The Manual of Detection (16 page)

Unwin scoured the report again, searching for some better explanation. How did Sivart know what had happened that morning, when everyone else was fooled? The best explanation he could find, and the only conclusion the file would ever have, was Sivart’s assertion that he had simply
remembered.

UNWIN’S UMBRELLA WAS FOLDED on the bed beside him, droplets of water clinging to the black fabric. The bed was made, though the blankets were soggy and rumpled, as were his clothes. His briefcase was on the floor by the bed. From the kitchen came the sound of the icebox door clinking open and closed. A woman was humming to herself, and Unwin recognized the tune from Miss Greenwood’s performance the night before.

It hurt too much to move his head, so he raised his wristwatch to his eyes. Six thirty-two—still early. But early for what? For work? They would apprehend him as soon as he brought his bicycle through the lobby door. For coffee at Central Terminal? They could be waiting for him anywhere: in line at the breakfast cart, next to the information booth, beneath the arch of Gate Fourteen. Even the woman in the plaid coat, it seemed, was in on it.

Then he remembered Edwin Moore, remembered how he had looked in the back of the steam truck, shivering among all those alarm clocks.
They will find me,
Moore had told him in the museum storeroom, and he was right—they had found him. Would the Rooks murder him, as they murdered Detective Pith?

“Breakfast is ready,” Emily called from the kitchen.

He sat up slowly. What was his assistant doing in his apartment? The sleep drained out of his head and pooled sickeningly in his stomach. He peeled the damp socks off his feet and dropped them onto the floor next to his shoes. He would have to find Edwin Moore, and quickly.

He rose shakily and went to the kitchen. Buttered toast was piled at the center of the table, and a pair of eggs, sunny side up, were set on a plate for him. Emily was swirling more butter over the hot surface of a skillet. It had been a late night for her, but she appeared rested, dressed now in a gray skirt and pinstripe blouse. The pencils in her hair were freshly sharpened.

“I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in,” she said. “I found the spare key in your desk yesterday. And since I couldn’t go back to the office, I came right here. I figured you’d want to start on your case first thing.”

“You stole my spare key?”

“ ‘Stole’ is unfair,” she said. She selected an egg from the open carton, cracked its shell, and spilled it into the skillet, all with one hand.

“Emily, we don’t have time for breakfast. One of my . . . primary contacts. He’s been kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped? Who is he?”

Unwin wondered whether her question was genuine. Emily always seemed to know more than she let on. Still, she had only helped him thus far, so he would have to trust her for now. “He’s a museum attendant. He—”

“Eat while you talk, Detective. I won’t consider it rude.”

It was more a command than a suggestion. Unwin helped himself to his plate from the table, took some toast, and ate standing up. He was hungrier than he thought, and the eggs were perfect, the whites cooked through but the yolks still runny. “His name’s Edwin Moore,” he said between bites. “He told me he used to work for the Agency.”

She thought that over for a moment. “He could be valuable, then—if he’s telling the truth. Where is he?”

“The Rook brothers took him.”

She stood still, running the tip of her tongue along her crooked teeth. Then she sprinkled pepper over the eggs in the pan. “Nobody’s seen the Rooks since Hoffmann went into hiding,” she said.

“Emily, do you remember anything about last night? About the Cat & Tonic?”

He saw a twitch at the corner of her eye, magnified by her glasses. Some part of her knew what he was talking about, but she said, “I went straight home after I dropped you off at the Gilbert. I worked on a crossword puzzle and went to sleep. Cat, tonic. It
sounds
familiar. Did you do the same puzzle? I think maybe ‘cat’ was one of the answers, and so was ‘tonic.’ They might have shared their letter
t.
I’m not sure, though. I don’t remember what the clues were.”

She would not remember their dance, then, or anything else she had seen.

Unwin sat down. “Enoch Hoffmann’s back,” he told her. “The Rooks are working for him again, and they’re up to something. Something big, I think. If we’re ever going to find Sivart, we’ll have to figure out what he was investigating when he disappeared.”

