His apartment door was open, his spare key still in the lock. He put that in his pocket and went in, closing the door behind him. In the kitchen he found himself again at the barrel end of a gun—his own this time. Emily Doppel’s eyes were half closed, but her aim seemed true enough. She carried her lunch box in her other hand.
Testing her, Unwin walked toward his bedroom. Emily followed, keeping the pistol trained on her target. He considered going into the bathroom to change, but Emily would probably have followed him there, too. So he undressed in front of her, leaving the damp and bloody clothes in a heap on the floor. Naked, he wondered if there were Agency bylaws regarding detectives and their assistants and whether this violated any of them.
Once he had put on dry clothes, he set the alarm clock he’d taken from the rowboat on his nightstand, then changed his mind and tucked it into his jacket. “I’m sure I was wrong about your lunch box,” he said to Emily. “This might be my last chance to learn the truth.”
After a moment she seemed to understand. She shook the pistol at him, directing him into the kitchen, then put the lunch box on the table and flipped it open.
Inside were dozens of tin figurines. Unwin set them on the table, lining them up like soldiers. They were not soldiers, though—they were detectives. One crouched with a magnifying glass in his hand, another spoke into a telephone, another held out his badge. One stood as Emily stood now, arm outstretched with pistol in hand. Another resembled Unwin in his current stance, bent over with his hands on his knees, an expression of mild astonishment on his face.
Only flecks of paint remained on the figurines; they had seen a lot of use through the years. Unwin imagined a little red-haired girl, alone at the playground, sitting cross-legged in the grass, surrounded by her dreamed-up operatives. What adventures they must have had under her authority! Now the game had become real for her.
“You understand that the memo I asked you to type was not a ruse,” Unwin said. “You deserve better. You deserve a real detective.”
Emily swept the figurines back into her lunch box. She kept the gun pointed at him and gestured toward his briefcase, which was lying on the floor near the door. He picked it up and she directed him out of the apartment and back down the stairs.
No one was on the street to witness the sleepwalker conduct him at gunpoint to the black car at the end of the block. He got in on the passenger side and set his briefcase between his feet.
“Are you sure you can drive?” Unwin asked.
For answer, Emily put the car into gear and turned out onto the street. She drove very carefully the seven blocks to the Agency office building, though no one else was on the road now. They parked right outside the lobby, and when Unwin got out of the car, he saw that lights were on in all forty-six floors.
TWELVE
On Interrogation
The process begins long before you are alone in
a room together. By the time you ask the suspect your
questions, you should already know the answers.
The fortieth floor, like the fourteenth, was a single enormous room, but it was empty except for a square metal table and two chairs at its center. Emily stood to one side, at the edge of the bright yellow light aimed at the table from above. She still held the gun but had left her lunch box in the car and taken Unwin’s briefcase instead.
The man with the pointy blond beard was seated opposite Unwin. Of all the people who lived in the city, this man was one who Unwin wished were among the sleeping. But it seemed that Hoffmann had left the Agency’s employees to go about their work unhindered—Emily’s sleep was probably just a result of her condition. Whatever the magician was up to, he did not want anyone from the Agency’s ranks involved. Or was it simply as Moore had said, that Hoffmann wanted them to see how he had triumphed?
If so, the man with the blond beard revealed no concern for what was happening outside. Without looking at Unwin, he set his portable typewriter on the table. He snapped his fingers at Emily, and she gave him the briefcase. He began removing its contents.
“Two pencils,” he said, and put them side by side. “In need of sharpening.”
Next he took out Unwin’s copy of The Manual of Detection. “Standard issue,” he said, and sneered as he flipped it open to the title page. “Fourth edition, utterly useless.”
Next were some file folders, all empty—Unwin liked to keep a few spares handy.
Last was the phonograph record. This he examined more carefully, holding it up to the light and gazing at its grooves, as though he could hear it if he looked closely enough. “A watcher-class file, Sivart-related. Recorded by the late Mr. Lamech, pressed by Miss Palsgrave on Agency premises. Not logged in any official registry. Most suspect.” He slipped it back into its cover and set it on the table, then turned the briefcase upside down and shook it. It was empty.
“I think the Agency has bigger worries than what I keep in my briefcase,” Unwin said.
“Quiet,” snapped the man with the blond beard. He put everything back, set the briefcase aside, and loaded a sheet of paper into his typewriter. “It took me hours to polish the keys after your accomplice spilled water on them.” He sat very straight in his chair and closed his eyes, then rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers. Next he stretched out his arms and flexed his hands. He seemed to be getting ready for some kind of performance.
“Maybe you should take notes about what’s going on outside,” Unwin said.
The man with the blond beard said to Emily, “If he speaks again, shoot him.”
Unwin sighed and looked at the table while the man went through his stretching routine again. Then, with his eyes partly closed, he began to type. He worked quickly, just as he had done at the museum café. He seemed to be drawing words out of the air, typing them as he breathed them in.
He reached the bottom of the first page, set the sheet aside, and loaded another. Unwin looked at his watch to time the man’s progress. He finished the second page in just under three minutes.
