The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

by Michael Chabon

  "I don't understand."

  "The numbers," Inspector Bellows said. "You keep track of them. Write them down."

  The hesitation was brief, but the old man had been lied to by some of the greatest liars of his generation, among whom modesty did not prevent him from including himself. His nearly thirty years spent almost solely in the company of creatures whose honesty could not be impeached seemed to have had no ill effects on the sensitivity of his instrument. Parkins was lying his head off.

  "Merely for my own amusement," Parkins said. "There's nothing in them. Just a lot of nonsense."

  A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to as­semble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystal­lization, this paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.

  "What does Bruno know?" he said. "Whose numbers was he taught to repeat?"

  "I'm afraid we don't concern ourselves with such ques­tions here," Mr. Sackett said quietly.

  "Am I to understand," the old man said, "that Mr. Parkins is an employee, or as it were a fellow, of your facil­ity, Mr. Sackett? Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?"

  The inspector sought valiantly to cover his laughter with a cough. Mr. Sackett frowned.

  "Detective Inspector Bellows," Sackett said, his voice softer than ever. "I wonder if I might have a word with you."

  Bellows nodded and they stood up and went out into the hall. Just before he left the room, Mr. Sackett turned and aimed a warning look at Mr. Parkins, whose cheeks colored.

  "I take it I am about to be warned off," the old man said.

  But the rime of light had returned to the lenses of Mr. Parkins's spectacles. He smiled thinly. The tap dripped into the basin; a cigarette in one of the choked ashtrays burned to the filter and filled the room with an acrid smell of hair. A moment later the inspector came back into the room, alone.

  "Thank you, Mr. Parkins. You may go," he said, then turned to the old man, an apology in his expression, his voice imprinted, as it were, with an echo of Mr. Sackett's hard-edged whisper of command. "We're all finished here."

  An hour later, Reggie Panicker was released, with all charges against him dropped, and the next day, at the in­quest, the death of Richard Woolsey Shane was officially ruled to have been the result of an accident whose nature was not then or afterward specified.

  7

  The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The fea­tureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable, and distinct as the separate stones of a featureless gray shingle, and he moved along the sound, tending to his hives like a beachcomber, stooped and marveling. It meant nothing, of course-he wasn't as batty as all that-but this did not imply, not at all, that the song had no meaning. It was the song of a city, a city as far from London as London was from heaven or Rangoon, a city in which all did pre­cisely what they were supposed to do, in the way that had been prescribed by their most remote and venerable ances­tors. A city in which gems, gold ingots, letters of credit, or secret naval plans were never stolen, in which long-lost sec­ond sons and ne'er-do-well first husbands did not turn up from the Wawoora Valley or the Rand with some clever backwoods trick for scaring an old moneybags out of his wits. No stabbings, garrotings, beatings, shootings; almost no violence at all, apart from the occasional regicide. All of the death in the city of the bees had been scheduled, pro­vided for, tens of millions of years ago; each death as it occurred was translated, efficiently and immediately, into more life for the hive.

  It was the sort of city in which a man who had earned his keep among murderers and ruffians might choose to pass the remainder of his days, listening to its song, as a young man fresh to Paris or New York or Rome (or even, as he still dimly recalled, London) stood on a balcony, at the window of a bedsit, on the roof of a tenement house, listening to the rumble of traffic and the fanfare of horns, and feeling that he was hearing the music of his own mysterious destiny.

  Between the epic of the bees and the rasp of his own res­piration within the tent of his protective netting, he failed to hear, as he had failed to anticipate, the long black saloon car that turned up the day after his interview with Parkins. It was not until the man from London was ten feet behind him that the old man turned. Easy prey, he thought, disgusted with himself. Fortunate, really, that all one's enemies are dead.

  The man from London was dressed like a cabinet min­ister but he moved like a cashiered soldier. Broad-chested, fair-haired, squinting as against a hostile sun, a curious shuffling motion in his left foot, in its good Cleverley brogue, as he came toward the hives. Old enough to have ac­cumulated a score of enemies, certainly, but not yet old enough to have outlived them all. His driver waited by the car with its London plates and its slitted blackout headlights that echoed the sun-blasted squint of its passenger.

