Michael Chabon: The Final Solution

‘Shane was approached and struck, with considerable force, from behind; you have that much right. Tell me, Inspector, how you square that with your idea that the deceased came upon and surprised young Mr Panicker in the act of stealing the parrot?’

Bellows started to speak, then left off with a short, weary sigh, and shook his head. DC Quint tugged his moustache down now, in an attempt to conceal the smile that had formed on his lips.

‘The pattern and frequency of footprints indicates,’ the old man continued, ‘that at the moment the blow fell Mr Shane was moving in some haste, and carrying something in his left hand, something rather heavy, I should wager. Since your men found his valise and all of his personal effects by the garden door, as if waiting to be transferred to the boot of the car, and since the birdcage is nowhere to be found, I think it reasonable to infer that Shane was fleeing, when he was murdered, with the birdcage. Presumably the bird was in it, though I think a thorough search of neighbourhood trees ought to be made, and soon.’

The young inspector turned to DC Quint and nodded once. DC Quint let go of his moustache. He looked aghast.

‘You can’t mean, sir, with all due respect, that you want me to waste valuable time staring up into trees looking for a—’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry, Detective Constable,’ the old man said, with a wink. He did not care to divulge his hypothesis – naturally only one of several under consideration – that Bruno the African grey parrot might be clever enough to have engineered an escape from his captor. Men, policemen in particular, tended to discount the capacity of animals to enact, often with considerable panache, the foulest of crimes and the most daring stunts. ‘You can’t miss the tail.’

Constable Quint seemed unable for a moment to gain control of the musculature of his jaw. Then he turned and stomped off down the lane, toward the trellised doorway that led into the garden of the vicarage.

‘As for you.’ The old man turned to the inspector. ‘You must seek to inform yourself about our victim. I will want to see the body, of course. I suspect we may discover—’

A woman screamed, grandly at first, almost one would have said with a hint of melody. Then her cry disintegrated into a series of little gasping barks:

Oh oh oh oh oh –

The inspector took off at a run, leaving the old man to follow scraping and hobbling along behind. When he came into the garden he saw a number of familiar objects and entities set about on an expanse of green as if arranged to a desired effect or inferable purpose, like counters or chessmen in some kingly recreation. Regarding them the old man experienced a moment of vertiginous horror during which he could neither reckon their number nor recall their names or purposes. He felt – with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia – the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap. He feared then that he was going to be sick, and raised the head of his stick to his mouth. It was cold against his lips. The horror seemed to subside at once; consciousness rallied itself around the brutal taste of metal, and all at once he found himself looking, with inexpressible relief, merely at the two policemen, Bellows and Quint; at Mr and Mrs Panicker, standing on either side of a bird bath; at a handsome Jew in a grey suit; a sundial; a wooden chair; a hawthorn bush in lavish flower. They were all gazing upward to the peak of the vicarage’s thatched roof at the remaining token in the game.

‘Young man, you will come down from there at once!’

The voice was that of Mr Panicker – who was rather more intelligent than the average country parson, in the old man’s view, and rather less competent to minister to the souls of his parishioners. He backed a step or two away from the house as if to find a better spot from which to fix the boy on the roof of the house with a baleful stare. But the vicar’s eyes were far too large and sorrowful, the old man thought, ever to do the trick.

‘Sonny boy,’ Constable Quint called up. ‘You’re going to break your neck!’

The boy stood, upright, hands dangling by his sides, feet together, teetering on the fulcrum of his heels. He looked neither distressed nor playful, merely gazed down at his shoes or at the ground far below him. The old man wondered if he could have gone up there to search for his parrot. Perhaps in the past the bird had been known to take refuge on housetops.

‘Fetch a ladder,’ the inspector said.

The boy slipped, and went sliding on his bottom down the long thatch slope of the roof toward the edge. Mrs Panicker let out another scream. At the last moment the boy gripped two fistfuls of thatch and held on to them. His progress was arrested with a jerk, and then the handfuls ripped free of the roof and he sailed out into the void and plummeted to earth, landing on top of the good-looking young Jewish man, a Londoner by the cut of his suit, with a startling crunch like a barrel shattering against rocks. After a dazed moment the boy stood up, and shook his hands as if they stung him. Then he offered one to the man on his belly on the ground.

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