The Manual of Detection (19 page)

Just then the door opened and Josiah came in, still carrying his clipboard. He did not take his hat off, did not even blink. He looked at Unwin, looked at Moore, and looked at his brother. Then he set his clipboard on the table and whispered something in Jasper’s ear.

The fire in the coal stove brightened, and Unwin felt the room grow suddenly hotter. Moore began to mumble in his sleep. The muscles of his skinny arms convulsed, and he slid back to the floor as Unwin lost his grip on him.

Jasper drew close and said, “My brother has advised me to advise you to hold very still.” He raised the gun over his head and brought it down hard. With it came sleep—sleep, and a very strange dream.

 

 

 

IN THE DREAM, Unwin stood with his head against a tree, hands cupped around his face, counting out loud. When he finished counting, he had to go find some people who were hiding from him. His socks were wet, because he had been running around in the grass without any shoes on.

He stood on a hill near a little cottage, and at the bottom of the hill was a pond. The cottage was the one Sivart had written about in his reports, the one he wanted to retire to.

“Ready or not,” Unwin called, but the words dropped like stones into the pond and fell to the bottom. A tire swing moved back and forth over the water, spinning as though someone had only just climbed off it. That, Unwin thought, was not a detail. It was a clue.

At the bottom of the hill, past a tangle of blackberry briars, he found footprints in the mud. He followed them around the edge of the pond, then down a trail leading into the woods, kicking red and orange leaves as he walked. In the middle of a clearing, the leaves were piled higher than everywhere else, just high enough to conceal a small person.

Unwin smelled something burning. A thin stream of smoke rose up from the leaves. Poking out of them was the tip of a lit cigar. He knelt beside it and cleared away some of the leaves, revealing the face of a young boy. The boy blinked at Unwin, then took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Okay, Charlie. You got me.”

The boy sat up and brushed the rest of the leaves off his body, off his gray raincoat. Then he stood and put his hat on. “I’ll help you get the others,” he said.

Unwin followed the boy back down the trail. His feet were getting cold. “Detective Sivart?” he said.

“Yeah, Charlie,” said the boy.

“I can’t remember the name of this game.”

“It’s an old game,” the boy said. “Older than chess. Older than curse words and shoeshine. Doesn’t matter what you call it, so long as you know how to play. Everyone’s in on it, except one guy, and that guy’s ‘it.’ Okay?”

“Detective Sivart?”

“Yeah, Charlie.”

“I’m ‘it,’ aren’t I?”

“And quick, too,” the boy said.

They stood together at the edge of the pond, the boy puffing at his cigar. Up in the cottage, someone had turned the radio on. Unwin could hear the music, but he could not make out the words. The sun was going down behind the hill.

“Some birthday.” The boy sighed. “So who’s next?”

“We have to find the magician,” Unwin said.

“They hired a magician? What kinds of tricks can he do?”

“All kinds,” Unwin said.

“Then how do you know you haven’t found him already?”

Unwin looked down. The boy’s face had changed. It was squarish now, and his eyes had turned a dull brown color. He still had the cigar in his hand, but both his sleeves were rolled up, and the coat looked too big on him.

Enoch Hoffmann grinned. “See?” he said. “He could be anyone.”

ELEVEN

On Bluffing

 

 

 

U
nwin waited for the world to stop swaying, but it did not stop swaying, because the world was a barge, and the barge was out on the rolling waters of the bay. He tried to check the time, but his arms were tied behind his back. Anyway, he did not need his watch. He was surrounded by alarm clocks—hills, mountains of them. On a dozen of their rain-spattered faces, he read the same time. It was only ten of eight.

Curled at his feet was Edwin Moore, still bound, still sleeping. In this light, Unwin could see the lump at the top of the old man’s forehead. He knew from the throbbing at his own temple that he had one to match.

Next to Moore was the plump body of Detective Pith, his suit waterlogged and bloodstained. Unwin glimpsed the ashen, jowly face above the collar of the herringbone suit. He looked away.

