The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2 page)

A profound reservoir of poise, or a pathological deficit of curiosity, Parkins supposed, might explain the near-total lack of interest that Mr. Shane, who gave himself out to be a traveler in milking equipment for the firm of Chedbourne & Jones, Yorkshire, appeared to take in the nature of his interlocutor, Mr. Panicker, who was not only a Malayalee from Kerala, black as a bootheel, but also a high-church Anglican vicar. Politesse or stupidity, perhaps, might also prevent him from remarking on the sullen way in which Reggie Panicker, the vicar's grown son, was gouging a deep hole in the tatted tablecloth with the point of his fish knife, as well as on the presence at the table of a mute nine-year-old boy whose face was like a blank back page from the book of human sorrows. But it was the way in which Mr. Shane paid so little attention to the boy's parrot that made it impossible for Mr. Parkins to accept the new lodger at face value. No one could be immune to the interest that inhered in the parrot, even if, as now, the bird was merely reciting bits and scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of seven. Mr. Parkins, who had, for reasons of his own, long kept the African gray under careful observation, immediately saw in the new lodger a potential rival in his ongoing quest to solve the deepest and most vexing mystery of the remarkable African bird. Clearly, Someone Important had heard about the numbers, and had sent Mr. Shane to hear them for himself.

"Well, here we are." Into the dining room swung Mrs. Panicker, carrying a Spode tureen. She was a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman whose unimaginably wild inspiration of thirty years past, to marry her father's coal-eyed, serious young assistant minister from India, had borne fruit far mealier than the ripe rosy pawpaws that she had, breathing in the scent of Mr. K. T. Panicker's hair oil on a warm summer evening in 1913, permitted herself to anticipate. But she kept an excellent table, one that merited the custom of a far greater number of lodgers than the Panicker household currently enjoyed. The living was a minor one, the black vicar locally unpopular, the parishioners stingy as flints, and the Panicker family, in spite of Mrs. Panicker's thrift and stern providence, uncomfortably poor. It was only Mrs. Panicker's lavishly tended kitchen garden and culinary knack that could make possible a fine cold cucumber and chervil soup such as the one that she now proposed, lifting the lid of the tureen, to Mr. Shane, for whose sudden presence in the house, with two months paid in advance, she was clearly grateful.

"Now, I'm warning you well beforehand, this time, Master Steinman," she said as she ladled pale green cream, flecked with emerald, into the boy's bowl, "it's a
cold
soup and meant to be." She looked at Mr. Shane, frowning, though her eyes held a faint glint of amusement. "Sprayed the whole table with cream soup, last week, did the boy, Mr. Shane," she went on. "Ruined Reggie's best cravat."

"If only that were the most this boy had ruined," Reggie said, from behind his spoonful of cucumber soup. "If only we could leave it at a cravat."

Reggie Panicker was the despair of the Panickers and, like many sons who betray even the most modest aspirations of their parents, a scourge of the neighborhood as well. He was a gambler, a liar, a malcontent, and a sneak. Parkins- showing, it now seemed to him, a certain thickness of wit- had lost a pair of gold cufflinks, a box of pen nibs, twelve shillings, and his good luck charm, a blond five-franc chip from the Casino Royale in Monaco, before catching on to Reggie's thieving ways.

"And how old would young Mr. Steinman be, then?" Mr. Shane said, training the flashing heliograph of his smile on the faraway eyes of the little Jew. "Nine is it? Are you nine, boy?"

As usual, though, the lookouts in the head of Linus Steinman had been left unmanned. The smile went unacknowledged. The boy seemed, in fact, not to have heard the question, though Parkins had long since established that there was nothing wrong with his ears. The sudden clatter of a plate could make him jump. The tolling of the bell in the church tower could fill his great dark eyes with unaccountable tears.

"You won't get answers out of that one," Reggie said, tipping the last of his soup into his mouth. "Dumb as a mallet, is that one."

The boy looked down at his soup. He frowned. He was regarded by most of the residents of the vicarage, and in the neighborhood, as non-Anglophonic and quite possibly stupid. But Parkins had his doubts on both scores.

"Master Steinman came to us from Germany," Mr. Pan-icker said. He was a learned man whose Oxford accent was tinged with a disappointed subcontinental lilt. "He formed part of a small group of children, most of them Jewish, whose emigration to Britain was negotiated by Mr. Wilkes, the vicar of the English Church in Berlin."

