The Final Solution Page 7

  “Rail service ‘interrupted,’” the old man said dryly. “Troop movements, I imagine. Reinforcements to Mortain, no doubt. I gather the fighting there has turned thick. In any case, I have no way to reach London by rail today, and yet I find myself very much obliged to go.”

  He peered forward, looking into the foot-well between his mud-caked boots, high-lacing, thick-ribbed old ammunition boots of the sort that had marched on Khartoum and Bloemfontein. With a grunt, and a creaking of bones that Mr. Panicker found quite alarming, he reached forward and retrieved the bottle of brandy, and with it the tiny corked stopper that had popped out and rolled from view soon after his departure—clandestine if hardly stealthy—from the vicarage. The old man sniffed at the neck of the bottle, and grimaced, raising an eyebrow. Then, with his facial features settled into an expression so deadpan that it could not fail to register as mocking, he proffered the bottle to Mr. Panicker.

  Mr. Panicker shook his head dumbly and engaged the clutch. The old man replaced the stopper on the bottle. And they set off for the city through the rain.

  They drove in silence for a long while as Mr. Panicker, finding his tank of rage drained and his drunkenness subsiding, lapsed into a funk of baffled embarrassment at his own recent behavior. He had always been, supremely and if nothing else, a man whose acts and opinions were characterized by rectitude, by that careful absence of surprisingness that he had been taught, years before at the seminary in Kottayam, to prize among the signal virtues of a successful vicar. The silence, the deep elderly sighs and occasional sidewise glances of his unwanted passenger struck him as prelude to an inevitable request for explanation.

  “I suppose you’re wondering…?” he began, hands gripping the wheel, hunching forward to bring his face nearer the windscreen.

  “Yes?”

  He decided—the idea appeared full and lustrous in his imagination as if tipped in by an artful hand—to tell the old man that he was on his way to London to attend a synod, entirely fictitious, of the Anglican clergy of southeastern England. This would account for the grip on the rear bench, beside the cans of precious petrol, packed for a journey of some two or three days. Yes, a synod at Church House. He would be staying at the Crampton, with its more than adequate restaurant. There was to be a series of thoughtful discussions, in the morning, of questions of liturgy, followed by lunch, and then in the afternoon a series of more practical seminars devoted to preparing the ministry to enter the postwar period. The Right Reverend Stackhouse-Hall, Archdeacon of Bromley, would address, with his usual learned good humor, the unexpected stresses that would naturally present themselves to families as they welcomed soldier fathers and husbands home. As Mr. Panicker continued to burnish and amplify his excuse, its appeal to him increased, and he found himself strangely cheered by its prospect.

  “I perceive that I have intruded on you in a difficult time, Mr. Panicker,” the old man said.

  With a wistful gesture Mr. Panicker swept the conference hall, hotel, restaurant, a set of matchstick towers, from the tabletop of his fancy. He was a faithless middle-aged minister, drunk and in flight from the ruin of his life.

  “Oh, no, I…” Mr. Panicker began, but then found that he was unable to continue, his throat constricted and his eyes stung with the imminence of tears. There are times, as he well knew, when merely having our sorrow guessed at could itself be a kind of rude consolation.

  “It’s really quite remarkable that I should so literally have crossed your path this morning. For the business that brings me to London is intimately connected with your own household, sir.”

  So that was it. Though the police had exonerated, or at least called off their investigation of his son in the murder of that chair-straddling traveler in teat-yanking machinery, the shadow of doubt had not been lifted from Mr. Panicker’s own consideration of the crime. The possibility of Reggie’s guilt was a matter of shame to Mr. Panicker, as was nearly everything that touched in some way or another on his son, but this time his shame was compounded by the intimate knowledge that Richard Shane’s brutal murder in the road behind the vicarage had echoed, in outline and particulars, the secret trend of his own darkest imaginings. When the detective inspector, Bellows, had called last week, the implication of the visit, couched though the questions were in terms of utmost circumspection, had been unmistakable. He himself, Kumbhampoika Thomas Panicker, public proponent and living symbol of the gentle but unyielding love of the Lord, stood credibly under suspicion of having killed a man—out of jealousy. And he could not help feeling that his desire to do so—that anger which set his hands trembling whenever a word of Shane’s induced the stunning miracle of a smile on his wife’s face—had somehow escaped his heart, like a gas, and fatally poisoned his son’s, already diseased.

