The Final Solution. Michael Chabon

of green as if arranged to a desired effect or inferable purpose, like counters or chessmen in some kingly recreation. Regarding them the old man experienced a moment of vertiginous horror during which he could neither reckon their number nor recall their names or purposes. He felt – with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity or inertia – the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap. He feared then that he was going to be sick, and raised the head of his stick to his mouth. It was cold against his lips. The horror seemed to subside at once; consciousness rallied itself around the brutal taste of metal, and all at once he found himself looking, with inexpressible relief, merely at the two policemen, Bellows and Quint; at Mr and Mrs Panicker, standing on either side of a bird bath; at a handsome Jew in a grey suit; a sundial; a wooden chair; a hawthorn bush in lavish flower. They were all gazing upward to the peak of the vicarage’s thatched roof at the remaining token in the game.

      ‘Young man, you will come down from there at once!’

      The voice was that of Mr Panicker – who was rather more intelligent than the average country parson, in the old man’s view, and rather less competent to minister to the souls of his parishioners. He backed a step or two away from the house as if to find a better spot from which to fix the boy on the roof of the house with a baleful stare. But the vicar’s eyes were far too large and sorrowful, the old man thought, ever to do the trick.

      ‘Sonny boy,’ Constable Quint called up. ‘You’re going to break your neck!’

      The boy stood, upright, hands dangling by his sides, feet together, teetering on the fulcrum of his heels. He looked neither distressed nor playful, merely gazed down at his shoes or at the ground far below him. The old man wondered if he could have gone up there to search for his parrot. Perhaps in the past the bird had been known to take refuge on housetops.

      ‘Fetch a ladder,’ the inspector said.

      The boy slipped, and went sliding on his bottom down the long thatch slope of the roof toward the edge. Mrs Panicker let out another scream. At the last moment the boy gripped two fistfuls of thatch and held on to them. His progress was arrested with a jerk, and then the handfuls ripped free of the roof and he sailed out into the void and plummeted to earth, landing on top of the good-looking young Jewish man, a Londoner by the cut of his suit, with a startling crunch like a barrel shattering against rocks. After a dazed moment the boy stood up, and shook his hands as if they stung him. Then he offered one to the man on his belly on the ground.