The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (11 page)

The man was standing there now, shoeless, shirtless, with just such a torn blue sheet of claw marks in his hand, muttering. He had come in not long before, breathing heavily from his climb up the steps of the high room, and exuding powerfully his characteristic smell of murdered and boiled bird.

"The routing prefix," he kept saying to himself, bitterly, in the language of the boy and his family. This man could also speak in the language of Poor Reggie and
his
family, and once there had been a visitor-their single visitor-with whom the madman had easily conversed in the language of Wierzbicka, whose memory Bruno would always reverence, because it was Wierzbicka the sad-voiced little tailor who had sold Bruno to the boy's family, in a transfer that Bruno had experienced, without quite knowing it at the time but thereafter retrospectively and certainly since losing Linus, as the sense and fulfillment of his long life's pointless wanderings.

"There is no fucking prefix," Kalb said. He lowered the sheet of blue paper and fixed his madman's gaze on Bruno. Bruno set his head to an angle that, among his own kind, would have been understood as an eloquent expression of sardonic intransigence, and waited.

"How about some
letters,
for a change?" the man said. "Don't you know any letters?"

Letters
was in fact a concept that he grasped, or at any rate one that he recognized; it was the name of the bright bundles of paper that men ripped open so ravenously and watched so hopelessly with their darting white eyes.

"Alphabet?" Kalb tried. "A-B-C?"

Bruno held his head steady, but his pulse quickened at the sound. He was fond of alphabets; they were intensely pleasurable to sing. He remembered Linus singing his alphabet, in the tiny errant voice of his first vocalizations. The memory was poignant, and the urge to repeat his
ABC
bubbled and rose in Bruno until it nearly overwhelmed him, until his claws ached for the give of the boy's slim shoulder. But he remained silent. The man blinked, breathing steadily, angrily, through his soft pale beak.

"Come on," he said. He bared his teeth. "Please.
Please."

The alphabet song swelled and billowed, distending Bruno's breast. As was true of all his kind there was a raw place somewhere, inside him, that singing pressed against in a way that felt very good. If he sang the alphabet song for the man, the rawness would diminish. If he sang the train song, which had lingered far longer and more vividly in his mind than any of the thousand other songs he could sing, for reasons unclear even to him but having to do with sadness, with the sadness of his captivity, of his wanderings, of his finding the boy, of the rolling trains, of the boy's mama and papa and the mad silence that had come over the boy when he was banished from them, then the rawness would be soothed. It was bliss to sing the train song. But the alphabet song would do.

He could just sing a little of it; just the beginning. Surely that could be of no possible value to the man. He shined his staring left eye at Kalb, fighting him as he had been fighting him for weeks.

"There is no fucking prefix," Bruno said.

The man let out a sharp soft whistle of breath, and raised his hand as if to strike the bird. Bruno had been struck before, several times over the years. He had been throttled and shaken and kicked. There were certain songs that provoked such responses in certain people, and one learned to avoid them, or in the case of a very clever bird like Bruno, to choose one's moments. It had been possible to torment
le Colonel,
for example, simply through the judicious repetition, in the presence of his wife, of certain choice remarks of
le Colonel's petite amie
Mile. Arnaud.

He raised one claw to ward off the blow. He prepared to snatch a moist chunk of flesh from the man's hand. But instead of hitting him the man turned away, and went to lie down on the bed. This was a welcome development; for if the man fell asleep, then Bruno could permit himself to sing the alphabet song, and also the train song, which he sang, of course, in the boy's secret voice, just as the boy had sung it to him, standing in the window at the back of Herr Ober-gruppenfuhrer's house, overlooking the railroad tracks, watching the endless trains rolling off to the place where the sun came up out of the ground every day, each piece of the train bearing the special claw marks that were the interminable lyrics of the train song. Because Kalb seemed to want so badly to hear the train song, Bruno was careful now only to sing it when the man was asleep, with the instinctive and deliberate perversity that was among the virtues most highly prized by his kind. The sound of the train song, arising in the middle of the night, would jar the man from his slumber, send him scrabbling for his pencil and pad. When at last he was awake, sitting in a circle of light from the lamp with pencil clutched in his fingers, then-of course-Bruno would leave off singing. Night after night, this performance was repeated. Bruno had seen men driven mad, beginning with that Dutchman on the island of Ferdinand Po, in the heat, with the endless humming of the cicadas. He knew how it was done.

