MICHAEL CHABON
The Final Solution

Dedication

To the memory of AMANDA DAVIS first reader of these pages

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

I

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking…

II

There were so many queer aspects to Sunday dinner at…

III

They found him sitting on the boot bench outside his…

IV

The old man settled himself onto one knee. The left…

V

She packed a pair of shirts, two pairs of socks,…

VI

The old man had visited Gabriel Park once before; sometime…

VII

The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The…

VIII

The hives were a row of gabled boxes on the…

IX

Mr Panicker nearly ran him down.

X

He had seen madmen: the man who smelled of boiled…

XI

The boy watched, unsmiling, his dark blazer neat and pressed,…

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I

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking along the railway tracks. His gait was dreamy and he swung a daisy as he went. With each step the boy dragged his toes in the rail bed, as if measuring out his journey with careful ruled marks of his shoetops in the gravel. It was midsummer, and there was something about the black hair and pale face of the boy against the green unfurling flag of the downs beyond, the rolling white eye of the daisy, the knobby knees in their short pants, the self-important air of the handsome grey parrot with its savage red tail feather, that charmed the old man as he watched them go by. Charmed him, or aroused his sense – a faculty at one time renowned throughout Europe – of promising anomaly.

The old man lowered the latest number of The British Bee Journal to the rug of Shetland wool that was spread across his own knobby but far from charming knees, and brought the long bones of his face closer to the windowpane. The tracks – a spur of the Brighton–Eastbourne line, electrified in the late twenties with the consolidation of the Southern Railway routes – ran along an embankment a hundred yards to the north of the cottage, between the concrete posts of a wire fence. It was ancient glass the old man peered through, rich with ripples and bubbles that twisted and toyed with the world outside. Yet even through this distorting pane it seemed to the old man that he had never before glimpsed two beings more intimate in their parsimonious sharing of a sunny summer afternoon than these.

He was struck, as well, by their apparent silence. It seemed probable to him that in any given grouping of an African grey parrot – a notoriously prolix species – and a boy of nine or ten, at any given moment, one or the other of them ought to be talking. Here was another anomaly. As for what it promised, this the old man – though he had once made his fortune and his reputation through a long and brilliant series of extrapolations from unlikely groupings of facts – could not, could never, have begun to foretell.

As he came nearly in line with the old man’s window, some one hundred yards away, the boy stopped. He turned his narrow back to the old man as if he could feel the latter’s gaze upon him. The parrot glanced first to the east, then to the west, with a strangely furtive air. The boy was up to something. A hunching of the shoulders, an anticipatory flexing of the knees. It was some mysterious business – distant in time but deeply familiar – yes—

—the toothless clockwork engaged; the unstrung Steinway sounded: the conductor rail.

Even on a sultry afternoon like this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter – newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers, bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs – that made treacherous the crossing of his parlour, and open his front door to the world. Indeed the daunting prospect of the journey from armchair to doorstep was among the reasons for his lack of commerce with the world, on the rare occasions when the world, gingerly taking hold of the brass door-knocker wrought in the hostile form of a giant apis dorsata, came calling. Nine visitors out of ten he would sit, listening to the bemused mutterings and fumblings at the door, reminding himself that there were few now living for whom he would willingly risk catching the toe of his slipper in the hearth rug and spilling the scant remainder of his life across the cold stone floor. But as the boy with the parrot on his shoulder prepared to link his own modest puddle of electrons to the torrent of them being pumped along the conductor or third rail from the Southern Railway power plant on the Ouse outside of Lewes, the old man hoisted himself from his chair with such unaccustomed alacrity that the bones of his left hip produced a disturbing scrape. Lap rug and journal slid to the floor.

He wavered a moment, groping already for the door latch, though he still had to cross the entire room to reach it. His failing arterial system laboured to supply his suddenly skybound brain with useful blood. His ears rang and his knees ached and his feet were plagued with stinging. He lurched, with a haste that struck him as positively giddy, toward the door, and jerked it open, somehow injuring, as he did so, the nail of his right forefinger.

‘You, boy!’ he called, and even to his own ears his voice sounded querulous, wheezy, even a touch demented. ‘Stop that at once!’

The boy turned. With one hand he clutched at the fly of his trousers. With the other he cast aside the daisy. The parrot sidestepped across the boy’s shoulders to the back of his head, as if taking shelter there.

