“We were supposed to get these skulls,” he said. “Maybe the maggots can find one in your face.” He shot the major in the chest. The man let go of Grutas’ pants leg and looked at his own bare wrist as though curious about the time of his death.
The half-track truck bounced across the field, its tracks mushing bodies, and as it reached the woods, the canvas lifted on the back and Grentz threw the body out.
From above, a screaming Stuka dive bomber came after the Russian tank, cannon blazing. Under the cover of the forest canopy, buttoned up in the tank, the crew heard a bomb go off in the trees and splinters and shrapnel rang on the armored hull.
6
“DO YOU KNOW what today is?” Hannibal asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. “It’s the day the sun reaches Uncle Elgar’s window.”
“What time will it appear?” Mr. Jakov asked, as though he didn’t know.
“It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty,” Hannibal said.
“That was in 1941,” Mr. Jakov said. “Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?”
“Yes.”
“But the year is more than 365 days long.”
“But, Mr. Jakov, this is the year after leap year. So was l941, the last time we watched.”
“Then does the calendar adjust perfectly or do we live by gross corrections?”
A thorn popped in the fire.
“I think those are separate questions,” Hannibal said.
Mr. Jakov was pleased, but his response was just another question: “Will the year 2000 be a leap year?”
“No—yes, yes, it will be a leap year.”
“But it is divisible by one hundred,” Mr. Jakov said.
“It’s also divisible by four hundred,” Hannibal said.
“Exactly so,” Mr. Jakov said. “It will be the first time the Gregorian rule is applied. Perhaps, on that day, surviving all gross corrections, you will remember our talk. In this strange place.” He raised his cup. “Next year in Lecter Castle.”
Lothar heard it first as he drew water, the roar of an engine in low gear and cracking of branches. He left the bucket on the well and in his haste he came into the lodge without wiping his feet.
A Soviet tank, a T-34 in winter camouflage of snow and straw, crashed up the horse trail and into the clearing. Painted on the turret in Russian were AVENGE OUR SOVIET GIRLS AND WIPE OUT THE FASCIST VERMIN. Two soldiers in white rode on the back over the radiators. The turret swiveled to point the tank’s cannon at the house. A hatch opened and a gunner in hooded winter white stood behind a machine gun. The tank commander stood in the other hatch with a megaphone. He repeated his message in Russian and in German, barking over the diesel clatter of the tank engine.
“We want water, we will not harm you or take your food unless a shot comes from the house. If we are fired on, every one of you will die. Now come outside. Gunner, lock and load. If you don’t see faces by the count of ten, fire.” A loud clack as the machine gun’s bolt went back.
Count Lecter stepped outside, standing straight in the sunshine, his hands visible. “Take the water. We are no harm to you.”
The tank commander put his megaphone aside. “Everyone outside where I can see you.”
The count and the tank commander looked at each other for a long moment. The tank commander showed his palms. The count showed his palms.
The count turned to the house. “Come.”
When the commander saw the family he said, “The children can stay inside where it’s warm.” And to his gunner and crew, “Cover them. Watch the upstairs windows. Start the pump. You can smoke.”
The machine gunner pushed up his goggles and lit a cigarette. He was no more than a boy, the skin of his face paler around his eyes. He saw Mischa peeping around the door facing and smiled at her.
Among the fuel and water drums lashed to the tank was a small petrol-powered pump with a rope starter.
The tank driver snaked a hose with a screen filter down the well and after many pulls on the rope the pump clattered, squealed, and primed itself.
The noise covered the scream of the Stuka dive bomber until it was almost on them, the tank’s gunner swiveling his muzzle around, cranking hard to elevate his gun, firing as the airplane’s winking cannon stitched the ground. Rounds screamed off the tank, the gunner hit, still firing with his remaining arm.
The Stuka’s windscreen starred with fractures, the pilot’s goggles filled with blood and the dive bomber, still carrying one of its eggs, hit treetops, plowed into the garden and its fuel exploded, cannon under the wings still firing after the impact.
