Grutas and Mueller bound Lady Murasaki to the chair.

Grutas dismissed Mueller. He lounged on a chaise against the wall, his legs spread, rubbing his thighs. "Do you have any idea what will happen if you don't find me some bliss?" Grutas said.

Lady Murasaki closed her eyes. She felt the boat tremble and begin to move.

Hercule made two trips out of the café with the garbage cans. He unlocked his bicycle and rode away.

His taillight was still visible when Hannibal slipped into the kitchen door. He carried a bulky object in a bloodstained bag.

Kolnas came into the kitchen carrying his ledger. He opened the firebox of the wood-burning oven, put in some receipts and poked them back into the fire.

Behind him, Hannibal said, "Herr Kolnas, surrounded by bowls."

Kolnas spun around to see Hannibal leaning against the wall, a glass of wine in one hand and a pistol in the other.

"What do you want? We are closed here."

"Kolnas in bowl heaven. Surrounded by bowls. Are you wearing your dog tag, Herr Kolnas?"

"I am Kleber, citizen of France, and I am calling the police."

"Let me call them for you." Hannibal put down his glass and picked up the telephone. "Do you mind if I call the War Crimes Commission at the same time? I'll pay for the call."

"Fuck you. Call who you please. You can call them, I'm serious. Or I'll do it. I have papers, I have friends."

"I have children. Yours."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I have both of them. I went to your home on the Rue Juliana. I went into the room with the big stuffed elephant and I took them."

"You are lying."

"Take her, she's going to die anyway, that's what you said. Remember?

Tagging along behind Grutas with your bowl.

"I brought something for your oven." Hannibal reached behind him and threw onto the table his bloody bag. "We can cook together, like old times." He dropped Mischa's bracelet onto the kitchen table. It rolled around and around before it settled to a stop.

Kolnas made a gagging sound. For a moment he could not touch the bag with his trembling hands and then he tore at it, tore at the bloody butcher paper inside, tore down to meat and bones.

"It's a beef roast, Herr Kolnas, and a melon. I got them at Les Halles. But do you see how it feels?"

Kolnas lunged across the table, bloody hands finding Hannibal 's face, but he was off his feet stretched over the table and Hannibal pulled him down, and he brought the pistol down on the base of Kolnas' skull, not too hard, and Kolnas' lights went out.

Hannibal 's face, smeared with blood, looked like the demonic faces in his own dreams. He poured water in Kolnas' face until his eyes opened.

"Where is Katerina, what have you done with her?" Kolnas said.

"She is safe, Herr Kolnas. She is pink and perfect. You can see the pulse in her temple. I will give her back to you when you give me Lady Murasaki."

"If I do that I am a dead man."

"No. Grutas will be arrested and I will not remember your face. You get a pass for the sake of your children."

"How do I know they are alive?"

"I swear on my sister's soul you will hear their voices. Safe. Help me or I will kill you and leave the child to starve. Where is Grutas? Where is Lady Murasaki?"

Kolnas swallowed, choked on some blood in his mouth. "Grutas has a houseboat, a canal boat, he moves around. He's in the Canal de Loing south of Nemours."

"The name of the boat?"

"Christabel. You gave your word, where are my children?"

Hannibal let Kolnas up. He picked up the telephone beside the cash register, dialed a number and handed Kolnas the receiver.

For a moment Kolnas could not recognize his wife's voice, and then "Hello! Hello! Astrid?? Check on the children, let me speak to Katerina!

Just do it!"

As Kolnas listened to the puzzled sleepy voice of the awakened child, his face changed. First relief and then curious blankness as his hand crept toward the gun on the shelf beneath the cash register. His shoulders slumped. "You tricked me, Herr Lecter."

"I kept my word. I will spare your life for the sake of your-"

Kolnas spun with the big Webley in his fist, Hannibal 's hand slashing toward it, the gun going off beside them, and Hannibal drove the tanto dagger underneath Kolnas' chin and the point came out the top of his head.

The telephone receiver swung from its wire. Kolnas fell forward on his face. Hannibal rolled him over and sat for a moment in a kitchen chair looking at him. Kolnas' eyes were open, already glazing. Hannibal put a bowl over his face.

He carried the cage ofortolans outside and opened it. He had to grab the last one and toss it into the moon bright sky. He opened the outdoor aviary and shooed the birds out. They formed up in a flock and circled once, tiny shadows flicking across the patio, climbing to test the wind and pick up the polestar. "Go," Hannibal said. "The Baltic is that way.

Stay all season."

56

THROUGH THE VAST NIGHT a single point of light shot across the dark fields ofIle de France, the motorcycle flat out, Hannibal down on the gas tank. Off the concrete south of Nemours and following an old towpath along the Canal de Loing, asphalt and gravel, now a single lane of asphalt overgrown on both sides, Hannibal once zigging at speed through cows on the road and feeling a tail-brush sting him as he passed, swerving off the pavement, gravel rattling under the fenders, and back on again, the motorcycle shaking its head and catching itself, settling into speed again.

The lights of Nemours dimming behind him, flat country now, and only the darkness ahead, the details of the gravel and the weeds absurdly sharp, insistent in his headlight, and the dark ahead swallowed up the yellow beam. He wondered if he joined the canal too far south-was the boat behind him?

He stopped and turned off his lights, to sit in darkness and decide, the motorcycle shivering under him.

Far ahead, far into the dark, it appeared that two little houses moved in tandem across the meadow, deckhouses just visible above the banks of the Canal de Loing.

Vladis Grutas' houseboat was wonderfully quiet as it motored southward sending a soft ripple against the sides of the canal, cows asleep in the fields on both sides. Mueller, nursing stitches in his thigh, sat in a canvas chair on the fore-deck, a shotgun propped against the railing of the companionway beside him. At the stern, Gassmann opened a locker and took out some canvas fenders.

Three hundred meters back, Hannibal slowed, the BMW burbling along, weeds brushing his shins. He stopped and took his father's field glasses from the saddlebag. He could not read the name of the boat in the darkness.

Only the boat's running lights showed and the glow from behind the window curtains. Here the canal was too wide to be sure of making a jump onto the deck.

From the bank he might be able to hit the captain in the wheelhouse with the pistol-he could surely drive him from the helm-but then the boat would be alerted, he would have to face them all at once as he came aboard. They could be coming from both ends at once. He could see a covered companionway at the stern and a dark lump near the bow that was probably another entrance to the lower deck.

The binnacle light glowed in the wheelhouse windows near the stern, but he could not make out anyone inside. He needed to get ahead of them. The towpath was close beside the water and the fields too rough for a detour.

Hannibal rode past the canal boat on the towpath, feeling his side toward the boat tingling. A glance at the boat. Gassmann on the stern was pulling canvas fenders out of a locker. He looked up as the motorcycle passed. Moths fluttered above a cabin skylight.

Hannibal held himself to a moderate pace. A kilometer ahead he saw the lights of a car crossing the canal.