Michael Chabon - The Final Solution

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THE FINAL SoLUTIoN
ALSo BY MICHAEL CHABoN Summerland The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Wonder Boys Werewolves in Their Youth A Model World and Other Stories
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
THE FINAL SoLUTIoN A Story of Detection
Michael Chabon
First published in a slightly different form in The Paris Review in 2003.
The steadfast generosity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle enabled the author to begin this novella; that of the
MacDowell Colony
enabled him to complete it.
Fourth Estate An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishing THE FINAL SOLUTION. Copyright © 2004 by Michael Chabon. All rights reserved. Printed in
the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York,
NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets
Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. The epigraph is taken from "Alternating Currents," in A Kiss in
Space: Poems by Mary Jo Salter. Knopf, 1999. FIRST U.S. EDITION Printed on acid-free paper Book design by Jennifer Ann Daddio Illustrations by Jay
Ryan Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 0-06-076340-X
To the memory of
AMaNDA DaVIS
First reader or these pages
The distinction's always fine
between detection and invention.
- MARY JO SALTER
THE FINAL S°LUTI°N
1
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 gray 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 Eu-rope-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 window-pane. 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 hun-dred 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 distort-ing 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 gray 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 bril-liant 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-dis-tant in time but deeply
familiar-yes-
-the toothless clockwork engaged; the unstrung Stein-way sounded: the conductor rail.
Even on a sultry afternoon like this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the
hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his
chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter- newspapers both cheap and
of quality, trousers, bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of
crumbs-that made treacherous the crossing of his parlor, and open his front door to the
world. Indeed the daunting prospect of the journey from armchair to doorstep was among
the reasons for his lack of commerce with the world, on the rare occasions when the
world, gingerly taking hold of the brass door-knocker wrought in the hostile form of a giant
Apis dorsata, came calling. Nine visitors out of ten he would sit, listening to the bemused
mutterings and fum-blings at the door, reminding himself that there were few now living
for whom he would willingly risk catching the toe of his slipper in the hearth rug and
spilling the scant re-mainder of his life across the cold stone floor. But as the boy with the
parrot on his shoulder prepared to link his) own modest puddle of electrons to the torrent
of them being pumped along the conductor, or third, rail from the South-ern Railway
power plant on the Ouse outside of Lewes, the old man hoisted himself from his chair with
such unaccus-tomed alacrity that the bones of his left hip produced a dis-turbing scrape.
Lap rug and journal slid to the floor.
He wavered a moment, groping already for the door latch, though he still had to cross
the entire room to reach it. His failing arterial system labored to supply his suddenly
skybound brain with useful blood. His ears rang and his knees ached and his feet were
plagued with stinging. He lurched, with a haste that struck him as positively giddy, toward
the door, and jerked it open, somehow injuring, as he did so, the nail of his right
forefinger.
"You, boy!" he called, and even to his own ears his voice sounded querulous, wheezy,
even a touch demented. "Stop that at once!"
The boy turned. With one hand he clutched at the fly of his trousers. With the other
he cast aside the daisy. The par-rot sidestepped across the boy's shoulders to the back of
his head, as if taking shelter there.
"Why, do you imagine, is there a fence?" the old man said, aware that the barrier
fences had not been maintained since the war began and were in poor condition for ten
miles in either direction. "For pity's sake, you'd be fried like a smelt!" As he hobbled across
his dooryard toward the boy on the tracks, he took no note of the savage pounding of his
heart. Or rather he noted it with anxiety and then covered the anxiety with a hard
remark. "One can only imagine the stench."
Flower discarded, valuables restored with a zip to their lodging, the boy stood
motionless. He held out to the old man a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a
beggar's tin cup. The old man could hear the flatted chiming of milk cans at Satterlee's farm
a quarter mile off, the agitated rus-tle of the housemartins under his own eaves, and, as
always, the ceaseless machination of the hives. The boy shifted from one foot to the
other, as if searching for an appropriate re-sponse. He opened his mouth, and closed it
again. It was the parrot who finally spoke.
"Zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei," the parrot said, in a soft, oddly breathy
voice, with the slightest hint of a lisp. The boy stood, as if listening to the parrot's
statement, though his expression did not deepen or complicate. "Vier acht vier neun eins
eins sieben."
The old man blinked. The German numbers were so unexpected, literally so outlandish,
that for a moment they registered only as a series of uncanny noises, savage avian
utterances devoid of any sense.
"Bist du deutscher?" the old man finally managed, a little uncertain, for a moment, of
whether he was addressing the boy or the parrot. It had been thirty years since he had last
spoken German, and he felt the words tumble from a high back shelf of his mind.
Cautiously, with a first flicker of emotion in his gaze, the boy nodded.
The old man stuck his injured finger into his mouth and sucked it without quite
realizing that he did so, without re-marking the salt flavor of his own blood. To encounter
a solitary German, on the South Downs, in July 1944, and a German boy at that-here was a
puzzle to kindle old ap-petites and energies. He felt pleased with himself for having roused
his bent frame from the insidious grip of his arm-chair.
"How did you get here?" the old man said. "Where are you going? Where in heaven's
name did you get that par-rot?" Then he offered translations into German, of varying
quality, for each of his questions.
The boy stood, faintly smiling as he scratched at the back of the parrot's head with
two grimy fingers. The den-sity of his silence suggested something more than unwill-ingness
to speak; the old man wondered if the boy might be rather less German than mentally
defective, incapable of sound or sense. An idea came to the old man. He held up a hand to
the boy, signaling that he ought to wait just where he was. Then he withdrew once more
to the gloom of his cottage. In a corner cabinet, behind a battered coal scuttle in which he
had once kept his pipes, he found a dust-furred tin of violet pastilles, stamped with the
por-trait of a British general whose great victory had long since lost any relevance to the
present situation of the Empire. The old man's retinae swam with blots and paisley
tad-poles of remembered summer light, and the luminous in-verted ghost of a boy with a
parrot on his shoulder. He had a sudden understanding of himself, from the boy's point of
view, as a kind of irascible ogre, appearing from the dark-ness of his thatched cottage like
something out of the Brothers Grimm, with a rusted tin of suspect sweets in his clawlike,
bony hand. He was surprised, and relieved as well, to find the boy still standing there
when he re-emerged.
"Here," he said, holding out the tin. "It has been many years, but in my time sweets
were widely acknowledged to be a kind of juvenile Esperanto." He grinned, doubtless a
crooked and ogreish grin. "Come. Have a pastille? There. Good lad."
The boy nodded, and crossed the sandy dooryard to take the confectionery from the
tin. He helped himself to three or four of the little pilules, then gave a solemn nod
of thanks. A mute, then; something wrong with his vocal ap-paratus.
"Bitte," said the old man. For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old
vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up
its mysteries without a fight. "Now," he went on, licking his dry lips with patent
ogreishness. "Tell me how you came to be so very far from home."
The pastilles rattled like beads against the boy's little teeth. The parrot worked its
graphite blue beak fondly through his hair. The boy sighed, an apologetic shrug taking
momentary hold of his shoulders. Then he turned and went back the way he had come.
"Neun neun drei acht zwei sechs sieben," said the parrot, as they walked off into the
wavering green vastness of the afternoon.
2
There were so many queer aspects to Sunday dinner at the Panicker table that Mr.
Shane, the new arrival, aroused the suspicions of his fellow lodger Mr. Parkins merely by
seeming to take no notice of any of them. He strode into the dining room, a grand,
rubicund fellow who set the floorboards to creaking mightily when he trod them and who
looked as if he keenly felt the lack of a pony between his legs. He wore his penny-red hair
cropped close to the scalp and there was something indefinitely colo-nial, a nasal echo of
cantonment or goldfields, in his speech. He nodded in turn to Parkins, to the refugee child,
and to Reggie Panicker, and then flung himself into his chair like a boy settling onto the
back of a school chum for a ride across the lawn. Immediately he struck up a conversation
with the elder Panicker on the subject of American roses, a subject about which, he freely
admitted, he knew nothing.
