Unwin avoided answering by patting his palms against the folders and smiling.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for?” The underclerk’s cheeks reddened. Apparently, the prospect of assisting someone else was a great embarrassment to him.
“You’re too kind.” Unwin did not want to ask this man about the phonograph record, but he had to tell him something, so he said, “I’m looking for the Sivart case files. The Colonel Baker case would be a good start.”
The underclerk frowned at that. “Sounds like you’ve got too many modifiers. What’s the primary correlative?”
Unwin considered. “Faked death,” he said.
The underclerk tapped one finger against his round, clean-shaven chin. “Now, I’ve been here almost two years, and I don’t recall . . .” His cheeks went redder, until they matched the color of his cravat. “What did you say your name was?” he asked.
Unwin coughed and waved his hand, and pretended to study the files again. The underclerk went away very quietly and quietly closed the drawer he had opened a minute before. Then he started off toward the center of the room with a quick, resolute pace, more like a messenger than an underclerk.
Unwin closed the drawer and followed. The underclerk saw him pursuing and walked faster, so Unwin began to run. The underclerk ran, too, and by this time most everyone in the archive was watching them. Unwin could see the booth more clearly now. At its peak was a four-faced clock, nearly identical to the one at Central Terminal. Unwin checked his watch and saw that it matched to the very second the clock at the heart of the Agency archives. It was seventeen minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon. The underclerk drew up to the booth, pushing others aside to reach the front. There was a lot of jostling and grumbling, but the others went quiet as he began to speak to someone inside the booth. Then they all turned to watch Unwin’s approach. Some removed their hats and started fidgeting with the brims. They parted to let him through, and the one in the red cravat stood aside.
A woman was seated in the booth, surrounded by card catalogs. She was younger than Unwin, though older than Emily. She had straight brown hair and a wide, frowning mouth. She looked him over carefully, paying special attention to his hat.
“You’re not an underclerk,” she said.
“My apologies,” said Unwin. “It is not my intention to deceive. I am a clerk of the fourteenth floor.”
Now the underclerks began to chatter all at once. “Clerk!” they said, and, “Fourteenth floor!” They repeated the words until the woman hushed them with a wave of her hand.
“No,” Unwin said, shaking his head, “I was a clerk. I am hardly accustomed to the change myself. Just yesterday I was promoted to the rank of detective. In fact, I’m here on business of a detectorial nature.” He showed her his badge.
Again the underclerks started talking, their voices rising higher as they pushed and pulled at their hats, nearly tearing them in half. “Detective!” they said, and one among them wailed, “What’s a detective?”
“Quiet!” the woman shouted. She glared at Unwin. “This is highly irregular. You’d better come in.”
She opened a door to the side of her window and ushered Unwin into the booth; some of the underclerks made as though to follow, but the woman closed it before any could slip through. Then she closed green shutters over her window. Unwin could still hear the pleas of the underclerks outside: “What’s a detective?” they cried, and then, “What’s promoted?” The few near the window scratched at the shutters with their fingernails; one was brazen enough to tap his knuckles against the door.
Unwin now saw that the card catalogs replicated in miniature the archives themselves. Each stack of file drawers outside had a corresponding stack within the booth; even the columns were represented by eight freestanding pillars. This explained the lack of references to content or indexing in the archive proper. The only key was here.
The woman reached under her desk, took a silver flask from its hiding place, and set out two tin cups. She poured a little brown liquid into each and pressed one into Unwin’s hand. She drank. Unwin was unaccustomed to drinking whiskey straight, from a flask or otherwise. And though he did not find it altogether unpleasant, each sip was a keen surprise to his tongue.
The underclerks were silent now. They had either dispersed or agreed to stay quiet and listen in.
“You must forgive them,” the woman said. “They’ve had a very trying week. We all have.” She offered him her hand; her palm was cool and papery against his own. “Eleanor Benjamin,” she said, “Chief Clerk of Mysteries.”
“Charles Unwin, Detective.”