  “It was my understanding… Reggie … the police said…”

  It struck him now that the old man and he had not “crossed paths” at all. He was still under investigation, and now the police had enlisted this ancient veteran; or perhaps the fantastical coot had put himself, half dementedly, on the case.

  “Tell me,” the old man said, and the prosecutorial lilt in his voice confirmed all of Mr. Panicker’s fears. “Have you remarked, or encountered personally, any strangers around the vicarage of late?”

  “Strangers? I don’t—”

  “This would be a chap from London, likely I should say an older man, perhaps a Jew. Man by the name of Black.”

  “The dealer in birds,” Mr. Panicker said. “They found his card in Reggie’s pocket.”

  “I have reason to believe that he has recently paid a visit to your young lodger, Master Steinman.”

  “Paid a visit?” The boy of course received no visitors at all, apart from Martin Kalb. “Not so far as I—”

  “Clearly, as I have suspected from the beginning, Mr. Black is indeed aware of our Bruno’s existence, and of his remarkable abilities. This recent attempt directly to contact Master Steinman suggests that Black had received no communication from any of his alleged agents in this affair, and knew nothing of the bird’s disappearance. Perhaps, indeed, it was in despair of ever receiving such a communication that he paid a clandestine visit to the boy, seeking to arrange for its sale, or perhaps to steal it himself. In any event, I intend to put some rather direct questions to Mr. Joseph Black of Club Row. Otherwise I shall never arrive at a final disposition of the bird’s whereabouts.”

  “The bird,” Mr. Panicker repeated, slowing the car. They were approaching East Grinstead, where the police had set up a checkpoint, and the traffic had already begun to back up. The old man had been correct then, in his surmise about increased military activity; security had been tightened. “You are looking for the bird.”

  The old man turned to him, an eyebrow raised, as if something about Mr. Panicker struck him as unfortunate or reproachable.

  “Aren’t you?” he said. “It seems to me that anyone charged with acting in loco parentis would view the disappearance of such a beloved and remarkable animal…”

  “Yes, yes of course,” Mr. Panicker said. “We are all very … the boy has been … inconsolable.”

  In fact the bird had entered Mr. Panicker’s thoughts in the two weeks since its disappearance only as a kind of grim mental aftereffect of the scenes of violence and bloodshed, of cuckoldry revenged and indignity repaid, that had characterized his imaginings during the brief tenancy at the vicarage of the damned Mr. Shane. For Mr. Panicker was certain that Bruno the parrot was dead, and dead furthermore in some particularly gruesome or violent manner. Despite its wild origin in, as his consultation of the “P” volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica had informed him, the tropical regions of Africa, Bruno was a house bird, cultivated and tamed. In the open country, in the hands of ruffians, surely it would come to grief. He envisioned the bird’s staring ink-pool eye as its neck was wrung; saw its body tossed, broken, trailing feathers and fluff, into a dustbin or gutter; saw it torn apart by stoats; tangled in telegraph wires. The horror o
f these visions came somewhat as a surprise to Mr. Panicker, given that—as was not the case with the late Dick Shane, whom his imagination had consigned to similar fates—he had always esteemed the bird very highly. In all the turmoil of the murder investigation, the foul tide of neighborhood gossip, and the drawing, at long last, of the final synthesis in the lifelong syllogism of disappointment that was his marriage to Ginny Stallard, these irruptions of blood-bright avian mayhem were the sole intrusions of the matter of the missing bird into his consciousness. Now for the first time (and here the sense of shame he felt was deeper and more searing than anything his marriage, his career, or the misbehavior of his unfortunate son had ever or could ever have inspired in him) he spared a thought—a small, frail, sober-eyed, wordless, Linus Steinman-sized thought—for the boy who had lost his only friend.

