The Manual of Detection (32 page)

“The taxi,” Moore said, his eyes brightening a little. “Yes, I was a passenger in one of many taxis, and we joined others who had walked the whole way. They were bound for the fairgrounds, Mr. Unwin—an army of somnambulists, all set to one great task. We have been beaten, I’m certain of it now. Hoffmann has won.”

“Why?” Unwin asked. “What did they do?”

“They gathered tools. They brought ladders and saws and drills. The remnants of Caligari’s were terrified at first and tried to keep them out, tried to wake them. But once the old carnies comprehended the invaders’ objective, they let them be, and then they joined them, even helped to direct their work. I had to pitch in, too, or be found out!” Moore was trembling harder now. “Caligari’s Carnival is remade, Mr. Unwin, in all its iniquity. Hoffmann’s lair of old is restored. He is laughing at us—laughing.”

Unwin set his bicycle down and knelt beside the old clerk. He put a hand on Moore’s knee and said, “Mr. Moore, I’m not sure it was Hoffmann who did this.”

“Who then?”

“The woman in the plaid coat. The same woman who showed you the gold tooth of the Oldest Murdered Man, that night in your sleep.”

Moore stood and moved back a step. “Who are you, to have seen into my dreams?”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Unwin said. “We have a good team here. Remember?”

Moore was moving farther up the steps. He surveyed the street as the sound of the approaching steam truck grew louder. “You’re one of
them,”
he said. “I remember nothing. Nothing! You may put that in your report if you like.” He threw the umbrella to the ground and hurried back up the steps. Unwin watched him go, hoping he would stop, but the old clerk scurried between the massive columns and through the revolving door of the museum.

What good would it do to go after him? Moore would walk the halls of the museum alone, keeping to his usual route. There would be no guests today, no tearful children seeking their parents. After a while he might come to the chamber where the Oldest Murdered Man was housed. There, he would notice the glinting of a gold tooth at the back of the corpse’s mouth. And then he would telephone the Agency, to let Detective Sivart know that he had been tricked, that he had better come see for himself and fix his mistake.

The discarded umbrella was already filling with rainwater. Unwin left it and pedaled on.

 

 

 

IN THE LIGHT of day, Unwin saw that the wall of the Baker estate was in disrepair; stones had long ago come loose in places and lay in mounds over the sidewalk. The iron gates, which he had thought left open for Hoffmann’s sleeping guests the night before, were simply rusted open on their hinges. He pedaled up the long drive, his legs aching, the bicycle tires scattering wet sycamore seeds behind him.

At the top of the hill, the mansion lay in partial ruin. It had appeared stately the night before, lit from within and shining like a magic lantern. Now Unwin saw its sickly old face, its slumping porches and teetering balconies, its broken windowpanes and gapped shingles. He dismounted and walked his bicycle the rest of the way up the hill, left it leaning against a column of the portico.

The front door was unlocked. He went into the foyer, his clothes dripping on the hardwood. In the room where Miss Greenwood had performed the night before, highball glasses crusted with milk lay strewn over the tables and ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts and stubbed cigars. The floors were covered with muddy footprints, most from bare feet.

He took to the stairs, and the creaking of the steps was the only sound in the place, aside from the rain pattering on the roof. He went down the hall to Hoffmann’s room and opened the door.

The hearth was cold. A draft from the chimney played with the ashes, tracing small spirals over the floor. Hoffmann was still in his chair, asleep. Someone had left him with a blanket, but it had fallen off him and lay twisted around his ankles. He mumbled and shook, his hands trembling in his lap. He looked like nothing more than a harmless old man in blue pajamas.

Penelope had given up on Sivart, but Unwin could not.
You’re the best chance I’ve got,
the detective had told him in the dream Unwin twice dreamed, first in his own bed and then in the third archive.
Try this time, would you?
And so he would try. It was possible that Penelope had underestimated Sivart’s stubbornness.

Unwin took the alarm clock from his briefcase, wound it, and turned the hands to match those on his wristwatch. It was six o’clock exactly. He set the alarm as far in advance as he could and carefully placed the clock on the table, next to the near-empty bottle of brandy.