‘Why, do you imagine, is there a fence?’ the old man said, aware that the barrier fences had not been maintained since the war began and were in poor condition for ten miles in either direction. ‘For pity’s sake, you’d be fried like a smelt!’ As he hobbled across his dooryard toward the boy on the tracks, he took no note of the savage pounding of his heart. Or rather he noted it with anxiety and then covered the anxiety with a hard remark. ‘One can only imagine the stench.’

Flower discarded, valuables restored with a zip to their lodging, the boy stood motionless. He held out to the old man a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a beggar’s tin cup. The old man could hear the flatted chiming of milk cans at Satterlee’s farm a quarter mile off, the agitated rustle of the housemartins under his own eaves, and, as always, the ceaseless machination of the hives. The boy shifted from one foot to the other, as if searching for an appropriate response. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. It was the parrot who finally spoke.

‘Zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei,’ the parrot said, in a soft, oddly breathy voice, with the slightest hint of a lisp. The boy stood, as if listening to the parrot’s statement, though his expression did not deepen or complicate. ‘Vier acht vier neun eins eins sieben.’

The old man blinked. The German numbers were so unexpected, literally so outlandish, that for a moment they registered only as a series of uncanny noises, savage avian utterances devoid of any sense.

‘Bist du deutscher?’ the old man finally managed, a little uncertain, for a moment, of whether he was addressing the boy or the parrot. It had been thirty years since he had last spoken German, and he felt the words tumble from a high back shelf of his mind.

Cautiously, with a first flicker of emotion in his gaze, the boy nodded.

The old man stuck his injured finger into his mouth and sucked it without quite realizing that he did so, without remarking the salt flavour of his own blood. To encounter a solitary German, on the South Downs, in July 1944, and a German boy at that – here was a puzzle to kindle old appetites and energies. He felt pleased with himself for having roused his bent frame from the insidious grip of his armchair.

‘How did you get here?’ the old man said. ‘Where are you going? Where in heaven’s name did you get that parrot?’ Then he offered translations into German, of varying quality, for each of his questions.

The boy stood, faintly smiling as he scratched at the back of the parrot’s head with two grimy fingers. The density of his silence suggested something more than unwillingness to speak; the old man wondered if the boy might be rather less German than mentally defective, incapable of sound or sense. An idea came to the old man. He held up a hand to the boy, signaling that he ought to wait just where he was. Then he withdrew once more to the gloom of his cottage. In a corner cabinet, behind a battered coal scuttle in which he had once kept his pipes, he found a dust-furred tin of violet pastilles, stamped with the portrait of a British general whose great victory had long since lost any relevance to the present situation of the Empire. The old man’s retinae swam with blots and paisley tadpoles of remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder. He had a sudden understanding of himself, from the boy’s point of view, as a kind of irascible ogre, appearing from the darkness of his thatched cottage like something out of the Brothers Grimm, with a rusted tin of suspect sweets in his clawlike, bony hand. He was surprised, and relieved as well, to find the boy still standing there when he reemerged.

‘Here,’ he said, holding out the tin. ‘It has been many years, but in my time sweets were widely acknowledged to be a kind of juvenile Esperanto.’ He grinned, doubtless a crooked and ogreish grin. ‘Come. Have a pastille? There. Good lad.’

The boy nodded, and crossed the sandy dooryard to take the confectionery from the tin. He helped himself to three or four of the little pilules, then gave a solemn nod of thanks. A mute, then; something wrong with his vocal apparatus.

‘Bitte,’ said the old man. For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight. ‘Now,’ he went on, licking his dry lips with patent ogreishness. ‘Tell me how you came to be so very far from home.’

The pastilles rattled like beads against the boy’s little teeth. The parrot worked its graphite blue beak fondly through his hair. The boy sighed, an apologetic shrug taking momentary hold of his shoulders. Then he turned and went back the way he had come.

‘Neun neun drei acht zwei sechs sieben,’ said the parrot, as they walked off into the wavering green vastness of the afternoon.

II

There were so many queer aspects to Sunday dinner at the Panicker table that Mr Shane, the new arrival, aroused the suspicions of his fellow lodger Mr Parkins merely by seeming to take no notice of any of them. He strode into the dining room, a grand, rubicund fellow who set the floorboards to creaking mightily when he trod them and who looked as if he keenly felt the lack of a pony between his legs. He wore his penny-red hair cropped close to the scalp and there was something indefinitely colonial, a nasal echo of cantonment or goldfields, in his speech. He nodded in turn to Parkins, to the refugee child, and to Reggie Panicker, and then flung himself into his chair like a boy settling onto the back of a school chum for a ride across the lawn. Immediately he struck up a conversation with the elder Panicker on the subject of American roses, a subject about which, he freely admitted, he knew nothing.

