Free Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris Page A

brittle, respectively. The organ grinder drank all the wine at once and confiscated half the peanut brittle for himself, the monkey noting with his wise little eyes which pocket his master put the candy in. Two gendarmes gave the musician the usual futile admonitions and found the pastry stall.
    Lady Murasaki’s objective was Legumes Bulot, the premier vegetable booth, to obtain fiddlehead ferns. Fiddleheads were a great favorite of the count, and they sold out early.
    Hannibal trailed behind her carrying a basket. He paused to watch as a cheese merchant oiled a length of piano wire and used it to cut a great wheel of Grana. The merchant gave him a bite and asked him to recommend it to Madame.
    Lady Murasaki did not see any fiddleheads on display and before she had the chance to ask, Bulot of the Vegetables brought a basket of the coiled ferns from under his counter. “Madame, these are so superlative I would not allow the sun to touch them. Awaiting your arrival, I covered them with this cloth, dampened not with water, but with actual garden dew.”
    Across the aisle from the greengrocer, Paul Momund sat in his bloody apron at a butcher-block table cleaning fowl, throwing the offal into a bucket, and dividing gizzards and livers between two bowls. The butcher was a big, beefy man with a tattoo on his forearm—a cherry with the legend
Void la Mienne, où est la Tienne?
The red of the cherry had faded paler than the blood on his hands. Paul the Butcher’s brother, more suited to dealing with the public, worked the counter under the banner of
Momund’s Fine Meats
.
    Paul’s brother brought him a goose to draw. Paul had a drink from the bottle of marc beside him andwiped his face with his bloody hand, leaving blood and feathers on his cheeks.
    “Take it easy, Paul,” his brother said. “We have a long day.”
    “Why don’t you pluck the fucking thing? I think you’d rather pluck than fuck,” Paul the Butcher said, to his own intense amusement.
    Hannibal was looking at a pig’s head in a display case when he heard Paul’s voice.
    “Hey Japonnaise!”
    And the voice of Bulot of the Vegetables: “Please, Monsieur! That is unacceptable.”
    And Paul again: “Hey Japonnaise, tell me, is it true that your pussy runs crossways? With a little puff of straight hairs like an explosion?”
    Hannibal saw Paul then, his face smeared with blood and feathers,
like the Blue-Eyed One, like the Blue-Eyed One gnawing a birdskin
.
    Paul turned to his brother now. “I’ll tell you, I had one in Marseilles one time that could take your whole—”
    The leg of lamb smashing into Paul’s face drove him over backward in a spill of bird intestines, Hannibal on top of him, the leg of lamb rising and slamming down until it slipped from Hannibal’s hand, the boy reaching behind him for the poultry knife on the table, not finding it, finding a handful of chicken innards and smashing them into Paul’s face, the butcher pounding at him with his great bloody hands. Paul’s brother kicked Hannibal in the back of the head, picked up a veal hammer from thecounter, Lady Murasaki flying into the butcher stall, shoved away and then a cry
“Kiai!”
    Lady Murasaki held a large butcher knife against the butcher’s brother’s throat, exactly where he would stick a pig, and she said, “Be perfectly still, Messieurs.” They froze for a long moment, the police whistles coming, Paul’s great hands around Hannibal’s throat and his brother’s eye twitching on the side where the steel touched his neck, Hannibal feeling, feeling on the tabletop behind him. The two gendarmes, slipping on the offal, pulled Paul the Butcher and Hannibal apart, a gendarme prying the boy off the butcher, lifting him off the ground and setting him on the other side of the booth.
    Hannibal’s voice was rusty with disuse, but the butcher understood him. He said “Beast” very calmly. It sounded like taxonomy rather than insult.
    The police station faced the square, a