A profound reservoir of poise, or a pathological deficit of curiosity, Parkins supposed,
might explain the near-total lack of interest that Mr. Shane, who gave himself out to be a
traveler in milking equipment for the firm of Chedbourne & Jones, Yorkshire, appeared to
take in the nature of his in-terlocutor, Mr. Panicker, who was not only a Malayalee from
Kerala, black as a bootheel, but also a high-church Anglican vicar. Politesse or stupidity,
perhaps, might also prevent him from remarking on the sullen way in which Reggie
Panicker, the vicar's grown son, was gouging a deep hole in the tatted tablecloth with the
point of his fish knife, as well as on the presence at the table of a mute nine-year-old boy
whose face was like a blank back page from the book of human sorrows. But it was the
way in which Mr. Shane paid so little atten-tion to the boy's parrot that made it impossible
for Mr. Parkins to accept the new lodger at face value. No one could be immune to the
interest that inhered in the parrot, even if, as now, the bird was merely reciting bits and
scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of
seven. Mr. Parkins, who had, for reasons of his own, long kept the African gray under
careful observation, immediately saw in the new lodger a potential rival in his ongoing
quest to solve the deepest and most vex-ing mystery of the remarkable African bird.
Clearly, Someone Important had heard about the numbers, and had sent Mr. Shane to hear
them for himself.
"Well, here we are." Into the dining room swung Mrs. Panicker, carrying a Spode
tureen. She was a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman whose unimaginably wild
inspiration of thirty years past, to marry her father's coal-eyed, serious young assistant
minister from India, had borne fruit far mealier than the ripe rosy pawpaws that she had,
breathing in the scent of Mr. K. T. Panicker's hair oil on a warm summer evening in 1913,
permitted herself to antici-pate. But she kept an excellent table, one that merited the
custom of a far greater number of lodgers than the Panicker household currently enjoyed.
The living was a minor one, the black vicar locally unpopular, the parishioners stingy as
flints, and the Panicker family, in spite of Mrs. Panicker's thrift and stern providence,
uncomfortably poor. It was only Mrs. Panicker's lavishly tended kitchen garden and culinary
knack that could make possible a fine cold cucumber and chervil soup such as the one that
she now proposed, lifting the lid of the tureen, to Mr. Shane, for whose sudden pres-ence
in the house, with two months paid in advance, she was clearly grateful.
"Now, I'm warning you well beforehand, this time, Master Steinman," she said as she
ladled pale green cream, flecked with emerald, into the boy's bowl, "it's a cold soup and
meant to be." She looked at Mr. Shane, frowning, though her eyes held a faint glint
of amusement. "Sprayed the whole table with cream soup, last week, did the boy, Mr.
Shane," she went on. "Ruined Reggie's best cravat."
"If only that were the most this boy had ruined," Reg-gie said, from behind his spoonful
of cucumber soup. "If only we could leave it at a cravat."
Reggie Panicker was the despair of the Panickers and, like many sons who betray even
the most modest aspirations of their parents, a scourge of the neighborhood as well. He
was a gambler, a liar, a malcontent, and a sneak. Parkins- showing, it now seemed to him,
a certain thickness of wit- had lost a pair of gold cufflinks, a box of pen nibs, twelve
shillings, and his good luck charm, a blond five-franc chip from the Casino Royale in
Monaco, before catching on to Reggie's thieving ways.
"And how old would young Mr. Steinman be, then?" Mr. Shane said, training the flashing
heliograph of his smile on the faraway eyes of the little Jew. "Nine is it? Are you nine,
boy?"
As usual, though, the lookouts in the head of Linus Steinman had been left unmanned.