Hannibal, on the floor of the lodge, Mischa partly under him, saw his mother lying in the yard, bloody and her dress on fire.
“Stay here!” to Mischa and he ran to his mother, ammunition in the airplane cooking off now, slow and then faster, casings flying backward striking the snow, flames licking around the remaining bomb beneath the wing. The pilot sat in the cockpit, dead, his face burned to a death’s head in flaming scarf and helmet, his gunner dead behind him.
Lothar alone survived in the yard and he raised a bloody arm to the boy. Then Mischa ran to her mother, out into the yard and Lothar tried to reach her and pull her down as she passed, but a cannon round from the flaming plane slammed through him, blood spattering the baby and Mischa raised her arms and screamed into the sky. Hannibal heaped snow onto the fire in his mother’s clothes, stood up and ran to Mischa amid the random shots and carried her into the lodge, into the cellar. The shots outside slowed and stopped as bullets melted in the breeches of the cannon. The sky darkened and snow came again, hissing on the hot metal.
Darkness, and snow again. Hannibal among the corpses, how much later he did not know, snow drifting down to dust his mother’s eyelashes and her hair. She was the only corpse not blackened and crisped. Hannibal tugged at her, but her body was frozen to the ground. He pressed his face against her. Her bosom was frozen hard, her heart silent. He put a napkin over her face and piled snow on her. Dark shapes moved at the edge of the woods. His torch reflected on wolves’ eyes. He shouted at them and waved a shovel. Mischa was determined to come out to her mother—he had to choose. He took Mischa back inside and left the dead to the dark. Mr. Jakov’s book was undamaged beside his blackened hand until a wolf ate the leather cover and amid the scattered pages of Huyghens’ Treatise on Light licked Mr. Jakov’s brains off the snow.
Hannibal and Mischa heard snuffling and growling outside. Hannibal built up the fire. To cover the noise he tried to get Mischa to sing; he sang to her. She clutched his coat in her fists.
“Ein Mannlein …”
Snowflakes on the windows. In the corner of a pane, a dark circle appeared, made by the tip of a glove. In the dark circle a pale blue eye.
7
THE DOOR BURST OPEN then and Grutas came in with Milko and Dortlich. Hannibal grabbed a boar spear from the wall and Grutas, with his sure instinct turned his gun on the little girl.
“Drop it or I’ll shoot her. Do you understand me?”
The looters swarmed Hannibal and Mischa then.
The looters in the house, Grentz outside waved for the half-track truck to come up, the truck slit-eyed, its blackout lights picking up wolves’ eyes at the edge of the clearing, a wolf dragging something.
The men gathered around Hannibal and his sister at the fire, the fire warming from the looters’ clothes a sweetish stink of weeks in the field and old blood caked in the treads of their boots, they gathered close. Pot Watcher caught a small insect emerging from his clothes and popped its head off with his thumbnail.
They coughed on the children. Predator breath, ketosis from their scavenged diet of mostly meat, some scraped from the half-track’s treads, made Mischa bury her face in Hannibal’s coat. He gathered her inside his coat and felt her heart beating hard. Dortlich picked up Mischa’s bowl of porridge and wolfed it down himself, getting the last wipe from the bowl on his scarred and webbed fingers. Kolnas extended his
bowl, but Dortlich did not give him any.
Kolnas was stocky and his eyes took on a shine when he looked at precious metal. He slipped Mischa’s bracelet off her wrist and put it in his pocket. When Hannibal grabbed at his hand, Grentz pinched him on the side of the neck and his whole arm went numb.
Distant artillery boomed.
Grutas said, “If a patrol comes—either side— we’re setting up a field hospital here. We saved these little ones and we’re protecting their family’s stuff in the truck. Get a Red Cross off the truck and hang it over the door. Do it now.”
“The other two will freeze if you leave them in the truck,” Pot Watcher said. “They got us by the patrol, they may be useful again.”
“Put them in the bunkhouse,” Grutas said. “Lock them in.”
“Where would they go?” Grentz said. “Who would they tell?”