“And, I suppose, the reason I lost my best staffer to the fourteenth floor yesterday. To promote someone from one department to another is atypical. To promote two people at once is absurd. I’m afraid we’re all a little rattled down here.”
“The woman who has taken my place used to work for you?” Unwin asked.
“Yes,” said Miss Benjamin. “Only two months into the job and she was already the best underclerk I had.”
This was a surprise even sharper than the whiskey. The woman in the plaid coat, Cleo Greenwood’s daughter, had started working at the Agency long before the first time Unwin saw her at Central Terminal. She must have used the time to find and steal an unabridged copy of the Manual. But what else had she been up to?
“I hardly know what to do without her,” Miss Benjamin went on. “She went about her work so calmly that she kept everyone else calm, too. I’m certain one of these twittering old men will fall from his ladder someday. And they haven’t even assigned a replacement yet. The whole archive could fall into ruin.”
She paused and looked up at the shutters, seeming to see through them and into an archive in flames, sheets of burning paper falling out of the sky, columns of file drawers collapsing under their own weight. Unwin wondered if she knew that the world outside the Agency office was already in the process of disintegrating.
“Why was she promoted?” Unwin asked. “Did anyone inform you?”
Miss Benjamin blinked away her vision. “I hardly see the relevance of that,” she said, and poured more whiskey into their cups. “You know perfectly well that detectives are barred from the archives, Mr. Unwin. Only messengers are permitted to move freely from one floor to another. And under no circumstances should a detective be caught drinking whiskey with a chief clerk. So what are you doing down here?”
Answer questions with questions, he reminded himself—he had read that in the Manual. “How many chief clerks are there?”
Miss Benjamin smiled. “I’m not unwilling to help you, Detective. I’m just saying that there’s a price. Now, what were you looking for out there in my archive?”
Unwin found that he liked this chief clerk’s plainspokenness, but he was not yet sure if he could trust her. “I was looking for my old case files,” he said. This was not completely a lie—seeing those files would have been of interest, especially after all he learned since his first meeting with Edwin Moore.
Miss Benjamin laughed, and from outside the booth came the sound of shuffling feet.
“Are you surprised?” Unwin asked. “I’ve done plenty of case files. The Oldest Murdered Man, The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker.”
“Yes, yes,” said Miss Benjamin. “But you’re talking post-detection, Mr. Unwin. Solutions. This”—she gestured to the card catalogs around her and, by extension, the file drawers beyond—“is Mysteries.”
“Only Mysteries?”
“Only Mysteries! What did you expect, everything jammed into one archive? That would be an organizational nightmare. I am Chief Clerk of Mysteries, and the underclerks out there are familiar only with mysteries. It’s why they don’t know what a detective is—they don’t need to. The vicissitudes of detection aren’t part of their work. As far as they know, mysteries come here and stay here. It’s why they’re so nervous. Imagine having all the questions but none of the answers.”
“I don??
?t have to imagine it,” Unwin said.
“Three.”
“What?”
“You asked me how many chief clerks there are. There are three. Miss Burgrave, Miss Palsgrave, and myself. Miss Burgrave is Chief Clerk of Solutions. It’s her archive you meant to infiltrate, not mine.” She lowered her eyelids and added, “Though it isn’t a terrible thing, having someone to talk to. Your average underclerk doesn’t know a woman from a pile of paper clips.”
Unwin sipped from his whiskey—just as little as he could, because he already felt dizzy from it. “What about Miss Palsgrave’s archive?” he asked. “What is kept there?”
“What I want to know is why a clerk, promoted though he may be, would want to see his own files. Don’t you fellows know your cases back to front?”
“Yes,” Unwin said. “But it’s less a matter of content than of cross-referencing.”
She was silent. He would have to give her at least part of the truth. “The case files are categorized as solutions, and rightly so. They are the finest, most thorough solutions imaginable. But what if an error, a purposeful error conceived for some dark purpose, had been inserted into one of those files? What if an aspect of a solution were thus rendered a mystery? What then, Miss Benjamin?”
