The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

by Michael Chabon

  The old man rose and jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe in the direction of her son.

  "Has this man been harmed?" he said, his voice thin even to her ears, petulant, as if there were a kind of moral obviousness to the beating her son had been given by the police that trumped any craven protest he or anyone might register. The horror of it vied in her thoughts with a low rough voice whispering Had it coming. Had it coming now a very long time. It took all of her powers of self-possession- a considerable resource, strengthened through a lifetime of nearly continuous exercise-to refrain from crossing the room and taking his battered dark head in her arms, if only to smooth the disorder of his thick black mat of hair.

  The two policemen, communicants of Mr. Panicker, Noakes and Woollett as she at last succeeded in putting names to them, stood blinking at the old man as if there were a bit of breakfast clinging to his lip.

  "Had a fall," said the one she believed to be Noakes.

  Woollett nodded. "Bad luck, that," he said.

  "Indeed," the old man said. The expression drained from his face as he made another of his long, deep examinations, this time of the outraged face of her son, who stared back at the old man with a look of hatred that failed to astonish her, any more than she was surprised when in the end Reggie's gaze faltered, and he stared down, looking much younger than his twenty-two years, at his skinny brown wrists crossed in his lap.

  "What's she doing here?" he said at last.

  "Your mother has brought a few personal articles," the old man said. "I'm sure they will be welcome. But if you like, I will ask her to wait outside."

  Reggie looked up, at her, and in his pout there was some­thing that resembled thanks, a sardonic gratitude as if per­haps she were not quite as horrid a mother as he had always believed. Though in her own accounting-and she was not generous with herself-she had never failed him, every time she stood by him he seemed to view it with the same skep­tical surprise.

  "I don't give a damn what she does," he said.

  "No," the old man said dryly. "No, I don't suppose you do. Now. Hah. Hmm. Yes. All right. Tell me, why don't you, about your friend Mr. Black, of Club Row."

  "There's nothing to tell," Reggie said. "Don't know the bloke."

  "Mr. Panicker," the old man said. "I am eighty-nine years old. The little life that remains to me I would much prefer to spend in the company of creatures far more intelligent and mysterious than you. Therefore, in the interest of conserving the scant time I have, allow me to tell you about Mr. Black of Club Row. Word has lately reached his ear, I imagine, of a re­markable parrot, mature and in good health, with a gift for mimicry and a retentive mind far beyond the norm for its species. Were it his, our Mr. Black might sell this bird to a British or Continental fancier for a handsome sum. You had made up your mind, therefore, and got everything in readi­ness, to steal the bird and sell it to him, in the hopes of raising a large sum of cash. Which cash, if I am not mistaken, you re­quire to repay the debt you have incurred to Fatty Hodges."

  The words were spoken and left behind before her thoughts could catch up to them or to the instantaneous jolt they had sent straight through her. Fatty Hodges was by every reckoning and general acclaim the worst man on the South Downs. There was no telling what kind of mischief he had got Reggie up to.

  Noakes and Woollet stared; Reggie stared; they all stared. How could he possibly have known?

  "My bees fly everywhere," the old man said. He flexed his neck and rubbed his hands together with a dry rasp. A conjuror with cards, after the ace has been produced. "And they see everyone."

  His conclusion, that his bees told him everything, he left unspoken. She supposed he feared it would have sounded mad; he was widely held to be quite batty.

  "Alas, before you could steal the beloved pet and sole friend of a lonely refugee orphan, you were beaten to the punch by Mr. Shane, the lodger. But as he was about to make off with the bird, Shane was attacked and killed. Now we arrive at the place, or I should say at one place, where the police and I differ. For clearly we also differ as to the advis­ability of beating the Crown's prisoners, in particular those who have not yet been convicted."

  Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion In­verness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the Empire.

  "Now, sir-" Noakes put in, reproachful; or was it Woollet?

  "The police, I say," the old man said, innocent and serene, "seem fairly certain that it was you who surprised Mr. Shane as he was carrying Bruno off, and murdered him. Whereas I believe that it was another, a man-"

  The old man's avid gaze now found its way to Reggie's black brogues, bright with the shine she had given them that morning, when the day had promised nothing out of the or­dinary.

  "-with feet a good deal smaller than your own."

  Reggie's face slipped-that disappointed face, smooth as a kneecap. Motionless except where it twisted up at one eyebrow and down at one corner of the mouth. Now, for an instant, it fell away, and he grinned, like a boy. He pulled his great big feet from under the table and stuck them straight out in front of him, marveling as if for the first time at their appalling size.

  "That's what I've been telling these two!" he cried. "Yes, all right, another day and I'd have had that bird sold and Fatty paid, and off my back. But the idea wasn't original with me. It's Parkins you should have in here. It was in his wallet that I found Black's card."

  "Parkins?" the old man looked to the policemen, who shrugged, and then at her.

  "My oldest lodger," she said. "Two years last March." She had never quite trusted Mr. Simon Parkins, she realized, though to all appearances there was nothing in the least ex­ceptionable or shady about him. He rose at the same late hour each morning, went off to study his rolls or rubbings or whatever it was he pored over in the library at Gabriel Park until long past nightfall, and then returned to his room, his lamp, and his supper, warmed over, under a dish.

