"Where is Bruno now?" he said.
He lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto the pile of fag ends in the nearest ashtray. Keeping his face with its illegible eyes on the inspector, he paid not the slightest attention to his companion, a squat, sunburned man who introduced himself, without explanation for his presence at the interview, as Mr. Sackett, managing director of the Research Dairy. Aside from giving his name and title Sackett said nothing. But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.
"We had some hope that you might be able to tell us that," the old man said.
"I? You suspect me?"
"Not at all," the inspector said earnestly. "Not for a moment."
"No more," the old man said, "than we believe you to be conducting elaborate mathematical surveys of the height of the church tower in the fourteenth century."
Ah. That one found a chink. The light died in the lenses of his spectacles. Parkins glanced at Mr. Sackett, whose meaty face in its absolute expressionlessness was as eloquent as a fist.
"Gentlemen," Parkins said after a moment. "Inspector. I assure you that I had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Shane, nor with the disappearance of that admirable bird. I have either been in my bed or in the library here for the past two days, though I can offer no proof of that statement, I'm afraid. I can, however, prove to you that my researches are genuine. Let me just run back and fetch my notebook, and I'll show you-"
"What is the current height of the church tower?" the old man said.
"One hundred and thirty-two feet, six inches," said Parkins at once. He smiled. Mr. Sackett tapped the ash from his cigarette.
"And in 1312?"
"I should say seventeen feet shorter, though that remains to be proven."
"A difficult question to settle?"
"Frightfully," Parkins said.
"And doubtless an important one."
"Only to Dryasdusts like me, I'm afraid."
"Bruno, I gather, has provided you with some key insights."
"I don't understand."
"The numbers," Inspector Bellows said. "You keep track of them. Write them down."
The hesitation was brief, but the old man had been lied to by some of the greatest liars of his generation, among whom modesty did not prevent him from including himself. His nearly thirty years spent almost solely in the company of creatures whose honesty could not be impeached seemed to have had no ill effects on the sensitivity of his instrument. Parkins was lying his head off.
"Merely for my own amusement," Parkins said. "There's nothing in them. Just a lot of nonsense."
A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallization, this paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.
"What does Bruno know?" he said. "Whose numbers was he taught to repeat?"
"I'm afraid we don't concern ourselves with such questions here," Mr. Sackett said quietly.
"Am I to understand," the old man said, "that Mr. Parkins is an employee, or as it were a fellow, of your facility, Mr. Sackett? Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?"
The inspector sought valiantly to cover his laughter with a cough. Mr. Sackett frowned.
"Detective Inspector Bellows," Sackett said, his voice softer than ever. "I wonder if I might have a word with you."
Bellows nodded and they stood up and went out into the hall. Just before he left the room, Mr. Sackett turned and aimed a warning look at Mr. Parkins, whose cheeks colored.
"I take it I am about to be warned off," the old man said.
But the rime of light had returned to the lenses of Mr. Parkins's spectacles. He smiled thinly. The tap dripped into the basin; a cigarette in one of the choked ashtrays burned to the filter and filled the room with an acrid smell of hair. A moment later the inspector came back into the room, alone.
"Thank you, Mr. Parkins. You may go," he said, then turned to the old man, an apology in his expression, his voice imprinted, as it were, with an echo of Mr. Sackett's hard-edged whisper of command. "We're all finished here."
An hour later, Reggie Panicker was released, with all charges against him dropped, and the next day, at the inquest, the death of Richard Woolsey Shane was officially ruled to have been the result of an accident whose nature was not then or afterward specified.
7
The bees did speak to him, after a fashion. The featureless drone, the sonic blank that others heard was to him a shifting narrative, rich, inflected, variable, and distinct as the separate stones of a featureless gray shingle, and he moved along the sound, tending to his hives like a beachcomber, stooped and marveling. It meant nothing, of course-he wasn't as batty as all that-but this did not imply, not at all, that the song had no meaning. It was the song of a city, a city as far from London as London was from heaven or Rangoon, a city in which all did precisely what they were supposed to do, in the way that had been prescribed by their most remote and venerable ancestors. A city in which gems, gold ingots, letters of credit, or secret naval plans were never stolen, in which long-lost second sons and ne'er-do-well first husbands did not turn up from the Wawoora Valley or the Rand with some clever backwoods trick for scaring an old moneybags out of his wits. No stabbings, garrotings, beatings, shootings; almost no violence at all, apart from the occasional regicide. All of the death in the city of the bees had been scheduled, provided for, tens of millions of years ago; each death as it occurred was translated, efficiently and immediately, into more life for the hive.
It was the sort of city in which a man who had earned his keep among murderers and ruffians might choose to pass the remainder of his days, listening to its song, as a young man fresh to Paris or New York or Rome (or even, as he still dimly recalled, London) stood on a balcony, at the window of a bedsit, on the roof of a tenement house, listening to the rumble of traffic and the fanfare of horns, and feeling that he was hearing the music of his own mysterious destiny.
Between the epic of the bees and the rasp of his own respiration within the tent of his protective netting, he failed to hear, as he had failed to anticipate, the long black saloon car that turned up the day after his interview with Parkins. It was not until the man from London was ten feet behind him that the old man turned. Easy prey, he thought, disgusted with himself. Fortunate, really, that all one's enemies are dead.
The man from London was dressed like a cabinet minister but he moved like a cashiered soldier. Broad-chested, fair-haired, squinting as against a hostile sun, a curious shuffling motion in his left foot, in its good Cleverley brogue, as he came toward the hives. Old enough to have accumulated a score of enemies, certainly, but not yet old enough to have outlived them all. His driver waited by the car with its London plates and its slitted blackout headlights that echoed the sun-blasted squint of its passenger.
"Do they ever sting you?" the man from London said.
"Constantly."