The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

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.

The man was standing there now, shoeless, shirtless, with just such a torn blue sheet of claw marks in his hand, muttering. He had come in not long before, breathing heav­ily from his climb up the steps of the high room, and ex­uding powerfully his characteristic smell of murdered and boiled bird.

'The routing prefix,' he kept saying to himself, bitterly, in the language of the boy and his family. This man could also speak in the language of Poor Reggie and his family, and once there had been a visitor-their single visitor-with whom the madman had easily conversed in the language of Wierzbicka, whose memory Bruno would always reverence, because it was Wierzbicka the sad-voiced little tailor who had sold Bruno to the boy's family, in a transfer that Bruno had experienced, without quite knowing it at the time but thereafter