Eleven hours, fifty-nine minutes: that was how long he had to set everything in place. It was just a matter of timing now. If his plan worked, it would be like Miss Greenwood’s story about all those spindles, and the one the king had missed. Only in this version of the story, instead of someone falling asleep, someone was going to wake up. A few people, actually.

A shadow moved over the floor. Unwin turned to see Cleo Greenwood standing by the window, her red raincoat dripping on the rug. She had been watching from a corner of the room—had come in, maybe, through one of Colonel Baker’s old secret passages. The pistol in her hand was steady in spite of her exhaustion. It was another one of Baker’s antiques; she had taken it from the wall.

“You’re standing in my way,” she said.

Unwin stood straight and kept himself in front of the magician. “Hoffmann is already spoken for, Miss Greenwood. And anyway, he’s only half of the problem. If you’ll give me the chance, I can deliver the overseer to you.” Unwin was making bold promises again. He knew that it was more likely he would soon find the overseer’s fingers at his own throat the next time he slept—if he ever slept again. But he went on talking.

“Those eyes at the back of your skull,” he said. “You’ve had to work hard to keep your secret hidden from them. I understand now why you don’t want him to know about your daughter. He would torment her as he’s tormented you. And if she were turned to his side, nothing would be safe from the Agency’s eye. Arthur thinks he’s close to breaking you.”

“He is,” she said.

“Then let me help you.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Sivart. My old job back, maybe.”

She held still a moment, then covered her face with her free hand. “You’re a clerk,” she said, her shoulders shaking. “Oh, God, you were his clerk.”

“Not a very good one,” Unwin said. “My files are full of errors. I’m just trying to make corrections now.”

Hoffmann mumbled in his sleep again. On the table beside the magician, Unwin’s alarm clock ticked faintly.

“All those years you played the magician’s assistant,” Unwin said. “I know how you tricked Colonel Baker out of his fortune. And you were there that night on
The Wonderly,
to make sure Sivart took the wrong corpse back to the museum.” He gestured toward the display case at the back of the room. “There’s the real Oldest Murdered Man there. And it’s Caligari’s corpse in the museum, isn’t it?”

She did not deny it, and Unwin knew that his guess was right. Hoffmann would have needed the old man’s carnival to seize control of the city’s underworld. And he needed it more after striking his deal with the Agency: where else to find so dependable a supply of performers to act as the agents, goons, and spies who would be thwarted by Travis T. Sivart? Getting Caligari out of the way, and hiding his body in plain sight, must have been the first scheme on which the magician and the overseer colluded.

“I got out when I could,” Miss Greenwood said at last.

“But now you’re back in. Hoffmann needed you to make everyone sleep. Just as he did on November twelfth. Your song was on the radio that time. We all heard it, we all slept. But putting people to sleep wasn’t enough. He could get into their dreams, but that wasn’t enough either. He needed to plant a single suggestion in all their minds, all
our
minds: cross that one day off the calendar. That’s where your daughter came in.”

“It was Caligari who realized what she could do,” Miss Greenwood said. “He took an interest in her from the beginning. He said that she was a natural hypnotist, that it would be dangerous to allow her talents to develop unschooled. Once, when she was only six or seven, I caught her watching me in my own dreams—just standing there, staring. Those eyes of hers, Mr. Unwin. When I saw them, I knew that my daughter no longer belonged to me, would never belong to me again. I was frightened. So was Enoch.”

“Not too frightened to put her talents to use.”

A sound from outside: the Rooks’ steam truck had arrived. It spluttered to a halt, and the door opened and slammed closed.

Miss Greenwood heard it, too. She squeezed the handle of the gun. “I would have stopped him if I’d known how he intended to use her. It’s why I’m here now.”

“And why is Penelope here?” Unwin asked. “Why would she want to rebuild Caligari’s Carnival?”

The ancient pistol shook in her hand. Unwin could not tell if she was surprised by the question or by the fact that Unwin knew her daughter’s name. “To give it back to her father,” she said, “or to take it from him.” Miss Greenwood swayed slightly, struggling to stay awake even as she stood there. The front door opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.

