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The scalpel was so sharp that it did not cut the skin so much as unzip it, as if it were only a piece of clothing that needed to be pushed out of the way. Below that was the pale yellow subcutaneous fat. Not too far, or he would pierce the muscle. Hannibal hooked his finger underneath a corner of the flap of skin and peeled it away. It was not unlike skinning a deer or a rabbit. The room was quiet, two dozen heads bent over half a dozen cold, stiff bodies.
The professor's voice boomed over the room: "You should see small, cutaneous nerves extending through the deep fascia covering the muscle and traversing the superficial fascial space, small strands that reach up from the muscle and into the skin. You should see them at quite regular intervals."
Hannibal saw.
There was a beautiful regularity in the white strands that burrowed through muscle and fat to reach the skin. They were what enabled the human animal to feel the touch of a lover or the burn of the flame. Because of them, the skin contracted in the cold or exuded sweat in the heat. Hannibal lifted one end of the flap of skin, and then the other. Symmetrical. The nerve fibers lifted up one after the other as if they'd been designed, or programmed by a computer.
The colors were a little disappointing. In the medical atlases the muscles were deep red, like aged sides of beef. He'd remembered there being more red, at his sister's death, and at his parents'. But there'd been a lot of blood, too; perhaps that was what he was remembering: beating hearts and gasping lungs. These people were long dead, their bodies filled with embalming fluid. Maybe it would be different if he could peel the skin back on someone who was still breathing, flush with all the colors of life.
"Hey," said Donny, one of the other young men in the program who'd been assigned to this examining table, "can I make the next incision?"
"Yes, of course," Hannibal murmured, but he didn't take his eyes from the yellow fat, the pink flesh, the white nerves. He thought about lunch. The smell of formaldehyde is an appetite stimulant.
-----
"Okay." Don dropped the business card back to his lap, covered with his hand. "What did it say?"
"Maziyar Jobrani," Hannibal said, and spelled it out letter by letter as well. "Driver for Yellow Cab Baltimore. The logo for Yellow Cab Baltimore is the stylized bonnet of a taxi cab, zebra-striped in yellow and black. The phone number is," and he recited the phone number.
Don fished another card out of his wallet and held it up for ten seconds before covering it. "What about that one?"
"It's not a party trick," said Hannibal. "Besides, you're not proving anything other than that I have an excellent short term memory. It's not as if I'd remember the card tomorrow."
"But you could," said Donny, in tones of deep envy.
"Maybe," Hannibal acknowledged. "But I don't see any motivation. I'll have a Rolodex like everyone else."
Hannibal could reproduce the textbook diagrams in flesh and sinew; he had no trouble recalling dosages and diagnoses. It made him the envy of the other students and the pet of the instructors. As the years went on, his classmates began to gravitate toward less demanding and higher paying specialties, such as dermatology and radiology, but Hannibal knew that he would be a surgeon. He liked the challenge of surgery: finding the fine line between speed and precision and walking it, all while knowing that someone's life or livelihood hung suspended there.
He had great deal of time on his hands, compared to his classmates, but they rarely begrudged him; his precise, methodical movements and perfect recall also made him an excellent chef, and Hannibal was generous.
-----
His aunt was ill.
And so, instead of applying for residencies with the rest of his cohort, Hannibal returned to Europe.
Murasaki lived in Florence now. Hannibal strolled along ancient streets, past sculptures that had survived their empires and were now gawked at by tourists and eaten by acid rain. When his aunt did not need him, he visited art museums and practiced his Italian, which was not nearly as good as his French or even his English.
He went often to the Uffizi. It was a few short blocks away from his aunt's apartment, and Hannibal gladly spent the handful of lira each time. He went not for Michelangelo's David--though of course he paid his respects to that masterpiece--but for the other rooms, filled with names like Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Raphael. He brought paper with him, and pencils, and he sat and tried to recreate their perfection, as he had with the bodies and diagrams in medical school. He took his time, unlike the packs of tourists that roved frantically from room to room, maps clutched in their fists, who spent ten seconds on each famous painting and only glanced at the rest.