  "Do they ever sting you?" the man from London said.

  "Constantly."

  "Does it hurt?"

  The old man raised the netting, so that he would not have to waste a perfectly good yes on such a fatuous ques­tion. The man from London concealed the traces of a smile in his graying blond mustache.

  "Suppose it would," he said. "Like honey, do you?"

  "Not particularly, no," said the old man.

  The man from London appeared to be a little surprised by this reply, then nodded and confessed that he was not ter­ribly fond of honey himself.

  "Know who I am?" he said, after a moment.

  "Genus and species," the old man said. He lifted a hand to the veil of net as if to lower it again. Then he pulled off the hat entirely, and tucked it under his arm. "You'd better come inside."

  The man from London took the chair by the window, and made a discreet attempt to crank an inch or two of fresh air into the room. It was the least comfortable chair in the cottage, combining all the worst qualities of a sawhorse and a church pew, but the old man was under no illusion about the odor in the room. Not that he could smell it himself, any more than a bear, or for that matter an ogre, noticed or minded the stench of his own dark den.

  "I can offer you a cup of tea," he said, though in fact he was not entirely certain that he could. "I believe my supply dates from the early nineteen thirties. I don't know, Colonel, whether tea leaves turn bitter with time or lose their flavor entirely but I feel reasonably certain that mine have met their fate. Am I right? It is Colonel?"

  "Threadneedle."

  "Colonel Threadneedle. Cavalryman?"

  "Mounted infantry. Lennox Highlanders."

  "Ah. Whisky, then."

  The proposal was offered and accepted in the spirit of hostile good humor that had so far characterized his dealings with the intelligence officer, but at once he was racked with anxiety as to whether the whisky he had suggested in such a cavalier fashion had been drunk years before, in other lodg­ings, had perhaps evaporated or turned to a tarry paste, was not whisky to begin with, had ever existed at all. Five min­utes' speleology in the nether regions of the corner cabinet produced a bottle of Glenmorangie, buried in a layer of dust that might have repelled a Schliemann. He stood, trembling with relief, and brushed the sweat from his brow with the back of a cardiganned arm. As a young man, to be warned off from pursuing an investigation had been a positive development, a landmark on the road to solution, and more than this, a thrill.

  "Found it!" he cried.

  He spilled a generous amount into a reasonably clean glass and handed it to the man from London, then lowered himself into his armchair. The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth like the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woolen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.

  "This country," the colonel began. "Too quick to forgive its enemies and too hasty
to forget its old friends." He took a deep whiff of the two inches of scotch in his glass, as if to scour his nostrils, then drained half. He grunted, in a way that was perhaps involuntary, and gave a wistful sigh of con­tentment: the passing years were, in every other respect, so cruel. "That at least is my view."

  "I hope that I was of some little service, here and there, over the years."

  "It was felt," the colonel began, "that you were entitled to an explanation."

  "That's very kind."

  "The boy is the son of a Dr. Julius Steinman, Berlin physician. Name means nothing to me, but in psychiatric circles ..." He made a face to indicate his judgment of psy­chiatrists and their opinions. The old man appreciated but did not share the prejudice; as doctors, no doubt, psychiatrists left something to be desired, but they often made fine detec­tives. "Apparently the man had some success treating certain forms of sleep disorders. God knows how. Drugs, I'd wager. At any rate, the boy and his parents were spared deportation in 1938. Taken off the train at the last moment, I gather."

  "Someone having nightmares," the old man said.

  "Shouldn't wonder."

  "Someone involved with codes and ciphers."

  " 'Involved' with something very secret, at any rate." He gazed fondly at the last inch of whisky in his glass, then bade it farewell. "Held on to his personal Jew doctor for as long as he could. Keeping the bad dreams at bay. Quartered with him in some kind of secret facility or camp. The whole family. Wife, boy, parrot."

