Michael Chabon: The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

"I can offer you a cup of tea," he said, though in fact he was not entirely certain that he could. "I believe my supply dates from the early nineteen thirties. I don't know, Colonel, whether tea leaves turn bitter with time or lose their flavor entirely but I feel reasonably certain that mine have met their fate. Am I right? It is Colonel?"

"Threadneedle."

"Colonel Threadneedle. Cavalryman?"

"Mounted infantry. Lennox Highlanders."

"Ah. Whisky, then."

The proposal was offered and accepted in the spirit of hostile good humor that had so far characterized his dealings with the intelligence officer, but at once he was racked with anxiety as to whether the whisky he had suggested in such a cavalier fashion had been drunk years before, in other lodgings, had perhaps evaporated or turned to a tarry paste, was not whisky to begin with, had ever existed at all. Five minutes' speleology in the nether regions of the corner cabinet produced a bottle of Glenmorangie, buried in a layer of dust that might have repelled a Schliemann. He stood, trembling with relief, and brushed the sweat from his brow with the back of a cardiganned arm. As a young man, to be warned off from pursuing an investigation had been a positive development, a landmark on the road to solution, and more than this, a thrill.

"Found it!" he cried.

He spilled a generous amount into a reasonably clean glass and handed it to the man from London, then lowered himself into his armchair. The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth like the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woolen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.

"This country," the colonel began. "Too quick to forgive its enemies and too hasty to forget its old friends." He took a deep whiff of the two inches of scotch in his glass, as if to scour his nostrils, then drained half. He grunted, in a way that was perhaps involuntary, and gave a wistful sigh of contentment: the passing years were, in every other respect, so cruel. "That at least is my view."

"I hope that I was of some little service, here and there, over the years."

"It was felt," the colonel began, "that you were entitled to an explanation."

"That's very kind."

"The boy is the son of a Dr. Julius Steinman, Berlin physician. Name means nothing to me, but in psychiatric circles…" He made a face to indicate his judgment of psychiatrists and their opinions. The old man appreciated but did not share the prejudice; as doctors, no doubt, psychiatrists left something to be desired, but they often made fine detectives. "Apparently the man had some success treating certain forms of sleep disorders. God knows how. Drugs, I'd wager. At any rate, the boy and his parents were spared deportation in 1938. Taken off the train at the last moment, I gather."

"Someone having nightmares," the old man said.

"Shouldn't wonder."

"Someone involved with codes and ciphers."

" 'Involved' with something very secret, at any rate." He gazed fondly at the last inch of whisky in his glass, then bade it farewell. "Held on to his personal Jew doctor for as long as he could. Keeping the bad dreams at bay. Quartered with him in some kind of secret facility or camp. The whole family. Wife, boy, parrot."

"Where the parrot, with all the stealth and craft his breed is known for, proceeded to commit to memory the cipher keys for the Kriegsmarine."

The man from London appreciated the sarcasm slightly less, perhaps, than he had the scotch.

"They were taught to him, naturally," he said. "That's the theory, at any rate. This Parkins fellow has been sitting on it for months, apparently. As soon as we learned of it-"

"You tried to get Reggie Panicker to steal it for you, and sell it to this Mr. Black, who, I suppose, is in your employ."

"Not to my knowledge," the man from London said, and in his tone was the polite suggestion that the ambit of this knowledge well sufficed any purpose of the old man's. "And you're wrong about the Panicker lad. We had nothing to do with that."

"And you don't care who killed your Mr. Shane."

"Oh, we care. Yes, indeed. Shane was a fine man. A skilled operative. His death is most disturbing, not least for its clear implication that someone was sent to retrieve this bird." He did not seem to feel it necessary to suggest who this someone might have been sent by. "He may be lying low in the surrounding countryside. He may be a sleeper, someone who's been here living and working in the village since long before the war began. Or he may be halfway across the North Sea at this moment, on his way home."

"Or he may be in his study in the vicarage, hard at work on a sermon for this Sunday. A sermon whose text is taken from the second chapter of Hosea, verses one through three."

"Perhaps," the man from London said with a dry cough that he seemed to intend to serve as proxy for an actual laugh. "Your young friend the inspector is onto the father now."

"Yes, he would be."

"But that seems unlikely. Chap grows roses, doesn't he?"

"A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand-"

"Yes, well." The colonel peered into the empty glass of whisky, cheeks coloring as if with chagrin. "It's just that, given the opportunity, we would do the same thing, wouldn't we?" Some inward slackening of the cords seemed to have taken place in the colonel, but the old man doubted that the fault lay in a dusty glass of scotch. He had known the flower of British intelligence, from the days of the Great Game through the first echoes of the guns of Mons. In the end their trade boiled down to purest mirror work: inversions and reflections, echoes. And there was always something dispiriting about the things one saw in a looking glass. "If they had a parrot stuffed to the wingtips with our naval cipher, we would certainly make every effort to get it back." The colonel looked up at the old man with a smile that mocked himself and the ministry that employed him. "Or see it roasted on a spit."

He rose from the very hard chair with a cracking of the timbers of his soldierly frame. Then with a last longing look at the bottle of scotch, he went to the door.

"This is a war we are trying extremely hard not to lose," he said. "A learned parrot would be far from the most preposterous thing for it to hinge upon."

"I have promised to find Bruno," the old man said. "And so I shall."

"Should you manage the trick," the colonel said. A long shaft of the summer afternoon reached into the house as he opened the door. The old man could hear the chant of the bees in their cities. The light itself was the color of honey. In the dooryard the driver awoke from his drowse, and the engine of the saloon car rumbled to life. "Thanks of a grateful nation and so forth."

"I shall return him to the boy."

This came out more petulant than the old man would have liked, reedy and cracked, and he regretted having said it. It could not be regarded by his visitor even as the hollow bravado of an old codger.

The man from London frowned, and let out a sigh that might have been embittered or admiring. Then the colonel shook his head once, firmly, in a way that was ordinarily, the old man imagined, sufficient to any nullifying purpose that might arise in the course of a day's work. The colonel took out a scrap of paper and the chewed blue stub of a pencil. He scrawled a number on the back of the scrap and then neatly poked it into a crack in the warped wooden frame of the door. Just before he went out, he turned back and looked at the old man, wearing an oddly dreamy expression.

"What's the taste of parrot meat, I wonder?" he said.