The Final Solution: A Story of Detection Read Online Free PDF Page B

combed his hair. She had fed him, and clothed him, and caught his vomit in a basin when he was sick. But she had never embraced him. She put out her hands; he sat forward, and laid his head, a bit carefully, against her belly. Mr. Kalb cleared his throat. She could feel the weight of his not looking at them as she patted the boy's hair and tried to gather herself together for the visit to the jail. She was embarrassed at weeping in front of the young man from the Aid Committee. After a moment she glanced at him and saw that he was proffering a handkerchief. She took it with a murmur of thanks.
    The boy drew back, studying her while she dabbed at her eyes. She was absurdly touched to see how concerned he looked. He patted her hand as if he wanted her to pay particularly close inspection to what he had to say next. Then he scrawled four more words on his little pad. Mr. Kalb examined them with a frown. The boy's writing was atrocious, rudimentary. He reversed letters and even words, especially on those rare occasions when he tried to communicate in English. Once he had greatly discomfited her husband with a written query reading WHY DOG OV KRISCHIN DON'T LIKE JUDISH SDIK?
    " 'Ask the old man,' " Mr. Kalb read.
    "What on earth should I ask him?" said Mrs. Panicker.
    O nly once before had she seen the old man, in 1936, at the railway station, when he had emerged from his bee-crazed hermitage to meet five enormous crates sent down to him from London. Mrs. Panicker was bound for Lewes that morning, but when the old man shuffled onto the southbound platform, accompanied by the strapping eldest son of his neighbor Walt Satterlee, she crossed over to get a better look at him. Years and years ago his name-itself redolent now of the fustian and rectitude of that vanished era-had adorned the newspapers and police gazettes of the empire, but it was his more recent, local celebrity, founded almost exclusively on legends of his shyness, irascibility, and hostility to all human commerce, that drew her across to his side of the platform that morning. Thin as a whippet, she had later reported to her husband, with something canine, or rather lupine, in the face as well, the heavy-lidded eyes intelligent and watchful and pale. They took in the features and furnishings of the platform, the texts of the posted notices, the discarded end of a cigar, a starling's ragged nest in the rafters of the overhanging roof. And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was-and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature"-a hunger devoid of prurience, appetite, malice, or goodwill. It was a hunger, she decided later, for information. And yet there was liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement, as if a steady lifelong diet of mundane observations had preserved the youthful-ness of his optic organs alone. Stooped in the manner of tall old men, but not bent, he had stood in the full April sunshine wrapped in a thick woolen Inverness, studying her, inspecting her, making no effort to conceal or dissemble his examination. The cloak, she remembered, had been heavily patched, with total disregard for pattern or stuff, and darned in a hundred places in a motley spectrum of colored thread.
    Presently the train from London had pulled in, disgorging the great crates, punched with round holes at regular intervals, and stamped with the gentleman's antique name. Clearly visible on the side of each crate was the stenciled address of a city in Texas, U.S.A. Later she learned that they had contained, among other outlandish items, heavy trays packed with the eggs of a variety of honeybee hitherto unknown in Britain.
    Mr. Panicker's reply, when she