Hannibal showed the drawings to his aunt once, thinking that she would enjoy, at the very least, a reproduction of the art she was no longer strong enough to see with her own eyes. She held the stiff paper in her hands and regarded it for a long time, expressionless.
"What is it?" Hannibal asked.
"It's very beautiful." She placed the paper flat on her lap, above the covers, careful not to smear the pencil with her fingertips.
"It's not," said Hannibal. "There's something missing."
Murasaki sighed. "Beauty is always missing. When you find it, it's only for a moment. The rest of the time, you search."
-----
Murasaki's illness had rendered her unable to enjoy rich foods such as bistecca and gelato, and so Hannibal prepared for her the simple dishes of her homeland which she now craved: miso soup; grilled mackerel; chawanmushi; and always, a bowl of steamed white short-grain rice. Murasaki ate sitting up in bed, her bowl in one hand and her chopsticks in the other. Hannibal ate in a chair by her bedside. Afterward, if she was feeling well enough, he would help her to the sitting room, and she would lie on the couch while Hannibal played the piano for her.
"It has been many months now," said Murasaki, after the last notes had lingered and then dissipated.
"Not yet half a year," said Hannibal. He turned on the piano bench to face her.
"You do not need to stay," she said. "When I asked you to come, it was only because I wished to see you before I died."
"I'm not uncomfortable with death," said Hannibal.
His aunt smiled, and there was sadness in her smile. "I don't want you to suspend your life for me. Life is short, no matter whether you live eight years or eighty. You should be cooking and playing music for a lover, not spending your days with a ghost."
"I am learning to find beauty in every moment," said Hannibal. Last week, he had killed a German couple and posed them as Venus and her handmaiden from the Birth of Venus. He'd scattered the scene with violets. "I enjoy being with you."
Murasaki looked down at her folded hands, and then up at Hannibal. "I will return to Japan to die there," she said. "You will not come with me."
Hannibal bowed his head. "As you wish."
Time to return to the United States then, take up his medical practice, and see if beauty was there.
-----
Perhaps if he'd not chosen Baltimore, of all places.
It would have been easier to find beauty in New York or San Francisco, or even Chicago. Certainly the food would be better. But he was familiar with the environment, Johns Hopkins was a prestigious place for a residency, and the distance to D.C. was not insurmountable despite the dreadful traffic. Though there were no remnants of ancient, gorgeous empires or art museums stuffed with canvases predating Christopher Columbus, there was opera and the symphony and the ballet.
But ugliness intruded on him even there: a long-suffering woman's husband who complained loudly during the intermission that he didn't know why his wife liked these things; a badly out-of-tune violin; garish costumes and dull choreography.
But Hannibal could do something about that. It was easy, for example, to find out that the boorish husband enjoyed hiking, easy to follow him on one of these hikes, and even easier to ensure that he never made it home. More difficult was making beauty out of him. Hannibal was done imitating masters like Botticelli and Raphael. Time for original compositions.
Afterward, he was hungry. Hannibal took home a souvenir and made bœuf bourguignon, paying special attention to the colors: the red wine, the orange carrot, the dark green parsley he sprinkled on top afterward. He arranged it in a white bowl. Food should be beautiful. He'd learned this lesson early on, in Paris.
His aunt died, less than a month after returning to Japan. Hannibal received a letter in the mail and a copy of the death certificate. She had left him her cooking knives, a sword, and for whatever reason, a suit of samurai armor that had been in her family for generations. He went to Japan to collect the effects and afterward stayed for a month simply seeing the sights. After returning to Baltimore, he kept the armor in a corner of his bedroom because there was no other place in the townhouse for it.
He would not be there much longer. The townhouse was very nice and very well located, but he wanted a larger kitchen. He wanted more space to entertain. He wanted people to listen to his music and to enjoy his food, as his aunt had, and exclaim that it was beautiful.