A profound reservoir of poise, or a pathological deficit of curiosity, Parkins supposed, might explain the near-total lack of interest that Mr Shane, who gave himself out to be a traveller in milking equipment for the firm of Chedbourne & Jones, Yorkshire, appeared to take in the nature of his interlocutor, Mr Panicker, who was not only a Malayalee from Kerala, black as a boot-heel, but also a high-church Anglican vicar. Politesse or stupidity, perhaps, might also prevent him from remarking on the sullen way in which Reggie Panicker, the vicar’s grown son, was gouging a deep hole in the tatted tablecloth with the point of his fish knife, as well as of the presence at the table of a mute nine-year-old boy whose face was like a blank back page from the book of human sorrows. But it was the way in which Mr Shane paid so little attention to the boy’s parrot that made it impossible for Mr Parkins to accept the new lodger at face value. No one could be immune to the interest that inhered in the parrot, even if, as now, the bird was merely reciting bits and scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of seven. Mr Parkins, who had, for reasons of his own, long kept the African grey under careful observation, immediately saw in the new lodger a potential rival in his ongoing quest to solve the deepest and most vexing mystery of the remarkable African bird. Clearly, Someone Important had heard about the numbers, and had sent Mr Shane to hear them for himself.

‘Well, here we are.’ Into the dining room swung Mrs Panicker, carrying a Spode tureen. She was a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman whose unimaginably wild inspiration of thirty years past, to marry her father’s coal-eyed, serious young assistant minister from India, had borne fruit far mealier than the ripe rosy pawpaws which she had, breathing in the scent of Mr K.T. Panicker’s hair oil on a warm summer evening in 1913, permitted herself to anticipate. But she kept an excellent table, one that merited the custom of a far greater number of lodgers than the Panicker household currently enjoyed. The living was a minor one, the black vicar locally unpopular, the parishioners stingy as flints, and the Panicker family, in spite of Mrs Panicker’s thrift and stern providence, uncomfortably poor. It was only Mrs Panicker’s lavishly tended kitchen garden and culinary knack that could make possible a fine cold cucumber and chervil soup such as the one that she now proposed, lifting the lid of the tureen, to Mr Shane, for whose sudden presence in the house, with two months paid in advance, she was clearly grateful.

‘Now, I’m warning you well beforehand, this time, Master Steinman,’ she said as she ladled pale green cream, flecked with emerald, into the boy’s bowl, ‘it’s a cold soup and meant to be.’ She looked at Mr Shane, frowning, though her eyes held a faint glint of amusement. ‘Sprayed the whole table with cream soup, last week, did the boy, Mr Shane,’ she went on. ‘Ruined Reggie’s best cravat.’

‘If only that were the most this boy had ruined,’ Reggie said, from behind his spoonful of cucumber soup. ‘If only we could leave it at a cravat.’

Reggie Panicker was the despair of the Panickers and, like many sons who betray even the most modest aspirations of their parents, a scourge of the neighbourhood as well. He was a gambler, a liar, a malcontent, and a sneak. Parkins – showing, it now seemed to him, a certain thickness of wit – had lost a pair of gold cufflinks, a box of pen nibs, twelve shillings, and his good luck charm, a blond five-franc chip from the Casino Royale in Monaco, before catching on to Reggie’s thieving ways.

‘And how old would young Mr Steinman be, then?’ Mr Shane said, training the flashing heliograph of his smile on the faraway eyes of the little Jew. ‘Nine is it? Are you nine, boy?’

As usual, though, the lookouts in the head of Linus Steinman had been left unmanned. The smile went unacknowledged. The boy seemed, in fact, not to have heard the question, though Parkins had long since established that there was nothing wrong with his ears. The sudden clatter of a plate could make him jump. The tolling of the bell in the church tower could fill his great dark eyes with unaccountable tears.

‘You won’t get answers out of that one,’ Reggie said, tipping the last of his soup into his mouth. ‘Dumb as a mallet, is that one.’

