Grutas was pensive. "Was this Svenka at the front?" They did not believe anyone innocent of the Eastern Front could be truly practical.

Kolnas shrugged. "He sounds young on the telephone. Dortlich had some arrangements."

"We'll bring everything out now. It's too soon to sell, but we need to get it out. When is he calling again?"

"Friday."

"Tell him to do it now."

"He'll want out. He'll want papers."

"We can get him to Rome. I don't know if we want him here. Promise him whatever, you know?"

"The art is hot," Kolnas said.

"Go back to your restaurant, Kolnas. Keep feeding the flics for free and they will keep tearing up your traffic tickets. Bring some profiteroles next time you come down here to bleat."

"He's all right," Grutas told Milko, when Kolnas was gone.

"I hope so," Milko said. "I don't want to run a restaurant."

"Dieter! Where is Dieter?" Grutas pounded on a cabin door on the lower deck, and shoved it open.

Two frightened young women were sitting on their bunks, each chained by a wrist to the pipe frame of the bunk. Dieter, twenty-five, held one of them by a fistful of her hair.

"You bruise their faces, split their lip, the money goes down," Grutas said. "And that one is mine for now."

Dieter released the woman's hair and rummaged in the manifold contents of his pockets for a key. "Eva!"

The older woman came into the cabin and stood close to the wall.

"Clean that one up and Mueller will take her to the house," Dieter said.

Grutas and Milko walked through the warehouse to the car. In a special area bound off by a rope were crates marked HOUSEHOLD. Grutas spotted among the appliances a British refrigerator.

"Milko, do you know why the English drink warm beer? Because they have Lucas refrigerators. Not for my house. I wantKelvinator, Frigidaire, Magnavox, Curtis-Mathis. I want all made in America." Grutas raised the cover of an upright piano and played a few notes. "This is a whorehouse piano. I don't want it. Kolnas found me aBosendorfer. The best. Pick it up in Paris, Milko… when you do the other thing."

47

KNOWING HE WOULD not come to her until he was scrubbed and groomed, she waited in his room. He had never invited her there, and she did not poke around. She looked at the drawings on the walls, the medical illustrations that filled one half of the room. She stretched out on his bed in the perfect order of the Japanese half beneath the eaves. On a small shelf facing the bed was a framed picture covered by a silk cloth embroidered with night herons. Lying on her side Lady Murasaki reached over and lifted the silk. It covered a beautiful drawing of her naked in the bath at the chateau, in pencil and chalk and tinted with pastel. The drawing was signed with the chop for Eternity in Eight Strokes and the Japanese symbols in the grass style, and not strictly correct, for "water flowers."

She looked at it for a long time, and then she covered it and closed her eyes, a poem ofYosano Akiko running in her head:

Amid the notes of my koto is another

Deep mysterious tone,

A sound that comes from.

Within my own breast.

Shortly after daylight on the second day, she heard footsteps on the stairs. A key in the lock, and Hannibal stood there, scruffy and tired, his pack hanging from his hand.

Lady Murasaki was standing.

" Hannibal, I need to hear your heart," she said. "Robert's heart went silent. Your heart stopped in my dreams." She went to him and put her ear against his chest. "You smell of smoke and blood."

"You smell of jasmine and green tea. You smell of peace."

"Do you have wounds?"

"No."

Her face was against the scorched dog tags hanging around Hannibal 's neck. She took them out of his shirt.

"Did you take these from the dead?"

"What dead would that be?"

"The Soviet police know who you are. Inspector Popil came to see me. If you go directly to him he will help you."

"These men are not dead. They are very much alive."

"Are they in France? Then give them to Inspector Popil."

"Give them to the French police? Why?" He shook his head. "Tomorrow is Sunday-do I have that right?"

"Yes, Sunday."

"Come with me tomorrow. I'll pick you up. I want you to look at a beast with me and tell me he should fear the French police."

"Inspector Popil-"

"When you see Inspector Popil, tell him I have some mail for him."

Hannibal 's head was nodding.

"Where do you bathe?"

"The hazard shower in the lab," he said. "I'm going down there now."

"Would you like some food?"

"No, thank you."

"Then sleep," she said. "I will go with you tomorrow. And the days after that."

48

HANNIBAL LECTER'S motorcycle was a BMW boxer twin left behind by the retreating German army. It was re-sprayed flat black and had low handlebars and a pillion seat. Lady Murasaki rode behind him, her headband and boots giving her a touch of Paris Apache. She held on to Hannibal, her hands lightly on his ribs.

Rain had fallen in the night and the pavement now was clean and dry in the sunny morning, grippy when they leaned into the curves on the road through the forest of Fontainebleau, flashing through the stripes of tree shadow and sunlight across the road, the air hanging cool in the dips, then warm in their faces as they crossed the open glades.

The angle of a lean on a motorcycle feels exaggerated on the pillion, and Hannibal felt her behind him trying to correct it for the first few miles, but then she got the feel of it, the last five degrees being on faith, and her weight became one with his as they sped through the forest. They passed a hedge full of honeysuckle and the air was sweet enough to taste on her lips. Hot tar and honeysuckle.

The Cafe de L'Este is on the west bank of the Seine about a half-mile from the village of Fontainebleau, with a pleasant prospect of woods across the river. The motorcycle went silent, and began to tick as it cooled. Near the entrance to the cafe terrace is an aviary and the birds in it are ortolans, a sub-rosa specialty of the cafe. Ordinances against the serving ofortolans came and went. They were listed on the menu as larks. Theortolan is a good singer, and these were enjoying the sunshine.

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki paused to look at them.

"So small, so beautiful," she said, her blood still up from the ride.

Hannibal rested his forehead against the cage. The little birds turned their heads to look at him using one eye at a time. Their songs were the Baltic dialect he heard in the woods at home. "They're just like us," he said. "They can smell the others cooking, and still they try to sing. Come."

Three quarters of the terrace tables were taken, a mixture of country and town in Sunday clothes, eating an early lunch. The waiter found a place for them.

A table of men next to them had orderedortolans all around. When the little roasted birds arrived, they bent low over their plates and tented their napkins over their heads to keep all the aroma in.

Hannibal sniffed their wine from the next table and determined it was corked. He watched without expression as, oblivious, they drank it anyway.

"Would you like an ice cream sundae?"

"Perfect."

Hannibal went inside the restaurant. He paused before the specials chalked on the blackboard while he read the restaurant license posted near the cash register.

In the corridor was a door marked Prive. The corridor was empty. The door was not locked. Hannibal opened it and went down the basement steps. In a partly opened crate was an American dishwasher. He bent to read the shipping label.

Hercule, the restaurant helper, came down the stairs carrying a basket of soiled napkins. "What are you doing down here, this is private."