The smile went unac-knowledged. The boy seemed, in fact, not to have heard the
question, though Parkins had long since established that there was nothing wrong with his
ears. The sudden clatter of a plate could make him jump. The tolling of the bell in the
church tower could fill his great dark eyes with unac-countable tears.
"You won't get answers out of that one," Reggie said, tipping the last of his soup into
his mouth. "Dumb as a mal-let, is that one."
The boy looked down at his soup. He frowned. He was regarded by most of the
residents of the vicarage, and in the neighborhood, as non-Anglophonic and quite possibly
stu-pid. But Parkins had his doubts on both scores.
"Master Steinman came to us from Germany," Mr. Pan-icker said. He was a learned man
whose Oxford accent was tinged with a disappointed subcontinental lilt. "He formed part of
a small group of children, most of them Jewish, whose emigration to Britain was
negotiated by Mr. Wilkes, the vicar of the English Church in Berlin."
Shane nodded, mouth open, eyes blinking slowly, like a golfing man pretending to
enjoy for courtesy's sake an im-promptu lecture on cell mitosis or irrational numbers. He
might never have heard of Germany or Jews or, for that matter, of vicars or children. The
air of deep boredom that settled over his features looked entirely natural to them. And yet
Mr. Parkins mistrusted it. The parrot, whose name was Bruno, was now reciting from Der
Erlkönig, softly, even one might have said politely, in its high, halting voice. The bird's
delivery, though toneless and a bit rushed, had a childish poignancy not inappropriate to
the subject of the poem. And yet still the new lodger had taken no notice of the parrot.
Mr. Shane looked at the boy, who looked down at his soup, dipping the merest tip of
his spoon into the thick pale bowlful. As far as Parkins had ever observed-and he was a
careful and pointed observer-the boy ate with relish only sweets and puddings.
"Nazis, was it?" said Shane. He gave his head a moder-ate shake. "Rotten business.
Tough luck for the Jews, when you come right down to it." The question of whether or not
the boy was going to spit out the bit of soup he had dabbed onto his tongue appeared to
interest him far more than had the internment of the Jews. The boy frowned, and knit his
thick eyebrows together. But the soup remained safely in his mouth, and at last Mr. Shane
turned his attention to polish-ing off his own portion. Parkins wondered if the dull and
unpleasant subject were now to be dropped.
"No place for a child, to be sure," said Shane. "A camp of that sort. Nor, I imagine-" He
laid down his spoon and raised his eyes, with a swiftness that startled Mr. Parkins, to the
corner of the room where, on top of a heavy iron pole, on a scarred wooden crosspiece,
with pages of yesterday's Express spread underneath, Bruno the parrot gazed critically back
at him. "-for a parrot."
Ah, thought Mr. Parkins.
"I suppose you think a wretched stone hovel in the dullest corner of Sussex is a fine
place for an African bird, then," Reggie Panicker said.
Mr. Shane blinked.
"Please excuse my son's rudeness," Mr. Panicker said, with a sigh, laying down his own
spoon though his bowl was only half empty. If there had been a time when he
repri-manded the steady churlishness of his only child, it pre-dated Mr. Parkins's tenure in
the house. "We have all grown very fond of young Linus and his pet, as it happens. And
really, Bruno is a most remarkable animal. He recites poetry, as you hear now. He sings
songs. He is a most gifted mimic and has already startled my wife a number of times by
counterfeiting my own, perhaps overly vehement, manner of sneezing."
"Really?" Mr. Shane said. "Well, Mr. Panicker, I hope you won't mind my saying that
between your roses and this young chap with his parrot, I seem to have landed myself in a
very interesting household."
He was watching the bird, head cocked to one side in a way that echoed, no doubt
unconsciously, the angle from which Bruno habitually preferred to view the world.
"Sings does he?"
