Michael Chabon: The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

"Hello," the parrot said.

"Hello, yourself," she said to the parrot.

"I doubt very much," the old man said, "if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold."

It was not, heaven knew, a familiar or comfortable admission for the old man to make. The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings-the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted-had he not? — by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies' wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems-the false leads and the cold cases-that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.

At that moment the ground rumbled faintly, and in the distance, growing nearer, there was the cry of iron wheels against iron rails. A train was passing through the station, a freight, a military transport, its cars painted dull gray-green, carrying shells and hams and coffins to stock the busy depots of the European war. The boy looked up as it tottered past, slowing but not coming to a stop. He watched the cars, his eyes flicking from left to right as if reading them go by.

"Sieben zwei eins vier drei," the boy whispered, with the slightest hint of a lisp. "Sieben acht vier vier fünf."

Then the parrot, startled perhaps by the clamor of the passing train, flew up into the rafters of the station roof, where, in flawless mockery of the voice of a woman whom none of them would ever meet or see again, it began, very sweetly, to sing.