The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

'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, and 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.

'Yes?'

He decided-the idea appeared full and lustrous in his imagination as if tipped in by an artful hand-to tell the old man that he was on his way to London to attend a synod, entirely fictitious, of the Anglican clergy of southeastern England. This would account for the grip on the rear bench, beside the cans of precious petrol, packed for a journey of some two or three days. Yes, a synod at Church House. He would be staying at the Crampton, with its more than ade­quate restaurant. There was to be a series of thoughtful dis­cussions, in the morning, of questions of liturgy, followed by lunch, and then in the afternoon a series of more practi­cal seminars devoted to preparing the ministry to enter the postwar period. The Right Reverend Stackhouse-Hall, Archdeacon of Bromley, would address, with his usual learned good humor, the unexpected stresses that would naturally present themselves to families as they welcomed soldier fathers and husbands home. As Mr. Panicker con­tinued to burnish and amplify his excuse, its appeal to him increased, and he found himself strangely cheered by its prospect.

'I perceive that I have intruded on you in a difficult time, Mr. Panicker,' the old man said.

With a wistful gesture Mr. Panicker swept the confer­ence hall, hotel, restaurant, a set of matchstick towers, from the tabletop of his fancy. He was a faithless middle-aged minister, drunk and in flight from the ruin of his life.

'Oh, no, I . . .' Mr. Panicker began, but then found that he was unable to continue, his throat constricted and