The Final Solution. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ re-queened.’

      And he waved a long-fingered starfish hand, all warts and speckles, dismissing them. Sending them along their way. He patted down the pockets of his wrinkled suit: looking for his pipe.

      ‘A parrot is missing!’ Inspector Michael Bellows tried, helpless, hoping this titbit might in the old man’s unimaginable estimation add some kind of lustre to the crime. ‘And we found this on the person of the vicar’s son.’

      He drew from his breast pocket the dog-eared calling card of Mr Jos. Black, Dealer in Rare and Exotic Birds, Club Row, London, and submitted it to the old man, who did not give it a glance.

      ‘A parrot.’ Somehow, Bellows saw, he had managed not merely to impress but to astonish the old man. And the old man looked delighted to so find himself. ‘Yes, of course. An African grey. Belonging, perhaps, to a small boy. Aged about nine years. A German national – of Jewish origin, I’d wager – and incapable of speech.’

      Now would have been the moment for the inspector to clear his own throat. DC Quint had argued strenuously against involving the old man in the investigation. He’s strictly non compos sir, I can heartily assure you of that. But Inspector Bellows was too flummoxed to gloat. He had heard the tales, the legends, the wild, famous leaps of induction pulled off by the old man in his heyday, assassins inferred from cigar ash, horse thieves from the absence of a watchdog’s bark. Try as he might, the inspector could not find the way to a mute German jewboy from a missing parrot and a corpse named Shane with a ventilated skull. And so he missed his opportunity to score a point off DC Quint.

      Now the old man had a look at Mr Jos. Black’s calling card, lips pursed, dragging it across a range of distances from the tip of his nose until he settled on one that would do.

      ‘Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘So our Mr Shane came upon young Panicker as he was making off with the poor boy’s pet, which he hoped to sell to this Mr Black. And Shane attempted to prevent him from doing so, and so paid dearly for his heroism. Do I fairly summarize your view?’

      Though this was in short the whole of his theory, from the first there had been something in it – something in the circumstances of the murder itself – that troubled the inspector enough to send him, against the advice of his constable, calling on this half-legendary friend and adversary of his grandfather’s entire generation of policemen. Nevertheless it had sounded a sensible enough theory, all in all. The old man’s tone, however, rendered it as likely as the agency of fairies.

      ‘Ap-parently there were words between them,’ the inspector said, wincing as an ancient stammer resurfaced from the depths of his boyhood. ‘They quarrelled. It came to blows.’

      ‘Yes, yes. Well, I don’t doubt that you are right.’

      The old man composed the seam of his mouth into the most insincere smile Inspector Bellows had ever seen.

      ‘And, really,’ he continued, ‘it is most fortunate that you require so little assistance from me, since, as you must know, I am retired. As indeed I have been since the tenth of August, 1914. At which time, you may take it from me, I was far less sunk in decrepitude than the withered carapace you now see before you.’ He tapped the shaft of his stick juridically against the doorstep. They were dismissed. ‘Good day.’

      And then, with an echo of the love of theatrics that had so tried the patience and enlivened the language of the inspector’s grandfather, the old man tilted his face up to the sun, and closed his eyes.

      The two policemen stood a moment, watching this shameless simulacrum of an afternoon nap. It crossed the inspector’s mind that perhaps the old man wished them to plead with him. He glanced at DC Quint. No doubt abject pleading with the mad old hermit was a step to which his late predecessor would never have been reduced. And yet how much there was to be learned from such a man if only one could—

      The eyes snapped open, and now the smile hardened into something more sincere and cruel.

      ‘Still here?’ he said.

      ‘Sir – if I may—’

      ‘Very well.’ The old man chuckled dryly, entirely to himself. ‘I have considered the needs of my bees. And I believe that I can spare a few hours. Therefore I will assist you.’ He held up a long, admonishing finger. ‘To find the boy’s parrot.’ Laboriously, and with an air that rebuffed in advance any offers of assistance, the old man, relying heavily on his scarred black stick, hoisted himself onto his feet. ‘If we should encounter the actual murderer along the way, well, then it will be so much the better for you.’

      IV

      The old man settled himself onto one knee. The left one; the right knee was no good for anything anymore. It took him a damnably long time, and on the way down there was a horrible snapping sound. But he managed it and went about his work with dispatch. He pulled off his right glove and poked his naked finger into the bloody mud where Richard Woolsey Shane’s life had seeped away. Then he reached into the old conjuror’s pocket sewn into the lining of his cloak and took out his glass. It was brass and tortoise shell, and bore around its bezel an affectionate inscription from the sole great friend of his life.

      With a series of huffings and grunts, labouring across twenty feet square of level ground as if they were the sheer icy face of Karakorum, the old man turned his beloved lens upon everything that occupied or surrounded the fatal spot, tucked between the lush green hedgerows of Hallows Lane, at which Shane’s half-headless body had been found, early that morning, by his landlord, Mr Panicker. Alas that the body had already been moved, and by clumsy men in heavy boots! All that remained was its faint imprint, a twisted cross in the dust. On the right tyre of the dead man’s motorcar – awfully flash for a traveller in milking machines – he noted the centripetal pattern and moderate degree of darkening in the feathery spray of blood on the tyre’s white wall. Though the police had made a search of the car, turning up an Ordnance Survey map of Sussex, a length of clear rubber milking hose, bits of valve and pipe, several glossy prospectuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley’s Common Diseases of Milch Kine, 1926 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a certain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This procedure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 calibre cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to indicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or romance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.

      He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and countless insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered garments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.

      At last he put the glass away and stood up as straight as СКАЧАТЬ