-----
"Whose profile are you working on?" the man demanded. He turned to Jack without even so much as waiting for an answer. "Whose profile is he working on?"
"I'm sorry, Will," said Hannibal. "Observing is what we do. I can't shut mine off any more than you can shut yours off."
Will Graham continued with a raised voice at Crawford. Hannibal did not pay a great deal of attention to that exchange. He was thinking.
Hannibal had transformed many a man or woman into an object worthy of reverence. He'd turned uncouth boors into plump sausages and whimsical art pieces; he'd shaped trembling, self-loathing characters unaware of their own power into beautiful beasts. Will Graham was something different. Rude, yes, the way he snapped and avoided eye contact; trembling and self-loathing also because of the grotesque mirror maze of his mind. It was clear that Will regarded his own mind as ugly, but Hannibal had a great deal of practice finding beauty in ugliness.
"Maybe we shouldn't poke him like that," said Crawford.
Hannibal fully intended to continue poking Will. But perhaps a less direct approach.
-----
He heard, later, what Will had said about the woman impaled on antlers: Field kabuki. Intelligent psychopath. A sadist. No traceable motive, no patterns--he may never kill this way again.
He heard it for himself, later still, when he walked into Will's lecture hall on the day Will lectured about the Chesapeake Ripper and called his victims pigs, unworthy of life. Said that the Chesapeake Ripper killed in sounders.
Hannibal took a deep, trembling breath. Will was so close.
He hadn't displayed his kills in a while--the game had grown stale, the world lacking in inspiration--but now! Now there was someone to see. Someone who could read the messages that he left, whether it was a single arm in the observatory or a man left sitting across from himself in a bus yard. Someone who could tell when a man left to bleed in a bathtub was not his work. Hannibal gladly sacrificed Donny on his new altar, devoted to the cultivation of Will's instincts.
Every day after Will came into Hannibal's life seemed to produce new inspiration. It wasn't long before Wound Man and tongues in Bibles seemed vulgar and passé. How had Hannibal ever thought that was elevating them? The judge, posed with his scales: that made a statement. The one-time councilman, grafted into a tree and his chest cavity filled with poisonous blooms: that was beauty. Oh, and that last one took days--almost a week. Hannibal found himself possessed of new patience. Will had done that to him, for him.
And then Will left him.
Hannibal returned to Florence. He walked the ancient streets and past the acid-eaten sculptures; he stood before Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Primavera once again. But all he felt was the lack, even though Bedelia was at his side for much of it. He didn't know why he still hungered. Bedelia saw him, just as Will Graham had seen him. She knew him as well as any other. But she backed away from him when she saw the blood on his hands. Will had never backed away.
It had been almost two years since Hannibal had made any art, but his hands remembered how. He pushed and skinned and glued, almost without the conscious guidance of his mind, and stepped away to regard the product when it was finished. The room reeked of blood and warm meat.
He sketched it for Bedelia, afterward. She regarded it politely. "The three of swords, representing betrayal, heartbreak, and separation," she said. "I didn't think you knew tarot."
"Do you think it's beautiful?" Hannibal asked.
Bedelia gave him the same cool, appraising look as she always did. "Do you think it's beautiful?"
Here, at last, was the thing that had been missing all those years ago, when he'd shown his aunt his sketches. But Bedelia didn't see it. "I do," said Hannibal.
-----
"It really does look black in the moonlight," Will rasped.
Hannibal supposed he could wish for better lighting. He wanted to see the color of Will's eyes; whether there was blood also in his hair and under his fingernails. But it was beautiful like this, too, like a Caravaggio, all dramatic shadows and slices of stark, pale skin. And indeed, he could wish for nothing better when he offered Will a hand up, and Will not only came to him, but put his arms around him.
"This is all I ever wanted for you," Hannibal confessed; Will had this effect on him. "For both of us."
"It's beautiful," Will whispered.
It was.
---end---