The boy looked down at his soup. He frowned. He was regarded by most of the residents of the vicarage, and in the neighbourhood, as non-Anglophonic and quite possibly stupid. But Parkins had his doubts on both scores.

‘Master Steinman came to us from Germany,’ Mr Panicker said. He was a learned man whose Oxford accent was tinged with a disappointed subcontinental lilt. ‘He formed part of a small group of children, most of them Jewish, whose emigration to Britain was negotiated by Mr Wilkes, the vicar of the English Church in Berlin.’

Shane nodded, mouth open, eyes blinking slowly, like a golfing man pretending to enjoy for courtesy’s sake an impromptu lecture on cell mitosis or irrational numbers. He might never have heard of Germany or Jews or, for that matter, of vicars or children. The air of deep boredom that settled over his features looked entirely natural to them. And yet Mr Parkins mistrusted it. The parrot, whose name was Bruno, was now reciting from Der Erlkönig, softly, even one might have said politely, in its high, halting voice. The bird’s delivery, though toneless and a bit rushed, had a childish poignancy not inappropriate to the subject of the poem. And yet still the new lodger had taken no notice of the parrot.

Mr Shane looked at the boy, who looked down at his soup, dipping the merest tip of his spoon into the thick pale bowlful. As far as Parkins had ever observed – and he was a careful and pointed observer – the boy ate with relish only sweets and puddings.

‘Nazis, was it?’ said Shane. He gave his head a moderate shake. ‘Rotten business. Tough luck for the Jews, when you come right down to it.’ The question of whether or not the boy was going to spit out the bit of soup he had dabbed onto his tongue appeared to interest him far more than had the internment of the Jews. The boy frowned, and knit his thick eyebrows together. But the soup remained safely in his mouth, and at last Mr Shane turned his attention to polishing off his own portion. Parkins wondered if the dull and unpleasant subject were now to be dropped.

‘No place for a child, to be sure,’ said Shane. ‘A camp of that sort. Nor, I imagine –’ He laid down his spoon and raised his eyes, with a swiftness that startled Mr Parkins, to the corner of the room where, on top of a heavy iron pole, on a scarred wooden crosspiece, with pages of yesterday’s Express spread underneath, Bruno the parrot gazed critically back at him. ‘– for a parrot.’

Ah, thought Mr Parkins.

‘I suppose you think a wretched stone hovel in the dullest corner of Sussex is a fine place for an African bird, then,’ Reggie Panicker said.

Mr Shane blinked.

‘Please excuse my son’s rudeness,’ Mr Panicker said, with a sigh, laying down his own spoon though his bowl was only half empty. If there had been a time when he reprimanded the steady churlishness of his only child, it predated Mr Parkins’s tenure in the house. ‘We have all grown very fond of young Linus and his pet, as it happens. And really, Bruno is a most remarkable animal. He recites poetry, as you hear now. He sings songs. He is a most gifted mimic and has already startled my wife a number of times by counterfeiting my own, perhaps overly vehement, manner of sneezing.’

‘Really?’ Mr Shane said. ‘Well, Mr Panicker, I hope you won’t mind my saying that between your roses and this young chap with his parrot, I seem to have landed myself in a very interesting household.’

He was watching the bird, head cocked to one side in a way that echoed, no doubt unconsciously, the angle from which Bruno habitually preferred to view the world.

‘Sings does he?’

‘That’s right. Principally in German, though from time to time one hears snatches of Gilbert & Sullivan. Chiefly bits of Iolanthe, as far as I can tell. Quite startling the first few times.’

‘But is it all rote – parroting, as it were?’ Mr Shane smiled thinly, as if to imply, insincerely Mr Parkins thought, that he knew his little joke was not amusing. ‘Or is he capable of actual thought, would you say? I once saw a pig, as a boy, a performing pig, that could find the square root of three-digit numbers.’

His gaze, as he said this, flashed briefly and for the first time toward Parkins. This, though it seemed to confirm Mr Parkins’s hunch about the new lodger, also troubled him. As far as anyone in the neighbourhood knew, there was no reason to connect him with the subject of digits and numbers. The suspicion that Mr Shane had been sent by Certain People to observe Bruno firsthand, Mr Parkins now considered to have been confirmed.

‘Numbers,’ Mr Panicker said. ‘Oddly enough, Bruno seems quite fond of them, doesn’t he, Mr Parkins? Always rattling off great chains and lists of them. All in German, naturally. Though I can’t say that he appears to do anything with them that I’m aware of.’