Shane nodded, mouth open, eyes blinking slowly, like a golfing man pretending to enjoy for courtesy's sake an impromptu lecture on cell mitosis or irrational numbers. He might never have heard of Germany or Jews or, for that matter, of vicars or children. The air of deep boredom that settled over his features looked entirely natural to them. And yet Mr. Parkins mistrusted it. The parrot, whose name was Bruno, was now reciting from
Der Erlkönig,
softly, even one might have said politely, in its high, halting voice. The bird's delivery, though toneless and a bit rushed, had a childish poignancy not inappropriate to the subject of the poem. And yet still the new lodger had taken no notice of the parrot.

Mr. Shane looked at the boy, who looked down at his soup, dipping the merest tip of his spoon into the thick pale bowlful. As far as Parkins had ever observed-and he was a careful and pointed observer-the boy ate with relish only sweets and puddings.

"Nazis, was it?" said Shane. He gave his head a moderate shake. "Rotten business. Tough luck for the Jews, when you come right down to it." The question of whether or not the boy was going to spit out the bit of soup he had dabbed onto his tongue appeared to interest him far more than had the internment of the Jews. The boy frowned, and knit his thick eyebrows together. But the soup remained safely in his mouth, and at last Mr. Shane turned his attention to polishing off his own portion. Parkins wondered if the dull and unpleasant subject were now to be dropped.

"No place for a child, to be sure," said Shane. "A camp of that sort. Nor, I imagine-" He laid down his spoon and raised his eyes, with a swiftness that startled Mr. Parkins, to the corner of the room where, on top of a heavy iron pole, on a scarred wooden crosspiece, with pages of yesterday's
Express
spread underneath, Bruno the parrot gazed critically back at him. "-for a parrot."

Ah, thought Mr. Parkins.

"I suppose you think a wretched stone hovel in the dullest corner of Sussex is a fine place for an African bird, then," Reggie Panicker said.

Mr. Shane blinked.

"Please excuse my son's rudeness," Mr. Panicker said, with a sigh, laying down his own spoon though his bowl was only half empty. If there had been a time when he reprimanded the steady churlishness of his only child, it predated Mr. Parkins's tenure in the house. "We have all grown very fond of young Linus and his pet, as it happens. And really, Bruno is a most remarkable animal. He recites poetry, as you hear now. He sings songs. He is a most gifted mimic and has already startled my wife a number of times by counterfeiting my own, perhaps overly vehement, manner of sneezing."

"Really?" Mr. Shane said. "Well, Mr. Panicker, I hope you won't mind my saying that between your roses and this young chap with his parrot, I seem to have landed myself in a very interesting household."

He was watching the bird, head cocked to one side in a way that echoed, no doubt unconsciously, the angle from which Bruno habitually preferred to view the world.

"Sings does he?"

"That's right. Principally in German, though from time to time one hears snatches of Gilbert & Sullivan. Chiefly bits of
Iolanthe,
as far as I can tell. Quite startling the first few times."

"But is it all rote-
parroting,
as it were?" Mr. Shane smiled thinly, as if to imply, insincerely Mr. Parkins thought, that he knew his little joke was not amusing. "Or is he capable of actual thought, would you say? I once saw a pig, as a boy, a performing pig, that could find the square root of three-digit numbers."

His gaze, as he said this, flashed briefly and for the first time toward Parkins. This, though it seemed to confirm Mr. Parkins's hunch about the new lodger, also troubled him. As far as anyone in the neighborhood knew, there was no reason to connect him with the subject of digits and numbers. The suspicion that Mr. Shane had been sent by Certain People to observe Bruno firsthand, Mr. Parkins now considered to have been confirmed.

"Numbers," Mr. Panicker said. "Oddly enough, Bruno seems quite fond of them, doesn't he, Mr. Parkins? Always rattling off great chains and lists of them. All in German, naturally. Though I can't say that he appears to do anything with them that I'm aware of."

"No? He keeps me from sleeping," Reggie said. "That's use enough for me. That's
startling
enough for me, all right."

