The giantess was silent. She went back to work, ignoring him.
That’s when I put a cigar in my mouth, tore the end with my teeth, and raised a lighter to the tip. Before I could spark the flint, she had my fist closed up in hers. I showed her my best grin and said, “I can understand your not wanting to talk about it, angel. So maybe I should speak to the man himself ?”
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:
Apparently, Caligari and his young assistant do the dirty work themselves, almost every day. It is not fun and does not leave you smelling wholesome. If I’m ever feeling down, clerk, remind me not to run away and join the circus.
“The ears,” the girl reminded me. I’d been sudsing the big guy’s back, and she held my ladder steady while I worked, which was a good thing, what with my belly full of swill.
“Yeah, sure,” I said to her. “The ears.”
The three of us talked, and Caligari fed me a nonsense sandwich or two. He told me he took special care of the elephants because their dreams were so expansive, and clear as crystal.
That got a chuckle out of me. “What do you do,” I said, “peel back their eyelids and shine a light in there?”
“Everything I tell you is true,” he said, “and everything you see is as real as you are.”
I’d read that on one of the posters they’d pasted around town. It was this fellow’s catchphrase, and I didn’t need it. Later, while we were getting fresh water from the cistern, I finally got him to say something interesting. “The people who stay put don’t trust the people who don’t,” he said. “My carnival’s been the subject of many wild accusations over the years, all of which have proved groundless. I’m getting tired of having to listen to the same old stories.”
“Stories are what I’m here for,” I told him. “Are you saying we have nothing to worry about?”
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.”
He’d worked himself up a bit and had to sit down and catch his breath. The little girl ran off and came back a minute later with a cup of cocoa. He sipped, watching the elephants. The animals were eating now, fetching clumps of hay with their trunks.
“They remember everything,” Caligari said quietly. “I don’t know what I’d do without them. And their dreams, Detective. A minute in one of their dreams is a month on the open plain, unfettered, unchartable.”
I don’t know what he meant by that, or whether he meant anything at all. But this much I know: we need to keep an eye on this character.
The carnival had closed up by then, and lights were going off all around us. The girl took my hand and led me away, back to the front gate. There she turned my hand over and looked at the palm. “You’ll live a long life,” she said, “but a long part of it won’t be your own. Good night, Travis.”
That bugged me some—not the fortune, which is malarkey. But the fact that she knew my first name. I hadn’t mentioned it, not to anyone in the place.
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.
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
Answer questions with questions. If you are caught
in a lie, lie again. You do not need to know the
truth to trick another into speaking it.
Unwin 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.