The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (10 page)

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 market 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.

"Nobody home," Mr. Panicker said, pressing his forehead against the morning-cool steel of the grate. "We ought not to have come on a Monday."

The old man raised his stick and struck the grate, again and again, with gleeful savagery, eyes alight at the clang and the ringing of steel. When he stopped, the shadowy population of the shop had been thrown or had thrown themselves into pandemonium. The old man stood with his stick held high, chest heaving, a fleck of spittle on his cheek. The clamor of the rage resounded and died. The light went from his eyes.

"A Monday," said the old man sadly. "I ought to have foreseen this."

"Perhaps you might have rung in advance," Mr. Pan-icker said. "Made an appointment with this Black chap."

"No doubt," the old man said. He lowered his stick to the pavement and then, sagging, leaned heavily upon it. "In my haste I ..." He wiped at his cheek with the back of a hand. "Such practical considerations seem to lie beyond my . . ." He lurched forward, and Mr. Panicker caught his arm, and this time the old man failed to shrug him off. His eyes stared as if blindly at the unanswering face of the shop, his face inhabited only by a hint of elderly alarm.

"There there," Mr. Panicker murmured, seeking to ignore and conceal the brutality of his own disappointment at the sudden failure of their quest. He had begun the day sleepless, drunk, and contemplating the bombed-out house of his life as a man. His vacant marriage, his useless son, the eclipse of his professional ambitions, these were the shattered windows, the scorched wallpaper, and twisted fau-teuils of that wreckage; and lying over all of it like a snowfall of ash, hanging in the air like an ineradicable pall of smoke, layer after charred layer reaching all the way down to bedrock, was the knowledge of his own godless-ness, of his doubt and unbelief and the distance of his own heart from that of Christ the Lord. A minor Blitz, of no concern to anyone; the falling bomb-like all bombs a chance and mindless thing-the arrival and murder of Mr. Richard Shane. At the moment of impact the whole rotten structure had collapsed and it was as if, as Mr. Panicker had seen described in newspaper accounts of the Blitz, all of the hundreds of rats dwelling in the walls of the edifice were exposed, suspended and surprised in their customary leering attitudes, before their bodies came plopping to earth in a sickening gray shower of rat. And yet, as he had also read, from time to time such explosions had been known to discover the glint of odd and surprising treasure. Rare things, delicate things that, unknown, unobserved, had been there all along. This morning on the London road, when the old man had swept into the car in his mantle of wool and rain, it was as if the boy, Linus Steinman, bereft and friendless, had been thus revealed, standing tiny and alone in the midst of the heap of gray ash, eyes trained longingly on the sky. Mr. Panicker was not so hopeful or so foolish as to imagine that finding a refugee boy's missing parrot would restore the meaning and purpose to his life. But he had been willing to settle for so very much less.

"Perhaps we might return another day. Tomorrow. We could put up in a hotel tonight. There's a very decent little place I know."

Abruptly Mr. Panicker's earlier fantasy of the Crampton Hotel, with its really excellent breakfast, sprung, vividly and temptingly, back to life. Only now, in the place of seminars and presentations that even in fancy could only be imagined as repetitious and interminably dull there was, in the company of this mad old beekeeper, the unlikely possibility, all the more splendid for its unlikeliness, of adventure. The man seemed, in a way that Mr. Panicker would have been hard-pressed to explain or instance, not only to generate or to invite such a possibility but, somehow, implicitly to require a confederate in its undertaking. It was this possibility, even more than the sense of altruistic mission and opportunity for redemption represented by retrieval of a boy's lost bird, that Mr. Panicker now found himself battling to sustain. For what, in the end, had drawn him, a gangly barefoot Malayalee country boy, into the life of a Minister of the Church of England? Naturally it had been a question-and so, to the point of tedium and nonsense, had he incessantly repeated over the past forty years-of one's answering a call. Only now, however, did it occur to him that the call was neither, as he had once supposed, divine or mystical in origin nor, as he had later bitterly concluded, a kind of emotional
ignis fatuus.
How many rude and shoeless young men, he wondered, set off in search of adventure, believing with all their hearts that they were answering a summons from God?

"Come!" Mr. Panicker said. "Wait here. I will fetch the car. We'll take a pair of rooms at the Crampton and arrange to meet this Black-we'll lay a very trap for him!"

The old man nodded, slowly, his expression abstract, his eyes dull, barely registering the words. In the aftermath of his moment of confusion and alarm a deep melancholy seemed to have come over him. It was in stark contrast to the sense of readiness, of irrepressible fitness to continue the game, that now animated Mr. Panicker. He ran all the way to Boundary Street, leapt into the Imperia, and hurried back to retrieve his co-adventurer. As he neared Black's shop the old man did not move. He stood hunched over, balanced on his stick, in precisely the same way in which Mr. Panicker had left him. Mr. Panicker pulled up alongside the curb and set the hand brake. The old man stood, gazing down at his great boots. After a moment Mr. Panicker sounded the horn, one two. The old man raised his head, slowly, and peered toward the front passenger window of the car as if he had no idea whom he might find within. Just before Mr. Panicker leaned over to roll the window down, however, the old man's face suddenly altered. He arched an eyebrow, and his eyes narrowed slyly, and a long thin smile twisted one of the corners of his mouth.

