Michael Chabon - The Final Solution - A Story of Detection

"He is presently making a survey of some very old village rolls they keep in the library at Gabriel Park," she said. "I'm afraid I don't really understand it. He's trying to make calculations about the height of the tower in the Middle Ages. It's all-he showed me once. It seemed as much math as architecture."

The old man sank slowly back into his chair, but this time with an air of great abstraction. He was no longer looking at her or at Reggie, or, so far as she could see, at anything in the room. His pipe had long since gone out, and working through a series of automatic steps he relit it, without appearing to notice that he did so. The four human beings sharing the room with him stood or sat, waiting with a remarkable unanimity for him to come to some conclusion. After a full minute of furious smoking, he said, "Parkins," clearly and distinctly, and then he gave a little mumbled speech whose words she couldn't catch. He appeared, she would have said, to be delivering a lecture to himself. Once more he made it up onto his feet, and then headed toward the door of the waiting room, without a backward glance. It was as if he had forgotten them entirely.

"What about me?" Reggie said. "Tell them to let me out, you silly old geezer!"

"Reggie!" She was horrified. Thus far he had said nothing that even remotely resembled an expression of regret over what had happened to Mr. Shane. He had confessed without a jot of shame his plan to steal Bruno from an orphaned little refugee Jew, and to going through the contents of Mr. Parkins's wallet. And now here he was, being rude to the only really worthwhile ally he had ever possessed, apart from her. "For heaven's sake. If you can't see the mess you've got yourself into this time. ."

The old man turned back from the door, wearing an annoyed little smile.

"Your mother is right," he said. "At this point there is very little evidence to exonerate you, and a good deal of circumstantial evidence that might seem to implicate you. These gentlemen"-he nodded toward Noakes and Woollett- "would be in dereliction of duty if they were to free you. You appear, in short, to be quite guilty of murdering Mr. Shane."

Then he pulled on his hunting cap and, with a last nod in her direction, went out.

6

The old man had visited Gabriel Park once before; sometime in the late nineties, that would have been. Then as now it was a question of murder, and there had also been an animal concerned, then-a Siamese cat, painstakingly trained to administer a rare Malay poison with a brush of its whisker against the lips.

The great old house's fortunes appeared in the intervening years to have declined. Before the last war a fire had destroyed the north wing, with its turreted observatory from whose slitted eyelid the Baroness di Sforza-that grand and hideous woman-had leapt to her death, with her precious Siam Queen clutched yowling to her breast. Here and there one still saw blackened timbers jutting from the tall grass like a row of snuffed wicks. The main hall, with all the surrounding pasturelands, had been taken over just before the present war by something called the National Research Dairy; its small, admirably healthy herd of Galloways was the subject of immense skepticism and amusement in the neighborhood.

Forty years ago, the old man recalled, it had needed a regiment of servants to tend the place. Now there was no one to clip the ivy or repaint the window frames, or to replace the lost tiles of the roof, which five years of occupation by the Research Dairy had transformed from a stately defile of chimneys to an upset knitting-basket of aerials and wires. The dairy researchers themselves were seldom seen in town, but it had been observed that a number of them appeared to speak with the accents of far-off Central European lands where, perhaps, the fact that Galloways were beef cattle un-suited to the production of milk was not appreciated. The south wing, severed from the hall by the ostensible milk needs of the nation, languished. One or two of the surviving Curlewes haunted its upper storey. And in its grand old library-the very room in which the old man had, by means of a cleverly placed tin of sardines, unmasked the larcenous feline-Mr. Parkins, and a dozen or so other historians too old or unfit for war, pored over the estate's world-renowned and unparalleled store of tax rolls, account books, and judicial records, kept by the Curlewe family during the seven centuries they had ruled over this part of Sussex.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the young soldier who sat behind a small metal desk in a small metal building at the end of the drive that led up to the house. It was a building of recent and cheap manufacture. One could hardly fail to notice that the soldier wore a Webley in a holster. "But you can't come in without the proper credentials."

The grandson of Sandy Bellows, that dour and tireless exposer of charlatans, displayed his identification card.

"I'm investigating a murder," he said, sounding less sure of himself than either his ancestor or the old man would have liked.

"I heard all about it," said the soldier. He looked, for a moment, truly pained by the thought of Shane's death, long enough for it to strike the old man as curious. Then his face resumed its placid smirk. "But a police badge ain't credentials enough, I'm afraid. National security."

"National-this is a dairy, is it not?" the old man cried.

"Milk and milk production are essential to the British war effort," the soldier said brightly.

The old man turned to Sandy Bellows's grandson and saw to his annoyance that the young man seemed to accept this egregious lie. The inspector took a calling card from his wallet and jotted a few words on the reverse.

"Might I ask you to carry this message to Mr. Parkins?" the inspector said. "Or arrange for that to be done?"

The soldier read the message on the back of the card, and considered it for a moment. Then he reached for a black handset and spoke into it softly.

"What did you write?" the old man asked.

The young inspector raised an eyebrow, and it was as if the face of Sandy Bellows were looking out at him across the decades, irritated and amused.

"Can't you guess?" he said.

"Don't be impertinent." And then, out of the side of his mouth, "You wrote, Richard Shane is dead."

"Iam very much aggrieved to hear that," Francis Parkins declared. They sat in a large room at the back of the south wing, just below the library itself. At one time it had been the servants' dining room; the old man, seeking the poisoner, had conducted interviews with the household staff at this very table. Now the room was being used as a kind of canteen. Tumbled cities of tea tins. Biscuit wrappers. A gas ring for the kettle, and an acrid smell of scorched coffee. The ashtrays had not been emptied. "He was a fine fellow." "Undoubtedly," the old man said. "He was also a parrot thief."

This Parkins was a long, lean man, dressed like a don in a good tweed suit ill-treated. His head looked too large for his neck, his Adam's apple for his throat, and his hands for his frail white wrists. They were clever hands, supple and expressive. He wore little steel-rimmed spectacles and the lenses caught the light in a way that made it difficult to read his eyes. He gave every appearance of being a cool and settied fellow. There was nothing to be learned from the way Parkins reacted to news of the parrot's disappearance, unless it was something in his reply itself.

"Where is Bruno now?" he said.

He lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto the pile of fag ends in the nearest ashtray. Keeping his face with its illegible eyes on the inspector, he paid not the slightest attention to his companion, a squat, sunburned man who introduced himself, without explanation for his presence at the interview, as Mr. Sackett, managing director of the Research Dairy. Aside from giving his name and title Sackett said nothing. But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.