‘No? He keeps me from sleeping,’ Reggie said. ‘That’s use enough for me. That’s startling enough for me, all right.’

At this point Mrs Panicker swept back into the dining room carrying the fish course on a pale green platter. For reasons that had never been articulated to Mr Parkins but which he felt must have a good deal to do with her otherwise unexpressed feelings about her husband and son, she never joined them for dinner. She cleared away the bowls as Mr Parkins muttered his approval of the soup. There was something desperate and brave about the landlady’s good cookery. It was like the quavering voice of a bagpipe, issuing forth from a citadel that was invested on all sides by dervishes and infidels on the morning of the day on which it would finally be sacked.

‘Excellent soup!’ barked Mr Shane. ‘Compliments to the chef!’

Mrs Panicker flushed deeply, and a smile unlike any that Parkins had ever seen there, tiny and pouting, made a brief appearance on her lips.

Mr Panicker noticed it too, and frowned.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘Phew!’ said the younger Panicker, fanning away the steam that rose from the platter on which lay a plaice that retained its head and tail. ‘That fish is off, Mother. It smells like the underside of Brighton Pier.’

Without missing a beat – with a last trace of the girlish smile still lingering – Mrs Panicker reached across and slapped Reggie’s face. Her son leapt from his seat, a hand to his blazing cheek, and for a moment he only glared at her. Then his hand shot out toward her throat as if he meant to choke her. Before his fingers could find purchase, however, the new lodger was on his feet and had interposed himself between mother and son. Mr Shane’s hands flew out in front of him and before Parkins quite understood what was happening Reggie Panicker was lying flat on his back on the oval rug. Bright blood sprang from his nose.

He sat up. Blood dripped onto his collar and he dabbed at it with a finger, then pressed the finger against his left nostril. Mr Shane offered him a hand, and Reggie batted it aside. He got to his feet and snuffled deeply. He stared at Shane, then nodded toward Mrs Panicker.

‘Mother,’ he said. Then he turned and went out.

‘Mother,’ said the parrot, in his soft voice. Linus Steinman was looking at Bruno with the deep affection that was the only recognizable emotion Parkins had ever seen the boy express. And then, in a clear, fluting, tender voice Parkins had never heard, the bird began to sing.

Wien, Wien, Wien

Sterbende Märchenstadt

It was a lovely contralto and, as it issued jerkily from the bill of the grey animal in the corner, disturbingly human. They listened for a moment, and then Linus Steinman rose from his chair and went to the perch. The bird fell silent, and stepped onto the outstretched forearm that was proffered. The boy turned back to them, and his eyes were filled with tears and with a simple question as well.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Panicker with a sigh. ‘You may as well be excused.’

III

They found him sitting on the boot bench outside his front door, hatted and caped in spite of the heat, sunburnt hands clasping the head of his blackthorn stick. All ready to go. As if – though it was impossible – he were expecting them. They must have caught him on his doorstep, boots laced, gathering his strength for a late-morning tramp across the Downs.

‘Which one are you?’ he said to Inspector Bellows. His eye was exceedingly bright. The great beak quivered as if catching scent of them. ‘Speak up.’

‘Bellows,’ said the inspector. ‘Detective Inspector Michael Bellows. Sorry to bother you, sir. But I am new on the job, down here, learning the ropes, as they say, and I don’t at all overrate my capacities.’

At this last assertion the inspector’s companion, Detective Constable Quint, cleared his throat and politely directed his gaze toward the middle distance.

‘Bellows … I knew your father,’ the old man suggested. Head tottering on his feeble neck. Cheeks flecked with the blood and plaster of an old man’s hasty shave. ‘Surely? In the West End. Red-haired chap, ginger moustache. Specialized, as I recall, in confidence men. Not without ability I should have said.’

‘Sandy Bellows,’ the inspector said. ‘Grandfather, actually. And how often did I hear him speak highly of you, sir.’

Not quite so often, perhaps, the inspector thought, as I heard him curse your name.

The old man nodded, gravely. The inspector’s sharp eye detected a fleeting sadness, a flicker of memory that briefly seamed the old man’s face.

‘I have known a great many policemen,’ he said. ‘A great many.’ He brightened, wilfully. ‘But it is always a pleasure to make the acquaintance of another. And Detective Constable … Quint, I believe?’

