Page 76

60

GREAT SOFT FLAKES fall in still morning air along the Lievre River, Quebec, and lie feathery on the sills of the Caribou Corner Outdoor and Taxidermy shop.

Big flakes like feathers fall in Hannibal Lecter’s hair as he hikes up the wooded lane to the log building. It is open for business. He can hear “O Canada!” coming from a radio in the back as a high school hockey game is about to begin. Trophy heads cover the walls. A moose is at the top and arranged in Sistine fashion below it are tableaus of Arctic fox and ptarmigan, soft-eyed deer, lynx and bobcat.

On the counter is a partitioned tray of taxidermy eyes. Hannibal sets down his bag and pokes through the eyes with a finger. He finds a pair of the palest blue intended for a dear and deceased husky. Hannibal takes them out of the tray and places them side by side on the countertop.

The proprietor is coming out. Bronys Grentz’s beard is grizzled now, his temples are greying.

“Yah? I can help you?”

Hannibal looks at him, pokes in the tray and finds a pair of eyes that match Grentz’s bright brown eyes.

“What is it?” Grentz asks.

“I’ve come to collect a head,” Hannibal said.

“Which one, have you got your ticket?”

“I don’t see it up there on the wall.”

“It’s probably in the back.”

Hannibal has a suggestion. “May I come? I’ll show you which one.”

Hannibal brings his bag with him. It contains a few clothes, a cleaver and a rubber apron marked Property of Johns Hopkins.

It was interesting to compare Grentz’s mail and his address book to the roster of the wanted Totenkopfs circulated by the British after the war. Grentz had a number of correspondents in Canada and Paraguay and several in the United States. Hannibal examined the documents at his leisure on the train, where he enjoyed a private compartment, courtesy of Grentz’s cash box.

On the way back to his internship in Baltimore, he broke his trip in Montreal, where he mailed Grentz’s head to one of the taxidermist’s pen pals and put as a return address the name and address of another.

He was not torn with anger at Grentz. He was not torn at all by anger anymore, or tortured by dreams. This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing.

The train rocking southward toward America, so warm and well sprung. So different from his long train trip to Lithuania as a boy.

He would stop in New York overnight, stay at the Carlyle as the guest of Grentz, and see a play. He had tickets for both Dial M for Murder and Picnic. He decided to see Picnic as he found stage murders unconvincing.

America fascinated him. Such abundant heat and electricity. Such odd, wide cars. American faces, open but not innocent, readable. In time he would use his access as a patron of the arts to stand backstage and look out at audiences, their rapt faces glowing in the stage lights, and read and read and read.

Darkness fell and the waiter in the dining car brought a candle to his table, the blood-red claret shivering slightly in his glass with the movement of the train. Once in the night he woke at a station to hear the railroad workers blasting ice off the undercarriage with a steam hose, great clouds of steam sweeping past his window on the wind. The train started again with a tiny jerk and then a liquid glide away from the station lights and into the night, stroking southward toward America. His window cleared and he could see the stars.