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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 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." |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 "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. 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. |
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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 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, |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 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: 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 ear-rings, 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. |
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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 saw a wisp of smoke from the bunkhouse chimney. He looked at Cesar's big horse-shoe 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. |
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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 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. |
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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 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. |
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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 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. |
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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 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. |
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著作権の関係でファンのみの公開となります。 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 destory 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. |