He trained his raptor gaze now on the constable, a dark, brooding potato-nosed fellow. DC Quint was much attached, as he rarely neglected to let it be known, to the prior detective inspector, sadly deceased but a proponent apparently of the old solid methods of policework. Quint tipped a finger to the brim of his hat. Not a talkative fellow, DC Quint.

‘Now, who has died, and by what means?’ the old man said.

‘A man named Shane, sir. Struck in the back of the head with a blunt object.’

The old man looked unimpressed. Even, perhaps, disappointed.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Shane struck in the back of the head. Blunt object. I see.’

Perhaps a bit batty after all, thought the inspector. Not what he used to be, as Quint had put it. Pity.

‘I am not in the least senile, Inspector, I assure you,’ the old man said. He had read the trend of the inspector’s thoughts; no, that was impossible, too. Read his face, then; the cant of his shoulders. ‘But this is a crucial moment, a crisis, if you will, in the hives. I could not possibly abandon them for an unremarkable crime.’

Bellows glanced at his constable. The inspector was young enough, and murder rare enough on the South Downs, for it to seem to both policemen that there was perhaps something remarkable about a man’s skull being staved in with a poker or a sap, behind a vicarage.

‘And this Shane was armed, sir,’ DC Quint said. ‘Carried a Webley service pistol, for all that he claimed to be, and near as we can tell he were, nothing but a commercial traveller in –’ He pulled a small oilskin-covered notepad from his pocket and consulted it. The inspector had already learned to detest the sight of that notepad with its careful inventory of deeply irrelevant facts. ‘– the dairy machine and equipment line.’

‘Hit from behind,’ the inspector said. ‘It appears. In the dead of night as he was about to get into his motor. Bags all packed, apparently leaving town with no explanation or goodbye, though only just a week before he prepaid two months’ lodging at the vicarage.’

‘The vicarage, yes, I see.’ The old man closed his eyes, heavily, as if the facts in the case were not merely unremarkable but soporific. ‘And no doubt you have, quite literally unadvisedly, since you can have received no sensible counsel in the matter, leapt to the readiest conclusion, and placed young Mr Panicker under arrest for the crime.’

Though aware of the silent film comedy aspect of their behaviour, Inspector Bellows found to his shame he couldn’t prevent himself from exchanging another sheep-faced look with his constable. Reggie Panicker had been arrested at ten that morning, three hours after the discovery of the body of Richard Woolsey Shane, of Sevenoaks, Kent, in the lane behind the vicarage where the deceased had parked his 1933 MG Midget.

‘For which crime,’ continued the old man, ‘that lamentable young man in the fullness of time will duly be hanged by the neck, and his mother will weep, and then the world will continue to roll blindly on its way through the void, and in the end your Mr Shane will still be dead. But in the meantime, Inspector, Number 4 must be re-queened.’

And he waved a long-fingered starfish hand, all warts and speckles, dismissing them. Sending them along their way. He patted down the pockets of his wrinkled suit: looking for his pipe.

‘A parrot is missing!’ Inspector Michael Bellows tried, helpless, hoping this titbit might in the old man’s unimaginable estimation add some kind of lustre to the crime. ‘And we found this on the person of the vicar’s son.’

He drew from his breast pocket the dog-eared calling card of Mr Jos. Black, Dealer in Rare and Exotic Birds, Club Row, London, and submitted it to the old man, who did not give it a glance.

‘A parrot.’ Somehow, Bellows saw, he had managed not merely to impress but to astonish the old man. And the old man looked delighted to so find himself. ‘Yes, of course. An African grey. Belonging, perhaps, to a small boy. Aged about nine years. A German national – of Jewish origin, I’d wager – and incapable of speech.’

Now would have been the moment for the inspector to clear his own throat. DC Quint had argued strenuously against involving the old man in the investigation. He’s strictly non compos sir, I can heartily assure you of that. But Inspector Bellows was too flummoxed to gloat. He had heard the tales, the legends, the wild, famous leaps of induction pulled off by the old man in his heyday, assassins inferred from cigar ash, horse thieves from the absence of a watchdog’s bark. Try as he might, the inspector could not find the way to a mute German jewboy from a missing parrot and a corpse named Shane with a ventilated skull. And so he missed his opportunity to score a point off DC Quint.

Now the old man had a look at Mr Jos. Black’s calling card, lips pursed, dragging it across a range of distances from the tip of his nose until he settled on one that would do.

