Final Solution : A Story of Detection (9780062319401) by Chabon Michael

Author:Chabon, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

9

Mr. Panicker nearly ran him down.

In fine weather, and driven by a man as sober as the tenor of his profession demanded, the Panicker vehicle, small, Belgian, ancient, ill-used by the son of its current owner and retaining few of its original constituent parts, was difficult to govern. Its tiny windscreen and broken left headlamp lent it a squinting, groping aspect, like that of a drowning sinner seeking an allegorical lifeline. Its steering mechanism, as was perhaps fitting, relied to a large degree on the steady application of prayer. Its brakes, though it was blasphemy to say, may have lain beyond the help even of divine intercession. On the whole in its unfitness, shabbiness, and supreme air of steady and irremediable poverty it neatly symbolized, in his own personal view, all that was germane to the life of the man who—far from professionally sober and caught up in a gust of inward turbulence nearly as profound as that which on this cold, wet, blustery, thoroughly English summer morning buffeted the sad tan Imperia from one side to the other of the London road—found himself, his foot pumping madly at the hopeless brake pedal, the single wiper smearing and revising its translucent arc of murk across the windscreen, on the brink of committing vehicular manslaughter.

At first, seeing nothing but a flapping shadow, a tumbling sheet of oilcloth blown from on top of some farmer’s woodpile, empty and uninhabited, he prepared to plunge straight through it and trust in the ironic fortune that had ever been his to fathom. Then, just as the furling blanket of his destiny was about to swallow him, the sheet resolved itself into a cloak and claws, a great bat of brown tweed flap-ping toward him. It was a man, the old man, the mad old beekeeper, lurching into the road with his long pale face, arms awhirl. A huge frantic hawk moth fluttering into his path. Mr. Panicker wrenched the wheel to the left. The open bottle, purloined from his wretched son, that until now had been the sole companion of his turmoil flew from its perch on the seat beside him and smacked against the glove compartment, scattering brandy as it swung through the air like an aspergillum. With a palpable sense of freedom, as if at last it had attained the state to which, throughout its meager career of puttering, shivering, creeping, and stalling, it had long aspired, the Imperia described a series of broad, balletic loops across the London road, each linked, in a circular pattern, to the last, leaving a child’s drawing of a daisy half drawn in 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

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