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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 "Stand in there." Hannibal stood in the middle of the cell. The commandant shut the cell door with a clang that made the drunk stir and mutter. "Look at the floor. Do you see how the boards are stained and shrunken?" They are pickled with tears. Try the door. Do it. You see it will not open from that side. Temper is a useful but dangerous gift. Use judgment and you will never occupy a cell like this. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 I never give but one pass. This is yours. But don't do it again. Flog no one else with meat." The commandant walked Lady Murasaki and Hannibal to their car. When Hannibal was inside, Lady Murasaki had a moment with the policeman. "Commandant, I don't want my husband to know. Dr. Rufin could tell you why." He nodded. "If the count learns of it at all and asks me, I will say it was a brawl among drunks and the boy happened to be in the middle. I'm sorry if the count is not well. In other ways he is the most fortunate of men." It was possible that the count, in his working isolation at the chateau, might never have heard of the incident. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 But in the evening, as he smoked a cigar, the driver Serge returned from the village with the evening papers and drew him aside. The Friday market was in Villiers, ten miles away. The count, grey and sleepless, climbed out of his car as Paul the Butcher was carrying the carcass of a lamb into his booth. The count's cane caught Paul across the upper lip and the count flew at him, slashing with the cane. "Piece of filth, you would insult my wife!!" Paul dropped the meat and shoved the count hard, the count's thin frame flying back against a counter and the count came on again, slashing with his cane, and then he stopped, a look of surprise on his face. He raised his hands halfway to his waistcoat and fell facedown on the floor of the butcher's stall. DISGUSTED WITH the whining and bleating of the hymns and the droning nonsense of the funeral, Hannibal Lecter, thirteen and the last of his line, stood beside Lady Murasaki and Chiyoh at the church door absently shaking hands as the mourners filed out, the women uncovering their heads as they left the church in the post-war prejudice against head scarves. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Lady Murasaki listened, making gracious and correct responses. Hannibal's sense of her fatigue took him out of himself and he found that he was talking so she would not have to talk, his new-found voice degenerating quickly to a croak. If Lady Murasaki was surprised to hear him she did not show it, but took his hand and squeezed it tight as she extended her other hand to the next mourner in line. A gaggle of Paris press and the news services were there to cover the demise of a major artist who avoided them during his lifetime. Lady Murasaki had nothing to say to them. In the afternoon of this endless day, the count's lawyer came to the chateau along with an official of the Bureau of Taxation. Lady Murasaki gave them tea. "Madame, I hesitate to intrude upon your grief," the tax official said, "but I want to assure you that you will have plenty of time to make other arrangements before the chateau is auctioned for death duties. I wish we could accept your own sureties for the death tax, but as your resident status in France will now come into question, that is impossible." Night came at last. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door, and Chiyoh had made up a pallet to sleep in the room with her. He lay awake in his room for a long time and when sleep came, with it came dreams. The Blue-Eyed One's face smeared with blood and feathers morphing into the face of Paul the Butcher, and back again. Hannibal woke in the dark and it did not stop, the faces like holograms on the ceiling. Now that he could speak, he did not scream. He rose and went quietly up the stairs to the count's studio. Hannibal lit the candelabra on either side of the easel. The portraits on the walls, finished and half-finished had gained presence with their maker gone. Hannibal felt them straining toward the spirit of the count as though they might find him breath. His uncle's cleaned brushes stood in a canister, his chalks and charcoals in their grooved trays. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 The painting of Lady Murasaki was gone, and she had taken her kimono from the hook as well. Hannibal began to draw with big arm motions, as the count had counseled, trying to let it go, making great diagonal strokes across newsprint, slashes of color. It did not work. Toward dawn he stopped forcing; he quit pushing, and simply watched what his hand revealed to him. HANNIBAL SAT on a stump in a small glade beside the river, plucking the lute and watching a spider spin. The spider was a splendid yellow and black orb weaver, working away. The web vibrated as the spider worked. The spider seemed excited by the lute, running to various parts of its web to check for captives as Hannibal plucked the strings. He could approximate the Japanese song, but he still hit clinkers. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 He thought of Lady Murasaki's pleasant alto voice speaking English, with its occasional accidental notes not on the Western scale. He plucked closer to the web and further away. A slow-flying beetle crashed into the web and the spider rushed to bind it. The air was still and warm, the river perfectly smooth. Near the banks water bugs ran across the surface and dragonflies darted over the reeds. Paul the Butcher paddled his small boat with one hand, and let it drift near the willows overhanging the bank. The crickets chirped in Paul's bait basket, attracting a red-eyed fly, which fled from Paul's big hand as be grabbed a cricket and put it on his hook. He cast under the willows and at once his quill float plunged and his rod came alive. Paul reeled in his fish and put it with the others on a chain stringer hanging over the side of his boat. Occupied with the fish he only half-heard a thrumming in the air. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 He sucked fish blood off his thumb and paddled to a small pier on the wooded bank where his truck was parked. He used the rude bench on the pier to clean his biggest fish and put it in a canvas bag with some ice. The others were still alive on the stringer in the water. They pulled the chain under the pier in an attempt to hide. A twanging in the air, a broken tune from somewhere far from France. Paul looked at his truck as though it might be a mechanical noise. He walked up the bank, still carrying his filleting knife, and examined his truck, checked the radio aerial and looked at his tires. He made sure his doors were locked. Again came the twanging, a progression of notes now. Paul followed the sound, rounding some bushes into the little glade, where he found Hannibal seated on the stump playing the Japanese lute, its case propped against a motorbike. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Beside him was a drawing pad. Paul went back at-once to his truck and checked the gas filler pipe for grains of sugar. Hannibal did not look up from his playing until the butcher returned and stood before him. "Paul Momund, fine meats," Hannibal said. He was experiencing a sharpness of vision, with edges of refracted red like ice on a window or the edge of a lens. "You've started talking, you little mute bastard. If you pissed in my heater I'll twist your fucking head off. There's no flic to help you here." "Nor to help you either." Hannibal plucked several notes. "What you have done is unforgivable." Hannibal put down the lute and took up his sketch pad. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 Looking up at Paul, he used his little finger as a smudge to make a small adjustment on the pad. He turned the page and rose, extending a blank page to Paul. "You owe a certain lady a written apology." Paul smelled rank to him, sebum and dirty hair. "Boy, you are crazy to come here." "Write that you are sorry, you realize that you are despicable, and you will never look at her or address her in the market again." "Apologize to the Japonnaise?" Paul laughed. "The first thing I'll do is throw you in the river and rinse you off." He put his hand on his knife. "Then maybe I'll slit your pants and give you something where you don't want it." |