“They can tell you about their sad fucking lives, in Albanian, Grentz. Get your ass out there and do it.”
In the blowing snow, Grentz lifted two small figures out of the truck and prodded them toward the barn bunkhouse.
8
GRUTAS HAD A SLENDER chain, freezing against the children’s skin as he looped it around their necks. Kolnas snapped on the heavy padlocks. Grutas and Dortlich chained Hannibal and Mischa to the banister on the upper landing of the staircase, where they were out of the way but visible. The one called Pot Watcher brought them a chamber pot and blanket from a bedroom.
Through the bars of the banister, Hannibal watched them throw the piano stool onto the fire. He tucked Mischa’s collar underneath the chain to keep it off her neck.
The snow banked high against the lodge, only the upper panes of the windows admitted a grey light. With the snow blowing sideways past the windows and the wind squeal, the lodge was like a great train moving. Hannibal rolled himself and his sister in the blanket and the landing carpet. Mischa’s coughs were muffled. Her forehead was hot against Hannibal’s cheek. From beneath his coat, he took a crust of stale bread and put it in his mouth. When it was soft, he gave it to her.
Grutas drove one of his men outside every few hours to shovel the doorway, keeping a path to the well. And once Pot Watcher took a pan of scraps to the barn.
Snowed in, the time passing in a slow ache. There was no food, and then there was food, Kolnas and Milko carrying Mischa’s bathtub to the stove lidded with a plank, which scorched where it overhung the tub, Pot Watcher feeding the fire with books and wooden salad bowls. With one eye on the stove, Pot Watcher caught up on his journal and accounts. He piled small items of loot on the table for sorting and counting. In a spidery hand he wrote each man’s name at the top of a page:
Vladis Grutas
Zigmas Milko
Bronys Grentz
Enrikas Dortlich
Petras Kolnas
And last he wrote his own name, Kazys Porvik.
Beneath the names he listed each man’s share of the loot—gold eyeglasses, watches, rings and earrings, and gold teeth, which he measured in a stolen silver cup.
Grutas and Grentz searched the lodge obsessively, snatching out drawers, tearing the backs off bureaus.
After five days the weather cleared. They all put on snowshoes and walked Hannibal and Mischa out to the barn. Hannibal saw a wisp of smoke from the bunkhouse chimney. He looked at Cesar’s big horseshoe nailed above the door for luck and wondered if the horse was still alive. Grutas and Dortlich shoved the children into the barn and locked the door. Through the crack between the double doors, Hannibal watched them fan out into the woods. It was very cold in the barn. Pieces of children’s clothing lay wadded in the straw. The door into the bunkhouse was closed but not locked. Hannibal pushed it open. Wrapped in all the blankets off the cots and as close as possible to the small stove was a boy not more than eight years old. His face was dark around his sunken eyes. He wore a mixture of clothing, layer on layer, some of it girl’s garments. Hannibal put Mischa behind him. The boy shrank away from him.
Hannibal said “Hello.” He said it in Lithuanian, German, English and Polish. The boy did not reply. Red and swollen chilblains were on his ears and fingers. Over the course of the long cold day he managed to convey that he was from Albania and only spoke that language. He said his name was Agon. Hannibal let him feel his pockets for food. He did not let him touch Mischa. When Hannibal indicated he and his sister wanted half the blankets the boy did not resist. The young Albanian started at every sound, his eyes rolling toward the door, and he made chopping motions with his hand.
The looters came back just before sunset. Hannibal heard them and peered through the crack in the double doors of the barn.
They were leading a half-starved little deer, alive and stumbling, a tasseled swag from some looted mansion looped around its neck, an arrow sticking in its side. Milko picked up an axe.
“Don’t waste the blood,” Pot Watcher said with a cook’s authority.
Kolnas came running with his bowl, his eyes shining. A cry from the yard and Hannibal covered Mischa’s ears against the sound of the axe. The Albanian boy cried and gave thanks.