"That's right. Principally in German, though from time to time one hears snatches of
Gilbert & Sullivan. Chiefly bits of Iolanthe, as far as I can tell. Quite startling the first few
times."
"But is it all rote-parroting, as it were?" Mr. Shane smiled thinly, as if to imply,
insincerely Mr. Parkins thought, that he knew his little joke was not amusing. "Or is he
capable of actual thought, would you say? I once saw a pig, as a boy, a performing pig, that
could find the square root of three-digit numbers."
His gaze, as he said this, flashed briefly and for the first time toward Parkins. This,
though it seemed to confirm Mr. Parkins's hunch about the new lodger, also troubled him.
As far as anyone in the neighborhood knew, there was no rea-son to connect him with the
subject of digits and numbers. The suspicion that Mr. Shane had been sent by Certain
Peo-ple to observe Bruno firsthand, Mr. Parkins now considered to have been confirmed.
"Numbers," Mr. Panicker said. "Oddly enough, Bruno seems quite fond of them, doesn't
he, Mr. Parkins? Always rattling off great chains and lists of them. All in German, naturally.
Though I can't say that he appears to do anything with them that I'm aware of."
"No? He keeps me from sleeping," Reggie said. "That's use enough for me. That's
startling enough for me, all right."
At this point Mrs. Panicker swept back into the dining room carrying the fish course on
a pale green platter. For reasons that had never been articulated to Mr. Parkins but which
he felt must have a good deal to do with her otherwise unexpressed feelings about her
husband and son, she never joined them for dinner. She cleared away the bowls as Mr.
Parkins muttered his approval of the soup. There was some-thing desperate and brave
about the landlady's good cook-ery. It was like the quavering voice of a bagpipe, issuing
forth from a citadel that was invested on all sides by dervishes and infidels on the
morning of the day on which it would finally be sacked.
"Excellent soup!" barked Mr. Shane. "Compliments to the chef!"
Mrs. Panicker flushed deeply, and a smile unlike any that Parkins had ever seen there,
tiny and pouting, made a brief appearance on her lips.
Mr. Panicker noticed it too, and frowned.
"Indeed," he said.
"Phew!" said the younger Panicker, fanning away the steam that rose from the platter
on which lay a plaice that re-tained its head and tail. "That fish is off, Mother. It smells like
the underside of Brighton Pier."
Without missing a beat-with a last trace of the girlish smile still lingering-Mrs. Panicker
reached across and slapped Reggie's face. Her son leapt from his seat, a hand to his blazing
cheek, and for a moment he only glared at her. Then his hand shot out toward her throat
as if he meant to choke her. Before his fingers could find purchase, however, the new
lodger was on his feet and had interposed himself between mother and son. Mr. Shane's
hands flew out in front of him and before Parkins quite understood what was happening
Reggie Panicker was lying flat on his back on the oval rug. Bright blood sprang from his
nose.
He sat up. Blood dripped onto his collar and he dabbed at it with a finger, then
pressed the finger against his left nostril. Mr. Shane offered him a hand, and Reggie batted
it aside. He got to his feet and snuffled deeply. He stared at Shane, then nodded toward
Mrs. Panicker.
"Mother," he said. Then he turned and went out.
"Mother," said the parrot, in his soft voice. Linus Stein-man was looking at Bruno with
the deep affection that was the only recognizable emotion Parkins had ever seen the boy
express. And then, in a clear, fluting, tender voice Parkins had never heard, the bird began
to sing.
Wien, Wien, Wien
Sterbende Märchenstadt
It was a lovely contralto and, as it issued jerkily from the bill of the gray animal in the
corner, disturbingly human. They listened for a moment, and then Linus Steinman rose from
his chair and went to the perch. The bird fell silent, and stepped onto the outstretched
forearm that was prof-fered. The boy turned back to them, and his eyes were filled with
tears and with a simple question as well.
"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Panicker with a sigh. "You may as well be excused."