"No, you fool!" he cried, as Mr. Panicker lowered the window. "Roll it back up!"

Mr. Panicker complied, and as he did so the grin on the old man's face widened and spread very wonderfully, and he said something that Mr. Panicker failed to understand. He studied the window glass for a full minute-he might, it seemed to Mr. Panicker, have been examining his own reflection-smiling and saying the mysterious words to himself. Even when, having got into the car alongside Mr. Pan-icker, he repeated the words aloud, the minister found himself at a loss.

"Leg ov red!" the old man repeated inanely. "As is ever the case, ha ha, a matter of
reflection! Leg
ov red!"

"I-I'm sorry, sir. I fail to understand-"

"Quickly! What features characterize the Steinman boy's scratchings in that notebook of his?"

"Well, he has the strange trait, of course, of reversing his words. Mirror writing. Apparently, according to the doctors, it's related in some way to his inability to speak. Some sort of trauma, no doubt. And then I have noticed that he is an execrable speller."

"Yes! And when, in what I now perceive to have been a pathetic plea for assistance, he scrawled the words leg ov red' on a bit of paper, he was neatly exhibiting both traits."

"Leg ov red," Mr. Panicker tried, projecting and reversing the letters against an interior screen. "Der . . . Vog . . . el." Ah. "Der Vogel. He was asking after the bird. Of course."

"Yes. And now, tell me what he was saying on the
other
side of the scrap."

"Scrap?"

The old man thrust a bit of writing paper into his hands.

"This scrap. On which was written, by an adult man,

young, with a Continental hand, the address of the very establishment before which we now sit. Dropped, or so I mistakenly concluded, by the proprietor himself."

"Blak," Mr. Panicker read. And then, reverse-projecting it: "Good God."

10

He had seen madmen: the man who smelled of boiled bird-flesh was going mad. He knew the smell of bird-flesh, for they ate it. They ate anything. The knowledge that the men of his home forests would burn and eat with relish the flesh of his own kind was a stark feature of his ancestral lore. In the first days of his captivity the contemplation of their bloody diet and the likelihood that he was being kept by them against the satiation of some future hunger so troubled and revolted him that he had fallen silent and chewed a bald place in the feathers of his breast. By now he was long accustomed to the horror of their appetities, and he had lost the fear of being eaten; insofar as he had observed them, these men, pale creatures, though they devoured birds in cruel abundance and variety, arbitrarily exempted his kind from slaughter. The bird they ate most often was the kurcze Hahne poulet chicken kip and it was this odor, of a chicken slaughtered and boiled in water with carrots and onions, that, for some reason, the man who was going mad exuded, even though he never appeared to eat anything more than toast and tinned sardines.

In the Dutchman's house, by the harbor, on the island of his hatching, when he still feared the fires and teeth of these terrible apes with their strange, beguiling songs, he had gone, he supposed, slightly mad himself. As he watched the boiled-chicken man, Kalb, stalk back and forth across the room, hour after hour, the pelt of his head disordered, the pelt of his face grown thick, singing softly to himself, the parrot would creep, in unwilling sympathy, from one end to the other of his perch, and feel a certain comfort in so doing, and recall how, in those first fearful months with the Dutchman, he had passed hours making the same short journey, back and forth, silently chewing on his own plumage until he bled.

He had seen madmen. The Dutchman had gone mad, in fact; had killed with the knotted-up bones of his hands the girl who shared his bed, then drunk his own death in a glass of whisky spoilt by the worst-smelling substance that Bruno had yet encountered in his long life among men and their remarkable vocabulary of stenches. Whisky had a stench of its own, but it was one that Bruno during the later time of his tenure with
le Colonel
had learned to appreciate. (It had been ages now since anyone had offered whisky to Bruno. The boy and his family never drank it at all, and though he had often detected its acrid flavor on the breath and clothing of Poor Reggie, he had never actually seen Poor Reggie with a glass or bottle of the stuff in his hand.)
Le Colonel
had his bouts of madness, too, silent, lasting glooms into which he sank so far that his songlessness Bruno experienced as a kind of sorrow, though it was nothing like the sorrow that he felt now, having lost his boy, Linus, who sang in secret, to Bruno alone.

It was one of Linus's old songs, the train song, that was driving Kalb mad, in a way Bruno did not entirely understand but that he appreciated and, it must be admitted, even encouraged. Kalb would come to stand before Bruno on his perch, with a sheet of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other, and beg him to sing the train song, the song of the long rolling cars. The room was filled with sheets of paper that the man had covered with claw marks, marks that Bruno understood to represent, in a manner whose principles he grasped but had never learned to master, the elements, simple and infectious, of the train song. Sometimes when the man left the room they shared, he would return with a small blue bundle of folded paper, which he tore open as if it were food and voided hungrily of its contents. Invariably and to Bruno's bemused annoyance these contents turned out to be yet another sheet of little marks. And then the pleas and threats would begin again.