The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

by Michael Chabon

  When the veil of his bee hat was lowered he generally could hear nothing apart from the breathing and the mum­ble of bees. But he had not troubled with the veil, with the bees so slow and fat, and so he chanced to hear the stifled cry behind him. It was more of a gasp than a cry, really, brief and disappointed. At first he thought it must be the Satter-lee girl but when he turned he saw the boy standing by the garden shed, sucking on the back of his hand. He was wear­ing the same short pants and clean, pressed shirt as on the day of their first encounter, but standing there without the parrot he struck the old man as looking glaringly bereft.

  The old man grinned. "Hurts, don't it?"

  The boy nodded slowly, too surprised or in too much pain to feign lack of understanding. The old man ambled over to him, shaking his head.

  "What a singularly unlucky boy you are," he said. "Let's have a look."

  He took hold of the boy's hand. On the back, just below the wrist, a puffy nipple of flesh, tipped with the black fila­ment of the barb. The old man took a matchbox from the zip pocket of his bee suit, poked out the tray of matches. Cupping the tray in his left hand, with his right he flattened the outer sleeve of the matchbox. Then, using an edge of the flattened bit of cardboard, he scraped the sting out of the boy's hand. The boy wept freely during this procedure.

  "Mustn't yank them out," he told the boy with a sharp­ness he did not entirely intend. He was aware of the existence of a vocabulary for the consolation of sorrowing children, but it was one he had never troubled to learn. Boys had served him well over the years-but that was in another cen­tury!-extending the reach of his eyes and ears, passing in­visibly into dark lanes and courtyards where his own presence would have drawn undue attention, slipping over transoms, through the back doors of hostile alehouses, in and out of the stable yards of crooked horse trainers. And in his own lofty jocular way he had spoken to and even, carelessly, cared for those boys. But they were a different species of boy entirely, ragged, rude, pinched and avid, holes in their shoes, holes for eyes, boys disciplined by hunger and poverty to dis­play the narrowest possible spectrum of human emotion. They would have sooner drunk lye than allowed themselves to be seen to shed a tear. "Only spreads the venom."

  The barb tumbled free; the boy took back his hand and studied the pink histamine swell. Then he returned his hand to the solace of his mouth. There was something about the sight of the mute boy sucking on the back of his hand that enraged the old man. He allowed a desire to slap the boy's cheek thrill him for a moment.

  "Wait a moment," he said. "Not like that." Fumbling, rage and arthritis crippling his fingers, he tried to reassemble the components of the matchbox. The little drawer tipped and scattered matches on the ground. The old man swore. Then, at once with deliberateness and out of some wild impulse he swore a second time, vilely, in German. The agreeably rancid syllables escaped his lips with an audible smack of pleasure.

  The boy unkissed the fiery back of his hand. A wicked look animated the wide somber gaze, a parrot gleam of hard amusement that had from time to time, in that vanished nineteenth century, flared in the hard hollow eyes of those ragged urchin irregulars. The boy unburdened the old man of the sundered halves of matchbox, knelt down, quickly gathered up the strewn matchsticks, and tucked them neatly into their berth. He passed the box back to the old man, who restored it to the zip pocket of his bee suit and took out the pouch of shag. He removed a pinch, showering rank confetti on the ground. Out came his ogre tongue, pointed and fis­sured. A dab of his dragon saliva. Then he held out his hand to the boy.

  "Here," the old man said as gently as he could manage. He had a feeling that it was none too gently. The boy un­derstood. He passed his wounded hand to the old man, his face at once grave and expectant, as if they were about to seal some boyish pact in pinpricks of blood or palms anointed with sacrosanct saliva. The old man laid the moist gob of tobacco against the welt. He took the boy's other hand and pressed the palm against the bee sting and the knot of tobacco. "Like this. Hold it there."

  The boy obeyed while the old man labored to remove the fuming board from the uppermost super. He hoped he had not left it to sit too long; prolonged exposure to the fumes could queer the flavor of the honey. Setting the board to one side he grasped the ends of the honey-laden super and staggered a few steps toward the extracting porch, working feverishly, and with a desperation that saddened him, not to appear to be staggering. His effort failed to fool the boy. There was a squeak of rubber soles in the grass and then the boy was there, beside him, taking hold of one end of the rectangular frame of the super with the injured hand-the welt appeared already to have begun to subside.

  Together they made their way to the porch. The boy's eyes were not on the old man but on the air around him, darting, wary, fearing a further attack. As the old man strug­gled to get the screened door open the weight of the frame shifted inexorably onto the boy. He bore it. They lumbered into the porch, where the centrifuge, with its great, toothed hand crank, waited, bearing the patient reproachful air of all idle farm machinery. Even open as it was, a deep, vinegar gloom hung about the porch from bygone years of harvest. They laid the tray with its weirdly radiant cargo of wax on a clean bedsheet and started back toward the hives.