Unwin’s hat was still on his head, and his umbrella was open above him, fixed in place by the same ropes that bound his aching arms. He wondered which of the Rooks had afforded him this kindness. There was no sign of the twins here. In every direction he could see nothing but piles of alarm clocks. All the alarm clocks in the city, maybe even his.

“Wake up,” he said to Moore. “Wake up, will you?”

He slid himself forward, bringing his feet close to the other man’s, and tapped the sole of one of his shoes. “Wake up!” he shouted.

“Hush,” said someone behind him. “The Rooks will hear you. You’re lucky they prefer to watch their victims drown.”

Unwin recognized Miss Greenwood’s voice. “How did
you
get here?” She knelt behind him and tugged at the ropes. “More easily than you did,” she said. She reached into her coat, and Unwin looked over his shoulder to see a dagger appear in her hand. It was identical to those that Brock carried—it must have been the one that pierced her leg during his knife-throwing act, all those years ago.

“I don’t like being left in the rain without an umbrella, Mr. Unwin.”

“Those elephants back there,” he said. “Something ought to be done about them, too.”

She sighed. “Caligari would be furious.”

Unwin waited, listening. He felt the edge of the blade against his spine. Then a sudden pressure, and the fibers of the rope started snapping. He held the umbrella over Miss Greenwood while she cut the cords around his ankles. When they both were standing, she said, “I know you’re not a detective.”

That passage from page ninety-six of the
Manual
returned to his mind. Without any secrets he was lost forever. But what was he now, if not lost already? “No,” he admitted. “I’m not a detective.”

“Not a watcher either. Something else, some new kind of puppet. I know you’re working for him. I know he sent you to taunt me.”

“Working for whom?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “That phonograph record, those sounds. You have no idea what it’s like, Mr. Unwin. To always find him there waiting for you. To have his eyes in the back of your skull.”

“Whose eyes? What are you talking about?”

She stared at him, still disbelieving. “The Agency’s overseer,” she said. “Your boss.”

It had never occurred to Unwin that the Agency had an overseer, that one person could be in charge. Where, he wondered, was that man’s office?

Miss Greenwood must have seen that his surprise was real. “He and I . . . we know one another,” she said. “Hoffmann is dangerous, Mr. Unwin. But you ought to know that your employer is something worse. Whatever happens, he can’t find out about my daughter.” The barge shifted, and she stumbled on her bad leg. Unwin moved to steady her, but she pushed him away. “There’s a boat tied up on the starboard side,” she said. “Go, take it.”

He gestured at Moore. “Will you cut him free?”

“There’s no time,” she said. “The Rooks aren’t far.”

He held out his hand. “Give me the dagger, then. I’ll do it myself.”

Miss Greenwood hesitated, then turned the handle over to him. “I hope this rescue goes better than your first,” she said.

Unwin knelt and started cutting. These ropes were thicker, and he made slow progress.

“I didn’t want to come back to the city,” Miss Greenwood said.

“I was through with all of this. With the Agency, with Hoffmann; I can hardly tell the difference between them anymore. But I had to come back.”

Unwin cut through the last cord around Moore’s wrists and started working to free his ankles.

“These clocks remind me of a story I used to read to my daughter,” she said. “It was in her favorite book, an old one with a checkered cover. It was the story of a princess who’d been cursed by an old witch—or was it a fairy? In any case, the curse meant she would fall asleep—forever, maybe—if she were pricked by a spinning needle. So the king and queen did what any good parents would do, and piled up all the spindles in the land and burned them, and everyone had to wear worn-out old clothes for a very long time.”

The last of the ropes fell away. He swung Moore’s arms up over his shoulders and with Miss Greenwood’s help lifted him onto his back. She put the umbrella into his hand, and for a moment they stood looking at one another.

“How did the story end?” he asked.

It was not a question she had expected. “They missed one of the spindles, of course.”

 

 

 

UNWIN TRUGED TOWARD THE starboard side of the barge, following a narrow trail between mounds of alarm clocks. His shoes squeaked with every labored step over the slick metal deck. He would have taken them off, but shards of glass from the broken faces of clocks were everywhere.

