The Final Solution Page 3

  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 behavior 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 traveled to the sullen Constable Quint, standing by the little green roadster. The constable pulled on one half of his mustache 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 mustache 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 neighborhood trees ought to be made, and soon.”

  The young inspector turned to DC Quint and nodded once. DC Quint let go of his mustache. 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 gray 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 birdbath; at a handsome Jew in a black 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.

  “Mr. Kalb,” cried Mrs. Panicker, scurrying over, a hand pressed to the necklace at her bosom, to the side of the dapper Londoner. “Good heavens, are you hurt?”

  Mr. Kalb accepted the hand the child offered him, and pretended to let the boy drag him to his feet. Though he winced and groaned, the grin did not leave his face for a moment.

  “Not terribly. A bruised rib perhaps. It’s nothing at all.”

  He held out his hands to the boy, and the boy stepped between them. Mr. Kalb, with a visible wince, lifted him into the air. Only once he was safely in the arms of the visitor from London, for reasons that the old man felt a powerful desire to understand, did the boy relax his grip over his emotions, and mourn, wildly and uncontrollably, the loss of his friend, burying his face in Mr. Kalb’s shoulder.

  The old man made his way across the garden.

  “Boy,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

  The boy looked up, his face flushed and swollen. A delicate span of mucus connected the tip of his nose to the lapel of Mr. Kalb’s jacket.

  The inspector introduced the old man to the mournful-eyed man from the Aid Committee, Mr. Martin Kalb. Mrs. Panicker had sent for him as soon as Bruno went missing that morning. When he heard the old man’s name, something flickered, a dim memory, in the eyes of Mr. Kalb. He smiled, and turned to the boy.

  “Well,” he said, in German that the old man understood a few moments after the words were spoken, giving the boy’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “Here is the man to find your bird. Now you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Mrs. Panicker,” the old man said, over his shoulder. The blood drained from the woman’s face—every bit, though he did not suspect her for a moment, as if he had caught her without an alibi. “I shall want to speak to your son. I am sure that the police will have no objection to your coming along with a clean shirt and a packet of biscuits.”

  5

  She packed a pair of shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of neatly pressed underpants. A brand-new toothbrush. A cheese, a packet of cracker
s, and an ancient, prerationing box of the sultanas he liked. The lot barely filled a small grip. She put on her good blue dress with the mandarin collar and then went downstairs to find the boy.

  Even before the theft of Bruno, Linus had been prone to disappearance. He seemed less a boy to her than the shadow of a boy, stealing through the house, the village, the world. He had mouseholes everywhere, in shaded corners of the churchyard, under the eaves of the vicarage, in the belfry of the church tower itself. He wandered off into the countryside with the bird on his shoulder, and though she disapproved strongly of this, she had given up trying to stop him, because she could never bring herself to punish the poor child. She didn’t have the heart. At any rate she had treated her Reggie with a strictness that did not come at all naturally to her, and look how he had turned out in the end.

  She found him down by the stream at the foot of the churchyard. There was a mossy stone bench there on which six or seven hundred years of villagers, no doubt, had come to sit under the spreading yew tree, thinking mournful thoughts. Martin Kalb sat beside him. Linus had taken off his shoes and socks. And Mr. Kalb went barefoot too. For some reason the sight of his pale feet poking naked from the turn-ups of his fine gray pinstripe trousers shocked Mrs. Panicker.

  “I am going out,” she said, too loudly. She knew it was awful of her but she could not help shouting at the boy as if he were deaf. “I must pay a visit to Reggie. Mr. Kalb, I hope you will stay the night with us.”

  Mr. Kalb nodded. He had a long, sweet face, plain and studious. He reminded her of Mr. Panicker at the age of twenty-six. “Naturally.”

  “You can stay in Linus’s room. There are two beds.”

  Mr. Kalb looked at the boy, raising an eyebrow. As if out of respect for the boy’s muteness he spoke to the boy very little. The boy nodded. Mr. Kalb nodded. Mrs. Panicker felt a rush of gratitude.

  The boy took his pad from his jacket, and his bit of green pencil. He painstakingly scrawled something on one page; he wrote only with great difficulty, chewing on his lower lip. For a moment he studied what he had written. Then he showed the page to Mr. Kalb. She could never make head or tail of the things he wrote down.

  “He asks if Mr. Shane is really dead,” said Mr. Kalb.

  “Yes,” she fairly shouted, and then, more softly, “he is.”

  Linus stared up at her with his enormous brown eyes, and nodded, once, almost to himself. It was impossible to say what he was thinking. It nearly always was. Though she pitied him, and remembered him in her prayers, and in some strange way felt also that she loved him, there was something more deeply alien to her about Linus than his nationality or race could explain. Though he was a good-looking boy and the bird a handsome animal—and both of them surprisingly clean in their habits—there was an intensity in their attachment to each other that Mrs. Panicker found eerier than the bird’s numerical tirades or its singing with a sweetness that froze the heart.

  The boy wrestled a few more words out of his pencil stub. Mr. Kalb scanned, then, with a sigh, translated them.

  “‘He was kind to me,’” he said.