  Laboring alone-his way, preferred and inevitable, for the past thirty years-it might have taken him until well past dark to finish the job of removing the supers one by one from the six hives, two supers per hive; cutting out the frames of comb; slicing off the wax caps with the heated blade of a bread knife; loading dripping sections of cut comb into the extractor and working the crank until all the honey that could be persuaded to abandon the combs had been drained off, by various operations of centrifugal force and gravity, into the settling jars; ensuring that the porch was screened and sealed against counterraids; and returning the ravaged supers to the hives. With the help of Linus Steinman, increasingly competent as the day wore on, intel­ligent and handy and blessedly, staunchly, wonderfully free of conversation, he completed the work just after four in the afternoon. They stood together in the screened porch, in the dense, foul reek-like the atmosphere of a planet of fer­mentation and decay, like the planet Venus in all its pur­ported rank inhospitable riot-of honey. At the stilling of the centrifuge the porch, the farmstead, this vale in the lee of a hillside, the immense bowl of tedious green country around them seemed to fill with a thick and gummy mass of silence.

  All at once the comfort of their mutual labor abandoned them. They regarded each other.

  The boy had something he wanted to say. He felt his pockets, fingers sticking with a whispery rasp to the fabric of short trousers, and shirt. His bit of pencil turned up in the seat pocket of his short trousers, but as the search for the pad continued without issue a crease appeared in the boy's domed brow. He patted himself up and down until fila­ments of honey floss formed between his fingertips and pockets, coating him in a gossamer down. The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips. Doubtless the pad, in the continued absence of Bruno, was all that re­mained to him in the way of a companion to his thoughts.

  "Perhaps you dropped it by the hives," the old man sug­gested, and as he said the words he heard both the note of genuine comfort that he had, at last, managed to work into them; and the utter adult hollowness of the hope that they extended.

  Duly they tramped out across the hiveyard where the old man, his joints ablaze, his muscles quivering, managed to get his clattering remains down onto the ground. With his accustomed canine aplomb he combed the yard for the cheap pasteboard-and-pulp remnant of the lost boy's voice. From the low angle of his search the six hives loomed white and solemn in the late sunlight as a street of temples in Luc-know or Hong Kong. While he crawled on hands and knees the possibility of his dying thus recurred to him, and he found to his pleasure that no shadow of indignity darkened the prospect. Long life wore away everything that was not essential. Some old men finished their lives as l
ittle more than the sum total of their memories, others as nothing but a pair of grasping pincers, or a set of bitter axioms proven. It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.

  At last, however, he was forced to concede that there was nothing to be found. When he rose unsteadily to his feet, the throbbing of his joints was like a universal sentiment of loss, the action on his bones of certain things' implacable resis­tance, once lost, to ever being found. Heavily, as if fetching it from far across the North Sea, the boy produced a sigh. The old man stood, shrugging. With the consciousness of failure, a gray shadow seemed to steal over his senses as if, steady as a cloud, a great obstructing satellite were scudding across the face of the sun. Meaning drained from the world like light fleeing the operation of an eclipse. The vast body of experi­ence and lore, of corollaries and observed results, of which he felt himself the master, was at a stroke rendered useless. The world around him was a page of alien text. A row of white cubes from which there escaped a mysterious drone of lamentation. A boy in a glowing miasma of threads, his star­ing face flat and edged with shadow as if cut from paper and pasted against the sky. A breeze drawing rippling portraits of emptiness in the pale green tips of the grass.

  The old man brought a fist to his lips and pressed it there, fighting down a hot spike of nausea. His attempt to reassure himself with the dim recollection that such eclipses had hap­pened before was arrested by the counter-recollection that they were coming more frequently now.

  Linus Steinman smiled. From some unplumbed pocket, or lining the boy had produced a scrap of card. The occlud­ing moon rolled on; the world was dazzled once more with sense and light and the marvelous vanity of meaning. The old man's eyes filmed with shameful tears as, relieved, he watched the boy scribble a brief query on the bit of paper he had found. He came across the grass and, a question in his eyes, handed the old man the torn scrap of ecru laid.

