The Manual of Detection (18 page)

Nicest girl I’ve talked to in months,
Sivart wrote.
The air must be clearer up there.

Only when Sivart tried to turn the conversation to Caligari himself did the giantess grow reticent. The cask was almost empty, so he had to try a more direct approach. Was it true that the carnival served as a haven for criminals and outlaws? That Caligari was responsible for corruption and ruination wherever he went?

The giantess was silent. She went back to work, ignoring him.

Though Sivart’s report from this investigation belonged to no particular case, it was significant as the only documented account of an agent’s meeting with Caligari. The ringmaster was in the tent where the elephants were stabled. According to the detective’s description, he was a quick-moving, gray-bearded man in an ancient, moth-eaten suit, his eyes blue behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles. He told Sivart he had come just in time to help with the cleaning.

A little girl, about seven years old, handed the detective a brush and said, “They like it when you scrub them behind the ears.”

From the report:

Clerk, you should have seen the sparkle in his eye. “You have plenty to worry about, Detective. Make no mistake, I
am
your enemy. You think you can control what is known and what is unknown? I tell you the unknown will always be boundless. This place thrives on mystery; we revel in it here. All the world’s a rube, and he who tries to prove otherwise will be the first to wake onstage, victim of our just ridicule.”

Five months later Caligari vanished. His employees never left the city, and in the end the carnival was shut down by force. But the workers, despite numerous arrests, refused to go. They found other ways to provide for themselves, and like-minded souls were welcomed into their gang. The gates were shut against all others, and the Traveling Carnival became the Travels-No-More.

Many wondered: What about the elephants? What happened to them?

For years some reported hearing, on especially quiet nights, a trumpeting call out there in the dark, like a reminder, or an omen.

What troubled Unwin now was that little girl, Caligari’s assistant, who had known Sivart’s name and had spoken like some kind of sibyl. Could she have been the daughter of Cleopatra Greenwood?

 

 

 

IN THE BED OF the Rooks’ steam truck, the ticking of the alarm clocks was the hum of a thousand insects. They jangled and buzzed when the truck went over bumps, and Unwin imagined they were about to burst free in a great tick-tocking swarm. Peering under the canvas, he saw that Moore was not in there, and neither was Pith’s body. How many truckloads of clocks had the sleepwalkers stolen?

In time they came to the farthest corner of the carnival. Here at the edge of the bay, the tents were still striped with color, and electric lights along the waterfront shone red, blue, and orange. Most of the little makeshift structures had been converted into cottages, and shacks had sprung up among them. It looked less like a carnival here and more like a shantytown into which a carnival had erupted. The truck halted beside the largest of the pavilions, and almost immediately a group of men with shovels emerged.

Unwin hopped off the bumper and went around the passenger side. The men went straight to work, shoveling the alarm clocks into the tent, where thousands more were already piled. The noise of them was a second storm. Down at the docks, tractors swept heaps of clocks onto the deck of a waiting barge.

The steam engine of the truck spluttered and halted, and one of the Rooks climbed from the cab, a clipboard in his hand. Unwin knelt behind the rear tire. Looking beneath the truck, he saw a dockworker’s shoes draw up to the big, uneven boots—Josiah’s.

“What’s Hoffmann want with it all anyway?”

“I believe there was something in your contract about questions and whether they ought to be asked,” said Josiah.

“Right, right,” the dockworker said. He flipped open a cigarette lighter and followed Josiah in the direction of the tent. “So long as I get paid.”

The truck was parked not far from a row of cottages. They were built close to one another, some leaning nearly to the point of touching. Unwin took to the paths between them, crouching low under the windows, though all were dark. He moved as quickly as he could, keeping his umbrella closed in his hand, searching for some sign of Edwin Moore.

Rounding a corner, he nearly collided with an enormous animal—a real one, not one of those plaster simulacra. It was an elephant, gray and wild-looking in the rain, its eyes bright yellow in their dark, wrinkled sockets. Unwin slipped and fell in the mud at its feet. Startled, the elephant reared on its hind legs and raised its trunk in the air.

Unwin froze as the beast’s forelegs churned over his head. He could smell the musky scent of the animal, could hear its wheezing breath. Finally the elephant held still, then slowly returned the columns of its legs gently to the ground.

Unwin got to his feet and picked up his umbrella. There were two other elephants here in a makeshift pen. These were older and lay with their bellies flattened to the muck. All three were chained to the same post, and their tethers had become tangled and knotted. The largest elephant, its hide sagging with age, raised its head and spread its ears but was otherwise still. The other rolled its eyes in Unwin’s direction and lifted its trunk from the mud. Its searching snout moved toward him through the rain, issuing steam as it sniffed the air. The youngest began to rock impatiently, its great round feet squelching in the soft earth.