“You would not have done such a thing.”
“I have, Miss Benjamin. Many times, perhaps, though without realizing it. I believe that a man was murdered to keep it a secret. Somewhere in these archives are mysteries that have been passed off as solutions, so they belong here, Miss Benjamin, in your archive. And they are deliberately being kept from you.
“Under normal circumstances, I could work through the messengers, calling up one file after another, checking references, piecing the puzzle together. But that would take time. And I don’t know if I can trust the usual channels. Will you help me, Miss Benjamin? Will you tell me the way to the Archive of Solutions?”
He was not sure what he was getting himself into, but Moore had told him that the key to understanding the phonograph record was here in the archives. If not in the first, then maybe in the second.
Miss Benjamin stood, and Unwin saw that she was tall, perhaps a foot taller than he was. She crossed her arms and looked worried. “There are several paths to the Archive of Solutions,” she said, “but most will be too dangerous.” She pushed her chair aside and lifted an edge of the frayed blue rug. A trapdoor was beneath. “This passage is reserved for the use of the chief clerks. I don’t think anyone but the three of us remembers it’s here.”
She lifted a brass ring and pulled the trapdoor open. A stairwell spiraled downward into the gloom.
“Thank you,” he said.
Miss Benjamin took a step closer to him. With the shutters over the window, the air in the booth had grown warmer, and now Unwin found it difficult to breathe, especially when each breath carried with it the sweet aroma of the whiskey on Miss Benjamin’s lips.
She said, “I do know a thing or two about detectives, Mr. Unwin. I know that with a few words you could have won my heart. But you’re one of the noble ones, aren’t you?”
Unwin did not contradict her, though he doubted that even the Manual would contain the few words—whatever they were—to which Miss Benjamin was referring.
“What about the third archive?” he said. “You didn’t tell me about Miss Palsgrave.”
Miss Benjamin stepped back. “I won’t,” she said. “This is Mysteries, after all, and Miss Palsgrave’s work is her own.”
Unwin put on his hat and started down the stairs. Miss Benjamin had seemed tall to him, and now, waist-deep in the floor, he looked up and found her terrible and magnificent, a towering, sulky idol in a brown wool skirt. “Good-bye, Miss Benjamin.”
She capped her silver flask and sighed. “Watch out for the ninth step,” she said, and Unwin had to duck as she kicked the trapdoor closed over his head.
THE STAIRS WERE LIT only by dim lamps that flickered as though to relay a coded message. There was no banister. The wooden steps creaked underfoot, and Unwin felt each with the toe of his shoe before stepping down. Was it a trick of the whiskey, that the walls of the passage seemed to narrow as Unwin descended? Or had he always been a claustrophobe and only needed an experience like this to find out?
The ninth step appeared as sturdy as the others, but he skipped it as Miss Benjamin advised. Unwin found it difficult to stop counting anything once he had begun. Counting sheep, in fact, was his surest route to insomnia—by morning he could fill whole pastures with a vast and clamorous flock. Now he counted steps, and by the twentieth he felt certain the walls really were narrowing, and the ceiling was getting lower, too. How deep did the stairway go? Maybe Miss Benjamin had tricked him into an oubliette. She could have locked the trapdoor and sent a message to Detective Screed by now—but then, perhaps Mr. Duden already had.
The lamps were fewer in number here, and dimmer. He hoped Edwin Moore had known what he was talking about. Could the old man’s memory be trusted at all? Unwin had to bend low to take the last several steps. The fifty-second was the last.
Here was a plain wooden door no more than four feet tall. From beyond it came a sound—a wild, incessant clattering, as of many people typing without pause. Unwin felt for a doorknob but could not find one. When he pushed, the door swung open on silent hinges. He ducked through and had to remain crouched on the other side because the ceiling was so low.
