The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (12 page)

The train swayed slowly toward the end of the platform. Lamentations and irritable bovine sighing from the engine. The inspector stood behind the old man, clearing his throat as if in expectation of making a few modest remarks on this satisfactory occasion. It had been agreed among the three men-Mr. Panicker lingered in the corridor-that it was to the eldest of them that the honor of returning bird to master would fall. The old man supposed that this was only fair; he had not merely permitted but insisted that Inspector Bellows take and receive full credit for the apprehension and arrest of the murderer Martin Kalb. As for the minister's reasons for declining the honor, his role in the adventure of the bird's return, marginal perhaps but true, appeared in the long run to have done little to improve his view of things. He had been gloomy and taciturn the whole way down from London, sitting in the smoking car scattering pipe ash all over his dull layman's clothes. He was coming home, it seemed to the old man, rather with his tail between his legs.

Apart from his wife and the boy, the platform of the country station was, but for the local postmaster and a pair of young women dressed for a day down at Eastbourne, deserted. The vicar's son had chosen not to welcome his father home; according to the inspector, Reggie Panicker had fled Sussex "for good one does hope," though the old man considered that perhaps it would have been more charitable to say that Reggie had gone in search of a place where his shortcomings of character were less well catalogued, where his unfortunate history would not forever be held against him, where he would not be the likeliest suspect for every wrong deed committed in the neighborhood, and, crucially, where a vengeful Fatty Hodges would not be able to track him down.

The train shuddered then fell still. The boy took a step toward the carriage, a step so tentative that the old man saw Mrs. Panicker press a hand against the back of his neck to encourage him.

"You'd think he could manage a smile, at least," Mr.

Panicker said, brushing ash from his shirtfront. "Today of all days. Good God. Lucky to have the bird at all."

"True enough," the old man said. He wondered a little, still, that the parrot, until recently the object of intense regard at the highest levels of government, had been so rapidly and without apparent interest discharged from official custody. Amid the absolute indifference of Colonel Threadneedle's office to the disposition of Bruno, there were hints given out that enemy codes had been changed, rendering inutile whatever secret information Bruno might possess. These hints were proffered with just enough offhand firmness as to leave the old man persuaded that in fact something deeper was afoot. Perhaps, he thought, some better, more reliable means of decipherment had been arrived at than a middle-aged and somewhat perverse polyglot bird. "A smile would not be at all unwelcome." In fact the old man felt a strong desire, nearly an ache, to see the reflection of happiness in the boy's face. The business of detection had for so many years been caught up with questions of remuneration and reward that although he was by now long beyond such concerns he felt, with surprising vigor, that the boy owed him the payment of a smile. But as Linus Stein-man approached the train, his eyes on the hooded dome at the old man's feet, his expression did not alter from its habitual blankness, apart, perhaps, from a flicker of anxiety in the eyes, even of doubt. It was a look that the old man recognized, though for an instant he could not recall whence.

But perhaps it was not too different from the doubt that haunted the eyes of the Reverend Mr. K.T. Panicker.

Well, the old man thought. Of course he's worried: he can't
see
his friend.

"Here," he said, brusquely, to the vicar. He lifted the cage, not without difficulty, and handed it to Mr. Panicker. The vicar started to shake his head, but the old man pressed the cage toward him with all the strength in his arms. He gave the vicar a shove, none too gently, toward the stair. Then as Mr. Panicker hesitantly stepped down from the train, the old man reached over with a crooked trembling arm and tugged the oilcloth hood from the cage, revealing with a conjuror's flourish the scarlet tail, the powerful black bill, the bottomless black eyes, the legs of red.

The boy smiled.

Mr. Panicker ruffled his hair, a little stiffly. Then he turned to face his wife.

"Well done, Mr. Panicker," she said, and she offered him her hand.

The boy took the cage from Mr. Panicker, and lowered it to the platform. He worked the wire latch, opened the cage door, and thrust in his hand and arm. Bruno stepped nimbly on, and then as the boy drew him out, inched his way up the dark blue sleeve to the shoulder, where, in an echo conscious or accidental of the vicar's awkward gesture of a moment before, he worked his bill tenderly through the dark curls above the boy's right ear.

Mrs. Panicker watched for a moment, her own smile at the sight of bird and boy reunited both ironic and wistful, as one might contemplate the salt and pepper shakers or favorite pair of socks that alone survived the burning of one's house to the ground. Then she turned to the inspector.

"So is he rich, then?" she said.

"He very well might be," Inspector Bellows said. "But so far as we-or, I might add, as Mr. Kalb-has been able to determine, those endless digits of the bird's do not in fact represent numbered Swiss bank accounts. Even though Kalb had his brother working overtime in Zurich trying to track them down." Mrs. Panicker nodded. She had suspected as much. She went over to stand with her husband, the boy, and Bruno.

"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.