The doorbell rang, far below Kalb's cramped room. Bruno heard it, and then, an instant later as always, the man heard it, too. He sat up, his head cocked at an angle that among parrots would have signified mild sexual arousal but that among apes denoted vigilance. Kalb was always alert to the comings and goings of the house, in which seventeen other humans, six of them female, dwelled, in separate quarters, only rarely exchanging their songs. Bruno could hear nine of the other humans now, heard their wireless sets, their coal hissing in the grate, the clack of a pair of knitting needles. And he could hear the voice of Mrs. Dunn, the landlady, far down at the bottom of the stairs. In reply came a male voice that he didn't recognize. Then Bruno heard heavy treads on the stairway, three, no, four men, and Mrs. Dunn as well, but Kalb appeared not to remark this clamor until the climbers were well past the second-storey landing and still coming up.

At last Kalb flew to his feet and ran to press his ear to the door. He listened for a moment, then uttered a dark, harsh syllable much favored by Herr Obergruppenführer when he had lain on Papa's couch, in the office at the back of the house by the railroad tracks, a stench on his boots that was almost as terrible as the smell of the Dutchman's glass of death. Kalb spun from the door and cast his eyes wildly around the room, then turned to Bruno, his arms outspread, as though asking for assistance. But Bruno felt no inclination to help him, for Kalb was not at all a good man. He had taken Bruno from Linus, who needed Bruno and sang to him in a way that deeply repaid all the long years of suffering and captivity; and, what was more, Kalb was a killer of his fellow men-Bruno had seen him strike down the man called Mr. Shane, from behind, with a hammer. It was true, of course, that Mr. Shane had also been planning to take Bruno from Linus; nonetheless Bruno would never have desired his death, and hated the ineradicable memory of having witnessed it.

He determined to inform Kalb that he would not help him, even if somehow he could have done so, even if he understood what danger it was that now approached.

He opened his beak and emitted, in a way that pressed very satisfyingly on the raw place inside him, a series of low chuckling coughs. This allusion to Kalb's characteristic odor, though the man would have had no way of knowing it, constituted a faithful and exact reproduction of the sound produced by the Blue Minorcans that had scratched in the back garden of
le Colonel's
house in Biskra, Algeria, in particular of one strapping blue and white lady whose coloration Bruno had always admired.

The next moment he paid rather dearly for his little joke, however, when the man snatched up a canvas laundry sack and dived at Bruno, grasping him unfairly but effectively by the legs. Before Bruno could get hold of Kalb's hand or nose or earlobe with the mighty implement, horn and shears and mouth and hand, that was his sole pride and vanity and treasure in the world, he found himself thrust into darkness.

From within the laundry sack he heard the sound of the man gathering up his scattered sheets of claw marks, and then the creak of the wardrobe door. The darkness around him resounded with an unmistakably wooden vibration and he understood from this that he was going to be put inside the wardrobe. He felt his head strike against something and then there was a flash in his skull, vivid as the breast feathers of that long-since-eaten Blue Minorcan chicken. Next a clatter, as his perch itself tumbled in alongside, jostling him; a soft splash of water from the little tin dish attached to the crossbar. Then another creak as Kalb closed the wardrobe, sealing Bruno up.

Bruno lay perfectly still, paralyzed by darkness and the light that had burst in his skull. When the knock sounded at the door he tried to sing out but found that he could not move his tongue.

"Mr. Kalb?" It was Mrs. Dunn. "The police are here. They want to speak to you."

"Yes, all right."

There was the sound of the tap running, the chiming of the shaving brush against the cup. And then the clatter of the lock on the door.

"Mr. Martin Kalb?"

"That's right. Has something happened?"