At this point Mrs. Panicker swept back into the dining room carrying the fish course on a pale green platter. For reasons that had never been articulated to Mr. Parkins but which he felt must have a good deal to do with her otherwise unexpressed feelings about her husband and son, she never joined them for dinner. She cleared away the bowls as Mr. Parkins muttered his approval of the soup. There was something desperate and brave about the landlady's good cookery. It was like the quavering voice of a bagpipe, issuing forth from a citadel that was invested on all sides by dervishes and infidels on the morning of the day on which it would finally be sacked.

"Excellent soup!" barked Mr. Shane. "Compliments to the chef!"

Mrs. Panicker flushed deeply, and a smile unlike any that Parkins had ever seen there, tiny and pouting, made a brief appearance on her lips.

Mr. Panicker noticed it too, and frowned.

"Indeed," he said.

"Phew!" said the younger Panicker, fanning away the steam that rose from the platter on which lay a plaice that retained its head and tail. "That fish is off, Mother. It smells like the underside of Brighton Pier."

Without missing a beat-with a last trace of the girlish smile still lingering-Mrs. Panicker reached across and slapped Reggie's face. Her son leapt from his seat, a hand to his blazing cheek, and for a moment he only glared at her. Then his hand shot out toward her throat as if he meant to choke her. Before his fingers could find purchase, however, the new lodger was on his feet and had interposed himself between mother and son. Mr. Shane's hands flew out in front of him and before Parkins quite understood what was happening Reggie Panicker was lying flat on his back on the oval rug. Bright blood sprang from his nose.

He sat up. Blood dripped onto his collar and he dabbed at it with a finger, then pressed the finger against his left nostril. Mr. Shane offered him a hand, and Reggie batted it aside. He got to his feet and snuffled deeply. He stared at Shane, then nodded toward Mrs. Panicker.

"Mother," he said. Then he turned and went out.

"Mother," said the parrot, in his soft voice. Linus Steinman was looking at Bruno with the deep affection that was the only recognizable emotion Parkins had ever seen the boy express. And then, in a clear, fluting, tender voice Parkins had never heard, the bird began to sing.

Wien, Wien, Wien

Sterbende Märchenstadt

It was a lovely contralto and, as it issued jerkily from the bill of the gray animal in the corner, disturbingly human. They listened for a moment, and then Linus Steinman rose from his chair and went to the perch. The bird fell silent, and stepped onto the outstretched forearm that was proffered. The boy turned back to them, and his eyes were filled with tears and with a simple question as well.

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Panicker with a sigh. "You may as well be excused."

3

They found him sitting on the boot bench outside his front door, hatted and caped in spite of the heat, sunburnt hands clasping the head of his blackthorn stick. All ready to go. As if-though it was impossible-he were expecting them. They must have caught him on his doorstep, boots laced, gathering his strength for a late-morning tramp across the Downs.

"Which one are you?" he said to Inspector Bellows. His eye was exceedingly bright. The great beak quivered as if catching scent of them. "Speak up."

"Bellows," said the inspector. "Detective Inspector Michael Bellows. Sorry to bother you, sir. But I am new on the job, down here, learning the ropes, as they say, and I don't at all overrate my capacities."

At this last assertion the inspector's companion, Detective Constable Quint, cleared his throat and politely directed his gaze toward the middle distance.

"Bellows ... I knew your father," the old man suggested. Head tottering on his feeble neck. Cheeks flecked with the blood and plaster of an old man's hasty shave. "Surely? In the West End. Red-haired chap, ginger mustache. Specialized, as I recall, in confidence men. Not without ability I should have said."

"Sandy Bellows," the inspector said. "Grandfather, actually. And how often did I hear him speak highly of you, sir."

Not quite so often, perhaps, the inspector thought, as I heard him curse your name.

The old man nodded, gravely. The inspector's sharp eye detected a fleeting sadness, a flicker of memory that briefly seamed the old man's face.

"I have known a great many policemen," he said. "A great many." He brightened, willfully. "But it is always a pleasure to make the acquaintance of another. And Detective Constable . . .
Quint,
I believe?"

He trained his raptor gaze now on the constable, a dark, brooding potato-nosed fellow. DC Quint was much attached, as he rarely neglected to let it be known, to the prior detective inspector, sadly deceased but a proponent apparently of the old solid methods of policework. Quint tipped a finger to the brim of his hat. Not a talkative fellow, DC Quint.