The room was barely larger than the desk in his own office, though finished all in dark wood that gleamed in the light from a chandelier. Where Unwin had expected a legion of underclerks, he saw one tiny woman, her silvery hair pinned in a mound atop her head, seated at a desk at the center of the room. He stooped over her, an uncouth giant in a too-small cave, but she did nothing to acknowledge his presence. Her typing was the quickest Unwin had ever seen—quicker than Emily’s, quicker, even, than the man with the blond beard’s. The sound of one key-clap was indiscernible from the next, and the carrier bell never ceased to reverberate, chiming the end of each line in rapid succession.
“Miss Burgrave?” Unwin said.
The woman stopped typing and peered at him, the wrinkles at the edges of her mouth and eyes fixed in severe concentration. She wore red lipstick, and her cheeks, soft and sagging, were the pink of pink roses. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, then went back to her work.
Her little hands were a hundred-fingered blur. The paper went into her typewriter from a single great roll that had been mounted to the front of her desk, then onto a second roll mounted just above the first. This system freed her of the need to pause and insert fresh sheets.
Unwin bent over to read what she was typing, but Miss Burgrave stopped again and stared at him, causing him to withdraw so quickly that he bumped his head against the ceiling.
“This will not do,” Miss Burgrave said. “You know what it means to be on a schedule, of course, so I will not rebuke you unnecessarily, as that would be tantamount to redundancy, which I already risk by speaking to you at all, and risk again by observing the risk, and so again by observing the observation. In this we could proceed endlessly. Will you not relent? Are you really so stubborn? I ask these questions rhetorically, and thus degrade further the value of my speech.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Miss Burgrave, but if perhaps you’d allow me into the archives—”
“If perhaps,” she repeated, her wrinkles deepening. “Mr. Unwin, we shall brook no degree of mysteriousness on this floor. So that weak-kneed naïf allowed you entrance through the trapdoor, and you believe that entitles you to further transgression—and with my assistance, at that.”
Unwin kept quiet now. In spite of himself, he glanced again at the typescript mounted to the desk.
“Facts,” Miss Burgrave explained. “Dead facts, all questions beaten out of them, all lines of inquiry followed to their termini. Answers and answers to answers, the end of the road, of the world, maybe. Yes, that is how I feel sometimes, as though the world has already ended, the s
hades drawn over every window, the stars burned down to little black beads, the moon waned beyond waning, all life a dollop of ash, and still I remain at work, trying to explain what happened.”
“Explain to whom?”
“Ah, now we come to something.” Miss Burgrave rose from her chair, and Unwin saw that she stood no taller than a child. She waved Unwin out of her way and opened a panel hidden in the wall. From there she drew a book about the size of The Manual of Detection but bound in red rather than green. She turned to a certain page and, without having to search, read aloud a single paragraph:
Solutions, as distilled by the clerks so Entrusted, from the Reports of detectives so Assigned, and borne by messengers to the aforementioned Dominions, are there to be studied and Linked each to the other according to common significance, and so prepared for Review by the Overseer. It is solely to the Chief Clerk of Solutions to whom this Task falls, so let him work alone, unhindered by his subordinates in their Courses and his Seniors in their many Doings.
“Where are your underclerks, then?” Unwin asked.
Miss Burgrave sighed. She seemed to have abandoned something: a conviction, maybe, or a hope. She replaced the book and closed the panel, then gestured for Unwin to follow her through a door behind her desk. In the passage beyond, Unwin was able to stand straight again. He heard the quiet commotion of clerkly work: the whisperings, the pen scratchings, the hurried footfalls. But those who made these sounds were nowhere visible in the long hall, nor in the many branches extending from it. Out of the walls protruded two rows of file drawers, one near the floor and the other at waist height, situated so that all their contents were visible. Now and then these drawers would disappear into the walls, only to return a moment later.
As they walked, Miss Burgrave explained, “We are now between the walls of the Archive of Solutions. My underclerks are without, accessing what files they require, according to the instructions I give them by various means, including notes, bellpulls, and color-coded signals. They do not know me, nor would I recognize them, except by the way each clears his throat.”