Late in the day when the others had eaten, Pot Watcher gave the children a bone to gnaw with a little meat and sinew on it. Hannibal ate a little and chewed up mush for Mischa. The juice got away when he transferred it with his fingers, so he gave it to her mouth to mouth. They moved Hannibal and Mischa back into the lodge and chained them to the balcony railing, and left the Albanian boy in the barn alone. Mischa was hot with fever, and Hannibal held her tight under the cold-dust smell of the rug.
The flu dropped them all; the men lay as close to the dying fire as they could get, coughing on one another, Milko finding Kolnas’ comb and sucking the grease from it. The skull of the little deer lay in the dry bathtub, every scrap boiled off it.
Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Watcher gave gristle and broth to Hannibal and Mischa. He carried nothing to the barn.
The weather would not break, the sky low and granite grey, sounds of the woods hushed except for the crack and crash of ice-laden boughs.
The food was gone days before the sky cleared. The coughing seemed louder in the bright afternoon after the wind dropped. Grutas and Milko staggered out on snowshoes.
After the length of a fever dream, Hannibal heard them return. A loud argument and scuffling. Through the bars of the banister he saw Grutas licking a bloody birdskin, throwing it to the others, and they fell on it like dogs. Grutas’ face was smeared with blood and feathers. He turned his bloody face up to the children and he said, “We have to eat or die.”
That was the last conscious memory Hannibal Lecter had of the lodge.
Because of the Russian rubber shortage the tank was running on steel road wheels that sent a numbing vibration through the hull and blurred the view in the periscope. It was a big KV-1 going hard along a forest trail in freezing weather, the front moving miles westward with every day of the German retreat. Two infantrymen in winter camouflage rode on the rear deck of the tank, huddled over the radiators, watching for the odd German Werewolf, a fanatic left behind with a Panzerfaust rocket to try to destroy a tank. They saw movement in the brush. The tank commander heard the soldiers on top firing, turned the tank toward their target to bring his coaxial machine gun to bear. His magnifying eyepiece showed a boy a child coming out of the brush, bullets kicking up the snow beside him as the soldiers shot from the moving tank. The commander stood up in the hatch and stopped the shooting. They had killed a few children by mistake, the way it happens, and were glad enough not to kill this one.
The soldiers saw a child, thin and pale, with a chain locked around his neck, the end of the chain dragging in an empty loop. When they set him near the radiators and cut the chain off him, pieces of his skin came away on the links. He carried good binoculars in a bag clutched fiercely against his chest. They shook him, asking questions in Russian, Polish, and makeshift Lithuanian, until they realized he could
not speak at all.
The soldiers shamed each other into not taking the field glasses from the boy. They gave him half an apple and let him ride behind the turret in the warm breath of the radiators until they reached a village.
9
A SOVIET MOTORIZED unit with a tank destroyer and heavy rocket launcher had sheltered at the abandoned Lecter Castle overnight. They were moving before dawn, leaving melted places in the snow of the courtyard with dark oil stains in them. One light truck remained at the castle entrance, the motor idling.
Grutas and his four surviving companions, in their medical uniforms, watched from the woods. It had been four years since Grutas shot the cook in the castle courtyard, fourteen hours since the looters fled the burning hunting lodge, leaving their dead behind them.
Bombs thudded far away and on the horizon antiaircraft tracers arched into the sky.
The last soldier backed out the door, paying out fuse from a reel.
“Hell,” Milko said. “It’s about to rain rocks big as boxcars.”
“We’re going in there anyway,” Grutas said.
The soldier unreeled fuse to the bottom of the steps, cut it and squatted at the end.
“The dump’s been looted anyway,” Grentz said. “C’est foutu.”
“Tu débandes?” Dortlich said.
“Va te faire enculer” Grentz said. They had picked up the French when the Totenkopfs refitted near Marseilles, and liked to insult each other with it in the tight moments before action. The curses reminded them of pleasant times in France.
The Soviet trooper on the steps split the fuse ten centimeters from the end and stuck a match head in the split.
“What color’s the fuse?” Milko said.
Grutas had the field glasses. “Dark, I can’t tell.”