  “In all the recent confusion…” the old man offered helpfully. And then, “No doubt your pastoral duties and obligations…”

  “No,” Mr. Panicker said. All at once he felt himself sober and calm, and, at the same time a spasm of absurd gratitude seized him. “Of course not.”

  They had reached the checkpoint. A pair of uniformed policemen approached the Imperia, one on either side. Mr. Panicker rolled down his window, assisting the process as was necessary with a series of sharp tugs on the upper edge of the glass.

  “Good morning, sir. May I ask your reason for traveling to London?”

  “Reason?”

  Mr. Panicker looked at the old man, who looked back at him with a steady humorous unconcern.

  “Yes,” Mr. Panicker said. “Oh. Yes. Well, we’ve, ex, come to look for a parrot, haven’t we?”

  Mr. Panicker’s wife, ruefully true to her married name, suffered from gephyrophobia, the morbid fear of crossing bridges. When a car, bus, or train in which she was riding hung suspended over some river, she would sink deeply into her seat, eyes closed, breath coming through her nostrils in short whistling gusts, moaning softly, holding herself perfectly still with the brimming cup of her fear clutched between her palms as if she dared not spill a drop. As Mr. Panicker drove through Croydon, the swift, haphazard gathering of the city around them appeared to arouse in the old man some allied phobic turbulence. The rasp of breath in the nostrils, the knuckles white as they gripped the hafts of his knees, the stayed cables of his wasted neck standing out—all these Mr. Panicker recognized as the signs of an all but unmasterable dread. Yet as they entered London the old man’s eyes, unlike those of Mrs. Panicker when she found herself trapped mid-span, remained wide-staring open. He was, by irremediable nature, a man who looked at things, even when, as now, clearly they terrified him.

  “You are unwell?”

  For a full minute the old man made no reply and merely stared out the side window, watching the streets of South London slide by.

  “Twenty-three years,” he croaked. “August 14, 1921.” He drew a handkerchief from some interior pocket, patted his brow, dabbed at the corners of his mouth. “A Sunday.”

  Affixing a date and day of the week to his last glimpse of London appeared to a degree to restore the old man’s equilibrium.

  “I don’t know what I … silly. One has read so extensively about the damage from bombs and fires. I had prepared myself for a ruin. Indeed I confess to having in some measure anticipated, simply out of a kind of, well, let us be charitable and term it a ‘scientific curiosity,’ you know, the sight of this great city lying in smoking ashes along the Thames. But this is…”

  The adequate adjective eluded him. They were across the river now, and found themselves caught between and towered over by two high red trams. Rows of staring faces gazing down at them with inquisitorial indifference. Then the trams split off east and west respectively and, as if a pair of water gates had been lifted, the flood of inner London rushed over them. They had bombed it; they had burned it; but they had not killed it, and now it was sending forth growths and tendrils of some strange new life. To Mr. Panicker the thing that chiefly struck him, and had done over the year leading up to 6 June, was the startling Americanness of London: American airmen and sailors, officers, and foot soldiers, American military vehicles in the streets, American films in the cinemas, and an atmosphere of loud, raffish swagger, a smell of hair tonic, a cacophony of sprung vowels that might, as Mr. Panicker was prepared to concede, be entirely the product of his own imagination but which nevertheless animated the city for him in a way that he found at once appalling and irresistible, an air of riotous, brutal good humor, as if the invasion of Europe itself, now proceeding in bloody stages across northern France, were only the inevitable exploding forth of a buildup of jazzy slang and the uncontainable urge to buck and wing.

  “That’s new,” the old man said, over and over, crooking a stiff finger toward some office block or housing estate. “That was not here.” And then as they passed the somber hulk, often still festooned with streamers of gray smoke, of yet another bombed-out block of flats, simply, “Good God.”

  His voice, as they plunged deeper into the changes wrought in London by construction crews and German bombs since that Sunday afternoon in 1921, fell to a harsh, appalled whisper. Mr. Panicker imagined—he had a powerfully sermonizing imagination—that the old man must have been experiencing (rather belatedly, in the vicar’s opinion) a kind of foretaste or demonstration of the nature of death itself. After his long absence from the city over which he had once exercised his quiet brand of domination, he had seemed to expect that it, like the world when we depart it, would stop changing, would somehow cease to exist. After us, the Blitz! And now here he was confronted by not simply the continued existence of the city but, amid the smoking piles of brick and jagged windowpanes, by the irrepressible, inhuman force of its expansion.