The beasts must have been evicted from their pavilion to make way for the alarm clocks. Unwin remembered the affection with which Caligari had spoken of the beasts, and he felt sick at the sight of them now. He would have liked to set them free, but even if he were able to remove the stake, it seemed unlikely that the elephants’ condition would be improved. If those in charge cared little enough about the animals to leave them here, would they hesitate to kill them if they were set loose into the carnival? Unwin would have to return for them later; for now he had to concentrate on finding Edwin Moore.

The windows of one nearby cottage were lit with a flickering, rosy glow. Smoke streamed from a crooked length of stovepipe at the back, and Unwin thought he heard music playing within. He went to the window and peered through. Inside was a coal-burning stove, a table covered with books, and buckets of dirty plates and cups. A phonograph was on, and Unwin recognized the song. It was the same one Cleopatra Greenwood had sung the night before, at the Cat & Tonic.

At the back of the single room were two beds, perfectly made and barely an inch apart. More books were scattered over the beds, and the pillows were undented. Propped against the foot of the bed on the right was Edwin Moore. He was bound at the wrists and ankles by lengths of tough-looking rope, and his uniform was dirty.

The elephants seemed to have lost interest in Unwin. The youngest had gone to huddle against the eldest, and the other laid its trunk on the ground again.

Unwin tried the door and found it unlocked. The air inside was warm and smelled faintly of grease. He set his umbrella by the door, then opened his coat to rid himself of the chill he had carried with him all morning. On the table was a backgammon board, abandoned in midgame. White and brown playing pieces were grouped in sets of twos and threes, and the dice revealed the last roll as a double three. From what Unwin knew of the game, it looked as though each player had the other in a deadlock, with pieces captured and escape routes blocked.

Unwin knelt beside Moore and shook him. The old clerk mumbled in his sleep but did not waken.

Outside, the elephants were moving again; one of them sent up an aggrieved lament. Unwin moved around the beds, thinking to hide beneath one of them, but he stubbed his foot against a tin bucket and sent it clattering over the floor, strewing coal briquettes in a wide arc.

The door opened, and one of the Rooks came into the room. It was Jasper: left boot smaller than the right. He looked at Unwin, looked at the toppled bucket, then blinked once and closed the door behind him. He went to the phonograph and shut it off.

Unwin stepped over the coal, upsetting a stack of books in the process. He mumbled an apology and quickly began to gather them, blowing coal dust off the covers as he set them in a pile.

Jasper reached into his coat and withdrew a pocketwatch, checked the time, and put the watch away. His hand came back with a pistol in it. Even with the gun in his hand, Jasper seemed only vaguely interested in the fact that Unwin was there.

Unwin set the last few books into place and stood up. He thought of his own pistol, still in his desk drawer in Room 2919, but knew it would not have been of any help to him. Pith surely carried a pistol, and he had not even bothered to draw.

Talk.
He had read that in the
Manual
somewhere.
When all seems lost, start talking, keep talking. People do not kill people they think have something useful to say.

“Is it true?” Unwin said. “Seventeen years without a minute of sleep?”

Jasper’s face was a dull mask, his eyes green stones. He raised the pistol, pointing it at Unwin’s heart.

What would the shot feel like? Like a hole punch, Unwin thought, when it punctured a small stack of pages. He took a step toward the gun and said, “That’s a tiredness beyond tiredness. Everything must seem like a dream.” He glanced at the pair of identical beds at the back of the room. “When was the last time you even bothered to try?”

Jasper blinked again, and Unwin waited for the blast.

It did not come. “I wonder how it happened,” Unwin said. “Did you even want the operation? Or was that Hoffmann’s idea? He needed the two of you to be in different places at the same time, I suppose. But he didn’t know how much he was cutting. You weren’t really two people to begin with. There was a time when you could see each other’s dreams, hear each other’s thoughts. But they were the same dreams, the same thoughts.”

He was guessing now, imagining a role for them in the earlier days of Caligari’s carnival: those boys Cleo Greenwood had described, clothed in a single wide coat and set on a double stool, put onstage to sing a duet, maybe. He must have come close to the truth, because Jasper slowly lowered his pistol.

“One plus one does not equal one,” Jasper said.

“No,” Unwin agreed. “That man you have there, Edwin Moore, is a lot like me. Or I’m a lot like him, maybe. We don’t know each other very well, but I understand him, I think. We were both clerks once. So you see why I had to come looking for him.”

Jasper seemed to consider this.

“I’m going to carry him out of here,” Unwin said. “I won’t ask you to help me. I won’t ask you to open the door. I won’t even ask you not to shoot me, but if you don’t, I’ll take it to mean that you understand, and I’ll thank you for that.”

Unwin lifted Moore by the arms. Taking care not to upset any of the books or to look at Jasper, Unwin dragged the man slowly toward the door. There he set Moore down and picked up his umbrella. It was shaking in his hands.