The Final Solution

The Final Solution
Michael Chabon

A brilliant reworking of the detective story by the much-acclaimed Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’.In THE FINAL SOLUTION Michael Chabon has crafted a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic 19th-century detective story.In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year-old man, vaguely remembered by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with other people. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African grey parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out – a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case – the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot – beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

MICHAEL CHABON

The Final Solution

Dedication

To the memory of AMANDA DAVIS first reader of these pages

Contents

Title Page (#u90c66331-19fc-5f03-830d-5a89f16b19fa)

Dedication

I

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking…

II

There were so many queer aspects to Sunday dinner at…

III

They found him sitting on the boot bench outside his…

IV

The old man settled himself onto one knee. The left…

V

She packed a pair of shirts, two pairs of socks,…

VI

The old man had visited Gabriel Park once before; sometime…

VII

The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The…

VIII

The hives were a row of gabled boxes on the…

IX

Mr Panicker nearly ran him down.

X

He had seen madmen: the man who smelled of boiled…

XI

The boy watched, unsmiling, his dark blazer neat and pressed,…

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I

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking along the railway tracks. His gait was dreamy and he swung a daisy as he went. With each step the boy dragged his toes in the rail bed, as if measuring out his journey with careful ruled marks of his shoetops in the gravel. It was midsummer, and there was something about the black hair and pale face of the boy against the green unfurling flag of the downs beyond, the rolling white eye of the daisy, the knobby knees in their short pants, the self-important air of the handsome grey parrot with its savage red tail feather, that charmed the old man as he watched them go by. Charmed him, or aroused his sense – a faculty at one time renowned throughout Europe – of promising anomaly.

The old man lowered the latest number of The British Bee Journal to the rug of Shetland wool that was spread across his own knobby but far from charming knees, and brought the long bones of his face closer to the windowpane. The tracks – a spur of the Brighton–Eastbourne line, electrified in the late twenties with the consolidation of the Southern Railway routes – ran along an embankment a hundred yards to the north of the cottage, between the concrete posts of a wire fence. It was ancient glass the old man peered through, rich with ripples and bubbles that twisted and toyed with the world outside. Yet even through this distorting pane it seemed to the old man that he had never before glimpsed two beings more intimate in their parsimonious sharing of a sunny summer afternoon than these.

He was struck, as well, by their apparent silence. It seemed probable to him that in any given grouping of an African grey parrot – a notoriously prolix species – and a boy of nine or ten, at any given moment, one or the other of them ought to be talking. Here was another anomaly. As for what it promised, this the old man – though he had once made his fortune and his reputation through a long and brilliant series of extrapolations from unlikely groupings of facts – could not, could never, have begun to foretell.

As he came nearly in line with the old man’s window, some one hundred yards away, the boy stopped. He turned his narrow back to the old man as if he could feel the latter’s gaze upon him. The parrot glanced first to the east, then to the west, with a strangely furtive air. The boy was up to something. A hunching of the shoulders, an anticipatory flexing of the knees. It was some mysterious business – distant in time but deeply familiar – yes—

—the toothless clockwork engaged; the unstrung Steinway sounded: the conductor rail.