The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

and towered over by two high red trams. Rows of staring faces gazing down at them with inquisitorial indifference. Then the trams split off east and west respectively and, as if a pair of water gates had been lifted, the flood of inner London rushed over them. They had bombed it; they had burned it; but they had not killed it, and now it was sending forth growths and tendrils of some strange new life. To Mr. Pan-icker the thing that chiefly struck him, and had done over the year leading up to 6 June, was the startling American-ness of London: American airmen and sailors, officers, and foot soldiers, American military vehicles in the streets, American films in the cinemas, and an atmosphere of loud, raffish swagger, a smell of hair tonic, a cacophony of sprung vowels that might, as Mr. Panicker was prepared to concede, be entirely the product of his own imagination but which nevertheless animated the city for him in a way that he found at once appalling and irresistible, an air of riotous, brutal good humor, as if the invasion of Europe itself, now proceeding in bloody stages across northern France, were only the inevitable exploding forth of a buildup of jazzy slang and the uncontainable urge to buck and wing.

'That's new,' the old man said, over and over, crooking a stiff finger toward some office block or housing estate. 'That was not here.' And then as they passed the somber hulk, of­ten still festooned with streamers of gray smoke, of yet an­other bombed-out block of flats, simply, 'Good God.'

His voice, as they plunged deeper into the changes wrought in London by construction crews and German bombs since that Sunday afternoon in 1921, fell to a harsh, appalled whisper. Mr. Panicker imagined-he had a power­fully sermonizing imagination-that the old man must have been experiencing (rather belatedly, in the vicar's opinion) a kind of foretaste or demonstration of the nature of death it­self. After his long absence from the city over which he had once exercised his quiet brand of domination, he had seemed to expect that it, like the world when we depart it, would stop changing, would somehow cease to exist. After us, the Blitz! And now here he was confronted by not simply the contin­ued existence of the city but, amid the smoking piles of brick and jagged windowpanes, by the irrepressible, inhuman force of its expansion.

'Ashes,' the old man said wonderingly as they passed a huge new area of emergency housing built by Mr. Churchill, like a vast tilled allotment sprouting row upon row of little tin houses. 'I had thought to see nothing but smoke and ashes.'

They drove along the grimy arches of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard and left the car by Arnold Circus, in a street that was greatly the worse for having borne the brunt of a German SC, beside a neat pile of paving stones salvaged from the blast and still awaiting redeployment. Then they walked around the corner into Club Row. Mr. Panicker was practiced and even authoritative in his offering of a steadying arm to the eld­erly, but the old man refused his every attempt, having de­clined even to let the vicar help him out of the cramped interior of the car. As soon as he found himself on the ground, so to speak-as soon as the hunt commenced, as Mr. Panicker could not help putting it, somewhat romantically, to him­self-he seemed to shake off the phobic bewilderment of the voyage. He held his chin high and gripped the head of his stick as if very soon he intended to begin swinging it toward the de­serving skulls of ruffians. As they turned into Club Row, in fact, Mr. Panicker found himself hard-pressed to keep up with the long crooked scarecrow stride of the old man.

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.'