Hannibal Rising Page 0,62

shot him in the back."

"Ivanov owes me," Grutas said. "Soviet Embassy security will point out little Hannibal, and we will do the rest. So Kolnas will not worry."

Muffled cries and the sound of blows came from elsewhere in the boat.

The men paid no attention.

"Taking over from Dortlich will be Svenka," Kolnas said, to show he was not worrying.

"Do we want him?" Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. "We have to have him. Svenka worked with Dortlich two years. He has our items. He's the only link we have left to the pictures. He sees the deportees, he can mark the decent-looking ones forDPCBremerhaven. We can get them from there."

Frightened by thePleven Plan's potential for rearming Germany, Joseph Stalin was purging Eastern Europe with mass deportations. The jammed trains ran weekly, to death in the labor camps in Siberia, and to misery in refugee camps in the West. The desperate deportees provided Grutas with a rich supply of women and boys. He stood behind his merchandise. His morphine was German medical-grade. He supplied ACDC converters for the black-market appliances, and made any mental adjustments his human merchandise required in order to perform.

Grutas was pensive. "Was this Svenka at the front?" They did not believe anyone innocent of the Eastern Front could be truly practical.

Kolnas shrugged. "He sounds young on the telephone. Dortlich had some arrangements."

"We'll bring everything out now. It's too soon to sell, but we need to get it out. When is he calling again?"

"Friday."

"Tell him to do it now."

"He'll want out. He'll want papers."

"We can get him to Rome. I don't know if we want him here. Promise him whatever, you know?"

"The art is hot," Kolnas said.

"Go back to your restaurant, Kolnas. Keep feeding the flics for free and they will keep tearing up your traffic tickets. Bring some profiteroles next time you come down here to bleat."

"He's all right," Grutas told Milko, when Kolnas was gone.

"I hope so," Milko said. "I don't want to run a restaurant."

"Dieter! Where is Dieter?" Grutas pounded on a cabin door on the lower deck, and shoved it open.

Two frightened young women were sitting on their bunks, each chained by a wrist to the pipe frame of the bunk. Dieter, twenty-five, held one of them by a fistful of her hair.

"You bruise their faces, split their lip, the money goes down," Grutas said. "And that one is mine for now."

Dieter released the woman's hair and rummaged in the manifold contents of his pockets for a key. "Eva!"

The older woman came into the cabin and stood close to the wall.

"Clean that one up and Mueller will take her to the house," Dieter said.

Grutas and Milko walked through the warehouse to the car. In a special area bound off by a rope were crates marked HOUSEHOLD. Grutas spotted among the appliances a British refrigerator.

"Milko, do you know why the English drink warm beer? Because they have Lucas refrigerators. Not for my house. I wantKelvinator, Frigidaire, Magnavox, Curtis-Mathis. I want all made in America." Grutas raised the cover of an upright piano and played a few notes. "This is a whorehouse piano. I don't want it. Kolnas found me aBosendorfer. The best. Pick it up in Paris, Milko... when you do the other thing."

Chapter 47-48

47

KNOWING HE WOULD not come to her until he was scrubbed and groomed, she waited in his room. He had never invited her there, and she did not poke around. She looked at the drawings on the walls, the medical illustrations that filled one half of the room. She stretched out on his bed in the perfect order of the Japanese half beneath the eaves. On a small shelf facing the bed was a framed picture covered by a silk cloth embroidered with night herons. Lying on her side Lady Murasaki reached over and lifted the silk. It covered a beautiful drawing of her naked in the bath at the chateau, in pencil and chalk and tinted with pastel. The drawing was signed with the chop for Eternity in Eight Strokes and the Japanese symbols in the grass style, and not strictly correct, for "water flowers."

She looked at it for a long time, and then she covered it and closed her eyes, a poem ofYosano Akiko running in her head:

Amid the notes of my koto is another

Deep mysterious tone,

A sound that comes from.

Within my own breast.

Shortly after daylight on the second day, she heard footsteps on the stairs. A key in the lock, and Hannibal stood there, scruffy and tired, his pack hanging from