  "Are you in the habit of studyin' the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet, then, Reg?" said Noakes or Woollett, affably though with a hint of trying too hard, as though he felt the chance to fix Reggie with a murder charge slipping away and hoped to fix him with something else before it was too late.

  The old man's head turned toward the policemen with an audible snap.

  "I beg you gentlemen also to consider that my days are numbered," he said. "Pray don't ask superfluous questions. Does Parkins take an interest in the bird?"

  The question was directed at her.

  "Everyone took an interest in Bruno," she said, wonder­ing why she referred to the parrot in the past tense. "Every­one except poor Mr. Shane. Isn't that strange?"

  "Parkins takes an interest, all right," Reggie said. The sullenness to which he had at first treated the old man was all gone. "He was always jotting things in his little notebook. Every time the bird started in on those damned numbers."

  For the first time since their arrival at the police station, the old man looked truly interested in what was happening. He rose to his feet with none of the moaning and muttering that had attended this action hitherto.

  "The numbers!" He laid his hands together palm to palm, arrested between prayer and applause. "Yes! I like that! The bird was wont to repeat numbers."

  "All bloody day long."

  "Endless series of them," she said, failing even to notice the expletive, though it made one of the policemen wince. She realized now that she had indeed many times seen Parkins pull out a small paper notebook and copy down the numeric arias that emerged from the uncanny clockwork snapping of Bruno's black bill. "One to nine, over and over again, in no particular order."

  "And all in German," Reggie said.

  "And our Mr. Parkins. He is presently employed in what line of work? A commercial traveler, like Richard Shane?"

  "He is an architectural historian," she said, noticing that neither Noakes nor Woollett was bothering to
write anything down. To look at them, those sweating hulks in their blue woolen coats, they might not even have been listening, let alone thinking. Perhaps they felt it was too hot to think. She felt sorry for that intense little inspector from London, Bel­lows. No wonder he had sent for the old man's help. "He is preparing a monograph on our church."

  "And yet he's never there," Reggie said. "Least of all on Sunday."

  The detective looked at her for confirmation of this.

  "He is presently making a survey of some very old vil­lage rolls they keep in the library at Gabriel Park," she said. "I'm afraid I don't really understand it. He's trying to make calculations about the height of the tower in the Middle Ages. It's all-he showed me once. It seemed as much math as architecture."

  The old man sank slowly back into his chair, but this time with an air of great abstraction. He was no longer look­ing at her or at Reggie, or, so far as she could see, at anything in the room. His pipe had long since gone out, and working through a series of automatic steps he relit it, without ap­pearing to notice that he did so. The four human beings sharing the room with him stood or sat, waiting with a re­markable unanimity for him to come to some conclusion. After a full minute of furious smoking, he said, "Parkins," clearly and distinctly, and then he gave a little mumbled speech whose words she couldn't catch. He appeared, she would have said, to be delivering a lecture to himself. Once more he made it up onto his feet, and then headed toward the door of the waiting room, without a backward glance. It was as if he had forgotten them entirely.

  "What about me?" Reggie said. "Tell them to let me out, you silly old geezer!"

  "Reggie!" She was horrified. Thus far he had said noth­ing that even remotely resembled an expression of regret over what had happened to Mr. Shane. He had confessed without a jot of shame his plan to steal Bruno from an or­phaned little refugee Jew, and to going through the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet. And now here he was, being rude to the only really worthwhile ally he had ever possessed, apart from her. "For heaven's sake. If you can't see the mess you've got yourself into this time . . ."

  The old man turned back from the door, wearing an an­noyed little smile.

  "Your mother is right," he said. "At this point there is very little evidence to exonerate you, and a good deal of circum­stantial evidence that might seem to implicate you. These gentlemen"-he nodded toward Noakes and Woollett- "would be in dereliction of duty if they were to free you. You appear, in short, to be quite guilty of murdering Mr. Shane."

  Then he pulled on his hunting cap and, with a last nod in her direction, went out.

  6

  The old man had visited Gabriel Park once before; sometime in the late nineties, that would have been. Then as now it was a question of murder, and there had also been an animal concerned, then-a Siamese cat, painstakingly trained to administer a rare Malay poison with a brush of its whisker against the lips.

  The great old house's fortunes appeared in the interven­ing years to have declined. Before the last war a fire had de­stroyed the north wing, with its turreted observatory from whose slitted eyelid the Baroness di Sforza-that grand and hideous woman-had leapt to her death, with her precious Siam Queen clutched yowling to her breast. Here and there one still saw blackened timbers jutting from the tall grass like a row of snuffed wicks. The main hall, with all the sur­rounding pasturelands, had been taken over just before the present war by something called the National Research Dairy; its small, admirably healthy herd of Galloways was the subject of immense skepticism and amusement in the neighborhood.