‘Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘So our Mr Shane came upon young Panicker as he was making off with the poor boy’s pet, which he hoped to sell to this Mr Black. And Shane attempted to prevent him from doing so, and so paid dearly for his heroism. Do I fairly summarize your view?’

Though this was in short the whole of his theory, from the first there had been something in it – something in the circumstances of the murder itself – that troubled the inspector enough to send him, against the advice of his constable, calling on this half-legendary friend and adversary of his grandfather’s entire generation of policemen. Nevertheless it had sounded a sensible enough theory, all in all. The old man’s tone, however, rendered it as likely as the agency of fairies.

‘Ap-parently there were words between them,’ the inspector said, wincing as an ancient stammer resurfaced from the depths of his boyhood. ‘They quarrelled. It came to blows.’

‘Yes, yes. Well, I don’t doubt that you are right.’

The old man composed the seam of his mouth into the most insincere smile Inspector Bellows had ever seen.

‘And, really,’ he continued, ‘it is most fortunate that you require so little assistance from me, since, as you must know, I am retired. As indeed I have been since the tenth of August, 1914. At which time, you may take it from me, I was far less sunk in decrepitude than the withered carapace you now see before you.’ He tapped the shaft of his stick juridically against the doorstep. They were dismissed. ‘Good day.’

And then, with an echo of the love of theatrics that had so tried the patience and enlivened the language of the inspector’s grandfather, the old man tilted his face up to the sun, and closed his eyes.

The two policemen stood a moment, watching this shameless simulacrum of an afternoon nap. It crossed the inspector’s mind that perhaps the old man wished them to plead with him. He glanced at DC Quint. No doubt abject pleading with the mad old hermit was a step to which his late predecessor would never have been reduced. And yet how much there was to be learned from such a man if only one could—

The eyes snapped open, and now the smile hardened into something more sincere and cruel.

‘Still here?’ he said.

‘Sir – if I may—’

‘Very well.’ The old man chuckled dryly, entirely to himself. ‘I have considered the needs of my bees. And I believe that I can spare a few hours. Therefore I will assist you.’ He held up a long, admonishing finger. ‘To find the boy’s parrot.’ Laboriously, and with an air that rebuffed in advance any offers of assistance, the old man, relying heavily on his scarred black stick, hoisted himself onto his feet. ‘If we should encounter the actual murderer along the way, well, then it will be so much the better for you.’

IV

The old man settled himself onto one knee. The left one; the right knee was no good for anything anymore. It took him a damnably long time, and on the way down there was a horrible snapping sound. But he managed it and went about his work with dispatch. He pulled off his right glove and poked his naked finger into the bloody mud where Richard Woolsey Shane’s life had seeped away. Then he reached into the old conjuror’s pocket sewn into the lining of his cloak and took out his glass. It was brass and tortoise shell, and bore around its bezel an affectionate inscription from the sole great friend of his life.

With a series of huffings and grunts, labouring across twenty feet square of level ground as if they were the sheer icy face of Karakorum, the old man turned his beloved lens upon everything that occupied or surrounded the fatal spot, tucked between the lush green hedgerows of Hallows Lane, at which Shane’s half-headless body had been found, early that morning, by his landlord, Mr Panicker. Alas that the body had already been moved, and by clumsy men in heavy boots! All that remained was its faint imprint, a twisted cross in the dust. On the right tyre of the dead man’s motorcar – awfully flash for a traveller in milking machines – he noted the centripetal pattern and moderate degree of darkening in the feathery spray of blood on the tyre’s white wall. Though the police had made a search of the car, turning up an Ordnance Survey map of Sussex, a length of clear rubber milking hose, bits of valve and pipe, several glossy prospectuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley’s Common Diseases of Milch Kine, 1926 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a certain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This procedure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 calibre cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to indicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or romance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.

He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and countless insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered garments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.

At last he put the glass away and stood up as straight as he could manage. He gave a last look around at the situation of the hedgerows, the MG under its tarpaulin of dust, the behaviour of the rooks, the direction taken by the coal smoke streaming from the chimney of the vicarage. Then he turned to the young inspector, studying him at some length without speaking.

‘Anything wrong?’ Sandy Bellows’s grandson said. So far the old man had refrained from asking the inspector whether his grandfather was living or dead. He knew all too well what the answer would be.

‘You have done a fine job,’ the old man said. ‘First rate.’

