Will opened his eyes in the dream, although he was content to stay under the sheets resting his cheek on someone's shoulder. He studied the room disinterestedly. Wine glasses crowded a side table. The window was a black square looking down on nothing. Bomber planes sailed unseen overhead and dropped their load and edged the distant mountains in red light
A stranger lay warm beneath him. Moonlight cut across his chest and obscured his face. He was tall and flat-muscled and completely naked. His eyes shone white in the dark like polished stones. Will couldn't tell if the man wore a mask or if the words simply issued from his open mouth without having to move. He said, "I have a few more questions if that's all right, Mister Graham.
Low and secretive, Hannibal spoke in a hushed voice as though someone outside the door had their ear to the keyhole. His long fingers idly twisted a lock of Will's hair.
"When do I get to ask questions?" asked Will. He was scared to touch Hannibal's face. He knew it would wake him if he did. He pretended it was normal to have naked arguments with Nazi scientists. His dreams of late were populated with gunfire and hot pursuits through the forest, and he wanted this one to linger a little longer.
"When you're ready." Hannibal answered.
His fingers skated lightly over Will's arm, up and down, eliciting a little shiver as he asked the following questions:
"When is a sound not music?
Are people sounds?
What about the people very far away from me?
If I were on the opposite end of the world, would I still hear you?"
Hannibal's hand slid over the thin sheet covering Will.
"How many sounds would you make?
A dozen?
A hundred?
A thousand?"
His mouth found Will's throat, words slurring against his skin.
"Sounds are just vibrations, yes?
Radio and x-ray and sunbeams reflected on distant satellites?
Are they music?"
Hannibal pulled back the sheet, cinders burning in the back of his eyes as the clouds parted outside and washed Will's naked body in radiant blue light.
"Is moonlight music?"
Will tipped up his face. Under the pillow, he gripped the pistol the police had confiscated before his arrest that, until now, he'd had every reason to use, and now he couldn't think of one. Mason's screams, the dead girl in the dormitory, faded under Hannibal's kiss. Will sank into it, and when he awoke his hand reached out to empty air.
(*)
Having received Doctor Lecter's evaluation, Chilton moved Will Graham from the construction crew to a desk in a crackling radio lab. The two big receivers dated from the 1920's and threw off sparks when plugged in. Several ledgers monitoring Allied back channels were the product of the capable security officer Gideon and his even more formidable commander Hobbs, who had recently been called away for "re-education". Hobbs had been caught snooping in Lecter's old office, according to Gideon.
"Did Lecter work here before the war?" Will asked. He immediately regretted calling himself to Gideon's attention.
"They didn't tell you?" said Gideon. He was a big man who rarely bathed and always insisted on whispering directly into Will's ear for fear, rightly, that Chilton was recording their conversations. "Well yes, I suppose that makes sense, what with what happened to Lecter's other patients."
Will pretended to tune him out, adjusting his headset and listening to the static between radio stations, though curiosity ate at him. "That a fact."
"Don't get me wrong, Lecter is a man of distinction, and has sought the noble art of medicine in a dozen international theaters of war."
"Which is a fancy way of saying Lecter's got a hard-on for mad science and not enough volunteers."
Gideon leered. "Now I get what he sees in you."
"You mean the doctor?"
"Yeah."
"What could my therapist possibly see in me?"
"A total dish. Good looks and brains to match." Gideon turned quarterwise in his chair, studying Will. "Anyway there's more to him than that. Doctor, interrogator, art critic, black magician, wine expert, our Lecter is a man of many hats."
"Didn't know he was into intelligence gathering as well." Will nodded to the equipment filling up one wall.
"Oh no, the radios are Chilton's idea, these rooms were all doctor's offices back when Camp Mullerin was a spa and Richie Riches came here to quietly die of tuberculosis."
"How convenient for the doctor."
Gideon made a dismissive hand gesture. "There's no record of any wrongdoing. Even if they'd found the bodies, the Reich needed every man on deck after the brain drain in '39."
"What did he do to his patients?"
Gideon wagged a finger. "Nice try kid, no cigar."
Will glanced at the door to the adjoining hallway, now a storage unit for antiquated medical paraphernalia. Bone saws and rib spreaders and whatnot. Lector's old office door loomed just beyond the edge of the lamplight. "What was Hobbs doing in there?" Will asked.
"Same thing as everyone else, trying to get over the fence." Gideon smiled and licked his pencil, sketching a crude map of the camp on a sheet of paper. "Wouldn't be the first time. The office window on that side of the building is only a few feet from the fence, and at sunrise the shadows from the north gun tower form a blind spot for about ten minutes every morning." He marked an X showing their location relative to the fence. "Toss a blanket over the barbed wire, tie a toaster to one end of a sheet rope for your grappling hook, a good climber could shimmy home free. He and his daughter planned it for months. The daughter's in the infirmary with a broken leg, lost her balance on the window ledge. Hobbs on the other hand..."
"What happened to him?"
"We know he picked the office lock, then went missing for three hours. Gunner spotted him rocking back and forth on the roof of the mess hall, ten stories up, on the farthest opposite corner of the camp. Won't come down, won't talk. Damnedest thing. Chilton's waiting him out, man's gotta get hungry eventually."
Another question formed on Will's mouth, when a secretary knocked on the door and called Gideon away for a debriefing with the top brass, locking Will in the room with a promise to return before dark.
Will ran a hand through his hair, bored. Russians encrypted their emergency band chatter with a combination of dates, names, Chinese slang, and bad French spelled phonetically by half-literate soldiers. Backlogs were stacked to the ceiling. Cracking the code would take him, at most, half an hour, and his thoughts quickly turned to Hannibal. Doctor Lecter, he corrected himself.
He walked past the shelves of old medical equipment to Lecter's old office door. New lock, three deadbolts, with an oak bar nailed across it as thick as his calf. He gave the bar a good tug. Nobody was getting past that.
Will put his ear to the door. Nothing, not even the ambient noise of the pipes upstairs. He had the unsettling impression of someone listening in from the other side.
"Graham!" Chilton barked.
"Present." Will replied, sliding back behind his work station. "I've got the first backlog analyzed."
"Were you analyzing from the storage room? It had better be A fucking plus material Mister Graham. Don't let me catch you missing a second time or it's no food and two weeks grave digging in the rain."
Will eyed his work, mind still whirring about Hannibal's office door and how...familiar it felt to him. "I'll take that recommendation under advisement."
TO BE CONTINUED