  Forty years ago, the old man recalled, it had needed a reg­iment of servants to tend the place. Now there was no one to clip the ivy or repaint the window frames, or to replace the lost tiles of the roof, which five years of occupation by the Research Dairy had transformed from a stately defile of chimneys to an upset knitting-basket of aerials and wires. The dairy researchers themselves were seldom seen in town, but it had been observed that a number of them appeared to speak with the accents of far-off Central European lands where, perhaps, the fact that Galloways were beef cattle un-suited to the production of milk was not appreciated. The south wing, severed from the hall by the ostensible milk needs of the nation, languished. One or two of the surviving Curlewes haunted its upper storey. And in its grand old li­brary-the very room in which the old man had, by means of a cleverly placed tin of sardines, unmasked the larcenous fe­line-Mr. Parkins, and a dozen or so other historians too old or unfit for war, pored over the estate's world-renowned and unparalleled store of tax rolls, account books, and judicial records, kept by the Curlewe family during the seven cen­turies they had ruled over this part of Sussex.

  "I'm sorry, sir," said the young soldier who sat behind a small metal desk in a small metal building at the end of the drive that led up to the house. It was a building of recent and cheap manufacture. One could hardly fail to notice that the soldier wore a Webley in a holster. "But you can't come in without the proper credentials."

  The grandson of Sandy Bellows, that dour and tireless exposer of charlatans, displayed his identification card.

  "I'm investigating a murder," he said, sounding less sure of himself than either his ancestor or the old man would have liked.

  "I heard all about it," said the soldier. He looked, for a moment, truly pained by the thought of Shane's death, long enough for it to strike the old man as curious. Then his face resumed its placid smirk. "But a police badge ain't creden­tials enough, I'm afraid. National security."

  "National-this is a dairy, is it not?" the old man cried.

  "Milk and milk production are essential to the British war effort," the soldier said brightly.

  The old man turned to Sandy Bellows's grandson and saw to his annoyance that the young man seemed to accept this egregious lie. The inspector took a calling card from his wallet and jotted a few words on the reverse.

  "Might I ask you to carry this message to Mr. Parkins?" the inspector said. "Or arrange for that to be done?"

  The soldier read the message on the back of the card, and considered it for a moment. Then he reached for a black handset and spoke into it softly.

  "What did you write?" the old man asked.

  The young inspector raised an eyebrow, and it was as if the face of Sandy Bellows were looking out at him across the decades, irritated and amused.

  "Can't you guess?" he said.

  "Don't be impertinent." And then, out of the side of his mouth, "You wrote, Richard Shane is dead."

  "I am very much aggrieved to hear that," Francis Parkins de­clared. They sat in a large room at the back of the south wing, just below the library itself. At one time it had been the servants' dining room; the old man, seeking the poi­soner, had conducted interviews with the household staff at this very table. Now the room was being used as a kind of canteen. Tumbled cities of tea tins. Biscuit wrappers. A gas ring for the kettle, and an acrid smell of scorched coffee. The ashtrays had not been emptied. "He was a fine fellow." "Undoubtedly," the old man said. "He was also a par­rot thief."

  This Parkins was a long, lean man, dressed like a don in a good tweed suit ill-treated. His head looked too large for his neck, his Adam's apple for his throat, and his hands for his frail white wrists. They were clever hands, supple and expressive. He wore little steel-rimmed spectacles and the lenses caught the light in a way that made it difficult to read his eyes. He gave every appearance of being a cool and settied fellow. There was nothing to be learned from the way Parkins reacted to news of the parrot's disappearance, un­less it was something in his reply itself.

  "Where is Bruno now?" he said.

  He lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto the pile of fag ends in the nearest ashtray. Keeping his face with its il­legible eyes on the inspector, he paid not the slightest attention to his companion, a squat, sunburned man who introduced himself, without explanation for his presence at the interview, as Mr. Sackett, managing director of the Re­search Dairy. Aside from giving his name and
title Sackett said nothing. But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.

  "We had some hope that you might be able to tell us that," the old man said.

  "I? You suspect me?"

  "Not at all," the inspector said earnestly. "Not for a moment."

  "No more," the old man said, "than we believe you to be conducting elaborate mathematical surveys of the height of the church tower in the fourteenth century."

  Ah. That one found a chink. The light died in the lenses of his spectacles. Parkins glanced at Mr. Sackett, whose meaty face in its absolute expressionlessness was as eloquent as a fist.

  "Gentlemen," Parkins said after a moment. "Inspector. I assure you that I had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Shane, nor with the disappearance of that admirable bird. I have either been in my bed or in the library here for the past two days, though I can offer no proof of that statement, I'm afraid. I can, however, prove to you that my researches are genuine. Let me just run back and fetch my notebook, and I'll show you-"

  "What is the current height of the church tower?" the old man said.

  "One hundred and thirty-two feet, six inches," said Parkins at once. He smiled. Mr. Sackett tapped the ash from his cigarette.

  "And in 1312?"

  "I should say seventeen feet shorter, though that remains to be proven."

  "A difficult question to settle?"

  "Frightfully," Parkins said.

  "And doubtless an important one."

  "Only to Dryasdusts like me, I'm afraid."

  "Bruno, I gather, has provided you with some key in­sights."