The inspector smiled, and his eyes travelled to the sullen Constable Quint, standing by the little green roadster. The constable pulled on one half of his moustache and glowered at the muddy purple puddle at his feet.

‘Shane was approached and struck, with considerable force, from behind; you have that much right. Tell me, Inspector, how you square that with your idea that the deceased came upon and surprised young Mr Panicker in the act of stealing the parrot?’

Bellows started to speak, then left off with a short, weary sigh, and shook his head. DC Quint tugged his moustache down now, in an attempt to conceal the smile that had formed on his lips.

‘The pattern and frequency of footprints indicates,’ the old man continued, ‘that at the moment the blow fell Mr Shane was moving in some haste, and carrying something in his left hand, something rather heavy, I should wager. Since your men found his valise and all of his personal effects by the garden door, as if waiting to be transferred to the boot of the car, and since the birdcage is nowhere to be found, I think it reasonable to infer that Shane was fleeing, when he was murdered, with the birdcage. Presumably the bird was in it, though I think a thorough search of neighbourhood trees ought to be made, and soon.’

The young inspector turned to DC Quint and nodded once. DC Quint let go of his moustache. He looked aghast.

‘You can’t mean, sir, with all due respect, that you want me to waste valuable time staring up into trees looking for a—’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry, Detective Constable,’ the old man said, with a wink. He did not care to divulge his hypothesis – naturally only one of several under consideration – that Bruno the African grey parrot might be clever enough to have engineered an escape from his captor. Men, policemen in particular, tended to discount the capacity of animals to enact, often with considerable panache, the foulest of crimes and the most daring stunts. ‘You can’t miss the tail.’

Constable Quint seemed unable for a moment to gain control of the musculature of his jaw. Then he turned and stomped off down the lane, toward the trellised doorway that led into the garden of the vicarage.

‘As for you.’ The old man turned to the inspector. ‘You must seek to inform yourself about our victim. I will want to see the body, of course. I suspect we may discover—’

A woman screamed, grandly at first, almost one would have said with a hint of melody. Then her cry disintegrated into a series of little gasping barks:

Oh oh oh oh oh –

The inspector took off at a run, leaving the old man to follow scraping and hobbling along behind. When he came into the garden he saw a number of familiar objects and entities set about on an expanse of green as if arranged to a desired effect or inferable purpose, like counters or chessmen in some kingly recreation. Regarding them the old man experienced a moment of vertiginous horror during which he could neither reckon their number nor recall their names or purposes. He felt – with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia – the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap. He feared then that he was going to be sick, and raised the head of his stick to his mouth. It was cold against his lips. The horror seemed to subside at once; consciousness rallied itself around the brutal taste of metal, and all at once he found himself looking, with inexpressible relief, merely at the two policemen, Bellows and Quint; at Mr and Mrs Panicker, standing on either side of a bird bath; at a handsome Jew in a grey suit; a sundial; a wooden chair; a hawthorn bush in lavish flower. They were all gazing upward to the peak of the vicarage’s thatched roof at the remaining token in the game.

‘Young man, you will come down from there at once!’

The voice was that of Mr Panicker – who was rather more intelligent than the average country parson, in the old man’s view, and rather less competent to minister to the souls of his parishioners. He backed a step or two away from the house as if to find a better spot from which to fix the boy on the roof of the house with a baleful stare. But the vicar’s eyes were far too large and sorrowful, the old man thought, ever to do the trick.

‘Sonny boy,’ Constable Quint called up. ‘You’re going to break your neck!’

The boy stood, upright, hands dangling by his sides, feet together, teetering on the fulcrum of his heels. He looked neither distressed nor playful, merely gazed down at his shoes or at the ground far below him. The old man wondered if he could have gone up there to search for his parrot. Perhaps in the past the bird had been known to take refuge on housetops.

‘Fetch a ladder,’ the inspector said.

The boy slipped, and went sliding on his bottom down the long thatch slope of the roof toward the edge. Mrs Panicker let out another scream. At the last moment the boy gripped two fistfuls of thatch and held on to them. His progress was arrested with a jerk, and then the handfuls ripped free of the roof and he sailed out into the void and plummeted to earth, landing on top of the good-looking young Jewish man, a Londoner by the cut of his suit, with a startling crunch like a barrel shattering against rocks. After a dazed moment the boy stood up, and shook his hands as if they stung him. Then he offered one to the man on his belly on the ground.

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