  “Ashes,” the old man said wonderingly as they passed a huge new area of emergency housing built by Mr. Churchill, like a vast tilled allotment sprouting row upon row of little tin houses. “I had thought to see nothing but smoke and ashes.”

  They drove along the grimy arches of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and left the car by Arnold Circus, in a street that was greatly the worse for having borne the brunt of a German SC, beside a neat pile of paving stones salvaged from the blast and still awaiting redeployment. Then they walked around the corner into Club Row. Mr. Panicker was practiced and even authoritative in his offering of a steadying arm to the elderly, but the old man refused his every attempt, having declined even to let the vicar help him out of the cramped interior of the car. As soon as he found himself on the ground, so to speak—as soon as the hunt commenced, as Mr. Panicker could not help putting it, somewhat romantically, to himself—he seemed to shake off the phobic bewilderment of the voyage. He held his chin high and gripped the head of his stick as if very soon he intended to begin swinging it toward the deserving skulls of ruffians. As they turned into Club Row, in fact, Mr. Panicker found himself hard-pressed to keep up with the long crooked scarecrow stride of the old man.

  And indeed Club Row had changed very little, if at all, since August 1921 or, indeed, he supposed, since the August of 1901, or 1881. Some long-forgotten business had carried Mr. Panicker here, one Sunday morning years before. He recalled how the street seemed inanely alive with the horrid cheer that haunted zoos and menageries, how the cries of bird sellers, of puppy wallahs and cat peddlers intermingled and created an eerie and disturbing echolalia, at once mocking of and mocked by the chatter of their caged and staring stock in trade. In spite of the fact that he had known perfectly well, as he passed them, that the lorikeets and budgerigars, the spaniels and tabbies, and even the odd sharp-eyed weaselish thing, were to be sold and purchased as pets, Mr. Panicker had not been able to rid himself, as he proceeded along Club Row on that forgotten errand, of the notion that he was walking down a street of the condemned, and that all of this sad caged animal flesh was intended only for the slaughter.

  Today, however, the Row was silent, haunted only by the litter and faint invisible gutter-drip of the Monday after marke
t day. Torn wrappers, bits of greasy newsprint, twisted hanks of rag, sawdust caked in puddles of fluids on whose nature Mr. Panicker preferred not to speculate. The stalls and shops dark behind their curtains of articulated bars and padlocked steel shutters. Above the storefronts, the low, disreputable buildings jostled one another, in serried ranks, like rounded-up suspects trying to exhibit a collective and wholly spurious innocence, while their brick cornices leaned ever so slightly inward over the row, as if to peer into the breast pockets of passing marks. It was, or ought to have been, a singularly depressing prospect. And yet the verve and energetic tread of the old man, the vaguely drum-majorish way in which he swung his heavy stick, inspired Mr. Panicker with a giddy and surprising optimism. He felt a mounting sense, as they headed down toward Bethnal Green Road—a sense that had obscure roots in that vanished market morning when he had passed amid the hectic stalls of the dealers in animals—that they were penetrating to the heart of some authentic mystery of London, or perhaps of life itself; that at last, in the company of this singular old gentleman whose command of mystery had at one time been spoken of as far away as Kerala, he might discover some elucidation of the heartbreaking clockwork of the world.

  “Here,” the old man said, with a sidewise thrust of his stick. Its plated head rang against a small enameled sign, affixed with rusted screws to the brick front of number 122, that read BLACK, and then in smaller type beneath this, BIRDS RARE AND EXOTIC. A grating was drawn across the front but through the murky window Mr. Panicker could make out the vaguely Asiatic shapes of gabled cages and even perhaps the flutter of a wing or tail feather, ghostly as a breeze that stirred the dust. A faint but animated whistling pierced gloom, glass, and shutters, rising and complicating itself as his ears became attuned to it. Doubtless the old man’s rapping had roused the denizens of Black’s shop.