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

streaks on the slick black macadam. It was at this point that Mr. Panicker's relations with his deity once again demonstrated their long-standing sardonic trend. The car abandoned or perhaps lost interest in its escapade and came to a juddering stop some twenty feet farther along the road than it had begun, its bonnet directed faithfully toward London, engine rumbling, lone headlamp peering through the falling rain, as if it had received a scolding for its antics and was now prepared to continue on its humble way. His process of thought, hitherto a chaotic combustion fueled by twin reservoirs of unaccustomed bibulousness and a kind of jolly rage, also appeared to have come juddering to a halt. Where was he going, what was he doing? Had he truly, at long last, escaped? Could one simply roll one's trousers in a grip and walk out?
    The passenger door flew open. With a howl of wind and trailing a retinue of raindrops the old man billowed into the car. He pulled the door shut behind him and shook himself in his Inverness like a lean dank dog.
    "Thanks," he said curtly. He turned his horrible bright gaze on his rescuer, on the upended bottle of brandy, on the torn seat-leather and exposed wires and peeling dashboard, on the very state, or so it seemed to Mr. Panicker, of his sodden and astonished soul. His long flared nostrils felt out each scattered fleck of brandy in the air. "Good morning to you."
    Mr. Panicker understood that he was expected now to engage the forward gear and proceed to London, conveying thither, as if they had prearranged it, his new passenger and his smell of wet wool and tobacco. Yet he could not seem to bring himself to do so. So profound had his unconscious identification with the 1927 Imperia become that he felt now as if this large, damp old man had intruded directly into the glum sanctity of his own rattletrap skull.
    The engine as if with a sigh settled into a patient idle. His passenger seemed to interpret Mr. Panicker's immobility and silence as a request for explanation, which, in a manner of speaking, Mr. Panicker supposed, it was.
    "Rail service 'interrupted,' " the old man said dryly. "Troop movements, I imagine. Reinforcements to Mortain, no doubt. I gather the fighting there has turned thick. In any case, I have no way to reach London by rail today, and yet I find myself very much obliged to go."
    He peered forward, looking into the foot-well between his mud-caked boots, high-lacing, thick-ribbed old ammunition boots of the sort that had marched on Khartoum and Bloemfontein. With a grunt, and a creaking of bones that Mr. Panicker found quite alarming, he reached forward and retrieved the bottle of brandy, and with it the tiny corked stopper that had popped out and rolled from view soon after his departure-clandestine if hardly stealthy-from the vicarage. The old man sniffed at the neck of the bottle, and grimaced, raising an eyebrow. Then, with his facial features settled into an expression so deadpan that it could not fail to register as mocking, he proffered the bottle to Mr. Panicker.
    Mr. Panicker shook his head dumbly and engaged the clutch. The old man replaced the stopper on the bottle. And they set off for the city through the rain.
    They drove in silence for a long while as Mr. Panicker, finding his tank of rage drained and his drunkenness subsiding, lapsed into a funk of baffled embarrassment at his own recent behavior. He had always been, supremely and if nothing else, a man whose acts and opinions were characterized by rectitude, by that careful absence of surprisingness that he had been taught, years before at the seminary in Kottayam, to prize among the signal virtues of a successful vicar. The silence, the deep elderly sighs and occasional sidewise glances of his unwanted passenger struck him as prelude to an inevitable request for explanation.
    "I suppose you're wondering . . . ?" he began, hands gripping the wheel, hunching forward to bring his face nearer the