There followed a brief murmured exchange of song between the men, one to which Bruno paid little attention. He was badly disoriented, and the effects of the man's brutality toward him lingered, ringing in his cranium. This disturbed him, for it seemed to demand to be echoed, repeated-it called for retribution-and yet violence was as foreign to him as silence itself.

"So you have no idea what could have become then of the boy's parrot?" he heard one of the men saying. He recognized the voice as that of the old, broken-down man with the admirable beak of flesh, who had come flapping out of his lair to frighten the boy and him on that dazzled afternoon along the tracks.

"I'm afraid not. What an insupportable loss."

It grew increasingly difficult to breathe; there was not enough air in the sack. And then a moment arrived when Bruno felt that he might just stop breathing, give it up, allow all the sad wandering and cruelty of his captivity to come at last to a gentle dark finale. He was prevented in the end from doing so only by the unexpected hope, entirely alien to his nature and temperament, of sinking his talons into the skin of Kalb's throat, of biting off the tip of the hated pale snout.

"And you never met Mr. Richard Shane?"

'Alas, no."

Though the man had cinched it shut, the laundry sack was made from rather thin canvas. Bruno gave his jaws an experimental clack.

"Would you have any objection, sir, to our having a look round your room?"

The material offered little resistance to his efforts; chewing it was not unpleasurable.

"Ordinarily, Inspector, I would have no objection at all, but you catch me at a most inopportune moment. One of my children has fallen gravely ill, I'm afraid, and I'm just on my way now to see to her. Not one of my, ah,
actual
children, of course-perhaps you are aware of my work with the Aid Committee."

Neat as Herr Wierzbicka with his great glinting scissors Bruno chewed a slit in the canvas sack, then a second slit running at right angles to the first. He grasped the loose corner in his bill and gave a sharp yank. There was a soft ripping sound as a flap tore away from the sack. It was an interesting sound-
ksst, ksssst
-and Bruno would have liked to produce it himself, but his mouth was filled with canvas and furthermore the hole was still not large enough. At any rate it was not easy for a parrot to sing when it was in the grip of a dark emotion such as the rage that now suffused him.

"I'm terribly sorry, but I must ask you . . . have you come to arrest me?"

"No, no. Not at all."

Bruno gave another yank on the flap, then poked his head through the hole he had made. There was an alteration in the quality of darkness; he could see a shimmering seam running all the way around the edges of the wardrobe door.

"And I'm not-I can hardly imagine that I would be under suspicion-"

"Not at all. But we
would
like to put a few questions to you."

"Then I really must ask you, for now, to excuse me. I have to make a train for Slough in-oh, my goodness, twenty-five minutes. I would be happy to come down to Scotland Yard and speak to you. Later today, perhaps four or four-thirty. Would that be all right?"

"All right, then," said the one called Inspector, employing tones of regret and doubtfulness. There was the scrape and susurrus of the men's feet and they turned for the door.

Bruno struggled, flapping and scrabbling, to free the remainder of his body from the sack. One of his wings struck the cold shaft of his perch, and having found it he gripped the metal tightly with a talon. Using the shaft as purchase on the darkness he launched himself against the wardrobe door, prepared when it swung open to fly at the throat of the man and expose the red meat within.

This time there was no flash inside his skull; it was his body that struck the door, smacking the breath from his lungs like the back of a massive wooden hand. He lay at the bottom of the wardrobe, failed and trembling and gasping for air. He opened his mouth to sing of his impotence, his anger, his hatred of the man who had taken him away from Linus Steinman. For a long moment nothing emerged from his paralyzed throat. The room beyond the wardrobe door was deeply, almost audibly silent, as if all the creatures there were waiting to hear whatever it was that Bruno might- must-manage to say. In the instant before he lost consciousness he felt, rather than heard, the low gutteral chuckle that bubbled up from him, and the words of the inspector beyond the door.

"Are you keeping a chicken in your wardrobe, then, Mr. Kalb?"

11

The boy watched, unsmiling, his dark blazer neat and pressed, his collar buttoned, his rep necktie, which he looked to have knotted himself, dangling limply in the heat. He might have been awaiting the passage of a funeral. The old man stood on the top of the carriage stairs with the wire cage, hooded, at his feet.