Free The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon Page A

unplumbed pocket, or lining the boy had produced a scrap of card. The occluding moon rolled on; the world was dazzled once more with sense and light and the marvelous vanity of meaning. The old man's eyes filmed with shameful tears as, relieved, he watched the boy scribble a brief query on the bit of paper he had found. He came across the grass and, a question in his eyes, handed the old man the torn scrap of ecru laid.
    "Leg ov red," the old man read. He felt strongly that he ought to understand this communication but the sense of it lay just beyond his grasp. Perhaps his breaking-down brain had failed, this time, to make a full recovery from its recent lapse. An invocation, perhaps, illiterate and broken, of the pink-tinged talons of the vanished African gray? Or-
    The scrap slipped from the old man's fingers and spun fluttering to the ground. The old man stooped, grunting, to retrieve it, and when he picked it up again found on the reverse of the scrap two words and a numeral, written not in the boy's crooked graphite scratch but in the bold hand of an adult, in black ink with a narrow nib. It was the address, in Club Row, of Mr. Jos. Black, Dealer in Rare and Exotic Birds.
    "Where did you get this paper?" the old man said.
    The boy took back the card and, under the address, scrawled the single word: BLAK.
    "He was here? You spoke to him?"
    The boy nodded.
    "I see," the old man said. "I see that I must go up to London."
    9
    Mr. Panicker nearly ran him down. In fine weather, and driven by a man as sober as the tenor of his profession demanded, the Panicker vehicle, small, Belgian, ancient, ill-used by the son of its current owner and retaining few of its original constituent parts, was difficult to govern. Its tiny windscreen and broken left headlamp lent it a squinting, groping aspect, like that of a drowning sinner seeking an allegorical lifeline. Its steering mechanism, as was perhaps fitting, relied to a large degree on the steady application of prayer. Its brakes, though it was blasphemy to say, may have lain beyond the help even of divine intercession. On the whole in its unfitness, shabbiness, and supreme air of steady and irremediable poverty it neatly symbolized, in his own personal view, all that was germane to the life of the man who-far from professionally sober and caught up in a gust of inward turbulence nearly as profound as that which on this cold, wet, blustery, thoroughly English summer morning buffeted the sad tan Imperia from one side to the other of the London road-found himself, his foot pumping madly at the hopeless brake pedal, the single wiper smearing and revising its translucent arc of murk across the windscreen, on the brink of committing vehicular manslaughter.

    At first, seeing nothing but a flapping shadow, a tumbling sheet of oilcloth blown from on top of some farmer's woodpile, empty and uninhabited, he prepared to plunge straight through it and trust in the ironic fortune that had ever been his to fathom. Then, just as the furling blanket of his destiny was about to swallow him, the sheet resolved itself into a cloak and claws, a great bat of brown tweed flapping toward him. It was a man, the old man, the mad old beekeeper, lurching into the road with his long pale face, arms awhirl. A huge frantic hawk moth fluttering into his path. Mr. Panicker wrenched the wheel to the left. The open bottle, purloined from his wretched son, that until now had been the sole companion of his turmoil flew from its perch on the seat beside him and smacked against the glove compartment, scattering brandy as it swung through the air like an aspergillum. With a palpable sense of freedom, as if at last it had attained the state to which, throughout its meager career of puttering, shivering, creeping, and stalling, it had long aspired, the Imperia described a series of broad, balletic loops across the London road, each linked, in a circular pattern, to the last, leaving a child's drawing of a daisy half drawn in