Today, however, the Row was silent, haunted only by the litter and faint invisible gutter-drip of the Monday after market day. Torn wrappers, bits of greasy newsprint, twisted hanks of rag, sawdust caked in puddles of fluids on whose nature Mr. Panicker preferred not to speculate. The stalls and shops dark behind their curtains of articulated bars and padlocked steel shutters. Above the storefronts, the low, disreputable buildings jostled one another, in serried ranks, like rounded-up suspects trying to exhibit a collective and wholly spurious innocence, while their brick cornices leaned ever so slightly inward over the row, as if to peer into the breast pockets of passing marks. It was, or ought to have been, a singularly depressing prospect. And yet the verve and energetic tread of the old man, the vaguely drum-majorish way in which he swung his heavy stick, inspired Mr. Panicker with a giddy and surprising optimism. He felt a mounting sense, as they headed down toward Bethnal Green Road-a sense that had obscure roots in that vanished market morning when he had passed amid the hectic stalls of the dealers in animals-that they were penetrating to the heart of some authentic mystery of London, or perhaps of life itself; that at last, in the company of this singular old gentleman whose command of mystery had at one time been spoken of as far away as Kerala, he might discover some elucidation of the heartbreaking clockwork of the world.
"Here," the old man said, with a sidewise thrust of his stick. Its plated head rang against a small enameled sign, affixed with rusted screws to the brick front of number 122, that read BLACK, and then in smaller type beneath this, BIRDS RARE AND EXOTIC. A grating was drawn across the front but through the murky window Mr. Panicker could make out the vaguely Asiatic shapes of gabled cages and even perhaps the flutter of a wing or tail feather, ghostly as a breeze that stirred the dust. A faint but animated whistling pierced gloom, glass, and shutters, rising and complicating itself as his ears became attuned to it. Doubtless the old man's rapping had roused the denizens of Black's shop.
"Nobody home," Mr. Panicker said, pressing his forehead against the morning-cool steel of the grate. "We ought not to have come on a Monday."
The old man raised his stick and struck the grate, again and again, with gleeful savagery, eyes alight at the clang and the ringing of steel. When he stopped, the shadowy population of the shop had been thrown or had thrown themselves into pandemonium. The old man stood with his stick held high, chest heaving, a fleck of spittle on his cheek. The clamor of the rage resounded and died. The light went from his eyes.
"A Monday," said the old man sadly. "I ought to have foreseen this."
"Perhaps you might have rung in advance," Mr. Pan-icker said. "Made an appointment with this Black chap."
"No doubt," the old man said. He lowered his stick to the pavement and then, sagging, leaned heavily upon it. "In my haste I ..." He wiped at his cheek with the back of a hand. "Such practical considerations seem to lie beyond my . . ." He lurched forward, and Mr. Panicker caught his arm, and this time the old man failed to shrug him off. His eyes stared as if blindly at the unanswering face of the shop, his face inhabited only by a hint of elderly alarm.
"There there," Mr. Panicker murmured, seeking to ignore and conceal the brutality of his own disappointment at the sudden failure of their quest. He had begun the day sleepless, drunk, and contemplating the bombed-out house of his life as a man. His vacant marriage, his useless son, the eclipse of his professional ambitions, these were the shattered windows, the scorched wallpaper, and twisted fau-teuils of that wreckage; and lying over all of it like a snowfall of ash, hanging in the air like an ineradicable pall of smoke, layer after charred layer reaching all the way down to bedrock, was the knowledge of his own godless-ness, of his doubt and unbelief and the distance of his own heart from that of Christ the Lord. A minor Blitz, of no concern to anyone; the falling bomb-like all bombs a chance and mindless thing-the arrival and murder of Mr. Richard Shane. At the moment of impact the whole rotten structure had collapsed and it was as if, as Mr. Panicker had seen described in newspaper accounts of the Blitz, all of the hundreds of rats dwelling in the walls of the edifice were exposed, suspended and surprised in their customary leering attitudes, before their bodies came plopping to earth in a sickening gray shower of rat. And yet, as he had also read, from time to time such explosions had been known to discover the glint of odd and surprising treasure. Rare things, delicate things that, unknown, unobserved, had been there all along. This morning on the London road, when the old man had swept into the car in his mantle of wool and rain, it was as if the boy, Linus Steinman, bereft and friendless, had been thus revealed, standing tiny and alone in the midst of the heap of gray ash, eyes trained longingly on the sky. Mr. Panicker was not so hopeful or so foolish as to imagine that finding a refugee boy's missing parrot would restore the meaning and purpose to his life. But he had been willing to settle for so very much less.
"Perhaps we might return another day. Tomorrow. We could put up in a hotel tonight. There's a very decent little place I know."
Abruptly Mr. Panicker's earlier fantasy of the Crampton Hotel, with its really excellent breakfast, sprung, vividly and temptingly, back to life. Only now, in the place of seminars and presentations that even in fancy could only be imagined as repetitious and interminably dull there was, in the company of this mad old beekeeper, the unlikely possibility, all the more splendid for its unlikeliness, of adventure. The man seemed, in a way that Mr. Panicker would have been hard-pressed to explain or instance, not only to generate or to invite such a possibility but, somehow, implicitly to require a confederate in its undertaking. It was this possibility, even more than the sense of altruistic mission and opportunity for redemption represented by retrieval of a boy's lost bird, that Mr. Panicker now found himself battling to sustain. For what, in the end, had drawn him, a gangly barefoot Malayalee country boy, into the life of a Minister of the Church of England? Naturally it had been a question-and so, to the point of tedium and nonsense, had he incessantly repeated over the past forty years-of one's answering a call. Only now, however, did it occur to him that the call was neither, as he had once supposed, divine or mystical in origin nor, as he had later bitterly concluded, a kind of emotional ignis fatuus. How many rude and shoeless young men, he wondered, set off in search of adventure, believing with all their hearts that they were answering a summons from God?
"Come!" Mr. Panicker said. "Wait here. I will fetch the car. We'll take a pair of rooms at the Crampton and arrange to meet this Black-we'll lay a very trap for him!"
The old man nodded, slowly, his expression abstract, his eyes dull, barely registering the words. In the aftermath of his moment of confusion and alarm a deep melancholy seemed to have come over him. It was in stark contrast to the sense of readiness, of irrepressible fitness to continue the game, that now animated Mr. Panicker. He ran all the way to Boundary Street, leapt into the Imperia, and hurried back to retrieve his co-adventurer. As he neared Black's shop the old man did not move. He stood hunched over, balanced on his stick, in precisely the same way in which Mr. Panicker had left him. Mr. Panicker pulled up alongside the curb and set the hand brake. The old man stood, gazing down at his great boots. After a moment Mr. Panicker sounded the horn, one two. The old man raised his head, slowly, and peered toward the front passenger window of the car as if he had no idea whom he might find within. Just before Mr. Panicker leaned over to roll the window down, however, the old man's face suddenly altered. He arched an eyebrow, and his eyes narrowed slyly, and a long thin smile twisted one of the corners of his mouth.