Hannibal Rising (Hannibal Lecter 4)

Gassmann raised the flap over the tailgate of the five-ton. He saw a piano in a crate and a smaller crate plastered with a sign: POUR LA CAVE and FOR THE WINE CELLAR—STORE IN A COOL PLACE. The motorbike was lashed to the side rails of the truck. A plank ramp was in the truck, but it was easier to lift the little motorbike down.

Mueller came to help Gassmann with the bike. He looked at the woman.

“Do you want a drink?”

“Not here,” she said, swinging a leg over the bike.

“Your moto sounds like a fart,” Mueller called after her as she rode away.

“You’re winning her over with suave conversation,” the other German said.

The piano tuner was a skeletal man with dark places between his teeth and a fixed rictus smile like that of Lawrence Welk. When he had finished tuning the black Bösendorfer, he changed into his ancient white tie and tailcoat and came out to play cocktail piano as Grutas’ guests arrived. The piano sounded brittle against the tile floor and glass expanses of the house. The shelves of a glass-and-steel bookcase near the piano buzzed along with B-flat until he moved the books around and then it buzzed at B. He had used a kitchen chair when tuning, but he did not want to sit on it to play.

“Where am I to sit? Where is the piano bench?” he asked the maid, who asked Mueller. Mueller found him a chair of the correct height, but it had arms. “I’ll have to play with my elbows spread,” the tuner said.

“Shut the fuck up and play American,” Mueller said. “Cocktail American he wants, with the singing along.”

The cocktail buffet served thirty guests, curious flotsam of the war. Ivanov from the Soviet embassy was there, too well tailored for a servant of the state. He was talking with an American first sergeant who kept the books at the U.S. Post Exchange in Neuilly. The sergeant was in mufti, a sack suit in window-pane check of a color that brought out the spider angioma on the side of his nose. The bishop down from Versailles was accompanied by the acolyte who did his nails.

Under the pitiless tube lighting, the bishop’s black suit had a greenish roast-beef sheen, Grutas observed as he kissed the bishop’s ring. They talked briefly about mutual acquaintances in Argentina. There was a strong strain of Vichy in the room.

The piano player favored the crowd with his skeletal smile and approximated some Cole Porter songs. English was his fourth language and he was forced sometimes to improvise.

“Night and day, you are the sun. Only you beneese the moon, you are the one.”

The basement was almost dark. A single bulb burned near the stairs. Faintly the music sounded from the floor above.

One wall of the basement was covered with a wine rack. Near it were a number of crates, some of them opened with shavings spilling out. A new stainless-steel sink lay on the floor beside a Rock-Ola Luxury Light-Up jukebox with the latest platters and rolls of nickels to put in it. Beside the wine wall was a crate labeled POUR LA CAVE AND STORE IN A COOL PLACE. A faint creak came from the crate.

The pianist added some fortissimo to drown himself out at uncertain verses: “Whether me or you depart, no matter darling I’m apart, I think of you Night and Dayyyyy.”

Grutas moved through his guests shaking hands. With a small motion of his head he summoned Ivanov into his library. It was stark modern, a trestle-table desk, steel and glass shelves and a sculpture after Picasso by Anthony Quinn entitled “Logic Is a Woman’s Behind.” Ivanov considered the carving.

“You like sculpture?” Grutas said.

“My father was a curator at St. Petersburg, when it was St. Petersburg.”

“You can touch it if you like,” Grutas said.

“Thank you. The appliances for Moscow?”

“Sixty refrigerators on the train in Helsinki at this moment. Kelvinator. And what do you have for me?” Grutas could not help snapping his fingers.

Because of the snap, Ivanov made Grutas wait while he perused the stone buttocks. “There is no file on the boy at the embassy,” he said at last. “He got a visa for Lithuania by proposing to do an article for L’Humanité. It was supposed to be on how well the collectivization worked when the farmlands were seized from his family and how delighted the farmers are to move to the city and build a sewage plant. An aristocrat endorsing the revolution.”

Grutas snorted through his nose.

Ivanov put a photograph on the desk and pushed it across to Grutas. It showed Lady Murasaki and Hannibal outside her apartment building.

“When was this taken?”

“Yesterday morning. Milko was with my man when he took it. The Lecter boy is a student, he works at night, sleeps over the medical school. My man showed Milko everything—I don’t want to know anything else.”

“When did he last see Milko?”

Ivanov looked up sharply. “Yesterday. Something’s wrong?”

Grutas shrugged it off. “Probably not. Who is the woman?”