3
They found him sitting on the boot bench outside his front door, hatted and caped in
spite of the heat, sun-burnt hands clasping the head of his blackthorn stick. All ready
to go. As if-though it was impossi-ble-he were expecting them. They must have caught him
on his doorstep, boots laced, gathering his strength for a late-morning tramp across the
Downs.
"Which one are you?" he said to Inspector Bellows. His eye was exceedingly bright. The
great beak quivered as if catching scent of them. "Speak up."
"Bellows," said the inspector. "Detective Inspector Michael Bellows. Sorry to bother
you, sir. But I am new on the job, down here, learning the ropes, as they say, and I don't at
all overrate my capacities."
At this last assertion the inspector's companion, Detective Constable Quint, cleared his
throat and politely directed his gaze toward the middle distance.
"Bellows ... I knew your father," the old man sug-gested. Head tottering on his feeble
neck. Cheeks flecked with the blood and plaster of an old man's hasty shave. "Surely? In the
West End. Red-haired chap, ginger mus-tache. Specialized, as I recall, in confidence men.
Not with-out ability I should have said."
"Sandy Bellows," the inspector said. "Grandfather, actu-ally. And how often did I hear
him speak highly of you, sir."
Not quite so often, perhaps, the inspector thought, as I heard him curse your name.
The old man nodded, gravely. The inspector's sharp eye detected a fleeting sadness, a
flicker of memory that briefly seamed the old man's face.
"I have known a great many policemen," he said. "A great many." He brightened,
willfully. "But it is always a pleasure to make the acquaintance of another. And Detec-tive
Constable . . . Quint, I believe?"
He trained his raptor gaze now on the constable, a dark, brooding potato-nosed fellow.
DC Quint was much attached, as he rarely neglected to let it be known, to the prior
detective inspector, sadly deceased but a proponent apparently of the old solid methods of
policework. Quint tipped a finger to the brim of his hat. Not a talkative fellow, DC Quint.
"Now, who has died, and by what means?" the old man said.
"A man named Shane, sir. Struck in the back of the head with a blunt object."
The old man looked unimpressed. Even, perhaps, disap-pointed.
"Ah," he said. "Shane struck in the back of the head. Blunt object. I see."
Perhaps a bit batty after all, thought the inspector. Not what he used to be, as Quint
had put it. Pity.
"I am not in the least senile, Inspector, I assure you," the old man said. He had read the
trend of the inspector's thoughts; no, that was impossible, too. Read his face, then; the
cant of his shoulders. "But this is a crucial moment, a crisis, if you will, in the hives. I could
not possibly abandon them for an unremarkable crime."
Bellows glanced at his constable. The inspector was young enough, and murder rare
enough on the South Downs, for it to seem to both policemen that there was per-haps
something remarkable about a man's skull being staved in with a poker or a sap, behind a
vicarage.
"And this Shane was armed, sir," DC Quint said. "Car-ried a Webley service pistol, for
all that he claimed to be, and near as we can tell he were, nothing but a commercial
traveler in-" He pulled a small oilskin-covered notepad from his pocket and consulted it.
The inspector had already learned to detest the sight of that notepad with its careful
inventory of deeply irrelevant facts. "-the dairy machine and equipment line."
"Hit from behind," the inspector said. "It appears. In the dead of night as he was about
to get into his motor. Bags all packed, apparently leaving town with no explanation or
goodbye, though only just a week before he prepaid two months' lodging at the vicarage."
"The vicarage, yes, I see." The old man closed his eyes, heavily, as if the facts in the
摘要:

THEFINALSoLUTIoNALSoBYMICHAELCHABoNSummerlandTheAmazingAdventuresofKavalier&ClayWonderBoysWerewolvesinTheirYouthAModelWorldandOtherStoriesTheMysteriesofPittsburghTHEFINALSoLUTIoNAStoryofDetectionMichaelChabonFirstpublishedinaslightlydifferentforminTheParisReviewin2003.ThesteadfastgenerosityofSirArth...

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