Unwin glanced down at Hoffmann, saw the magician’s eyes darting behind their lids. A fever rose up from him, and Unwin thought he detected the sickly burning odor of kettle corn. Sivart was still in there—trapped in that other carnival, the spectral one Hoffmann had built in the dream of the city. What would happen to Sivart if Miss Greenwood pulled the trigger?

“Cleo,” Unwin said. “Please.”

The door slammed open, and Jasper Rook burst in, his green eyes feverish under the brim of his immense hat. With every step he seemed to grow in size, until they were all gathered up in the great black heat of his shadow. Unwin opened his umbrella to shield himself, but Jasper flung it aside, and Unwin stumbled backward, landing hard on the floor.

Jasper reached for him with those enormous, suffocating hands. They filled Unwin’s vision, and he felt himself drowning in the monster’s shadow, which was bottomless and the color of headache.

Then Miss Greenwood was there, her arms around Jasper’s shoulders. She had her lips to his ear as she embraced him. Jasper’s eyelids fluttered, his body slackened, and he staggered back. Miss Greenwood eased him down, until finally he lay across the rug with his head in her lap. She took off his hat and smoothed his hair with her hand, still whispering sleep into his ear.

“He’s tired,” Miss Greenwood said to Unwin. “He’ll sleep for a very long time, I think.”

Unwin stood and found his umbrella, then leaned himself against the back of Hoffmann’s chair. The air in the room was cooling again. “I will too, when this is over.”

Miss Greenwood said nothing, but through her exhaustion Unwin saw something else, something she could not speak of, even now. She had loved those two men, and both had tried to destroy her—Hoffmann when he let her take the fall for November twelfth, Arthur when he began to besiege her dreams.
A kind of order and a kind of disorder:
Miss Greenwood had suffered in the tempest between the two.

In the refuge of her lap, Jasper Rook started to snore.

 

 

 

TOGETHER THEY dragged the sleeping body out of the room and down the stairs. Nothing woke Jasper—not the steps striking the back of his head when Unwin lost his grip for a moment, not the rain falling full on his face outside. With much effort they managed to get him up into the bed of his truck. Miss Greenwood found an oilcloth tarp and laid it over him. It was just after seven o’clock when they left the grounds of the Baker estate.

Miss Greenwood was familiar with the peculiar controls of the steam truck. She kept her eye on a row of gauges over the dashboard while regulating the engine with a row of levers under the wheel, which was enormous and had the spokes of a ship’s wheel. The boiler thumped and hissed at their backs.

Unwin gazed silently out the passenger window. On one corner a young boy was shaking a woman’s arm and crying, “Wake up, Mom! Wake up!” Lights were on in some apartment buildings, and Unwin glimpsed nervous, confused faces in the windows. Some people had woken and gone home. Was Hoffmann’s grip beginning to loosen?

“It will come in waves now,” Miss Greenwood said. “He can’t keep them asleep all the time, so some will get a reprieve. But most who do will doubt whether they’re really awake.”

It was hot inside the cab, and sometimes the needles on the dials strayed into the red. Miss Greenwood drove south past the Agency office building and into the old port town. They left Jasper and his truck in front of the Forty Winks, where someone from the carnival was sure to find them. At eight twenty-seven, Unwin and Miss Greenwood went together into the cemetery.

Unwin read the names on tombstones they passed: Two-Toe Charlie, Theda Verdigris, Father Jack, Ricky Shortchange. Saints’ Hill had always been the place where criminals went to bury their own, and these were the outlaws, thieves, and grifters of an earlier era. It ended with the rise of Enoch Hoffmann and was familiar to Unwin only through the oldest of the Agency’s files.

“Caligari took Hoffmann in when he was a boy,” Unwin said. “It couldn’t have been easy for him to plot the old man’s murder.”

“They always disagreed on how the carnival should be used,” Miss Greenwood said. “I think Caligari saw it as a tool for stirring up trouble—but only for those he felt deserved it. He would go ahead to each town we visited, get a room somewhere, and ‘scout things out,’ as he used to say. He was delving into the dreams of the people there.”

“Looking for what?”

“He never really explained, and there wasn’t always a logic to it. But most of time he found people who had something to hide. Caligari could be ruthless once he’d chosen his subject. Sometimes, though . . .” She paused and rested with one hand against a tombstone, catching her breath.