  Mrs. Panicker tried to reply, but she seemed to have lost her voice. Something elbowed its way up into her rib cage. Then to her shame and dismay she burst lavishly into tears. It was the first time that she had cried since sometime in the late twenties, though the Lord knew that she had reason enough to cry. She cried because this boy, this somehow bruised or dented boy, had lost his parrot. She cried because her son was sitting in a cell under the town hall, a prisoner of the Crown. And she cried because at the age of forty-seven, after twenty-five years of piety, disappointment, and restraint, she had taken a deeply foolish interest in the new lodger Mr. Richard Shane, like someone out of a coarse novel.

  She went to the boy and stood before him. She had washed his bottom and combed his hair. She had fed him, and clothed him, and caught his vomit in a basin when he was sick. But she had never embraced him. She put out her hands; he sat forward, and laid his head, a bit carefully, against her belly. Mr. Kalb cleared his throat. She could feel the weight of his not looking at them as she patted the boy’s hair and tried to gather herself together for the visit to the jail. She was embarrassed at weeping in front of the young man from the Aid Committee. After a moment she glanced at him and saw that he was proffering a handkerchief. She took it with a murmur of thanks.

  The boy drew back, studying her while she dabbed at her eyes. She was absurdly touched to see how concerned he looked. He patted her hand as if he wanted her to pay particularly close inspection to what he had to say next. Then he scrawled four more words on his little pad. Mr. Kalb examined them with a frown. The boy’s writing was atrocious, rudimentary. He reversed letters and even words, especially on those rare occasions when he tried to communicate in English. Once he had greatly discomfited her husband with a written query reading WHY DOG OV KRISCHIN DON’T LIKE JUDISH SDIK?

  “‘Ask the old man,’” Mr. Kalb read.

  “What on earth should I ask him?” said Mrs. Panicker.

  Only once before had she seen the old man, in 1936, at the railway station, when he had emerged from his bee-crazed hermitage to meet five enormous crates sent down to him from London. Mrs. Panicker was bound for Lewes that morning, but when the old man shuffled onto the southbound platform, accompanied by the strapping eldest son of his neighbor Walt Satterlee, she crossed over to get a better look at him. Years and years ago his name—itself redolent now of the fustian and rectitude of that vanished era—had adorned the newspapers and police gazettes of the empire, but it was his more recent, local celebrity, founded almost exclusively on legends of his shyness, irascibility, and hostility to all human commerce, that drew her across to his side of the platform that morning. Thin as a whippet, she had later reported to her husband, with something canine, or rather lupine, in the face as well, the heavy-lidded eyes intelligent and watchful and pale. They took in the features and furnishings of the platform, the texts of the posted notices, the discarded end of a cigar, a starling’s ragged nest in the rafters of the overhanging roof. And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was—and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her “romantic nature”—a hunger devoid of prurience, appetite, malice, or goodwill. It was a hunger, she decided later, for information. And yet there was liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement, as if a steady lifelong diet of mundane observations had preserved the youthfulness of his optic organs alone. Stooped in the manner of tall old men, but not bent, he had stood in the full April sunshine wrapped in a thick woolen Inverness, studying her, inspecting her, making no effort to conceal or dissemble his examination. The cloak, she remembered, had been heavily patched, with total disregard for pattern or stuff, and darned in a hundred places in a motley spectrum of colored thread.

  Presently the train from London had pulled in, disgorging the great crates, punched with round holes at regular intervals, and stamped with the gentleman’s antique name. Clearly visible on the side of each crate was the stenciled address of a city in Texas, U.S.A. Later she learned that they had contained, among other outlandish items, heavy trays packed with the eggs of a variety of honeybee hitherto unknown in Britain.

  Mr. Panicker’s reply, when she finished her account, had been a characteristic one.

  “I am sorry to learn that our good English bees are insufficient to his purposes,” he had said.

  Now she was sitting beside him, in a back room of the town hall. Through the lone window from the vacant lot beyond there radiated as if drawn by the old man himself the murmur of bees, insistent as the stifling afternoon itself. The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of
his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had ever been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.

  As she watched the vines of smoke twisting in the sunlight, she tried to picture her son as he went about the business of murdering that fine, vital man. Nothing that she saw in her imaginings wholly persuaded her. Mrs. Panicker, née Ginny Stallard, had seen two men killed, on different occasions, during her girlhood. The first was Huey Blake, drowned by her brothers in Piltdown Pond during a semi-friendly bout of wrestling. The other was her father, the Reverend Oliver Stallard, shot at Sunday dinner by old Mr. Catley after he went off his head. Though all the world blamed her black husband for the unstable character of her one and only son, Mrs. Panicker suspected that the fault lay squarely with her. The Stallard men had always been blackguards or misfortunates. She was almost inclined to view the fact that it was taking Reggie so long to be brought up from the cells as yet one more example, though heaven knew none was needed, of her son’s poor character. She could not imagine what was keeping him.

  The sudden touch of the old man’s dry fingers on the back of her right hand made her heart leap in her chest.

  “Please,” he said, with a glance at her fingers, and she saw that she had taken off her wedding ring and held it pinched tightly between the thumb and first. Clearly she had been tap-tapping the ring against the arm of her chair for quite some time, perhaps from the moment she sat down in the waiting room. The sound of it echoed dimly in her memory.