sleeves out of sight. When Grutas turned his pale eyes on the players, they folded the cards and left the cabin.

Kolnas did not waste time on greetings.

"Dortlich's dog tag was jammed in his teeth. Good German stainless steel, didn't melt, didn't burn. The boy will have yours too, and mine and Milko's, and Grentz's."

"You told Dortlich to search the lodge four years ago," Milko said.

"Poked around with his picnic fork, lazy bastard," Grutas said. He pushed the woman away with his foot, never looking at her, and she hurried out of the cabin.

"Where is he, this poison little boy who kills Dortlich?" Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. "A student in Paris. I don't know how he got the visa.

He used it going in. No information on him coming out. They don't know where he is."

"What if he goes to the police?" Kolnas said.

"With what?" Grutas said. "Baby memories, child nightmares, old dog tags?"

"Dortlich could have told him how he telephones me to get in touch with you," Kolnas said.

Grutas shrugged. "The boy will try to be a nuisance."

Milko snorted. "A nuisance? I would say he was nuisance enough to Dortlich. Killing Dortlich could not have been easy; he probably shot him in the back."

"Ivanov owes me," Grutas said. "Soviet Embassy security will point out little Hannibal, and we will do the rest. So Kolnas will not worry."

Muffled cries and the sound of blows came from elsewhere in the boat.

The men paid no attention.

"Taking over from Dortlich will be Svenka," Kolnas said, to show he was not worrying.

"Do we want him?" Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. "We have to have him. Svenka worked with Dortlich two years. He has our items. He's the only link we have left to the pictures. He sees the deportees, he can mark the decent-looking ones forDPCBremerhaven. We can get them from there."

Frightened by thePleven Plan's potential for rearming Germany, Joseph Stalin was purging Eastern Europe with mass deportations. The jammed trains ran weekly, to death in the labor camps in Siberia, and to misery in refugee camps in the West. The desperate deportees provided Grutas with a rich supply of women and boys. He stood behind his merchandise. His morphine was German medical-grade. He supplied ACDC converters for the black-market appliances, and made any mental adjustments his human merchandise required in order to perform.