When the third page was done, the man with the blond beard stacked them together, folded them, and slid them into an envelope. He put the envelope inside his jacket, then closed the typewriter case and stood.
“That’s it?” Unwin asked.
The man picked up Unwin’s briefcase and went toward the door.
“Sir,” Unwin said, getting to his feet, “I’d like my briefcase now.”
“We have what we need,” the man said to Emily. “And you have your orders.”
Emily frowned in her sleep. It would not be easy for her to shoot him, Unwin thought. But she was angry. He had deceived her, disappointed her, made her believe he was something he was not. She must have drifted off to sleep sometime after she put him on the eight train that morning. Then she fell victim to the same plague that had infected the rest of the city, and her anger was shaken awake.
She pushed her glasses back on her nose and took aim. Did the Manual include advice appropriate to situations like these? No, Unwin thought, it was not The Manual of Detection he needed. It was his assistant’s own good planning.
“Emily,” he said. “The devil’s in the details.”
Her aim faltered a little.
He repeated the phrase, and Emily swayed on her feet as though the ground had shifted beneath her. “And doubly in the bubbly,” she said, opening her eyes. She looked with alarm at the gun in her hand.
Unwin gestured to the man with the blond beard. “There,” he said. “There!”
Emily swung the gun around, and the man with the blond beard stopped walking.
“Sir,” Unwin said again. “My briefcase.”
The man gave Emily a withering look and returned to the table. He dropped the case in front of Unwin.
“Your typewriter as well,” Unwin said.
He set the typewriter down.
“Now sit.”
Audibly grinding his teeth, the man with the blond beard sat. Emily kept the gun trained on him while Unw
in removed the man’s necktie and used it to bind his hands behind his back. It would not hold for long, Unwin thought, but it was the best he could do for now.
“Quickly,” he said to Emily. “I need you to write a memo.”
She put the pistol away, then sat and opened the typewriter, loaded a fresh sheet of paper.
The man with the blond beard snorted at all this but said nothing. Indeed, as Unwin began to dictate, he leaned forward a little, listening with apparent interest.
“To colon Benjamin Screed comma Detective comma floor twenty-nine return from colon Charles Unwin comma capital D capital E capital T capital E capital C capital T capital I capital V capital E comma floor twenty-nine comma temporarily floor forty return.
He took a deep breath and continued. “Sir comma despite the unhappy beginning of our association comma it is my hope that we may still find a way to work together as colleagues to our mutual satisfaction point. To that end comma I offer you the opportunity to assist me—”
But here Unwin frowned and said, “Emily, strike that. Resume: To that end comma I offer to assist you in solving a very important case comma or rather several important cases all at once point. In addition to delivering to you the killer of Edward Lamech comma I intend also to shed new light on cases now at rest in the Agency archives comma including The Oldest Murdered Man comma The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker comma and The Man Who Stole November Twelfth point. I trust this will be of interest to you comma as you are no doubt aware that our organization is in need of a new star detective comma and I can tell you I have no interest in the job point. If you find this satisfactory comma I leave it to you to choose our place of meeting point. I will come unarmed full stop.”
Emily snatched out the page, quickly typed a final draft, and said, “I’ll go and find a messenger.”
“No messengers, Emily. I don’t think they can be trusted. This remains, as you once put it, an internal affair.”
The man with the blond beard was grinning now. Straining against the bonds, he turned in his seat to watch them go. Unwin avoided the man’s eyes, glancing back only once while he and Emily waited for the elevator to arrive. He had not even bothered to look at the document the man with the blond beard had typed. Whatever it contained—a false confession, a memory somehow plucked from his brain—it could not possibly matter after this. They believed he was a renegade, and now he was acting like one.
Unwin had worried that the elevator attendant might recognize him, that even he might have been notified of Unwin’s fugitive status. But the white-haired little man only hummed to himself as the car descended, seemingly oblivious to his passengers.
Emily drew close to Unwin and whispered, “Do you really know who killed Lamech?”
“No,” he said. “But if I don’t find out soon, I think it won’t matter anyway.”
Emily looked at her shoes. “I haven’t been a very good assistant,” she said.
They both were quiet, and the only sounds in the car were the elevator attendant’s tuneless humming and the grating of the machinery above. Unwin knew that it was he, not Emily, who had failed. She had saved him from Detective Screed, had chosen the secret signal that saved him a second time. But outside the Gilbert Hotel, when she asked him what would happen to her once they found Sivart, he had failed to give her an answer.
Maybe he should have told her that he would remain a detective, that she would still be his assistant. Better yet, they could act as partners: the meticulous dreamer and his somnolent sidekick. Together they would untangle the knots Enoch Hoffmann and his villainous cohorts had tied in the city, in its dreams. Their suspects would be disarmed by his clerkly demeanor; she would ask the tough questions and do most of the driving. They would track down every error Sivart had committed, re-solve all the great cases, set the record straight. Their reports would be precise, complete, and timely: the envy of every clerk on the fourteenth floor.
But he had not even cleared his name yet, and Emily now would also be hunted.