  "Where the parrot, with all the stealth and craft his breed is known for, proceeded to commit to memory the ci­pher keys for the Kriegsmarine."

  The man from London appreciated the sarcasm slightly less, perhaps, than he had the scotch.

  "They were taught to him, naturally," he said. "That's the theory, at any rate. This Parkins fellow has been sitting on it for months, apparently. As soon as we learned of it-"

  "You tried to get Reggie Panicker to steal it for you, and sell it to this Mr. Black, who, I suppose, is in your employ."

  "Not to my knowledge," the man from London said, and in his tone was the polite suggestion that the ambit of this knowledge well sufficed any purpose of the old man's. "And you're wrong about the Panicker lad. We had nothing to do with that."

  "And you don't care who killed your Mr. Shane."

  "Oh, we care. Yes, indeed. Shane was a fine man. A skilled operative. His death is most disturbing, not least for its clear implication that someone was sent to retrieve this bird." He did not seem to feel it necessary to suggest who this someone might have been sent by. "He may be lying low in the surrounding countryside. He may be a sleeper, someone who's been here living and working in the village since long before the war began. Or he may be halfway across the North Sea at this moment, on his way home."

  "Or he may be in his study in the vicarage, hard at work on a sermon for this Sunday. A sermon whose text is taken from the second chapter of Hosea, verses one through three."

  "Perhaps," the man from London said with a dry cough that he seemed to intend to serve as proxy for an actual laugh. "Your young friend the inspector is onto the father now."

  "Yes, he would be."

  "But that seems unlikely. Chap grows roses, doesn't he?"

  "A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be un­likely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand-"

  "Yes, well." The colonel peered into the empty glass of whisky, cheeks coloring as if with chagrin. "It's just that, given the opportunity, we would do the same thing, wouldn't we?" Some inward slackening of the cords seemed to have taken place in the colonel, but the old man doubted that the fault lay in a dusty glass of scotch. He had known the flower of British intelligence, from the days of the Great Game through the first echoes of the guns of Mons. In the end their trade boiled down to purest mirror work: inversions and re­flections, echoes. And there was always something dispirit­ing about the things one saw in a looking glass. "If they had a parrot stuffed to the wingtips with our naval cipher, we would certainly make every effort to get it back." The colonel looked up at the old man with a smile that mocked himself and the ministry that employed him. "Or see it roasted on a spit."

  He rose from the very hard chair with a cracking of the timbers of his soldierly frame. Then with a last longing look at the bottle of scotch, he went to the door.

  "This is a war we are trying extremely hard not to lose," he said. "A learned parrot would be far from the most pre­posterous thing for it to hinge upon."

  "I have promised to find Bruno," the old man said. "And so I shall."

  "Should you manage the trick," the colonel said. A long shaft of the summer afternoon reached into the house as he opened the door. The old man could hear the chant of the bees in their cities. The light itself was the color of honey. In the dooryard the driver awoke from his drowse, and the engine of the saloon car rumbled to life. "Thanks of a grate­ful nation and so forth."

  "I shall return him to the boy."

  This came out more petulant than the old man would have liked, reedy and cracked, and he regretted having said it. It could not be regarded by his visitor even as the hollow bravado of an old codger.

  The man from London frowned, and let out a sigh that might have been embittered or admiring. Then the colonel shook his head once, firmly, in a way that was ordinarily, the old man imagined, sufficient to any nullifying purpose that might arise in the course of a day's work. The colonel took out a scrap of paper and the chewed blue stub of a pencil. He scrawled a number on the back of the scrap and then neatly poked it into a crack in the warped wooden frame of the door. Just before he went out, he turned back and looked at the old man, wearing an oddly dreamy expression.

  "What's the taste of parrot meat, I wonder?" he said.

  8

  The hives were a row of gabled boxes on the south side of the cottage, miniature pagodas, white and stepped as wedding cakes. One of the colonies dated from 1926; in his thoughts it was always the "Old Hive." The "Old Hive" had been mothered and ruled by genera­tions of strong, prolific queens. It was as ancient to the old man as Britain itself, as the chalk bones of the South Downs. And now, as in each of the seventeen preceding summers, the time had come to ravish it of its honey.