She was quiet a moment. Then she flipped her eggs onto a plate and said, “In that case, you’ll have to go to the Travels-No-More.”

Unwin knew she was right. The Rooks had always operated out of the carnival—they arrived in the city with it thirteen years before. They would not have taken Moore to the Forty Winks: too many questions to answer there. But in the lightless center of Caligari’s, they could carry on with their plans undisturbed.

Emily brought her plate to the table and sat down, then unfolded a napkin on her lap. “I just hope he’s worth it,” she said.

 

 

 

THEY WALKED TOGETHER UNDER Unwin’s umbrella. Neither of them had seen the morning papers yet, but they knew that Unwin’s photograph would likely have made front page by now. They kept to the alleyways and side streets, and Emily went ahead to peer around the corners. She took his hand, pulling him along while he kept the umbrella low over his face.

“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” he asked.

“I think the closest entry point is a block north of here.”

He knew better than to ask what she meant, and besides, Emily was doing a good job of keeping them out of sight. They passed no one on the sidewalks, and no vehicles moved on the streets. Still, Unwin felt they were being watched. He tried to remind himself that Sivart considered that a good thing.
Means I’m doing my job,
he often wrote.

She waved him into a subway station and produced a pair of tokens from her skirt pocket. As she passed through the turnstile, she raised her lunch box in the air. Unwin did the same with his umbrella. He had left his briefcase in his apartment: safer there than with him.

When the train arrived, Emily ushered him into an empty car. He moved to take a seat, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him over to a door on the opposite side. With a swift movement, she snatched the umbrella out of his hand and wedged it between the doors, forcing them open. Then she gave the umbrella back and led him onto the platform beyond. They went along the narrow walkway to a gate at its end—the entrance, Unwin thought, to a place only the city’s transit workers could ever need to access. Emily lifted the padlock in her hand. “I know a few of the codes,” she said, and added bashfully, “in case of emergencies.”

She turned the dial a few times, and the lock popped open. Once they were in, she closed the gate and reached through the bars to lock it again. The air was cold and musty here, and Unwin could hear a low electrical hum. They took a flight of stairs downward, switching back at a landing, moving slowly until their eyes adjusted to the dimness of the place.

They had come to a second subway platform below the first. Water dripped from leaky pipes in the ceiling and formed grimy puddles amid bits of trash. Emily took only a few steps before turning to face the tracks. She grabbed hold of his left arm, lifting it to bring his wristwatch close to her face. The scent of her lavender perfume nearly blocked out the stench of the place.

“The eight train always arrives on time,” she said.

“You mean the A train?”

Emily pursed her lips, then said, “I mean the
eight
train. I suppose they didn’t cover that in your orientation. It’s an old line, decommissioned by the city years ago. The Agency made arrangements. Only detectives are allowed to ride it.”

He nodded as though to say that yes, of course, he remembered all that now.

“Not even assistants are permitted on board,” she went on. “Really, we’re not even supposed to know about it.”

Unwin refrained from asking the obvious question.

The rails began to warble, and then the light of the approaching train appeared in the tunnel. Unlike the station, the train itself looked clean and well maintained. It glided into place alongside the platform, and the doors hissed open. Unwin got on, then turned to face his assistant.

“They say every detective has a dagger-sharp understanding of the human mind,” she said to him. “Do you have a dagger-sharp understanding of the human mind, Detective Unwin? Can you tell me what I have in my lunch box?”

He had tested her; now she was testing him. Unwin wondered whether some part of
The Manual of Detection
might have prepared him for a question like this. Looking at the lunch box, he could not even tell if it was a detail or a clue. Finally he made his guess. “Your lunch?”

The doors closed. Through the window, behind her thick glasses, Emily’s eyes were unreadable. She stood unmoving at the platform’s edge as the train left the station.

He was the only passenger in the car—maybe the only passenger in the train. He took a seat and watched the tunnel walls slide past the windows.