  "Leg ov red," the old man read. He felt strongly that he ought to understand this communication but the sense of it lay just beyond his grasp. Perhaps his breaking-down brain had failed, this time, to make a full recovery from its recent lapse. An invocation, perhaps, illiterate and broken, of the pink-tinged talons of the vanished African gray? Or-

  The scrap slipped from the old man's fingers and spun fluttering to the ground. The old man stooped, grunting, to retrieve it, and when he picked it up again found on the re­verse of the scrap two words and a numeral, written not in the boy's crooked graphite scratch but in the bold hand of an adult, in black ink with a narrow nib. It was the address, in Club Row, of Mr. Jos. Black, Dealer in Rare and Exotic Birds.

  "Where did you get this paper?" the old man said.

  The boy took back the card and, under the address, scrawled the single word: BLAK.

  "He was here? You spoke to him?"

  The boy nodded.

  "I see," the old man said. "I see that I must go up to London."

  9

  Mr. Panicker nearly ran him down. In fine weather, and driven by a man as sober as the tenor of his profession de­manded, the Panicker vehicle, small, Bel­gian, ancient, ill-used by the son of its current owner and retaining few of its original constituent parts, was difficult to govern. Its tiny windscreen and broken left headlamp lent it a squinting, groping aspect, like that of a drowning sinner seeking an allegorical lifeline. Its steering mechanism, as was perhaps fitting, relied to a large degree on the steady ap­plication of prayer. Its brakes, though it was blasphemy to say, may have lain beyond the help even of divine interces­sion. On the whole in its unfitness, shabbiness, and supreme air of steady and irremediable poverty it neatly symbolized, in his own personal view, all that was germane to the life of the man who-far from professionally sober and caught up in a gust of inward turbulence nearly as profound as that which on this cold, wet, blustery, thoroughly English sum­mer morning buffeted the sad tan Imperia from one side to the other of the London road-found himself, his foot pumping madly at the hopeless brake pedal, the single wiper smearing and revising its translucent arc of murk across the windscreen, on the brink of committing vehicular manslaughter.

  At first, seeing nothing but a flapping shadow, a tum­bling sheet of oilcloth blown from on top of some farmer's woodpile, empty and uninhabited, he prepared to plunge straight through it and trust in the ironic fortune that had ever been his to fathom. Then, just as the furling blanket of his destiny was about to swallow him, the sheet resolved it­self into a cloak and claws, a great bat of brown tweed flap­ping toward him. It was a man, the old man, the mad old beekeeper, lurching into the road with his long pale face, arms awhirl. A huge frantic hawk moth fluttering into his path. Mr. Panicker wrenched the wheel to the left. The open bottle, purloined from his wretched son, that until now had been the sole companion of his turmoil flew from its perch on the seat beside him and smacked against the glove com­partment, scattering brandy as it swung through the air like an aspergillum. With a palpable sense of freedom, as if at last it had attained the state to which, throughout its meager career of puttering, shivering, creeping, and stalling, it had long aspired, the Imperia described a series of broad, bal­letic loops across the London road, each linked, in a circular pattern, to the last, leaving a child's drawing of a daisy half drawn in streaks on the slick black macadam. It was at this point that Mr. Panicker's relations with his deity once again demonstrated their long-standing sardonic trend. The car abandoned or perhaps lost interest in its escapade and came to a juddering stop some twenty feet farther along the road than it had begun, its bonnet directed faithfully toward London, engine rumbling, lone headlamp peering through the falling rain, as if it had received a scolding for its antics and was now prepared to continue on its humble way. His process of thought, hitherto a chaotic combustion fueled by twin reservoirs of unaccustomed bibulousness and a kind of jolly rage, also appeared to have come juddering to a halt. Where was he going, what was he doing? Had he truly, at long last, escaped? Could one simply roll one's trousers in a grip and walk out?

  The passenger door flew open. With a howl of wind and trailing a retinue of raindrops the old man billowed into the car. He pulled the door shut behind him and shook himself in his Inverness like a lean dank dog.

  "Thanks," he said curtly. He turned his horrible bright gaze on his rescuer, on the upended bottle of brandy, on the torn seat-leather and exposed wires and peeling dashboard, on the very state, or so it seemed to Mr. Panicker, of his sod­den and astonished soul. His long flared nostrils felt out each scattered fleck of brandy in the air. "Good morning to you."

  Mr. Panicker understood that he was expected now to engage the forward gear and proceed to London, conveying thither, as if they had prearranged it, his new passenger and his smell of wet wool and tobacco. Yet he could not seem to bring himself to do so. So profound had his unconscious identification with the 1927 Imperia become that he felt now as if this large, damp old man had intruded directly into the glum sanctity of his own rattletrap skull.

  The engine as if with a sigh settled into a patient idle. His passenger seemed to interpret Mr. Panicker's immobil­ity and silence as a request for explanation, which, in a man­ner of speaking, Mr. Panicker supposed, it was.

  "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, a
nd 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.