  On the morning proposed for the extraction, he read J.G. Digges until four, then slept fitfully for an hour until he knew that it was time to get up. He had never relied on alarm clocks. He was a lifelong light sleeper, and in his dotage an outright insomniac. When he did sleep, his dreams were puzzles and algebra problems, troubling his rest. He pre­ferred on the whole to be awake.

  Everything took longer than it ought to have taken- ablutions, coffee, priming the first pipe of the day. He had never really learned to cook, and the latest Satterlee girl who looked after him would not be in until seven. By then he would be deeply at work on the hives. So he ate nothing. Even without bothering about breakfast, however, he was annoyed to find that by the time he had fought the daily bat­tle in the lavatory, washed his lean old limbs, fastened all the zips of his bee suit, pulled on his rubber-soled boots, and donned his bee hat, the sun was already well up and blazing in the sky. It was going to be a hot day, and hot bees were discontented bees. For now at least there was still a noctur­nal chill in the air, fog on the high ground, a heavy taste of the sea. So he wasted another five minutes enjoying his pipe. The morning cool, the burning shag, the drowse of the late summer, honey-sated bees: until this recent adventure of the learned parrot these were the pleasures of his life. They were animal pleasures, as he recognized.

  Such things had once meant very little to him.

  The soles of his boots squeaked in the grass as he went to the shed to fetch his housebreaking tools, and they squeaked as he limped across to the hives. He could smell the ointment tang of heather honey from halfway across the hiveyard. A good summer for heather this year. The Satter-lees would be pleased; by ancie
nt arrangement the family sold the yield of his hives, and kept the profits, and heather honey fetched four or five times the price of a common blend.

  At last he stood before the "Old Hive," holding his fum­ing board and the stoppered bottle of benzaldehyde. The hive gave off an air of doomed contentment, like a city sleeping it off on the day after carnival, contemplated from a hilltop by an army of Huns. The old man drew a deep chestful of smoke and then lowered himself to the ground, leaning on the fuming board for balance. A couple of work­ers loitered outside the round portal of the city.

  "Morning, ladies," he said; or perhaps he merely thought it.

  He put his lips to the entrance hole and blew in a rank rich exhalation of mundungus. He had bred a commendable docility into his stock but when you came to steal their honey it was best not to take any chances. The shag he fa­vored possessed remarkable powers of tranquilization; The British Bee Journal had published his notes on the subject.

  He ratcheted himself to his feet and prepared to remove the super, with its fat, waxy combs. This was not a task he relished; the supers got heavier every year. It took no effort to imagine losing his footing on the way to the covered porch around the back of the cottage where he ran the ex­tractor: the snap of a critical bone, the splintered frames of honey spilt on the ground. He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.

  Carefully he let his pipe go out and then tucked it into the wide pocket of his bee suit alongside his matches and pouch of tobacco. Benzoic aldehyde was only moderately flamma­ble, but the prospect of setting himself on fire with his own pipe conformed to his worst ideas of the indignity that death would one day visit upon him. With the pipe out of the way, he unstoppered the brown glass bottle, and his organ of smell was overwhelmed, all but undone, by a strident blast of marzipan. He sprinkled the stuff liberally on the felt batting of the fuming board. Then he reached for the peaked roof of the hive and lifted it off. Quickly, nearly dropping it, he laid it on the ground and turned back to the comb, the beautiful comb, each cell of it sealed with a wax cap of sturdy bee man­ufacture. It had the strange pallor of heather honeycomb, an intense whiteness, white as death or a gardenia. He admired it. Here and there a bee surprised at its business contem­plated the meaning of the disturbance, the sudden burst of daylight. One, a heroine of her people, rose at once into the air to attack him. If she stung him, he didn't remark it; he had long since grown habituated to the stings. He settled the fuming board down over the pale expanse of comb and hoisted the roof back into place over it. In a few minutes the hated stench of the aldehyde would have driven any bees still hanging about the comb down to the next level in the hive.