Michael Chabon: The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

"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. Pan-icker 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.

"Mr. Kalb," cried Mrs. Panicker, scurrying over, a hand pressed to the necklace at her bosom, to the side of the dapper Londoner. "Good heavens, are you hurt?"

Mr. Kalb accepted the hand the child offered him, and pretended to let the boy drag him to his feet. Though he winced and groaned, the grin did not leave his face for a moment.

"Not terribly. A bruised rib perhaps. It's nothing at all."

He held out his hands to the boy, and the boy stepped between them. Mr. Kalb, with a visible wince, lifted him into the air. Only once he was safely in the arms of the visitor from London, for reasons that the old man felt a powerful desire to understand, did the boy relax his grip over his emotions, and mourn, wildly and uncontrollably, the loss of his friend, burying his face in Mr. Kalb's shoulder.

The old man made his way across the garden.

"Boy," he said. "Do you remember me?"

The boy looked up, his face flushed and swollen. A delicate span of mucus connected the tip of his nose to the lapel of Mr. Kalb's jacket.

The inspector introduced the old man to the mournful-eyed man from the Aid Committee, Mr. Martin Kalb. Mrs. Panicker had sent for him as soon as Bruno went missing that morning. When he heard the old man's name, something flickered, a dim memory, in the eyes of Mr. Kalb. He smiled, and turned to the boy.

"Well," he said, in German that the old man understood a few moments after the words were spoken, giving the boy's shoulder an encouraging squeeze. "Here is the man to find your bird. Now you have nothing to worry about."

"Mrs. Panicker," the old man said, over his shoulder. The blood drained from the woman's face-every bit, though he did not suspect her for a moment, as if he had caught her without an alibi. "I shall want to speak to your son. I am sure that the police will have no objection to your coming along with a clean shirt and a packet of biscuits."

5

She packed a pair of shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of neatly pressed underpants. A brand-new toothbrush. A cheese, a packet of crackers, and an ancient, prerationing box of the sultanas he liked. The lot barely filled a small grip. She put on her good blue dress with the mandarin collar and then went downstairs to find the boy. Even before the theft of Bruno, Linus had been prone to disappearance. He seemed less a boy to her than the shadow of a boy, stealing through the house, the village, the world. He had mouseholes everywhere, in shaded corners of the churchyard, under the eaves of the vicarage, in the belfry of the church tower itself. He wandered off into the countryside with the bird on his shoulder, and though she disapproved strongly of this, she had given up trying to stop him, because she could never bring herself to punish the poor child. She didn't have the heart. At any rate she had treated her Reggie with a strictness that did not come at all naturally to her, and look how he had turned out in the end.

She found him down by the stream at the foot of the churchyard. There was a mossy stone bench there on which six or seven hundred years of villagers, no doubt, had come to sit under the spreading yew tree, thinking mournful thoughts. Martin Kalb sat beside him. Linus had taken off his shoes and socks. And Mr. Kalb went barefoot too. For some reason the sight of his pale feet poking naked from the turn-ups of his fine gray pinstripe trousers shocked Mrs. Panicker.

"I am going out," she said, too loudly. She knew it was awful of her but she could not help shouting at the boy as if he were deaf. "I must pay a visit to Reggie. Mr. Kalb, I hope you will stay the night with us."

Mr. Kalb nodded. He had a long, sweet face, plain and studious. He reminded her of Mr. Panicker at the age of twenty-six. "Naturally."

"You can stay in Linus's room. There are two beds."

Mr. Kalb looked at the boy, raising an eyebrow. As if out of respect for the boy's muteness he spoke to the boy very little. The boy nodded. Mr. Kalb nodded. Mrs. Panicker felt a rush of gratitude.

The boy took his pad from his jacket, and his bit of green pencil. He painstakingly scrawled something on one page; he wrote only with great difficulty, chewing on his lower lip. For a moment he studied what he had written.

Then he showed the page to Mr. Kalb. She could never make head or tail of the things he wrote down.

"He asks if Mr. Shane is really dead," said Mr. Kalb.

"Yes," she fairly shouted, and then, more softly, "he is."

Linus stared up at her with his enormous brown eyes, and nodded, once, almost to himself. It was impossible to say what he was thinking. It nearly always was. Though she pitied him, and remembered him in her prayers, and in some strange way felt also that she loved him, there was something more deeply alien to her about Linus than his nationality or race could explain. Though he was a good-looking boy and the bird a handsome animal-and both of them surprisingly clean in their habits-there was an intensity in their attachment to each other that Mrs. Panicker found eerier than the bird's numerical tirades or its singing with a sweetness that froze the heart.

The boy wrestled a few more words out of his pencil stub. Mr. Kalb scanned, then, with a sigh, translated them.

" 'He was kind to me,' " he said.

Mrs. Panicker tried to reply, but she seemed to have lost her voice. Something elbowed its way up into her rib cage. Then to her shame and dismay she burst lavishly into tears. It was the first time that she had cried since sometime in the late twenties, though the Lord knew that she had reason enough to cry. She cried because this boy, this somehow bruised or dented boy, had lost his parrot. She cried because her son was sitting in a cell under the town hall, a prisoner of the Crown. And she cried because at the age of forty-seven, after twenty-five years of piety, disappointment, and restraint, she had taken a deeply foolish interest in the new lodger Mr. Richard Shane, like someone out of a coarse novel.

She went to the boy and stood before him. She had washed his bottom and combed his hair. She had fed him, and clothed him, and caught his vomit in a basin when he was sick. But she had never embraced him. She put out her hands; he sat forward, and laid his head, a bit carefully, against her belly. Mr. Kalb cleared his throat. She could feel the weight of his not looking at them as she patted the boy's hair and tried to gather herself together for the visit to the jail. She was embarrassed at weeping in front of the young man from the Aid Committee. After a moment she glanced at him and saw that he was proffering a handkerchief. She took it with a murmur of thanks.