The words of her ancestor Murasaki Shikibu came to her and she said them:

"The troubled waters

Are frozen fast.

Under clear heaven

Moonlight and shadow

Ebb and flow."

Hannibal made Prince Genji's classic reply:

"The memories of long love

Gather like drifting snow.

Poignant as the mandarin ducks

Who float side by side in sleep."

"No," Lady Murasaki said. "No. Now there is only ice. It's gone. Is it not gone?"

"You are my favorite person in the world," he said, quite truthfully.

She inclined her head to him and left the room.

In Popil's office she found Dr. Rufin and Dr. Dumas in close conversation. Rufin took Lady Murasaki's hands.

"You told me he might freeze inside forever," she said.

"Do you feel it?" Rufin said.

"I love him and I cannot find him," Lady Murasaki said. Can you?"

"I never could," Rufin said.

She left without seeing Popil.

Hannibal volunteered to work in the jail dispensary and petitioned the court to allow him to return to medical school. Dr. Claire De Vrie, the head of the fledgling Police Forensics Laboratory, a bright and attractive woman, found Hannibal extremely useful in setting up a compact qualitative analysis and toxin identification unit with the minimum of reagents and equipment. She wrote a letter on his behalf.

Dr. Dumas, whose relentless cheer irritated Popil beyond measure, submitted a ringing endorsement of Hannibal, and explained that Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, America, was offering him an internship, after reviewing his illustrations for the new anatomy text. Dumas addressed the morals clause in no uncertain terms.

In three weeks' time, over the objections of Inspector Popil, Hannibal walked out of the Palace of Justice and returned to his room above the medical school. Popil did not say goodbye to him, a guard simply brought him his clothes.

He slept very well in his room. In the morning he called the Place de Vosges and found Lady Murasaki's telephone had been disconnected. He went there and let himself in with his key. The apartment was empty except for the telephone stand. Beside the telephone was a letter for him. It was attached to the blackened twig from Hiroshima sent to Lady Murasaki by her father.

The letter said Goodbye, Hannibal. I have gone home.

He tossed the burnt twig into the Seine on his way to dinner. At the Restaurant Champs de Mars he had a splendid jugged hare on the money Louis left to buy Masses for his soul. Warmed with wine, he decided that in strict fairness he should read some prayers in Latin for Louis and perhaps sing one to a popular tune, reasoning that his own prayers would be no less efficacious than those he could buy at St. Sulpice.

He dined alone and he was not lonely.

Hannibal had entered his heart's long winter. He slept soundly, and was not visited in dreams as humans are.

III

I'd yield me to the Devil instantly,

Did it not happen that myself am he!

– -J. W. von Goethe: Faust: A Tragedy

58

IT SEEMED TO SVENKA that Dortlich's father was never going to die. The old man breathed and breathed, two years of breathing while the coffin draped with a tarpaulin waited on sawhorses in Svenka's cramped apartment. It took up most of the parlor. This occasioned a lot of griping by the woman living with Svenka, who pointed out that the coffin's rounded top prevented its use even as a sideboard. After a few months she began to keep in the coffin contraband canned goods Svenka extorted from people returning from Helsinki on the ferries.

In the two years of Joseph Stalin's murderous purges, three of Svenka's fellow officers were shot and a fourth was hanged in Lubyanka Prison.

Svenka could see that it was time to go. The art was his and he was not leaving it. Svenka did not inherit all of Dortlich's contacts, but he could get good papers. He did not have contacts inside Sweden, but he had plenty on the boats between Riga and Sweden who could deal with a package once it was at sea.

First things first.

On Sunday morning at six forty-five a.m., the maid Bergid emerged from the Vilnius apartment building where Dortlich's father lived. She was bareheaded to avoid the appearance of going to church, and carried a sizable pocket-book with her scarf and her Bible in it.

She had been gone about ten minutes when, from his bed, Dortlich's father heard the footsteps of a person heavier than Bergid coming up the stairs. A clicking and a rasping came from the apartment door as someone raked the tumblers of the lock.

With an effort, Dortlich's father pushed himself up on his pillows.

The outside door dragged on the threshold as it was pushed open. He fumbled in the drawer beside his bed and took out a Luger pistol. Faint with the effort, he held the gun in both hands and brought it under the sheet.

He closed his eyes until the door of his room opened.

"Are you sleeping, Herr Dortlich? I hope I'm not disturbing you," said Sergeant Svenka, in civilian clothes with his hair slicked down.

"Oh, it's you." The old man's expression was as fierce as usual, but he looked gratifyingly weak.

"I came on behalf of the Police and Customs Brotherhood," Svenka said.

"We were cleaning out a locker and we found some more of your son's things."

"I don't want them. Keep them," the old man said. "Did you break the lock?"

"When no one came to the door I let myself in. I thought I'd just leave the box if no one was home. I have your son's key."

"He never had a key."

"It's his skeleton key."

"Then you can lock the door on your way out."

"Lieutenant Dortlich confided to me some details about your… situation and your eventual wishes. Have you written them down? You have the documents? The brotherhood feels it's our responsibility now to see your desires carried out to the letter."

"Yes," Dortlich's father said. "Signed and witnessed. A copy sent to the Klaipeda. You won't need to do anything."

"Yes, I do. One thing." Sergeant Svenka put down the box.

Smiling as he approached the bed, he picked up a cushion off a chair, scuttling sideways spiderlike to put it over the old man's face, climbing astride him on the bed, knees on his shoulders, and leaned with his elbows locked, his weight on the cushion. How long would it take?

The old man was not thrashing.

Svenka felt something hard pressing in his crotch, the sheet tented under him and the Luger went off. Svenka felt the burn on his skin and the burn deep up inside him and fell away backward, the old man raising the gun and shooting through the sheet, hitting him in the chest and chin, the muzzle drooping, and the last shot hit his own foot. The old man's heart beat faster and faster faster stop. The clock above his bed struck seven, and he heard the first four strokes.