It was seven o’clock now, and on a normal day he would already be on his way to Central Terminal. He thought of the woman in the plaid coat. Had she gone to wait at Gate Fourteen as usual? What if the person she was waiting for chose this day to arrive? Unwin would never see her there again, never know what happened. Who was she, to have taken his job on the fourteenth floor? To have sipped milk at the Cat & Tonic? Enoch Hoffmann was enraged at the mention of her. Did they know each other?

The train screeched as it rounded a bend. Unwin saw abandoned stations go by—not real places anymore, just forgotten hollows, decaying in the dark under the city. The train halted at one of them and opened its doors. It was not his stop.

All this was happening, he imagined, not because Sivart was gone, or because Lamech promoted him, or because Hoffmann was stealing the city’s alarm clocks. It was happening because the woman in the plaid coat had dropped her umbrella and he failed to pick it up. If he
had
picked it up, she would have spoken to him. They might have left the terminal together, before Detective Pith could find him. They might have walked side by side and talked, he pushing his bicycle along the sidewalk.

His bicycle! It was still chained to the fire escape outside the Gilbert Hotel. Its chain would rust badly in this weather.

The door at the back of the car opened, and a gray, coveralled figure shuffled in, pushing a wheeled bucket in front of him. It was Arthur, the custodian. The man seemed to be everywhere—first in Central Terminal, then on the stage of the Cat & Tonic, and now in the subway. The train rounded another bend, and he stumbled. Unwin rose to offer assistance, but Arthur hopped to keep his balance, then resumed his advance.

The custodian’s eyes were closed; he was still snoring. Yet he came toward Unwin as though with conscious design, squeezing the handle of the mop with his big hands, his knuckles white with the effort. They were very clean, those hands, and his fingernails were wide and flat.

The lights went out, and the darkness was total. Unwin could hear the creaking of the bucket’s wheels draw closer. When the lights came back on, Arthur was only a few paces away, his teeth clenched behind parted lips.

Unwin backed away and knocked into a pole, nearly falling, then spun himself around to the other side of it. What did Arthur want with him? He blamed Unwin for Samuel Pith’s death, perhaps; or worse, he was in league with those who had murdered the detective. Unwin fled, but this was the lead car—he had nowhere to go. The window at the front offered a view onto the tunnel, tracks gleaming in the train’s single headlight.

Arthur drew closer, his face set in a rictus. Unwin could not make out the words he was muttering, but they sounded disagreeable at best. He pounded a fist against the door to the motorman’s compartment. The only reply was the static from a two-way radio, and he thought he heard in it those familiar sounds—the rustling of paper, the cooing of pigeons.

The train slowed as it entered another station. Unwin brandished his umbrella in front of him as he circled the custodian and went to the door. For a moment he could see into Arthur’s bucket. It was full of red and orange leaves.

When the train stopped, he ran along the platform toward the exit. The walls of the station were decorated with a tile mosaic depicting carousels and tents with pennants at their peaks. This was the stop he wanted. At a row of broken turnstiles, he paused to look back.

The train was leaving the station. The custodian had not followed.

TEN

On Infiltration

 

 

 

A
n enormous plaster clown stood bowlegged at the entrance of the Travels-No-More Carnival. The colors of its face and suit were chipped and faded to shades of brown and purple, and the arch of its legs were the gates through which visitors were compelled to pass. The clown’s smile was welcoming, but in a hungry sort of way.

Beyond was the flooded labyrinth of the Travels-No-More. Planks of wood lay over wide pools of muddy water between the remaining attractions—though “attractions” was hardly the word. Great machines that had once swayed and wheeled and swerved now lay rusting, their broken arms sprawled amid collapsed tents and decrepit booths. The place was full of lost things, and Edwin Moore was one of them now. Looking at it, Unwin felt lost himself. He knew he could not leave the old clerk to this place.

He had gone no more than a few steps beyond the gate when the window of a nearby booth shot open. A man with a cigarette clenched in his teeth peered at him through a cloud of yellow smoke. He had a thick white mustache, stringy shoulder-length hair, and he wore an oilskin duster buttoned tight at his throat. From out of the collar, angular black tattoos like the roots of an overturned tree spread up his leathery neck to his jawline.