He paused often to catch his breath and to reposition Moore’s limp body over his back. Finally he saw the edge of the barge. Bobbing over the green-gray swells was the little rowboat Miss Greenwood had promised. But one of the Rooks was nearby, leaning over the water with his big left boot on the rail: Josiah. He gazed across the bay at the mist-shrouded city, smoking a cigarette while the rain poured over the brim of his hat, which was nearly the size of Unwin’s umbrella.

Unwin thought he could reach the boat without Josiah’s seeing, but not without his shoes betraying him. So he crouched and waited for Josiah to finish smoking.

Somewhere amid the hills of clocks, a bell began to ring, a futile attempt to wake some sleeper a mile or more away. To Unwin the sound was a hook in his heart: the world goes to shambles in the murky corners of night, and we trust a little bell to set it right again. A spring is released, a gear is spun, a clapper is set fluttering, and here is the cup of water you keep at your bedside, here the shoes you will wear to work today. But if a soul and its alarms are parted, one from the other? If the body is left alone to its somnolent watches? When it rises—if it rises—it may not recognize itself, nor any of brief day’s trappings. A hat is a snake is a lamp is a child is an insect is a clothesline hung with telephones. That was the world into which Unwin had woken.

While he listened, the one bell was joined by another, and then another, and soon a thousand or more clocks were sounding all at once, a chorus fit to rouse the deepest sleeper. He glanced at his watch. It was eight o’clock; many in the city had meant to wake up now. Instead they had given him a chance to reach the rowboat undetected. The squeaking of his shoes was nothing compared to that thunderous proclamation of morning.

His sleeping companion’s feet dragged bumping behind him as he ran, and the umbrella wobbled above. He leaned against the rails, heaving Edwin Moore up and over. The old man landed hard and the rowboat shuddered beneath him. One of his arms flopped into the water, and his bruised face turned up to the rain.

Josiah looked over—he had felt the rail shift under Unwin’s weight. He flicked his cigarette into the water and came toward Unwin, an expression of mild disappointment on his face.

Unwin clambered up onto the rail, collapsing his umbrella. In his haste he caught the handle on the sleeve of his jacket, and the umbrella popped open again. The wind pulled at it, and Unwin pitched back onto the barge.

Josiah took him by the collar and swung him to the deck, his coat flapping in the rain as he fell upon Unwin. The heat coming off the man was incredible—Unwin thought he saw steam rising from the Rook’s back. Josiah put one enormous hand behind Unwin’s head, as though to cushion it, and the other flat over his face. His hand was dry. He covered Unwin’s nose and mouth and did not take it away. “Let’s both be very quiet now,” he said.

The bells were ringing all around them—some stopping as others started. The ringing joined with the ringing in Unwin’s ears, and a darkness rose up as though from the sea. It seemed to him that he stood on a street in the dark. Children had left chalk drawings on the pavement, but there were no children here. It was the avenue of the lost and secret-less: empty tenement buildings all the way to the bottom of the world.

Detective Pith emerged from the shadows and stood in the cone of light from a streetlamp. “Papers and pigeons, Unwin. It’s all papers and pigeons. We’ll have to rewrite the goddamn manual.”

“Detective Pith,” he said, “I saw them shoot you.”

“Aw, nuts,” said Pith. He took off his hat and held it over his chest. There was a bullet hole in the top of it. “Damn it, Unwin. Do something!” he said, and when he moved the hat away his shirt was covered with blood.

Unwin tried to hold the wound shut, but it was no use; the blood seeped between his fingers and spilled everywhere.

When the darkness receded, the blood was still there, pouring down Unwin’s arms and over his chest. Not Detective Pith’s, though. Miss Greenwood’s dagger was in his hands again—he had slipped it into his pocket without thinking—and now the blade was stuck deep in Josiah’s chest. Unwin had stabbed him.

Josiah took his hand from Unwin’s face and sat down next to him, staring at the handle there between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt.

Unwin got to his knees. He reached to take the knife but stopped himself. Had he read in the
Manual
that removing the weapon will worsen the wound? “Don’t move,” he said.