Michael Chabon - The Final Solution - A Story of Detection

8

The hives were a row of gabled boxes on the south side of the cottage, miniature pagodas, white and stepped as wedding cakes. One of the colonies dated from 1926; in his thoughts it was always the "Old Hive." The "Old Hive" had been mothered and ruled by generations of strong, prolific queens. It was as ancient to the old man as Britain itself, as the chalk bones of the South Downs. And now, as in each of the seventeen preceding summers, the time had come to ravish it of its honey.

On the morning proposed for the extraction, he read J.G. Digges until four, then slept fitfully for an hour until he knew that it was time to get up. He had never relied on alarm clocks. He was a lifelong light sleeper, and in his dotage an outright insomniac. When he did sleep, his dreams were puzzles and algebra problems, troubling his rest. He preferred on the whole to be awake.

Everything took longer than it ought to have taken- ablutions, coffee, priming the first pipe of the day. He had never really learned to cook, and the latest Satterlee girl who looked after him would not be in until seven. By then he would be deeply at work on the hives. So he ate nothing. Even without bothering about breakfast, however, he was annoyed to find that by the time he had fought the daily battle in the lavatory, washed his lean old limbs, fastened all the zips of his bee suit, pulled on his rubber-soled boots, and donned his bee hat, the sun was already well up and blazing in the sky. It was going to be a hot day, and hot bees were discontented bees. For now at least there was still a nocturnal chill in the air, fog on the high ground, a heavy taste of the sea. So he wasted another five minutes enjoying his pipe. The morning cool, the burning shag, the drowse of the late summer, honey-sated bees: until this recent adventure of the learned parrot these were the pleasures of his life. They were animal pleasures, as he recognized.

Such things had once meant very little to him.

The soles of his boots squeaked in the grass as he went to the shed to fetch his housebreaking tools, and they squeaked as he limped across to the hives. He could smell the ointment tang of heather honey from halfway across the hiveyard. A good summer for heather this year. The Satter-lees would be pleased; by ancient arrangement the family sold the yield of his hives, and kept the profits, and heather honey fetched four or five times the price of a common blend.

At last he stood before the "Old Hive," holding his fuming board and the stoppered bottle of benzaldehyde. The hive gave off an air of doomed contentment, like a city sleeping it off on the day after carnival, contemplated from a hilltop by an army of Huns. The old man drew a deep chestful of smoke and then lowered himself to the ground, leaning on the fuming board for balance. A couple of workers loitered outside the round portal of the city.

"Morning, ladies," he said; or perhaps he merely thought it.

He put his lips to the entrance hole and blew in a rank rich exhalation of mundungus. He had bred a commendable docility into his stock but when you came to steal their honey it was best not to take any chances. The shag he favored possessed remarkable powers of tranquilization; The British Bee Journal had published his notes on the subject.

He ratcheted himself to his feet and prepared to remove the super, with its fat, waxy combs. This was not a task he relished; the supers got heavier every year. It took no effort to imagine losing his footing on the way to the covered porch around the back of the cottage where he ran the extractor: the snap of a critical bone, the splintered frames of honey spilt on the ground. He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.

Carefully he let his pipe go out and then tucked it into the wide pocket of his bee suit alongside his matches and pouch of tobacco. Benzoic aldehyde was only moderately flammable, but the prospect of setting himself on fire with his own pipe conformed to his worst ideas of the indignity that death would one day visit upon him. With the pipe out of the way, he unstoppered the brown glass bottle, and his organ of smell was overwhelmed, all but undone, by a strident blast of marzipan. He sprinkled the stuff liberally on the felt batting of the fuming board. Then he reached for the peaked roof of the hive and lifted it off. Quickly, nearly dropping it, he laid it on the ground and turned back to the comb, the beautiful comb, each cell of it sealed with a wax cap of sturdy bee manufacture. It had the strange pallor of heather honeycomb, an intense whiteness, white as death or a gardenia. He admired it. Here and there a bee surprised at its business contemplated the meaning of the disturbance, the sudden burst of daylight. One, a heroine of her people, rose at once into the air to attack him. If she stung him, he didn't remark it; he had long since grown habituated to the stings. He settled the fuming board down over the pale expanse of comb and hoisted the roof back into place over it. In a few minutes the hated stench of the aldehyde would have driven any bees still hanging about the comb down to the next level in the hive.

When the veil of his bee hat was lowered he generally could hear nothing apart from the breathing and the mumble of bees. But he had not troubled with the veil, with the bees so slow and fat, and so he chanced to hear the stifled cry behind him. It was more of a gasp than a cry, really, brief and disappointed. At first he thought it must be the Satter-lee girl but when he turned he saw the boy standing by the garden shed, sucking on the back of his hand. He was wearing the same short pants and clean, pressed shirt as on the day of their first encounter, but standing there without the parrot he struck the old man as looking glaringly bereft.

The old man grinned. "Hurts, don't it?"

The boy nodded slowly, too surprised or in too much pain to feign lack of understanding. The old man ambled over to him, shaking his head.

"What a singularly unlucky boy you are," he said. "Let's have a look."

He took hold of the boy's hand. On the back, just below the wrist, a puffy nipple of flesh, tipped with the black filament of the barb. The old man took a matchbox from the zip pocket of his bee suit, poked out the tray of matches. Cupping the tray in his left hand, with his right he flattened the outer sleeve of the matchbox. Then, using an edge of the flattened bit of cardboard, he scraped the sting out of the boy's hand. The boy wept freely during this procedure.

"Mustn't yank them out," he told the boy with a sharpness he did not entirely intend. He was aware of the existence of a vocabulary for the consolation of sorrowing children, but it was one he had never troubled to learn. Boys had served him well over the years-but that was in another century! — extending the reach of his eyes and ears, passing invisibly into dark lanes and courtyards where his own presence would have drawn undue attention, slipping over transoms, through the back doors of hostile alehouses, in and out of the stable yards of crooked horse trainers. And in his own lofty jocular way he had spoken to and even, carelessly, cared for those boys. But they were a different species of boy entirely, ragged, rude, pinched and avid, holes in their shoes, holes for eyes, boys disciplined by hunger and poverty to display the narrowest possible spectrum of human emotion. They would have sooner drunk lye than allowed themselves to be seen to shed a tear. "Only spreads the venom."