The material offered little resistance to his efforts; chewing it was not unpleasurable.
"Ordinarily, Inspector, I would have no objection at all, but you catch me at a most inopportune moment. One of my children has fallen gravely ill, I'm afraid, and I'm just on my way now to see to her. Not one of my, ah, actual children, of course-perhaps you are aware of my work with the Aid Committee."
Neat as Herr Wierzbicka with his great glinting scissors Bruno chewed a slit in the canvas sack, then a second slit running at right angles to the first. He grasped the loose corner in his bill and gave a sharp yank. There was a soft ripping sound as a flap tore away from the sack. It was an interesting sound-ksst, ksssst-and Bruno would have liked to produce it himself, but his mouth was filled with canvas and furthermore the hole was still not large enough. At any rate it was not easy for a parrot to sing when it was in the grip of a dark emotion such as the rage that now suffused him.
"I'm terribly sorry, but I must ask you. . have you come to arrest me?"
"No, no. Not at all."
Bruno gave another yank on the flap, then poked his head through the hole he had made. There was an alteration in the quality of darkness; he could see a shimmering seam running all the way around the edges of the wardrobe door.
"And I'm not-I can hardly imagine that I would be under suspicion-"
"Not at all. But we would like to put a few questions to you."
"Then I really must ask you, for now, to excuse me. I have to make a train for Slough in-oh, my goodness, twenty-five minutes. I would be happy to come down to Scotland Yard and speak to you. Later today, perhaps four or four-thirty. Would that be all right?"
"All right, then," said the one called Inspector, employing tones of regret and doubtfulness. There was the scrape and susurrus of the men's feet and they turned for the door.
Bruno struggled, flapping and scrabbling, to free the remainder of his body from the sack. One of his wings struck the cold shaft of his perch, and having found it he gripped the metal tightly with a talon. Using the shaft as purchase on the darkness he launched himself against the wardrobe door, prepared when it swung open to fly at the throat of the man and expose the red meat within.
This time there was no flash inside his skull; it was his body that struck the door, smacking the breath from his lungs like the back of a massive wooden hand. He lay at the bottom of the wardrobe, failed and trembling and gasping for air. He opened his mouth to sing of his impotence, his anger, his hatred of the man who had taken him away from Linus Steinman. For a long moment nothing emerged from his paralyzed throat. The room beyond the wardrobe door was deeply, almost audibly silent, as if all the creatures there were waiting to hear whatever it was that Bruno might- must-manage to say. In the instant before he lost consciousness he felt, rather than heard, the low gutteral chuckle that bubbled up from him, and the words of the inspector beyond the door.
"Are you keeping a chicken in your wardrobe, then, Mr. Kalb?"
11
The boy watched, unsmiling, his dark blazer neat and pressed, his collar buttoned, his rep necktie, which he looked to have knotted himself, dangling limply in the heat. He might have been awaiting the passage of a funeral. The old man stood on the top of the carriage stairs with the wire cage, hooded, at his feet.
The train swayed slowly toward the end of the platform. Lamentations and irritable bovine sighing from the engine. The inspector stood behind the old man, clearing his throat as if in expectation of making a few modest remarks on this satisfactory occasion. It had been agreed among the three men-Mr. Panicker lingered in the corridor-that it was to the eldest of them that the honor of returning bird to master would fall. The old man supposed that this was only fair; he had not merely permitted but insisted that Inspector Bellows take and receive full credit for the apprehension and arrest of the murderer Martin Kalb. As for the minister's reasons for declining the honor, his role in the adventure of the bird's return, marginal perhaps but true, appeared in the long run to have done little to improve his view of things. He had been gloomy and taciturn the whole way down from London, sitting in the smoking car scattering pipe ash all over his dull layman's clothes. He was coming home, it seemed to the old man, rather with his tail between his legs.
Apart from his wife and the boy, the platform of the country station was, but for the local postmaster and a pair of young women dressed for a day down at Eastbourne, deserted. The vicar's son had chosen not to welcome his father home; according to the inspector, Reggie Panicker had fled Sussex "for good one does hope," though the old man considered that perhaps it would have been more charitable to say that Reggie had gone in search of a place where his shortcomings of character were less well catalogued, where his unfortunate history would not forever be held against him, where he would not be the likeliest suspect for every wrong deed committed in the neighborhood, and, crucially, where a vengeful Fatty Hodges would not be able to track him down.
The train shuddered then fell still. The boy took a step toward the carriage, a step so tentative that the old man saw Mrs. Panicker press a hand against the back of his neck to encourage him.
"You'd think he could manage a smile, at least," Mr.
Panicker said, brushing ash from his shirtfront. "Today of all days. Good God. Lucky to have the bird at all."
"True enough," the old man said. He wondered a little, still, that the parrot, until recently the object of intense regard at the highest levels of government, had been so rapidly and without apparent interest discharged from official custody. Amid the absolute indifference of Colonel Threadneedle's office to the disposition of Bruno, there were hints given out that enemy codes had been changed, rendering inutile whatever secret information Bruno might possess. These hints were proffered with just enough offhand firmness as to leave the old man persuaded that in fact something deeper was afoot. Perhaps, he thought, some better, more reliable means of decipherment had been arrived at than a middle-aged and somewhat perverse polyglot bird. "A smile would not be at all unwelcome." In fact the old man felt a strong desire, nearly an ache, to see the reflection of happiness in the boy's face. The business of detection had for so many years been caught up with questions of remuneration and reward that although he was by now long beyond such concerns he felt, with surprising vigor, that the boy owed him the payment of a smile. But as Linus Stein-man approached the train, his eyes on the hooded dome at the old man's feet, his expression did not alter from its habitual blankness, apart, perhaps, from a flicker of anxiety in the eyes, even of doubt. It was a look that the old man recognized, though for an instant he could not recall whence.
But perhaps it was not too different from the doubt that haunted the eyes of the Reverend Mr. K.T. Panicker.
Well, the old man thought. Of course he's worried: he can't see his friend.
"Here," he said, brusquely, to the vicar. He lifted the cage, not without difficulty, and handed it to Mr. Panicker. The vicar started to shake his head, but the old man pressed the cage toward him with all the strength in his arms. He gave the vicar a shove, none too gently, toward the stair. Then as Mr. Panicker hesitantly stepped down from the train, the old man reached over with a crooked trembling arm and tugged the oilcloth hood from the cage, revealing with a conjuror's flourish the scarlet tail, the powerful black bill, the bottomless black eyes, the legs of red.
The boy smiled.
Mr. Panicker ruffled his hair, a little stiffly. Then he turned to face his wife.
"Well done, Mr. Panicker," she said, and she offered him her hand.