She was still looking at her shoes when Unwin put a hand on her shoulder. “You are the finest assistant a detective could wish for,” he said.
With a swift movement, as though the floor had tilted or the elevator slipped its cable, Emily fell fully into him and laid her head against his chest, wrapping her arms around his middle. Unwin stifled a gasp at the sudden and complete materialization of this young woman in his arms. He could smell her lavender perfume again, and beneath that the sharpness of her sweat.
Emily raised her lips close to his ear and said, “It’s really something, don’t you think? We have so much work to do, but we can’t trust anyone. And when you get right down to it, we can barely trust each other. But it’s better that way, I suppose. It keeps us thinking, keeps us guessing. Just a couple of shadows, that’s what we are. Turn the light on and that’s the end of us.”
The elevator attendant had stopped humming, and Unwin caught himself wondering about bylaws again.
“Emily,” he said, “do you remember anything of the dream you were having earlier?”
She moved back an inch and adjusted her glasses. “I remember birds, lots of them. Pigeons, I think. And a breeze. Open windows. There were papers everywhere.”
The elevator attendant cleared his throat. “Floor twenty-nine,” he said.
Emily slowly let go of Unwin, then stepped out onto the polished wood floor. The custodian had cleaned it to a shine—not a trace of black paint remained.
“Emily?” Unwin said.
“Sir?”
“Do try to stay awake.”
The attendant closed the door, and Unwin told him to take him to the archives. Clerks, and even detectives, were technically prohibited from entering, but the little man made no protest. He threw the lever and sat on his stool. “The archives,” he said. “The long-term memory of our esteemed organization. Without it we are nothing but a jumble of trivialities, delusions, and windblown stratagems.”
A bulb on the attendant’s panel lit yellow, and he brought the car to a halt. Unwin found himself looking into the broad office of the fourteenth floor. His overclerk, Mr. Duden, stood in front of him. The round-faced man took a step back when he saw Unwin. “I’ll get the next one,” he said.
THAT ONLY UNDERCLERKS were permitted access to the Agency archives had instilled in Unwin a simmering resentment of his inferiors. He sometimes daydreamed about catching one of the affable little men on his way to lunch and accompanying him to the booth of a local eatery. There he would buy the man a sandwich, pickles, a glass of what-have-you, and gradually turn the conversation to the topic of their work—forbidden, of course, between employees of different departments. In time the underclerk’s caginess would give way to happy disclosure; he was as proud of his work as Unwin was of his, after all. And so Unwin would come to learn the secrets of that place to which his completed case files, and the files of a hundred other clerks, were delivered each day, to be housed in perpetuity. All for the price of a roast beef on rye.
Of course Unwin never did anything of the sort. He was not a faker, not a sneak. At least he had been neither of those things until recently.
The elevator attendant had left him in a corridor one level below the subbasement. It ended at a small wooden door. Slowly, but not so slowly he would appear to be trespassing, Unwin opened it and stepped through.
The heart of the archives (for what else could this be?) smelled of cologne, of dust, of the withered-flower sweetness of old paper. Its ceiling, high as Central Terminal’s sweeping vaults, was hung with clusters of electric lamps shaded in green glass, and the walls were made entirely of file drawers. The drawers were of the older sort, with bronze handles and paneling of dark wood. Rolling library ladders, each seven times the height of a man, provided access throughout. Eight massive columns spanned the room, and these, too, were lined with file drawers and equipped with ladders.
Dozens of underclerks were at work here, browsing open drawers, jotting notes on inde
x cards, ascending and descending ladders, wheeling them into new positions. They went back and forth between the files and a squat booth at the center of the room. Meanwhile, messengers in yellow suspenders appeared and disappeared through doors disguised to look like stacks of file drawers, some of them high in the walls. To access one of these, the messenger would climb a ladder, open the door with a telescoping pole he drew from his sack, then leap through the opening.
Unwin closed the door behind him—it, too, was disguised as a stack of file drawers—and walked along the wall searching for some indication of an organizational scheme. But the drawers were not labeled, nor were they divided into sections, alphabetical or otherwise. He chose one at waist height and opened it. The files were all dark blue, not the light brown he was accustomed to seeing. He removed one and found a card pasted to its front. Typed on the card were a series of phrases:
Stolen Journal
Jilted Lover
Vague Threats
Long-Lost Sister
Mysterious Double
The documents inside were formatted according to some method that was wholly unfamiliar to him. Pages of handwritten notes identified a client, described his meeting with an Agency representative, and gave an account of his suspicions and fears. But where were the clues? Who was the detective assigned to the case? How had the matter been resolved?
A nearby drawer slid open, and Unwin looked up to see an underclerk just a few steps away. The man grinned at him. He had round cheeks and wore a bowler hat and a scarlet cravat. Unwin returned the file and ran his fingers over the folder tabs, pretending to search for another.
But the underclerk came closer and bowed, and when Unwin did not look up at him, he bowed again, more deeply this time, and with the third bow he made a dispirited little huffing sound. Finally the underclerk spoke. “You must be the new fellow, yes, the new fellow?”